This is just a snippet of a memory. Another of my earliest. I’ve been dropped off at the babysitter’s house to spend the night. I’m being babysat by the older sister(s) of Jim’s elementary school friend. One of them must be a teenager, so when I do the math in my head, that makes me between five and seven years old. I have no idea why I am staying with them overnight.

What I remember is my suitcase. It’s the first time I have a suitcase. That I packed. From research/googling, I guess it was a “train case”, a little handheld thing, not much bigger than a shoebox, that a fancy lady would keep her makeup and gloves in in a fifties movie. I’m sure it was from the luggage my mom got when she went to college, or got married. It would be the perfect size for a little kid to pack his PJs and a stuffed animal in. Probably a change of clothes. It’s blue, and hard-shell on the outside. The inside lining is silky, if not silk. I have no idea what I put it in, but I remember it feeling so official that I had my own luggage. I played with the metal latch, and listened to it’s satisfying spring “clack” as it snapped open or closed.

My niece, Tyler Glynn turns 22 today. Here are some memory snippets in her honor.

It’s my wedding reception. It’s a muggy Texas outdoor evening, and I’m dancing with my new wife. A little moppet of a girl, just able to walk, is “dancing” in a flowery toddler dress nearby. Everyone, including the bride and groom are watching her instead of us.

Michele and I are babysitting Tyler and her brother for the weekend at our appartment in Temple Texas. We’ve gotten the kids hopped up on pizza and jellybeans, or whatever you give kids when they’re four and six years old and Tyler is so overtired she refuses to go to sleep. She’s crying and writhing and just so loud and overtired, that she can’t giver herself the one thing she needs: rest.  and I lay down with her and hug her tight to keep her from getting out of bed, as she yells in my good ear, until she’s exhausted and falls asleep.

Her dad and I are driving somewhere. She is six-ish, and riding in the backseat/car seat. She’s singing All Star by smash mouth, and it’s not even on the radio. She just keeps sing-chanting “Hey now…Rockstar….You’re an All-Star….Go Play…” on loop. 

It’s a family reunion, and she’s a young highschooler. Me Jim Jordan and she have been doing a track/cross-country work-out of sprints. We’re all tired, and she’s so small, and so fast-like a whippet. She came late to the reunion from the funeral of a high school classmate. She’s grieving. And she’s exhausted, and she’s still so tough and so fast as she runs her sprints and cries from a mixed cocktail of pains. 

It’s Christmas 2018, and the Glynn family is together and she’s home from college. She has received  a beer pong set up as a “gag gift“ and her dad and she have set it up and to play. She’s been talking like an innocent about how she’s played once or twice but doesn’t really know how and her dad’s talking about how he hasn’t played in as long as she’s been alive. It looks to be a wonderful father-daughter bonding experience. 

She arcs her first toss into the cup like Michael Jordan at his NBA finals best and smirks. He gives her this little squint-eye of surprise. How proud should a dad be that his kid has mad beer-pong skills? He squares up and sinks his first shot, like the old pro. They’ve both been bald-faced liars for the last few minutes! The game is on, and two beer-pong  sharks have just recognized a kindred spirit.  Like sees like, father sees daughter, killer sees killer. The smile they give each other is nothing compared to the smile I have watching them.

In 10th grade we took world history. I can’t remember the name of the teacher, I am confident one of my high school friends on Facebook will give it to me, if I don’t remember it by the time I post this. He also coached one of the basketball teams, and his nephew was one of our classmates, but I can’t member his name…

I am a history nerd. I have always liked history, I’ve read history for fun for as long as I can remember, and I was a very good history student. I had straight A’s in world history all year, and I might’ve had 100 average in that class going into the final. On the final I got an F. Or something close to an F. Super low. Not “ooh, I did so bad…I only  got an 89. Like a legit shit-show of a grade.. It is by far the lowest grade I received in high school.  As you might expect, I took it with the grace and humility that you would imagine an uptight nerdy white boy would. Meaning of course but I threw a nutty! Like a Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh “I LIKE BEER!” vibe. 

All year long, the class had been a rousing, almost Socratic, set of discussions between the teacher and the students about the major concepts and epochs of western civilization, and I must have been one of the most active participants in this class. The final was a series of essay questions where we were expected to integrate the ideas into essays that demonstrated our understanding and mastery of the year. I think the last week of classes were review and all we did was integrate all eras and ideas into one big picture before final. For the exam itself, we were given a big stack of blank, I think unlined, paper to write our essays on. We had a half a dozen essay questions and I wrote out my answers in rough draft form, and had enough time to re-copy them from my horrible chicken scratch to my best, mechanical drafting, handwriting.

Have you seen the movie Real Genius? At the end of that movie Val Kilmer’s character finishes his physics final and drops his paper off on the teachers desk with an asinine smirk, hands the teacher an F.U. apple, and a note that says “I aced this.” That’s the way I remember feeling as I handed in my world history final.

How’d we find out our grades? Were the posted? I don’t remember, but however it happened, I went to talk to the teacher about how I managed to do so stellarly bad on the test. He Indicated that I had completely omitted one of the five or six essay questions. The two of us quickly agreed that I had probably thrown away a final draft essay question with all my rough draft scratch paper.

I begged him to change my grade, and give me a grade I would have gotten, if I hadn’t done something so boneheaded. (Oh the entitlement) He told me he couldn’t do that, but also told me not to worry about it, in some reassuring way. I definitely was not reassured, because I had my head up my own ass, but I distinctly remember him trying to get me to chill. Probably attempting to teach me a life lesson, and maybe that grades weren’t that important in the long run. None of that was getting through to my uptight 16-year-old brain that day.

When he “refused to change my grade” (my recollection) I went with my sob story to the vice principal and principal or somebody in administration who I thought could tell him what to do. I’m such a weenie. The next thing I remember is meeting with him again where he effectively told me that I was such a weenie. And then I needed to chill. I don’t remember if he told me right then, or made me wait until the official report card came in the mail, but he had obviously taken into account the error on my exam, and my final grade for the class was a 95, instead of the 78 or some thing that I had calculated it would be. Yes, I’m the kind of kid who would calculate in advance what my final grade would be, in advance, based on various scores. (Remind me to tell you about gas-pump math sometime). 

So, another Kevin classic, in which the hero’s boneheaded behavior, and self-inflicted error gets resolved with little or no consequence, but a lesson is learned, in some very small way. Only to be repeated. I am one lucky man.

The air is a perfect skin temperature, and the sky is a brilliant clear-blue, with the smattering of clouds a child might draw to indicate “sky”. The child’s sun is also hanging perfectly, casting just enough warmth so the gently-blowing breeze can take credit for cooling me a bit without being showy. 

I am sitting in a cheap plastic chair, next to the parking lot of a hamburger joint. An odd place to achieve a moment of pure harmony with the universe, I grant you. It might make a little more sense if you know that this one is in Santa Barbara, California, which is probably one of the most beautiful and relaxing places on the planet. 

Jim is stationed in San Diego, and my parents and I are visiting him and his family. We make a quick trip up the coast to Santa Barbara to do some touristy California things. For the Glynn’s that means walking. We’ve interrupted our city-hike at lunch time, and while everyone else goes inside to order, my job is to occupy a table. This is not a difficult job. It’s barely lunch time, as my father is one of those men who will NOT wait in line for food or a seat. 

I sit with my eyes closed, and turn my face towards the sun like a daisy, and literally bask. Time has stopped. There is no asphalt or cheap plastic, or traffic. Only a toasty hug from coastal California’s atmosphere. 

A hundred years later, my family starts coming outside with baskets of food. The aura of peace will nest inside me the whole trip, and make the excellent milk-shake and decent burger even more enjoyable. 

Later there will be palm-trees and the nicest grass I’ve ever seen in a public park, and many homeless people who have made enviable choices regarding places to subsist, undermining my life’s choices.

The very first position I got after graduating PA school, and relocating for my wife’s residency program, was the first offer I received, which was to work at a women’s prison in Gatesville, TX. I’d been looking for almost six months at that point, and had driven to towns as far as 70 miles away to cold-call practices and drop of resumes. I would have taken anything at that point, as evidenced by the fact that I took work at a women’s prison in Gatesville, TX. 

Now honestly, there are quite a few good things I could say about the experience, along the vein of the “every cloud has a silver lining.” 1) My supervising physician was so checked out and incompetent that after two weeks of barely training me, I was left to my own devices and learned to depend upon myself. 2) There were lots of abscesses and ingrown toenails, and so I got incredibly good at minor surgical procedures, and plenty of practice with donning sterile gloves (see 0.01644). 3) I got really good at identifying lice. 4) There’s almost nowhere safer to be on 9/11 than a razor-wire enclosed compound with armed guards in the middle of nowhere.

So that was a fun 6 months – because I got the hell out of there as fast as possible for at least FOUR reasons.

But the fifth, and the most entertaining, reason for leaving, is actually the first thing that happened to me: on my very first day of seeing patients, the last one of the morning, just before lunch, a very nice convicted lady looked me in the eye and said “Doc, you know the crotch of your pants is split wide open, right? We’ve been laughing about it in the waiting room all morning.”

P.S. At lunch, I sewed my pants crotch back together with wound suture (it comes pre-threaded!), and had to work out the rest of the day.

There was a time when I could tell you the longest river in Africa, or the leading crop or state bird of Montana. At least there was a time when I could ask you those questions, and check to see if your answer was correct. That time would have been in the evening, on a Saturday, while we ate take-out pizza, from the Pizza Nook. 

For many years growing up, the Times-Union newspaper in Albany, NY had a 5 or 10 question trivia quiz in the back pages, near the crossword and chess problem.  I think it was only a summer feature, though I have no idea why that would be. Our family loved doing those trivia quizzes. Naming Cy Young winners or President’s wives or whatever, honestly I have no recollection of those questions, because after a while, we started making our own trivia quizzes for Saturday night dinners. I suspect I probably annoyed my parents into doing the first ones, but soon it became a rotating responsibility.  Again, I suspect that I annoyed people with requests for “more questions” until they just made me make my own. My parents say I was eight or nine when I started to comb through the World Almanac looking for ten things I could ask my brother and parents. I recall tables of Gross Domestic Products, Presidential Birthplaces, and Best Actor Oscar winners and runners-up, and can see the little text under my fingers like it was yesterday. 

I have vivid memories of the distinctive scribble of my dad’s questions on his beloved 3×5 cards, and how thrilled I was when we replaced the 1976 World Almanac with one from ‘81 or ‘82. The eighties book had world flags IN COLOR! 

I think one of the most personally profound changes technology has wrought is that as a child, my prodigious memory was a huge part of what made me a successful student, and therefore a happy and successful person, since school was the defining part of who I was. Modern day use of the Google means that keeping facts stored in my brain seems a waste; the mental equivalent of keeping receipts from McDonalds. Anyone can seek information out faster with a keyboard, or a yell of “Hey Siri, Alexa, or OK Google”. Lot’s of my fellow olds may be uncomfortable with this, but I don’t mind that my superpower is no longer impressive.

I’m still an active trivia guy: A few years ago, Marsha Nagorsky invited me to join the Learned League, an online trivia/knowledge quiz that arranges people into groups of about 25 other folks with similarly spongy brains in head-to-head competition for about a month at a time, a few times a year. It’s enough fun that I’ve recruited a few others into the cult, and made some real friends among competitors.  It’s a wonderful way to frustrate myself for a few minutes each day, and the best part is complaining about the fairness of the questions, with my compatriots. The most impressive thing about it is that every day  you click a box as you submit the answers to the six questions, affirming that you did not cheat. Any community that trusts the honesty of 18,000 strangers is worth being a member of. We’re about midway through a season currently, but if you think it sounds fun, let me know. Another Rookie League will start in August. 

Nile, wheat, western meadowlark

Feel free to chime in with a favorite bit of trivia, OR your favorite pizza place.

When I was 25 I had arthroscopic knee surgery, and because I was living in Texas, one of my coworkers at the school was the person who came and picked me up and helped me fill my prescriptions. The evening after my surgery she took me out for dinner and as I crutch walked into the food court, still a little high from meds, I remember showing off to her that if I flexed my knee real fast I could make liquid shoot out of one of the incision holes. I definitely recall telling Janet “and it doesn’t even hurt!“ 

Anesthesia is an amazing thing. If you look at the Greek word translates literally as  “without sensation”. It means you can’t feel what is happening to you. Technically there are diseases that will leave you with the condition of “anesthesia.” A spinal chord injury might leave you unable to feel parts of your body. However most of the time when we use that word we’re talking about receiving an external substance that leaves us numb to pain. 

Last week Tuesday, Jarrett came into work and said “well we’ve descended into authoritarian rule now” after the government had used gas and heavily armored police to disperse the protesting crowd in Lafayette Park. I can honestly say that I had looked at the story in the news, but it didn’t register as any bigger deal than all the other crap that the President and his allies have been doing these last three years. 

Here’s a cool thing that often happens when you remove someone’s toenail:. To numb the toe for the procedure, you give a small prick  of lidocaine to the surface of each side of the base of the toe to numb the skin, and then you plunge the needle all the way down until you feel it hit the side of the bone. Then you push the medicine out right there where the nerve is passing, so the tip of the toe (and nail) go senseless. After a minute or so, it’s so asleep that many patients want to watch while you do the bloody work of pushing back the skin, clamping onto the nail with medical pliers and tugging. They often exclaim how much they can’t feel it. Sometimes they have a look of amazed glee. What I know that they do not, is that they WILL feel it later. A lot. 

I am not unaware of the killing of Breyonna Taylor in her own home, or George Floyd, or Ahmaud Arbery, or the huge list of others. Police and state violence are not just things on the news to me. I have a young patient whose elementary school classmate was shot and killed by a “stray round” when police raided a mobile home and the bullets penetrated a neighboring trailer. I live thirty miles from an immigration detention facility. These things are known to me. I actively try to rectify these wrongs with my time, my money, and my voice. I even write my congressmen (and let me tell you writing to Ted Cruz regularly is an advanced course in squandering precious time and energy). I am not blind. Nor am I ignorant. I recognize the wound. I apply the bandage to the bleeding. 
But I am anesthetized.

I’m plunging toward the river, and all of my oxygen is knotted up under my sternum. It’s a race now between whether I asphyxiate before or after I hit the water.

In the summer of 1994, I was living and working in Hanover, New Hampshire. I was working as a contractor for a ropes course construction company  before I moved to Texas to start my teaching career. By living in Hanover, New Hampshire, I mean living in a bed of pine-needles in a park outside Hanover. One highlight of that summer was the two nights I worked at an actual camp, because I got an indoor bed to sleep in. One low light of that summer was when the guy I was working for had sufficiently low cash flow, that he paid me in one hundred sixty feet of rope. 

Coincidentally, while Bill Church and I were in New Zealand earlier that year, we met a couple of Dartmouth College students who were taking a break to do some mountaineering.  I had their contact information in my journal, and it was nice to see “familiar” faces,  so I connected up with them for a drink and a meal one afternoon.

They decided to take me out to a swimming hole on the Connecticut River for part of the afternoon. It had an amazing rope swing that hung from a grand old pine tree that angled out over the water.  The swing was pretty exhilarating in it’s own right. However the branches of the pine tree were spaced just right so that you can basically walk up this tree like a ramp out over the deep water in the river, and generations of adventurous, and inebriated, locals and Dartmouth students had been jumping off this tree into the water, and these guys invited me to join them. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m not sure now, how much of it was a testosterone challenge, and how much was just adventurous young men enjoying a summer day. 

I think most amateur rock climbers will tell you that they have a healthy fear of heights, and a healthy trust in their gear. I’m solidly in that group. I’m actually not much of a risk taker. I’m a calculated risk taker, and there’s a huge difference. Most of the time, anyway. Climbing up the tree was fine, and certainly no challenge for a guy who’d been working in trees for the past year, but the thing I didn’t find out until I was up there, is that there was a big branch you needed to clear, so not only do you have to really commit but you can’t see below you. When I was standing up there, amongst the branches, there was no ground. Just sky, and the jump.  I don’t know what fraction of my motivation was to not look like a fool in front of these guys, but that was some of it. One of them went first, and whooped and lived and yelled something. Now it was my turn…3…2…1… here I go…

Have you ever slipped and fallen down on your back and knocked the wind out of yourself? I hate that feeling. I think it’s one of the physically and emotionally worst feelings somebody can have. Despite knowing it’s not really serious, and that you will be fine in a moment, there’s just this kernel of doubt. A small part of you says “what if it lasts forever?” Now imagine having that feeling while accelerating towards the earth. 

The acceleration due to the gravity of the earth is 32 feet (or 9.81meters) per second, per second. In the first second you go from a speed of zero, to a speed of 32 feet/sec, so on average you are doing 16 feet per second for the first second, and so you fall 16 feet. That gets you past the first branch, and now you can look down to see the water coming up at you (in your reference frame. To a neutral observer, you are falling toward the stationary river, and the River observes that the tree has just shot at it with a large peachy, screaming pine-cone). The water is coming at you fast. In the 2nd second you’ll fall about 48 feet (we’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader), and I really don’t think this tree was 60 feet above the water, so the whole experience lasted less than two seconds, if you don’t count the infinity I spent coming up from the water, or the 26 years that loop has played in my psyche.

A stranger stands over me. I’m somewhere around 10 years old. “Well, I can’t fix his hearing. If you want, though, I can pin his ears back.” This is the first time I have ever thought “Fuck you” to an adult.

I was born deaf in my right ear. I have a medical degree now, and I still just think of it as “nerve-deafness” which is what my mother, or my doctor explained it as, when I was a kid. My real doctor. Not that dick who took the opportunity to stigmatize my prominent, sticky-outy ears. My sticky-outy ears are why someone in my family referred to me as looking like a sugarbowl (old-timey ones have a handle on both sides), and why “big ears” was probably the most common insult hurled at me growing up – aren’t kids great. I can’t say I liked being made fun of any more than any other kid would, but let’s be honest, “big-ears” is pretty weak sauce as insults go, so I have no complaints. I’ve always thought I have a striking resemblance to Charlie Brown, so I’ve got that going for me. I got one ear stuck on a fence once, but that’s about the worst. Still, fuck you, doc.

Now my non-stereo existence is far more significant. It’s the reason I couldn’t get an appointment a military academy, and follow in my brother’s footsteps. I think we can all agree that’s both a metaphorical and literal bullet dodged there. It’s the reason some of you know which side of me to stand/sit/walk on, if you expect me to understand a thing you say. One girlfriend thought I was a real gentleman because I always put myself on the street side of any sidewalk whenever we walked anywhere. She assumed it was me trying to “protect her” from traffic, until much later when she understood it was because I can’t hear anything.  If you’ve ever seen me spin around in slow circles, like a lighthouse, when you call my name across the cafeteria, mall, grocery store, or open campus, now you know why. 

To this day my wife, STILL has a tendency to respond “in here” when I call her name, not quite remembering how she’s torturing me. It’s really fun when I misplace my phone, try to figure out which room’s smoke alarm is low. Oh, it also saves a ton of money on stereo speakers and headphones, but it makes movies and video games annoying when they pipe the sound into different speakers for effect. You have no idea how many dramatic moments I only hear half of.

My cousin Sarah (24?) is sitting across the small table from my nephew Jordan (11?), with the last cards finally out of her hand, the rest on the table before them. The stress in her eyes, visible all day, is now receding quickly, because they have won, against much a more experienced pair. This tournament has been going on all week, and she and her young partner (the youngest in the game), underdogs all week, are the champions of the Schmid Family Reunion Pitch Tournament. Cheering ensues. 

I’m from a family that plays cards. My grandmother, Maude Schmid, was a card-sharp (not shark – look it up). She played bridge and pinochle, rummy and a hundred other old-lady games. She had three daughters, and each of them had two kids. Three sets of pairs, which is probably a high-scoring hand in some game my grandma played with a neighbor, but who knows? We all learned, young. We had round, plastic pringles-can lids fastened together so we could hold card hands bigger than our kid-hands. There’s not a blood relative of mine who cannot shuffle, or who isn’t planning to teach their kid to shuffle if they’re too young.

At every family gathering big enough to get three other people around a table, my grandmother would start a game, or be a willing fourth, or coach, or substitute, depending upon how many others were playing. In our family, THE GAME, is known as Pitch. Played in two teams of two, three, or four, I’ve been friend or foe with every aunt, uncle, parent, sibling, cousin, niece, nephew, and their children or their partners. I know how likely they are to play aggressive or hold back, how likely they are to bluff, and how happy they’ll get when their gambit works out, or when they block the success of their favored enemy at the table. I know which family members will bid to take the lead with one crappy Queen in their hand, and which ones will sit quietly on Ace, King, Jack.

I learned about people’s tolerance for risk, reward, and failure. I learned to focus at the card table. How to see who followed suit, and how many cards of the favored suit have been played each round, so I could track whether my teammates or opponents were more likely to take control of the game. I learned statistics at the table: depending upon how many players (6 cards per) there are 24, 36, or 48 cards in play, that means Aces, Jacks, 10s and 2’s are more or less likely to be hiding in someone’s hand, to  be hunted. I learned to keep long and short term objectives in balance between taking a trick, taking a round, and winning the game. I learned to win gracefully, occasionally, and how to lose gracefully, a lot.  I learned all of these things in spoken and unspoken ways from my grandma, my partners, and my opponents. My family.

After my grandmother died, my grandfather made sure the entire family got together every other summer, to connect and watch families and kids grow. For the first few, we drew pairs, and played all week, culminating in a final. It was intense. Too intense for some of us, and getting in all the permutations of games cut into the swimming and the catching up. Now the tournament has been retired, but the casual late-night games continue, with people rotating in and out. Laughing, loving, remembering…