How tall is a hedge? Four feet? How thick? Two feet, maybe, depending on how it’s pruned. Same for width. A row might be hundreds of feet long on an estate, or just a couple shrubs side by side helping define the edge of, say, a backyard in suburban New York. It’s important that you picture such a hedge in your mind. Now you may forget it’s existence in a moment. If you do, I will not judge you harshly, because as you will soon learn, others made just the same mistake. In everyones, there will soon be more exciting things to focus on than this mundane, immobile bush, important though it may have been to seasonal birds and hiders and seekers at other times. But remember that the hedge is there. Or not. It will come back into the story to remind you of its presence, oh yes.

I was born on May 24th 1970. The 4th of July 1976 was the first I can remember. It was a big deal. It was the US bicentennial, and our country pulled out all the stops. Great historic ships paraded in New York harbor, and they rang the cracked Liberty Bell. It was the most memorable of my life. I don’t mean the life of a six year old; that would be silly. I mean that was the most memorable 4th of July in my lifetime. We’d begun that day, and likely prior days, listening to an album of patriot music, in the spirit of the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I knew the marches and tunes by heart, especially “The Stars and Stripes Forever”. (As yet another coincidence, this song was written by John Phillip Sousa, the most famous composer of American patriotic marches, and director of the United States Marine Corps band.) The song is “beloved” by children, not for it’s upbeat tempo, horns and drums, or the lilting piccolos embodying the blowing wind of the flag over the White House. It is loved because someone, somewhere “rewrote” the lyrics from the original “Hurrah for the flag of the free, may it wave as our standard forever” to the far more vivid “Be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck could be somebody’s mother…”

When you are six years old, there are not many parts of the Fourth of July that could be described as “hands-on”. Tiny arms do not reach high enough to hang decorations, and little feet can not be trusted on a ladder. The traditional food is prepared over open flame, and by American law you must hold a beer in the non-grilling hand. Perhaps mom (assuming traditional patriarchal roles) might trust you to hold a spatula and stir the mayonnaise-y potato salad, but only because the bowl is huge and the mess is easy to clean. So food is hands-off until the eating. If you come from small town America, perhaps you attend a parade. As a six year old, too young to be a scout or other parade marcher, it is just a viewing experience. If you have a good spot in front or on a convenient shoulder, the view is of the local fire-department or high-school band. If not, the view is all crotches. Fireworks are wonderful, but not for little hands. All that flame, and fuse, and countdown and explosion, is not for wee fingers, if you want to keep the finger census high and the ER census low. Only the sparkler is considered kid friendly, because it is long-lasting, ends with a fizzle, and lit by a parental flame. We are all fools to trust sparklers. A devious sparkler once bit me on the finger pad, immediately before I learned that not-sparkly isn’t the same as not-hot.

After the hot-dogs and potato salad, my brother, all of nine, would help set off a firecracker or roman candle. But I was thrilled with being entrusted with the noble sparkler. The first time I held one, I extended my elbow and shoulder keeping the sparks as far from my body as my little arm could stretch. I’m sure my eyes kept darting between the bright crackling particles near my trunk and my parents’ faces, checking how I should feel about having such frightening power in my hands. They must have been encouraging because I loosened up, and became more dynamic. As the daylight waned, I became enamoured of the visual trail that comes with moving the arm joints. I began to skip and prance around the yard. It wasn’t long before I was dual-wielding sparklers, running to and fro in the yard, waving the gloriously sizzling fire above my head and singing at the top of my lungs. All eyes must have been on me, and my eyes were looking up to the sparks as I conducted an imaginary marching band with my glittering batons, and bellowed “be kind to your web-footed friends…”

The reason I feel comfortable saying all eyes must have been on me, is that everyone in the family was so focused upon the jumping, spark-wielding, and singing, that they lost track of the surroundings, and the speed and direction of the running straight at the hedge. 

Let’s edit that preposition, shall we? 

Straight INTO the hedge. 

I’m not sure exactly how many things need to line up perfectly for a six year old boy to run at a hedge of appropriate dimensions with exactly the proper speed and angle so as to penetrate the bush without injury.  Hard enough to wedge himself tight, with his feet unable to get purchase on the ground, and his arms trapped in the branches. Timed perfectly that the boys arms are positioned so the still bright sparklers are extended just beyond the edge of the leaves, so that the bulk of the illumination on the frozen boy is more sparkler than sunset. Whatever the odds, that’s how many things occurred just so, because I remember hovering there, in that bush, looking out at my mom, dad, and brother, as they were bound in place, consumed by laughter at my strange little arboreal interpretation of the Statue of Liberty.

Begin zoomed way in to the tip of a pencil, not too sharp, or the lead will poke through the rough brown paper and damage the surface of the book it’s protecting. The pencil is inscribing another small, lower-case letter b, in the cramped space between the packing wide clear packing tape reinforcement to the cut up grocery bag covering the math book. The little b, and it’s neighbors were each earned by doing extra math lessons on the school computer, and each one added one-tenth of a point to my final (or quarterly?) grade. It must have been 7th grade, because I didn’t have a “math class” until then, and it was definitely still at Roessleville. 

Rick Miller and I had time before school almost every day, and were competing to see which of us was most likely to get stuffed into a locker for being a math suck up. That’s not true, partially because we didn’t have lockers big enough. What teasing I experienced was more focussed on glasses, big ears, and actual deviations from the pack mentality, as is to be expected for children. I was teased occasionally, not consistently. I had no nemesis or bully to fear. I never really saw anti-nerd abuse. The toxicities my school specialised in were casual homophobia and racism against the few non-white students, shaming poor kids, and rampant teasing of girls. That last one turned into harassment by junior high, and of which I was an embarrassingly active participant. I’m sure there were other abuses heaped upon children, but those are the chart-toppers. I was successful and comfortable and safe. 

Those little b’s were an important part of the world. My safe little space of reward for effort, and approval by adult authority. I would put another little b on my book-cover, in a nice row of five or ten, and assured myself another incremental gimme from the system. I earned them by doing “extra work”, sure,  but I was already at school early, and if they were going to reward me, for doing MATH, on a COMPUTER, I was on-board. The only thing better would have been academic credit for eating those coconut-covered red Twinkies.

Narratively, there feels like there should be ominous music, or a foreshadowing of an impending overturning of my world. There wasn’t. Not in any honest recording of events. As the year went on the small brown windows between the tape filled up with b’s, and the biggest source of stress in my orderly world was finding room for more rows of letters, and could I get a grade above one-hundred. I grew up in a world that rewarded studious white guys whose values were in line with authority. It obviously still does, although so many people who look like me are screaming that it did not and does not.

A decade ago, Michele and I flew to Germany to visit Jim’s family. The visit was great, but that’s a different story. After an umpteen hour overnight flight from Houston, we had an eleven hour layover at Heathrow Airport in England. Even as we made the reservation, that seemed like it would be long enough to drive us insane if we stayed in the airport, and just enough time to get out of the airport and back with a safe margin. 

The musician to whom we owe our first date and wedding first-dance, has a lovely song called “Paris in a Day”, and I’ll trust you to figure out what it’s about. Dared to be brave by our favorite musician, and too tired to sleep, we took our first steps in Europe onto a shuttle train running into town, attempting to jam as much of a city founded by the Roman Empire into our souls before teatime. 

We arrived above ground at Baker St station, but didn’t search too hard for the famous detective. We marveled at the crazy zig-zag traffic lines, and mused on whether finding a bike-share would lead to greater site-seeing or merely a quick death. It was late September, and as is our perpetual good fortune, we experienced unusually perfect weather at our destination. By the time we found Hyde Park, the sun was bright enough that the locals were sunning on blankets, pulling their pant legs up to warm their pasty shins. Strolling south through the park towards Buckingham Palace consumed an hour but filled us with buoyancy after a long night in a tin can. The pictures we have reveal us shedding layers of clothing and emotional armor as we get our traveling groove in our first “foreign country” as a couple. Michele found a London Phone box. I imposed upon a police officer for the requisite tourist photo with a funny helmet. I had the unreasonable goal of getting all the way to Westminster Abbey so I kept us marching  away from the giant gates towards landmarks on the horizon.

We raced past the Horse Guards, but I’m going to go ahead and say we would have lingered if I’d realized at the time it was the home of His Royal Excellence Lord Edgar Darby Covington from Parks and Rec. So much history we missed. For the period of my life that includes this trip, I had an ironic tourism habit of taking pictures of the backs of statues. I thought it funny at the time, but I can’t really defend or recommend it anymore. Maybe I started the habit on a darier. Anyway, for reasons no longer relevant, when we reached Trafalgar Square, with lions and more sunbathers on the stairs of the Museum looking on, I took a picture of Lord Nelson where the sun doesn’t shine.

Knowing we were at the mercy of the train schedule, and the customs and security at the airport, we made our way to Charing Cross station, without browsing the bookshops, which is for the best, as my favorite, the fictional 84 Charing Cross Road (watch the movie) appears to be a vape shop. We made it back to Heathrow without drama, and had airport sushi, while Emma Watson encouraged us to buy Burberry coats. 

The entire day was a folly, and if semi-angry shame-posts come in the replies, I wouldn’t defend myself. We “squandered” London, from one perspective. We were more enthralled looking out for Warren’s Werewolves than St. Paul’s Cathedral. It wasn’t the real London we saw, but a painted background of the city.  It was an imagination of the two of us. It was the real us though. Our vacation became more concrete the more streets we touched down upon. We were waking up to our trip, growing more solid as a couple. Finding a rhythm where we centered each other. We tore through that city like a tornado that day: spinning around our own axis. Less property damage though.  We rejoined the clouds and headed east towards family.

I’m no airline pilot, but the view through the cockpit window wasn’t filling me with confidence. It alternated:  landing strip/water landing strip/water landing strip/water in a way that was far too reminiscent of a roulette wheel, a far too real example of “gambling with my life.” I was captivated by having the same view as the pilots, but I sure hope it’ gave them more confidence in our safety than it gave me.  This was my first time flying alone. I was  flying down for a funeral, and for a moment or two, I wondered if it would be my own.

Aunt Cassie died days before my high school senior prom. The funeral was going to be that Monday and we kids already had plans to go visit Sean Barnhart‘s camp on Lake Ontario for the weekend after the dance. My parents were amazing, and freeing  me to continue my young life, bought me a plane ticket to fly down in time for the funeral.

The airports in Queens, New York are only 150 miles from Albany so the entire flight takes 45 minutes.  It’s done in one of those little rubber band wind up planes where you can’t put luggage anywhere, and in 1988, that meant they could even leave the cockpit door open for the flight. I sat no more than five rows back, and might easily have spent the trip yelling advice to the pilots. During the landing I strongly considered it. I honestly can’t remember what airport we landed at, and looking at Google maps tells me that they are both built out into water, so I don’t know if I was afraid of drowning in the East River or Jamaica Bay.

Cassie (my great aunt) lived with my dad‘s mom, my Nana, for all of my conscious life. My cousins MaryBeth, Brenda and Mike grew up sharing the house with them, and had the blessed good fortune to know them as complete people, as opposed to merely the neat old ladies who gave kisses, butterscotch candies, and money when you came for a visit. I will trust them to set me straight on details that matter, as they come up in future stories. 

I can’t separate her funeral from Nana’s, partially because they were so close together in time, but mostly because I compounded “Nana-and-Cassie” my whole life. I’m not sure at what age I could have explained, if asked, that Nana was my grandmother and Cassie was my dad’s aunt, her sister. They were “Nana and Cassie” until it became totemic, not descriptive. 

Both funerals were held at R.A., their church, where we went every Sunday I visited. It was the church my Dad served at altar growing up, and where my cousins took first communion. It was so much bigger and marbly-er, so much churchier than my own post-modern suburban church. It always filled me with awe. If the funeral really took place in the manner it does in my pocket-universe of memory, the Lamb of God at the mass was sung by the same wonderful black woman in the checkered plaid shirt who led singing for many years. She was the first saint I ever saw, if you define a saint as someone who loves God so much that they don’t seem like they are fully paying attention to this world as people. So whether she led the singing at Cassie’s funeral or not, she was present to ME, because her voice was a physical thing as real as the yellow-blonde wood pews, or stations of the cross. 

I still possess one of Cassie’s rosaries. I can not say that the rituals of the Catholic Church instill in me the peace they once did, and that they brought Nana and Cassie through their lives.  I can say that the rosary is still infused with the love that those women showered upon me as a boy, and has been a comfort to me on those occasions when the only choice is to kneel and grieve with others.

Down past the hill at the end of Braintree St, if I turned left, instead of going to Stephanie’s or Fred’s houses,  onto Newton Ave, I would be only about a hundred steps from the entrance to the West Albany Pocket Park. It wasn’t completed when we moved there in 1976, because I remember it opening, but it must have been very soon after, because I simultaneously remember it being there the entire time. It had the usual fields for sports: the Pop Warner football team played there every fall. It had batting-ball fields, though I don’t think I ever played on the baseball diamond. By the way, my recollection is that the baseball Little League’s were all affiliated with the Catholic Church in Colonie. That can’t be right. Clearly just selection bias on my part, but I would happily take input from someone on the subject.

For all it’s amenities, if it was a local hangout for the kids in my neighborhood, it wasn’t when I was around. I can’t remember ever meeting friends down there to throw a ball or ride a swing. I guess I disconnected from the neighborhood scene fairly young, now that I think about it, and tagged along with Jim when he’d go visit his friends at their parks or driveway hoops.

I have two really strong recollections from the Pocket Park. One makes a decent story.

The other is this one: When the park opened, it had the most magnificent slide. It was built into the slope of the landscape (I’m sure all the earth was moved to make the slope actually) so it could be simultaneously dangerously tall from top to bottom, and never more than 6 inches above the ground. There were no stairs/ladder to fuck around on and fall off of and break your arm or neck. Just railroad ties on grass you’d ascend to the top of a hill, and a 6 foot? wide metal slide down the other. It owed it’s design inspiration to a good sledding hill or ski jump. It’s the kind of thing northerners would design, in my opinion.

To a little kid it was a mountain. I’m sure it’s actually not that big. The first time I slid down it, it must have been facing just the right angle that the sun had been heating it up like a hot-plate. It was also perfectly dry, and I was wearing shorts. I recall the sensation of the back of my thighs being cooked by both friction and conduction by that metal, and reaching the bottom in excruciating pain. We learned to get handfuls of water from the water-fountain to cool and lubricate it before going down. That also apples for the slide we had in my back-yard pool. I may be conflating or confusing those stories. Either way, that slide at the park felt like it was as big as the Matterhorn.

The better story captures the fundamental essence of difference between my brother and I. Regularly, we would go down to the park to shoot hoops. If he could pick up a game with other kids he would, but he was perfectly happy to shoot baskets and play a game of H-O-R-S-E, where you have to copy the shot of the original shooter, or you get a letter. Loser is first to get the entire word spelled. So…me. Or play one on one. He’d spot my three, or five, or nine points, and we’d play to eleven. After I’d get tired of sucking, he’d shoot layups or jump shots or free throws while I pressed my face against the chain link fence to give my face a waffle texture.

One particular evening, he challenged himself to get 10 straight free throws before we left for home. I don’t know if it was before dinner, and I was hungry, or after dinner and it was getting dark. It definitely was after I was well and truly bored and before he was willing to give up. He’d get five or six in a row, and then miss, and start again. He must have gotten eight or nine at some point, or at least super close, because I know I popped up like a cartoon devil-on-the-shoulder, to advocate that whatever his achievement was, it was basically the same as his stated goal, and could we please go home and get a snack? That is so me. Close enough, let’s go. Now that I think about it, someone please have that engraved on my tombstone. “Kevin Glynn May 24th, 1970 – Close enough, let’s go”. I felt I made a strong case for popsicle time, but was he swayed? No. He stayed and shot that stupid ball, through that stupid hoop, while the stupid chain-link net made a jingling sound every time he made a basket. I really want to say the light got dim as the sun set as he practiced, but perhaps that was just ennui and low popsicle levels in my blood. I was young enough that I couldn’t walk home alone, so I was a captive to his perfectionism. I’m confident others may have similar Stockholm syndrome situations with him over the years.

I don’t know if he ever got all ten in a row so we could go home. We might still be there. It’s possible I’m hallucinating all of this from the park at the end of the hill, forever swinging around the metal pole holding up the backboard, while he’s stuck on nine.

U2 sucks. 

It’s May 26th 2017, and we’re at Dallas Cowboy Stadium with our friends to see the best band Michele has never seen, and the only band that could lure me back to a large arena show. The last time I went to a big concert was The Police reunion tour, and we had seats within spitting range of the band. After 45 minutes I begged Michele to text her sister sitting in the nosebleeds to switch with me, so she could have more fun, and I’d stop getting stink eye from Andy Sumner. It was loud, OK? I don’t like loud. I have hearing problems anyway, and spending two days with ringing in my ears isn’t cool. Also, I’m old and boring.

So here I am at the concert. I don’t like concerts. But Michele loves concerts, and I love  her. The best part of my night has been walking Michele’s not-remotely-see-through-enough purse all the way back to the car. So I got my steps. The stadium pretzel was OK. Other than that, this night is not going well. It’s not Bono’s fault. I’m kidding. Of course it’s Bono’s fault. If he hadn’t been so damn compelling in the With or Without you MTV video, I wouldn’t be here, musing on the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound, the speed of video monitors, and the speed of the audience singing along, but we’re not there yet. So 1) everything in my life since 1986 is technically Bono’s fault, and 2) this isn’t a metaphysics lecture, so let’s move along.

This is definitely Michele’s fault. (Because I’m not confident in my ability to write satire properly, and because my wife sometimes only skims my narcissistic writing exercises on FB, because she has to put up with this crap all the time, I’d like to get out front here and say it’s definitely NOT Michele’s fault at all. Having unequivocally stated that it’s NOT Michele’s fault, let’s move along.) It’s Michele’s fault in the way that it’s Charlie Brown’s fault he keeps missing the football. Sure Lucy’’s a gaslighter, but at a certain point, kid, just walk away from the football and get some therapy. And not from Lucy. She’s hardly objective. Also, she only costs a nickel. Save up and get a proper therapist. Now I’ve just analogized myself to Lucy, AND called her (and by the commutative property myself) a gaslighter. And not worth what she costs. So let’s be straight, I told Michele I would accompany her, but she knew the risks. I’m on record as saying the most I can do at a big live-music show is not detract from her good time. And it’s worth it to see U2. She shouldn’t have to do that alone. She wants to share the experience with her husband. So here I am. None of THAT is her fault. That’s my baggage. 

What’s her fault is that she bought the tickets. These horrible, horrible tickets. We’re so far to the left that we’re behind the line of the stage. I can see the Edge’s ass. Well, I could, if he wasn’t so far away. We’re also in the fourth row from the top of the stadium. Our friends Vic and Sonya are one row further, but several seats less back stage. Later, they’ll tell me it didn’t make a qualitative difference. These tickets up here in Section Omega, Row ZZZ..ZZQ.784x’click-sound’B. These are her fault, we can all agree. 

No, they’re not. She bought bargain tickets, because she had an imaginary, but very lifelike version of me in her head when she was on Tickets-for-Kidneys, or whatever legitimated mafia-scam is in charge of selling tickets in America. The prices were so insane, and she knows I’m so cheap, AND she was buying tickets for Vic and Sonya. She didn’t have the guts to squander all of our retirement plans for seats that didn’t require a safety briefing on fastening our lap belts and how to put on our oxygen masks in the case of sudden cabin depressurization. So here we are  where the only ass I can see is the ass of the spot-light operator, who is literally closer to the stage than we are. Up here where we are above and behind the stadium’s speakers, we’re getting sound  reflection interference patterns so complex that I can build 3-D maps like a bat. I don’t remember what I did to her to make her so gunshy when she bought these tickets, and neither does she (I checked). So it’s nobody’s fault. It’s just one of those things. Everyone agree? I’m sorry. No time for further questions.  Let’s move along.

The opening band is the Lumineer’s, who, in addition to being responsible for the funniest joke in the Parks & Rec TV series, have other qualities. We were very much looking forward to seeing them as well, but since Michele had to wait for me at the front gate while I completed the “why should I have paid attention to where we parked-I wasn’t the driver” half-marathon with her purse, we experience the best of their set through four-hundred million dollars of concrete. As we ascend through layers of now-deserted concourses, their haunting lyrics feel like their inviting us “to come play with us, Danny.” We have not yet realized that this will be the musical highlight of the night, the best the music will sound. For the rest of my life every time I hear the song “Ophelia”, I will want to pay too much for pizza.

By the time U2 comes on stage, we’ve acclimatized to the altitude and have enough energy to stomp and scream with the rest of the stadium for the opening number, which immediately begins a night long struggle between Bono and the audience for vocal supremacy in some bizarre musical anti-tug-of war, for which the best mental analogue is the scene in  Scott Pilgrim where Sex-bo-bomb battles the Katayanagi Twins. From our vantage among the weather satellites, we can almost see the high and low pressure waves of sound blasting out from the stage. Answered by the inebriated and overstimulated crowd in floor admission, at times Bono has to physically lean into the noise like he’s reporting live before the hurricane makes landfall.

My poor wife is heartbroken. This is her Moby Dick. She’s been trying to catch a glimpse of this great white band her entire life, and it’s a disaster. At one point she actually cries,  but not because MLK has been killed. She’s crying because what  we hear is the exact same thing you would get if you pressed play on a boombox containing the Rattle and Hum CD, and placed the whole thing into a metal trash can. We actually leave before the encore. Our friends agree that getting out of the stadium parking lot before it clogs up is the best part of the night.

In the back yard of the house on Braintree Street, along the right side, we had a small circular bed of plants, breaking up the line of hedges that ate the soccer ball. By luck or design, there was a hand-sized patch of lilies-of-the-valley that grew there. Lilies-of-the-valley are small, delicate plants that look like they were drawn by a small delicate child, with a small delicate pencil. They only grow to about eight inches high, and their necks bend back towards the earth with white bells the size of the fingertip of that child-artist. 

My mother, who is an avid identifier of plants to this day, introduced me to them one day when I was in elementary school. I can see her fingertip supporting the little flower, and my own reaching out to touch it. I know they smell lovely, but in my memory I can just smell growing things: grass and dirt and leaf. 

The lily-of-the-valley is the “official” flower of May. My birth flower. 

At some point when you’re a kid you dive into the zodiac and your birthstone. It must be a part of the practice of forming yourself. Assembling who you are out of not quite spare parts laying around, that people say should fit. An Emerald. A rock you can look at in a book. It’s hard and colorful, things a child can understand. A Gemini. A list of traits you can read in a book. Adaptable, impulsive, outgoing. These are words we try on like Ray-Bans, or Chuck Taylors, or Jams-shorts.  Before you can really explore your own, delicate, squishy, undefinable parts of yourself, you can take pre-made attributes off the rack for fit.

Growing up, that little patch of flowers would return every spring. While occasionally it would be trampled by a chased dog, or errant soccer ball, it mostly grew a few shoots in the shade, for a while. It was a quiet, private, nook. Not hidden, but not commented upon. A little piece of me in the back yard. A little peace in the back yard. 

I am not a believer in the zodiac. I think the list of traits, or a horoscope, are written sufficiently vague as to be self-fulfillingly generic. But I am a believer in my birth flower. Not some associated myth or symbol. I never bothered to read up on that. I believe that I keep a patch of small, delicate flowers nested up under the protection of the hedges.

“Feet out!”

My feet are the closest of the three of us to the open door, so I ease forward and aim my them at the black non-skid surface of the platform. The next object beyond that little foot-square is a couple thousand feet below.

“Get out!”

I lean my body forward past my feet, and reach out to grasp the strut of the wing. Now my feet are dangling behind me.

“Look at me!”

That’s for the picture, showing me grinning from ear to ear with joy, fear, and an almost- hundred-mile-an-hour wind.

“Let go!”

I do. 

Bill Church, his girlfriend Patti, and I all shelled out a hundred bucks to take the first day of parachute/sky-diving lessons. We left from Binghamton in the dark, and drove a couple hours to get there on time.  In a few years, the business model will change to strapping you to someone experienced and jumping out for piggy-back freefall and a home video. This predated that, at least in rural New York State. This was actual day one of jumping out of plane school. It consisted of several hours of physics lessons on airflow and lift, learning how to pack your own parachute, all the steps of how and when to pull your emergency ‘chute, body position in the air and upon landing, and a written test. Oh, and of course a truly horrifying waiver form. 

We passed the written test, and got to load up, three at a time, plus pilot and guy who yells at you, and circle up to two-or-three-thousand feet, gawking out the open door of a little single-prop plane, thinking about our life choices.  Despite learning to pack a ‘chute, they fitted us with pre-folded ones, and rigged them to pull automatically a few feet behind the plane. 

I don’t know about you, but when I let go of an airplane wing, my brain just short circuits. We were supposed to practice trying to maintain that arms-out skydivey position you see in videos, but I had no control over my muscular function. By the time my brain rebooted and made the Apple Computer start-up noise, I was hanging vertically beneath a rectangle of colored nylon floating downward “slowly” over an unplanted farm field. Those few minutes between the sky and the ground were the most exhilarating hours of my life. I recall no cognitive memories; only sensations of coolness and gliding, with a soft wind in my face. It was much like coasting on a bicycle for a bit, but with a much better view.  

As I descended to where the trees became three-dimensional, the sensation of speed and the fear of heights returned. The ground transmuted to foreground from background. The school had optimistically chalked a circle target we were supposed to aim for as a landing spot. I was nowhere close. I was a football field away when I pulled the handles that stall forward progress for ground contact. Unfortunately, I was also eight feet in the air, and I plummeted like a rock onto my ass, so thank g-d for the big piles of dirt in that unplanted farm field. Could have been worse, because a few minutes later, Patti took too much speed into her landing and face-planted her helmet into the soft soil. She was much closer to the target though.

On the ground we survivors hugged and bled off adrenaline, and compared notes with our fellows, feeling oh-so-worldly to the classmates who had yet to ascend. We were still so pumped on the drive home that I took my little Pontiac 2000 over 90 mph on one straightaway.

The Polaroid of me lived on the door of my dorm-room for the rest of that year, so any visitors might see how cool I had been, and how happy I was, hanging from the wing of a plane.

In my childhood and teenage bedroom, the head of the bed sat about a foot away from the wall. That empty space left just enough clearance so the single shelf above the headboard didn’t hit my skull when I woke up every morning. It also left room for the red spring arm reading lamp to move in and out of position as needed.

On that small shelf perched above my pillow there were always two things. One was the book I was reading. The other was the digital solid-state alarm clock radio.  It was an inch-high brick of silver gray plastic, with a round radio dial on the right side. It has red eight segment LED numerals. It was purchased at the Service Merchandise on Wolf Road. I surmise that I got it in ‘82 or ‘83, because Jim moved out of our shared  bedroom into his own so he could have teenage privacy. Prior to that  we both woke up to his alarm clock radio. It was cigar-box sized, of  brown plastic . The digits were yellow green.

Every night, I would set the timer to about 30 minutes, and listen to the radio as I fell asleep. I can’t remember what stations were cool back then. That clock woke me up every weekday through high-school. One Saturday night, in high school I laid on the bed, and listened to Madonna sing “Crazy for You”, and feeling incredibly sad and alone. 

My alarm clock got removed from it’s shelf in the fall of 1988 and went to college with me, where it spent two years on a little two drawer filing cabinet that acted as my bedside table in Champlain Hall, when I lived with Steven Rubenstein. It has sat its nightly sentry perched on a milk crate next to a pile of blankets (late college), and on a rough beam in a horse barn stall in Maryland.

It woke me up for classes I got A’s in, and for an eight AM differential equation math class I barely passed. It has woke me up to teach classes, and to round on surgeries. It was my bedside alarm clock until Into the 21st-century, when it was replaced with a CD player/alarm clock, in the brief era that preceded the iPod.

Early one Saturday morning, when I was almost twice as old as that lonely boy listening to Madonna, it woke me up to begin the day I got married.

While at the outdoor learning center we occasionally had very large, multi day school groups that required a large group of instructors to coordinate. For one of these events,  I was either the designated leader, or a defacto leader due to my seniority. I don’t remember if we were having a specific problem, or a more general meeting in our instructor house, but as groups of a dozen or so often do, we began to descend into chaos and crosstalk, and voices were getting louder. Nothing crazy, but at that point in a meeting where the average person starts to know the actual issue won’t get solved, fear nothing will get solved, and want to just get the hell out of there. Since I was “in charge” simply leaving wasn’t an option, so that left me feeling frustrated. 

We were equal parts teachers and maintenance workers, and I had a hammer nearby the couch I was sitting on. I grabbed the hammer and banged on the concrete floor loudy. Like a gavel. Everyone got quiet. I don’t know what we talked about to finish the meeting, because that’s not the point of the story. 

After the meeting, one of the instructors, Mick, who hadn’t been there very long, asked to talk with me in private. He was tense, literally, with visible muscle tension in his arms and face. He told me that my banging the hammer had been an escalation of tension and violence, and that it really upset him. He challenged me to think about how I would feel if someone else had done that, and how I would have dealt with someone further escalating the mood. I could see that this wasn’t a mere hypothetical, and that he was having difficulty controlling the emotions I had failed to hold in.

I would like to think I said something gracious and contrite at the time, but I have no memory of my response. Apparently I wasn’t a complete ass at the moment, because we didn’t come to blows. I do know that it was an incredibly meaningful intervention. I’m not a very alpha guy, so it’s not like I wave my anger around. But I am a white cisgender man, which means I get to justify my occasional emotional outbursts as the rightful reaction to the situation, in ways many others do not. I took it as an unquestionable right, until the moment he took me aside. Mick was certainly the first peer who stepped forward like that. It took real courage. 

FWIW, this particular story is “inspired” by a couple Twitter stories today of Science Fiction authors being rightly called out for ongoing behavior in their personal and professional lives, and how blind some of them seem to be to their own culpability, even after doing their public apologies. Recently I told a friend that one danger of writing myself as the center of every story is writing myself as the hero as well. I know I’m mostly a good guy, but to anyone I haven’t been good to, I’m a bad guy. That’s fair. I’ll own that.

 For those who’ve asked, I’m still not really sure exactly what I’m doing with these stories. I’m having a lot of fun writing. Many of you have been incredibly generous with your compliments. Thanks for reading, even to the less goofy ones.