Not Even Not Zen 383: Biomythography - Note 118: Depression

Depression

I didn't want to write about this. But if I'm going to put my stories and thoughts into a family book, it's irresponsible to avoid it.

Everyone deals with depression at some point. Everyone spends time designing or enacting their suicide. Or so I suppose. I became obsessed with it starting at age five. That may have been excellent timing, too, even if it made me a little weird. As with many things from childhood, my morbid drives were poorly focused, apathetic, and easily derailed.

The suicide mindset could have come from my environment. On television, I watched the World at War series complete with the emaciated bodies stacked high. Then the prisoners burned and buried the bodies in mass graves under the watchful eyes and guns of the concentration camp guards. I saw Vietnam War photos of executions and other atrocities - children crying as they ran from a bomb blast, a man with a gun to his head the moment before another man executed him. The world offered lots of examples of pains and cruelties. In my regular (not televised) life, relatives died in manners that I would have expected if I weren't a child. My pets did their jobs in teaching me about death, too. I had plenty of chances to think about mortality. I had reasons to seek it out.

We always have reasons. As I write, I simply no longer have the mindset to care for them.

My childhood frame of mind feels like an alien world. Of course, everyone undergoes a series of personality changes over time. Some of them are profound. Even though I still feel a useful death is important if you can get it, like it's a bonus track to the album of life, I've moved away from contemplating suicide. I'm probably at an opposite extreme now, wanting to die slowly, naturally, and remain conscious to the end. And I've been that way since my late teens. It's part of why it's so odd to contemplate the depressing aspect of my earlier self. I'm leery about this writing and these thoughts.

1. For one thing, dwelling on the past gets overdone.

2. In particular, spending time on the subject of suicide is worse. There's a strong correlation between suicide as a cultural concept and the actual suicides committed in a culture. The more it's part of the discussion, the more some people think of it as their solution. And that was me as a child. It makes me leery.

Since I've left the mindset behind, I find it hard to recreate. The best I can do is illustrate it with a couple stories.

In fifth grade, despite being in the midst of a crush on a beautiful girl, drawing in my school books, sparring every Saturday for fun, getting elected to student patrol, and traveling to Russia, I had lots of spare time. Time when I was tired even from trying to read the encyclopedia. In those long bouts of boredom, I planned my suicide. One of my recurring ideas was to make a noose in the curtain cord, jump hard, and strangle.

There's something about a little brother coming into the room while you're giving it a try, though, and punching you. Then it feels dumb. I guess no one wants to partly strangle while getting playfully hit.

I knew then I needed a more competent process. I had to learn to make a noose. One autumn day in a hall of my school, I encountered my friend Greg tying a noose in a piece of string. I halted, amazed. Someone understood how to make the knot I wanted. I backed up, sidled over to him, and studied his practice sessions until I was sure.

When I got home, though, I discovered I hadn't really learned it. I fooled around trying nooses in a clothesline, coming close, and failing. Most of my noose-looking knots wouldn't open or close at all. Once, I stuck my head through what I thought was a noose and the knot fell apart. Obviously, I needed to study more. Days later, back in school, I located Greg in his green blazer jacket. .

"Show me those nooses again," I said to Greg. I moved my empty hands as if I were tying a knot. "I've almost got it."

"No." He stepped away from me.  

"But it's cool!" I protested. Coolness was the thing Greg cared most about. It was almost the only thing he wanted in fifth grade: to be cool. Any mention of it made him fold. Here in the hall on the way to lunch, I knew he had to be as concerned about it as ever. He even looked as stylish as he could be in our school uniform. He had on a white turtleneck beneath his green blazer.

"No." He'd had a string in his hand. Now he put his hands in his pockets.

"Why not?"

"Just no." This time, he wasn't caving in. And that was weird. It felt like someone had gotten to him. He had talked with a classmate and fallen under their influence. I caught him looking behind me and to my right. I turned to see who it was, but there was no student there, only the principal, Mr. Cohen, off in the distance.

 

Had the principal warned Greg not to show me how to make a noose? I couldn't think why Mr. Cohen would care. Had Greg decided for himself? He was a strong-willed boy, so I knew it was possible. But if he made his own decision, then somehow I had given myself away. That worried me. In fifth grade, I was becoming aware of how I kept giving away my thoughts. Other people knew my plans.

I hadn't figured out how they knew. 

 

Over a span of days, maybe weeks, my problems with Greg continued. He had never refused me anything before, partly because he was so concerned with being cool. But he declined to show me how to tie nooses. He stopped bringing twine to school. Eventually, I gave up. I had the sense that someone was watching me, maybe a teacher. The rest of life kept interrupting my suicidal explorations, too. I forgot about nooses. I had the trip to the Soviet Union to prepare for, then endure. I had the crush on Leslie, who was smart and cute and usually with a bright smile. Eventually, the rest of life gave way to mooning over her. I wanted her to touch me but also I avoided her touch. I thought about her constantly.

By sixth grade I'd admitted to Leslie I liked her a whole, whole lot. I'd said it to her face. And it turned out she didn't hate me. So that was good. Plus, for some reason, I ended up being named valedictorian for our sixth grade graduation instead of Leslie. That didn't make any sense to either of us. I had all As in sixth grade. So did she. But she was just a better, more diligent student. We agreed on it. If you went back to fifth grade, she was better by a fractional point in her scores. How did the administration pick me instead? Neither of us were sure. Leslie suggested it was because I'd been in the school since pre-kindergarten. She was a newcomer, relatively speaking.

At the time and even now, I wonder if she was judged differently because she was a girl. The teachers often openly loved me and said so. And I loved them back. They seemed skeptical of Leslie. I was never sure why.  

At any rate, I spoke at the dinner before the sixth grade graduation. It was part of the valedictorian job. The next day, I got up in my white shirt and green tie to be introduced as the valedictorian for my class at the graduation.  The school only taught up to sixth grade, so this was it. This was the big deal.

"In his eight years here," said the principal, counting my time correctly to include nursery and kindergarten, "I have never seen Eric smile."

In retrospect, it's a dramatic thing to say. He must have written it down and practiced it. He meant it. Also, I knew it was true. I was not a happy boy. In a very steady way, except when Leslie held my hand, I thought about how I could die and how I should, too, and no one would miss me. The principal had noticed. He may have been trying to tell my parents something with his comment.

He spoke for what seemed like ages, a half-minute of it in praise of me as a student. Even though I had returned to my seat, I felt uncomfortable. Thankfully, he moved on to praise the rest of the students, each and every one as individuals. Then he gave glowing remarks to the teachers, the whole school, and our bright future.  

"Why did your principal say you never smile?" my father asked me after the ceremony. It was an accusation.

I shrugged. "I dunno."

"Well, smile." 

My father's sense of "make yourself smile!" might not have a bad way, at least for some people, some of the time. If you can fake being happy, maybe some part of it will stick with you. Most of the time I received those orders, though, I couldn't manage it. I couldn't even put on a false grin. Sometimes, I could be beaten or threatened into trying but something about it, something in the faking, made me break out in tears and ruin it.

 

This is probably why I was such a joy to pose in pictures.

#

It was a popular theme song. I wandered from my bedroom, humming and singing it. 

The game of life is hard to play

I'm gonna lose it anyway

The losing card I'll someday lay

This is all I have to say:

Suicide is painless

it brings on many changes

and I can take or leave it if I please.

and you can do the same thing if you please.

"Stop that," my mother said. She looked up from tending to a plant in the hallway and gave me a worried scowl. 

Not Even Not Zen 382: Biomythography - Note 120: I'm With the Band

I'm With the Band

I was playing with our high school garage band, the Misfits, on a Friday night. We had a rare, paying gig. It was at a party held by one of our best friends, Sharon. And we had a lot of fun. There were no parents in the house that evening. There were a few beers. There was dancing. We provided the music ourselves, of course, with cover tunes and originals. And around us, it seemed like a good time was had by all. 

The band played late into the night. I banged on the keyboard and sang. For a couple numbers, I got up and crooned the lyrics into a ball microphone on a stand. I danced and leaned sideways with the mic stand in my arms. And at the end of the evening, I headed home with a girl. She drove me to her house. We crept downstairs. She folded out the basement couch into a makeshift bed.

We had sex in her home with her family upstairs, although she assured me it was just her mother. I wasn't as uptight as I'd been when I was in this situation before. For her part, my girl seemed to be rolling in the flow of the moment. She forgot about being quiet or she didn't care. Afterwards, looking flushed, she held me close. She drifted off to sleep before I did, still partly dressed in the bits of clothing that neither of us, in our haste, had taken off her body. She looked warm. She felt it, too. She made me feel cozy. I drifted into dreamy half-consciousness while staring at her basement ceiling, satisfied and warily affectionate about being in someone's embrace, naked under the makeshift covers.

Hours later, I woke to light seeping between the leafless backyard trees. The ruddy glow shone through the plate glass. The basement of the townhouse had been built with floor to ceiling windows and a sliding, glass door. In here, facing southeast, it got bright early. Over the span of half a minute, however, I became aware it wasn't the luster of morning that had woken me. It was the sounds upstairs.

Above my head, someone strode across the floors wearing hard-soled shoes. The steps clacked from the tiles in the kitchen, to the rug next to the hall closet, and back into the kitchen again. Someone opened a drawer. A kitchen implement rattled. A pan hit the burner on a stove top.

Dimly, I remembered how seldom anyone's parents ever seemed happy to see me. I'd never met this girl's family. I'd wanted to. She hadn't introduced me, though. Even if she lived with only her mother, I wondered how unhappy a parent would be to find me, a stranger, in the house. Would her mother scream and throw things? Should I try to sneak out? There was nowhere to go. This place was a long way from home. I had no car and no money. Besides, the fast-paced movements upstairs signaled to me that slipping out would be difficult.

The pattern of footfalls changed. Next to me, my girl murmured something in her sleep. I must have moved. In reaction, she curled closer into my shoulder. She had been resting on my arm. Now she occupied the whole left side of my body.

The hard-soled shoes clicked into the hall. They paused. Someone had to be standing near the top of the padded stairs that ran from the ground floor down to the basement. How well did this young lady get along with her mother? Suddenly, that seemed important. Would her mom want me to introduce myself or would she rather knife me? For that matter, had I heard quiet footsteps on the stairs, earlier? I'd stirred. Was it from the padded, quiet sound of feet? Maybe her mother had already crept down and seen us lying on the fold-out couch. Maybe some barely-aware part of me had taken note.

The person at the top of the staircase decided to come down, maybe for the second time. I jostled my left arm. It seemed smart to wake my girl, just in case we needed to move fast. Step, step, step, the footfalls approached. The blonde head next to me turned. The blue eyes blinked. They followed my line of sight - or more accurately, they tried. Her eyesight wasn't so great without glasses. She'd told me. I'd forgotten.

My eyes were perfect. I could see brown, low-heeled office shoes on the stairs. I could see shoes and blue slacks. I could see the torso of a middle-aged woman.

Finally, I saw the woman herself. She was brown-haired and looked a little rumpled, although in business-style clothes. She wore a plain blouse. She stopped on the stairs when she saw me studying her. In one hand, she held a spatula. The other hand, she rested on her hip.

"How do you like your eggs?" she said.

"I'm sorry?" I thought I had misheard. I turned to the girl next to me. She couldn't see the situation but she knew her mother, surely. She would understand what was going on.

"Well?" she prompted.

"The eggs?" repeated her mother from the staircase.

"My mom is making us breakfast," she explained.

"Oh." This was so far from what I had expected, I had to replay the conversation in my head to make sure I understood. "Sunny side up?"

"Are you sure?"

"Yes?" Well, I was sure my girl and I were teenagers. And that her mother was the calmest parent I had ever met.

Not Even Not Zen 381: Biomythography - Note 119: Lemon Twist

Lemon Twist

My mother had already gone to work. When my father walked out the door, he left me alone with my nanny.

"Stand on the chair," she told me.

She was a short, strongly-built woman. It's hard to look severe in a floral dress but she managed. She was a very serious person. When she pointed, it was with her fist. Her stubby finger at the end was merely an ornament to provide emphasis. I knew what to do when she indicated the dining room chair she had pulled away from the table. Minutes earlier, as my nanny placed it at the corner of the kitchen tiles next to the adjoining room, I expected the order to come. Now I climbed up onto the padded seat. I rose with one hand on the wall, the other on the back of the chair.

She started to vacuum. Her motions were brusque and efficient. She did her chores with strength. With narrow-eyed disdain, she dumped grey powder and flakes from the ashtray into the garbage. She moved plates into the sink and scrubbed them. She finished her washing in thirty seconds. She strode to the chairs and carried them back into the living room, two at a time, except for the one I was in.

She gave me a calculated glance. She was too far away to slap me, but her expression put me on alert.

"How would you like to go on a train ride?" she asked.

I rose on my tiptoes. It was all I could do not to jump off the chair. I started vibrating up and down. Trains were fun. I loved them and the noises they made, the rushes of air, the sights out the windows, the bustle of the people, and everything else about them. Better, I knew it was unusual for my nanny to take me anywhere. I couldn't be silent enough or hold still long enough for her tastes. Sometimes, though, she allowed these fun trips to happen.

"Well, if you want to go with me," she said. She pointed a finger in my direction. "You must do as I say. You must be quiet. And very polite."

I nodded and kept nodding.

"You must go use the bathroom now. And you must not wet yourself where we go. I won't bring diapers, understand?"

I nodded more deeply. For a moment, I started to climb down from the chair. But I remembered. I looked for her nod of approval. After a moment of consideration, she gave it. We started on our mission.  

 

Our preparations passed in a blur. I didn’t understand a lot of them. We stopped at the market, I remember, and my nanny picked up a couple bags of items, mostly meat and fruit. The shopping was tedious. My legs started to hurt. I wanted to whine about it, as I might do with my mother, but I glanced at my nanny's face. She glared me a warning. I took a deep breath.

One of the butchers offered her a couple of sausage samples. She handed me one under the benevolent smile of the stall manager.

Finally my legs grew so hot and tired, I started to stumble.

"My arms are full!“ she warned. I knew that tone. I tried to stand up straighter. "I won’t pick you up.“

”How much farther?” I whispered.

“We are close,” she conceded. “We are almost to the train station.”

At the station, the cashier tried to sell her a ticket for me and she refused. She shouted at him for a minute or two, then she got her ticket. A few minutes later, she turned and showed me off to her fellow passengers waiting for the train. She did the same with the ticket taker when we got on, too. She produced only one ticket and her eyes dared the man to demand one for the child with her. He declined the confrontation and sent us down the aisle.

The train had berths. At least, that's how I remember the longest portion of our travel. Sure, at least one or two cars held rows of benches. My nanny led me through one. But other train cars had a corridor wide enough for two grown people to pass. Alongside the corridor were rooms where passengers could lounge in relative comfort. They sat on padded benches, as with the more crowded arrangement. In the berths, the passengers had privacy of a sort. Only a few people at a time could sit facing one another.  

I accepted our seat in the higher-class booths as a normal mode of transport even though it wasn’t how my parents usually traveled. Most things adults did were inscrutable. How they decided on seats was a mystery. I didn’t question it. In retrospect, I wonder if my nanny, so possessed of her sense of place in her society and so saturated with her determination, simply seized the opportunity to upgrade. She had already coerced the ticket booth man and the conductor. Maybe it was how she operated.  

On the train, I stopped with my face against a window to see as much as I could. The sight of buildings passing by thrilled me with the speed and the largeness of the world. After a while, I talked with the other passengers. Some of them were women my mother's age. Some were businessmen. There weren't many children. People came and went. I can't remember most of them although my nanny explained to some of them that I didn't know German because my parents were Americans. At the time, I knew enough German to get a general sense of what she was saying about me.

When she talked with other adults about adult topics, I had no idea what was going on. I have no visceral recollections of those spans of time.

I do know we kept occupying the same booth. Other people on shorter trips came and went. We stayed. Our ride lasted long enough for me to get hungry. That's when I discovered my nanny had brought us no snacks. I was young enough to feel the physical discomfort in a self-absorbed way. Once I felt hunger pains, tears welled up in my eyes. My nanny seemed to sense the impending outburst. She reached into one of her bags and pulled out a lemon. I grabbed it with a smile.

Lemons were sweet fruits I knew from the drinks in my parents house. How I encountered them was through our house guests. My mother would make her friends sweet tea with squeezed lemon. She served drinks on a tray. Couples would hang around the coffee table and talk. When the guests were done, the group would usually head to another room. I would stay and toddle from glass to glass. My stubby fingers could muddle around in the ice to find the fruit. Then, one by one, I would suck on each sweet lemon. The pieces were mostly devoid of their natural juice but they were filled with droplets of syrupy tea and heavy sugar.  

The circumstances of my eating the lemons may have misled me as a toddler. When I bit into the half-peeled lemon on the train, I shivered. Involuntarily, I put out my arms to keep my balance. I shivered again. My eyes widened. The fruit had tasted so sweet but so tart, it made me befuddled.

The expression on my face made my caretaker burst out with a guffaw. She bent over at the waist.

"Nanny?" It was such a strange thing to hear her laugh that I turned to stare. I was still wobbling, a little. She kept laughing.

After she wheezed to a halt, I turned away. I noticed the lemon in my hand. I pulled it close to my face and took another bite. Startled, I gave a yelp. She laughed again. The memory of my own surprise remains so clear. The pulp was so bitter, so tart, and yet sugary enough to pull me back to it. I kept going. I got determined like it was my sweet, sweet enemy. I got down to the rind.

My nanny’s hand appeared. She took the soggy rind away. 

"No more for now," she said. She wiped her hand on her skirts. "Why don't you sleep?" 

It was not quite an order. But there would be consequences if I didn't try. So I tried. I closed my eyes and held still. I must have napped at least a little because my next memory comes as I'm out of the train, walking. From my sense of balance and my plodding legs, I must have been stumbling at first and waking as we got nearer to our destination. 

Our first destination was a wide expanse of concrete, a bit like a town square or a trolley car crossing. The pale sunlight turned bright, here. My nanny appeared to be talking to a pair of guards in uniform. One of them was taller and bolder than the other. I knew what guards were. We had them at the base where my parents taught and where I went to nursery school. They never paid attention to me. To guards, I was invisible. But to my surprise, the tall one now spared me a glance. It was because of something my nanny said. Both of the men motioned toward me. They said something in German. My nanny chuckled. They chuckled. Finally, the guards motioned my nanny through. 

"Schnell," she said. She grabbed my hand and marched. I sprinted to keep up. We didn't maintain the brisk pace for long, though. My nanny met someone. We slowed to a stop. The two women looming above me exchanged severe nods at first, then made friendlier sounding noises. Then, for a moment, they embraced. I had never seen anything like this from my nanny. Even when the women backed away from each other by a step, they held hands. 

My nanny turned her head and glanced down to me. Her hair had grey in it. The other woman's hair was brown although she kept it in a severe haircut, the way some did.

"This is my sister," announced my nanny. 

 

As a group, we started to walk. The conversation switched back to German. We may have taken a trolley or maybe we hiked all the way in the pale sunshine but, wherever we went, it didn't seem to take long. We arrived at a pale, yellowish brick building. At the door, my nanny shook me by my arm to catch my attention.  

"We are going to visit," she said. "Behave."

For a long time, as the two women sat down in one of the apartments, I concentrated on behaving. I moved from place to place as silently as I could. I didn't ask questions. The adults spoke only German. I spent my time studying my surroundings. I looked at walls. I gazed out a window. When I had explored the small apartment, I found a footstool near the women and sat. 

They talked and talked. It took so long and happened so much in German, I couldn't understand any of it. I tried my best to behave. I'm not sure what I did wrong but something in the way I got up and strolled around the room grabbed my nanny's attention. I put my hands behind my back. She didn't like me to fidget. But I had been playing with my fingers. 

She leaned close and asked her sister something, maybe about food. The women studied me. Her sister shook her head. If it was about food, she didn't have anything. On an apparent impulse, my nanny reached into one of the bags she had deposited in her sister's apartment. She pulled out a lemon.

Her sister gasped. She said something to object. 

Despite her sister's outrage, my nanny gave me another lemon. After I fumbled as I tried to bite into it - this one had a tougher rind than the one on the train - she even helped me by peeling it. I think her sister protested the whole time. Still, the two women started to laugh as I bit in. I ate the peeled fruit with fury, anger, hunger, determination, and with clearer-minded expectations of the bitter and the sweet of it. I could hear myself struggle. A noise poured out of me as I ate.

 

I think the shock of the two lemons, the one on the train and the one in the apartment, are the key to me having memories of this. Everything ends here, with the second lemon. I have no clear images of returning home. Even now, after several rememberings, the explosion of the luscious, almost candy-coated and tongue-curdling sourness makes me shiver. Everything else is a mental slideshow of sorts, a set of brief but connected vignettes, images, smells, distant sounds and words. But the taste of lemon - it's clear. It rings my body like a bell.  

Our family lived in Frankfurt, Bitburg, and Hamburg while my parents taught at army bases. I'm guessing this occurred while we lived in Hamburg.

#

Years later, I told a shortened version of the lemon story to my parents. My father gave me a narrow-eyed look, like I was a liar. I couldn't figure out what I'd said that was wrong. I thought the story was about sour fruit and a mean nanny (or, more accurately, a strict one). The incident seemed amusing to me in retrospect. I had anticipated chuckles about it from my parents. At the least, my reaction as a three year old to the taste of the lemons should have been amusing to my father.

It was my mother who turned to me and said, "No, you must be mistaken."

"But I'm not." The recollection had been utterly clear and based on the taste of those lemons.

"No, that one had a sister in East Germany. She wouldn't have taken you there."

There was a long pause as we all thought about the possibility. I remembered the guards and the laughter about me. Had I crossed the border in Berlin? Later, I looked it up on a map. It would have been a long trip from our home to the big city. I can see my parents' point. Still, this is what I remember.

"Anyway," my father said, still shaking his head. "You liked that nanny."

I'm pretty sure I trembled in fear around that nanny. I did and said everything she wanted, probably including telling my parents whatever she wanted them to hear. But they would have presented a different viewpoint, of course. 

Not Even Not Zen 380: Biomythography - Note 117: Persistence

Persistence

In the 1970s, at the top of a small mountain near the Finger Lakes, my parents drove our stations wagon into the entrance of Wig-Wam Harbor. For at least six years, Wig-Wam was our vacation destination every August. The place had been a farm. Now it was an upstate campsite with sparse woods, a view overlooking Keuka Lake, a couple of grassy hillsides near the top, and a pond nestled close to the underbelly of the tallest of the lush Wig-Wam slopes. 

The family-run campsite had installed a pool as well. It sat half in the ground and half above. The owners kept pool pumps running most of the time but the water turned frigid overnight, probably because the mountain nights got down to forty-five degrees. On many mornings, we swam anyway. We splashed around until our our lips turned blue. Sometimes that took half an hour, sometimes less.

When we couldn't bear the pool, we played on the tetherball pole next to the pond. After we whacked the tetherball until our hands burned and we staggered, drunk with effort, we hiked up to the recreation center.

In theory, the recreation center had things to do. You could buy worms there to use as bait in the stocked fishing pond. You could buy gumballs from machines. You could buy plastic toys from other, neighboring machines for a dime. Mostly, though, the place was a low, one-story farm building converted into a holding area for sterile equipment that was decades old, didn't work, and could almost seem interesting for a minute but not really. The main reason we ventured into the center was it had a ping-pong table at the back. (It had a pool table, too, but it cost a dollar to play, so no one could afford it.)

Next to the ping-pong table sat a gumball-style dispenser with a few white, plastic spheres inside. For a quarter, you could turn the crank, buy a ping-pong ball, and play games while it lasted. 

Once, I found a quarter on the street during a visit to town. 

"Did someone just drop it?" my parents chided me. "You should make sure no one's looking for it." Apparently, I had gotten suspiciously good at finding lost change. I wandered along the nearest street for a minute, looking people over, deciding they were unworthy, and finally I pocketed the quarter. 

"I'm going to play ping-pong," I told my cousins and my uncle. My parents had been stingy with their quarters because we kept breaking the cheap, plastic balls. 

Still, we played whenever we had the money. We preserved the balls for hours, sometimes for days, but eventually, after hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of whacks, smashes, pokes in the eye, accidental kicks, drops against the concrete floor, or finger-smashing cracks between two paddles near the net, the balls broke. They didn't simply give up all at once. Usually, they acquired a critical flaw and we could massage the wounded plastic sphere with a blip of tape. Sometimes we played with a jagged, crazy-bouncing ball until we exploded it with a smash that sent bits in multiple directions, sometimes as hostile chunks, more often as delicate hemispherical curves that floated in the air like feathers, twirling, before descending, to our sighs and to their ruin. 

Sometimes we could find one or two pieces but not a critical missing chunk. We had been warned to keep the rec center clean and to throw away the broken stuff. Once, after yet another sad ending to our game, we couldn't find any pieces at all. My little brother said a part had flown outside but we didn't see where in the grass it might have gone. The other piece or pieces must have rolled under the shelves of the camping stoves or the racks of fishing lines and poles, we guessed. The disappearance made the older kids laugh. 

It was my idea, I think, to hold a ping-pong tournament. 

Usually, we played doubles. More kids could play that way. Plus, I hated waiting for the others to finish a game. We played 'winner keeps the table' style, so losing meant sulking at the edges of the rec center or sitting on a stool, kicking the air. Joining in teams of two to a side kept our idle times to a minimum. 

"We should draw lots if we're going to have a contest," said my uncle. He was tall, thin, and fair minded. (He was still two years away from discovering that he could win endlessly in tetherball by keeping the ball too high for my short, jumping-bean self to reach.)

"Fine." I felt strict about fairness, too. If I got an older cousin I couldn't beat, that was fine. I wanted to try. 

Unfortunately, I got my girl cousin, Annie, as my first opponent. She was too happy to let me win because I was trying so hard. After that, the tournament memory is a blur. I think I won but, toward the end, it simply didn't matter. We only played for two hours and I wanted to keep playing. I tried to make my cousins skip lunch with me. They shook their heads and left. My younger brother stayed with me the longest. 

Eventually, even he shook his head, said, "I'm getting hungry" and put down his paddle. 

That afternoon, I persuaded everyone to try a doubles tournament and we kept going until dinner. When we started that week, I had not been anywhere near as good as my older uncles and cousins. I improved, though. We all did. The more we trained ourselves during the long, summer week, the better our games progressed. Once, our volleys had lasted a few seconds. Now, they lasted for minutes. We ran to get the longest shots. Often enough, we made them. 

At a certain point, I noticed that the more we played, the more tired and discouraged the others got. If I played my older cousins in the morning, I couldn't win. If I played them after an hour of games, I often did. I could outlast the people who were better than me. 

"Again?" my cousin asked. 

"Yes!" I shouted with glee. Because it had become my strategy. Soon, although I didn't know it, this was going to become a favorite tactic throughout my teenaged life. 

Not everyone was used to playing alone, one to a side, but I was ready. I tried to keep long, long volleys going. I liked the action. And I could force other people to make mistakes. Once I noticed I could wear people down, it became my favorite method. Soon I would apply it to tetherball, tennis, and anything else requiring endurance. It wasn't simply a matter of being in better aerobic shape. My mantra inside my head became, 'I can out-care them.' (Out-caring does not, as I found out in tetherball and basketball, make me six feet tall. It does not solve every tactical problem.) 

I realized I could be a steady winner by virtue of being fanatical. Extremism was my path to success. This was not the same as being the best at something, of course. I simply cared so much that I stayed on the field when all my competitors left. 

By the time I was a teenager, I could out-care anyone who had a modicum of sense. (Unfortunately for them, most people do have some.) Too often, I cultivated a militant streak that came naturally to me. That's a dangerous thing. When coupled with my discovery that I was better at fighting than talking and better at taking a punch than most people were at punching, I became, just a little, someone who wouldn't let go of arguments. Even people who liked me, even my best of friends, clearly thought at times I was a bit much. 

But I loved my friends anyway. And when they were irritated and told me to fuck off, I wouldn't. Because their anger was temporary. And my persistence was not. I still loved them; I would out-care them. I could wait through a minute of punches, an hour of scowls. I could hear insults, scowl back and, eventually, make them laugh. 

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 through 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 put 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 you're 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: Poem - 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