History III

Whenever the subject of the contest came up, the mispronunciation peppered my speech like cayenne in a cookie.

"I'm going to win duriation aloft."

"The world record for duriation is eighteen seconds."

"These flaps, right here, they give you a longer flight duriation."

Between recess and lunch, we had writing, which was actually mostly spelling. The week before, everyone scored a hundred on the test, and, as a reward, Mister Wayerski announced that our class would have a paper airplane contest. He produced a huge paperback book, entitled The Great International Paper Airplane Book, about a famous contest held by a magazine called Scientific American, way back in the late sixties.

He passed the book around the classroom and explained the four events: duration aloft, distance flown, aerobatics and origami. We would learn to spell aeronautical terms, and write about our airplanes. At this, a collective groan rose from the class, but I was distracted, leafing through the magnificent book, turning the giant pages, examining the winning designs. I know I tried to pay attention, but that must have been when I confused the pronunciation of the word meaning "length of time".

After that, every recess and lunch, I stayed inside the classroom, poring over the book, mulling which tournaments to enter. I dismissed the origami competition, as being meaningless, beneath my dignity - these planes didn't even need to fly. Aerobatic entries would be judged by a panel of students, scored on the intricacy of their flight, and variety of maneuvers performed.

True, honest, objective data would determine the winners of distance and duration. I suspected distance flown would boil down to the thrower's skill and strength. Me, I could barely throw a baseball. If I wanted to win (and I truly did, with all my heart), I would have to focus on the duriation aloft event. The instructions for folding the original winning design were included in the book, and I studied, practiced, and made it my own. I invented a clever, and, apparently novel, trick for forming the difficult initial folds required by the plans.

The day before the competition, after the morning recess, Mister Wayerski pulled me aside. My fifth grade teacher, with his mutton chops, reminded me of Burt Reynolds, and I knew he tried really hard to be the fun teacher at Happy Valley. I had heard that he used to be a P.E. teacher, a rumor supported by the games he taught us to play, on the grass right outside our classroom door.

He laid a hairy hand on my shoulder and leaned in, whispering, "What's your best..." He paused, looking around, conspiratorially, "...duration, so far?" He drew the word out into three long syllables. Oh... I get it.

I appreciated this kindness, but my face went hot anyway. My glasses, the frames a regrettable tortoiseshell pattern, began to fog, especially the thicker lens on the right, the eye with the astigmatism. I blankly looked up at him, his toothy smile hazily framed by his thick sideburns. I didn't know any other adults with sideburns. His were like black carpet.

"Come on, you can tell me. I can keep a secret."

"Um... I don't know. I don't have a stopwatch."

"Hmmm. Well, we'll have to find out." He released my shoulder, straightening up. I took this as a signal to take my seat. When everyone was seated, he waited for us to quiet down.

"I know we're supposed to have a spelling test today..." He had our rapt attention.

Mister Wayerski explained that we would be having a flight trial, a practice run, for the actual contest the next day. We had thirty minutes in which to create our entries, starting with a standard sheet of notebook paper, after which, the whole class would march up to the gymnasium to test them out. I took my time, folding carefully, ironing the creases perfectly flat with the side of a number two pencil. Using blunted safety scissors, I carefully cut identically matched flaps into the rear edge of the wings, and holding the plane up at eye level, I confirmed an absolute symmetry from all directions. After a few test flights, steady glides between the rows of desks, I was ready.

I used the remaining time to spy on my chief rival, Rick Lenaburg. Rick was not someone you would peg as a strong student. No one, except, possibly, his fawning toady, Tod Cernitch, would have considered copying from any of his tests. However, on matters important, Rick was the undisputed authority. If you were waffling between the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle or the Six Million Dollar Man Action Figure, ask Rick. He dominated bombardment, our playground dodge-ball game, delivering stinging attacks, the thrumming, crimson ball jouncing off your head or back. If you needed a BB gun, he was your man. Rick was a fearless BMX pioneer, jumping a bicycle he had built from spare parts. He once broke his collarbone, leaping from the climber on the playground, using his coat as a makeshift hang-glider, in a sixty-knot wind. If anyone could make a winning paper airplane, Rick Lenaburg could.

Curiosity, edged with nervous awe, propelled me to his desk, where sat three paper planes, to my one. Proudly, he showed me a sleek dart, wings folded repeatedly to the thickness of a ruler, clearly intended to dominate the distance category. I knew I was eyeing a champion. The second airplane, he told me, was an accident.

"When I throw this one, it spirals and loops - crazy! And, I figured... 'What the heck'?" So, an aerobatic entry, too. Rick, grinning, was more excited by this classroom activity than I could ever remember.

The final paper dart on his desk appeared identical to mine. Indistinguishable. I spun my head to verify that my entry was still on my desk where I had left it. It was. Any confidence I had felt, just moments before, drained from me like air from a leaking balloon. My face was hot again, my shoulders sagged.

"Well, good luck, Rick."

"Yeah, you too."

I returned to my desk, and sat, staring at my plane, and, suddenly, it was time. We gathered up our airplanes. Our teacher quietly led us, single-file, out the classroom door, through the resource center, - for reasons unknown, that's what they called the library - and up the ramp, to the gym.

It went quickly, Mister Wayerski imposing an improvised order on the proceedings. The origami portion was omitted, to "preserve originality". Of course, we went in alphabetical order, by last names. I thought Rick's aerobatic performance was the best, but, because it crashed into the floor, most of the class voted for Rhonda Calvin . Lined up along one wall, between folded lunch tables, the distance competitors took turns hurling their planes across the gym. As expected, Rick won, beating the next-best effort by twenty feet, almost hitting the far wall.

Few students, vying for duration aloft, were able to exceed eight seconds of flight. From the center of the basketball court, planes were thrown straight up, some falling back, straight down, barely missing the thrower. Rick took his turn, crouching like a coiled spring, his plane brushing the linoleum. At the end of the countdown, he exploded upwards, sneakers off the floor, arms windmilling. His plane described a tight loop fifteen feet above his head. It looked like it might loop again, but, lacking airspeed, it stalled and settled into a slow, dipping glide that carried it under the basketball hoop. When it touched down, Mister Wayerski clicked the stopwatch with an exaggerated chop of his arm.

"Twelve-point-five seconds." Crap.

I tried to duplicate Rick Lenaburg's athletic, off-balance launch, but the stance was awkward. I relaxed into a more-natural pose and, at the signal, pitched my glider with a grunt. Our planes' common pedigree was evidenced by similar, looping flights. After a heart-stopping stall, my plane, too, nosed into gentle, undulating descent. I held my breath, fists clenched, contorting my body, bowler-like, as if some kind of tormented physical effort might prolong the flight.

The plane hit the wall, with a crisp snap, four feet above the rubber baseboard. For a I moment, I believed it might glance off, fantastically remaining aloft. We watched it skid down the wall, crashing, thud, as Mister Wayerski dropped his arm again. I exhaled slowly, cheeks puffing.

"Eleven seconds."

I retrieved my plane, crumpling it in between my palms. Second place was still losing, but I wrung some satisfaction from beating Tod Cernitch, who, surprisingly, scored a 10.5. I suspected he used a plane built by Rick, to their mutual benefit. I was sick of paper airplanes. Our teacher congratulated the winners as the bell for the first lunch period rang. We hurriedly collected our lunches from the classroom, reconvening in the gym, now arrayed with the folding tables.

When Bob, the bus driver, dropped me off, I ran home, my backpack bouncing on my shoulders. After gulping from a carton of cold milk in the fridge, I fished a stack of paper from the double drawer in mom's desk. Kneeling at a side table, a stylish shade of avocado, molded from sturdy plastic, I set to the task of producing a squadron of duplicate paper airplanes. I knew, intuitively, that the key to the design's success lay in the details of the flaps.

Mom was in the kitchen, making spaghetti, and I excitedly detailed the drama of the paper airplane contest. Patiently, I explained my experiment, the comparison of different aileron sizes, the little paper flaps that inexplicably affected both the glide ratio and initial altitude.

"Too much lift, and the plane will loop too much... Less lift and it will fly higher, but it won't stay in the air long enough." I was thinking out loud.

"Umm Hmm." She wasn't even paying attention. "Dinnertime. Wash your hands, find your sisters."

Spaghetti was a favorite, but I ate silently, flying paper dogfights in my head. Dad wasn't home yet, and the women in my family had no interest in scientific sport. After the dishwasher was loaded, I returned to the little green table, moving it, and my fleet, into the center of the living room.

I resumed by cutting paired slits in the trailing edges of the planes' wings, adding ailerons of differing dimensions: wide, narrow, short, and long. When finished, I methodically threw each plane several times, weighing the merits of each, stashing the rejected versions under the table, at my knees. My brute-force approach yielded a plane with long narrow flaps, one marginally wider than the other. When thrown hard, the flaps bent down, allowing the plane to climb, but as speed was lost, the inherent springiness in the paper returned the flaps to a normal, high-lift orientation. Additionally, a wider flap steered the plane in a gentle spiral, keeping it from hitting a wall.

I could toss the plane toward the fireplace, only to have it bank over the couch and return to my hand, boomerang-like. On my knees, in the living room, I flew missions over the furniture, past the picture window, again and again. I had mastered aerodynamics, physical laws were my playthings, this aircraft did my bidding.

Experimentally, I gave the missile a mighty heave, banking its wings into the throw. For a moment, I feared it would clip the textured shag, cartwheeling across the green carpet. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, I delighted in my new-found powers, as the plane climbed, up, up, wheeling toward my head. A warm glee smoldered in my smug soul, when, confidant that the paper airplane would complete two circuits around the room, I ducked my head.

WHAM.

Reeling, my hands went to my face, which had just collided with the stout and immovable little green plastic table. The room tilted crazily, my heavy, dorky glasses knocked askew. I adjusted the lenses and my fingers came away, bloody. The vision in my left eye, my good eye, clouded, my nose was warm, wet. I tasted iron. Carefully, head tilted back, I stood up, stumbled into the kitchen.

"MOM!"

At the sink, I discarded my glasses, dousing my face with water from the tap. Every splash on the stainless steel was tinged with red. I ripped a paper towel from the dispenser under the cabinet, and plastered it against my brow. Mom swung the saloon doors open.

"What on Earth... Oh, dear." I couldn't see her expression, couldn't gauge her anger. "Jesus H. Christ... Let me get a towel."

I examined my face in the bathroom mirror. My stupid glasses had slammed into the bridge of my nose, and the gaping cut gushed when I moved the washcloth aside, to dab at the drying blood on my cheek and mouth.

"I think you need stitches."

Dad still wasn't home. Mom rounded up my sisters and we all went to the emergency room in the Dasher wagon. It bears mention that our Volkswagen was a certain shade of green: avocado. Let the record also reflect that I had never, in my short life, tasted the creamy and nutritious flesh of that exotic fruit, nor, I believe, had either of my parents, but I was intimately familiar with the decorator tint.

Sewing my flesh back together, the doctor chuckled quietly when I detailed the circumstances of my visit to the emergency room. Four neat loops of silk closed the split, but my nose was so swollen that my glasses would not fit my face. Secretly, I hoped they never would.

The next day, I stood up in writing class, and related my trip to the emergency room. I held up my paper airplane, and pointed to the tiny smudge of blood on the left wing. Mister Wayerski called me his little scientist, and joked about dangerous laboratory experiments. Afterwards, Rick showed me the scar on his knee, from a bike wreck.

Shortly, once again, we marched to the gym.

History II

My official license for mayhem arrived in the seventh grade.

"You're going to play sports, play an instrument, or get a job!" On this subject, my parents marched in rare lockstep.

I found a job.

Each day, after school, Saturday and Sunday mornings, I delivered the Bellingham Herald. Fifty customers, scattered across four miles of incline, lined my pockets with a token filthy lucre, and, more importantly, liberated me from the petty dramas of my family and adolescence. I was suddenly immune from being grounded. It was brilliant.

Now, It is a solid scientific fact that a bicycle cannot survive the rigors of newspaper delivery, and, shortly, I found myself walking the five miles each day. It was the rare occasion when my mom would drive me, allowing me to ride in the VW bus with the sliding door open. My best friend, Eric, accompanied me most days, substituting for me when I went fishing with my dad or came down with the plague. He knew the route intimately and its customer's peculiarities, and he knew I had a good thing. Eric had a pellet gun, which he'd bring along sometimes, and we'd hunt squirrels, songbirds, and Nazis in the thick second-growth woods.

My paper route was absurdly plotted upon the terrain. My papers were waiting for me each day, in a plywood box, at the precise midpoint of my customers. This meant, on one hand, that I only had to carry half my papers at a time, but also that I had to backtrack both legs of the route each day. More importantly, I got to make a strategic business decision every day. From the dropoff point, I could first go up Viewcrest Drive, delivering to the nicer homes, or down into Chuckanut Village, a funky community of hippies and hardscrabble hangers-on. Each Christmas, the view homes, overlooking the water, with their tasteful woodwork, could be counted on for a tip. But, the people who lived in the Village, in shacks with add-ons, smelling of woodsmoke and clams, were friendly all year.

The Village was platted at the head of a squarish, shallow bay, protected by a mile-long stone causeway. The Great Northern railway constructed this ballast berm in the 1920's, replacing an open timber trestle, which now formed a protective breakwater. A wide gravel beach ringed the north half of the bay, with sandstone boulders and cliffs eroded into bizarre honeycombed shapes. The south side had marshy islets, through which snaked a creek at low water, full of spawning salmon in September. Between these shores, a perilous, waist-deep, fragrant and sucking mud stretched. Every day, the promise of certain adventure pulled on me, separating from responsibility like a magnetic claw, until my wristwatch nagged me back to diligence.

In addition to delivering newspapers to the homes, I was charged with collecting the subscription payments. Shrewdly, I refused to perform this task while delivering papers, preferring instead, to make several expeditions dedicated to this chore each month. I favored weekends, and, especially, nights after dinner, for such skulking around.

On a cloudy Sunday afternoon, on the cusp of spring, a collection expedition found me walking the railroad tracks, on the causeway that hemmed in the bay. I had taken a circuitous path to arrive there, having no intention, none at all, of actually collecting subscriptions from any of my customers.

Decades before, a perfect magic was performed by the engineers and laborers that constructed the railroad. Trains demand the straightest possible path between two points, and toward that end, the berm had been constructed, boulder by boulder, spanning the mouth of this cove. The tide was left to breathe through a gap in the wall, bridged by timbers oozing creosote. The north end of the causeway butted against a ridge, the root of a peninsula, known locally as Clark's Point. And there the miracle occurs. Rather than take the serpentine path around the point, rather than going over the ridge, an army of muscle and dynamite had bored through the sandstone. The tunnel described a gentle arc inside the Earth, such that, in the middle third of the tunnel, you could see neither entrance directly, only trusting their existence by the dim reflection off the moisture that seeped from the concrete, coursed down the curved ceiling, in thin films, irrigating the mossy walls.

Blinking against the daylight, having, once again, stupidly, braved the dangerous shortcut through the train tunnel, several options confronted me. The causeway ahead offered a sterile predictability: tracks, rocks, a hundred feet of trestle, high tide. On my left, northeast, flat water filled the bay, beyond which lay the Village, paying customers, duty.

The green water on the southwest side of the railroad was deep, wide beds of kelp calmed the swell, and the point blocked any wind. A narrow gravel beach spanned the crotch formed by the railroad berm and the steep shore of Clark's Point. On this balmy, grey day, at this splendid intersection of landscape and engineering, a second miracle occurred. I looked down from the tracks and saw the boat, half-submerged, sitting on the bottom, a few feet from water's edge.

Teal above, and white below, I knew it was a Sportyak, a sort of hard-shelled polyethelene raft. I'd seen dozens of them, a cheap and ubiquitous dinghy, hanging on the transoms of small power boats in the marina and in the islands. They were supposed to be unsinkable, yet here was a Sportyak sunk. There was no registration number on the bow. No vessels bobbed at anchor or moved across the inlet. The nearest waterfront home was a mile or more away. Perhaps lost in a storm, perhaps abandoned, clearly it was salvage, and, clearly, it was all mine.

Wet sneakers were a small price to pay for such a prize, and I gleefully yarded it onto dry land after a mad scramble down the car-sized rocks. I half-expected to get, predictably, caught in the act, accused of theft. I rocked it experimentally, and gallons of brine sloshed between the hull and deck. A quick and minor surgery, effected with my Swiss Army knife, yielded a two-inch square inspection hole, as large as I dared, at the aft starboard (I was a Boat Owner!) corner of the deck.

The seawater inside was illuminated with by the warm glow of light through the plastic, a tiny speckling of sand visible in the corners. No rocks, no seaweed: a good sign. Heaving, I lifted the boat bow-up, straining against the mass of leakage, easing, relaxing finally, as the water gushed through the hole I'd carved, onto the beach. I spun the now-empty boat around, and tipped it toward me, the last few drops dripping reluctantly. I flipped it, upside-down, and inspected the bottom. Barnacles and stone had scored long scratches in the plastic, but none were deep enough to cause a leak. In the corner, directly under my inspection/drain port was a dent, caused by some great impact. I could find no breach in the hull, and convinced myself that water must have infiltrated the seam between the top and bottom.

Balancing the Sportyak over my head, it wasn't difficult to clamber up and over the railroad tracks, picking my path from boulder to boulder. I hoped to carry the boat to a safe spot in the woods, but tide had flooded the bay, and precious little beach was available. A faint rain began to fall, making perfect circles on the surface on the clear, flat water. I had my pick of driftwood paddles, and perched on my knees, I alternated strokes on each side, canoe-fashion.

As I skimmed across the glassy sea, sand dabs, tiny flounders, darted away from my shadow. A kingfisher chattered overhead, a great blue heron lifted from a floating log, flapping slowly, croaking, like a feathered pterodactyl, across the water, I was navigating Paradise. I was alone on this placid and untroubled body of water, and only the woodsmoke rising, straight up, from the chimneys of homes on the distant shore belied the truth of other people in the world.

Between strokes of my ersatz paddle, I could hear a burbling noise, like a wet flapping. At first, I assumed air bubbles were fluttering under the hull of my vessel, but at one point, I stopped to savor the delicious beauty of my situation, only to hear the burbling while motionless. I twisted around, awkward in the tiny boat, bent to the hole in the deck. A pin-sized jet of water dribbled through a crack in the dent I had found earlier. Dammit! Water, a couple of inches, had violated the division between boat and sea, so I turned for the sandy shore, a scant thirty feet away.

I tipped my vessel vertical again, easier this time, and a few gallons gushed forth. I looked at my watch and scanned the shore. Several cars were parked along the short, dead-end, dirt track that gave visitors access to the beach. No one was visible on the beach. I was hoping to stash my trophy in the marsh behind that road, but the presence of people - hostiles - ruled out any plan the might expose my treasure.

Long ago, before the railroad causeay, this bay had been exposed to fierce weather from the southwest. Wind and water had wrought the lacy erosion on the rocks, undermining tremendous blocks of stone that had tumbled onto the shore, bouncing, rolling across the beach to form small islands at high water. Directly above me, one such boulder was stacked upon two others, forming a sort of cave. I dragged my boat in between the rocks and wedged it on the crumbling hillside, well above sight from the shore. I emerged, stooping, from the cache and circled around the rock pile, confirming the security of my hiding place.

Owing to the water level, I had to walk past the parked cars. There was still nobody on the beach, but I could hear voices in the marsh beyond. Probably birdwatchers. I made a beeline for home, hastily passing obviously occupied homes, people who owed me money. When I got home, I called Eric, and filled him in on my discovery.

I could hear the excitement in his voice. "This is so neat!"

In class, the next day, all I could think about was having my own private Sportyak. The day dragged, and when the dismissal bell rang, Eric was waiting for me on the grass field. We trotted straight to my house. He had already obtained the necessary permission, the night before, to join my on my paper route. We picked up the dorky poncho-bag I carried the papers in. We were off.

Of course, we delivered to the Village first, practically running, pausing to stuff newspapers into mailboxes and the few plastic Bellingham Herald tubes (which I sold to customers concerned about something called mailbox fraud) . We took opposite sides of the street, meeting in the middle of the road to hand off papers. We arrived at the bay, panting, damp in the March air.

A Subaru was parked by the water's edge, on the short gravel lane that connected the parallel paved roads. During the highest storm tides, water covered this part of the road, functionally part of the beach, with driftwood and a line of seaweed. On top of the car was a boat - my boat! A young man, obviously a college student, was standing on the bumper, knotting a rope securing the boat - his boat? - to a roof rack. My beautiful dreams, visions, plans for that boat began to unravel in my brain. I had to act.

"Hey! Where'd you get that boat?" I could hear my anguish bending my voice.

He paused, noticing us, and gestured across the water. "It was up on the rocks. Over there."

"That's... That's our boat." I squared my shoulders. "That's where we, uh, store it."

The claim sounded thin when spoken aloud, and I suspected this guy's salvage rights were better, twenty-four hours fresher, than mine. I believe I actually swooned, as the simultaneous thoughts and ideas crashed in my head: He doesn't know I found it just yesterday. This guy might just drive off with it. Two against one: Simple playground math. We could all share it. He's bigger AND older. Where would we keep it? He's going to take it. In his dorm? Don't cry, do not cry. It's not really mine. Not yet.

It was my time-tested understanding that bigger kids picked on, and took advantage of, smaller kids. I had experienced it first-hand when I changed schools, and I exercised this principle upon my younger sisters. Adults, generally, treated kids fairly. This person, laying claim to my Sportyak, might fall on either side of the line demarking adolescence from maturity. We stood there, beside his car. I tried to appear defiant, glared accusingly, and telepathically willed Eric to do the same.

In slow motion, this interloper reached for the rope laced over the dinghy. He's going to keep it.

Slowly, he pulled the rope, and it snaked through the bars and around the boat, piling at his feet.

"I'm sorry about that." The boat (my boat?) was in his hands. "I just thought someone had lost it. I was going to put a lost and found ad in the paper." Ouch. I am a thief.

"That's OK." I mopped my brow with my sleeve. "I'm glad we caught you. I'd hate to lose it. It's a great little boat." He opened the rear hatch, tossing the tangled line in the back.

"Yes, it is," He climbed into his car, waved. "Have fun!" Like we might not.

History I

When you entered the building, the first thing you noticed was the sharp smell of chlorine. The second thing you noticed was a fainter, slightly sweet, clean smell - fresh fish. I had experience, references, I signed the non-disclosure (Surimi was high-tech, proprietary), and so started my brief career making artificial crab.

One night, a nosebleed took me off the line. Accidental, fortunate, probably the product of the dry air, dehydration, and sleep deprivation, I was sent to the QA office to staunch the flow. Ernie, the Quality Engineer, in lab coat, safety glasses, poofy hairnet, was dissecting a package of "flake". He cut the vacuum-packed pouch open with a razor knife and methodically fingered the product until he found something.

"Look at this! What do you think that is?" I plucked it from his open palm, enjoying this demonstration of trust.

"A ball bearing?" The production equipment must have required thousands of bearings.

"No, a BB!"

"What’s the difference?" I feigned bovine ignorance.

"Oh, there’s a difference…" He snatched it back, dropping it, with a rattle, into a shallow stainless pan.

I watched him, blankly daubing at my nostril. Eventually I trudged, in my floppy rubber boots, back out to my spot on the packaging line.

Later, around three in the morning, Ernie appeared on the line. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He repeatedly ran a pair of pouches through the metal detector, the same route that all packaged product took. Each time a gate popped out, across the conveyor belt, and directed the packages into a separate plastic tote. I knew, with certainty, those packages also contained my BB’s.

Vanity

When I was kid, my mom had a kitchen stool, a handy tool for reaching things on shelves, a perch for friends to set and talk, or for kids to stir cookies and sneak bites of raw egg-laden dough. She loved that stool, and when it wore out, she replaced it with a sturdy, assemble-it-yourself, high-back version, in maple. She painted it a jaunty shade of orange, just the accent to avocado Formica and green shag rug. When the first stool came apart, literally falling to pieces under my weight, it was like stepping across a threshold when the new stool entered our house. The old stool had been my nemesis, an execution tool, like an electric chair. If I could see it out of the corner of my eye, my breath would catch, my voice would fall softer, respectful. It's not that I feared the chair, but what it represented: haircuts.

Somewhere, sometime, my dad received an illustrated How-To book on cutting hair. He already possessed a set of clippers, possibly cast-offs from a veterinary clinic, and after a little light reading decided that he could make me a presentable young man, and save some money at the same time. Cutting hair, even a simple pig shave, has a learning curve. To this day, I have a thick scar, from a gouging scissors wound, behind the top of my right ear which causes eyeglasses to cant to the left if I don't tweak the temple piece just so.

Hair is composed of lifeless keratin, a proteinaceous material also comprising finger and toe nails. Completely lacking nerves, hair is dead, a solid scientific fact that I disputed for years. The combination of dad's rusty tools and aggressive style molded me into a quaking, hand-shy dog-boy when the subject of haircuts came up. Like a setter fearful of baths, I would disappear, kicking and crying when discovered and subsequently hoisted into position on the stool. Although I never had a problem with dentists, I completely understand the aversion some people develop, even after modern painless dentistry. I'm here to tell you that cutting hair hurts.

My family had moved to Bellingham, Washington from Billings, Montana, where boys were expected to look like boys, which, in the eyes of my parents, most of the male students and professors in Bellingham failed to achieve. Long hair was a hallmark of the Hippies, and for years my Montana relatives were fascinated by stories about men that looked like women. The other crucial element of my Big Sky origin was the Scando-Teutonic genotype that I inherited. Pale skin and blond hair, shorn to quarter-inch fuzz, guaranteed certain sunburn on my scalp, and I learned to sport a ball cap on my tender head. My unprotected ears, however, fried like eggs in the northern sun, and in the summer months the burnt skin flaked off like stale potato chips.

We moved when I was in fourth grade, and I was quickly greeted by Matt, a friendly, fearless boy, a year older, his hair shaped into what he called a "mop". Like the Monkees, he was cool, and my mom must have taken pity on me when I mentioned my envy for his long hair. Dad grudgingly attempted to learn a scissor cut, which still, inexplicably, hurt like hellfire. I no longer looked like a junior Marine, and I saw my social standing improve at my new school, Happy Valley Elementary, where no one wore a crew cut.

In fifth grade I rode a train by myself, back to Montana for the summer, to "work" on my grandparents' farm, with the fantastic goal of earning money for a ten-speed bike. They belonged to a small tight-knit "church", meeting in family member's homes twice a week, and I was soon led to understand that my shaggy hair was pure homemade sin. Grandpa sat me down, opened the bible, searching until he found the justification he needed to mandate the haircut:

Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her? For her hair is given to her for a
covering. 1 Corinthians 11:14-15

After reading me the verse, he paraphrased: "Boys with long hair are a disgrace."

My uncle Ervin held me down, like a bawling lamb, and duplicated my dad's ineptitude with scissors. Lacking proper clippers, I received a compromise haircut, well above my ears, but longer than a crew cut. In the mirror, through tearful eyes, I saw the boy I would recognize years later, playing banjo in Deliverance. Somewhere, I found a floppy, leather hat, a souvenir from Mexico, and wore it constantly to protect my dignity and albinism, at 3500 feet of elevation, under the blazing Big Sky.

I experimented briefly with growing my hair out in my late twenties. I was managing a Birkenstock store in Seattle, and I was tired of the bowl cut, the Caesar style, as kinder persons called it. This gave me a reason to wear a bandana, a different one each day, to restrain the bangs that would otherwise obscure my vision. Slowly, painfully so, my hair grew out to the point where I could finally tuck the strands behind my ears in imitation of my über-cool friend, Jorn. At last, I could pull it all into a stunted ponytail which looks ridiculous in the sole surviving photograph. I settled for a part down the middle, and my thick, straight hair fell like two greasy curtains on each side of my head.

There was a character on the TV series, Northern Exposure, named Ed Chigliak, played by Darren E. Burrows. He defined undefinable cool on the show, and we had the same haircut, even the same middle initials. I longed for people to compare us, but, in reality, I looked more like the villainous teacher of the Dark Arts, Severus Snape, from Harry Potter. Eventually, I succumbed to the tiny voice hissing inside my head, "You look like a complete ass." I went to Supercuts and had the whole tangled wreck shaved off my head, back to square one. When I picked up my son, Alec, at his daycare later, he burst into tears because I looked like someone else.

Ten years later, I experimented with actually shaving my head, switching to an electric shaver when I lopped off, like a carrot top, a mole behind my left ear. My head is uncommonly round, and I worried that it might be mistaken for a bowling ball, my narrow eyes imperceptible on the broad expanse of pink flesh. I grew a goatee with a thin wispy moustache drooping around the sides of my mouth. The goatee suggested where my face was located, but with the shaved head, and my bulk, I looked like a stereotypical B-grade biker movie bad-ass. I scraped off the facial hair and joined a more respectable society when I began volunteering for the local fire department.

Eventually, I grew tired of shaving my head every few days (and the frightened look in children's eyes), and went back to the original buzz cut, which morphed into the more stylized, and military, high and tight. Also known as a jarhead, a crew cut on the top, the sides and back trimmed as short as tools and talent allow. Some say the name comes from how the ears stick out like a jar, but the true origin is lost in USMC lore. I like the low maintenance of the style, and it offers a professional appearance at 0300.

My hair is the perfect shrub to the stylist's topiary. It quickly (about an inch a month) grows straight out, like the Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Barber guy, and lays down only after attaining a length of several inches. Until that time, it forms a halo around my head that looks like a bizarre dandelion gone to seed. Interestingly, the shortest hairs grow faster, and two week after a cut, it's all the same length.

The tenacity of my fuzz tends to highlight any lapse of attention by the barber, and I remained loyal to the rare but transient souls that could meet my high standards. After some time, he or she would quit or get fired, and I would renew my search for competent barber. Too many times, I examined my pelt, after a new stylist's trim, only to find a myriad of stray hairs poking up like so many snags in the carpet. Clipping these bristles myself was as frustrating an exercise as writing my name backwards in the mirror, upside-down, and invariably resulted in snipping at precisely the wrong place and copious profanity.

But no more. I have found my follicular angel, in the guise of Joie, at Rudy's Barbershop. She cut my hair flawlessly for my Chief's interview, and continues to do so three years later. She knows my preference for guards (a razor finish on the sides and back, a 3.0 on top), and has the process down to a quick and easy art form. Rather than take the cafeteria offering of the first-available barber, I'll call ahead to get my name on her list. My schedule allows me to exploit the slower times of day and I seldom wait long.

It's my one vanity, perhaps a little OCD, perhaps the result of childhood trauma, but it's all mine.

The Perfect Ten

"Sixty-six year old female, chest pain."

The roads are rimed with ice, thick in places, bumpy, dangerous. Cable chains, coupled with tremendous weight, give our aid car traction and mobility. It's two in the morning, and we are hurrying on the treacherous streets, closing distance with the medics. The address is at a mobile home park, "The Estates", a manicured ersatz village brimming with retirees, trailers lined up in tidy, landscaped, aluminum rows. We go there often.

At the station, Rich had stared sleepily at the map on the wall, pulling on his bunker pants. "I don't know where we're going."

"It's by the freeway." It had sounded so helpful in my head, before I said it. I try to coax my groggy mind into showing off with turn-by-turn directions. "Follow the medics. They know where they're going."

We lose sight of their flashing red and white lights. A dispatch to "chest pain" is urgent in itself, but a slow start and an icy night make me anxious. The medics have made the only possible turn, and when we come around the corner, we can see them again, two blocks ahead. I'm in the officer's seat, pulling on nitrile gloves, Rich is focused on navigating the slippery route - slow on the corners, faster on the straights. He closes the gap between the two vehicles, and I relax a little.

We arrive seconds behind Medic forty-six, parking behind them, and uphill on the glazed asphalt lane. A narrow set of stairs leads up to the door under the carport. I wait at the bottom, until the medics are inside. Last week, I was bringing a gurney into a similar mobile home, and my foot went through a rotten plywood step. I bounce experimentally on the treads, assessing their strength, should we need to carry a patient out this door - no cracking or creaking under my weight.

I enter the home, and a woman is flitting about at the front door. "I was hoping they'd send some handsome firefighters!"

"Nope," I deadpan, "They sent us, instead."

I expect her to usher us to our patient, but one of the medics, Eric, asks her to take a seat and launches into interview mode. I've got a report and clipboard in my hand, and it's my role to record patient demographics (name, age, address), medical history and chief complaint. I'm still groggy, and I strain to make sense of the conversation, recording pertinent facts. No one asks her name, so I scan the counter for medications. I pluck a bottle, empty of oxycodone, from the window sill. I squint at the label.

"Are you Peggy?"

She is and she has a host of medical issues, none of them cardiac related. But because she uttered the magic words to dispatch, the medics are chasing down the chest pain path. They hook up the cardiac monitor, sticky little blue patches connected to wires at her shoulders and hips, under her robe. Nothing remarkable.

"The pain is right here." She thumps her belly with a closed fist, below her ribcage. "It goes to my stomach, and chest. And my back."

Roger leans her forward and palpates her back in several places. She jumps a little when he presses her flank, in the middle of her back.

"Oooh, right there."

"Well, Ma'am, I don't think this has anything to do with your heart. But, these boys will be happy to take you up to the hospital... -if you want." Boys. Rich and I are both over forty. But it sounds down-homey. I let it slide.

She wants. Happily, she can walk just fine, and no one is too concerned if she does, but we would be for a patient in cardiac distress. Rich and I each take an arm, and steer her toward the door of the aid car, mincing our steps on the packed ice. She has some difficulty climbing in, due to her bum knee, but I don't want to lift her on the gurney, on this icy hill, if I don't have to. We take our time and soon she's belted into our bed in the back of the aid car. The heater barely maintains 68 degrees F, against the bitter cold outside, but I shake off the chill, and call the nurse, while Rich starts us in the general direction of the two hospitals.

I flesh out the report in the back of the rig, while we bounce along. The document constitutes a legal and medical record of the event, and different types of calls require specific information. She was never asked her to rate her pain during the interview.

"Ma'am? On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain? With one being no pain, and ten being..."

"Ten."

"...being the worst possible pain imaginable?" Like losing a leg in a meat grinder, like getting impaled on a fencepost, like giving birth to quintuplets - simultaneously?

"Oh, it's a ten." She smiles at me, nodding. Her hands are folded across her generous lap.

"Okey-doke. Ten out of ten. Got it. Thanks." I bend to the paperwork, making a note of her statement, but I frame it in quotation marks, in the subjective section of the report.

I reckon I've experienced 7/10 pain, and it made me sob. But I've seen 10/10 pain. I've heard the wailing, the moaning, the pleading for it to stop. The desperate writhing. The gnashed teeth, enamel squeaking, the clenched knuckles, squeezed bloodless, white. Ten out of ten? Balderdash. Hooey. Confabulation. Steaming bullshit.

There's no traffic, and despite the ice, we arrive at the hospital shortly. After a short wait, we are sent to a room at the emergency department. Peggy wriggles from our gurney to the hospital bed, after we raise the latter to the same level. There hangs a new flat screen monitor on the wall which monitors and displays vital signs. I like technology, and I comment on the addition to the room.

"Oh. I thought that was a TV. Isn't there a TV in here? I am so thirsty." She is sitting up, gazing about the room. "I thought there'd be TV..."

The admitting nurse has followed us into the room. "Nope. Sorry." She doesn't sound very apologetic.

I give her my short report, epigastric pain, radiating to the chest, abdomen, and back. I high-light the ten out of ten rating with animated fingers.

"Right." She looks blankly at me. "Worried about TV and a drink?" She smiles sweetly, and shrugs a little. "A ten? I don't think so."

"I know..." I tear off the pink copy of my report and hand it to her.

"Thanks. You have a good morning."

"You too." I call over my shoulder, "Bye Peggy! Hope you feel better." Rich is waiting in the idling rig, the cab heater blasting.

"Let's go home, Cowboy. I'm sleepy - A ten out of ten."

Out Of Phase

Like the brains of dogs, and certainly cats, the human brain is a fragile organ, susceptible to damage and pernicious meddling. Conditioned to respond to a recurrent situation, the brain re-wires its behavior to handle the repeated and expected situation. Consider the adopted pet, having changed households, now displaying inexplicable and irksome behavior towards its new owners. Ring a bell, Puddles salivates. Stimulus, response.

It seems that a small part of my own brain has been perverted from its previous programming in new ways both inconvenient and devious. Like an "abductee", wandering around Terra Firma after the rumored anal probe, I scratch my head and wonder aloud, "How did I get here?" Or more accurately, "What day is it?"

Give me your hand, walk with me.

The pre-Colombian Mayans didn't use the wheel, but they measured the length of the solar year to a far higher precision than the Europeans who formulated the Gregorian calendar. Curiously, the über-precise Mayans preferred a whole number, 365, to the precise value they measured, and built their elaborate calendars around that figure, eschewing leap days. Even with that small error, and given a (long) life time, by the time you were eighty years old, spring would arrive just a few weeks earlier (by the calendar), than it had when you were a Mayan child, playing in the mud.

The word month is a cognate to the word Moon, meaning they have a common, or related origin. In a climate without appreciable seasons, or if the Moon figured more prominently in your mythology than did the sun, it might seem reasonable to mark the passage of time by the phases of our satellite. The observant and diligent shaman, however, might eventually eventually discover four other ways to define the Moon's orbit: the sidereal month, relative to the stars; the tropical month, relative to the vernal equinox; the anomalistic month, relative to the Moon's position nearest to (or farthest from) the Earth; and the draconic month, relative to the ecliptic plane. The lengths of these five periods vary by as much as two days.

Every great thinker wrestles with the issues of incorporating new information into the body of "knowledge" he already possesses. Aristotle, later Ptolemy, played with a mental model of spheres, each moving a particular celestial object relative to the other objects, with the Earth in the center. The periodicity of the Moon has no direct numerical relation to the annual revolution of the Sun, and it must have made the great thinkers, trying to correlate the two, crazy.

I can easily imagine a Lunar Interpretive Committee arguing the merits of the different months around a campfire, weighing common sense against spiritual belief, much like certain discussions around the firehouse dinner table. In the end, apparently, some wise figurehead threw out the whole notion of a month's duration being, in any way, tied to the Moon. Subsequently, we inherited a year of twelve months, of varying duration, correlated to the signs of the Zodiac. Call it executive prerogative.
The seven day week, depending upon whom you ask, came from the average weight of a baby camel, the number of fingers on the hand of a convicted pirate, or the alcoholic content of early beers. Actually, seven is a hallowed number, derived, by most accounts, from the number of naked-eye, visible stellar objects in the night sky: Moon - Monday; Mars - Tuesday; Mercury - Wednesday; Jupiter - Thursday; Venus - Friday; Saturn - Saturday; Sun - Sunday. The length of the week in the western world has been solidly established for at least two millenia, perhaps much longer.

As to the reprogramming of my neural equipment, I'd lived forty years, happily measuring my days with the accepted and understood year, month and week, negotiated oh so long ago. When I was hired by my Department, the damage began. We use an eight day rotation of shifts, working two twenty-four hour shifts (plus the occasional overtime) in that time. Our days off comprise a "two-off" and a "four-off", meaning a two and a four-day period between shifts.

We ask a bread-and-butter question of some of our patients, to assess their level of orientation: "What day is it?" It's a mediocre question, often irrelevant to the changeless world of an extended care facility, where one day blends into the next. I often must perform some mental calculations of my own, before I can process the answer. Curiously, I have no problem remembering how many days until I work next, but I seldom know what day of the week it is.

The biggest effect arises as the real world moves out of phase with my eight-day week. Take for instance, weekends. The odds of a real-world weekend completely lining up with my time off are 50%. If I include Friday or Monday as part of the weekend, the probability drops to 25%. I'm not complaining; I have abundant unstructured time off from work, but it can be difficult to coordinate weekend activities with friends and loved ones.

Particularly troubling is the complication created by my kids living out of state. Initially, I was overjoyed with the schedule when I was hired, and the prospect of all the time it would allow me to spend with them during the week. After they moved to California, repeatedly negotiating which weekend the kids are coming up each month became a huge pain in the ass. Three quarters of the year's three-day weekends necessitate a trade or a day off to maximize visitation. I have a very limited pool of possible trade partners, and I try to reserve those trades for the months without an open weekend.

Conversely, it's nice to go do something during the week, without the weekend crowds. Movies, museums, trails are much less crowded on a Tuesday. I have a lot of flexibility in my week for dentist or doctor appointments. I have to go to bed on time just eight days a months, but every work day is both a Monday and a Friday.

What day is it today?

Give Thanks

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live in a time of abundance. Food, Metabolic energy, is cheap and plentiful. Indeed, many of the patients I see suffer from the side effects of abundance. Obesity, diabetes, alcoholism are all symptoms of too much, too good. It's easy to meet your caloric needs, and not much harder to exceed them, and just as easy to indulge in some recreational chemistry.

Life used to be much harder, and humans earned every calorie they consumed, whether it came from food grown from seed, or meat brought to the hearth after days of following the herd. Killing a mammoth, bringing in the harvest, warranted a feast, and the revelers would gorge on the bounty that they had wrought. I've heard that there is a "feast or famine" gene still lurking in our chromosomes. Refrigeration is a relatively new process, and it's been suggested that over-eating, over-spending, and over-indulging are related genetically-programmed behaviors, left over from the not-so-distant past, when meat would spoil if not consumed quickly.

Consider the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Assuming you aren't eating them daily out of economic necessity, it's a pretty good snack or lunch item. At worst, the PB&J is a sweet and gummy collection of tasteless and humble staples, but, when prepared with high-quality ingredients, it can achieve gourmet magnificence .

One of my favorite lunches, dating from my middle school, 4-H Club days, is a double-decker PB&J (three slices bread, the peanut butter and jam separated by the third slice of bread) and a can of V-8 juice. The sandwich is transformed by the extra bread and the segregation of ingredients. The V-8 juice forms a backdrop, a canvas, against which the elemental notes of peanut, strawberry, and wheat bread are rendered in a gustatory still life. Approaching fine French pastry, it has the supreme balance of taste, texture, that satisfies some fundamental, psycho-emotional need for sugar, fat, and salt.

Made with whole wheat bread, costing only pennies, half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich compares almost identically with a Clif bar, at $1.49. Maybe it's a little messier, and won't suffer weeks, or months, in your backpack, but a PB&J is definitely cheaper, easier, and handy. Properly assembled, it contains that balance of carbohydrates, fats, protein, and fiber for which people, athletes, spend a fortune, every year, on energy bars, hoping to find that perfectly-formulated, pre-made, pre-packaged product that will sustain them in the course of their daily adventures.

I offer the humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a metaphor for the modern diet. I fully believe that the PB&J, two thousand years ago, might have spawned bloody wars of conquest, bent on acquiring the fabled sandwich. Today, it is a tried and true lunch box staple, but way back then it would have been an unheard-of delicacy, in an age without refined sugar, leavened bread, and the necessary mechanization to mill peanut butter.

This Thanksgiving, please take a moment to acknowledge the unknown, the unsung, the unappreciated men and women who came before you. The person who invented the buffalo fall, the person that first added spices to roasting meat, the one who built a boat capable of carrying passengers to a new life in a new world. The inventor of peanut butter, Dr. Salk, Thomas Edison, Robert Ranson (inventor of the cast iron plowshare) also deserve our gratitude. And don't forget the people who, today, this day, make your life possible: the garbage man, long haul truckers, oil field wild-catters, police and fire.

And when the turkey's all gone, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wallow in the gifts of civilization.

“There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character”
-Henry Louis Mencken

“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr

“To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.”
-Bertrand Russell