Winter

You have to know how to love winter. Much like you have to know how to love summer, but few people think about that. Precautions like sunscreen, light clothes, and afternoons at the beach or the pool seem to come naturally. But winter seems almost universally loathed.
You have to learn how to love the cold, or at least how to bear it, as one bears the 100 degree temperatures of summer. A fireplace, a heater, a heavy blanket--if you think about it, we have more protections from cold than from heat. A good coat, gloves, hat, ear-muffs. Thermal underwear. Hot cocoa. You can grow to love these things. Then, fully equipped, to love walking out in the frozen air and even find it healing.
What is not to love about a blue-sky day with the late-rising sun creating a brighter-than-usual morning thanks to the whiteness of the world and the thinness of the air? White mountains, white fields, white houses, white trees. Sparkling, crisp air. Watch your own breath rise from your mouth and marvel at your own internal locomotive, that coal-burning fire within.
You can learn to love the winter, love the cold, and embrace the early dark. To open your eyes on a frosted morning with joy and peace that no other season provides.
Winter is quiet. Winter is lucid. Winter is peace.

Toy airplanes

They float, drifting through any color sky, from pale morning blue to December afternoon gray. They are noiseless, at least through my windshield. Through the windows at the office I can sometimes hear a low, unobtrusive rumbling reaching me from what seems like the wrong direction. Something about the way they move, like bubbles, or like puffs from a dandelion, compels me to watch. I can't look away as the tiny shape crawls across the blank sky and eventually vanishes behind a mountain, or beyond the frame of my window.
It was evening a week ago that I saw one lifting from an air field some miles ahead of me. It climbed silently up over the lake whose surface threw a reflection of the sky, of the hills beyond. They are supposed to be fast, but they always seem so slow looking from the ground with a craned neck, eyes squinting, flattened hand standing up on my brows. The color of bone, or of tooth, they seem to hang impossibly long in space.

We own the Bison

I wonder if they know they are publicly-owned, those American
Bison roaming and grazing this hump of earth stranded
in a lake of salt.

"Don't grow sentimental over the seven," the director spat,
"The animals are worthless - there isn't worse meat
on earth to eat."

Enormous, shaggy, drifting nomads hoisting heads big
as car tires; dark glossy eyes peering below curls. Why
would we eat them?

Pencil Sharpener

It hung at the front of the class beside the blackboard, which was usually green or blue. A heavy metal foot anchored to the wall an oval casing, graced with a metal dial of holes, each waiting its turn to be rotated over the round black eye that stared a line paralell to the wall all the way to the teacher's desk. Within that thin casing, two twisted horrors lurked, bound together and turned by a crank. Every child feared those gears, picturing their own finger inserting that channel where it was chewed, and turned to pulp among the piles of shavings.
Between lectures, you could cross the carpet and insert your pencil, and turn that crank, interrupting the silence with the grinding of those gears. You'd pull back a precise point, gleaming beneath the flourescents, needing only a quick puff from your lips to remove the chaff. The newly crisp line on your paper would bring a satisfied smile to your face, well worth braving the ominous sharpener's stare.
Years of school, and lots of practice, bring with them the hubris of ink. Blues, blacks, reds stand out more boldly and more permanently on the page. These marks cannot be erased, and so we believe they needn't be. And if not a pen, the insubstantial media of 1's and 0's, mediated by the keyboard that occupies the primary work space. The printer translates those tappings with its crisp laser, shooting out sheets of paper hot off the custom press. At the very least, the pencils we use are now mechanical, with tiny sticks of .5 graphite, ready at the click of the eraser.
Another childhood terror diminishes, becomes obsolete. If you hunt around your office, you'll find the token, grudging presence of their electric counterparts, sitting for the most part on some table in a room down the hall from your desk, ready to growl your old fashioned PaperMate down to a fine point and reinvoke that ghost of the past.

Leftie

A plump, generously-glazed donut occupied my dominant right hand this morning when I sat down at my desk. It didn't take long to realize I'd have to transfer the donut to my left hand and lick off a fair amount of residual sugar in order to operate my mouse. It seemed a lot easier to reach across with my left and work the mouse that way until the donut was gone.
That maneuver got old quickly, so on a whim, I pulled the mouse to the other side of my keyboard, remembering even in the act that my dad had made the artificial switch to left-moused-ness years ago. So many years ago that he may have switched back by now, I'm not sure. I didn't make too big a deal of this: I am coming to grips with the increasing similarities I see between myself and my father. It comes as no surprise that the monotony of the office would eventually lead me down the same paths. I am willing to bet that somewhere around 80% of all office workers have toyed with left-moused-ness at some point in there inauspicious careers.
One of my first left-handed actions was to open up the Control Panel and invert the buttons on the mouse so my pointer finger was still performing primary functions while my middle finger would be in charge of secondary functions, or "right-clicking" with the left button. This of course sets off the buzzer, "Wait, why is it called right-clicking if at least 10% of the population may be using the mouse with their left hands? that's going to mess me up all day..."
It does mess me up all day.
It takes a couple of hours before I am back in the control panel looking for a way to flip the cursor so that it is pointing to the right instead of to the left, which is a bit disorienting to me. Since the mouse is on the left of the screen, it feels like the pointer should be coming from that side. I look through all the menus in the mouse control box and can't find such an option.
One of my coworkers passes by my desk.
"Hey Robert, you're left-handed aren't you?"
"Yes, I am."
"I thought so. Do you use your mouse with your right hand or your left?"
"I use it right-handed. I mean, when I first encountered computers, the mouse was always on the right side of the keyboard. It wasn't like a motor skill that I'd developed up to that point, so I don't think it was any different than learning to use a mouse with my left hand would have been."
"Huh, I never thought of that."
"Yeah, I was actually just barely listening to a podcast about left-handedness. You must have felt some left-hand vibes coming across the wall. I don't really think there are very many scenarios where it really matters which hand you use, you know?"
He's probably right.
My left hand my be a bit more dexterous than the left hands of my other right-handed peers, owing to my long years of piano lessons, saxophone lessons, and even experimentation with the guitar, all of which require a fair amount of fine motor control in both hands. I remember that Jimi Hendrix - or was it Carlos Santana? Or both? - learned to play the guitar backwards because he was left-handed.
Around lunch time, I realize my left forearm is a little sore. I never would have considered pushing a mouse around for hours a day to be strenuous, but I'm feeling some admittedly minor effects even in my upper arm. "Maybe this will help ease that knot in my shoulder," I think to myself. Of course it will - changing hands changes my entire posture. My left arm is not accustomed to resting on the desk the way my right arm is.
Eight hours go by and I don't notice a dramatic increase in my left-mousing skills. My speed is still probably around half as quick, and I feel like I pick the mouse up way more than I did with my right hand. I can't figure out which finger I'm supposed to use on the scrolling wheel in the middle of the mouse My right hand is not a team player on the keyboard, making all those little contributory keystrokes that are all but unconscious with my left hand (hey, ctrl+z, ctrl+x, ctrl+c, ctrl+v -- they are all in the lower left corner of the keyboard, much easier to pull off with the left hand). If the mouse is the steering wheel of this operation, than the keyboard makes up the gear shift, the pedals, turn signals, wiper blades, headlights, and all those other functions of driving that don't get as much credit as they're due.
Miniscule observations like these don't mean much on their own, but taken together, they are just another example of the steamrolling of a group of people because of the ignorance or inconsideration of the majority. With handedness, the differences amount to trivial inconveniences and irritations. With other factors that contribute to diversity and differentiate one person from another - sightedness, religion, culture, upbringing - those differences still exist, and try as I might, I will never fully appreciate what another individual experiences.

Jumped Fence

Just before 1 AM, I heard the tell-tale rattle of a chain-link fence outside my bedroom window. In two steps I'm at the window with my fingers sliding apart two slats of the deep red blinds to look down into my back yard.
There, just passing beneath one of our large pine trees, threading his way through a labyrinth of toys left scattered across the grass by my kids earlier as they splashed in the blow-up pool, I see a tall figure illuminated in a white-blue light coming from the nearly full moon.
There's something slightly less than sinister about that loping unfamiliar figure, not hurrying, just strolling through the lawn I've only mowed a dozen times, towards the patio where earlier that evening we ate dinner with my in-laws. He's not heading for the house, just skirting along the back fence across the yard like he was cutting through a public park.
But that's not a public park and he doesn't belong there. I'm tired, nearly asleep, but I shout in a surprisingly robust voice through the screen in my bedroom window, "Stay out of my yard!"
Without turning or even starting, the figure bends into a jog continuing across the yard, unexpectedly tossing a "Sorry" over his lowered shoulder. It sounds obligatory and not at all contrite, as if he's hopped the fence a dozen times and attributes any sense of wrong-doing to outmoded views of property ownership that need revision.
The deck coming off the kitchen obscures my view of the part of the yard that he's in now, so I leave the bedroom. Instead of turning into the kitchen for a better view of the back, I veer to the living room window, wide open to let in the cooler night air. My house is a corner lot, so I expect this trespasser hopped my fence to cut the corner, though I can't see how it would save him any time. If that had been his route he should have reach the street by now. Peering as best I can down the road running parallel with my window I don't see a soul on the sidewalk.
After a short wait, I turn to the kitchen and scan the now-empty shadows. No movement, only the steady crickets texturing the darkness with their trilling.
Back in bed, Traci and I converse briefly about the intruder. She soon rolls over and sleeps. I lie awake. The crickets' chirping is tantamount to silence as I wait for other sounds. Though I'm nearly certain my yard is empty now, the silence fails to comfort me. I wait.

The first time I saw people cutting through my front yard, I was annoyed. Neighborhood kids did it on their way to school in the morning. A couple of loud-mouthed women had run across it one night months ago, tripping in a narrow rut running from the sidewalk to the front porch and dropping a nearly-full package of cigarettes which I threw in the trash the next morning with great relish.
The easiest solution to the problem would be to extend the fence line that enclosed my back yard along the west edge of my front lawn. Even the low four-foot chain link one would discourage most people. But apparently not everyone. To some, fences exist only to be jumped: there are no boundaries to some people's sense of self-entitlement, or their contempt for others.
I could put up a taller fence, perhaps a nicer-looking vinyl one. But I don't like the idea. A fence is not a friendly thing. In trying to wall too many things out, I fear I would only wall out more good than bad, while leaving myself feeling walled in. Transforming my yard into a prison, barring me from conversations with my elderly pigeon-keeping neighbors or friendly passers-by, would take a much greater toll on me than the guy who may just as soon scale an 8 foot fence.

Around 2:30 I call the police to report the neighbors to the east who are laughing loudly on their back porch and playing music, keeping me awake at least as much as my unease. Maybe that's why I didn't see him on the street: my yard was a more direct route to the backyard of my neighbors. Perhaps he lives right up the street from me. Or perhaps he's the owner of the small purple coupe parked on the corner by the fence that he jumped.
Either way, I don't know who he is, but he has an easy way to identify me. I'm the one coming out the front door of the large brown house on the corner with the low fences, trying to reconstruct an imaginary line that can't be crossed.

test

My computer was crippled by heat. Funny, I would have thought it immune to something so medieval.

canker

In the corner of my lip, burning

against my teeth with each attempted

smile, crying protest against forks, spoons,

salty foods, citric foods, almost any foods at all.
Just a canker, a small hurt. A two or three day
private tormentor, ending each expression
with a minor wince, interrupting conversations,
mincing words, giving the wrong impression.
Swelling into the precision machinery of incisors
as molars grind steak to mush, giving rise to more
of its own: a half circle of white inflamed craters
atop a hillock of dark red tissue just inside
my mouth. It's a small hurt, laughable

perhaps, to the guy who doesn't have one.

that time I dropped two CDs in the parking lot on my way in to work

I felt them slip from a grip I'd assumed strong
enough; the drop was over before I lowered my eyes,
catching only the impact, the crystalline explosion;
stratified in a single crack, fragmented, they spilled
then stilled themselves on unrelenting asphalt, but for
the discs which wheeled around the wreckage
like coins. I watch their circumscribing motion
circumspectly, til, with a dull clatter, they too
rest. On one knee, I pile layers together in one stack
and stand.
                 The jagged fragments I kick away skittering
to be crushed under tires or brushed down storm drains
or blown to the gutters with dried grass clippings and other
scraps. My load is handled with more care, carried
upstairs, to my desk, beside my keyboard, where I reassemble
as best I can without the missing pieces.

alignment

Orbits, nodes, celestial bodies, all became subjects of increased interest in my backyard yesterday afternoon as we sat in the lowering evening light, the kind that fills the blades of grass with that sublime, golden glow, and watched dots of light projected through pinholes in aluminum foil . On our papers, the moon crossing the face of the sun was evidenced by a painstakingly slow transformation in the dot until, after fifteen minutes of staring, a small indentation was visible in the perimeter, like a bite taken out of a cookie.

Later, as the bite grew larger, the light was changed. The familiar neighborhood outside my front door seemed altered somehow, the way the whole world does after a fierce rainstorm clears the sky of dust and debris and makes everything feel closer and more vibrant. Only last night it seemed filtered somehow. Perhaps it was just the thin veil of clouds that was stretching in front, but I can't help but think the moon's shouldering into the scene played its fair part too.

With the clouds and the lower light, our pinholes became almost pointless, projecting at best a dim crescent. If it hadn't been for Dave, the entire hour of waiting would have ended in bitter disappointment.

I had never met Dave before that night. His front door stands perhaps 100 yards away from mine. In eight months, I've walked by the house at least a dozen times, idly wondering who might live there but never actually expecting to have any interactions with them. He wore a grubby T-shirt that hung over a generous belly. His unkempt stringy brown hair blew around his forehead in the light breezes as he loped his way down the sidewalk. He had a welding mask in his hand.

"That's a great idea!" called my mother-in-law from behind our waist-high chain link fence, and the next thing I knew, Dave had crossed the street and was passing the mask around my gathered family.

I hope to remember that first tinted glimpse of the partial eclipse for a long time. At first glance, I believed I was looking at the moon. But the brightness of the crescent and the darkness of the black blot creeping in from the lower right, together with the brightness of the surrounding sky, altered that impression so forcefully that I almost felt a switch turn in my brain, evoking the same "oh, wow," I had heard from each viewer in turn before me.

As the mask passed around, I shook Dave's hand and we spoke only briefly. He then took his mask and continued on his way around the block to watch the rest of the eclipse.

A friend in New Mexico posted that while he and his family were watching the same eclipse, they met their neighbors who live across the street for the first time. I can't help but think that the same scene was acted out in hundreds of other neighborhoods throughout the eclipse's path. In Japan, California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, miles and miles to either side of that invisible track, people spent a little more time out in their yards, shared interests in the same thing as one another for a few moments, reached across lawns, across streets, to shake hands and draw the boundaries of their lives that much closer together.

30

There are 30 books on my Goodreads to-read list, though I could easily double that in an afternoon.
There are 30 emails in my inbox - 24 in my work email.
There's a list of 30 things I want to do by my next birthday, but a bunch of those I just made up. I've got a dozen or so more I could tack on, or else substitute.
It's not a remarkable number other than the fact that it ends in 0. The closer I get to it, the more artificial it seems as a milepost. It's not like I'll finally be able to drive or drink or vote or anything. What happens at 30? The twenty-somethings will tease me about being old, but the fifty-somethings will still think I'm a youngster.
It's the mark a new decade that happens to bridge the 20s and the 40s. I can't even remember turning 20. Back then, life was so narrowly-defined. I must have had a magnifying glass in front of my face all the time. I couldn't think ten years down the road, couldn't even see more than one year.
It's not that much different now. Just now I'll be 30 instead. Teenagers will think I'm impossibly old. I'll make jokes about being over the hill. I'll put up a confident front, but be just as uncertain about the coming years as I've ever been. The only change is that the uncertainty brings more trepidation with every tick on the calendar - because the stakes just keep getting higher.

commute

Yesterday I turned right into the end of a line of brakelights that wound over the rain-splashed roads at least as far as University Parkway. Not that I could see that far. It took ten minutes to cover those eight blocks, during which time the guy in the blue WWII era roofless jeep stood up only one time to reach over and wipe the rain from his windshield with a squeegee he pulled from the empty passenger seat.
Orange barrels lined my lane from University on, while to either side of the road, men and women in orange vests worked with machinery or held poles topped with one-word signs: "SLOW." Off to the left, new overpasses rose like ancient creatures being excavated from the brown sand strewn liberally around. Dump trucks rumbled, chains rattling their sides.
At last, coming around a curve at 400 North, I left the barrels behind. The line of vehicles was gone, and I was left alone on five lanes of new road. I rolled down my window and extended my arm to feel the sting of raindrops at sixty miles an hour.

The future is now

Would it fundamentally change things if, as a society, instead of being focused on the here and now, we were thinking about the far distant future?
If we were thinking of ourselves as someone's ancestors, wouldn't we worry more about the kind of legacy we were leaving? Wouldn't politicians think farther than the end of their term when they would be up for reelection? Wouldn't citizens award them for doing so by then reelecting them?
Wouldn't parents worry more about how well-adjusted their children were going to be as adults than how to keep them busy for an afternoon or evening or weekend, monitoring their activities and acquaintances more closely than is the norm?
It seems like instead of thinking the future is the future, we have succumbed to that popular sentiment that the future is now. The future is now - the future of the 1950's. The things they were imagining and postulating are happening, are getting closer and closer to our grasp - but that doesn't mean we have gotten any closer to our future. By giving in to the notion that we are living in the future, we cheat ourselves of a very real future involving our grandchildren and great grandchildren.
In the Bible, one of the worst threats seems to be to cut off posterity, or to cause a curse to endure for generations. That curse wouldn't hold much weight against modern americans - affecting future generations does not increase the penalty to the individual because the immediate effect on the individual is all that individual cares about. Just look at the way we are treating the energy crisis and other environmental movements. All the scholars in those fields say our current standard of living is just plain not sustainable, but we don't care. We still drive our kids to school two blocks away because it is faster than walking.
The framers of the constitution, the founders of the nation, left us a very real legacy. They were trying to frame a government that would fit their needs and protect generations of their posterity against the kind of tyranny they had experienced. And they did a great job. They left their legacy and achieved a sort of immortality, where second graders learn their names and learn to respect and revere them in spite of what scholars uncover about their mortal indiscretions. If we thought more the way they did - thought about how the way we live will affect generations of our own posterity - perhaps we would be more worthy of remembering.
The future is now, but the past is now also. Instead of living in someone else's future, let's live in a past that we can help to shape to look better than it's shaping up to be now.

The drummer nextdoor

The house came with its old sounds – the squeaks in the floorboards, the click and hum of the furnace, the buzz of the fluorescent lights in the basement. Sounds so familiar to the 16-year previous residents as to not even register. Other sounds I suspected were out of their elderly hearing range, such as the high-pitched squeal of the ventilator on the roof directly above the bedroom, turning freely in the night wind and filling the neighborhood with its rusty protests.

The first time the life flight helicopter buzzed our house, coming in for a landing at the hospital four blocks north of us, I thought we were under attack. The late evening train whistle rolling up the hillside from the tracks on the other side of the interstate was a familiar sound – farther and fainter than it had been in our last place.

The low occasional cooing and rustling of the neighbors pigeons housed in short, dark coops against the back fence was a welcome one, as was the flapping of their wings in concert as they circled our block in tight formations.

But the least welcome sound, one the previous tenants must have heard all too well and one they were no doubt relieved to be leaving behind, was the drumming.

We heard it first on that Saturday we moved in. While carrying in boxes, we craned our necks around the corner, trying to find the house, shielded by trees, from which the incessant beats were issuing one after the other. Cymbals crashed and the bass thumped as we settled the dining room table and stacked boxes against walls.

“I wonder how often this happens,” I thought, peering in the direction of the suspected house – white siding, perfectly innocent-looking.

I had always imagined having more control over the home-buying process. Perhaps we didn’t exercise as much care as we could have, but given our budget and the timing of our 6-month rental running up, I felt like we eventually had to go for what seemed like the best bet rather than an ideal. Given our restrictions, more and more of our stipulations were left by the wayside as we looked for the best house that would fit our price range.

And it’s a good house. But every house comes with surprises, of which a nearby drummer is a fairly mild one. Two or three houses away, his daily practices only faintly reach our house, and mainly the west end where the bedrooms are. Mostly, the drummer—whom we still haven’t met after six months of living here—restricts his performances to the afternoons, while I’m at work. But Saturday and Sunday bring no respite. Luckily, our young children don’t seem to be bothered by the muffled but discernible drumming when it is time for their naps, but that doesn’t stop us parents from muttering about the irritation when we’re pulling the doors closed behind us.

When it comes to nuisances like drumming, there can be no preventing it. Moving unwittingly into a neighborhood reigned by an amateur percussionist is only one way – imagine the disappointment of neighbors of a previously quiet block when a new percussionist moves in, or when a previously likeable high-schooler takes up the habit. My wife was just such a high-schooler, though she confesses that her drum set (which we sold only a few years ago) never saw as much use or created as much ruckus as our neighbor’s.

A man’s home is his castle. Within the walls of his castle, a man can and should be expected to pursue his own interests, however noisy. Though there are parts of me that would not hesitate to erect a sound-proof bubble along all the borders of my property, there’s another part that is glad my fences are only four foot high chain link, allowing easy sight lines around the neighborhood. I don’t want to be completely isolated from my neighbors, and that requires tolerance.

For now, I suppose I should just be grateful that all winter our neighbor has practiced with his garage door closed.

simpatico

Because it refuses to be winter, I refuse to act like it's still February and I dragged the kids and the wife out for a walk tonight. It was pleasant if a bit cold. My ears were stinging red by the end of the first twenty minutes, and for a moment the clouds threatened to drench us with post-game ice-water rain, but overall the weather and the children all cooperated.
The twins were a little put out about being strapped into the stroller rather than low-riding in our new red wagon, but a couple of saltines were all it took to compensate. After the walk was over, the older kids had clambered out of the wagon, and before they were even up the front steps, Parker had a leg over the side of the wagon, looking up at me. He wasn't so much asking my permission or approval as he was giving his orders: now it is my turn.
Emily caught on and toddled over from her lawn wanderings. Parker pointed to the seat opposite him, approving of bringing a travel companion, and I rolled the wagon about, wheeling towards the sidewalk while Traci took the kids in to finish puzzles and get dinner out of the oven.
Our route took us as far as the neighbor's driveway, and while I executed the 180, I turned to look at the quiet passengers. Both were hunched over in their seats. At first, I thought they were trying to counter the intense force of our pivot, but then I saw them pointing and commenting towards the bottom of the wagon.
Quarter-sized holes in the floor beneath their sneakers revealed a rolling view of the sidewalk below, and both of these toddlers were entranced by the spectacle. They looked up at one another periodically to verify that the other had seen a particular rock or an impressive fissure pass beneath.
At first I thought that it was because they are twins. Then I remembered that all kids around eighteen months are great imitators, especially of kids around their same age. Though my two passengers were twins, that didn't make them any more similar than any two kids at that age. While some moments accentuate their sameness, they are more different than they are similar.
Their behavior is no different than that of middle-schoolers and high-schoolers hoping to gain group acceptance through sameness. What my twins do is the same, on some level, as I do when I feel pressured to update my gadgets, watch award-winning movies, or otherwise conform my lifestyle to some mysterious "norm." It's just that when I do it, it's not so cute.
The wagon rolled back into the garage, and I carried the twins, one on each arm, up the back steps. Emily cried because the ride was over and she doesn't know when the next one will be. Parker took it in stride and welcomed the warmer weather of the kitchen. I sympathized with both.

An Eighth Grade Extra Curricular Cultural Experience

In eighth grade, I took a trip with Adam, my Roman Catholic neighbor, and his family to Seattle. We were taking another friend, Cherif, to see his father who was in a hospital there. At twelve or maybe thirteen years old, I had little awareness of why my friend's dad was in the hospital, all I knew was that I was taking a road trip to the biggest city in our state with my best friend, and, perhaps best of all, without my own parents.

Before leaving, Adam's parents prepped me for a cultural difference I would encounter on our trip.

"You know how you fast every month?" they asked me. Mrs. Lewis, though a devout Catholic, had grown up with an LDS father, and was good friends with my parents besides.

"Yeah," I said. It was not my favorite element of being Mormon.

"Well, Cherif's family does something kind of like that, only theirs lasts a whole month. They can eat at night and early in the morning, but while the sun is up, they don't eat."

"For a whole month?" It seemed extreme.

"Yes. They call it Ramadan. So while we're in Seattle, Cherif won't be eating meals with us. But it's nothing to worry about."

We stayed in the Embassy Suites which had a massive open atrium in the center of the hotel. From our room way up on the sixth or seventh floor, I could peer down through the glass railing at the narrow trails wending through the greenery. I'd never seen anything like it. Piano music wafted up, playing masterful arrangements of popular songs I vaguely recognized, probably for a wedding reception or other event.

The three of us boys had our own room while Adam's little brother stayed with his mom and dad in the neighboring room. What made them think having three 12-year-old boys share a hotel room alone is beyond me, but come to think of it, I'm not sure I would have wanted to spend any time with us. We stayed up late - much too late - watching TV. A movie information screen came up for National Lampoon's Summer Vacation, rated R.

I knew I was not supposed to watch R rated movies - my parents and my church teachers had warned me against them, but something about that severe capital R in that square box, and the warning listed below prevented me from speaking up. Besides, Adam acted as if he'd seen it already and he said it was funny.

The next morning, around 4 am, I woke to the sound of Thunder Cats playing softly on the TV. Cherif hunched at the kitchen table with three or four boxes of cold cereal stacked beside his bowl. He saw me lift my head from my pillow squinting over at him. He grinned around his spoon, "I love this show!" I groaned and went back to sleep.

I lived an extremely insular and selfish childhood. I didn't know anything about Islam or Muhammed back then. I'm not sure when I even learned. Perhaps not until six years later when the twin towers collapsed as I lay sleeping in the lower bunk at my parents' house. At around 9 am PDT, Mom woke me up, told me the World Trade Center had been demolished, and that it was time for me to go to the orthodontic surgeon to have my wisdom teeth removed in preparation for my mission. I scarcely knew what the World Trade Center was, either. Even then I did not consider that Cherif, the friendliest person in my class, who had been class president our senior year, was Muslim in the way that the news broadcasters that I watched that long week as I recovered on the couch talked about Muslims. Those Muslims could not be related to that gap-toothed teenager curling around a bowl of Froot Loops in that sixth-floor room of the Embassy Suites. They were from separate worlds.

Later in the morning, we visited Cherif's dad. At least, Cherif did. Adam and I idled around in the waiting room. Afterwards, we all went to an arcade where Mr. and Mrs. Lewis bought us prepaid game cards that gave us hours of gameplay on any of the machines we wished. We would grow apart gradually in years to come as I joined band and spent more time with band friends while Adam and Cherif both entered concurrent enrollment courses at the community college and spent less and less time around the high school. But we remained casual friends who once spent a weekend together and had a great time.