Not Even Not Zen 379: Biomythography - Note 116: The Credits (Some of Them)

The Credits

After the first month of wedding preparations, I started getting concerned about pulling off my half of the duties. Sure, I sometimes worked on the reception or helped with the rest of the preparations, such as driving Diane around to look at wedding dresses, paying for the tailoring of a donated dress, and so on. Often, though, I concentrated on corralling the groomsmen.

I wanted Sharon, Adam, Barb, Dave, my uncle Mark, and my brother Dylan to stand for me. I wanted my brother Galen too but he didn’t seem enthusiastic, which made sense given our relations at that point, and I wanted my old best friend Tucker but he had stopped replying to me years before. I wanted Richard, too, one of my best and definitely my longest-lasting friend. He was backpacking his way through Europe, though, and I had a marriage deadline.

Anyway, six groomsmen seemed like plenty. It feels good to invite half a dozen of your best friends to witness your most courageous blunder or your most interesting mistake. I knew Adam would be a solid Best Man. He was good on stage, at his best in a crisis - and if a wedding isn't a series of crises, it always has the potential - and he had been my friend since I was sixteen, when we discovered we were the only two people with good musical taste. Of course, all of the groomsmen contributed in their way, but Adam and Dylan took charge of others more. That is, they helped me with corralling other people who needed attention. Mark didn't need any. But Adam made sure Dave was good and Dylan, as it turned out, helped Barb. Of course, everyone did more than their parts in the ceremony. They wrote their testimonials beforehand. They rehearsed them. They stood up and testified. They moved furniture, moved drinks and food, and made the reception.

Credit to Sharon: She stepped down from giving a speech on stage, where she didn't feel comfortable, to take charge of other aspects, especially the wedding cake. She made one from scratch, a hard thing to do competently. (Wedding cake is not like other cake. See the Internet for references.) Sharon also helped organize the receiving line, the reception, and the other details of the event where she saw a chance to help us, including with her husband Steve.

Credit to Steve: We had a professional jazz guitarist play at our wedding. It was Steve Herberman. He played brilliantly for most of an hour before the ceremony, I think. The best part of the setup in Baker Park was him. He sat in the bandshell and gave a concert. He played during the ceremony, too, of course. He was our wedding music. He played for the reception line. He was the best part of the aural experience. He played for probably two hours, total.

Credit to Carol: It's an odd position to be in when you're the Maid of Honor but you dated the groom. Diane had decided Carol was one of her best friends. So it made sense to have her in the wedding. Carol rolled with being chosen for the job. She gave a fine speech. We already knew she had a great speaking voice and, that day at least, she held herself with a composed and smooth stage presence. We've mostly lost touch with Carol but not entirely. We're in the position of wondering how she's doing fairly often.

Credit to Adam: He enjoyed himself on the stage. He was good-humored and knew how to handle himself. He'd given a lot of thought to his speech. Moreover, he assumed the Best Man role months before the ceremony, which meant he organized the bachelor party and he did his share of managing other details when I was frazzled. It was in his usual character to do his best under pressure. In high-profile times, he increases his concern for doing right and being proper, so he was pretty much ideal.

Credit to my friends and parents: A lot of people came from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and from across Maryland to see a very low budget wedding and to eat what was essentially a potluck reception. Diane's professors came. My co-workers came. Friends drove in. Family, of course. Don Thornhill funded a lot of the details. One of our relations, our sister-in-law Sue, essentially made the event possible by watching Dylan Kyle, who was then a month-old infant. Sue managed to hold her own for the duration of the day's preparations and the ceremony. A newborn is a tough assignment. But she did it.

Credit to Laura: Although we didn't know her as well as we eventually would, Laura came to town when Adam did. She took Diane out to restaurants and kept her company while I was out at my bachelor party. It did Diane a lot of good and she still remembers it.

Credit to Barb: She traveled the farthest to be there. (I forgot to mention New York State; Barb drove from its farthest reaches.) Again, this could have been a weird position to be in as someone who had dated the groom and who the groom had decided was one of his best friends. But she clearly took it from the angle of 'one of his best friends' and made it fine. I had offered Sharon and Barb the opportunity to wear formal, inexpensive black dresses if that's what they wanted. Barb wasn't interested in anything but a tux. She laughed and said, "I'm really looking forward to wearing one."

She seemed tired at first, from the drive. It's good she gave herself a day to recover because she experienced a slight costume malfunction/mishap for the photo shoot. She had forgotten the tuxedo we'd picked up the day before.

 

Credit to Dylan: My brother really looked after not only his role in the ceremony, but checked in on his wife Sue, looked to help elsewhere, and found a solution to the crisis of Barb forgetting her tuxedo. Like a lot of my friends, my brother Dylan rises in pressure situations. He immediately saw what he could do for Barb. He drove her off in his car to my townhouse. We lived in the next town over, so they were under some time pressure. At my home, the two of them discovered the townhouse was locked. They broke in through the storm doors out back - well, Dylan managed it really - and then Barb got on her tux and together they drove back to Baker Park. In fact, they ran back through the fields in their tuxes to get to the gazebo for the very last photos of the session.

In their photographs, they both look great.

Credit to Dave: I've mentioned how plenty of my friends are their best in a crisis. That's not everyone, though. Dave was one of the most pleasant, fun-loving guys I hung out with but I noticed how he often seemed flustered in pressure situations. He had a habit of mistakes when pressed, especially with everyone's eyes on him. What's better for that than giving a speech to a hundred and fifty strangers in a public park? Yet on the afternoon of the ceremony, he was smooth.

Credit to Mark: He was a friend to me from the day I was born, really. We played together for entire summers as young kids. I'd spend weeks at his house. This was partly a product of him being family, of course, as my uncle while only three years older than me. But it wasn't all being related. We enjoyed hanging out together. As much as we saw each other, we would undoubtedly have done it more if our houses had been closer. As it was, I spent weeks in a row at his place, usually in the summers when we were small. Later, he vacationed with my family. Despite how we grew more apart as we aged - sometimes we were living in different states, after all - we never quite forgot the bonds of friendship. He traveled pretty far to us and spoke well of us both.

Credit to Geri: She was a friend of Diane in college and seemed surprised but happy to be part of the wedding party. Most significantly, she customized her testimonial for us. That week, our original officiate fell ill and dropped out, meaning we had to hire a substitute. The backup officiate, a conservative church pastor, refused to read the Wiccan or the American Indian (mostly Algonquin) spiritual references included in our ceremony. Fortunately for us, during her speech Geri re-inserted the language we wanted. Those restored passages gave our ceremony the egalitarian spirit we were aiming for. It was a very good deed on her part.  

#

Behind all the help from friends and family must be many hidden stories of how they did it, why they bothered, who else helped them, and what they had to overcome. Naturally, I can't know most of those tales. None of us are in the position to understand more than a fraction of the histories of others. We don't even comprehend our own stories all the way through.

I'm sure many of our friends and family did more than I can remember for our wedding. And by that I mean, more than I can know even when I was in the room at the time. It's just the way it works for me (and probably for you) as a human. But I am aware, at least slightly, of being unaware of all the good deeds. Some of them, I'm sure, were done not for us or for the marriage, since some of our relatives disapproved of it, but they were done nonetheless. Help was given in the name of decency, friendship, or family peace, and for those deeds, too, we are grateful.  

Not Even Not Zen 378: Biomythography - Note 115: Trying to be Clutch

Trying To Be Clutch

One night at about 6:00 a.m. in the morning, I had a great run on the pool table. Our group of a dozen men had been playing at the pool hall ever since our restaurant shift. I'd beaten everyone, even the best other player, who was my brother Dylan.

Dylan had a funny look in his eye as I sunk the winning bank shot on the 8 ball. In the distance, we heard other pool balls clack and crack on other tables. On mine, we listened to the soft bump of of the black ball on the back of its pocket.  Then it began to roll along the sorting track underneath. It rattled into the low, black return box and lay quiet.

"Looks like your night," he said.

"I'm getting better at using the rail," I offered cautiously.

"How'd you like to play for money?"

Now, Dylan had been playing pool maybe three times a week for a couple years. He was better than I was. But I'd been playing with the waiters and bartenders for at least two months. I thought I'd caught up to him.

"Sure. Five bucks?"

"Twenty."

He gave me that knowing look as we shook hands and I understood that he was depending on my lack of self-confidence. Again and again in pressure situations - darts, pool, and basketball, especially - I'd miss clutch shots. He was counting on that. In fact, he was putting on the pressure. Little did he know, I'd been training myself out of those bad habits. I'd proven myself in basketball, at least a little, and now I was starting to do it in pool, too. I was going to surprise him.

He volunteered to break, sank two balls on that shot, sank another solid, and then another. He put away four of his balls before I even got my turn. As it happened, my first shot was a hard one. The best angle was on the 15 to the middle pocket. In previous games that night, I would have sunk it. This time, I missed.

My brother laughed and leaped to his turn. He sunk one ball, then another, then another. Finally, he had only the 8 ball left. He didn't like his position on that so he deliberately missed.

My next shot was an angle at a corner, not very hard and I made it. Then I started thinking: I've got to make a run. I've got to sink everything. That's when I folded under the pressure, I guess. I wasn't thinking about my second shot because it was easy. Instead, I was concentrating on leaving myself a good third shot.

So I missed.

After the game, I knew I had to break that pattern. My brother had taught himself to be great under pressure. He'd risen to the occasion. And I hadn't.

But how do you train yourself to be a clutch shooter? Is it possible? I thought it was.  I'd trained myself not to be afraid of heights so I felt sure I could make this kind of self-training succeed. If I could jump out of an airplane (which I'd done the summer before) after being afraid to stand on the low dive at the pool, I could learn to like pressure situations. I thought I'd already come a long way. I could sink basketball shots under a little pressure.

I desperately wanted to be someone everyone could depend on, someone who everyone looked to in an emergency. In fact, that was already my strength - for most emergencies. Now it was time to add to the newly-formed strength.

First, I spent time thinking about crisis situations. I rehearsed how I should respond. I remembered how I'd responded in past crises (car accidents, serious fights, confrontations with girlfriends, clutch shots in sports, and so on) and I tried to figure out what I could have done better. I went over the situations again and again, envisioning improved outcomes.

Then I returned to college. Reading Daoist and Zen Buddhist texts, discussing Stoicism, going through envisioning meditations and sitting or walking for clear-mind meditations helped. Most of all, though, life itself gave me assistance. When you look for crises, you find them available. They are there mostly because you’re not turning away from them. (They may find you even when you’re trying to avoid them, of course.) I wanted improve my responses. At how many car accidents did I stop to help, now that I had a car at my college? Too many to count, maybe. How many fights did I break up as a bartender? Only a few because I learned to see them coming. We had an earthquake while I was in college. We had medical emergencies on my hall. 

When no one wanted to talk to the problem roommate, I volunteered.

When someone slipped on the pool deck, I rushed forward to carry them. 

When I came across another auto accident, I gave first aid, talked to the victims, and made the phone call for an ambulance. I developed a routine for car accidents. 

I started betting against myself mentally and, eventually, I was betting against other people on ping-pong, on pool, and even on basketball. I'd always been horrible at basketball but I spent a college semester getting good. I managed to beat a much better team of players with my clutch shooting.

For two years, I put pressure on myself to perform. Eventually, I found the right response inside me. I'd learned that, under pressure, my body would go calm. My shots could get more focused, more determined, more sure.

At college, I did well enough. But I couldn’t afford to stay on campus full time. I had to take semesters off to work in bars. I’d crank through full-time shifts for months to save up money. Then I’d head back to school when I was rich enough. So it was in Maryland, at another pool hall, when I found myself in a pressure situation more tense than the one before.

At this hall, the crowd was tougher, louder, and more drunk. You couldn’t rent a table. You had to pay for drinks, two dollars per beer, a beer every half hour to hold your spot. The pale ale was as bland as anyone makes it, which suited me. I liked whiskey. They didn’t serve any. And I liked some of the mixed drinks I made at work, which were fancy and therefore sissy. At the hall, I drank what I could of the light beer and spotted the other waiters and bartenders some of my cups. 

Every time I touched my beer, it felt sticky. Everything did. The smell of the beer, though, was a relief from the background stench of cigarettes. The number of smokers was never high on any given night. It didn’t seem to matter to the deep, pervading odor of the place. When there wasn’t an eye-watering burn beside me, I felt the air blurred with the lingerings of after-smoke. It gave every late night or early morning a soft, enjoyable glow. The chairs, benches, and wood panels on the walls gave off the stale reek of a thousand tobacco addicts puffing, dropping ash, flicking half-used butts at one another, laughing, or maybe cursing, but always blowing fumes and always reaching for another cigar or cigarette, for a decade or more. 

On this particular night, I was having a good run; I'd won most of my matches for about two hours. Then a new crowd of folks came in. There weren't enough pool tables anymore. They demanded the right to play for my table. That was the way it worked at this pool hall.

In fact, all of my friends lost their tables in about 15 minutes. The players at the hall were good. But I won for my team. My partner kept missing, although he managed two, easy shots. I sank everything else in a series of runs and then finished off with a long, straight shot at the 8 into a corner pocket.

The team that had lost sulked off. Of course, they were immediately replaced by the next team. That was the drawback of this playground-pool hall. An interesting thing happened, though, just then. A tall, thin black man who'd been watching me whispered to the team coming up. He wore gold chains and a fat, gold ring. After an urgent exchange of words, he talked his way onto the team. He got one of the other guys to go take a seat by promising him money. That was important, I thought - he managed to do it with a promise, not with any actual money. Everyone gave him the sort of semi-bored looks you give to a familiar hustler. He was obviously a known man. Also, he was way too obviously on the make.

In pool, a hustler is someone who acts like they're no good in order to encourage other players to bet against them. Then, when the bets are high enough, the hustler actually tries to win - and if he's good, he does. I knew right away that he wanted to catch me while I was hot so that he could sucker me into a bet.

My partner kept wringing and wiping his hands. Our other friends, who had gravitated to watch us while they waited for chances to play in, stood up around their table. They hadn’t seen many black men hanging around the hall. The ones who did usually looked tough, not slick. Those men had been more like construction workers, and they came with their white-trash pals who looked a lot like us. When I saw how nervous my friends were about the newcomer, I realized this was clutch time. I got calm.

First, we played as a team. The black guy was pretty good but he couldn't beat us. For one thing, my partner actually sank a couple, one on a side-rail touch shot. For another, I decided to keep on playing well. I took my shots and made them exactly like I'd been making them all night or - just maybe - a little better. I wanted to verify that I hadn't been emotionally suckered into changing my game for this guy, who was smiling, fidgeting, stopping play suddenly, switching his shot, making noise during my shot, and just generally doing anything that occurred to him to throw me off my game.

That was his plan, really. He was going to find out what bothered me and then do more of it. In various little ways, he wanted to psych me out and pressure me into making mistakes. 

After the team game, he said, "Feeling tired?"

"Not really," I said. But my partner, who actually did seem exhausted by the constant competition for the table, said he'd like to stop.

"Want to play for money?" the hustler asked with a sly smile. He hardly noticed the other players. His eyes were, as usual, on me. "I mean, just you and me."

"How much?" I asked.

"Twenty dollars?"  That was his opening offer. I knew damn well that he wanted to go higher.

"Let's see it."

"What?"

"Let's see your money."

When he opened his wallet, it turned out he only had eleven dollars on him. So we played for ten. That told me a lot of things. First, he was shocked that I'd asked to see his money - or he acted shocked. Second, he really was broke. He had to win the first game in order to raise the stakes for the second game. Third, as respected as he was in this little bar, he wasn't any great hustler.

I already knew showmanship was part of his game. The fact that he needed to apply social pressure meant that he wasn't outright as good as everyone thought he was. I had no doubt he'd won a lot of games in this place just based on his personality. He did seem to have the ability to make other players make mistakes.

He let me break. That was part of the way he exuded confidence. However, I was feeling deeply sure of myself. He might beat me, I thought, but he'd have to be good and lucky because I wasn't going to beat myself.

I should mention that my friends didn't want me to play. They whispered to me that they wanted to go home. They pulled out cigarettes to calm themselves. Each one of them looked nervous. They knew I was being hustled. Everyone at all the tables around us knew.

I sunk a ball on the break. I sunk an easy lie in the corner. Then I missed a hard shot. This was his chance.

The cue shook in his hands. I could see it despite his bluff show of confidence. His shot wasn't hard. In fact, he was already talking about the shot after, already planning ahead. And he missed. His 15 ball rattled in the corner and popped out.

I sank a couple more. On each shot, he said something. He tried to bet on a particular shot to make me more nervous. He had no choice but to keep raising the stakes. That was his game; that was what he did.

He sank a shot, finally. I could sense some of the tension go out of his arms. He sank a second shot but, this time, it was luck. Finally, laughing but visibly sweating, he missed.

I sank a couple. He missed. I sank my last ball and then the 8 ball. It was over. At the end, he tried acting extra-confident in my abilities. He started planning the next game, laughing, watching, hoping I would miss.

When we were done, I owed about eight dollars for the drinks to the table. We hadn’t paid the waitress in a couple hours. In fact, she had lined up my mostly-untouched cups. Three of them sat in a row, off to one side. I’d barely touched the first one.

I told my opponent how much and asked, "Pay for the tab and call it even?"

He leaped at the chance. The owner, who was working behind the register, seemed okay with it, so it became the bar’s problem, although I knew a guy like this would try to get away with a promise rather than money.

I tipped the waitress, a brunette woman with unnaturally red highlights. She was a solid figure with a grim almost-smile, an inch taller than me. She was older by eight years or so, we guessed. We were all waiters and bartenders in our group, so we tipped the beer girls in cash. For her part, our waitress recognized us and tried to hold back her her cynical comments, at least during the few seconds we were handing over our money. 

On my way out, my friends started congratulating me. One of them bumped me shoulder to shoulder. He had to lean close and bend at the knees to do it. A couple more put out their hands for low fives. 

Once we were out the door, the celebrations stopped. My friends didn't think me winning in that situation was such a big deal. They’d seen me with drunks at the bar. They’d seen me corral the manager, also raging drunk at the bar. They had expectations of me. And that was good. 

Our personal milestones don’t mean anything to most other people, I guess. My restaurant co-workers thought of me as reliable. They didn’t think me beating a pool hustler, especially a kind of terrible one, was a sign of my transformation. It was what I already was, to most of them.

#

Each clutch situation is different. In most of them, things happen so fast you don’t get to decide who you are. Instead, each urgent event reveals who you are. It lays bare the reflexes you’ve acquired. 

Are you really, deeply, the person you think you have become? A crisis will reveal how true your instincts are to your concept of yourself.   

As I look back on this thread in my life, I see how I applied the same process many times in attempts to grow and change. And I see the unfortunate limits of the process. Training yourself to be good in a crisis doesn’t make you a championship-level pool player, obviously. It only gets you so far. 

The best you can do, maybe, is to ensure you don’t defeat yourself. Your top limit is whatever it is. Not everyone has perfect hand-eye coordination. Not everyone can dunk a basketball. Not everyone’s core musculature has the same strength. Not everyone can take the same punch. (It helps to take a lot of childhood punches, I think.)  When I beat a hustler who wasn’t very good, it demonstrated something but, ultimately, not very much. 

I had gotten to a point where I didn’t have to fall apart and beat myself. If I had faced a better pool player – my brother really was very good at one point – my progress would not have shown up so well. Someone who could run the table would have left me no chance. 

Not Even Not Zen 377: Biomythography - Note 114: Correct But Wrong Memories

Correct But Wrong Memories

I’m standing in the living room of a fourth floor apartment in Frankfurt. From my angle relative to the furniture, and from the cushions and the rug, I’m about three years old. I turn toward my father in three, waddling steps. He's standing in the open floorspace past the couch.

My father is wearing dress pants, a buttoned shirt and a vest. He waves once to get my attention. When he’s got it, he says something he has said many times before.

“Vo bist du mama?”

He has encouraged me to memorize the phrase, I know. And I have. I know it's my turn. I’ve memorized an answering phrase.

“Mama ist in der Schule!” I pronounce. 

This is a compound memory in the sense that I can feel it happened more than once. Many times, he prompted me with the phrase, often in our home. The prompts happened slightly differently each time but they had a similar cadence. In my place during the return phrase of the ritual, I almost always I responded in the same, sing-song voice. The details of the individual events may be lost. They have been compounded into one archetypal memory. There's something slightly different about this one, a reason it stands out. The apartment has warm light from the lampshades.

Off to my left side, during this one instance, someone corrects my father. It must be one of my German nannies. I don’t remember her face, just the sound of a voice off to the side. And I remember my father trying out the new words she prompted and not liking them. 

Now that I have examined some German phrases, I realize why someone, most likely my nanny, was correcting my father.

The correct German phrase would have been, “Wo bist diene Mutter?” 

That doesn’t mean that my memory of my father's repeated phrase is incorrect. I think, in this case, I may have a correct memory of something repeated many times with the words incorrect. 

I've been a parent myself and I can reflect a little on how casually I approached some conversations with my children. I think my father had learned some German, very informally, and had either picked up local Frankfurt slang or he had decided to use his own blend of English and German to teach me.

"Vo bist du mama?"

The phrase illustrates a point, to me. No matter how careful I am with my memories, I am still led astray by them. Aside from how my process of recall is flawed, even a very faithful memory may in some way be corrupted slightly by my impressions of the humans of the time.

As a child, I learned many things that were wrong. I was taught wrong facts by trusted teachers, by textbooks, by uncles or cousins or other relatives, and sometimes by dear friends. I have tended not to examine those memories in light of my newer knowledge. That’s good for the process of faithful memory. 

It helps my recall to be faithful to the child I was. But it doesn’t make those wrong facts become true. It only points up how little most of us knew at the time and, probably, how little we know now. 

Not Even Not Zen 376: Biomythography - Note 112: Running from the Law, Part Zero

Running from the Law, Part 0

It started at a cast party. 

Someone's parents had lent their big, classy house for the event. I remember gawking (inwardly) at the cleanliness of the place. How was this a real family? They had matching furniture and pictures on the walls. The grey carpets looked new. The floors looked clean, especially the white kitchen tiles. Everything smelled nice. Someone had arranged knick-knacks tastefully on the shelves. They had hidden away their flatware in logical drawers and cabinets.

At my home, my father had started using his memory system for arranging everything. Lots of tools lived in odd places and the rest of us couldn't move them or else they'd be lost. Despite my mother's attempts to keep things clean, we had cat fur, dog fur, and cigar ash on most of our home surfaces (although not in the kitchen or dining room, where my mother was winning the battle against the rest of us). The furniture had once matched. Now, mostly, it didn't. My parents had added paneling to some of the walls because it was easy, but with different panel types in different rooms. We had a multi-colored faux-Afgani circus carpet in one bedroom. We had red, white, and blue carpet with stars in the main hall. Everywhere, we'd burned holes in the rugs and walls or we'd stained them with dirt and diet coke. 

Visiting a nice house was a revelation. The parents here had even put out plastic red solo cups. As with most cast parties, a few people managed to bring beer. We drank in celebration of the show. Then my girlfriend left. A couple cast members decided I should go out for more beer. That seemed fair. I had nothing to do but drink. (It's likely that I didn't have a car that night. Nevertheless, I looked old enough to not get carded, so I was the obvious choice to make purchases.)

Scene: There's a lack of a scene here, actually. I'm not sure if this was my first alcohol-induced blank spot. If so, it wasn't a major one. Part of the evening passed by in a blur, that's all. 

When my recall returns, I'm talking with one of my friends, Tom. He wants to serenade his girlfriend, Debi. That makes sense. I have the feeling he's mentioned this to me before, though. 

"Absolutely," I'm agreeing with him for the second or third time. "You should sing to her."

"And you?"

"Sure. We all should."

"I'll ask around for more singers."

"I'm in."

Scene: Our cast members include high school football stars, baseball stars, and a martial arts black belt, all part of our dancers. They're standing in the white-tile space between the kitchen and dining room. They're making wide arm gestures and they announce they're coming with us. They're agreeing to serenade our friend's girlfriend. 

"You agree?" Tom asks the baseball star again, a tall, black, muscular young man, possibly the best dancer in our show. 

"Of course I agree." He laughs. He's big, athletic, and sure of himself. In his way, he's a reassuring presence. He thinks we're doing something cute.

"You?" Tom turns to another friend.

"I already said I agree. Let's go."

 

"Okay." Tom nods. We're all agreeing. We're in. Tom returns to the question he's asked before. "Is anyone good to drive?"  

Scene: I am outside, wandering in the dark in front of the apartments at Orchard Pond in Gaithersburg. I'm not sure how we got here. But I know the development. In the distance, I see a streetlight. It's a long ways off. By my feet, I see inky black ashpalt outlining my shoes. 

One of my friends says, “Do we need him?”

“Yeah, we need him.”

Someone touches my elbow. Gently, he guides me by the arm toward the apartment on the next block. Sick from an over-indulgence of alcohol and maybe half blind, I stumble into the stairwell to join the others. I’m ready to sing.

Someone says, "Maybe this is a bad idea.” 

"It's a great idea."

"It's a hilarious idea," I volunteer.

Scene: We aren't in the stairwell anymore. We're outside, walking around the apartment building. The grass is dark. The sidewalks lay in shadow. I think that, moments before, we sang at the back windows of the complex. Already I don't remember the song we chose. It's a blank spot. Someone chuckles. 

“That was pretty bad. What next?”

“How did we get here?” I wonder aloud.

“Not with you," someone says, a bit too emphatically. "You didn’t drive.”

“Thank fucking god.”

After a minute or wandering in the dark, someone tells me I’m supposed to go to Jake’s house now. That’s a hefty walk, about a mile or maybe longer. It’s in another development. 

For a minute, I continue to wander in a circle. In the apartment parking lot. In the dark. Suddenly, a police car pulls up with whirling lights. Then another. Wow, it's a lot of lights. Then another. One of the doors opens on one of the cars. The silhouette of a man steps out. 

As I stand gawking at the lights, I hear voices behind me. My friends sound excited. 

Someone yells, “Scatter!”

Finally I know what to do. I scatter. Dim police shapes take off after me in the dark.

Scene: I'm on the double line near the top of the hill in the middle of Clopper Road. The street is not dark, at least not always. There's a streetlight behind me. There are headlights in front. A bit of traffic whizzes by, a silvery car. This is my strategy. An officer was chasing me in the development. But not anymore, not on the road. I’m losing the cops. 

Scene: I’m jogging on Longdraught Road, which in my head is spelled Long Draft. (For years, I'm surprised by the sign.) This isn't quite the direction to Jake’s neighborhood, but I'm pretty sure it gets me close. Every forty yards or so, I pause to look for cops. After a while, I cross to another road, Firstfield. It's so dark, the street sign for Firstfield looks silverly. The street lights are fewer here and farther between. But I'm pretty sure this is better. I'm think I'm almost on the main drag to Jake's condo development.

Behind me, red and blue lights swirl. When I sense they might be coming closer, I step off into the dark, behind a thick tree. It's like playing flashlight tag. I always liked that game. 

I'm good at it. A car passes. The lights never shine on me. The trees are my friends. Clumps of tall grass protect me when I lie down. I'm safe because I know how to play this.

Scene: I am standing outside a condominium. This looks like Jake’s door. It is putty gray with a stainless steel knocker in the center by the peephole. But I'm cursing at it. The door is locked. Either I got to Jake's place before he did or I have come to the wrong door. I knock again. I rattle the knob. 

Jake's condominium development duplicates the same pattern again and again. When I walk to the front stoop, I see identical design and construction in all directions. Even the street shapes are the same, although repeated twenty or thirty times. Every unit looks alike. I hadn't really thought about the condos before. They were just a place I’d visited while driving. Even then, I passed only with Jake giving me directions. I hadn’t traveled here on foot, drunk and lost.

I stand with my hands on my hips. Maybe I stopped walking one block too early. I only need to continue west a little more. 

While I'm thinking, a police cruiser whizzes by with its red and blue lightbar flashing. It's not running its siren. I take a few steps in the direction it took. Then I pause to throw up in some bushes. 

Scene: I'm standing at a similar building, a similar door, now one more block west. I had to dodge the cop car, which must have noticed me standing at the other place and doubled back. It's turned its search beam on now. That lets me see it coming from a long ways off, of course, and when I needed to, I just lay myself down in the tall grass. The beam passes over, no problem. 

Free of the pursuit, I try Jake's door. It's open.

With a sigh I keep to myself, I step inside. Quietly, I close the door behind me, careful not to wake Jake's parents like he said. Then I glance around. Except for a kitchen light, the place is dark. Apparently, I've beaten Jake home. 

I walk around for a minute and pause at the kitchen sink, wondering if I'll throw up again. The answer is no, so I look for Jake's father's liquor cabinet in the living room. To my surprise, they liquor isn't there. Is his father hiding it from us? If so, that was a lot of bottles. It took some effort. 

For a few minutes more, I walk in circles around the apartment. I stroll down the hall, where I can hear someone asleep in the main bedroom. Something about this place seems odd, though. The walls don't look quite right to me. Everything is set down with the right layout but the furniture and pictures seem slightly wrong. I head out to the liquor cabinet again. It's still not where it should be. 

With a feeling of dread, I inspect the pictures in the living room. There are none of Jake's mother. I don't see any of Jake, either. I'm in the wrong home. 

Feeling crushed and a little spooked, I step back outside. I squeeze shut the door behind me. Before, I was lost physically. Now I'm lost metaphysically, like a ghost. I'm moving through the world unnoticed. And I'm lucky to be passing through. I'm over-winning in the great game of flashlight tag.

If only I didn't have to keep dodging police cars, I know I could find Jake's house. All I need to do is clear my head a little. 

There on the front stoop, I sit down. Ten feet from the unlocked apartment, I lean my head against the cool, brick wall of the building's entrance hall. Maybe I doze for a moment, maybe not. For sure, I bring up a map of the development in my mind. I've never seen the place from above. But I have my driving experience on the roads. I remember the shape of the turns in my mind, the distances between. In a few minutes, I develop an eagle's-eye view in my head, or at least a drunk owl's view. I'm out of place because I've come too far south. I turned left, I realize, when I was lured by a familiar building I thought belonged to Jake's condo. What I needed to was continue west another block. 

I'm only two blocks away. No problem. One north, one west. I just need a moment to rest and then I'll be gone. 

When I close my eyes, I hear a car screech to the curb. I look up. Oh good, it's the police. 

Scene: 

"Are you okay, son?" The police officer seems to be dealing with me out of a sense of humor about the situation but also out of some real concern. 

There are three other officers behind him. One, apparently the first one's partner, stands close, silent, fingering a nightstick at his right hip but not in an anxious way. He's just fidgeting. The other two are wandering on the landing and sidewalk in front of the building. To my blurry vision, they are pretty much just uniforms. One of the distant pair has dark skin but the rest are pale-skinned in their dark, blue uniforms. Beyond them in the parking lot sits a parked police car in the fire lane. Behind it, with its lightbar on, sits a second cruiser. Wee-woo, wee-woo. It's not making any noise but I find myself humming to the inaudible sound waves for a moment. 

The cop asks me questions about my drinking and I confess that I'm only sixteen, no seventeen now, nearly legal. He's not impressed. He's also not mad. 

"Is this your first time drinking?" he asks.

I try to dance around that. He soon gets me questioning my knowledge about myself. It's not my first drink. Hunters had left their beers in the woods, for one thing. At fourteen, I had one. I maybe blurted that out because he gives a narrow-eyed, measured chuckle. 

"Are you good to walk?" he asks.

"Yeah. I know where my friend's house is. I'm supposed to spend the night there."

"Not supposed to be drinking, then."

"Um, no sir."

"Your parents don't know?"

"No."

"Can you find your way?"

"Yes. I'm sure." And I am. I have figured out how to get to Jake's. "I just needed to rest."

"And to throw up in the bushes."

"Oh, well, yes sir. Sorry."

"One last thing. We came here chasing some guys for disturbing the peace. Did you see anyone run by here?"

Meaning, did I see myself. And yet I had the impression it was a genuine question. He really thought I might have seen other teenagers run by.

"Uh, no." I pause for effect. "But I didn't notice you until you drove up."

"Yeah." He nods knowingly. "Are you sure you can make it to where you're going?"

"Yeah."

Amazingly, they hop into their cars and leave me on the stoop in front of the apartments. I rise to my feet as soon as they're gone. I pur a hand out and rip myself against the wall for a moment. Feeling wobbly or not, I'm not staying to find out if they change their minds.

Not Even Not Zen 375: Biomythography - Note 113: Our Own Best Doctors

Our Own Best Doctors

As I walked to the cashier line at the local Weis supermarket, a woman approached me from the right. The aisles were crowded. I stood among rows of shoppers trying to find the best checkout line for a moment, then I gravitated to a spot behind a lady trying to put her selections on a conveyor belt, so I didn't glance around much. A woman marched into my field of vision. She stopped next to me. Finally, I noticed. My visitor was a straight-haired brunette, about five foot six, a bit younger than me. She was in good shape in the ordinary way of an office worker, someone who doesn't have much time to spend in the gym. 

She gave me a friendly smile, which was, at the same time, a knowing expression. I wondered why she seemed so happy to see me and how we knew each other. Her face felt familiar, like she might be a person I'd seen enough to hold a brief conversation, maybe two or three. 

"Aren't you Mr. Gallagher?" she asked. Because she knew my name, that eliminated her as the sort of casual acquaintance I sometimes make with strangers. So I knew I should remember her.

"Um, yes?" She looked too young to be a swim team parent. She was the right age for an elementary school teacher. Maybe she knew my children.

"Didn't you break your plantaris tendon?" she continued. "And you ended up on crutches?"

"Well, yes." Now I felt mystified. A few teachers had seen me hobbling around but not many.

"I work for Doctor D, across the street."

The revelation took a moment. When I understood, I couldn't withhold a wince. That particular orthopedist had been useless. In fact, he'd been counterproductive. My GP had recommended him, which meant he was competent at his job and many other things besides. (My GP in those years was fantastic. She kept track of her recommendations and paid attention to what her patients reported back to her.) The orthopedist must have done well by a patient before me. But he got my case wrong from the start.

The problem, as sometimes happens with experts, was the state of the guidance. People have a tendency to accept a general summary sentence in a textbook as a hard rule. 

At the start of my only appearance in his office, Doctor D frowned when he saw me. I had broken my plantaris tendon. That's all I'd done, according to my paperwork. His textbooks told him it meant essentially nothing. Plantaris tendons aren't vital. I had hobbled in on crutches, so obviously (to him), I was a drama queen of some sort. He was pretty convinced from the start that I wasn't feeling any pain or disability. I only thought I was feeling pain. 

"You don't need those crutches," he said.

He dutifully and competently examined my right leg. He saw the lump created by my rolled up plantaris. It had been a clean break.

"I guess this is sore. You did this when you were running?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Trying to get back in shape?" He gave a slight smile. Although my body was fairly young and still mostly muscle, I was starting to develop pudge around my middle. Years at a desk job can do that. A few weeks earlier, when I'd stepped on the scale and saw I was ten pounds overweight (again), I went back to running after work each day. On one of those days, I felt an electric twang in my right calf. It brought me to a halt. My leg felt weird. But I had a mile more to run to get home, so I resumed my trek. 

Within a few minutes, I was limping as I ran. A minute more and I was walking. I could barely manage to put my right foot down. Soon, I couldn't. I finished by hopping on my left foot. Barely, I made it home. Right away, as I passed through the front door, I sent my family members to look for our old pair of wooden crutches.

That evening, I couldn't put weight on my right leg. The situation seemed to be getting worse, not better. I decided to visit my family doctor. Maybe there would be nothing she could do but I wanted to find out what had gone wrong with me. 

She laid me down on a table the next day, touched my calf, and figured out it was the plantaris instantly. That's how I ended up in an orthopedic specialist's office. 

The specialist kept telling me I wasn't really hurting. And I could go right back to running. But for my part, I kept not getting better. Day after day, week after week, I couldn't move my right foot. The swelling and pain continued. After a few weeks more on crutches, my GP gave me a different recommendation, this one to a podiatrist. 

"Why didn't you see me before?" the podiatrist asked. "Your right calf is twenty percent bigger than your left."

"I didn't know that."

"Your plantaris is reattaching, probably. It's too late to do anything about it. But I can make you walk with a shoe insert, I bet."

His proposal seemed ridiculous. A mere insert couldn't help and I said so. But the podiatrist insisted. Eventually, I agreed to go along with the program. He measured me for inserts. After another week on crutches, I picked up the inserts and tried them in my shoes. To my shock, I found myself walking. In a few days, I felt almost normal. Although the shoe inserts weren't exactly a cure, they were an unexpected help.

At the follow-up visit, I left my crutches behind and walked in. To the podiatrist, I mentioned that my orthopedist said I could go back to running. The podiatrist laughed. 

"Maybe someday," he said. "You can try. After your walking is pain free, maybe." 

In the line at the grocery store, a year later, I tried not to insult the woman who worked for the orthopedist. She seemed professional, bright, and she still had on a sly expression. I noticed, finally, that she was wearing scrubs.

"The orthopedist, right." I nodded politely. I was struggling not to frown or sigh. "I see."

"Hah." She read my expression perfectly anyway. "I notice you're walking now. With a limp, but walking. Did you see someone else?"

"Two others. I got a set of inserts from Dr. Levine. Those helped. They really do a lot for me, I have to say. I can't walk without pain yet, I guess, but I don't need crutches."

"Just inserts? Interesting." Her mouth hung open in a wry smile, no teeth showing.

"Well, it's nice to meet you again." I didn't want to talk more with her in case she tried to get me another appointment with her boss.

"Did you know Dr. D broke his tendon?" She said this with a sort of glee. It was very odd. After all, she worked with him.

"Sorry to hear it."

"His plantaris tendon." Finally, her barely-contained smile broke into a teeth-baring grin. Her eyes crinkled. She beamed me a sense of smugness. "He's on crutches." 

"What, really?" This time, it was my turn to let my jaw hang open. 

"I've been thinking about you." She closed her lips but she couldn't suppress her satisfaction. Really, it had been on her face the whole time.

"Wow."

"Anyway, I'm really glad you're walking." She seemed to realize it was a funny conversation to have. People were starting to line up behind us. She gave me a tiny wave.

"Thanks," I said, and meant it a little extra.

Not Even Not Zen 374: The Drop Off

The Drop Off

I open the front door and almost step into it.

On the concrete slab, we now have 

a big, brown box, high as my waist.

How could I have missed the delivery? 

The screen door slams behind me. I halt, puzzled

by the mystery package. 

I have always known in advance.

I have heard footfalls fade down the walkway, at least.

How many times have I listened to a retreat?

I've watched the drivers hop up into the cabs of their trucks. 

I've studied their vehicles as they pulled away. 

Then it strikes me. I have not known.

The dog knew. She always got up.

She danced. She barked. 

She bounded at the door. 

She threw herself against me for reassurance.

"Quiet! Quiet, down!" 

I would hold her, pat her.

She would wag, sometimes lick me.

She would pant or whine.

My dog always over-reacted

and I had to spend a moment

in a hug with her, making sure she was calm.

Then we would fall into our customary positions. 

as I strode to the door 

with her by my side, her tail wagging

as if she were looking forward to meeting our guest.

She was usually disappointed.

We heard those retreating steps

or the slam of the truck door

as our potential guest left us.

The routine irritated me every time,

which is why it is such a surprise

to feel the sigh well up in my chest,

notice the heat in my face, my throat,

and to gasp a shivery breath.

I blink at the drop-off through water in my eyes.

Here I am, close to crying 

on my front doorstoop

because I'm missing the most annoying love 

of all the loves.

-- Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 373: Biomythography - Note 111: Running from the Law III

Third Run

I don’t remember who I intended to visit. It had to be someone in Montgomery Village. That was the only reason to try Brink Road. 

At the time, Brink was a narrow, winding lane. A student at Seneca Valley showed me how to drive it. She compared it to my home street, a similarly constricted path, bounded on either side by steep berms of dirt. Twists in the road ended in cliffs, sometimes with gaurd rails, sometimes not. In a few places, the edge of the road fell off into a grove of trees. Brink left no margin for driver error but, to me, cruising on it felt like home. 

I was so comfortable, I picked up speed and started having fun. I raced into tight turns, going from fifteen to thirty, thirty to forty, forty to fifty. As I blasted through a straightaway and headed into another hard corner, I passed a police car coming the other way. 

The police hit the siren even before we passed. 

We were driving in the early days of speed radar. Police kept their units turned on all the time, it seemed. I figured, on a winding road like this, I could run. After all, there wasn't even a place for cop cars to turn around. I hit the gas.

As I spun into another switchback, I heard a squeal of tires behind and to my right. The police were risking it. They were turning around in the middle of the road. After a few seconds, I realized, oh no, I'm in a Volkswagon Rabbit.

Before, when I had managed to escape tickets, I'd had a car that had speed on a straightaway. This vehicle had nothing. Good gas mileage, that's what it had. With a second or two to think, I glanced up and saw a housing development sign on my left. This was my chance was to lose them. I turned into the freshly-paved development. This would be the kind of place where I would soon be lost to any pursuer in other traffic, other people, and maybe a few other cars like mine. 

Instead, I realized I was alone. A hundred yards after I pulled in, I could see this wasn't a development at all. It was just roads. It was the promise of a development. 

Someone was planning to put houses here. They had built some of the infrastructure, roads and streetlamps, plus a few green transformer boxes in the grass. And then construction had stopped. Lots of the grass was young and pushing through a layer of straw. The neighborhood-to-be was currently just rolling, green hills and weaving, weird avenues with cross-streets that looped into other cross-streets. After the first street sign, the roads weren't even marked.

This place was a fractal mandelbrot of suburban promise. To avoid a dead end, I turned left. A tenth of a mile later, I tried to turn back but there was no good way to do it. Behind me, I noticed flashing lights. The police car was pulling into the development. 

I drove while gazing backwards. The police, in their hurry, sped into the dead end I'd avoided. Good. I had a few more seconds. I took a turn that promised to hide me behind a hill for a moment.  

My hope had been that the cops wouldn't figure out I was hiding at all. Obviously, they knew. If I had seen them, they had been able to see me. I was driving the only other car in this lonely maze. They knew I was in a Volkswagon Rabbit, almost certainly, and that I was hoping to evade a speeding ticket. 

Over the span of a few minutes, I got myself even more lost. Without landmarks and with no road signs, it was hard to judge how much the loops of the roads were turning me away from the exit. If I hadn't been a frantic teenager, panicked about possibly losing my driver's license, I would have seen the comedy routine in what I was doing. Even at the time, I had a dim awareness of it. If this were a Benny Hill skit in fast-motion, both cars bumbling around and popping up in stupid places, it would be funny.

As it was, the police and I caught glimpses of each other when we both rose to the tops of hills at the same time. I remember being puzzled as to how they hadn't caught me yet and then seeing them bolt down an obvious cul-de-sac. As many wrong turns as I was making, they were making even more.  

At one point, I rose high enough on a hill that I could see the police car on a different rise far away in the development. We both slowed to glance at each other. In the pause, I became  aware of how, only a few minutes before, we had stared at each other from exactly the opposite positions. In my frantic turns in the asphalt loops hoping to escape the police pursuit, I had switched to the set of lanes from which the police had come. I had never left the development switchbacks. And yet, somehow, I'd gotten here. I felt sure the police had to be realizing the same thing. 

The sight of us in opposite positions made me realize I had to be close to getting out. I turned south. It only took one extra turn. Suddenly, there was Brink Road again at the intersection in front of me. I had reached a different exit to the development than the road I'd used to enter. But I didn't care. This was freedom. I came to a full stop, realizing I had time. Gently, I turned left out of the development. 

#

If I went on to visit someone, I don't remember. My time with a friend must pale in my memory when compared to the chase, I suppose. What I do realize in retrospect is that I had already told myself I wouldn't get into this situation again. But I did. Obviously, I had some sort of adrenaline reflex I needed to beat. 

And somehow, I did. For my next encounter, I pulled over, waited, apologized, gave my information, and took my ticket. I never tried to avoid the encounters again.

#

Years ago, I told one or two of these stories to my wife, trying out the idea they might be told in a funny way. Well, I made her laugh. But in trying to be more serious and accurate about them now, I found myself confronted by an odd idea, which is that the repeated narrow escapes eventually taught me to not have narrow escapes. 

All I had to do, after all, was be slightly less reckless. It took years for me to manage it, but I as I inspect life patterns in retrospect, I think this was the way it happened. Eventually, I did learn.

Not Even Not Zen 372: Biomythography - Note 110: Running from the Law II

Second Run

The second time I got caught speeding, I was so close to my house, I didn't have time to think much. My mind had already leaped ahead to the rest of the day. I woke up to the trouble when I saw lights flash behind me in Darnestown. I had passed through the speed trap area fine, I'd thought. I'd relaxed. And I'd hit the gas while the speed limit exiting town was still thirty. Everyone did it. The long straightaway out of town had a higher speed limit going in, so the same strip of road allowed forty-five in one direction and thirty in the other, which everyone knew didn't make sense. 

Of course, my parents had warned me the police were ticketing people doing exactly what I had just done. But still, I had acquired the habit of hitting the gas after the main intersection. I did it again.

As I climbed the hill where the speed limit was about to change, I reached fifty in the thirty zone. A police car crested the hill from the other side. The driver noticed my speed. He slowed and flicked on his light bar. I watched the bright blue flash in my rear view mirror. Then I topped the hill and dropped out of the officer's view.

If I got a ticket, that was probably the end of my driving. Or so I thought. (In retrospect, I question every bit of semi-thinking I did. I had no points on my license.) 

This was when radar was new. Police had started using it everywhere. They flipped it on and the readout light brightened their faces. They measured trucks. They measured cars. They measured birds. This particular police car was probably returning from giving a ticket to someone like me, someone who had done precisely what I had. As I'd been warned.

In my mind, the likely ticket meant no more driving, so that raised the stakes. Living in the forest where I did, I couldn't go anywhere at all if I couldn't drive. 

Part of my reaction was physical, too. In every difficult or dangerous situation, I tended to speed up. I wanted to get through the bad part as fast as possible, even if that meant acting before anyone was ready or slamming into everyone else at full speed. I leapt into fights to get hit, to be reassured I wouldn't have to wait. I got extra brash when trying to ask a girl out because I needed that. Taking my time was not an option. It was too painful.

Why not speed up a little and see if the cop car couldn't turn around? Maybe I would get out of sight before he could get on my trail. 

I crested the next hill. No car in sight behind me. Good. In the next valley, which was a few hundred feet of flat road, I sped up. 

On the next hill, I glanced back. Unfortunately, I could see a police car.

The car didn't have its siren on. Or at least, I couldn't hear it. The lights didn't whirl red, white, and blue. The light bar on top remained a steady bluish color. Or so I thought. I had to return my gaze to the front and watch out for traffic. Now that I was speeding in the fifty miles per hour zone, I felt leery about the  next intersection, the one between Darnestown Road and Germantown Road.

This was where Germantown Road ended and a housing development, Spring Meadows, rose on the left. I saw no cars on either side, no reason to slow down. As I passed through the crossway, a pale yellow car pulled in from the right. It slowed to the stop sign on Germantown Road, which was good because I couldn't have reacted if it ran through the sign. Then I was gone down the other side of the hill.

I thought that maybe I could continue to speed just a little, enough to get to my turn-off ahead of the cop but also not much more than normal. I wanted to aim for the middle ground of having an advantage but leaving room to pretend I hadn't noticed an attempt to stop me.

At the top of the next hill, I could see the police car gaining. There was only one hill to go.

It was really, really important to turn onto my road, the entrance to which was partly hidden, before a policeman could see me do it. I needed to get out of sight.

On the down side of the hill, the road ahead lay empty. A tunnel of trees and vegetation cane up on my right. This was my turn-off. Behind me, the cop car was out of sight but closing fast. I had to slow down for the turn. It would be worse than speeding if I drifted into the oncoming lane. The country road I lived on was narrow. We had dirt birms and trees on either side with branches that poked into open car windows. There was no extra room. Vehicles had to pass each other with less than a foot of space or else drive hard into tree branches. 

When I turned, I encountered no car coming the other way. And I thought I'd made it before the cop car could see. To the police, it might seem like I had disappeared or maybe sped up an awful lot. 

Hyperventilating and shaking, I drove the quarter mile to my driveway. If the police had made the turn with me, I would have no way to know. Every bend in the little road hid cars from each other in every direction. 

When I pulled into the driveway, I wanted to hop out while the station wagon was still rolling. I settled for slamming the car into park as soon as I could. No one was home. I sprinted inside. 

Alone, I watched out the picture window. A few seconds went by. Half a minute. No police car pulled up. I glanced at my parents green station wagon. It looked hot. And it was. Anyone who touched the hood would know I had just driven it. 

I wanted to hide the car. But going out to do it risked attention from the cops. 

Another half minute passed. Suppose the police had passed by my turn off but realized I must have taken it? How long would it take them to turn around and find me? 

Probably about this long. But maybe there was still time to hide my parents car. There couldn’t be that many big green station wagons. The side of our house was empty. It was wide enough to drive the car through. And to hide it behind the house.

That would leave ruts in the yard, though. It had rained. The ground was soft. Hard to explain. My parents would want to know why. For that matter, any cop who noticed me doing it would sarcastically want an explanation too. That would be a difficult conversation.

But it had to be done. Now.

I had ditched my car keys in the kitchen as if preparing to deny everything. Now I reclaimed them and headed back to the living room. As I started out, I froze. Through the picture window, I saw the cop. He sped along the road. Past my house. Past my driveway.  He kept going. 

Then the police disappeared down the hill.  Gone. 

I stood by the window, hyperventilating for a while. After I decided I didn’t want to be around if the car swung back up the road. I marched down in my room, instead. For a while, I listened to my racing heart. 

#

I'm pretty sure that, after the second run, I swore I would never do anything like it again. I would stop being stupid. For weeks, the memory of my guilt returned. It combined with my feeling of undeserved luck from the first time. I knew it wasn't worth feeling so guilty. And also, wasn't worth knowing that it wasn't just a feeling. 

Not Even Not Zen 371: Biomythography - Note 109: Running from the Law I

Running from the Cops I

A Series of Short-Short Stories

Plus Getting Caught Once, A Slightly Longer Story

The First Run

I was driving my family’s forest green Ranch Wagon on the Washington DC beltway. The weather was perfect for Maryland, not too humid. The sky was clear. The roads were full but only to the extent of a Saturday morning in the spring of 1980. The speed limit was 55 all across the nation but there were not enough cars around me to keep me from enjoying myself.

I pressed the pedal down. The speedometer read 70, 80, 90, 95. I turned up the radio and dodged between gaps in the traffic patterns. I sang to myself and laughed. I passed other station wagons. I passed sports cars. I passed every car.

In the process, I crossed the county line between PG and Montgomery. I checked for signs of speed traps and saw none.

Suddenly, I heard a roar. A blue Camaro pulled up beside me. The driver, a blonde haired man, waggled his steering wheel. He laughed at me and hit the gas. His car shot forward into a gap. He steered through a couple more cars and pulled away.

I smashed the accelerator down to reach the passing gear of my Ranch Wagon. It leaped after the Camaro.

Thirty seconds later, I passed the other driver. He raised his fist and shouted as I went by. Soon, his car caught mine again. He looked determined but not angry. He gave a puzzled smile as he tried to pass. I wouldn’t let him. The rest of the traffic wouldn’t let him, either.

I dodged the Ranch Wagon in and out of traffic patterns, often followed by the Camaro. The maneuvers went on for about a minute. Then the other driver spotted a gap in the far right lane. He slipped into it and put on the burst of speed. He pulled in front of me even while I was passing someone in the fast-but-not-fast-enough lane.

We spent a couple minutes tearing around the beltway. He slowed once to give me a nod and show he wasn’t mad. Then his body language changed and he started pulling over, lane after lane, to exit to the right. He didn’t make it. Or rather, he realized that he couldn’t hit the exit ramp at 100 miles an hour and survive.

So he pulled back onto the road. When I turned north onto route 270, he turned with me to continue the race. We sped up the six lane highway, picking up bursts of speed, passing each other and laughing. After a long while, the competition seemed to fade. I slowed down and took my exit onto route 28. To my surprise, the blue car swerved to follow me. At the first stoplight, the driver pulled up beside me and revved his engine. Clearly, he didn’t care about his destination anymore. He had left it far behind. Now, he was all in for the drag race. And he had a Camaro.

He peeled out from the starting line to show he had the better car. But in a very limited way, he didn’t. At the next light, I slammed into passing gear just before the light changed. The Ranch Wagon easily beat the blue car off the line.

Not long after, as we passed through the residential areas, I slowed to the speed limit. But the blue car didn’t care. Every time I slowed, it passed me. Once, the driver anticipated I would make a turn but I didn’t. So he spun his car in a gas station parking lot, hit the pedal, and caught up again. Now we were on a two lane road. He couldn’t pass. Except he did. He turned into oncoming traffic and drove it off the road.

And at the next light, I laughed, slammed the pedal, and passed the blue car again.

Finally, we hit a speed trap stretch of road where the limit was thirty. I slowed down to forty. The Camaro driver had already forced another car off to the side as he passed, but I knew this area was terrible with blind turns and tried to signal him. He didn't seem to notice. We rounded a corner as he was speeding by me on the left. Suddenly, straight ahead of him, there was a cop car. The Camaro didn’t flinch. To avoid the accident, the police officer pulled off to the side. As he did, he activated his sirens and lights.

The blue car sped onwards. But now we were in trouble with the law.

I slowed the Ranch Wagon. For an instant, it seemed possible that the cop might not have understood I was drag racing. But then I realized, no, I wasn’t going to get away with it. The other driver was as good as caught. He would tell the police.

I glimpsed the blue car, still racing, as it blasted up Route 28 ahead of me. It caught a little air on the top of the hill. My gaze narrowed. That was my route home. But it was also the route the Poolesville police force liked to take every day. I made my decision. My breath eased. My limbs went calm.

In the center of Darnestown, I took a left at the gas station. I planned to avoid the route home for twenty minutes. As an alternative, I mapped a quiet, country drive in my head. I let my car roll at the speed limit until I hit River Road. There, I turned south toward the developments and the estates of the super rich. After ten minutes, I pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store. It didn’t take long for my nervousness to return. When I thought about how I had fled from police pursuit, I knew I could be in more trouble than I'd dreamed. But did they even know they were chasing me? I started to calculate my chances. And I hyperventilated.

I pulled the car into driving gear. I had to keep moving because my body couldn't let me rest. I found my way back onto River Road. This time, I turned the Ranch Wagon north towards home. I took a wandering path, careful to stay at reasonable speeds. When I returned to Route 28, I felt a spike of anxiety. I needed to make another decision. From here, I was two hills from my house. This was the riskiest road but it was the fastest. If I choose the longer way, Route 118, I would have to drive another fifteen minutes.

I decided I was safe enough. I turned left onto Route 28.

As I crested the last hill, the one just before I turned towards my parents house, I looked down and hit the brakes. Then I took my foot off the brake pedal and coasted. My brain clamped down on my body's nervousness.

In the trough between the two great hills sat the blue Camaro. Three Montgomery County police cars surrounded it. I had to drive down the road watching the police as they conferenced next to the Camaro driver. And I watched the crowd of them. And watched. I kept waiting for the Camaro driver to glance up and recognize my car. He didn't. The police didn't. No one in the crowd looked up. I took a right turn onto my parents road and exhaled. I ambled amongst the trees on the winding gravel paving. In a tenth of a mile, I pulled into the driveway. No one had seen me. No one was home.

I walked inside and, for a while, I paced through every room of the house. I kept waiting for the police to drive along my road looking for a green Ranch Wagon and a driver of my description. No one ever came.

Not Even Not Zen 370: Biomythography - Note 108: Werewolves of Bethesda

Wikimedia Commons (Mech, Christensen, Asa)

Werewolves of Bethesda

On an early morning in December, 2023, I turned onto Democracy Boulevard. 

Democracy runs east-west through Bethesda, Maryland. It passes through commercial areas, strip malls, a few high-rises, wooded glades with single-family homes, and denser, apartment-style housing. The road hosts strips of forested lands along both sides but it does so in the manner of a city, with buildings breaking up the tree cover. The exceptions, where the tree cover remains continuous, are the single family homes and the parks. 

The largest employers in the area are hospitals: Naval Medical, National Institutes of Health, and Sibley Hospital. All three complexes keep their spaces relatively lush with flowers and grasses. They maintain freshwater ponds with ducks, geese, and deer. The largest parks in the area are the Cabin John Regional Park, Rollins Park, Garret Park, and Rock Creek Park. Bethesda is home to countless smaller community parks and other areas of green, living space like the Congressional Country Club. 

Despite the parks and other examples of relatively-tamed nature, though, Bethesda is functionally part of Washington, D.C. It's considered one of the more densely populated areas in the United States. That's why it was a surprise to meet a wolf on Democracy Boulevard. 

As I pulled up to a stoplight, it was on my right. I didn't notice it. In the dark, morning twilight, most of my visibility came from my headlights. Off to the side, even a large animal remained a dim silhouette. As I sat and waited for the light to turn, though, the wolf crossed from right to left.

It may have taken a full second for me to become aware of what it was. 

And maybe it was a coyote. If so, it was the biggest, healthiest-looking coyote I'd ever seen. After it trotted in front of my car, it stopped for a moment in the highway meridian, turned, and stared at me. 

The proper name, most likely, is coywolf. Many years ago, probably in Maine or Ontario according to the geneticists who track such things, a wolf interbred with a coyote. The result was a lithe, slightly delicate wolf. Or perhaps it was an unusually large, strong, and thick-haired coyote. The interbreeding has happened so many times and has been so successful that the process has spawned a term to match the canid. Now the east coast of the United States has 'coywolves.'

I had seen coyotes out west. This beast was considerably taller and more majestic. Its fur was heavy and, weirdly, too beautiful for a coyote. The street lights on the other side of the animal provided back-lighting that showed the fur as a sort of ghostly corona surrounding its wolf-like body. The fur, in fact, had the patterns and shades of grey, white, and black that are stereotypical for both wolves and coywolves. 

It couldn't have been a wolf, not in Maryland. Or so I have been told. But it seemed as tall as a wolf, perhaps a bit thinner, with long legs and narrow jaw. It might have had the bushiest tail I've seen on a wild animal. The black-furred tail reminded of how sheerly beautiful and healthy some wild animals seem. Large raptors are often like this for me, awe-inspiring and impressive up close. My mind's eye recalls, with a sense of startlement, turning to notice a peregrine falcon sitting on a picnic table as I hiked by on a secluded trail, a height which brought the bird's head level with mine. It hit me with its piercing gaze as if I had rudely interrupted something. Wild horses, too, often look groomed. They're always ready to pose for the covers of romance paperbacks. 

And this coywolf, too. Beautiful. 

As I maneuvered my car towards my seven-story office garage, which took a full U-turn on Democracy Boulevard, I inadvertently followed the path of the coywolf. In a few seconds, I caught sight of it moving. It had crossed the empty highway and hopped up to the grassy border of the Marriott building. Without any back-lighting, it presented a dark, quadruped shape as it loped between the high-rises. I recognized where it was going. There couldn't be any other destination. 

At the center of four large office complexes lay a retention pond. This was a good sized body of water, a permanent fixture in the landscape surrounded by mulberry trees, a stretch of thick bamboo, cat-o-nine-tails, and signs warning passers-by that this constrained clump of the natural world was a protected wilderness area. 

For years, the geese had driven out the ducks from the pond, outlasted the herons, and had in fact, occasionally chased hikers walking along the asphalt path that ran around the office complex and through the protected area. They pooped up a storm, of course. Geese droppings were so common a hazard on the hiking path that the day-walkers, as a habit, scraped their shoes on the grass before re-entering their workplaces. There was no way to count on avoiding all the goose poop. 

I hadn't hiked through the area much lately due to the pandemic shutdowns and slow transition into hybrid workspaces. The sight of the coywolf, who had disappeared behind a wall of my parking garage, inspired me to vow to visit it. Mentally, I started to list my meetings and the breaks between them. I looked for a chance to stroll outside, if only for a few minutes. 

In my office suite, I ran into another commuter and described to her the coywolf. She didn't react the way I'd expected, impressed with nature. She had heard warnings about coywolfs in our area, particularly around Rock Creek Park. They had eaten a few, small dogs.

"Would you have thought it was so beautiful," she asked me, "if you were out of your car?"

"Huh." That was a good question. 

Before my ten o'clock meeting, I managed to sprint down the stairs and out the back doors of my building. From there, it was a short walk to the pond. To my surprise, the pond had changed since my last hike around it. 

There was almost no goose poop. It was the first thing I noticed. My approach was a double-time march and it was trouble free. Going off the trail was harder. The bamboo had grown up nearly to the asphalt. I had to patrol around the grove to the cattail reeds, then to the rivulet that ran into the pond, which provided an open space with a view. It was also the most obvious path for the coywolf. I couldn't make out recognizable paw prints in the mud, though. 

When I got a clear look at the scene, I found all the geese in the water. There wasn't a single individual on shore. In fact, the geese gently paddled close together in a cluster near the center. Instead of there being more geese, which I would have expected with fewer people around than ever, there were only a dozen visible. The birds looked smaller than in previous years, not larger. I wondered about that, too. I wasn't sure the coywolf could be responsible. The biggest geese were probably as large as the coywolf and pretty tough, too. 

And yet this is the way it was. 

There's never one of any large animal, of course. The coywolf couldn't be alone. This recent stabilization of forces, probably including the changes in vegetation around the pond, was one that had taken years for the geese and coywolves to achieve. I was lucky to have arrived to work at the right time, noticed something (admittedly, right in front of my eyes), and taken an opportunity to follow up and see the adjusted balance of nature.

Not Even Not Zen 369: Biomythography - Note 107: The Frog Rebellion

The Frog Rebellion

The rebellion was led by college students, I think. That's just a guess.

I first encountered the frogs along a strip of forest that ran alongside a stream in the park next to my home. The water came from springs and drainage pipes farther north. It burbled southwards to a tiny, concrete bridge, just twenty feet long and six feet high. Of course, eventually the stream ran under the bridge, through the woods, and emptied into Paint Branch Creek. But it was a long and marshy hike to where the waters joined. 

There had always been turtles along the stream. They liked the mixture of shade and sun. They probably enjoyed the shelter of trees and rocky ground, too, with plenty of hiding places. My friend Joe found more than I did. He usually found more of any reptile. I searched, but not in a focused way. I wandered through the stream beds, hunting and hoping for curiosities. I uncovered occasional turtles, snakes, tadpoles, frogs, and minnows. One day, I ventured into the shaded waters with my younger brother. He turned around a corner in a forest trail and sprinted back to me, alarmed.

"There's a monster frog," he huffed.

"Is it a frog or a toad?" I wasn't bothered. He should have known not to get too excited about either one.

"I don't know. It's big." He moved his hands to almost a shoulder width apart. Even at his size, a few years younger than me, he was describing ridiculous dimensions for a frog. "Really big."

"Right." I hopped up out of the stream and marched up the trail.

Part of me expected to find nothing at all. My brother had probably seen a sort-of-large toad that moved into the underbrush as soon as he turned his back. On the other side of the tree, though, I found a thing. It hadn't moved. Maybe it felt no need to move, ever. It was larger than a box turtle. It was larger than most of the slabs of shale rock.

I took a step back. It was so large, I didn't want to get close. It couldn't be natural, here.

Whatever it was, it did look like a frog. But instead of being the size of my fist, it was at least eight to ten inches long. It was almost as fat, too, seven inches at the widest part of its belly. Instead of being forest colored, this creature was brownish-green with a pale, mottled, grey-tan underbelly.

"Wow," I breathed, after a few seconds had passed and I'd caught my breath enough to speak.

"See?" My little brother hovered behind me. He wanted to make sure the animal got me first, if it attacked. He put his left hand on my right shoulder.

"Huh." My gaze narrowed. This creature hadn't moved while I'd been watching it.

Maybe it was a rubber model. Maybe it was real, but dead. I had to find out. I wasn't putting my fingers near it, though. There were such things as poison frogs, after all. Instead, I shook off my brother's hand. Then I searched around and got a stick.

"Don't leave!" my brother hissed. I knew what he meant. This thing looked weird and out of place. He didn't want to stand too close to it. And he especially didn't want me to run off and ditch him.

"It's okay." I broke the stick to make it into the right length. Then I crept forward. "I just want to see if it's real."

"Don't do it!" My brother clenched his fists. He crouched to flee, as if he thought I could set off the animal like a bomb. Maybe he was right, but it sure didn't seem to move much.

I poked the frog. The frog blinked. It breathed rapidly, as if alarmed while being half-paralyzed. I saw its throat vibrate. It took one step. After a moment, it took another. Then it settled on its haunches. As far as the frog was concerned, it had moved far enough.

"It's alive." Okay. Now I had to think.

On the way in, I had noticed clutches of frog eggs in the water. They had looked like translucent grapes with black dots in the middle. Some of the eggs had been normal sized. Some had seemed oddly large, though.

We had gotten rain a few days ago. The water level had risen in the stream. The level had receded since, which resulted in tide pools next to the banks of the stream. Most of those stagnant pools had eggs in them. In total, our stream had accumulated hundreds of eggs, at least. And I thought only some of the eggs were normal. A few clutches were huge, several times the size of eggs that our local frogs produced.

"Let's go get Joe," I suggested. I knew my best friend in the neighborhood would want to see. Besides, Joe was two years older than me and his dad was some kind of bug-collecting scientist. Frogs weren't too different. At least, they ate bugs.

When we returned with Joe - prying him away from his family at their table took effort, although we were greatly aided by our breathless urgency in summoning him to see the giants - he was awed, at first. He quickly grew bewildered, as I'd expected, but the sight of the eggs also led him to a leap of logic.

"There have to be others," he said, staring at a clutch of frog jellies bigger than two of his fists together. "Let's find them."

The chore ended up being easy. There weren't many places for the frogs to hide. We found one on the trail, plainly visible, and it walked under a bush only when we shouted and ran up to it. Another, we found under a large fern on the banks of the stream. Soon, we located another. And another.

"At least five," Joe said.

"Are they weird?"

"This is really cool," he breathed. For a second, he tensed, as if he were on the verge of peeing himself. "Really, really."

The giants seemed oddly unafraid of us. We dashed from place to place, studying them, although no individual frog seemed to be doing much of anything interesting or, indeed, much of anything at all. Eventually, we got bored and went to play games on the ball fields in the park. But we vowed to return. Joe mumbled he wanted to take eggs to grow in an aquarium.

Later in the week, after Joe talked with his father, he concluded these were most likely specimens of American Bullfrog. They were too big to be anything else.

"Someone captured them for dissection, my father says." Joe shook his head at the craziness. "But I guess students set them free. Probably at the university."

A few weeks later, I wandered along the stream and noticed it was full of tadpoles. Nearly all the deep puddles on each bank had filled up with wriggling green-black creatures with thick bodies and eel-like tails. I reached in and picked up a mid-sized individual. It wriggled frantically in my fist, so I put it down. I crouched to study a group of them in their home.

Usually, I could hold tadpoles by making a cup of water in my hands. The tadpoles would swim around in the water for a while as I got my up-close look. These specimens, though, were a bit large for that. Some of them were already longer than my fingers. A few of them would have filled my cupped hands entirely, leaving almost no room for water.

I thought about all the frogs we were about to see.

In another week, I headed into the woods around the stream for an inspection. Sun poked through the boughs above me. Mostly in the shade but in a sunny spot, too, I found a half-dozen sizable frogs, for sure younger than their bigger mothers and fathers. Some of the frogs still had their tadpole tails. They were already bigger than our normal frogs, though. And they were growing pretty fast.  

When I mentioned it to Joe, he didn't seem as excited.

"They don't really belong here." He shrugged. "That's what my dad says."

A few days later, I walked through and saw even more frogs. There were almost no tadpoles left anywhere. A while after, though, my younger brother and I hiked in another check-up. This time, we found a bunch of dead frogs. Some of them were lying on their backs. At first, I thought they were pretending.

"What happened?" asked my brother in a hushed tone.

"I don't know." I picked up a stick from the trail. With it, I poked one of the frogs lying on its back.

"Don't do that," said my brother.

There was no sign of an injury. There was no obvious killer. The first body seemed stiff. The next, which I found under a bramble beside a tree, felt mushy through the poke of the stick. Whether that meant it had just died recently or had died before the others, I didn't know.

My brother and I hiked fifty yards downstream. We saw a few live frogs, big ones, but they hopped away from us. That was good. Most of the other frogs, though, were just dead bodies.

A rainstorm swept through the next day. It was three more days before the ground got firm enough for us to hike back along the path of the stream.

"Now everything is dead," my brother murmured.

"Yeah." This time, there was a deceased box turtle among the reptile corpses. We saw dead toads, which looked awfully small and warty. We saw minnows that had gone belly up. We found a drowned mouse, too, or at least something soft, furry, and washed up against a fallen tree branch. Finally, on the east side of the trail, I stumbled upon a larger, older box turtle that was still walking. It looked sick.

The turtle's shell and even its limbs seemed speckled by pale spots. I felt amazed and impressed by its hardiness inasmuch as it had survived a severe devastation, at least so far.

"A storm never killed everything before," I said to my brother. I was trying to think of why this one had been different.

"I've never seen so many animals dead." His eyes were wide. He looked to me for answers but I felt as bewildered as he was.

We never heard a good explanation, although my parents suggested pollution. It's a possible reason. At this distance in time, there's no way for me to know for sure what killed those frogs. The foremost possibilities:

a) The park service found out and set poison to prevent the transplanted frogs from taking over

b) A factory upstream dumped something. In that case, the water was always going to kill the animals downstream and it got especially bad when swollen flood waters carried even more pollution to them

c) A disease, possibly borne by the transplanted frogs, infected most of the reptiles

d) Our local park animals ate insects poisoned by insecticide

Whatever ended it, the frog rebellion lasted only for a spring and a summer. And it was probably started by college students.

Not Even Not Zen 368: Biomythography - Note 106: Apocalypse Horses

Apocalypse Horses

I used to visit the equestrian ring about a block from our house in College Park. A University of Maryland riding club had gotten permission to build their facility in an unused sector of the park. They didn't bring horses into the place often, so I had time to explore it on most afternoons. The builders made the fences white and the roofs green. They painted the obstacles for the horse agility training with the same color scheme, green blocks and white rails. They put up a lot of fencing, too, and that was also white. All of it grew a bit dingy within a few months.

Usually I played in the dirt of the main ring or in the stalls. Sometimes, I found wood chips or stacks of straw. I found a dime once, and later a nickel. I returned to the same spot for weeks, hoping for more fallen coins.

On a day when the women and men brought horses, I stood off to the side and leaned against the fence. Every now and then, riders took their horses through the agility training course. Most of the horses seemed good, not flawless, but resilient about the obstacles and hurdles. 

I watched for half an hour or more, like a kid with nothing to do, and I was surprised to see two horses shy away from the hurdles, one after the other. The second of them refused the smallest cross-bar, basically a step-over hop. I guessed that making horses jump took training like when I taught cats or dogs at home. Cats were pretty hard to persuade, too. How the riders negotiated with their much larger animals, I had no idea. 

Most of the dressing up in burgundy jackets and participating in this weird hobby fell into the realm of adulthood mysteries, a large category to my mind, so I didn't give it much thought. Adults hardly ever explained their habits. Eventually that afternoon, the riders started packing up to leave. This was, itself, a mystery. One man seemed to do most of it. 

A young woman rode off to the side and watched her fellow riders. After a moment, she encouraged her mount to sidle up to me.

“Do you like horses?” she asked. She had blondish hair in what appeared to be a mop-top cut underneath her helmet.

"Yeah ... it pooped!" My voice rose in pitch. Her animal had relieved itself suddenly, with a great plopping sound and smell. And it had done so as automatically as a fish or a bird. It had given no thought to its rider or me or, indeed, anything at all before letting go. 

"Yes, horses do that." Her voice grew slightly tired.

I couldn't get over how it just stood there and did its business.

"But it pooped!" I pointed in case she'd missed it.

"Yes."

I rested my chin on my hand, still propped against the fence, and thought about how I would handle this at home. "Can you train it to poop in the straw or something?"

"Uh," she hesitated. "Horses eat straw. So no."

The conversation went on for a while. I'm sure I served as an inadvertent advertisement for birth control to the girl. The ways in which horses were so different from other pets seemed unbelievable to me then. I could not buy a clue about the behaviors she was trying to describe. Also, she was telling me her animal was smart. But it wasn't smart enough not to step in its own poop. 

She let me pet her horse on the nose. It shivered and gave a sort of laughing sound.

"Did I do something funny?" I glanced from the horse to the rider.

"That was a whinny." By this point in our conversation, she could meet me at my level of understanding. "She makes that noise sometimes."

Although we talked a while longer, the young woman found a way to excuse herself from the conversation. Maybe she got called away to help pack. In either case, since watching grown-ups walk their horses on leads, stack obstacle cones, drag blocks to the fence, and fix rails was only moderately interesting, I wandered off.

I returned a week later to watch another team of riders lead horses by the reins, talk to one another, walk around, tie their beasts to the posts, and start a training session. Not long after, I came back to the equine ring to watch part of a competition. This was a vastly different experience - more cars, more trucks, and more people. The contestants seemed entirely competent in a grown-up way, which I took for granted. There was a very old-looking man, probably nearly thirty, who performed perfectly with his mount as they leapt over the most difficult hurdles, every one of them, without a flaw.

I watched the training sessions and competitions for two years more. They got boring, in a comfortable way, and I stopped by to watch them less often, partly because the place was getting too popular with adults who asked questions or stood in my way, partly because for my eighth birthday I received a five-speed bicycle, a spyder with high, raised handlebars and a banana seat. As I found myself more mobile, I realized I had friends to visit, a bowling alley to lurk in, magazines to read for free at a newsstand, and more I could do on the roads beyond my neighborhood. 

Upon returning from my bike trips, sometimes I slowed down to see the horse club. 

One day as I rode out on my bike, the insecticide trucks swept through. They sprayed a heavy mist that smelled hot, like menthol but worse. It fell on the grass, the trees, the streams, and the pond - everywhere. It wasn't DDT, I realized, but it was something else the local park monitors had decided was good for us. Whatever it was, it made my lungs ache. I recognized it as an insecticide that had given me breathing problems before. I pedaled out of there. 

When I returned, I sped through the smelling-awful zone and ignored the horse trailers. I kept going west until I hit University Boulevard. I turned down the wrong way on the shoulder of the road, and checked out the next set of houses to see if any kids would play. 

The yards looked empty, so I headed back home. As I came to my house, though, I noticed whirling lights farther up ahead, east into the park. 

"You're finally back," my mother said. I walked my bike inside our chain-link fence.

"There's no kids out," I complained. "I'm gonna make a sandwich. There are some ambulances and fire trucks near the horse ring. I'm gonna go see."

"No. Definitely not," my mother said. She held the door for me as we walked inside.

"But why?"

"There's nothing to see."

"That's okay." I turned the corner into the kitchen. I headed past my father, who was at the table reading, and pulled on the handle of the fridge with the idea of putting together ketchup and cheese on wonder bread. Maybe I could grab a pickle, too. "I'll stay to the side. I'll just look at the horses."

"No," my father insisted.

"The horses are dead," my mother told me. I turned to find her only a foot to my right. She had followed me all the way through the kitchen. 

"Why?" For the moment, I put the ketchup back on the shelf. I closed the refrigerator. 

"No one knows."

"All of the horses?" My feet took me in a circle around my mother in the kitchen. She had wanted to make sure I knew this.

"I think so."

"But ..." Finally, I stopped. I tried to think of how this was even possible. 

"Didn't they spray something on the grass this morning?" she asked. The tone of her voice told me she already knew the answer.

"Yeah." It had been the menthol-hot stuff. I hadn't been able to ignore it. 

My parents exchanged a meaningful look. 

"Horses eat grass," commented my mother, arms folded.

"Yes," said my father.

"Do you think they nibbled on the sprayed grass?" she asked. The question, by her glance and raised eyebrows, was meant for me. I tried to think. I hadn't paid attention to the arriving horse trailers. I had no answer.

"All of them?" I wondered. I couldn't comprehend the totality of it.

"They must have," my father said. 

It turned out my parents were right. According to our neighbors who had gone to see the what the ambulances were doing, and according to their kids as well, all the horses at the equine competition had died. Every single one. Why ambulances had come for the horses, I had no idea. Maybe no one at the equine competition, with their animals dying, knew what to do. Someone had simply driven to a payphone to dial for emergency help. And the ambulances came.

That was the end of the equine sports club. They never met in the park near my home again.

#

A friend of mine pointed out that pesticide poisoning incidents for horses, although common enough (https://beva.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eve.12887 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11780282/ for examples), are relatively rare. Mold-infected feed appears to be the most common cause of herd die-offs in our modern era.

Does this mean I'm remembering wrong? In this case, probably not. The recollection is a latticework of small things. I tell the story as two incidents but, in my mental background, the incidents are supported by many, many other brief but clear fragments. I don't doubt the horse club and stables. I don't doubt the insecticide sprayings. I don't doubt the abrupt shutdown of the horse club or the ambulances associated with it. I don't even doubt my parents explaining it to me (although the dialogue must be inaccurate) or my friends telling me their versions of the news later.

What I do doubt is everyone being right about the cause of death. If the feed were poisoned that day, our neighborhood would have been likely to a) not know, and b) blame the deaths on the most obvious cause, which was the insecticide spray. It does, on the surface, seem like insecticides are still a reasonable culprit. In contrast to the superficial evidence, though, it's significant that I'm remembering from the perspective of a child. No one told me the full facts as if I were grown. And the horse club folks didn't talk to our neighborhood residents anyway. If they figured it out a couple days later and the cause was determined to be contaminated feed, would they have come back to correct the record with the kids in the neighborhood? No. So there is still a decent chance that the more common cause, bad feed, resulted in those horse deaths.