Another Level

The World Cup is going on right now in Brazil. If I had grown up playing soccer, I am sure that I would enjoy watching the games much more. As it is, I grew up playing baseball.

So now, church league softball games in Live Oak are the highlight of my week.

Whatever skills that I acquired for softball did not come easy, though...

Lumberton, North Carolina. 1989-1992.

Coach wants to put me at catcher on my Little League team, but Dad tells him that is not a good idea, because I am “bat blind.”

This means that I flinch when the batter swings in front of me as I try to catch the ball. Perhaps it is a problem that could be worked out with practice, but I have no desire to be a catcher, really. It takes too long to constantly be changing in and out of that equipment in between innings when it is my turn to hit: The shin guards, the chest protector, the helmet and mask. The shin guards and chest protector have all sorts of straps to fasten. Plus, the catcher takes a beating in every game, for sure. Pitchers throw the ball hard into the dirt in front of home plate. There are foul tips, and collisions with base runners when I am supposed to block the plate as they round third base.



Still, during one of our games while our catcher is putting on his equipment again (he made the last out at bat in the inning before), the pitcher, Matt, asks me to get behind home plate and catch while he throws a few pitches to keep his arm loose.

I do not bother to use the catcher’s mitt, but rather my regular glove that I wear at my regular position at second base.

As the pitcher hurls the ball at me, it snaps loudly against the leather pocket. That is how you know that you are catching the ball in the pocket of the glove like you are supposed to- the loud pop.

One after another he tosses to me, including a couple of breaking pitches. It occurs to me that this is one of the hardest throwing games of catch that I have ever played in my life, and it also dawns on me, now, that I am playing a level of baseball where I am expected to hit a ball traveling faster than what I am used to catching in the field.

I tell this to my dad after the game, and he gives me a look like I am a little strange, like it is an obvious observation that I have made.

***

“High school is where you really begin to learn how to play baseball,” I heard Roger Clemens say once.

Well, I am not to high school yet, but next is junior high baseball at Littlefield. Littlefield is grades 7-12, and I play second base on the junior high team.

One day at practice, we decide to use the pitching machine that the high school team does, inside the batting cage.

There is a warped spot on the rollers that shoot out the ball. Actually there is a chunk missing from the roller. If the ball hits that warped spot, then it is likely to spray the pitch anywhere. I am watching when, more than once, the machine shoots a high speed fastball right at the batter’s head.



As with becoming a catcher, I have no desire to get into the batting cage with that broken machine, and I complain to the coach.

He rolls his eyes, and I realize that I need to get in there to stay in his good graces.

Once inside, the ball never comes at my head, but my fear that it might, combined with the fact that these are the fastest pitches that I have ever tried to hit in my life, means that I have zero success putting the bat on the ball. It is highly frustrating.

“You’ve got to do something, Nathan,” the coach says. “This is how fast the pitchers will be throwing, now. Hold your bat out and bunt the ball.”

This, I can do.

In another practice, we are performing infield drills where the runner on first attempts to steal, and as second baseman I cover the bag.

The catcher hums the ball to the bag, and I go to one knee to field it. The runner sliding in hits my leg, just as the ball gets right in my face. My glove drops slightly, and the ball hits the top of my glove and barely skips over my head.

“Hmm,” the coach grunts disapprovingly. I narrowly avoided getting smashed in the face with the baseball.

Another day, the coach gets one of the pitchers on the high school team to throw to us in a simulated game.

The high school pitcher is a very hard thrower. He is also very wild, both in his pitching and in his life. He has been suspended multiple times for fighting, and I generally avoid him in the hallways.

I watched one game where he was pitching, and he threw a ball that caught the batter square in the face. The batter just stayed face down on the ground for a few minutes. When he did leave, it was with the help of other people, and he went on to the hospital.

I have no desire to get in the batter’s box against the high school pitcher, either. My younger brother is on the team, and to his credit and courage does step in against the high school pitcher. I stay on the bench, though, hoping the coach does not notice that I have not hit, yet. If the coach does notice, he says nothing about it. To my relief, the practice ends without me having to step to the plate against this wild, hard thrower.

I have a pretty decent season with the Littlefield team, though. I do not hit well, but I field my position at second base better than others who want to play there.

In 1991, the Robeson County school systems merge, and I go to Lumberton junior high school for my 9th grade year. The class is much larger than what there was at Littlefield, and the competition to make the junior high school baseball team here is much more intense.

During tryouts, I field a throw coming in from the outfield to second base. The runner is coming from first, trying to take the extra base. I catch the ball, but the runner’s slide knocks me out of the way before I can apply the tag.

The coach shakes his head at me.

“They’re going to be wearing metal spikes, now,” he says. You cover the bag like that, and you’re going to get messed up.



I think I do pretty well fielding my position in tryouts, but it is obvious that I do not have the throwing arm that other guys on the team do.

The coach watches me relay a cutoff from right field to third base. He has me do it a few more times, and I can tell he does not like what he sees as far as how quickly and accurately I can get the ball there.

Later, I field a ground ball and throw it to first the way that I always do. But the coach yells at me, “Charge the ball!”

Then he asks the rest of the team in a loud voice, “What kind of defense do we play?”

“Attack defense!” all the other players shout in unison.

Tryouts are not a pleasant experience, and neither is it a good feeling when I see the final roster posted on the gym wall early one morning when I arrive at the compound that is called the junior high school. My name is not on the list.

I realize that I have come to another level of baseball, where the ball travels faster with more breaking pitches, and the players wear metal spikes. It is a level where I am not good enough to compete, anymore.

One of the assistant coaches talks to me during an afternoon after school, encouraging me to work harder and try out for the high school team next year. But this is a transition I do not make. Instead, I join the cross country team in high school and earn a letter in that sport.

***

Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.

I enjoy a softball game this evening, playing with high school and college baseball players who wear metal spikes, throw the ball like a rocket and can hit it out of the park.

Thanks to the baseball experience that I had growing up, though, I can hold a spot on this field and with this team. The captain keeps me in for about half the game, usually, and at catcher- which is a much different position in slow pitch softball than in baseball. I do not mind being a catcher in slow pitch softball.



Playing softball is one of the most enjoyable things that I do, now.

I also understand baseball better than any other sport, so I get more enjoyment out of watching a game than with other sports.

As a little league and junior high baseball player, I escaped the experience without any broken bones, concussions or a smashed-in face.

All in all, baseball and softball have been great experiences for me.

Mother's Day

Augusta, Georgia. 1983.

“Blue,” I say.

Mom smiles and nods. The index card is colored with blue crayon on one side. She turns the card over and shows me the word “blue,” written in ink in all lower case letters. Then she sets the card down in a stack and picks up another card.

“Green,” I say…

In the nursery of the church where Dad is a preacher, we continue this exercise of learning colors. It is at this time that blue becomes my favorite color.

***

Wake Forest, North Carolina. 1983.

At Grandma Carter’s house, the exercises have become more complicated. Rather than going to kindergarten, Mom is teaching me to read at home. I will begin school in first grade in the coming months.

She holds up a large card with a series of words that form a sentence. Each word is marked with pronunciation indications for me.

“No, it is the a sound,” Mom says. “Short a, not long a. A. Say that.”

My TV time is limited while I work with Mom during the day on these sorts of activities. I can only watch for an hour.

After we finish the day’s schooling, my brother wants to use his allotment of TV time to watch a re-run broadcast of BJ and the Bear.

I lay down on the floor, with one of the green pillows from the couch over my face while he sits in front of the television.
I peek out from underneath the pillow and also watch the show. I think that Mom does not notice this.

When the show finishes, my brother obediently turns off the television, but I protest that it is my turn for an hour.

“No,” mom says. “You weren’t fooling me with the pillow. That counts as your time.”

“But I couldn’t see anything,” I argue.

It does no good.

After I become an adult, Mom tells me that during the time when she taught me at home, she would often get frustrated with herself and worry that she was not doing a good job with me.

But the memories that I have of her and that part of my life are much more pleasant than my memories of when I began first grade at Millbrook K-12 school. I would have preferred to stay at home with her to continue my education.

***

Lumberton, North Carolina. Mid 1980s.

Many evenings after mom has spent a day teaching school and then come home, cooked and served supper, she stands at the sink washing dishes. The sink has a window to the yard and fields outside, and Mom is content with that.

We do not have a dishwasher in the house out in the country where we live at Route 7, Box 568B.

I watch her sometimes, looking at the back of her head as she gazes out the window and scrubs dishes without looking down at them.

“As long as I have a window, that is enough. I don’t need a dishwasher or want one.”

In addition to her regular State job of teaching children with mental handicaps, she is now also going to teach blind children with mental handicaps. She spends many days over the summer in between school sessions teaching herself Braille.

I listen to the sound of the heavy metal Braille typing machine. Mom has to mash down the keys very hard to create the raised dots on the special paper. It is a loud machine, and she has to lug it around wherever she goes.

***

Lumberton, North Carolina. 1990s. Saturdays.

We live in town, now, in a middleclass community called Lakewood Estates.

After cooking us a breakfast of scrambled eggs, grits, bacon, and biscuit toast with butter and jelly, Mom sets about the task of cleaning the house.

The chemicals that Mom is using in the bathrooms are too strong for me. I step outside onto the front porch and get some air.

After Mom finishes making the showers and sinks and toilets spotless, she starts on cleaning the hardwood floors. She goes over the whole house with a broom, and then a mop sprayed with another cleaning chemical of some sort.

When that task is finished, she does everyone’s laundry. Dad, hers, my brother’s and mine.

In between these activities, she stops to make us sandwiches for lunch. Then in the early afternoon, she cooks dinner for us. After dinner, she cleans up the kitchen and washes the dishes.

We now have a dishwasher, thank goodness, but Mom spends about as much time pre-washing the dishes, pots and pans before putting them in the machine as she did before when she stood looking out the window over the sink at the old country house.

Sundays.

While I am still sleeping, Mom gets up at 5am to study her Sunday school lesson and work on the lunchtime meal.

After church, the family sits down to a feast of barbecued chicken, or fried chicken, or roast beef, or ham, or sometimes all of this. There are green beans, mashed potatoes or white rice with gravy, corn, sweet potatoes, black eyed peas, green peas, and biscuits.

When we have finished stuffing ourselves on the tremendous food with a certain taste that only my Mom knows how to make, I go to the living room with Dad and my brother, and we turn on the television to watch the NFL games or baseball games or college basketball games.

Mom continues to work in the kitchen, cleaning up everything and packaging the leftovers that will be dinner tonight.

Monday morning, it will up again early for her to deal with the kids at school, followed by cooking dinner and cleaning the dishes afterward in the evening.

Dad, my brother and I dominate the television set, watching whatever we want- usually sports if it is on.

Mom does not like watching television. When Mom has finished the dishes, she goes back to the bedroom and reads a novel until she falls asleep on top of the covers of the bed. Many times I walk to the back bedroom and see that she is asleep with an open book on her lap, across her stomach or even across her face. It is not even nine o’clock yet.

***

Present Day.

Mom has Parkinson’s disease, now. It is slowly increasing on her left side. Unless she concentrates on it, her left hand trembles. She notices other people noticing this, though of course it is not something she chooses to dwell on.

“I do the best I can with it, each day,” she says.

Mom has not had a sense of smell for years, and I have all ideas that it was destroyed from all those chemicals she used time after time in cleaning the bathrooms for our family.

I wonder as well if the Parkinson’s disease could come from that. No one knows what causes Parkinson’s, but all those years of working with difficult children in the State school system, all those years of also making meals for us, constantly cleaning the house and our clothes and the dishes, a never ending cycle of exhaustion- that did nothing to help her body and immune system fight off the beginnings of the disease.

“A man works from sun to sun, while a woman’s work is never done,” I have heard my Dad say often.

Mom deserves so much more credit than that- a pithy rhyming expression or a blog entry.

I will never be able to repay all that she has done for Dad, my brother and me, and the love that she has given us.

Close Calls

Names (and nicknames) have been changed.

Lumberton, North Carolina. Mid 1980s.

Wal-Mart has come to Lumberton. It is not the 24 hour Super Center store that, in the mid-1990s, began sprouting up all over the country. This Wal-Mart does not sell groceries.

It is one of the biggest events in this town’s economic history. Later, when I am old enough to understand and care, I will learn that Sam Walton himself was there for the Grand Opening.

I have never liked shopping that much. Often, I instinctively tell my parents that I prefer to sit in the car and wait while they go inside whatever store it is and buy what they need to buy.

This evening, I am riding back with my Dad from somewhere. He needs to make a quick stop at Wal-Mart before we head to the house. When he parks in the lot, I tell him that I will wait in the pickup truck, a navy blue Chevy S10, while he runs inside.

So I sit quietly, watching people coming and going. Night has fallen.



I look to the back of the parking lot, farthest away from the store and from the fluorescent lamps.

There sets a huge, shiny transfer truck.

Many young boys want to be firemen, policemen, or athletes when they grow up. I have some thoughts of becoming a professional baseball player, but even at a young age I realize that I do not have the talent for it. A more serious thought is that I want to be a truck driver when I grow up. The idea of life on the open road, seeing the country, eating at restaurants or truck stops all the time, is very appealing to me.

What is unusual about this transfer truck is that it is pink in color. I have never seen a pink tractor trailer truck before, and I want to get a closer look. I clamber out of Dad’s pickup and walk to the back of the lot.

Whoever drives this truck takes real care of it. The chrome of the wheels and bumpers is polished. It is very clean.

Why is the truck pink, I wonder.

“Would you like to see the inside?”

I turn around, and a man is standing behind me.

“Sure, that would be neat,” I respond.

The man steps up on the running board and opens the passenger side door.

“Step up here,” he says. “I will go around to the other side.”

I am too short to see much of the inside of the truck from standing on the running board, so I climb up into the cabin.

The man is already up in the driver’s seat.

The inside of the truck is covered in dark red leather. I am fascinated by all the gears and instruments on the panels. It also has a sleeper cabin. The man tries to explain to me what the different knobs and gauges are for. As he points to things, his hand comes a little close to the scruff of my neck.

This sets off warning bells in my head. That is not something people usually do with me, not even my parents.

“I’ll start up the engine so you can see how it works,” the man says.

“That’s okay,” I say, and hop down out of the truck as quickly as I can.

I do not shut the door, and hustle back toward the front of the store and Dad’s pickup.

When I get to the pickup, I turn around and look back at the pink transfer truck. The man has cranked the engine, and the big piece of machinery is slowly rolling off the lot, probably toward Interstate 95, which is just a couple of miles down the road.

Perhaps the man was okay, but it was unusual for me to suddenly feel a warning like that.

When Dad comes out of the store, I tell him what happened. He gets angry with me.

“Don’t ever do anything like that again!” he says. “That man could have driven off with you, and I would have no idea what happened to you.”



***

Mid 1980s.

I am standing outside Allenton elementary school at recess, talking to my friends.

Suddenly, I get hit from behind and go to the ground.

Punching me is George, a fellow sixth grader whom everyone picks on for some reason. George makes low grades, misses school a lot, and I think his home life is not the best situation.

Maybe even I have talked about George behind his back, though I have nothing against him. If I have said things, it is because everyone else does it and I want to fit in with the group. This is probably why George has tackled me and is now hitting me. He and I are both small for our age, and he figures that he can take me on in a fight.

I am able to push him off me, though, and quickly get to my feet. While he is still on the ground, I kick him as hard as I can in the ribs.



He gets up and stands in my face.

“Kick a man while he’s down, do ya?” He mutters to me, nose to nose.

I really do not want to fight, and I can tell he does not, either. We let other students separate us.

Word gets back to the teachers about what happened. Rightly or wrongly, George gets punishment of some sort. Nothing happens to me, though, as I am an honor roll student and did not start the fight- at least I did not physically start it.

Later that year, the fight forgotten about, one of the janitors asks George and me to help him empty some trash into the dumpsters behind the cafeteria after lunch. This will make us late going back to class.

As the janitor slides the metal door open to the dumpster, George pukes.

“I’m sorry,” he says to the janitor. “That smell. I can’t stand that smell.”

This worries the janitor, and he realizes that he has probably asked us to do something we should not.

“Y’all get on back to class, now,” he says.

I can barely understand his thick Robeson County accent.

We both have to answer to the teacher for why we are walking into class late, and I believe that the janitor gets into some trouble, though I know George has also helped him with his work in the past.

***

1990.

The school systems of Robeson County have just merged. I am in 8th grade at a school that has only about 600 students combined for grades 7 seven through 12. Next year, though, I will attend a much larger junior high school. I am not looking forward to that experience.

Mom is a school teacher, so instead of riding the bus home, I wait for her after school.

One of the janitors of the school is a squat balding man with a mustache. His nickname is “Toad,” and I do not know what his real name is. Though I am short for my grade level, I am still taller than Toad.

Toad is friends with some students better than others. He has taken an interest in me, now that he knows I wait after hours for a while before I go home with mom. He has conversations with me, usually about Duke and UNC basketball or Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.

One day, I am sitting on the wooden fence railing outside after school. He walks up to me, carrying a mop with a wooden handle.

He starts giggling as he jabs and pokes at me with the end of the handle. I smile and laugh at first, but it gets annoying when he keeps doing it.

“Cut it out, Toad!” I say to him.

He holds the mop end of the handle close to his hip, and it occurs to me that the whole thing is way too amusing for him. I bat the handle away with my hand.

“Cut it out!” I repeat. He stops and walks away.

Another day, I am walking down the hallway of the school after hours. I go by the supply closet, and Toad is inside.

“Nathan, come in here!” Toad says to me.

“Why ?” I ask.

“Just come here,” he says. “I need your help with something.”

I ignore him and keep on walking.

He comes out of the supply closet, holding the mop again, a big grin on his face. He takes a few steps toward me.

This is weird, I think. I am literally ready to run from him. He sees this.

“Nathan, do you think that I would ever hurt you?”

“Yes, I do,” I say without hesitation.

The smile disappears from his face.

“That hurts me, Nathan,” Toad says. “That hurts me to my bones.”

“Sorry,” I say.

I walk off, not caring much if I really have hurt his feelings or not.

Not long after that incident, Toad disappears from the school. I notice that George is not around anymore, either.

I later am told that Toad has been accused of sexually molesting George.

Whether that is true or not, I never see Toad or George again.

***

Present Day. Live Oak, Florida.

This has been a rather morbid blog entry. I am not sure why these memories came to mind this morning.

I feel sorry for George, as he was a victim of his surroundings. My own life would probably have been a very different thing, if I had stayed in that transfer truck any longer or if I had not caught on to Toad’s strange behavior.

Of course, it is just as horrible a thing to be accused of crimes like that when you did not commit them.

Next Monday, the 24th, I dive into trials in felony court. I have three jury trials scheduled for that week. So next weekend, I doubt that I will have time to write a blog entry, as my mind will be deep into thinking about how these trials will play out.

I look forward to the challenge. The stress is there, to be sure, but I am much better suited to handling it than a day at the Post Office, believe it or not.

A History of Dog Bites

Lumberton, North Carolina. Fall 1998.

I drive my Nissan truck up the driveway of a home in the countryside of Robeson County. I know the house belongs to my old school principal. He is probably at work, now.

A white German Shepherd sits on the front porch of the house, quietly watching me, its ears perked up and alert.

I have no fear of dogs. I like dogs better than I like people, for the most part, and I certainly understand dogs better than I understand people. So I get out of my truck with no hesitation, I can see that the German Shepherd does not know what to make of me, its “fight or flight” instincts teetering back and forth.

“It’s all right, buddy,” I say.

The principal’s wife opens the door and steps out of the house as I get out of the truck. I hold up my identification card.

“Hello ma’am,” I say. “I’m working for the Census Bureau. I just need to verify the address of the house here.”

She comes down off the steps, and the dog follows her. He sits by her side looking up at me. I make a clicking noise at him, and his ears flatten for a moment in response. I assume he is satisfied that I am not a threat, now, because he casually walks off behind me.

The principal’s wife tells me the address to the home. I ask her a few more questions off my clipboard.

Suddenly, I feel a pinch on my Achilles tendon.

I turn and look down. The white German Shepherd has sneaked up behind me, very low to the ground.

“You bit me!” I say to the dog in disbelief.

The dog slinks away.



I look at the woman, and I am sure that the expression on my face shows her that I want an explanation. She looks back at me, her own expression a combination of shock at what her dog has done and concern over what I am going to do.

I decide not to make a big deal of it. Later that day, I look at my heel. There is redness and a small bruise, but it does not appear that he broke the skin.

***

Rochester, New York. June 2004.

The company that I work for is behind on its security clearance investigations in Rochester. As I am one of the few investigators who is single and without kids, I volunteer for these month long “details” in other parts of the country.

Part of my job as investigator is to go out to the places where the subject lives or has lived and find neighbors who will talk to me about them.

I knock on the screen door of a middle class home in a neat little Rochester community. A cute girl walks up from inside the house. I show her my badge and explain who I am.

She smiles at me and pushes open the door, holding it open with her hand.

I hear a dog barking inside the house. Suddenly, it comes flying out from inside, launching into the air, and biting me square on the left quad muscle above the knee. He bounces of and lands on his feet on the concrete.

“Oh my gosh!” the girl exclaims.

I am too surprised to react much. The dog and I exchange looks with each other, me looking down at him, him looking up at me. Then the dog simply turns and casually walks off, as if to say, “That’s right, I did it.” He disappears back into the house.

I am more amused by the whole situation than anything else, and I have to crack a smile. The young girl is too cute and friendly for me to get irritated.

Still, when I get back to the Strathallen Hotel, I look at my leg and see a neat circle of teeth marks. He broke the skin in a couple of places. I call my boss about a worker’s comp claim.

“I doubt anything will happen,” I say, “but I want to put you on notice, just in case I start foaming at the mouth.”

***

Western Carolina University. Spring 2008.

“Your legs are so skinny. Is that why you never where shorts?” asks a girl whom I’ve taken out on a date a few times.

She has a talent for making these off-hand comments that cut me down. It is strange for her to say this in front of everyone. She has seen my legs before.

“Well, you should know that my legs are not my best feature,” I answer.

She blushes.

It is a beautiful day, sunny and warm. It is also one of the last events of the school year for the Graduate Student Association. I have made a number friends and had some of the best times of my life with the people in this group.

We have a cookout going in the picnic area at the lower end of campus.

I toss a Frisbee with my insult prone girl friend and a couple of other guys.

One of her tosses goes wide, up under the picnic pavilion. I sprint to catch it and stop short on the concrete.
A young dog, not much more than a puppy, is tied up on a leash to one of the picnic tables. I can tell immediately that I have frightened it, and I can see the fight instinct welling up in its face.

This dog is going to attack me, I think to myself. But I cannot back up fast enough out of the range of the leash length.

A split second later, it snarls and lunges at me. Just like the dog in Rochester, it bites me on the quad above my left knee. I step off the pavilion.

“Wow!” one of the guys exclaims. “Did he bite you?”

“Yeah, he sure did,” I respond.

A different girl, the one who owns the dog, comes running up, a shocked expression on her face from what her pet just did.

This bite has broken the skin as well, and I have to wash it out in the picnic area restrooms.

It does not ruin the day or my mood, however.

The day is one of the best of my life, actually, and I am aware of that fact at that time.

***

Miami, Florida. Early 2013.

I walk between the buildings of my apartment complex, on my way to the Dadeland Mall next door and the food court to buy some dinner.

A young woman has a miniature Doberman Pinscher out for a walk. It must be a female dog, as it is in a cute little pink harness. They both have their back to me, and it is getting dark quickly in these winter shortened days.

“Don’t let me scare you,” I say as I get close.

The girl turns and smiles at me.

The little dog, though, snaps around and snarls. It runs at me, pulling hard at the harness and the leash.

“Trixie!” the girl scolds.

Then the dog manages to wiggle and slip free of the harness.

Uh-oh.

“Trixie!” the girl gasps.

I could punt Trixie over a nearby fence if I wanted, but I decide not to. Instead, I attempt to hop over the dog as she rushes up to me, but it is no good.

Determined to get me, the dog keeps jumping until she bites me hard on the left thigh right below my buttocks. Then she runs over into the grass a few yards away and hunkers down.



“Trixie! Bad dog!” the girl says as she goes over to the MinPin.

Trixie cowers in front of her as she pops the dog on the behind. Then she picks up the dog. I see one of its eyes is blue with no pupil.

“Ah, it’s blind in one eye,” I say.

“Yeah…I am so sorry,” the girl says.

I reach out my hand part way as I consider trying to pet the dog, but then I think better of it.

The girl wants to get away, and I let her. She goes back to her ground level apartment, quickly shutting the door behind her.

I continue on to the mall and get a to-go plate. Once I get back to my apartment, I examine the injury. Yep, this one broke the skin in several places through my blue jeans. Over the next few days, a nasty bruise develops as well.

I tell my parents the story, and they keep telling me to go see a doctor. I never do, though, and it eventually heals up with no problems.

***

Live Oak, Florida. December 2013.

One of the best places to eat in town is the Brown Lantern Restaurant.

My coworkers and I arrive there for lunch, not long before the Christmas holiday. Lots of trucks are parked outside, far more trucks than cars.

In the back of a white truck is a black Labrador Retriever. I can tell when the five of us get out of the car that this is not a friendly dog. It wants to be left alone. This is rare. The breed is normally very friendly.

Nevertheless, one of my coworkers, an avid hunter, goes up to the animal.

“Hey, what nice looking dog you are,” he says.

He too, can sense the dog. “You’re not very sociable, are you?” he asks it.

He reaches out and lightly touches the dog on the back of the head. When that is okay, he begins petting the dog on the ears.
The Lab enjoys this immensely, closing it eyes and leaning into the man’s hand.

After a few moments, my coworker lets go and everyone continues walking toward the restaurant entrance.

Well, I want to pet the dog, too.

“Hey, buddy,” I say to it.

I stick my left hand into the bed of the truck for the dog to smell my scent. It does not sniff it, but stands with its head askance, which should have been another warning.

Keeping my hand low, I move to pet him in his side. Suddenly the dog snaps at my hand, putting a puncture wound in the top and an even larger puncture wound into my palm.

Two of my coworkers see this happen. One grimaces, the other bursts out laughing.

I have to laugh, too, at my own stupidity.

My hand is bleeding pretty well. The dog just stares at me, now, a determined “Take that” look on its face.



What else is there to do? We go inside and I wash my hand in the restroom sink. I can tell this is the worst dog bite that I have had. It is hard to get it to stop bleeding, and it hurts to move my fingers.

I go out and ask one of the waitresses if they have a bandage. She believes that they do.

I go and sit down with my coworkers, holding my hand in some napkins, trying not to ruin their appetite. My own appetite is gone.

One of the waitresses comes to our table with some band aids.

“I was told there is a guy in a suit who is bleeding,” she says.

“That’s me,” I say.

She gives me the band aids.

The Brown Lantern is my usual Friday night hangout, and I have settled into the bar numerous times since moving to Live Oak in June.

After the waitress leaves, I remark, “As many times as I’ve been here and as many conversations as I’ve had with these waitresses, I’m still just ‘a guy in a suit.’”

This draws a laugh from my coworkers.

“You know, dogs are supposed to be pretty good judges of character,” one of them says.

Back at the office after lunch, the secretaries hook me up with hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin.

The wounds heal with no problems and I can move my digits like normal, though the scars are still present as I type this blog entry.

The Secret to Speed

Lumberton, North Carolina. Mid 1980s.

I can feel the air in the house breeze past my ears. I am running fast, faster than at any other time in my life. I go from my bedroom at the end of the hall to the living room in three seconds.

The reason I am able to run so fast is because of what is chasing me. For those three seconds, right at the back of my head, so close as to almost touch my hair and make my scalp tingle, is a sharp axe blade.

No one holds the handle to the axe. It floats in a dark vacuum of space. About a foot behind the handle, though, are two glowing red eyes. The eyes have no pupils, but they are focused on my spine and the back of my skull.



I reach base- the couch- and the axe and the eyes disappear.

This is all part of a game that I invented to motivate me to run faster. It only works for sprints, but sprints are all that I try to do as a child. I will not begin regularly running distances of more than a mile until 1990, when I am 13 years old.

Dad asks me why I run through the house like that, and I tell him the story of what is chasing me. He thinks this is amusing, and in turn tells me a story of when he was a kid. He imagined that there were little needles or pins sticking out from the heels of his shoes. The pins would pop him in the rear end as he ran, causing him to go faster, like a horse that is spurred.

***

It is Vacation Bible School week at my church, Hyde Park Baptist. I always hate these. I have just gotten out of public school for the summer, and now mom and dad are making me go to school again at the church, where we listen to Bible stories and have to make crafts out of ice cream sticks.

Late in the warm evening, while my parents socialize inside the sanctuary, I play hide and seek with the other kids of the church. Night has fallen, which of course makes it much easier to hide.

I can hear the boy who is “It” around the other side of the fellowship hall.

“Ready or not, here I come!” he shouts.

Base is on the other side of the fellowship hall, too- one of the columns on the front porch area. My plan simply is to sprint around to the front of the building, opposite the side from which the boy is coming. I need to be fast, so that if he sees me, then he will not have time to change direction, meet me at the front and tag me before I can touch base.

The axe appears behind me, along with the glowing red eyes. They fly toward me and I take off, sprinting as fast as I can through the darkness.

The axe blade can almost part the hair on the back of my head, but despite that pressing situation, I look to my left as I run, to see if there are other children hiding around the side of the building to where I am running, opposite of the boy who is “It.”

Turning my head to the side does not affect how fast I can run- or so I think.

To my shock, the red eyes catch up and karate chop me across the neck. I jerk to a sudden stop, my feet go flying up in the air in front of me. I land flat on my back, stunned, staring up at the stars.

What just happened? For a moment, I think I see the red eyes in the air a few feet above me, looking down. It was not the axe that hit me. The blow to my neck and throat did not feel like a blade. My head is still attached to my body, I think, though I lie very still for a few moments.

Finally, I sit up. No one saw me take the fall. I look around and see a steel cable, supporting a wooden power line pole for the church. The cable descends at a 45 degree angle from the top of the pole down to an anchor point on the ground. The cable is what clothes-lined me.



I rub my throat area and wow, it is sore. I immediately quit the game and go running to mom inside the church sanctuary to show her my neck.

“Nathan, what happened to you?”

I explain how I ran into the cable. One of the adults listening to the story is trying not to laugh.

“You’ve got a red mark on the back of your neck, too,” mom says. “How did you get a mark on the back of your neck?”

We come to the conclusion that I must have been running so hard that my head snapped around the cable when I flew into the air. But it all happened so fast that I cannot recall how I also got scraped on the back of the neck.

The red eyes won that round, and it turns out to be about the last time that I try to race the eyes or the axe.

Sky Toys and the Global Positioning System

Lumberton, North Carolina. 1986.

Today is a field trip for my third grade class to the Robeson County Planetarium.

The planetarium is one of the most fascinating buildings that I have ever been inside in my young life. As we sit in our theater styled chairs, the lights go out and the domed ceiling becomes the night sky. A narrator tells stories behind the history of the constellations. The Egyptian Pyramids, Greek and Roman gods appear overhead as we hear what the ancients thought about the heavens. I crane my neck, looking all around the ceiling and trying to take in everything that is going on. But it is too much.



When the program ends, the lights come back up and the man who runs the planetarium gives us a talk about Halley’s comet. It only comes by Earth once every 75 years, and this is the year. I really would like to see the comet. The lights dim slightly and he explains to us how to find it in the night sky, using a flashlight and pointing to certain grouping of stars that appear on the ceiling. He has lost me, though, and I feel the frustration welling in the back of my throat.

“So now, this may very well be a once in a lifetime chance for you to see the comet,” the man says. “Does everyone understand how to find it in the sky?”

All of my classmates shout, “Yeeeessss!”

I alone say, “Noooooo!”

“Does everyone promise me that they will go out on the first night it is clear and take a look at Halley’s comet?” the man asks.

“Yeeeesss!” the class responds.

“Nooooo!” I say at the same time.

The man either does not hear me or chooses to ignore my response.

In looking up at the night sky, I never do see what I know to be Halley’s comet. I later learn that 1986 was the worst viewing of the comet in thousands of years for people in the northern hemisphere, due to its positioning with the sun. It is difficult to spot with the naked eye in 1986. The next time it comes around, if I am still alive, will be in the year 2061, when I am 84 years old.

Western Carolina University. Spring Semester, 1996.

My favorite college course that I ever take at Western Carolina University is Astronomy 101. I enroll for honors credit, and I also take the night lab, which means it is a four credit course.

As part of the honors extra assignment, I have to write a research paper. The professor lets me compose a short story on an asteroid striking the earth. After I submit it, he tells me it is a “good read” and gives me an “A” for the course.

During the night lab, we set up enormous and expensive telescopes, and I see some pretty amazing stuff- the moon up close, Venus, the Orion star nebula, and the remnants of a supernova to name a few things. I also learn some constellations. As part of our assignments, we have to track the setting sun on the horizon each week throughout the semester. I go to a hill just above Graham Infirmary and watch some beautiful sunsets against the Great Smoky Mountains. My drawings of those mountains and where the sun disappears behind them each week is not the greatest work of art, however.

Unlike the fascination but then frustration that I felt at the planetarium, the class ignites a curiosity in me about the stars and the universe. If I could major in astronomy , I would. There is no such degree, however. What is more, after the basic 101 course, astronomy becomes the study of physics. The astronomy professor has a Ph.D. in physics, and his graduate student assistant, Ben, is a nice guy pursuing a degree in physics. I do not have the mind to comprehend the mathematical concepts of that subject.

Still, I always think back with fondness on that time in my life, the professor, the assistant, and a girl whom I knew in the class, Amy.

“Stop referring to what you are talking about as those three stars that form a triangle!” Ben tells Amy during the night lab. “Any three stars form a triangle!”

Amy and I laugh.

Wilmington, North Carolina. 2004.

I have just rented a place at Carolina Beach, one row back from the ocean. On the balcony outside, I can see many stars out over the water as I listen to the sound of the waves… I think I want to buy a telescope to get a better look at the celestial objects just outside my door.

After a trip to a hobby store and a $350 payment, I am the proud owner of an Orion refractor telescope with a German equatorial mount.

The scope is strong enough for me to see the color bands of Jupiter, along with four of that planet’s moons. I can also clearly see the rings of Saturn. The Orion nebula is a beautiful sight in my scope as well.



***

“Aaaahhhh!”

I hear the woman’s shriek and look up from my eyepiece. One of my neighbors in the beachfront condominium across the street sees me as she climbs the exterior stairs.

It takes me a moment to realize that she is shrieking at me. I am on the balcony in the complete darkness, and evidently, she believes that I am spying on her with my telescope.

I have been able to observe some ships out on the horizon with my instrument, but even if I wanted to be a “Peeping Tom,” her place is way too close for the telescope to be useful. From hers and other’s reactions, I learn that people are often leery of a single fellow, living alone, when they see that I own a telescope.

August 2005.

Some things have happened with my job that are beyond my control, and I have to move away from the beach. Unknown to me, I will not live in a place conducive to setting up a telescope for another eight years. I disassemble it, along with the equatorial mount, and pack it away at my parents’ house.

Tallahassee, Florida. November 2010.

I am winded and sweaty from having just run a 5k about as hard as I can go. One of my friends ran the race with me. She has recently become interested in the sport and trains for marathons. She crossed the finish line well ahead of me.

3.1 miles is not enough exercise for her, though, and she asks if I am interested in running longer.

“Sure,” I respond. She is cute and smarter than me, and I enjoy her company.

We proceed to run another five miles after the race is over and everyone has cleared out. Eight miles is the most that I have run since high school when I was on the cross country team, and I am pleased that I keep up with her pretty well.
During the run, she seems to know precisely how far we have gone and where to stop for the total of eight miles.

I ask her about that.

On her wrist, no larger than a watch, is a Global Positioning System device. Designed specifically for runners, I suppose, it lets her know exactly where she is on the planet and keeps track of the mileage she covers.



It is a rather amazing device. I have seen the Christmas television commercials for the “Garmin,” a GPS system for cars, and GPS navigators were built into some of the vehicles at the dealerships where I worked, but this is the first one I have come across for individuals to wear on their wrists.

She looks at me a little strangely. Perhaps the wristwatch GPS has been around for a while and I am behind the times.

Miami, Florida. June 2012.

I just bought a Garmin GPS to help me locate some apartment complexes in Miami, where I will move later this month to start a new job. My cell phone rings, and I see it is the lady I am replacing here in Miami calling me. I need to talk with her and set up place to meet. Sitting at a stop sign at a busy intersection is not where I should take her call, though. I glance behind me. There are no cars, so I will simply back off the road onto the grass. I answer the phone.

“Hey April, can you hold on a minute? I’m going to back off the road so we can talk.”

As I move the car in reverse, I hear an awful crunching sound. My Garmin guided me to this street, but it could not warn me about a low concrete pole protecting a fire hydrant.

Sure enough, I get out of my car to find the rear tail light is busted and the bumper is crushed inward. The pole was below my line of sight, which irritates me. I had no chance. It was just bad luck that I got the call right at that moment.

As much as I do not want to acknowledge it, this incident feels like an omen of what is to come in Miami.

The GPS will prove very valuable too me in navigating this city, though printed maps give me a better feel for exactly where I am and where other things are in relation to me.

Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.

The anxiety and stresses of my experience in Miami are behind me, now.

I rent a house with a fairly large backyard here in Suwannee County. For the first time in eight years, I can use my telescope again. Mom and Dad bring it from North Carolina, and to my pleasant surprise, no parts are missing when I assemble it.

The Orion nebula, along with the colorful bands of Jupiter, are back for me to view. I use a red lens flashlight to study my star charts in the backyard.

***

Browsing the internet, looking for some possible new eyepieces for the scope, I stumble across something called “The Celestron Personal Planetarium Sky Scout.” After watching a video on how the device works, I am sold. I order it immediately.

When it arrives a few days later, it is even better than what I hoped for. The Sky Scout uses a GPS system to identify my location on the globe. Once that is locked, I can point it at any object in the sky and it will tell me what I am looking at, often through audio narration. What is more, I can punch in the object that I want to observe, and arrows will light up on the device to guide me to where the object is in the sky.



It has made my backyard astronomy experience much more enjoyable. Often I do not use the telescope at all, as the Sky Scout can educate me about plenty of things in the night sky visible to the naked eye.

“Have the knowledge of a professional astronomer in the palm of your hand,” is one of the advertising slogans. It is true. The device brings back memories of some of the things that I learned in Astronomy 101.

I am a bit of a Luddite. I admit that. But I also have to acknowledge that GPS systems can be pretty cool. The Sky Scout in particular has given me access to a lot of information that I never would have been able to figure out on my own.

Athleticism

Lumberton, North Carolina. 1989 or 1990

The basketball is loose, near the sideline. I sprint for it and get there first.

Oh, man. Here I am, charging on a fast break down the basketball court at Littlefield High School.

Littlefield is a grade 7th through 12th school, but the total student body population is only about 600. I am in 8th grade, playing a game of pickup basketball with my brother and some friends.

I have watched several high school basketball games on this court, and the players are larger than life to me in the green and gold (yellow) uniforms and “Hornets” insignia. One guy on the team, Tim, can jump so high that when he takes a jump shot, it looks like he is shooting down on the goal.

This is also the floor where I sit in the bleachers and watch the pretty Littlefield cheerleaders. I am in love with one of the cheerleaders, a red head named Amy. She has never paid attention to me, though. The cheerleaders do their routines during the timeouts, and then jog back over to the first row of bleachers when the game begins again. After their routines, one cheerleader does a slow split as the others jog off. It is a sight forever etched in my brain, her smiling at the crowd as she slides to the floor with her tan legs. She holds the pose for a moment, and then gets up to join the other girls.

I run past the exact spot on the floor where she performs those incredible splits, going as fast as I can while bouncing a basketball.

The gym also has a stage for plays and school presentations. Coach T sits on the stage in a metal folding chair, watching our pickup game. Coach T is an all-around good coach for any sport. I want to impress him because he is the high school baseball coach, and that is the team I would like to join more than any other.

I do not know if anyone is behind me, catching up to steal the ball, but I don’t dare look. The basket is only a few more feet ahead.

The white bordered square on the glass backboard looms ahead of me. When shooting the ball, I have been taught that you should concentrate on the back of the rim- unless you want to bank the shot in. If you want to bank it off the glass, then make sure the ball hits in the middle of that square, and it will go in.



I cannot dunk a basketball, so this is going to be a lay-up off the glass.

Hit the square, I think to myself. Hit the square.

I am under the goal, now, still running about as hard as I can go. I put the ball up with two hands, like a chest pass, and it hits the center of the glass square perfectly.

Instead of going into the hoop, though, the ball launches backward and lands well behind the three point line. It bounces clear back to half court.

Everyone sort of freezes in stunned silence. Coach T has his arms crossed on his chest, and keeps a stoic expression. My friend, Ron, is the first to burst out in laughter. He puts his hands on his knees and doubles over.

My brother, a very good basketball player, just stares at me. We are both at an awkward age where we do not say much to each other in public, in front of other people. But once we are home, he lets me have it.

Years later, even in the present, he still talks about that play.

“We were all just shocked,” he says. “I couldn’t believe that you were that uncoordinated. I mean, the ball bounced back to half court. Didn’t you know how to make a lay-up?”

“I hit the square!” I answer defensively. “I was always told that if you hit the square, the ball will go in!”

After that disastrous attempt at a lay-up, I work on my technique a little more and learn that if I go up with one hand and pull the ball back from the backboard just before I release, then it takes away the momentum of my sprint and softens the bounce against the square. The ball should go in.

Luckily, no girls were around to watch that spectacle of athleticism.

The Cross Country Team

Lumberton, North Carolina. Fall, 1994.

I am lying on my back, looking up at the sunny, clear autumn sky as we perform our stretches in the west end zone of the football field.

The cross country season is in full swing. Our meets are normally on Tuesdays, and so the coach has designated Wednesdays as our long run days. We do not have to push ourselves for time- for a fast run on Wednesdays- but the coach expects us to go eight miles.

As we stretch, Penny, a cute blond on the team, sits close to me along with her friend, Dawn. I try to start a conversation with her as the coach walks around.

"Are you taking a foreign language this year, Penny?" I ask.

"I'm in Spanish II," she answers.

"I'm taking French," I say. " My teacher says that French is a much more developed language than Spanish. English is more developed than either of them."

Penny does not say anything.

"For example, in English, the words 'brain' and 'mind' have two different meanings. But Spanish has no separate word for brain and mind. That language just uses one name, or so my teacher says."

Flat on my back, I can not see Penny's reaction, but she says nothing. The coach comes around and looks down at me with a curious expression.

After our stretches, we head out from the high school into town, on the designated route for our run.

I ran 10 miles not too long ago, and I really do not feel the need to go eight miles today. None of the guys on the team do. All the girls are running together, though, separate from us boys. They are ahead of us but within sight, putting in a good pace, trying to get the run finished in a reasonable time.

David, one of the guys on the team, says he knows a short cut that will slice about two miles off the run.

All the guys agree to go with him, and we make sure the girls do not see us as we take a right off the main road.

Of course, we arrive back at the high school well before the girls. The coach is waiting for us.

I expect him to make some comment about how fast we did the eight miles, but I can tell he does not care. In addition to cross country, he is the head basketball coach at the high school. This is more on his mind and is his passion. The best runner on our team joined in part because he wants a starting slot when basketball season starts.

When the girls do finally get back, we are standing around under a tree, waiting on them. The coach has gone inside the school for a few minutes.

The shock on the girls' faces amuses me. David sees the opportunity to needle them a bit.

"What took you all so long?" he asks.

For whatever reason, this sets Dawn off. She launches into a heated diatribe against us guys and how we cheated. She says we should be ashamed of ourselves.

David is as shocked by Dawn's reaction, and I have to laugh at his facial expression, too.

"I'll do it again!" he says to her.

***

From then own, Dawn is always fussing at David, no matter what he does. Dawn is a pretty girl, and it is entertaining to watch her get so worked up.

The coach notices how she seems irritated by David as well. One day after she has said something harsh to David, the coach speaks.

"You know what you need to do, Dawn? You need to get yourself a young man like that, and cultivate him."

I burst out laughing. The phrase "cultivate him," and the way it sounds in the Robeson County accent of my coach cracks me up.

Dawn turns and glares at me with venomous eyes.

***

About a year later, I saw Penny in a Waldenbooks in Fayetteville. I tried to speak to her, but I could tell now that our shared connection of the cross country team had ended, she no longer had any interest in interacting with me. Or maybe it was just that I could not think of any good lines to say to her in Waldenbooks.

I also saw Dawn some months later, out in town in Lumberton. She was going to walk past me without saying anything, but I spoke to her. She stopped and wheeled, breathing a bit heavy, like out of exasperation.

I had more confidence with Dawn, but all I knew to ask her was what she was doing after high school. She said she was looking into some community college programs.

That was it. That was all that I had in my head to speak. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought she gave me a look like I had missed an opportunity. She turned and walked away, and I never saw her again.

In the years since I ran on the cross country team, my instincts in knowing what to say to women has only marginally improved.

Flying Between Fields

It has been an eventful and tiring week at work. Now past midnight, I am too exhausted to write the rather lengthy blog entry which I had in mind, "The Man With Faces On His Shoes," another story from my time in Las Vegas. That will come later. Instead, I will write about a memory from when I was eight years old or so, riding my bike out in the countryside where my family used to live: Rt. 7, Box 568B, Lumberton, North Carolina 28358.

There are no cars coming. Good.

I stand up on my BMX bike and push the pedals, pumping them one after another, as hard and rapidly as my legs can go.

"What's the fastest thing in the world?" I remember Brian, my friend at school, asking me one day.

"Light," I answer. "Nothing is faster than the speed of light."

"No, it's a bicycle," Brian says. "Because a bicycle is never wide open."

I smile at this memory. I think to myself, let's see if I can go faster than anything in the world.

It is a hot summer day. School is out for the year, which is why I can be outside pedaling down the middle of this country road in the early afternoon.

My plan is to get up close to my maximum speed on the asphalt, coast a little as I lean into a sharp left turn onto our long sandy driveway, then pedal again and go as fast as I can, until I come to the end of the driveway. I will push hard all the way to the finish, and then I will slam on brakes (my BMX has pedal brakes, not hand brakes, so I can easily lock the wheels).

The result is to skid several feet, turning my bike sideways to get a sensation, an angle of movement, that feels good and is rare.

I have done this several times before, and I enjoy studying the marks in the dirt afterward.

The house where we live is surrounded by corn and soybean fields. The crops whir by in my peripheral vision on either side of the road as I continue pumping my legs.

Here comes the driveway. I stop pedaling and lean hard into the turn, making sure that my left pedal is rotated high, otherwise it will scrape the pavement.

Riding on asphalt is quiet, but as soon as I hit the driveway, I listen to the sound of my tires crunching on sand and pebbles.

Keep pushing. Get up to the fastest speed I can. While a corn field is to my right, the yard is to the left, and a few pine trees line the driveway.

I pedal under them.

Suddenly, I find myself separated from my bike, flying through the air feet first. I am too startled, too confused by what is happening, to appreciate the weightless travel which I experience for just a second or two.

I land flat on my back with a hard thud. Fortunately, it does not hurt at all. It does not even knock the wind out of me.

Looking straight up at the blue sky through a few pine tree branches, I turn my head in time to see my bike, which must have been standing almost perfectly vertical on the front wheel for a second, crash to the side.

After a few more seconds on the ground, wondering what in the world just happened, I get up and dust myself off.

A crushed pine cone rests under my front wheel. This is amazing. I have run over countless pine cones with no problem. How is it that this one was able to stop my bike on a dime, traveling at my top speed, and send me flipping over the handle bars?

Reflecting on the situation for a couple more minutes brings me no closer to a solution, but I do decide that the whole thing was pretty cool, and I want to try it again.

I head back out to the road on my bike and go through it all once more. Speeding down the driveway, I run over the crushed pine cone, but nothing happens this time- only the slight bump.

I gather more pine cones and set them in a row across the drive way, to make sure that I do not miss, but still, there is no effect. My bike goes over them with no problem.

This is all very disappointing and puzzling.

Though I try for days and weeks after that experience, I am never able to replicate the two seconds of flight time between the corn fields and the soy bean fields.

Tennis

As a boy, I was not the greatest of athletes. I lettered for the cross country team in high school, but that was the height of my accomplishments in organized sports.

My two favorite sports have always been baseball and tennis. Dad taught me baseball as soon as I was old enough to swing a bat and throw a ball.

It was Mom, though, who taught the game of tennis to both my brother and me during the summer vacations in between school years.

My brother, Adam, learned the game fast, but it took me a while. When I first started playing, I literally could not keep the ball inside the court. Almost every time I swung, I launched the ball over the fence. Mom was very patient with me, though. We actually learned to play using her and Dad's old wooden rackets. Eventually, I was able to keep the ball inside the fence and inside the lines, but it was a couple of years before I began putting topspin into my swings.

Adam, after Mom bought us our own metal rackets, used Mom's wooden racket to hit rocks from our driveway out into the corn fields surrounding our house. He played whole imaginary baseball games hitting those rocks, the New York Mets versus the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, sometimes. The rocks gradually busted the strings and chewed up the wood. He later said that he hated he messed up Mom's racket, as it really was a nice vintage wooden piece.

Adam and I played a lot against each other while growing up. He beat me most of the time, but my peak came when I was 19 years old. That was my freshman year of college, and I was in perhaps the best shape of my whole life. I took tennis as an elective course at Western Carolina University. The instructor was one of the football coaches, an old man.

He really did not teach us that much. I remember him telling jokes to the class like, "Do you know what the students cheer at Furman University games?...FU!"

Or "Do you know what the students cheer at Austin Peay University?... Let's go Peay!"

He gave us written instructions on how the game is played and how to keep score, but the only teaching of how to play was when he told us and demonstrated, "Remember, bend your knees when you swing, bend your knees."

For our final grade, he started a tournament pitting everyone in the class against each other. I easily won my first two matches. The coach stopped the tournament after that, as it was pretty clear that I was the best player in the class. I'm not sure that he liked me that much, as I think I acted pretty cocky on the court. He challenged me to game of ping pong, and it was closely contested. The old ball coach eventually won, though, and he seemed to take a good deal of satisfaction in that.

My freshman year, I met a guy named Thomas who was also a very good tennis player for someone who never played it in an organized setting. We spent many evenings competing against each other. It was about 50/50, who would win. My strength, he said, was that I could run everything down and get every shot back across the net.

Thomas was a nice guy. He and I were both from the eastern part of the state, and he gave me a ride home during the Christmas break of my freshman year- over six hours of driving. I was pretty naive during college, and it took me all year to realize that Thomas was gay. This sort of blew my mind, given my conservative Christian upbringing. I immediately cut off all contact with him. It is one of the regrets that I have from my life that I was such a homophobe in those years and that I cruelly abandoned a friend who had done nothing wrong.

My brother joined me at Western during my sophomore year, and we continued our matches against each other on the courts beside Reid Gym (courts that now no longer exist due to building expansion on campus). I remember that these courts played slower, and the ball bounced higher than on the courts beside the high school where Adam and I attended. The slower court helped my game against him, and I went on a long winning streak. Eventually, he stopped playing against me because I was trash talking too much.

One night we were playing against each other and got into a heated argument over whether a ball was in or out. Some guys playing on the court beside us stopped to watch in awkward silence.

Finally, I yelled at Adam, "I'm going to beat your butt! I'm going to beat your butt tonight!"

At that exact instant, the lights went out.

I think it was probably someone from campus security who was watching and was able to shut the lights down before things escalated even further. I never knew the lights to just suddenly cut off like that at any time before or after when I played tennis at night.

When Adam stopped playing against me, I would go to those same courts and hit a ball against a brick wall until I got blisters on my hand.

During my sophomore year, I took racquetball as an elective course. The course was fun and was taught by the quarterbacks coach of the football team. He would later become the head coach. He also started a tournament in the class matching the students against each other. I finished second.

Taking the course was a mistake, though, as it completely ruined my tennis swing. In racquetball, you break your wrist when you swing. In tennis, you should keep the wrist stiff.

Adam eventually started playing tennis with me again, but it was a pathetic show. I began launching the ball over the fence once more. It was like I had forgotten how to play, like I was picking up a racket for the first time. It was not enjoyable for either of us, and he could not understand what had happened to me.

In college, I had a pretty strong crush on a girl, and I remember her walking by the court one night and seeing me play. I hated that I looked so pitiful out there as she went by- if only she could have seen me before I took that darn racquetball course, maybe things would things would have turned out differently between us. But probably not. In my head, it was a very important thing at that time, though.

I never did get my swing back. Instead, I developed a method of basically just punching the ball flatly back across the net, without topspin, and using the other player's velocity. Adam said it was very frustrating to play against me and that he could not get better himself with me playing in that style. I never was able to get back to the level when I was 19 and playing almost every day against Thomas, taking full swings and hitting with topspin.

Now, in my 30s, I have not played in years.

On the professional level, tennis has arguably changed more than any other major sport in the past 30 years. This is due to the rapid increase in racquet technology, the change from wooden racquets to graphite composites to whatever material is used today.

It is really a power game, now. No one serves and volleys any more, and you do not see the strategy in building points like you used to. I quit keeping up with all the changes, but I remember when Goran Ivanisevic won Wimbledon in 2001, that was a turning point. Ivanisevic, 6'4", had a big serve, but that was about it. Since his win, tennis has increased the size of the ball by 6% and changed the type of grass grown at Wimbledon to try and slow the game down. The real solution is to just go back to wooden rackets, but that will probably never happen.

Now, the men's game is two guys standing at the baseline and just hitting the ball as hard as they can. The best players are over six feet tall, whereas before shorter guys had a chance. To me, the game is not that interesting to watch anymore.

Enough about how things used to be, though.

Tennis, like baseball, has given me a lot of joy. I can write more blog entries about individual matches that I watched or played. I can write about specific shots, even. Perhaps in the future I will do so.

Rocking Chairs

I was not the best brother growing up.

One of the regrets that I have is how much of a hard time I gave my younger sibling, Adam, when we were boys. I was pretty good at arguments and enjoyed getting into them, especially with Adam. I rode him relentlessly whenever he made a mistake.

At one point when we were teenagers, I nicknamed him "Money Boy," for whenever he did things that cost the family some cash. It could be anything from accidentally breaking a drinking glass, to another time when he backed the family car into some bricks at the entrance to our driveway and damaged them.

I would stay on him about these things for days and weeks and even months, saying stuff like, "That one's forever, man."

I could be a real jerk about it, and I remember I got him so mad one day that he threw a quarter at my head, which just narrowly missed my left eye. It put a divot in the sheet rock of our dining room. Naturally, I never let him forget about that, either.

It was wrong to be tearing him down all the time. I should have been building him up, instead.

Adam was a very good athlete growing up.

We played in a church basketball league as teenagers. After one game, he was a little amazed and irked when I told people that he and I combined for 40 points in the game. It was true. I had six, he had 34.

Baseball in particular, he was good at. We played on the same teams at various times growing up, and anyone who played at that age knows that the best players on the team either pitched or were put at shortstop. Adam did both. He threw pretty hard, and a lot of guys in practice did not want to hit against him. I had no fear of him at all, of course, but that did not mean I could hit the ball when he pitched. Like any good athlete, Adam had his own stories he could tell of feats on the field.

One that I remember in a junior high school game was when a pitcher threw three straight balls to him. Adam was thinking of becoming a switch hitter, so with the count 3-0, he turned around in the box to bat left handed, to give the pitcher a different look. The pitcher laughed at him, and then threw a called strike. Adam turned back around to bat right handed, and on the next pitch slammed a double into the left field alley.

Around this same time, though, he also began struggling with some shyness at school. We went to a rather large high school. It was 4A, which at that time was the largest classification that high schools received in North Carolina (1A was a very small school, for example).

This was when I should have been encouraging him and helping him out, rather than constantly looking for ways to tear him down.

One of Adam's regrets which he talks about every now and again is that he did not play baseball in high school. In all of the leagues that he and I played in growing up, it was him and another guy named Jimmy who were always the best players. Jimmy went on to play some minor league ball in the Montreal Expos organization, if I am not mistaken.

Who knows how far Adam could have gone? I don't know that he had the stuff to make it all the way to the big leagues, but he believes he could have played college ball. I have no doubts about that, either. He would not be the first from our family. Our Uncle Jerry was a pitcher and first baseman at N.C. State University, and our cousin Jon also played some college baseball. That would have been enough, to play ball at a small school like Western Carolina University where we both attended.

In our big high school, with lots of guys trying out and getting cut from the team, the head coach actually came to Adam and asked him to play. But Adam said no, and it was because he was not happy in school.

I could have tried to help him with this. I remember Dad getting frustrated when Adam told him the story. "The coach came to you and asked you to play!?"

Anyway, Adam is enjoying life now, successful in his job, raising his son and teaching him to play sports as well.

But to title of this blog entry. One of the crueler things that I confess I did to my brother was when we were both young boys and I caught him asleep in our wooden rocking chair.

He was small enough then that he could sleep in the chair on his knees, facing backwards, his nose tucked in between the wooden splats of the back of the chair.

The temptation was just too great as I walked by. Without thinking, I gripped the top of the chair, yanked it backward and then pushed it forward hard again. My brother's head whip lashed back and then slammed against the splats. To say that was a rude awakening for him was an understatement. I don't know what possessed me to do that, other than just plain meanness...

One of my first memories of a rocking chair was in Wilmington, North Carolina. I was probably about three years old, and I can remember mom sitting in the chair and holding me while she watched TV. She rocked us back and forth. I had my head on her shoulder, and I was trying to go to sleep.

Though I was not watching the TV, I can remember what was on. It was "The Jim and Tammy Show," with televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

Mom must have been nodding off and going to sleep herself, as I remember that when the rocking chair stopped moving, I kicked my leg into her side and she would start rocking the chair again. Eventually, the rocking would slow down and stop once more, and I had to keep kicking my leg to get her to keep rocking the chair.

So, I suppose two memories that I have of rocking chairs involves me being sort of abusive to members of my family. As for my mom, though, I think I was too small for the kicks to hurt. Eventually, she stopped responding to them and we both went to sleep.

My First Time in an Airplane

Church was a big part of my life as a young boy. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in a pew with my mother at the United Advent Christian Church in Wilmington, NC. I could not have been more than three or four years old, as I remember my feet did not touch the floor. Many of the men at the church had patches on the elbows of their blazers, a style popular in the 1970s and early 80s. As a child, almost an infant, I thought these were pads to protect the men in case they fell down.

Mom held my hand, and I began to play a game where I took my hand out of hers and then walked my two fingers down her arm toward me before I quickly put my hand back in hers and she grabbed it. I repeated this over and over, and Mom silently played along as she listened to the preacher.

Of course, I was too young to understand my emotions at the time, but looking back now, the game fascinated me because I felt a sense of separation anxiety when I took my hand and began to walk it away from hers. The anxiety went away just as soon as I grabbed her hand again. I remember doing it over and over, and each time I would feel waves of sadness wash over me until I grabbed her hand again.

Later in my childhood, the family moved to Lumberton, North Carolina and we joined Hyde Park Baptist Church. Every so often, the church hosted a "Revival," where a guest preacher came in and we had services every night for a week.

One time, the revival preacher who came into town owned a Cessna airplane. He told the children that he would give a ride to whoever could recite the books of the Bible in order to him.

That same afternoon, I dedicated myself to learning the books, and that evening after the service was over, I went up and recited the books to him.

The preacher kept his word. Dad drove the family out to the Lumberton airport, and the preacher was there to meet us with his plane.

I brought my stuffed animals along so that they could see the world from above, too. "Otto" the Red Raccoon and my dachshund, "Cricket" were among those that made the trip with me.

My brother was about a year and a half younger than me, and he had not memorized the books like I had.

He was so upset about not getting the chance to fly in the airplane, that the preacher decided to take him up as well. Mom did not go up with us, though I can't remember if this was because she just did not want to. It was a four seater plane, and I don't know if the preacher offered to make two flights so that everyone would get a chance to fly.

Dad sat in the front passenger seat, with me behind him. My brother sat behind the preacher, who was of course in the pilot's seat.

As the plane took off, I held all of my stuffed animals up against the window so that they could see out.

To my chagrin, though, the preacher kept the plane cocked to his side for almost the entire flight. The result was that my brother got a great view of Lumberton and the surrounding area, while out my window, I was simply looking straight up at more sky.

Only once did the preacher roll the plane so that I and my stuffed animals could see the ground, and this lasted for just about a minute.

I remember more just straining to see as much as I could out of my brother's window.

At the time, it annoyed me that I had done all the work of memorizing the books of the Bible, but that my brother had gotten the benefit of it.

Now, though, it really does not matter. I'm glad my brother should have a good memory of his first time in an airplane.

Nathan Marshburn