The following are a few memories from my friend Steve who I used to race bikes with. We talked for the first time in years this week. He’d been reading my blog and he related these stories that he felt were in the same spirit as the stuff I was digging into. The well has sort of run dry for ideas to write about here these days—probably from being so busy—so these are my treatments of what I recall of our conversation.

1. That time laying in bed, trying to sleep was full of fascination and terror when I was young. I had patterned white and blue wall paper in my room. I remember seeing the image of a donkey and one of a rabbit and one of a dead woman in the patterns. Two particular hallucinations/sensations followed me up through my teen years. The first was a strange tactile feeling that I was tumbling through or in some sort of tumbler with some sort of sandy-feeling substance. There was a sound attached to it too, but the sound was internal in origin so it was felt more than heard.
The other was a white light that would come from the periphery of my eyes-closed “field of vision” and encompass my entire “field of vision.” This generally came in times of great turmoil or sadness, particularly after crying. It was always somehow comforting. It still occurs to this day, though is no longer really associated with turmoil.

2. When I was eight or nine my parents began taking me on family bike rides. When I was ten we started to go see some races. I became hooked and decided that that was what I was going to do. I announced this at the dinner table one night and my dad said, “You can’t be a bike racer, you’re too lazy, they train every day. That’s hard work.” That summer I began riding every day. Every night before I went to bed, I prayed, “Dear Jesus, Please help me. Thank you for everything you’ve done. I pray for my family and friends and everyone in my life and pray that I’ll get a good night’s sleep and wake up early enough tomorrow morning and train hard so that I can become a bike racer. (Here I would insert whatever particular concerns I might have on a given day). I thank you for everything you’ve done for me and in Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.”

When school was out that summer I would go to my grandmother’s every day and I started training. First it was only two miles or so, but I went as hard as I could and didn’t miss a day. The rides got longer and I got stronger. By the time I was twelve I talked my parents into letting me actually start racing. I never lost a race in my age group that first year. At some point after I had already won several races I was out riding (I still remember the exact stretch of road where it occurred) it occurred to me that I was a bike racer—and a good one! I don’t think I’d ever felt more excitement in my life. I also realized I’d have to change my prayers. As the years went on that same piece of road became a trigger for self-reflection: when I looked back as a junior national champion, national team member, or a veteran of Belgian kermesse racing like I had always dreamed of being, it was always a reminder—every moment lived enthusiastically is a prayer—and that there always comes a time when a prayer needs to be changed.

3. When I was twenty-two I was graduated from college and was living back at home for awhile while I drifted. My grandmother had moved in there too, for different reasons but was doing her own sort of drifting, I guess. One night she had congestive heart failure and was taken to the hospital. She stayed there a week and my father was sick with the flu and my mother had cancer, so I was the only one to be able to visit her. I visited her daily.
One night it seemed like all was up for her. Her heart was unstable and she was passing in and out of dementia. She thought I was her 22 year-dead husband. To blur matters more we shared a name so I was never sure who she was talking to—didn’t matter really, I suppose. She kept flashing back to strange times and places in her life. She repeatedly thought she was in the house next to the one in which she grew up. She thought I was her husband and we had been visiting her friend who lived there for dinner and something had gone wrong. She was worried about my father and his leg and kept asking if it would be alright. The thing that was coming up the most though was an ice cream party for her class. They were supposed to have an ice cream party and she was supposed to by them ice cream but new that she couldn’t. She kept saying, “Those poor kids, they won’t get their ice cream now.” She was in tears over the ice cream. Eventually I assured her that I would get the ice cream for her and she needn’t worry. Then she calmed down and was almost happy. She pulled through and lived for another two years. That night made me wonder, though—what the hell was that ice cream party? What will that be for me?

6. In preschool when we had free playtime inside the entire group of boys would rush to the toy shelf for the most desirable toys. Getting the right toy could make you the alpha male of the day. The two “power toys” were the big wooden dump truck and the “big cow.” The truck was big enough that you could put your knees in the back and ride it around. It could haul any other toy in the room. The “big cow” was the largest, most muscular horned bull out of a set of plastic cattle. When we “played cows” we all clustered around on our hands and knees on the carpeted floor. Your chosen plastic cow then became a battering ram to use against all the other cows while making “Mooooooooo!” noises or snorting. It was a very complex game. The amazing thing was to observe the power of the “big cow.” He could clear out the “corral” every time, even when in one of the weakest hands. But if he was claimed by too inferior a grip he would sometimes break loose and find a more suitable clutch. No one ever let the “big cow” win. We all fought hoof and sometimes udder for dominance but nine times out of ten the “big cow” prevailed. We had a seldom-voiced notion of magic associated with the “big cow.” We all realized it’s power and knew it was something supersensible yet real just the same.

7. When I was a kid Halley’s Comet came. A big deal, it happens only once every seventy-six years. I going through a big science/astronomy phase and was really excited. My mother took me to see it at the observatory down the road from our house. There was a long line and it was cold and at some point, there standing on line with my mother I realized that in seventy-six years, when Halley’s Comet came back again, I might be able to see it again,but I also realized that in seventy-six years my mother would certainly be dead. I had never realized such a thing before. I cried myself to sleep every night for almost a week after, but refused to say why. Finally one night, my mother came into my bedroom and sat down on my bed and said, “Who knows, I might be there with you to see the comet again,” and rubbed my head till I fell asleep. That convinced me then that there was something out there too big to understand, yet real. Whether it was God or ESP, or a mother’s love I wasn’t sure, but I knew it was real. I believed.

The next time I went to the observatory was with my wife and it was years later. There was a comet that I can’t recall the name of and we waited on line to go up in the telescope to see it. My mother was in the hospital then with lymphoma—she died before she ever got home. I think things are usually quite circular if and when you pay attention.

8. My grandmother who had been an elementary school teacher took care of me during the day. She would read to me every afternoon. We’d go to the library and get books or read the ones she had. The milk man brought milk and orange juice on Mondays and I particularly liked to read Curious George books with the orange juice. Somehow they went well together.

8. The first time I read on my own must have been when I was three or so—it was very young. It was just a book with pictures and the word of what was pictured, but I learned to go through and read the whole book myself—more an act of memorization really, but man, did I feel grown-up! In some ways I haven’t changed since that day. It couldn’t have been much after that that I really learned to read—it was well before kindergarten. My grandmother had gotten me a whole National Geographic children’s series on science and nature and we were reading my favorite part of my favorite one, which was a paragraph beneath a picture of a raccoon. She had been reading to me and she asked me if I wanted to read that page this time and I read the whole thing. She said something, like, “Good, now you know how to read. You can read anything you want now if you put your mind to it.” That was a pretty wild proclamation—even wilder because I realized it was true.

9. During the years I apprenticed and then worked as a metal smith I learned more than I have in any two year period of my life. The most important things were: 1.) it hurts when you hammer your finger; 2.) when you hammer your finger it is not an “accident”—it is your own fault; 3.) fingers only heal themselves, nothing else can heal a finger; 4.) when your finger heals itself, you are healing yourself because your finger is part of you; 5.) the hammer is better at hammering than you are, so get it started and then let it do its thing; 6.) practiced detachment from the mechanics of things prevents detachment from the art of things and fingers; 7.) art and detachment are both healing.

I was asked by a college student to help with her “Autobiographical Memories” assignment for her Psych class. I’m supposed to record fifteen memories–here are the first five:

1. I’m lying on my back in my parents’ bed getting my diaper changed by my maternal grandmother. My grandfather is in the kitchen, my father is working nights and my mother has gone to the city with her friend. The light is brown and somehow I know all of this.
2. I’m out picking tomatoes with my mother. I must be about four. It is before pre-school so maybe even three. She has to go into the house for a minute and she leaves me outside telling me to pick any of the tomatoes I want, just not the green one. As soon as she goes in I pick the green one. When she comes out I say, “I picked it anyway.”
3. I’ve heard that “fuck” is a bad word but don’t know what it means. I want to try the word out on my mother so I start saying words that rhyme with fuck in a stream-of-consciousness ramble: “Buck, luck, truck, duck, muck, suck, cluck, stuck, fuck . . .” and then a pause because I’d run out of rhymes. She was not impressed and I learned it really was a bad word, at least to say to your mom.
4. The first question I ever got wrong was in Kindergarten class. Mrs. Listener holds up a red stuffed-fabric, piece of fruit with green leaves on top and asks, “What is this?”
I raise my hand and answer, “An apple.”
She says, “No.” I am stunned. She must be wrong.
A girl in the class raises her hand, is called on and says, “A tomato.”
Mrs. Listener says, “Correct, it’s a tomato.”
How could she tell the difference? It was a poor replication and could easily have been an apple. If a representation is ambiguous can a judgment be incorrect? I sensed injustice in the world.
5. I was playing trucks with Tommy Johnson. He was six years older, lived up the street from me and was mistreated by his adoptive parents so he spent a lot of time with me and mine. He told me once that he was found in a dumpster in a garbage bag as an infant—that’s why he didn’t live with his real parents.
This time we weren’t talking, we were hauling dirt with our trucks. My truck’s wheel bent crooked and I said, “Jesus !” in disgust.
Tommy told me that I should never take the lord’s name in vain or else I’d go to hell.
“So?” I replied.
“You burn forever there.”
“Yeah, but you don’t feel it, do you?”
“That’s the problem, you do feel it—forever!”
I imagined what that would be like and how that could be possible. I realized that it was torture beyond what I could comprehend.
I decided then and there that 1.) I didn’t believe it; and 2.) If God would really do that to someone he wasn’t all he was cracked up to be.