Stillness

There's a lot of noise out there.  And there's a lot of noise in your head.

I grew up in a mostly rural pocket of northeastern Connecticut.  Save for being the home of the state's university, Mansfield was - and is still - a quiet town.  With the UConn skating rink and Student Union arcade room, a drive-in theater, and not much else, I was accustomed to finding ways of passing the hours.  I explored the woods looking for trails, I attempted to go fishing, I enjoyed sledding down pristine white hills.  Though there were many who chose to stay, I, like a lot of kids - many also the children of professional academics - sought to get away just as soon as we could.

Though college only took me to another college cow-town, Amherst, Massachusetts, it was big school in an area with several other colleges within a 20 minute radius.  I met hundreds of new people, joined the crew team and was exposed to a whole different set of experiences.  I fell under the spell of a fraternity, joining their ranks and living in our fetid house for three solid years of college.  There was a buzz and an energy and as a 20 year-old who wanted to be buzzed and energized there was no better place.  With the exception of the time I broke my humerus bone in half and got 10 stitches in my other hand (lumber yard accident, different story) and lived back home for a few weeks recuperation, I flew the coop right after high school.

Moving to a Boston suburb and then into the city after college, I have mostly lived in urban or suburban places ever since.  And as I moved into more compact and complex environments, my own world got more complex.  I had a job now, had to make my own decisions and sometimes suffer the consequences.   In my early twenties, I, like many, made - let's see, to put it politely - questionable decisions.  Many times given the choice between industriousness and indolence I chose the latter.  The party instead of the library, the girl instead of the gym.

A few years later, I advanced in my place of employment.  At first it wasn't really any kind of effort.  I was likable, reasonably intelligent, and mostly kind.  It wasn't long, however, that things got more complex.  If I was still going to be in the company's good favor - and just as importantly if I wanted to boost my pay, I had to take on more responsibility.  More responsibility requires more effort, more training, more curiosity and diligence.  Sure I'd made periodic efforts in my classes.  Sometimes I had to put in maximum effort to get passing grades in particularly difficult courses.  I often employed determination and resolve as an oarsman in college.  In crew I had to learn from my teammates and my coaches how to put forth consistent effort.  And in that sport my failure was my teammates' failure; I felt responsible to them.

Responsibility.  I have no idea how I came to possess any semblance of it.  When I was in high school I worked at the Mansfield Depot Restaurant.  I began as a dishwasher.  I showed up on time, I did my job thoroughly and conscientiously.  If someone called in sick and they called me, I went in.  If they needed someone to work a double, I offered.  Certainly, I was motivated by money.  Though I made less than $4/hr. when I started, those paychecks supplied all my spending money.  I saved up and with some help from my dad, bought my first car (1974 Volvo 164E, with a jerky transmission).  But not far  below money, I didn't want my bosses to think poorly of me.  I felt rewarded by how thankful they were that I was able to work and was a diligent employee.  I should have said "no" more than I did.  I should have spent a little bit of time being still while I could.

When I was in my early 30s, I moved abroad.  It had been a goal of mine; it appeared to be  the next adventure I was craving.  In my several years of city hopping, I lived in London, Amsterdam, Toronto, and Zurich - and that was only where I got my mail.  I was using my work postings to go to Italy or Luxembourg, France, Scandinavia, India, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Poland, and Malta of all places.  Though I travelled more than some, there were others I worked with who hadn't missed a continent and had seemingly alighted in every country on them.  They lived out of their suitcases, had wallets stuffed with reimbursable receipts, and knew every Irish bar in every non-Irish city they'd seen.   I relished the travel, the relative perks, and the opportunity to learn more about myself by seeing myself in different settings.

Year by year, the adventure continued until I moved back to Boston.  It was shortly after 9/11 and our country was a different place than the one that had launched me in the 1990s.  After the 2000 Election, when Bush 'beat' Gore, it was all and more than we might have anticipated.  The country moved right, and became even more partisan.  Bush made extraordinary gaffes, both publicly and politically. But it was funny still.  The Daily Show and Will Ferrell can thank Dubya (and a lot of talent, too) for much of their success today.  But after 9/11 things got pretty serious.  War.  Terrorists, Global Warming, global political unrest, loose nukes!  This was my 30s.

Eventually, traveling began to lose its luster and I had to make different kinds of choices.  I chose between a salary and a lifestyle.  I tried to strike a balance between what I wanted to do and what people wanted me to do.  I'd begun to save for my future.  I took time to consider.  I got my own financial planner.  The more I tried to reconcile what the heck I was doing with my life, I tried to think about what was meaningful to me.  My family.  My friends.  That was about it.  I was traipsing around the globe, but had so much time to myself that I had ample time to reflect.  I reflected on what was worthwhile.  Socializing was valuable, but I grew weary of the repetition.  On many quiet Sunday afternoons, I'd wander foreign city streets.  I was able to meet up with friends, but I also enjoyed the stillness of being alone in a park, by a river, on a trail.

Stillness.  That was the word that my stream of consciousness lingered on.  It's the word that inspired this posting.  I was enjoying a hot shower after a peaceful run.  Both of those things offer stillness, if one permits it to enter you.  Sometimes it's an effort, but other times it is spontaneous.  In the shower, you feel the warm water beat on your skin, cooling and warming at the same time.  You get to give yourself and all over body massage (if you're cleaning all the parts you ought to).  In the shower, behind the closed door, you're away from the TV, the kids, the internet and the iPhone.  Sure you can have a radio, but that would ruin the stillness, the privacy of the moment.  I many wives complain about the length of time their husbands spend in the bathroom doing number two.  It's the stillness.  Whether in the corporate bathroom stall, or the downstairs loo under the stairs, many a man takes respite from all that consumes him outside that door.  Take 10, deep, deep breaths, and you'll feel the stillness seep into you.  Calgon, take me away!

I don't know how many millions the makers of Ambien are raking in, but I do know that they are banking on people's inability to find and possess stillness.  And in that vein, alcohol, recreational drugs, including cigarettes, are mechanisms whereby many find that confounded, illusive stillness.  On the healthier side, many find stillness in yoga, pilates, and various forms of martial arts.  When I lived in New York City for an unemployed time, I had a lot of time to walk the island of Manhattan.  I'd walk 100 blocks at a time, at all hours of the day and night.  For the millions who've done this in any world class city around the globe, you know what it is to be struck by the sheer magnitude of the operation.  All those people, all that transportation, infrastructure, food, trash!  It's 24/7 because it has to be, because it's alive, it breathes.  I am thankful for the time I lived in Manhattan because at that point in my life it taught me that I didn't want to live there. For me, it was too busy.  I literally became tired sometimes after just a short walk outside because I couldn't help but absorb how busy everyone else was.  I needed more stillness.  I am betting there's a lot of Ambien in Manhattan.

In between my second and final European tour of living and that stint in NYC, I disappeared for two months.  Long before Mark Sanford made it a popular alibi, I hiked a few hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail.  Along with a friend who'd often found the stillness he craved in nature, we hoofed it up and down hills and mountains.  We traversed large open fields, scaled rocks, swam in ravines, and spent hour after hour not saying a word.  It was exactly what I needed when I needed it.  Before that hike, I was living in Zurich and planning on moving to Lucerne soon after the summer.  The company package offered wasn't quite what I was expecting and the company was not going to offer more.  We were at an impasse.  It was not the first time I had to make a decision about what was valuable to me, but it was one of those times where you ask yourself what your life means to you - and how valuable you feel to those you work for.  It was a watershed moment for me because it allowed me the opportunity to be true to myself.

I thanked them for the many opportunities I'd been given and gave my notice.  In the process of coming to that decision I spoke with many confidants.  As I'd done many times before and would do many times again, I used those discussions to comb through the complexity of emotions that accompany a major life decision.  As I explained the situation to people in both monetary terms and at what juncture in my life this occured, I began to understand that I'd reached as far as I wanted to go with the company.  I didn't want anyone else's job who was superior.  As I interpreted it then, to me those people were pawns of the company.  If you were talented and completely dedicated to the company, you were 'rewarded' by moving to ten cities in ten years.  Or maybe your whole family would have to move from Boston to China, no matter that it's your daugther's senior year in high school.  I didn't want to be a cog, however highly paid that cog was.

I knew that even though I knew I could earn more money, I also knew that you either have to be very intelligent or very hard working or both - and even if you are you have to catch some luck, too.  Whatever the psychological reasons (and I'm sure they are deep and plentiful), it wasn't enough to make me want to supplant my independence for the sake of the company.  I'd gotten what I perceived was valuable out of the relationship.  I was paid well enough, I got to travel, I had friends all over the world and a global perspective that I continue to carry with me every day.  But the wave had crested and I didn't want to be pulled down into the undertow.

Sadly, many of you - and certainly people you know  - are churning in the undertow and looking to come up for air.  To breathe.  To find stillness.  It happens imperceptibly slowly.  It's easy to see the second hand on a clock move.  If you stare carefully, you can see a minute hand move.  But staring at an hour hand will make you insane.  And yet, time passes.  Before you realize it, you bought a house.  You got married.  Your kids are almost in, what the F!, middle school!  And for too many, you're stuck in a job, town, marriage, relationship, bad habit that you've been in for years.  We find moments of stillness.  For the fortunate among us hard work leads to vacation and that sunrise on the lake from the deck.  A few bottles of wine will stop the mental carousel for an evening.  Otherwise, it's very hard to stop the noise.  Every question leads to another question and another person perhaps to involve, and a cost consideration, and maybe someone's feelings to think about.  With the increase in electronic communication, the immediacy of the times in which we live, presents the need of simply removing yourself from being accessible.  We now have the burden of being concerned that if you don't answer a text message in a 'reasonable' amount of time, you're perceived either as an idiot for not having your apparatus with you or as one intentionally avoiding communication.  And if you are having an affair, it means you are b-u-s-t-e-d.

My path required that I have a crises of personal conscious and leave the job that wasn't filling my soul anymore.  I ditched my laptop and mobile phone and took to the Appalachian Trail.  And while there was stillness and I had many pure and perfectly still moments, I had long, long conversations with myself, too.  What was I going to do when I came out of the woods?  Where was I going to live?  Who was going to be my life partner, the ballast for which I was so obviously yearning?

My romantic arc - rated PG - in brief.  I didn't have a real girlfriend until college.  In high school, I barely kissed a girl outside of whatever spin the bottle game I was fortunate in which to land a seat.  College was different.  In college I wasn't the person everybody already knew.  And girls were different.  They appreciated different things.  For years being funny meant getting laughs.  In college and beyond being funny meant you got to occasionally kiss the girl.  This was new to me and after finally experiencing it for myself it was hard for me to just want to kiss one girl.  So I kissed a few, had some major crushes, picked up girls, and got dumped by girls.  My dad's been married at least as many times as Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president and I used to say - and I think I believed  - that I didn't want to get married before I was ready to stay married.  I met some fantastic women, smart, beautiful, funny, athletic, driven, compassionate, worldly and then there were a few who weren't any of those things.  I was looking for the perfect woman for me and as searchers know the longer it takes the harder it becomes.

It was a void I was looking to fill.  And as much luck as I've ever had led Linda Mary LoPiccolo into my life.  As they say in life and in cliché, all the others were merely prelude to this.  When we finally engaged out in Long Beach, California where we lived in August of 2003, I'd chosen for the first time the kind of permanent commitment that had long eluded me.  It was the first time this selfish Sagittarius elected to be responsible for something other than himself.  It took me longer than it ought to have to realize it, but I fell in love with Linda and thankfully she with me.  I guess I am a slow learner because it's obvious to me now how perfect she is.  Not perfect.  Perfect for me.  But I digress.

There was this moment right after our wedding that I often return to.  After the reception and after stopping at the bar where our rowdy friends and repaired to, Linda and I got in the back of a somewhat tacky limo for our ride from Connecticut to our Boston hotel.  (We departed to Mexico the next morning.  I recommend Hotel Secreto).  It was the first time we were alone in several days.  Those days preceding the wedding are hectic.  There's family coming in, last minute arrangements, weather to watch, and of course, fun to be had.  With the wedding and our all our guests behind us, we could breathe.  We had stillness and the beauty of it, what was magical was that it was shared.  I looked into Linda's eyes and she into mine and in that moment we were perfectly aligned (horizontally, too).  It was a moment of stillness and perfection to which I regularly return.

But like that hour hand on a clock, time passes and it's hard to tell how it did, so quickly.  You think about all that's happened in that span of time, but looking back months get condensed into a nugget of experience.  When Linda and I were going through fertility treatments it went on for more than a year.  And then the whole process of considering and then moving forward with adoption is collapsed into a sentence when really that was probably a year, too. And whether you have your own baby or adopt one, you know what happens after it arrives.  And for those that don't have kids, you can imagine!  Time flies and the 'noise' is as loud as it's ever been.  Not just the noise of the kid, which is real to be sure, but now you've got a spouse, a child or two, or three or seven.  The dogs need to be walked and taken to the vet.  There's the dance recital, your sick parent, the hockey practice, the potential new position, GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN!  That's not what we were prepping for.  As you get older you realize the calamities of youth were but love taps compared to the punches life has in store for you now.

So much noise. A lot of political noise - everyone's pissed off.  They're pissed at their government and they're pissed at the opposition.  They're pissed at big business and they're pissed at corruption.  Sarah Palin's pissed off, Glen Beck's pissed off.  Keith Olberman's pissed off.  John McCain looks pissed off even when he's happy.  If you're at all tuned in, you can't miss the rancor - it's on the radio, the web and on billboards.  I was running around my sister's neighborhood in Texas and many houses had these "No Socialism" placards stuck on their front lawns.  I get freedom of speech, am 100% for it, but just because you can say something doesn't mean you should.  But hey, it's a free country.  I digress again.  And it's easy to do because there are a lot of things in this life that are truly distracting.

Television is pretty noisy too.  Many of these reality shows capitalize on conflict.  If someone's not pissed off, they better be obviously peeved.  How much louder are the commercials than the show?  I know I am not alone in muting them.  Mute.  Silent.  Still.  Breathe.  I used to listen to my iPod (which I still sometimes call a Walkman) a lot when I was running.  In the cities I used it to disappear into the music and into the rhythm of my stride.  I also liked drowning out the sound of my heavy breathing.  It's not attractive.  But as I got fitter and especially when I ran on quieter routes, I left the iPod at home and chose instead to absorb my environment completely.  I smelled the foliage, heard the rippling brook, the chirping birds.  When I lived closer to a pool and swam laps, I found stillness in the repetition.  I find that stillness sometimes when I'm doing dishes or ironing (yes I do both).

As much as I praise stillness, I cannot help now but hear the word still and associate it with stillborn - and that is what Leo what was.  Born still at eight months.  Years after fertility treatments failed and after adoption succeeded we got pregnant.  That event, too, now is reduced to a sentence.  Something years in the making, so much emotional energy invested, so much noise endured, even embraced at times, gets relegated to a sentence.  We got pregnant.  On our own.  Leo brought us tremendous joy while Linda's pregnancy progressed normally and without warning.  It was a warm July day, 4 weeks before the due date when we learned that the baby had died.  This was the kind of stillness I never sought, never truly considered, and the one that also necessitates the stillness I now perpetually crave.  After Leo died, after three long days in the hospital, and after we went to the funeral home to collect his ashes, Linda and I paused as best we could.  Our son Max needed and deserved our attention and he got it.  But we couldn't breathe and we needed to.  We left Max with relatives and went north, to Maine to a cabin retreat belonging to that hiking friend of mine.  Those days nestled in the thick woods, next to that long lake were a gift.  I went for a few jogs.  Linda read.  We swam and we napped.  And there were tears. We had coffee at sunrise with the water lapping on shores. Then we left.

2009 was especially noisy.  The economy tanked, the housing bubble burst, and Obama replaced 8 years of Bush.  I was unemployed and we'd made the decision to walk away from our upside down city condo.  We lost the baby we longed to raise, suddenly, tragically.  And through it all, Linda and I were making choices that compelled us to listen to our values.  I don't want to spend two hours commuting every work day.  I don't think working that hard is worth either commuting or paying through the nose to live closer.  It just makes things noisier.  Let me make sure that readers know that I am speaking only for myself.  Millions choose to commute or feel that what they get for their hard work is worth that equation.  That's fine if it's fine for you.  It wasn't for me and we chose to move to the Quiet Corner - what the northeastern part of the state of Connecticut is affectionately called.  Through all the noise, the message was steadily speaking.  Leo's stillness firmly repositioned stillness to the forefront of my thoughts.  I read some Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle.  I took some wonderfully long and meditative runs in preparation for my first marathon.  I practiced tuning out the noise.  I practiced being present.

Please don't imagine me some Buddhist monk in constant meditation.  I am not.  Despite my green environs and dearth of neighbors, the world too easily penetrates, vibrates, reverberates.  Internet, cable television, radio have made access to noise nearly as abundant here as it was in my former urban life.  But proximity permits me easier entry into stillness.  There's a mile stretch of road that I either drive or run on nearly every day.  It's one of the few straight roads around and there's a canopy of ancient and tall trees that form a cathedral vaulted ceiling of branches.  This time of year the green is so new and lustrous.  Later those leaves will grow richly and deeply green, but now they are translucent; when the sun shines through them the vernal splendor is arresting.

You might imagine me trotting down that shady road, or going to the farmer's market for freshly picked vegetables and those are things I indeed do.  But my mind is still too noisy, too many misplaced thoughts pulling me from the present.  I've read that it's a good first step that I'm aware of these leanings, that to be conscious of my thoughts helps to bring me back to the present.  It's an effort, every waking moment is an effort.  I go through phases of wanting to work on presence and in choosing not to, procrastinating being present for goodness sake!  Recently though, I was in a bookstore and saw a book about Zen Buddhism, Buddhism Is Not What You Think.  I bought it because everything I've ever read - which is not a ton - about Buddhism appeals to me.  I bought it because I knew I would find it helpful to have a new reminder of what it is I am seeking to honor, to value.  It's not something mystical I'm after; it's not even something necessarily spiritual.  What I'm looking for is something practical, a way to be, stasis.  There's a more peaceful mind in me - and in you.

My Bad Back

I had a music teacher in middle school - a kindly woman named Mrs. Taylor - who always told me to sit up straight.  "Stop slouching, David!"  She said that if I didn't, I would have a sore back when I got older.  If my back was in good shape today, I might have forgotten Mrs. Taylor long ago, especially given my lack of musical talent.

The first time I can ever really recall being conscious of my back as a body part was when I hurt it in a fall at the age of 14.   This was no ordinary tumble.  I can't recall why we decided to do it, but like much that a teenager does the reason was two-fold:  we had nothing better to do (motive) and we had the latitude to do it (opportunity).

I was a sophomore in high school and paling around with two older kids, a junior and senior couple, and the junior's freshman sister.  One night when I told my mom we were going to see Body Double at the now defunct College Theater, we instead decided to climb onto the roof of our high school, Edwin O. Smith School.  The night was cloudy and dark; there was little to illuminate our trespass.  If memory serves, it was Preston who knew the way.  We went around the side of the building where an emergency exit formed a good U shaped space between the main building and the math wing.  By using the corner of the building and the window mullions we were able to scale the 14 feet to the vast black tarred roof.  There was nothing to do up there, no mischief in which to engage, but the illicit nature of the act alone was exhilarating.  The four of us ventured out in separate directions to explore, each of us given to our own migratory predilections.

I walked atop the inky expanse and looked out from my lofty vantage at the front of the school, the movie theater across the street, and the UConn campus in the distance.  Temporarily entranced by the blackness of the roof and sky and the stillness of the night, I failed to perceive that the roof upon which I strode was nearing its end.  I walked on; my left foot landed firmly on the roof, but my right foot failed to find any surface whatsoever.  I literally walked right off the roof.  It happened so fast - and so long ago - that I can't say exactly what I felt when my consciousness absorbed the fact that I was falling off the roof of my school.  I know this:  as my right foot strode off the roof, my body twisted as I fell.  I dropped the dozen or so feet quickly like a stone and landed squarely on my back upon the firm autumn grass - my head mere inches from the asphalt foundation that ran along the base perimeter of the building.  I couldn't breathe, but I didn't know why.  Was I dying?  I must have made some sound of distress as I fell because it wasn't long before Preston made his way down the same way we'd climbed up, ran alongside the opposite side of the math wing and up the other side to where I lay supine and motionless.

Preston and I ascertained that I'd simply knocked the wind out of me (all of it!), but other than a sore foot, I seemed okay - no blood and no broken bones as far as we could tell.  Ashley and Nanny came upon us soon after.  Preston and I were so grateful and astounded that I seemed to be relatively uninjured that by the time the girls arrived, he and I were nearly laughing with relief.  The girls took this as a sign that we'd staged the whole event and Nanny pushed me to the ground in anger for having scared her so.  We soon convinced her that, no, it was as it appeared, I simply walked off the roof.

My back was sore for several weeks, but after that, the pain subsided.  My mother was none the wiser and I had a good story to share.  I'm not Irish, but I sure was lucky.  I thought that would be the last I heard of my back; I didn't give much thought to it for the next three years.  By then I was a freshman oarsman on the UMass Crew Club's Novice Team.  I was a burgeoning 18 year-old athlete, but not having played competitive sports before, my body had as yet little preparation for the stress I'd be applying to my slight frame and weak spine.  Core strength was not yet in vogue; sit-ups - poorly performed sit-ups - and back extensions were the entire scope of my abdominal and spinal training.  The toll of an infirm upper body trying to keep pace with my comparatively stronger legs eventually caught up to my lower back.  That winter I felt an especially acute ache and strain that wasn't dissipating.  I eventually sought treatment at UMass Health Services and was referred to physical therapy where I received ultrasound treatment, electric stimulation therapy, and massage (treatments I'd receive scores of times in the years ahead).  When my back felt somewhat better the treatments ended. I was given stretches and strengthening exercises to do and was prescribed a specific position in which to sleep (basically fetal on my side with a pillow between my knees).

As my crew career proceeded I had occasional bouts of pain in my lower back - some more severe than others.  There were several times I was forced to sit out practice for days or weeks - especially over the winters when our workouts focused more on weight training.  But season by season, I prevailed.  I learned to cope with a base level of pain - it became normal for me.  It just was.  After college - especially during the numerous spans of time when I was less active, my back would flair up and occasionally leave me laid up.  Sitting in almost any chair for more than twenty minutes proved a challenge.  I took Tylenol and ibuprofen, lots and lots of ibuprofen; I learned more exercises and stretches.  Inevitably though when my back felt better I'd forego my 'supermans' and leg lifts.  And just as inevitably I'd re-injure my back.   Over the years, I've seen chiropractors, massage therapists, and acupuncturists.  I've done yoga, pilates, and swum countless laps in the pool.  Like a comet with an unpredictable, but certain orbit, severe back pain comes and goes.  All the while though there is a residual pain that's nearly constant.

In late October, early November of 2000 I went on a long journey.  I was living in Amsterdam and flew to Malta for a week long meeting - which was also a week full of late nights and little sleep.  From there I flew- coach - from Malta to London and from London to San Francisco for the wedding of a high school friend.  After the weeks of late nights, little sleep, and long, uncomfortable travel, I sought refuge at my father's duplex unit in Marin County.  I arrived just a day or two before the historic 2000 Presidential Election between Gore and Dubya.  I stayed awake as late as I could that night, drifting to sleep to Tim Russert's famous, "Florida, Florida, Florida" refrain.  When I awoke the next day, still unsure as to who our President-elect was, I tried to rise from my makeshift couch cushion bed.  Immediately I froze in the sharpest, most debilitating back pain I'd ever experienced.  The pain was paralyzing.  I couldn't shift into any position without searing agony.  I spent the rest of my paternal visit supine.  I mustered all my strength and courage, to say nothing of the hundreds of milligrams of ibuprofen coursing through my body, to board a flight home.  The pain acted like a clarion call: Take care of your back!  And I did.  For a time.

The thing about a tricky back is that when it's fine it has a way of lulling you into complacency.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it.  I knew this:  when I was exercising regularly, my back felt better and hurt less.  Marrying a physical therapist helped, too.  (Though when I took her advice some years back and saw a back expert, had x-rays and an MRI taken, I was deeply saddened to hear the pronouncement that I had the back of a man twenty years my senior.)  The long and the short of it is that I have arthritis far more advanced than a man my age ought to - degenerative joint disease (DJD), also known as Osteoarthritis in my spine - commonly known as a bad back.  I was struck just now reading this from the DJD Wikipedia link: "it commonly arises from trauma."  Perhaps I wasn't as lucky as I thought with that school roof fall after all?

Lately and up until recently my back had been feeling great.  I've been running a lot, even finished a marathon this past fall.  Pain that used to be referred from my back down the front of my legs was a sensation from long ago.  But as sure as Halley's Comet returns, just days before this past Christmas, I was bending over and turning slightly when I felt The Twinge.  I didn't realize at that moment how badly I'd tweaked it, only that I had. For two days I managed with stiffness and general discomfort, but by Christmas Eve, I was an invalid, confined to my bed, barely able to move, let alone attend family festivities.  On Christmas morning, I drove myself to the doctor while my family waited to open presents.  Max got a toy truck; Linda got theater tickets; I got a shot of Toradol, two doses of Amrix, and a prescription for Vicodin.

I am feeling better, finally able to sit at the computer for more than a few minutes.  In a few more days I'll start running again.  I am sure that I'll do some core strengthening work.  In a month I'll scarcely remember how bad it was (my brain is funny like that).  I'll have that low level pain that's always there, my life long and less than amiable companion.  Long car rides will always be tough and as I age, it's not likely to improve.  I don't share this to engender sympathy.  If you don't have a bad back you either will or will have some other cross to bear.  I share it because whether it's a back, a disease, trauma - emotional or otherwise, we all have something to endure.  And if you don't, sure as shit you will.  How you choose to process your pain is what distinguishes suffering from perseverance.

My bad back is my ever present shadow.  We met that fateful autumn night some 26 years ago when I walked off that roof and we've been quite close ever since. Though not always visible to the casual observer, my bad back is as much a part of my identity as my gangly height and my goofy sense of humor.  Sentimentality aside, I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a healthy back today.

Still Running

About the furthest I'd ever run before going to college was 2 miles and I if you saw it, you'd probably not have called it running.  In high school gym class we had to do the Cooper Run, which at the time was a mile and half run  - 6 laps around the perimeter of a playing field. We were graded by how fast we ran.  I think I averaged a C+.  I wasn't much faster than the Future Farmers of America group who trudged around in the field in work boots and jeans.  (The web tells me that now the Cooper Run Test sees how far one can run in 12 minutes.)

I lacked the coordination to play competitive sports like basketball, baseball, or soccer.  As a result, I had stopped playing organized sports by the time I got to high school.  (The exception being the golf team for which I never played a single match.)  But when I went off to college I vowed to reinvent myself.  I exchanged my oft broken glasses for contact lenses and joined the crew team.  It was during my first week at UMass Amherst as I was walking near the student union that I saw the eight person crew shell staged as a recruiting tool.  They were looking for tall and athletic looking people to fill the novice ranks.  I wasn't athletic, but I was tall and thin and that was enough for them to ask me to come to an informational meeting.

There were at least a hundred young men who came to that first meeting.  I looked around the room and was convinced I was the weakest one in the room.  I was surrounded by high school varsity athletes who were a cut below collegiate skill levels in their respective sports.  Most of them had been playing organized sports for years.  The coaches outlined the program, the rigorous training schedule, and the early morning workouts.  The most important thing I heard was that there would be no cuts.   As long as I came to every practice and gave it my all, I'd be on the team (and hopefully racing in a shell one day).

When I went to my first crew practice, in the fall of 1987, there were already less young men than at the informational meeting.  My odds to make a boat had improved and all I'd done was shown up!  We were gathered in the large lobby area of Totman Gymnasium.  If I'd known that we were going to run four miles that day, I don't know that I would have shown up myself.  With little fanfare, the 60 or so of us rumbled out the lobby doors and and turned left up a steep hill leading past dormitories, the university horse barns and off campus.  By the time we reached the top of the hill, I was already toward the rear, firmly ensconced with the slower runners.  At the top of the hill we turned left again and it led down a straight, steady decline.  Far, far ahead, I could just barely see the front runners.  By the halfway point, I was just one of a half dozen runners within view. I had to frequently walk to catch my breath.  My chest burned and my legs felt like lead.  As I made the last turn back toward the gymnasium, I was ahead of just one other runner.  By the time I re-entered the gymnasium lobby, the entire team - long done with the run and soon headed to the showers - seemed to gawk at my belated appearance.

I spent much of that fall trying to catch up.  But I never stopped coming to practice and I never stopped trying.  Steadily, month by month, I grew more fit.  By late fall, I could run that four mile loop without stopping and by the following spring, I could run as much as six miles.  I never became fast, but I did become conditioned.  By my senior year, I was rowing in the first varsity boat.  We won the New England Rowing Championships and finished a heartbreaking fourth in our division's national final at the Dad Vail's.

New England MV8 Grand Final 1991

Order	Entry	Result
1	UMass-Amh	5:52.40
2	Wesleyan	5:56.76
3	USCGA	5:57.10
4	UNH	5:58.54
5	Conn Col	5:58.65
6	Holy Cross	6:05.67

I stopped rowing after college, but didn't want to forego fitness.  Running seemed the easiest way for me to stay healthy.  On and off for the next 13 years, I ran.  I'd run for several months, but then get lazy or injured and take as many months off.  During the time off I'd eat poorly, drink, and generally gain 10 or 15 pounds.  I am six foot three inches and slender enough that I can disguise a dozen pounds.  Or so I thought.  Whenever I began to run again and lose those pounds, I'd be surprised by comments from people who hadn't seen me recently.  "Have you lost some weight?" they'd inquire.  "I suppose," I'd demur.  This was the running pendulum as it swung in my life from the summer of 1991 until 2004.  I'd run for a season, stop, get lazy, put on a few pounds, get inspired to exercise and I'd repeat the cycle.  Fit, unfit.  Flabby, lean.  Able to run for miles, able to make a run to the pizza parlor.

Not long after Linda and I moved back to New England in 2004, I joined the North Shore Striders running club.  By then I was well acutely aware of my tendency to run in stints.   With high cholesterol and a directive to exercise regularly, I thought that joining a club would help get me on the roads and stay there.  I was nervous about joining a club of runners given that I wasn't in the best of shape.  The whole idea of ME joining a RUNNING club seemed daunting so before even daring to join the club on runs, I began to run on my own.  I signed up for a couple races and was just getting myself in decent enough shape to feel comfortable running with strangers (strange runners?).  But before I could, I strained my right Achilles tendon and didn't run for the next 6 months.  Several months after my tendon had healed, my laziness beginning to eat at my conscience, I joined the Striders for their regular Sunday run from the Anchor Restaurant in Beverly.

There were just a couple of people there that day, but each Sunday I returned and as the weeks passed, I began to meet more and more Striders.  Before long I was the guy greeting new club members.  I ran many races with the Striders in 2006 and into 2007 until Max arrived.  I wasn't prepared for how having baby would change my running habits and soon I was completely out of shape and paralyzingly afraid of the pain of getting back in shape.  My laziness festered for  almost the entire year.

I knew that I couldn't not exercise and I understood that realistically running was the only activity that was simple, straightforward, and easy enough for me to attempt.  Over a Christmas visit to my sister's in Texas, I went for a run.  I then went for couple more runs on that trip.  When we got back to Massachusetts, I began to run at three days a week.  I was heartened by the speed with which I was getting back into shape.  Make no mistake, I wasn't yet in shape.  I didn't run swiftly, but I was soon able to run continuously for 30 minutes.  Then 40 minutes.  Then an hour.  This was all well and good, but I knew that I needed a race to inspire me, to keep me running.

Through the North Shore Striders I learned about the United States Track and Field's New England Grand Prix, a series of 7 races beginning in February and finishing in October.  Perfect, I thought.  I decided to attempt to complete the series, to be what they call an Iron Runner.  This way, I thought, I'd be committed to running the whole year.  The first race was a 10 mile race in Amherst, MA.  Though I was not yet really in shape to race 10 miles, I went anyway, slogging my way through the cold, wet rain.
I huffed and puffed my way through the New Bedford Half Marathon in March. I felt stronger by the time I ran the Rotary 12K in New Hampshire in May.  By June when I ran the Rhody 5K I felt like I was in good shape.  I eased my way through the Ollie 5 Miler and the Lone Gull 10K in September.  The culmination of the series was the Baystate Marathon, about which I wrote in October.

Though I moved from the North Shore in September I still belong to my running club.  This past weekend I represented The North Shore Striders in the Mill Cities Relay, a 28 mile team race from Nashua, NH to Lawrence MA along the Merrimack River.  Later this month, the 27th, will mark one full year of regular running, the most consistent and productive year of running of my almost 40 years. And barring injury, I'll continue running.  The Striders have seen fit to award me one of the club's qualifying time exempt numbers for the 114th running of the Boston Marathon.

Below is a picture of me and fellow Strider, Annajean, sporting our Iron Runner jackets, which we were awarded after the Baystate Marathon for completing all 7 races in the series.

The Mime Chews Gum

I was young and it wasn’t clear to me that my mother, sister, and I lived in apartments.  And to have understood that the apartments were mostly full of college students was a leap my brain was as yet unprepared to make.  To me, the rows of four-unit, two bedroom apartments was simply where we lived.  There were probably six or seven buildings on each side of the road.  Each building has 75 yards of space between.  And the further down the road one went, the more sheltered by trees the buildings became until the road ended in a cul-de-sac beyond which was a steep hill of rocky terrain, thick woods, and a babbling creek.

Our unit was 18C.  18C Carriage House Apartments, Hunting Lodge Rd, second building on the right, second unit from the right.  The apartments were never, nor would they ever be carriage houses.  There was not a hunting lodge anywhere, not even a plaque to commemorate one that once stood.  The only marker of any sort were two natural stone obelisks between our building and the one down the street, leftover from some ice age, the same one likely that left all the stones that colonial farmers piled along the edges of their farms.

Less than a mile from the house was my school, Northwest Elementary.  Each morning, fall through spring, I walked the couple hundred yards down the hill to the bus stop at the bottom of the road.  I clasped my books under my arm, my glasses - already bent out of shape - loosely affixed to large ears.  I know this look from the pictures that my grandfather took of me one sunny spring morning.  I remember that day, crisp with the scent of morning dew on wet grass.  I remember that my dog, Heather, was allowed to come with us since grandpa would be able to bring her home.  And from the pictures, my memory of sun dappled light filtering through the not-as-yet-caterpillar-ravaged-maples is confirmed.  I am sporting a blue ‘baseball jacket,’ but not one licensed by Major League Baseball so the baseballs don’t say “Red Sox” or “Yankees,” but generically refer to cites, “Philly” and “Frisco.”

From riding the bus I knew that a lot of other kids didn’t live in apartment buildings.  The bus might stop at the top of a neighborhood entry road and beyond that point, I knew that they had their own house, and likely their own room.  I had neither, but it was then only a comparison, not a divide.  And there were several other children who lived in the apartments.  Children of graduate students from Europe; children of divorced parents, like us; and children whose parents simply didn’t make enough money to buy a house of their own.

My tenure at Northwest Elementary School is a foggy collection of images and sound bites.  It’s hard to fathom that five years - 900 school days! - now amount to a dozen memories, but then, as now, I think that I rarely was paying close attention.  Here are the highlights:

Kindergarten:  The ONLY thing I remember is that my teacher’s name was Mrs. Rosenberg who had curly blond/brown hair.
First grade:  Mrs. Rogers had some kind of handicap that required her to use a motorized chair.  She would give us rides from her classroom to the cafeteria.  She also played the ukulele and, at least as far as my recollection, she only played Frere Jacques.
Second Grade:  I think I must have been napping this entire year as I only recall the name of my teacher, Mrs. Marlin who was nice enough, had short straight brown hair, but wasn’t especially warm.
Third/Fourth Grade.  This is where things started to really come alive.  The class was a double classroom of 3rd and 4th graders co-taught by Mrs. Grant and Mrs. Dinan, who resembled two of the three original Charlie’s Angels (not Kate Jackson).  And I am pretty sure they also had their own television theme song.

I remember a girl named Catherine who brought in her cat to school.  There was the time I punched a boy named David in the glasses.  In a truly cruel moment the entire class of 40 plus kids started frantically waving their hands up and down to make fun of the way the excitable boy flung his own hands when, say, he’d built a fort just the way he wanted.  A boy named CJ who would sit on his hamburgers before he ate them because he liked them flat (which didn’t prevent me from asking to have his pickles). This was the same CJ who would urinate in the tea cups of tea set in the play area.  I remember how I figured out that if at recess I let all the many yards of string out on my kite and only began to reel it in when they called us in, I could get an extra ten minutes outside.  I remember the time playing soccer (on a field that sloped noticeably toward one goal) a ball kicked squarely into my chest knocked the wind out of me for the first time in my life. That’s an experience you don’t forget.

And in the longest and most vivid memory, Mrs. Anthony, our principal and a woman barely taller than the first graders, squirts us with water guns as we enter the gymnasium for a presentation for the entire school.  (I am pretty sure that principals are not allowed to shoot their students in school anymore, but at the time, they were just squirt guns and we couldn’t spell ‘appropriate’ anyway.)  For a liberal community the school trained us in military efficiency.  If we were practicing fire drills, we’d form a line quickly, always knowing our position and who was in front of you (Carol Riesen) and who was behind you (Mary Royal) and thus we, as a class could evacuate or indeed enter our gymnasium with marching band like precision.  As each class filed in we took our dedicated position on the floor, sitting in straight rows before the raised wooden stage.

This room was our gym, our playhouse, our musical auditorium and the venue for  award and ‘graduation’ ceremonies.  Today, however, Northwest Elementary School of Hunting Lodge Road was featuring a mime.  I had never seen a mime - or at least one that I remembered as anything other than a really quiet person.  I was struck at how he could not make a sound and still keep a gymnasium full of rambunctious kids as quiet as he.  It was the stillness of that afternoon that carves its way into my memory.  The rest of childhood was noisy so this, being so different, stands out.  The mime (why always in tights?) did the obligatory man trapped in a box and pulling a rope in an imaginary tug of war (with who and for what prize?).  And then he pretended that he was unfolding wrappers of sticks of chewing gum and one by one stuffing them into his mouth.  The more gum he put in the wider is mouth was stretched until at long last he couldn’t fit another stick.  His mouth, stuck wide open, mute, and obviously near choking.  He mimed that he was taking this ball of gum out of his mouth agape and looking for a place to store it, but there was no garbage, no container and as he spun in circles we children were spellbound by the fix he’d gotten himself into. What to do with this big wad of gum?  This was a big problem that we all identified with.  We’d want that gum later and so would the mime.  He then bolted upright as if struck with divine inspiration and made a great flamboyant show of his personal genius, placing the giant wad of gum behind his right ear.

I was thrilled to be both watching this and chewing a big wad of real gum myself.  What good fortune.  We had a kinship that few of the other kids picking their noses or wetting their pants could know.  As he’d put in another stick so had I until finally I also had a ball of gum the size of Delaware in my mouth.  The sugary juices were sucked out my gum and I was left only with malleable plastic.  And I, too, didn’t have a trash can nearby, not even a desk under which to stick it for later.  Imagine my relief when I saw that I could temporarily stash my gum behind my ear.

The main difference between mime gum and real gum must be its inherent stickiness.  It was the mid 1970s and I had the long hair that came with the times.  My hair wasn’t straight, but I imagine it to have been the general shape of Nicholas (played by the inimitable Adam Rich), the youngest boy on Eight is Enough. (I learned a lot of good lessons from that show and from one of my many television fathers, Dick Van Patten).  The gum quickly became entangled in my thick and wavy hair.  I’d like to believe it wasn’t long after that I understood, viscerally, the difference between what a mime does and what happens in real life.  I also knew I couldn’t go home with a big wad of gum in my hair.  I wasn’t very old, but I was pretty sure that I was old enough to not to have made this major blunder.

The teachers and kids were still rapt in the show and I snuck out of the gym and made my way along the long and eerily empty corridor back to my classroom.  I went directly to Mrs. Dinan’s desk, opened the drawer and took out her finest rubber handled, snub nose scissors.  I felt the hair and gum nest behind my right ear, estimated the scope of the infestation and then calmly removed most of the hair on the right side of my head, neatly dropping the clump in the trash.  Voilà! No more gum in my hair.  Feeling quite proud to have been my own problem solver I sauntered proudly and unabashedly back to the gymnasium where the show was wrapping up.  I was immediately spotted by Mrs. Dinan, but luckily she approached from my left and plunked me down between Riesen and Royal.  The show was at the end of the day and as soon as it was over we marched, Riesen, Ring, Royal, to our bus pick up spot (numbers 1 though 10) and I was home before General Hospital was even halfway through.

When my mom got home from work, it didn’t take her long to notice that there was a lot more ear exposed than when I’d left for school that morning.
“What did you do to you hair, David?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I lied.
“Are you sure, David, because it looks to me like you cut your hair,” she calmly replied.
God, she was sharp!  How could she have possibly noticed? I hadn’t thought through how I might even begin to address any questions.  From my point of view there was no gum in my hair so why would anyone say anything about it.  I hadn’t even considered being asked about it. With no story to explain, I panicked and did the only sensible thing.  I cried.  I told the saddest version of how the mean mime had made me put my gum behind my ear and that I was forced to cut my own hair.

My mom was disappointed with me, she said, not because I had cut my hair - though I should never do that again - but because I had lied to her and it was for the lie that I would be punished.  But given that it was the 70s, and Nancy Reagan hadn’t yet taught us how raise children, I was able to choose my own punishment.  The parameters were made clear to me.  I was to choose a punishment that was equal in degree to the offense I had committed.  I pondered my options until I finally settled on something that would be a genuine sacrifice for me.  That night, I would forego watching Welcome Back Kotter.  No Barbarino, Horseshack, Epstein, or Washington - to say nothing of the Kotters or Mr. Woodman.  My mother agreed that this was a fitting punishment.

It was only years later that I confessed to stowing myself in a closet with wood slat blinds and peering between them to watch the show anyway.  I mean if I could figure out how to cut gum out of my hair, how could she not know I’d engineer a way to watch my favorite TV show?

Hanging Paper

As the Martin Short character says in perhaps the best Saturday Night Live short ever produced said, "I am not that strong a swimmer."  Yet, today I again found myself in the pool at the Salem YMCA rhythmically flailing back and forth.  Lap swimming gives me both the time and mental space to think.  There are buoyed lanes and a line on the pool's bottom to help me swim straight, leaving my mind free to wander.  All I have to do is stroke, kick, and breathe.  Today I let my mind drift in hopes of settling on something to write about.  I found myself recalling the many places I've swum over the years.  Cape Cod beaches, Maine lakes, Connecticut ponds and rivers, and lots and lots of pools.



One pool in particular lodged in my memory this morning and I realized it wasn't the pool, but whose pool it was.  The pool was at Hollybrook in Pembroke Pines, Florida, a 55+ community where my grandparents moved in the 1970s.  My grandmother's name was Marcia (more on her in another essay) and my grandfather's name was Hyman Weldon.  As I swam back and forth this morning, I thought back to my youth when I visited grandparents during summer vacations.  They adored me with such unabashed vigor that I can still feel the warmth of their embrace, one I sometimes miss more than I realize.

Hy was the youngest of 9 children born to William and Sarah Weldowsky (proper spelling never verified), Jewish emigrants from what is now the region that includes parts of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia.  Born in Brooklyn in 1920, Hy was a teenager during The Great Depression.  Though he was intelligent he dropped out of school, presumably to earn money to help support his family.  He told me many tales, some even true, about his early jobs.  He was a diaper truck delivery man and one time he and a friend tried to run away to join the circus.  He married my grandmother at 21.

My mother was born just about a year later, followed by a son and another daughter.  Along with some of his brothers, Hy found work as a house painter (though three of them were in fact color blind).  Long before I was born, he became and remained a talented wallpaper hanger.  In those days, you just said you were a "paper hanger."  Eventually, he moved his family from Brooklyn to Levittown, NY, famous as the first real suburb.  From Wikipedia:  "Levittown gets its name from its builder, the firm of Levitt & Sons, Inc. founded by William Levitt, which built the district as a planned community between 1947 and 1951. William Levitt is considered the father of modern suburbia. Levittown was the first truly mass-produced suburb and is widely regarded as the archetype for postwar suburbs throughout the country."

For many years he commuted into New York City, hanging paper and working hard to support his family.  (He never forgave Barbara Streisand for stiffing him on a job because she wasn't happy with the pattern of the paper she'd chosen!).  In the years that followed, several of his brothers moved to South Florida.  Not long after his youngest child became a young adult, he and my grandmother made their way to Florida, too.  Though he lived in a retirement community, most weeks grandpa was still hanging paper.  Retirement was never a financial possibility.  He was working for himself, toting his equipment to jobs in a giant Cadillac.  He'd bring ladders, buckets of paste, brushes, smoothing rollers, putty knives of every imaginable width, and his most important tool, a unsheathed razor blade.  He had boxes and boxes of razor blades.  My grandfather loved gadgets and 'invented' a few of his own.  The razor blade is the indispensable tool of a paper hanger.  Trimming paper, aligning seams, perfecting the corners where paper meets ceilings, all require a deft touch, years of experience, and a very sharp razor blade.  To keep his blade always at the ready, he clipped it to the underside of his wristwatch - a beat up digital Casio - with a magnetic clip.  The exposed blade stuck to the magnet and rested, always sharp, not far from the veins in his wrist.  I can't recall his every cutting himself.

Hy Weldon loved to tinker with just about any kind of mechanical contraption.  And though he probably wasn't a master at anything other than paperhanging, he was more than proficient in a multitude of mechanical and musical hobbies.  Next to his study, between the organ and his desk was a closet, the shelves of which were lined with the detritus of a lifetime of gadgetry.  There were radios of varied sizes, eras, and working order.  There were several film cameras, flashes, light meters, lenses, and the photo developing equipment leftover from his darkroom days.  There were video cameras, reel to reel projectors, slide projectors, and stacks and stacks of slide boxes.  He had an old accordion, which had belonged to his son and which grandpa could still riff Scott Joplin's The Entertainer on.  He was an able tailor and had an old sewing machine in the closet that he took out from time to time to mend clothes.

When I was about 14 I went down to visit my grandparents.  Now that I was older, traveling on my own - my sisters now off to college and summer jobs - the usual agenda of trips to Disney World and water slide parks was to be replaced with a paper hanging apprenticeship.  We woke up early in the morning and I joined grandpa in their small eat-in kitchen.  Grandma made me a bialy with cream cheese and poured me a glass of orange juice.  My grandfather enjoyed his breakfast with coffee, a Camel cigarette, and the Miami Herald.  We grabbed some more tools from the front closet and stuffed them in the trunk already bulging with gear.  Our job that week was at a furniture store.  They were remodeling their showroom and putting up new walls which were to be papered.  There were two hispanic plasterers there, too,  who I clearly remember as having great affection for my grandpa. I vividly remember and can still feel how proud he was to introduce me, his only grandson, to them.

I was an able enough assistant under grandpa's expert tutelage.  I learned how to properly mix the paste to just the right consistency.  I learned how to handle the pasted paper so as not to dirty the exposed surfaces.  I watched my grandfather expertly align the patterns so that the seams were all but invisible.  I watched and tried to emulate how he'd brush the paper into its final place, starting from the top and moving trapped air down and out the sides of the sticky paper.  He showed me how to use the wide rollers to push the last remaining air pockets out leaving only the perfectly smooth and now patterned surface devoid of seams, wrinkles, and bubbles.

In the many years that followed that summer, the work became increasingly physically taxing for grandpa.  The decades of smoking caught up with him; heart problems arose. My grandparents didn't have the money to retire to a life of leisure.  As my grandfather's health declined further they elected to move north to Connecticut to be close to their daughters.  Though I no longer lived in the area, I visited my grandparents there regularly.  The Florida condo decor always looked out of place in Connecticut, the white vinyl bench, the white porcelain cat, the glass paper weights, and the candy dishes frozen in 1970s Florida.

Just months after his first great-grandchild was born my grandfather died in December of 1994.  Along with my family, I was able to be in the hospital as his vital signs faded.  He was on some strong medication and wasn't in pain, but he was gaunt, pale, and as skinny as I'd ever seen him.  He couldn't speak and wasn't really fully conscious.  Our family commandeered a waiting room to sit vigil for the night, taking turns sitting by his bedside.  As it became clear that his time was short, I went into the room.  I sat on his right side and took his hand in mine.  I don't remember the soft words I spoke, but as I said them I felt his hand squeeze mine, very tightly.  As I remember it, he opened his eyes, saw me, and smiled broadly, something he hadn't done for anyone else in several days.  And though it was not the smile of younger, stronger days it was the same one I'd seen so many times before.  It was the same one he'd showered me with when taking me out to hang paper.

Poison Ivy

I have small break out of poison ivy.  It's just on my foot and shin a bit.  For the most part I can control the scratching - far, far from a bad case.  I must have picked it up in Connecticut the week before last when I was barefoot in and around the garden at my in-laws property.

Getting poison ivy always makes me wax nostalgic.  Growing up in Storrs, Connecticut we were always close to the woods and there was plenty of poison ivy around.  In the summer, I'd go traipsing through the low ground cover and disappear in the cool woods.  I'd see huge ferns growing on the carcasses of fallen trees, fed by the dimpled sunlight filtering in through the canopy of leaves above.  I'd note fungi growing on moist limbs and from moss gathered on a rock buried like an iceberg, a comparatively small surface the stone exposed.  And during those excursions I'd inevitably rub my legs or clothes on the oily leaves of the ivy plant.

At that age  - 10, 11, 12 - I wasn't paying attention to, well, much.  And I certainly wasn't practicing any preventative measures like washing hands or clothes after parading through the grass.  I got poison ivy multiple times a summer.  Everywhere.  Not washing up meant my hands were covered with the ivy oils.  I'd touch my face, my eyes, go to the bathroom (yup, got it there, too).

One time I went to sleep with a small case of it and woke up in the morning with my eyes literally swelled shut from the allergic reaction.  That was scary.  We went to our family practitioner who prescribed some Benadryl pills.  Benadryl can cause drowsiness.

The next day, my mom went to work and I was home alone.  She called the house to check on me, but there was no answer.  She called again and again no answer.  She worried and called a neighbor.  Unaware of any of this, I was surprised to find the mother of my neighborhood friend in my bedroom rousing me out of bed.  With little explanation that I can recall, I was put in a car - still in my pajamas - and brought the the doctor's office, where my mom met us.  The doctor checked my pulse, blood pressure, and temperature.  He shined a bright light into my eyes and asked me if I knew who the President of the United States was (Reagan).  I was declared fine other than extremely groggy and was sent home.

Scratching the top of my pink-dotted foot reminds me of those idle summer days, exploring woods that seemed as infinite as my youth.

Stay tuned.