Last week in my physical science class, a student with a contagious laugh asked, “Would you write me a college recommendation letter?”  Her table-mates, three boys, broke up.  She was serious.

I chuckled too. For one, she’s a sophomore.  College application season comes fall, senior year.  Ambitious juniors request letters in May, before summer break but they’re the exceptions: the planners, forward thinkers, movers and shakers of the teenage set.  A sophomore?  You’d think this girl’s got rocket fuel in her veins.

Alas, no – she’s unproductive, off-task: giggling, laughing, goofing.  Hardly the right stuff.  It’s what sophomores are best at, being silly, but this girl lives to stand in the comedic spotlight.  She’s the Sarah Silverman of the classroom, minus the off-color.

She got the boys roaring again when she said, “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”

Life at 53 comes with its share of indignities.  Surrounded by youth, the indignities get amplified.  I’ve slipped on a scientific supply catalog and dropped like a telephone book from a lab table, briefly disappearing from class view before popping up like nothing happened, supercharged with adrenaline, having concussed myself – left to wonder later why my temple pounded so.  I’ve reached above my head to hang a toy airplane from the foam ceiling panel when a muscle cramp set like concrete along my jawline so severe I had to walk, head askew, to the rear of the room and request the class, “Stop looking at me.”  After scarfing a cafeteria plate of rice and butter beans, I’ve farted and stood silently, letting a nattily-attired boy take the fall.

I approached her table, withholding comment, a teacher’s first technique – physical proximity – to direct students back on task when Little Sarah Silverman, immune to discipline, dropped her pencil in dramatic fashion, “I want to be a pediatrician, so I need a recommendation letter from a science teacher.”

Between convulsive fits, the boy next to her, Deeter, said, “Can you imagine taking your children to see Sarah?”

Little Sarah Silverman said, “I can’t ask my biology teacher.  Last year I had a concussion and I was forced to make-up my finals before I was ready.”

“And your story proves what?”

Little Sarah changed the subject, “I have another request.”

“Ok.”

“Would you be offended if I told you a bald joke every day for the rest of the semester?”

Research suggests that about half of all men will experience some kind of male pattern baldness by the time they are 50. It has been linked with things like poor self-esteem and body image, the perception of being old, and depression. It’s hardly that surprising then that worldwide, men spend nearly $3.5 billion naturally trying to either hide or reverse their natural hair loss.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“You don’t get bald jokes?”

“I’m not bald.  A shaved head is my choice.”

“You look offended.”

“Irrelevance is not offensive.”

“Are you really that bald,” little Sarah paused, a look thrown to her boys, “or is your neck just blowing a bubble?”

The boys exploded.

Some students are not behaviorally built for the classroom.  The unconventional recommendation letter, for me, is the easiest to write.  The kids destined for stardom, you can just tell.  The ‘good student’ model is hardly the only, or even an adequate, predictor for future success.

This past Friday the class had been quieter than normal; little Sarah Silverman was absent.  End bell about to ring, Deeter presented his phone and I saw little Sarah’s face, Face-timing.  She appeared to be a passenger in a car.  Her voice, filtered through the phone, “I have a joke.  Ready?”

“Ok.”

“You’re so bald, I can see what’s on your mind.”

In one study, researchers had participants rate photos of men with full heads of hair, and another group rate the same men, but with their hair digitally removed.  Because only their hair was modified, any differences between the groups had to be due to baldness. The bald men were rated as being:

• 13 percent more dominant.
• 6 percent more confident.
• 10 percent more masculine.
• About an inch taller.
• 13 percent stronger.
• Nearly four years older.

Great news, still, four years older?  Ouch.  I could let my hair grow, perhaps regaining the lost four years, but at what cost?  There’s a third category of hair, the lowest rated:  Thinning, But Not Bald.

I’ll be writing little Sarah Silverman her recommendation letter in eighteen months, if she still wants it.  She’s not my best student, but little Sarah reminds me, you’re at your ambitious best with nothing to hide.

Yesterday, I showed an image to my physics class of a hedgehog curled into a ball and the description:

The spines of a hedgehog obviously help protect it from predators. But they serve another function as well. If a hedgehog falls from a tree—a not uncommon occurrence—it simply rolls itself into a ball before it lands. Its thick spines then cushion the blow by increasing the time it takes for the animal to come to rest. Indeed, hedgehogs have been observed to fall out of trees on purpose to get to the ground!

Pearson Education 2019

It’s the physics unit on impulse and momentum change.  Air bags, seat belts, and crumpling bumpers are more typical examples used to demonstrate the relationship between impact force and impact duration, the idea, increase the time duration of the collision to reduce the impact force (cushion the blow) while the moving body’s momentum drops to zero.

Hannah appears interested, raises her hand, “I have a hedgehog story.  My cousin had one.  She named it Bruce Quillis.”

“And?”

“That’s my story.  It’s not really a story.”

“Class, other hedgehog names?”

“Quill Smith.”

“Quill Ferrell.”

“Prince Quilliam.”

Seated next to Hannah, Stretcher says, “I have a story.  My aunt once killed a hedgehog by drowning it.”

“That’s one sadistic aunt.”

“No, wrong idea.  She drowned it in the bathtub.”

“And how does the bathtub make her less sadistic?”

“She was giving it a bath.”

“Hedgehogs require grooming?”

Stretcher says, “She got distracted, left to do something else.  Hedgehogs can’t swim.”

Someone else says, “They’re soft if you pet them in the right direction.”

I look at Blatt’s tablet and see a paused Youtube video, titled ‘Hedgehogs Swimming’.  Blatt turns his tablet to Stretcher, “Hedgehogs can swim.”

Stretcher shrugs, “Baby hedgehog.  They can’t swim.”

Rayva says “Hedgehogs are illegal in Georgia.  I tried to get one.”

I ask, “Before or after you discovered they were illegal?”  Rayva is silent and drops her head, acting like she’s taking notes.

Hedgehogs are much smaller than, and unrelated to, porcupines. Hedgehogs are not considered rodents, they’re insectivores.  Hedgehog spines do not detach like a porcupine’s quills.  Porcupines that shoot their quills like projectiles are a myth.

Young hedgehogs may lose their spines in a process called ‘quilling’ but they’re replaced as they age into adults.  Spines may be permanently lost due to disease or under stress.

Sally dug into her backpack and extracted a plastic bag containing her blood-stained wisdom teeth (permanently lost to the dentist just yesterday) and asked if anyone would like to see them.  She said her blood was taken and centrifuged (referencing first semester’s unit on centripetal forces) to separate the platelets, apparently used in her recovery treatment.

In Britain, wild hedgehogs are considered threatened by habitat loss and vehicular hedgicide.  In America, it is illegal to keep a hedgehog as pet in California, Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Maine, NYC, Pennysylvania, and Washington D.C.

Hedgehogs are used as croquet balls by the Queen of Hearts in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

The most common hedgehog pet species are hybrids of the white-bellied hedgehog and North African pygmy.  Hedgehogs can be socialized by tender pet owners, taught to trust being handled by humans without curling into a prickly ball, but by nature, they’re loners and only ‘hook up’ for mating.

Cross a hedgehog with a poodle to smooth their coat, what would you name it?

“Poodlehog.”

“Hedgoodle.”

“Hedgie-poo.”

A former student peeked into my empty room last week.  I was expecting a current student, worried she’d forgot to make-up her final exam.  She wouldn’t pass without it.  It was a Thursday, the first of two planning days in 2019 following winter break.  You might wonder how a student could forget such a thing.  She took it Friday, a day later, and passed.

It’s always a little jarring when a former student returns, a mental struggle to place them in time and space, awkward when their name is lost too.  Superior name recall was once a source of pride, but the waves of students over the years have cured me of that.  Minutes after she’d left, it came to me – Roopsha.  Only been two years after all, a unique name (the double o, an assonance rhyme with poodle) and she’d returned once before.  I should’ve remembered.  Would humanity be better off if we remembered everything?  If you could switch on the gene for photographic memory, would you?

First, you’d have to believe there is a gene, or gene combination, for photographic memory.  There isn’t.  How do I know?  Because there is no such thing as photographic memory.  An article in Scientific American, “Even a winner of the memory Olympics still had to keep sticky notes on the refrigerator to remember what she had to do during the day.”  I once had a parent call me on the last day of school to demand I add points to her child’s final grade, points her child deserved that I’d supposedly promised and failed to deliver, this mother telling me she believed her daughter over me because her daughter ‘kept a thorough system of sticky notes at her bedroom desk to keep track of such things’.

Some take pride in never forgetting a face, but most of us remember faces better, we remember visual material better than non-visual.  Seems we all have a kind of photographic memory.  It’s the few who combine intense study over years with better-than-average innate ability who seem to possess a remarkable skill.

I remember Roopsha had impeccable study habits: intense attention, note-taking, kept an agenda, planned ahead.  She stood out for the type of question, less about physics, more about logistics, like the classic, ‘how many questions on the test?’ Or, ‘can we round 9.8 to 10 for gravity?’ Or ‘is pen ok?’  Explaining the hard stuff, how to think about the physical world, can wear a teacher out, but the easy stuff, the sheer volume, is tiresome too.  Politeness and sincerity matter.  Roopsha oozed both and I came to enjoy her earnest questions, unnecessary as I felt them to be.

Today she’s a sophomore at MIT majoring in biomedical engineering.  Roopsha’s high school science fair project won acclaim at the County level and maybe the State too, I don’t remember.  She’d been an intern at the time and assisted a researcher at Georgia Tech.  Or Emory.

Now she’s researching the human genome, cataloguing proteins, a challenge shrinking her library of proteins.  She mentioned protein folding and synthesis, cellular somethings-or-other, microbial mish-machinations and I nodded along like it was all very interesting and made perfect sense.

On MIT’s website, there are  many young women in the images wearing lab coats and latex gloves.  No Roopsha though. On MIT News, an article discussed a gene form that’s been linked to Alzheimer’s.  “The researchers also found that they could eliminate the signs of Alzheimer’s in brain cells by editing the gene with CRISPR.”  Roopsha had referenced CRISPR technology and I said, “That reminds me of a short story I’d read over the holidays.”

It’s a story set in a future world where CRISPR gene-editing technology is mass-marketed to humans for the purpose of selecting traits for their lawn, pets, and children.

Roopsha said, “You know there are reports the Chinese have used this technology to clone a human baby.  I don’t know if I believe the story or not.”

“Healthy skepticism is the hallmark of a good scientist.  T.C. Boyle mentioned the Chinese pioneering the CRISPR technology in his story.”

Pulling out her phone, she asked, “What’s the title?”

“Are We Not Men?”

Roopsha said, “You should check out the movie, ‘Gattaca’.  And a novel called ‘Beggars in Spain.'”

In 2011, NASA published a list of its most scientifically plausible science-fiction movies.  Gattaca (1997), starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman made #1.  The theme is eugenics, a society where children are born with predetermined genetic traits.  The fictional society in the novel, ‘Beggars in Spain’ is split between the non-genetically modified (The Norms) and the modified to not need sleep, the sleepless gaining unfair advantage.

I jotted her recommendations thinking I’d need to forfeit sleep to get to these. 

***

CRISPR technology is touted as ‘democratized gene editing’  because the technology makes it super easy to snip DNA segments.  In effect, any old plumbing researcher with a pair of microscopic scissors and tweezers can mess with life’s fundamental building blocks.

You don’t need a lab coat, a petri dish, and university funding to mess with life’s fundamental blocks.

On Christmas Day at my sister’s I met McBaker.  Or Mick.  Or Baker.  Or Machine Gun.  Depending on who you ask.

My sister Rose’s husband picked the puppy up Christmas Eve at what he’d hoped wasn’t a puppy mill in a northeastern Ohio town I’d never heard of – Dundee – a town whose existence I briefly doubted; Dundee exists alright, it’s there in Wikipedia, 71 miles south of Cleveland in Tuscarawas County.  Tuscarawas is a Native American word meaning ‘open mouth’.

The puppy gnawed on my nephew’s socked foot with a weak jaw.

Poodles are apparently crossed with any breed.  The naming convention is biased toward oodles, doodles, and poos:  Malamoodle, Giant Schnoodle, Dalmadoodle, Eskapoo, Jackapoo, Poovanese, and Pootalian.  The list goes on:  Poodle, Woodle, Foodle, and Saint Berdoodle.  From a list of 112 Poodle mixes on dogbreedinfo.com, I counted three that excluded -oodle or -poo from the name, for good reason: Rattle, Rottle, and Daisy Dog.

Poodles crossed with Pit Bulls are Pit Boodles.

The hairless red pit bull, a taut muscular hide the color of a ripe maraschino, has a great name: Cherry Pit.  Cherry pits do not exist.  They’re the pigment of fiction writer T.C. Boyle’s imagination, bred to be germ-free in his short story, “Are We Not Men?”

Inside her home, my sister followed her Mini-Goldendoodle bent over with a spray bottle of pee-be-gone in one hand, damp sponge in the other.

The puppy needed a name.  Baker Mayfield-mania has overtaken northeastern Ohio as well as my sister’s household of three teenage boys.

Their last two dogs were named O’Malley and Finnegan.  The puppy’s working name was McBaker.  Shortened to Mick, or Baker.

My wife said McBaker wasn’t Irish, it’s Scottish.  How would she know this, I wondered?  Last year, my wife had submitted her own DNA to ancestry.com.  She knows things.

I like Peat.  Not Pete.  Peat.  Peat bogs are in Ireland.  Peat is burned to keep you warm (and cuddly).  I texted Rose my idea.  You could call him Peaty.  She texted back, “Dog’s don’t recognize their names for 12 weeks.  There’s time to change.  The boys have settled on Mick.”  The dog seller called, “How’s Charlie?”  Rose wondered, “Who’s Charlie?”

In a Sam Pickering essay collection, “Letters To A Teacher”, in the very first chapter on the first page, he writes of the value of forgetfulness:

“The heartache of being human is that often when we act selflessly and with good intentions we bruise others.  For teachers surrounded by children who at times seem sadly vulnerable the heartache rarely ends.  No matter how well intentioned teachers are, they will bump those about them.  Two things enable teachers to cope.  The first is simply forgetfulness.  Life pushes so much at us that a specific event rarely clogs the mind for a long time.  In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Mole and Ratty search for Portly, a lost baby otter.  They rescue Portly, finding him sleeping between the hooves of Pan, the deity of the natural world.  Pan bestows the gift of forgetfulness upon Mole and Rat, “lest,” Grahame writes, “the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.”

The second thing that enables teachers to cope, Pickering writes, “the real effects of teaching remain mysterious, something that complicates attempts to define good teaching.  Almost never do teachers know exactly how their words, or actions, affect students.  Moreover, if we really believed that everything we said shaped students, we would be too terrified to speak.”

And we’re all just passengers tonight

And we’re all just traveling through our lives

We will reach our destination

So just hang on for the ride

Say a prayer and close your eyes

It’s just a little turbulence.

~ Bowling For Soup

Cheryl sat next to me frantically fanning herself in the window seat, 29E, on Delta flight 804, CLE to ATL on Friday, December 28th, 2018.  She kept her window shade pulled down.  Foreboding clouds an unreliable reference, but I prefer seeing them anyway.  I sat in the aisle seat listening to music through headphones, trying to read.  The plane bounced around pretty good on its descent.  A healthy storm front had swept across the eastern US.  Cheryl claimed the pilot gave no warning and I was oblivious.

To deal with the motion, the bumpy ride, you’re supposed to imagine a rollercoaster ride.  At the amusement park, you pay good money for the thrill of acceleration.  Why not enjoy the fun, courtesy of Delta?

Has anyone ever accepted this?  If it were that fun, the airline industry would charge a fee, changing course hundreds of miles to provide passengers the supposed universal thrill of jouncing through inclement weather.

No one enjoys turbulence.  Some are better at psychologically dealing.  Out of the corner of my eye, I take comfort in the experienced, calm travelers placidly turning a page or sipping a cocktail, and I mimic best I can.  I keep my head down although I’m reading the same sentence over again.  I reflect on all the flights I’ve heard or read about that have met their demise due to turbulence on approach:  zero.  I think about the physics, the normal force, how it changes, unexpectedly, unpredictably; a dance whose secret steps exist between aluminum tube and gusting wind, engine thrust and pressure gradient.  The normal force is just the seat pushing upward on your bottom.  We’re made aware of only when it changes.  When the normal force increases, we feel heavy; it drops away, we feel light.

I think about relative motion.  Unbelted flight attendants caught in the aisle suddenly fly up to crack their heads on the cabin ceiling – it’s actually the airplane dropping while the unbelted stay in place.  Inertia.

On a rollercoaster, there’s a point of contact, the steel rail in view, just ahead, anticipatable.

It’s safe to say the baby, a girl, age seven months or so, being held by her father and looking back at me from one row up, across the aisle, had never been on a rollercoaster before.  This may have been the baby’s maiden flight.   She gave away no tells, although, in hindsight, I thought I saw a look of contentment under her wispy blonde locks, a well-fed, happy tummy look.

Airplanes can roll, pitch, and yaw, which is to say, they tip every which way.  The engine’s ominous revving reminds me the plane can move three additional ways, translationally.  The wonderful feeling of six degrees of freedom at work, riding the storm out.

The disconnect between the motion you see and the motion you feel overwhelms your senses and makes you dizzy.

Another baby, or young child, in the last row of the plane maybe eight rows behind us screamed like a banshee.  The banshee, you’ll remember, were flying creatures, those colorful winged pterodactyls the Na’vi rode in the movie Avatar.  The key to harnessing the flight power of the banshee was to neurally connect with the creatures by braiding your hair with their tails.  I knew Cheryl’s nerves were frayed when she kept looking to the rear of the plane to witness the blood-curdling source and said, “That scream cannot be coming from a human.”  Cheryl told me later that one of two children seated right behind us asked their father across the aisle in a preternaturally calm voice, as if she’d received penance for the sin of coveting her sibling’s toys, “Daddy, are we going to die?”

I didn’t hear a thing, listening to the recently departed (RIP) Lemmy Kilmister overwhelm my vestibular system with his gravelly growl, delivered like an ice pick to my auditory canal, courtesy of Bose, singing Motorhead’s version of Chuck Berry’s Run Run Rudolph.  A line in the song goes, “Then away went Rudolph, whizzing like a Saber jet” referencing, I believe, the North American F-86 Sabre, sometimes called the Sabre-jet, the first ‘swept wing’ jet fighter employed by the U.S. in the Korean War (1950-1953).  Makes sense as Chuck Berry’s version was released in 1958.  The swept wing was unique for angling backward from the body of the plane rather than at ninety degrees.  The swept wing reduced air drag and improved dog fighting maneuvers.

I offered my precious headphones to Cheryl.  She listened for awhile but Stevie Nicks rasping Silent Night only seemed to exacerbate her misery.

Two purple-clad flight attendants, one tall, one short, on top of each other, haltingly walked, the tall one practically pushing the short one, either by training or just frantic, I’m not certain. They clasped the headrests to steady themselves on their tandem wobble to the rear.  The shorter attendant had her own issues, but the taller took one look at Cheryl on passing and said, “Oh Dear God, grab your bag already,” in a tone that suggested Cheryl was acting childish, or worse, over-acting like a child, think Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.

Weeks ago, Cheryl and I watched The Christmas Chronicles on Netflix, a movie in which a pair of siblings accidentally crash Santa’s sleigh.  The sleigh was equipped with a glowing control to show percent Christmas spirit, ebbing worldwide as the siblings teamed with Santa on a quest to repair the sleigh and save Christmas.  Kurt Russell played Santa and you could tell he enjoyed over-acting his role.  A slim Santa who absolutely does not do ‘Ho-Ho-Ho’.  One night during our holiday stay with my mom, we watched Smokey and the Bandit.  Burt Reynolds and Sally Field played it understated, cool and hot, respectively, but Jackie Gleason, as Sheriff Buford T. Justice, gloriously over-acted.  Eye-bulging, spitting proclamations of stature, “Boy, do you know who I am?  I – am – Sheriff – Buford – T – Justice – of – Texas!” stole the show.

Too short a flight for a movie, I chanced a look, saw Cheryl’s eyes squeezed shut, lower lip trembling, like she was trapped in a nightmare unable to wake.

“Eric,” Cheryl said, nails digging into my wrist, driving her head back into the headrest, “get me off this plane.”

There are lines on OK Go’s song, Upside Down & Inside Out, that go, “Don’t know where your eyes are, but they’re not doin’ what you said.  Don’t know where your mind is baby, but you’re better off without it.”  The video for this song was filmed on a Zero-G flight.

I reached into the pouch on the seat-back and found the barf bag.  I puffed it open and comforted Cheryl by saying, “Here.  Take it.”  And then I noticed the baby across the aisle, staring.  The baby’s contented look was replaced by another, more dangerous look.

The Vomit Comet is the nickname for a jet ride (a modified Boeing 727) you can take to simulate weightlessness.  The ride is offered by a company called Zero-G who promise you will float like an astronaut and fly like a superhero.  The plane follows a parabolic trajectory, the same as a projectile in free fall.  As passenger, you’ll free fall along with the plane for 20 to 30 seconds.  For the privilege of fifteen of these half-minute parabolic maneuvers, you pay $4950 plus 5% tax. 

Martha Stewart and Stephen Hawking are quoted on the webpage, both using ‘amazing’ to describe the experience.  I found an interview with a Zero-G pilot who said, “I don’t really keep any stats, but it amounts to a rule of thirds – one-third violently ill, the next third moderately ill, and the final third not ill at all.”

I failed to anticipate the violently ill third which included my wife, and now the baby who blew a pale yellow stream of baby chunks into her father’s face. He turned his head and held the baby at arms’ length.  Mom pressed the call button but of course no attendant was unbelting.  The plane’s still bouncing, the baby’s got a poker face, and a dribble of partially digested goo on her chin.  To my left, the man across the aisle, directly behind the baby, was wiping his shirt and pants with a wet nap. I looked over at Cheryl.  I did not share the scene.

Motion simulators can duplicate six ways to move (six degrees of freedom) using three pairs of hydraulic actuators sandwiched between motion platforms in an arrangement called a hexapod.  Motion simulators are either occupant-controlled (like flight simulators used to train pilots and astronauts and teen drivers) or passive-rider (like theme park rides).

An airplane can rotate three ways: yaw, pitch, and roll.  Cars, for the most part, are not free to rotate like planes, but the black Firebird Trans Am that Burt Reynolds’ Bandit drove sure did.  Every spin-out was a yaw, and the jump, nose up across the incomplete bridge, nose down onto the football field was a pitch.  Sally Field’s character gyrating out of her wedding gown while in the passenger seat caused the Trans Am to roll as did the scene (presumably, as it was left to the imagination) where Bandit finally removed his cowboy hat, leaving it perched and rocking atop the radio antennae.

There are straight-line equivalents to rotation’s yaw, pitch, and roll.  They have interesting technical names:  sway, surge, and heave.

The baby kept it together and so did Cheryl, neither surging nor heaving the rest of the flight.  Although it did take Cheryl several hours of not swaying at home alone in bed to fully regain 100% Christmas spirit.

Last night, I watched a 3-minute National Geographic video clip of a Swedish man skating alone on a thin layer of black, river ice winding through a wilderness.  The visual is arresting. The video is captioned. I watched without sound, yet sound is what the video had to offer.

I believed I knew what it sounded like before I heard it.    I invented my own ethereal soundtrack: a low haunting whistle, a hollow drone, a mellifluous fluting.  Whatever the sound, it had to be beautifully spooky.

Inevitably, cracks emerged – I wondered, how safe?  I was skeptical. I watched the graceful solo skater.  Who’d do this without a team? A rescue team, on standby.  Or, was this adventure analogous to a free-solo ascent on Yosemite, the terrifying reality of a fall, or in this case, an unwanted breakthrough, ever present?

On Christmas Eve, George Bailey was on his own suicide mission in It’s a Wonderful Life, standing on a bridge, before his Guardian Angel, Second-Class appeared.  The Angel jumped off the bridge before George could, turning the suicide table, compelling George to save the Angel.

The Angel grants George the wish of having never been born.  Can you imagine? I mean, can you imagine your hometown, your family’s life in your hometown without you, as if you’d never been?  It’s quite the lofty premise. That by abandoning your entire existence, your small sliver of the world is left worse off.

In my own version of It’s a Wonderful Painesville Life, I cannot envision altering my hometown’s name, it’s still Painesville.  But Painesville’s recreation park has a Little League baseball field, named after a beloved local family, Calhoun Field, and I think maybe my LL participation played a part.  Without my team’s perennial losing (in part, a credit to my noodle-arm pitching and hitting, and father’s Buttermaker-esque coaching style) to Calhoun’s team, contributing to the Calhoun success and notoriety, the field name could have gone to some other, more successful coach, someone greedier (Scrooge Field?) who skimmed from the park concession stand and operated as slumlords in the nearby lakeside harbor village, contributing to its declining real estate value and ultimate conversion to a uranium-processing facility for the nuclear power plant just east of this former Eden.

And what about my younger brother Ed’s Hall of Fame football career at Mount Union?  Suppose it never came to be because Ed had no older brother to goad and challenge him, whose athletic prowess (a credit to my being older) Ed would eventually far surpass.  Maybe Ed never aspires to play college football, and the entire Mount Union dynasty, through some strange cause-and-effect, dominos-falling-awry scheme, never win any of those numerous D-III Championships.

Maybe without me, little sister Rose, rather than raising a handsome, successful family with dog, never develops into a fully mature, self-determined adult.  Instead, Rose falls prey to drug addiction from staying locked in her bedroom all of her tween years, stunting her mental and physical growth, never motivated to leave the house since no one was there (me) blasting Get the Knack and Live at Budokan on the turntable in my wall-sharing bedroom in our small home, driving her outside to commiserate with the neighbors and otherwise lead an active, healthy lifestyle.

Even wife Cheryl who, without me, marries unlucky, divorces, marries unlucky again, divorces again, then moves to Mexico, changes careers, leaving marketing for tequila distribution where she cuts all family ties, marries a drug lord and develops alcoholism.

In real life, the actress who played George Bailey’s little girl, Zuzu (in the movie, laying in bed she gave a wilting flower to her dad to paste back the dropped petals) had seven children of her own, one of whom committed suicide at age eighteen.

George Bailey loses hearing in one ear, saving his brother from an ice break on a pond, but the hearing loss is ultimately perceived as a blessing.

At the end of the movie, when George stands on the bridge, contemplating life’s hardships, he realizes that the life his Angel had erased, was reinstated when the policeman recognizes him and George tastes blood in his mouth.  The final confirmation: George finds Zuzu’s petals have materialized in his pants’ pocket.  The rose petals represent the emotional, spiritual, and financial support of George’s family and community in hard times.

I watched the video of the skater on thin black ice again, this time with the sound on: the eerie pinging, an enchanting echo.

The video captions suggest the importance of planning.  The advice, like checking temperature and atmospheric conditions, is obvious.  Other advice, like skating in groups sounds good, or bad. The ice flexes under the skater’s weight.  My favorite advice, ‘Take satellite images before you go.’

The Swedish skater, a mathematician, explained the appeal of this complicated challenge, “If it doesn’t work, you learn from your mistake and try again.”

GHSA 7A Football Championship

Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta, GA

December 12^th, 2018

Milton 14 – Colquitt County 13

The US Geological Survey reported a 4.4 magnitude earthquake, centered just north of Chattanooga, TN, shook north Georgia at 4:15am on December 12^th, 2018.  I was up at the time, thinking, that’s weird, a big gust of wind must’ve shook the house.  I walked to the window and saw the limbs and leaves motionless and forgot all about it until I heard the news report, still not dawning on me until I heard the time of occurrence.

The biggest aftershock occurred about 20 hours later that evening.

Five scores, four lead changes; two blocked field goals, one by each side; one field goal rejected, clanked high off the upright; a 57-yard field goal attempt with the distance, wide-right; four kick-offs beyond the end zone; three kick-offs returned to mid-field; one goal line interception; one 66-yard touchdown pass; two speedy interchangeable tailbacks; one wildly athletic QB; three fourth downs converted on the game winning touchdown drive; one epic game, one epic season.

This might be where I catalog the ups and downs of the season, the late game loss to cross-town rival Roswell, and earlier, the second game of the season victory against Archer, a 2018 final four state playoff team, and even earlier in the season, perhaps a reference to a pre-season scrimmage.  But no.  I did not attend any of those games.  I did attend a summer scrimmage, a seven-on-seven drill, but it was another team, my nephew’s, another state, Ohio. My sister’s boy playing for Lake Catholic High School against my alma-mater, Painesville Riverside, who capped their regular season a few weeks ago with a first-ever playoff victory on a game-ending, fifty yard Hail Mary completion to a player whose mom I graduated with.

I make no claim to the Milton team’s success, other than teaching two of the starters, a linebacker and defensive end, and in an attempt to take their minds off the game, burying them with physics problems.  Don’t believe for a second it worked.

The Milton game was the first game I’d attended in years.

By the time Friday Night Lights shine, I’m worn out, in bed, dimming the lights.

Good thing this game was on a Wednesday night, postponed four days from its original Saturday night slot, courtesy of the preemptive Atlanta United’s unplanned run to the Major League Soccer Championship Game against Portland on the night originally planned for the GHSA playoffs.

I watched some of the Atlanta United game last Saturday on tv at my brother-in-law Scott’s holiday party.  I attended the Milton-Colquitt game with him and his younger son, a freshman at Georgia Southern.  Scott played high school football at Rabun County whose team made the State 2A Final last year.  Scott had planned to attend the game last year at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, but was turned away, six of the eight championship games rescheduled that day due to snow.  A week later, Rabun County hosted the game in their own stadium against Hapeville Charter.  Scott is a mountain of a man and played football at Appalachian State where he manages to get to and watch a game every year.  His older son is a senior at Appalachian State and rides for their mountain bicycling team.

A few years ago, Appalachian State played Ohio University, my alma-mater, in the Raycom Media Camellia Bowl in Montgomery, Alabama.  Scott and I shared a (somewhat) good-natured bet on the game that Appalachian State won on a game-ending field goal.

We left the Milton game near midnight thoroughly impressed and entertained.  And worn out.

The team bus returned to Milton HS campus around 2:00 am Thursday morning.  A student told me this morning a large crowd welcomed their return. Yesterday at school was anticlimactic, as most students slept in and stayed home.

All the players wore their white GHSA Football Champion t-shirts and gray knit hats in school today.  Broad smiles everywhere.  High fives, slaps on the back.  The defensive end told me today the team will get fitted soon for Championship rings.  I hope he wears it for a short while then stores it in a display case. It took all of three months after I bought it for me to lose my senior class ring.  To this day I miss it. In some light, it was deep purple. Alexandrite, I think. I still have my varsity letter and football pin.

We’ve all got our glory days.  Our stories.  Different takes on epic.

Monday mornings, first thing, I ask for volunteers to share their weekend stories as they relate to physics or science or school activity or anything really, that might be of interest to the class.  Seated at the same table in my second period AP Physics class, two students shared their weekend stories spent out of the country.

The first student, RK, had just returned from London after an admission interview at Cambridge (his second choice; first choice, The Imperial College of London.)  A fellow student upon hearing Cambridge, asked, “What college?”

“Pembroke,” RK said, “I’m interested in medicine.”  RK said the interview was awful. “I was not prepared at all for what they asked.”

“Paint the scene, RK,” I said.  “Were you alone, seated across from a long table of five sour-faced, stuffy taskmasters in a dank, echoing room?”

“Almost as bad.  Only two people at a time, but two interviews, and yeah, the room smelled bad.  The building was beautiful but it was built before the U.S. even existed as a sovereign country.  So yeah, old.”

“Didn’t you google the most likely asked interview questions at Cambridge?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.  They only asked one question regarding my prep.  Instead, they showed me a graph, dated 1910-1920, which showed a decline in infant deaths and asked me why.  I answered, ‘immunizations’. The answer was sanitation. My first answer was water, and thinking back, the interviewer even tried to lead me to it, but I still blew it.”

RK said there were other questions, like,

• Are you aware of any recent viral outbreaks in the UK?
• Can you list three viruses responsible for transmitting disease from animals to humans?
• What treatments exist?
• The source of HIV?
• How did the first HIV transmission occur?

Two chairs to the left of RK, my other student, TC, shared her trip to Brussels, Belgium.  Her mom works in quality control, apparently addressing international product complaints, and brought her daughter along on a business trip as a birthday gift.

Another student commented, “On my birthday, my mom takes me to Olive Garden.”

“I met the Belgian Santa Claus,” TC said.

“Did you ask for Belgian toys?”

“No, candy.  Their Santa is really skinny and wears a red and gold-crossed bishop’s hat.

TC had purchased a gift-shop keychain with an image of a larger-than-life atomic iron crystal (constructed of stainless steel), or as Belgians know it to be, The Atomium, a science museum first built in 1958.  The Atomic spheres are large enough to walk inside and hold exhibits. Near The Atomium, TC took a picture of a brightly lit, miniature Eiffel tower at mini-Europe, a miniature park.

TC also attended a Smurf Experience Expo in Brussels.

Apparently, viruses and atoms and Smurfs and mini-parks are really big in Europe.

We’ve bought our Christmas tree at Scottsdale Farms the last few years, ever since the Lions Club stopped selling discount trees in a strip mall parking lot between Cici’s Pizza and Performance Bicycle.

Per its website, Scottsdale Farms is a 65-acre plant nursery and 12,000 square foot barn where they house and sell furniture and home décor, local art, clothing, jewelry, and other seasonal stuff like candles, ornaments, artificial trees.  It’s a grand place.

Standing in the ‘Enchanted Tree Forest’ just outside the big barn and a few steps from the penned chickens (Do Not Touch – They Peck) and pigs, a helper told us that the $$$ tree my wife thought was nice and full was the ‘Labradoodle’ of trees.

“Are you allergic to Christmas trees?” the helper asked.

“Yes, I am,” my wife said enthusiastically.

“Then this is the tree for you.”

I half-expected the helper to lift the tree, drop it, to show how all the needles would refrain from falling off, not forming a ring of needles around the base of the tree.

This was news to me – my wife’s Xmas tree allergy – surprising me so much, I laughed at the whole notion: non-allergenic trees.  Preposterous!

I thought some more.  A Christmas tree is, after all, a tree; trees release pollen; pollen makes you sneeze; therefore, a Christmas tree makes you sneeze.  This is the kind of not-so-stunning revelation that makes me feel allergic to smart.

Then again, whoa.  Am I to believe trees release pollen even after they’re cut?  Let’s say yes, isn’t it greatly reduced? Besides, it’s nearly December, hardly pollen season.

Who’s breeding these trees, documenting their allergenic traits?  Or did I just fall prey to Sales & Marketing 101? A designer tree is pricier, so it must be better, more appealing than a humdrum, un-designed, pollen-dropping, sneeze-inducing normal tree.  Right?

The man credited for cross-breeding the first Labradoodle deeply regrets it.  He tells the story of how the first Labradoodle came to be here, if you’re interested: Psychology Today – Labradoodle Article .

His regrets include, but are not limited to: coats that still produce allergies, eye problems, hip and elbow problems, epilepsy, fits, untrainable dogs, crazy dogs – all still being sold at top dollar by unethical ‘backyard breeders’.  Ultimately, a diminishment of value for pure breeds in favor of a marketing term: designer dogs.

The Labradoodle of firs (I’ve narrowed it down to Fraser, Noble, or Nordmann) is now standing tall after one day of listing slightly as viewed from one particular angle.  With Cheryl’s help, I loosened the tree stand’s screws, repositioned the fir, then re-tightened the screws. Day two, still upright, darn near vertical.

It looks great, so robust and full it practically engulfs and hides the ornaments.

I was just about to think the $$$ worth it when my wife asks if I could smell the tree.

“I don’t smell anything either,” she said, disappointed.

Did I mention what my wife wants for Christmas?  A dog.

Today, I went into the attic to look for someone else’s inspiration.

Yesterday, a sales rep from our pest service (not the guy that actually sprays, who’d arrived minutes earlier, but the guy that sells, who happens to look just like the guy that sprays) inspected our attic for critters.  The purpose of his visit, he said, “See if there’s anything we’re missing.”

“Ok, sure,” I said, suddenly concerned that raccoons had quietly set up shop, living it up in our attic without us knowing.

The next five minutes of fear went unrealized.  “Your house looks great,” the sales rep said, “But I might suggest more insulation, save you some money, it’s specially treated with insecticide.”

I went up looking for one particular book in a box of books.  I don’t like having my books in boxes in the attic, but my bookshelves are overflowing.  I reluctantly boxed about fifty or eighty a couple years ago and remembered one of the boxed genres, science-fiction, really old sci-fi I hadn’t read in thirty years.  I was looking for a story by Harlan Ellison, Shatterday.

I’ve been paying attention to blogs lately – their themes, format, and content and one in particular, Neil Gaiman’s, a British science fiction and fantasy novelist, wrote in his blog about Harlan Ellison and a story, Shatterday, that inspired and convinced him he could write for a living.

I thought maybe years ago I’d read the story.  (And I wondered, how could I have read this and not been inspired too?)  No Shatterday, but I found a collection of Harlan Ellison short stories called Alone Against Tomorrow.  The introduction, written by Ellison in 1970, states the theme unifying the collection: alienation.

Ellison writes, “The explanation for racial strife, random violence, mass madness, the rape of our planet.  Man feels cut off.  He feels denied.  He feels alone.  He is alienated.”  Ellison quotes Oscar Wilde: “To reject one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development.  To deny one’s own experience is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life.  It is no less than a denial of the Soul.”

In Aerosmith’s song, Toys in the Attic, Steven Tyler seems to sing about alienation:

Leaving the things that are real behind

Leaving the things that you love from mind

All of the things that you learned from fears

Nothing is left for the years

Voices scream

Nothing’s seen

Real’s a dream

The first story in Ellison’s collection, Alone Against Tomorrow is titled, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

Maybe a blog is like a scream.

My wife is officially in the holiday spirit.  Yesterday, we attended my niece Audrey’s ballet show at Central Forsyth High School.  The dancers ranged in age from 6-year olds to high school seniors.  Audrey is a thin vine disguised as an eighth-grader who likes to dance and it shows.

The skills of the dancers ranged, of course, and one notices these things even trying not to, but the dancers who drew my attention all had one thing in common – they smiled.

One of the tiniest dancers, who lost her balance before the others, turned left when all others turned right, drew me in, not for the entertainment value, not for the cuteness factor (she had both), but for the joy in her smile.  Pure joy.  When you like what you’re doing, people watch you, root for you, applaud for you.

Before you hand out the Uncle-of-the-Week Award, know that this was my first time watching Audrey whose danced for years.  And it was considerably easier to turn off yesterday’s OSU-Maryland game than this Saturday’s OSU-Michigan.  Lucky Audrey.

Just this week in class, a musically astute physics student of mine asked what my favorite Nutcracker song was.  Kids often ask for my favorite this or that.  But the Nutcracker?  A first.  I couldn’t name a single song, though arcane as this knowledge might be, I still couldn’t admit it.  He let me off the hook and asked, “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”?  That’s the one.

“Good morning,” I’ll say to my first two classes of the day.  On a good day, three kids will return the greeting.  “Let’s try that again,” I’ll say, “Good morning.”  Half the class responds this time.  One day last week, I said “Let’s try that again,” and left the room for a second.  I returned through the door on the run, kept running through to the rear of the classroom and helped myself to a student’s baggie of dry Frosted Flakes, threw my head back and dumped a stream of flakes into my mouth, catching maybe half, throwing the baggie aside, and said, “Good morning.”  A resounding Good morning from the class.

That’s me smiling.