It Might Get Messy

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I graduated high school. My beloved Aunt Deet, who was working at the time, I believe, doing accounting for a regional Jersey City record label (something like “CBS Records”, but not THAT CBS. A small, self-contained label that pressed its own vinyl and distributed the stuff locally by truck), gifted me with a brand-spanking new, state-of-the-art, first-of-its-kind, historically innovative Texas Instruments SR-10 Scientific calculator. I’m sure it cost well north of a hundred bucks at the time. It had hard function keys for squares, square roots, scientific notation, no storage registers, and a quirky red LED readout screen. For someone with a chronic math block (me), it was a godsend. 

My college career, spent in the hinterlands of Piscataway, New Jersey, had its ups and downs. In fact, while helping Cathy clean the house for Thanksgiving, I ran into a copy of my undergraduate transcript. At the end of first semester sophomore year I had a solid C minus average (including three outright F grades), and was facing the hard reality that I might not make it through college. But intellectual savvy (or maybe it was panicked fear of being scooped up by the military and shipped off to die in a steamy, remote, paddy landscape in the Mekong River delta) was starting to click. I ended sophomore year with a presentable second semester, a high B average which included a couple of difficult advanced courses. After that, I found my key. I ended up graduating one semester late, but with sufficient credits for a Bachelor of Science degree (required 30-something more credits than a Bachelor of Arts) presented Cum Laude. My transcript is a wacky trace of my transition from shy and sniveling adolescent to socially and intellectually functional adult. My junior year and three semester senior year were basically straight up A grades, including some exceedingly challenging graduate-level courses. 

And my SR-10 made enormous contributions to my success. Anyway, following graduation in January of 1976, I embarked on itinerant pursuit of a career in biology. I taught high school as a substitute, and a full summer semester remedial course in biology. That spring, I got a three month job living in a log cabin in a remote woodland along the Potomac River, catching and breeding fish and subjecting them to methodical thermosensitivity experiments. After summer school ended, I drove off to southern Virginia for a lengthy master’s program in marine sciences. Then I weaseled my way into the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia. Followed by a stint running a lab and teaching an advanced invertebrate zoology course at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in Princess Ann. Then into a series of consulting jobs, with a stop at New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection. We lived in Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and back to Maryland. Somewhere along the way, I lost track of that SR-10 calculator. Of course, this was a time of frenetic development in computing hardware, and the SR-10 had long been superseded by more sophisticated calculators, mainframe computers, and then desktop and laptop machines. 

Anyway, as we worked the kitchen for the Wednesday Night Seafood Supper on Thanksgiving Eve, Dr. B, an old friend who had himself moved from Virginia, to Canada, to Florida, to New Hampshire came in with a gift for me. It was my original SR-10, my name and dorm room scratched into the plastic, fully functional and fired up with new batteries that Dr. B kindly provided! 

Can you imagine? My 1972 calculator found its way back to me, rather like the Master Ring in Lord of the Rings, or the kitchen flatware in Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All. Another amazing circle of my life closing up neat and tidy.

The years I’ve been battling cancer have led to an astonishing number of such circles. I’ve re-established friendships with people who were intensely important to me decades ago and are now comfortably back in touch. I have achieved a worthy percentage of things on my life list of things-to-do-before-I-die, some of them added to the list when I was a child. I have been privileged to have a deeply satisfying life. 

I suppose all of us hope to live such a life that there is no hole in anybody’s heart when we die. If we have been good friends, good parents, good spouses, and have managed to help people learn some things, experience some things, develop cynical and humorous approaches to the contretemps of life, there will be no real sadness in our death. We leave big chunks of ourselves in the care of those we love. For myself, if I have been able to introduce people to music they might not otherwise experience, I would consider my time on earth a success. I would die satisfied and serene. Secure in the knowledge that part of me lives on, and my smiling and laughing spirit is invoked every time somebody listens to a song I helped them discover. Part of me then lives on in you, and I am immortal. My body will be cycled back to the universal pool of molecules as building blocks for the physical future. But my spirit is alive because you've got some piece of me to keep with you on your own life journey. I am there with you, even though my body has cut and run. 

I realized this as we celebrated Thanksgiving together. The holiday this year was magical. A house full of laughing friends pulled me away from my cancer-stricken body and put me on the path to forever. 

I am deeply in your debt. You have given me life even as death was raising its weapons to finish me off. 

I thank you. I love you.

Cathy and I talked it over, and next year we are going to rent an RV to park in the driveway for Thanksgiving week. They come with quite the berry bucket of amenities, ranging from big screen TVs and sound systems to supremely comfortable beds. Next year, nobody will have to scramble for uncomfortable sleeping space on couches and floors, or feel compelled to leave early for lack of sleeping space. We will be together for another sweet celebration of friendship and love, as many of us as can find their way to our home. We will collectively spit in the face of inevitable entropy on our way to another Best Thanksgiving Ever (trademark, copyright). 

ROCK ON, everybody. We’re not dead yet!!!!!

A few Thanksgiving snapshots below.