MosesWrites
I can’t imagine a more beautiful early autumn afternoon in New England, the fifth of October, 1993: a clear sky, fall. The slightest chill in the air; brightly shining sun counterbalances, touches me with warmth. Everything feels perfect, finally, as it ought to be.
My first year of middle school had been a bit of a disaster. I didn’t know how to study, and I didn’t know what my teachers wanted. I had been with the same fifteen or twenty kids at our neighborhood elementary school since kindergarten; after moving to a larger environment with students drawn from our entire town, nearly two hundred in each grade, and in a building adjacent to the even larger high school, I felt totally lost.
In sixth grade, I ought to have had a bit more of a chance to learn how to learn, to figure out how to manage time and to complete homework, but we had a burnt out, alcoholic teacher who ultimately took an extended leave after having a seizure. At first, we had a series of substitutes, and then a young, excellent, longer-term sub, who tried his very best with a group of twelve-year-olds who had gone feral. We pushed back with all the shenanigans and mischief we could muster, but he had real talent as a teacher and eventually we found more fun in learning than, say, exploding diodes in electrical outlets, or using nine-volt batteries to light steel wool on fire. In the spring, though, our original teacher returned, and we went back to our old ways: a lot of naughty exploration, but little if any useful instruction or guidance.
As the youngest of three, I didn’t get as much of the parental “here’s how to do school” lessons that I imagine my older siblings received, and my grandfather had little sense of what school meant: he had dropped out at fifteen, at the start of the Great Depression, to earn money for his family, and he never had any additional formal education beyond the training he received from the Navy, as a machinists mate. As far as I knew, as long as I had fun, as long as I did things I enjoyed, and avoided those that I didn’t, everything would be fine.
Oh boy. I couldn’t have been more naïve, or more wrong.
All of a sudden, it mattered what clothes you wore. It mattered who you talked to, and who would—or wouldn’t—talk to you. Overnight, girls had boobs, and their legs had grown longer, and their hair glistened with unspeakable, incomprehensible magic. Boys played sports and pushed each other around for fun, or worse, not for fun, to ensure you got out of their way. Teachers didn’t already know your name and you had to move from class to class and to keep track of what book, what notebook, what worksheet, what ruler or pen or pair of scissors you ought to bring.
As a bright and fairly precocious student, and also because my parents had a certain social standing in our community—my father worked as the attorney for the local school committee—I had been placed in all honors classes, the top level. Expectations ran high, but for what?
All of a sudden, too, without even knowing the word to describe it, I encountered competition. People wanted to get As and wanted to show that they could do more, that they could finish before me, that they could include bells and whistles that would dazzle the teacher, that they could review and remember what they ought to remember and write it down nicely the next day on the quiz they had prepared for, because when the teacher had said we would have a quiz, they made a note in their assignment book and they went home and took the time to study.
I did none of these things, and I started to fail spectacularly. I started to resent school, and so I did even less. You can imagine the doom spiral that led to my first middle school report card.
At some point, my parents must have discovered the mess in which I had found myself. But at that time, too, my grandmother’s health had begun to decline rapidly; she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. My mother’s attention, my grandfather’s attention, my own emotional energy, all centered on her. My father focused more on my brother and sister, in part because I think he didn’t quite understand what younger kids needed—he had lost his own mother at a young age, and had had a very difficult relationship with his own father, and his father’s second wife—plus my elder siblings needed no small amount of support: my brother had just finished high school, my sister needed to apply to college, and our family needed money to survive. Plus, I had been taken under my grandfather’s wing, and I had been receiving all the fathering which I needed, truthfully. I had been fathered in the most wonderful of ways, but in retrospect I also now realize the limitations, the difference between what a grandfather can and ought to provide, versus a father.
Somehow or another I did eventually get some help, and I wrapped my mind around the fact that I needed to read the books for class, not just the books I wanted to read. I had to pay attention and to take notes, if I wanted to grasp this new-fangled math that included letters, not just numbers, plus squares and square roots and complex fractions and who knows what else.
But I also loved my grandmother, and I wanted to sit by her bedside and to listen to her stories. I wanted to help my grandpa do the laundry, especially after my grandmother might have had an “accident;” when I could sense her shame, and my grandfather’s heartbreak, and his silent inner despair that the woman he loved with all his heart would soon leave him, I wanted to be a good grandson. Day-to-day that felt much more important than being a good student.
Sometime in the late fall of 1992, my grandmother’s doctors suggested that she have a palliative surgery that would give her a bit more comfort and perhaps ease her passing when the time came. I don’t know all the details, though I do remember that the surgery got scheduled for just a few days before Christmas.
My mother explained to me that, while unlikely, the procedure came with risks and my grandmother might not survive.
With the worry that mourning might overwhelm any sense of festivity, and since my grandmother loved Christmas, in a stroke of pure genius, my mother declared that we would simply celebrate on another day, on a day before my grandmother’s surgery. We would move Christmas.
Who says a date matters more than love? Who rules over traditions made by a family, practiced in the warmth and comfort of a home filled with joy?
Nobody, that’s who.
Point-of-fact, Santa Claus and Jesus Christ and whoever else might have a stake in the 25th of December, they too would be on board because if they know anything as we imagine they might know, they know that the spirit of Christmas matters more than anything on a calendar.
We did it: the Sunday before my grandmother’s surgery, we awoke to presents under the tree, we wore our new pajamas, we cooked a turkey dinner, we rummaged through our stockings and did everything that makes Christmas Christmas. I can’t know if everyone else felt the same way, but I certainly recall that as a thirteen-year-old I felt the fullness, the unquestioned happiness, the great wonder of the day, so much so that I remember how odd I felt the next morning when, back at school, no one else had had Christmas the day before.
Thankfully, my grandmother’s surgery proved successful, and she returned to our home to recuperate.
In turn, I learned what the word hospice meant: my grandmother told us she would die. She told us, too, that she couldn’t be happier, having had a wonderful life, having loved and been loved by so many incredible human beings, and that while she would miss us and we would miss her, we should try not to be too sad. She met death with grace, and with her characteristically impeccable manners, to the point that I remember her devoted hairdresser arriving one day to wash, trim, and dye her hair, because if she was going to be seeing people for the last time, she certainly wanted to look her best. I learned about palliative care and morphine patches; I learned that when a person starts to die, you can tell, because the ends of their fingers and toes start to lose color, that they begin to have a bluish hue.
I learned all this, but none of that knowledge got me an A in school.
My grandma got sleepier and sleepier and spent a lot of time resting. One morning, she hadn’t woken, and all signs pointed to her imminent passing. Everyone stayed home from work and school and the kind hospice nurse came to monitor things. We stayed in the room with her and told quiet stories and comforted each other. Then in what seemed an instant, my grandmother awoke and with crystal-clear lucidity and said she wanted to say goodbye and that she now knew everything would be ok and that we needn’t worry. Minutes later, she was dead. To this day, I think that if a god has ever existed, god existed in that moment.
Yesterday, thirty-two years later, on 9 August 2025, at Jesus College Cambridge, I read for the first time the poem “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti. I read aloud and found the same truth in this stanza:
Life out of death.
That night long Lizzie watched by her,
Counted her pulse’s flagging stir,
Felt for her breath,
Held water to her lips, and cooled her face
With tears and fanning leaves:
But when the first birds chirped about their eaves,
And early reapers plodded to the place
Of golden sheaves,
And dew-wet grass
Bowed in the morning winds so brisk to pass,
And new buds with new day
Opened of cup-like lilies on the steam,
Laura awoke as from a dream,
Laughed in the innocent old way,
Hugged Lizzie but not twice or thrice;
Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of grey,
Her breath was sweet as May
And light danced in her eyes.
Nonetheless, my grandfather was heartbroken and my mother, too, of course, and my father as well: he had loved my grandmother as his own mother. With time, they found solace in the unfolding spring, and eventually we all returned to our routines, if my grandfather especially, now that he had lost the person to whom he had dedicated so much of his life still, clearly, had an enormous hole in his heart.
Unsurprisingly, this meant we should take a trip: I had always wanted to see the Grand Canyon and, perhaps, now that I think about it, my grandfather also realized that he, too, wouldn’t live forever, and so he wanted to pass the torch to my own father.
A trip materialized for the three of us, grandfather, father, and son.
In late spring 1993, we flew to Arizona for four or five days, and we stayed at the Scottsdale Princess, an ode to the time in Bermuda with my grandmother.
I had never been west of the Appalachian Mountains; I had never been in another time zone. I had never seen a desert and I had never driven through an Indian Reservation. Yet we went, and I stood with my father and grandfather on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, and I saw nature with a magnitude that I couldn’t have imagined. I played tennis with my dad, and I started, in the swimming pool, to overcome my fear of getting my face wet. I plugged my nose with my fingers and closed my eyes and slowly submerged my head. I don’t know if anyone noticed, how awkward I must have appeared, slowly and unpleasantly garnering courage. Yet, with a determination greater than a need for comfort, I strove to overcome a fear I realized had less of a basis in reason than it did in some inexplicable subconscious aversion. I saw teepees. I ate cactus candy.
A month or so after Arizona, my father and I took our first-ever solo trip to our house in Maine, to do chores, to do yardwork, to prepare from the summer ahead. The torch-passing continued.
Then fall: back to that perfectly beautiful afternoon on the fifth of October. I had gone out to ride my bike, because I loved riding my bike, and part of me, too, had come to realize that I should exercise. I had gotten chubby as I approached puberty, always indulged by my grandfather, and at some point I remember my mother having to take me to a department store that had a “husky” section to find clothes that would fit. By today’s standard, sadly, I wasn’t all that fat, but compared to the boys on the soccer team, the boys on the basketball team, the boys who wanted to play football, compared to those boys who had transformed their lithe frames with muscle rather than mush, I had become what I saw as a monstrosity. In one moment of particular adolescent cruelty, my sister suggested I might need to wear a bra. That’s the sort of thing you never forget.
So, I rode my bike fast and hard. I wanted to find that daring self-confidence that others seemed to possess. Just blocks from my home, the parking lot of St Jude’s Catholic Church, on a weekday afternoon, offered an expanse of space for wheelies and sprinting and skidding. Also, too, I eyed a small, two step cement staircase, and I imagined how cool it would be to ramp off of it on my bicycle: I needed to overcome my tender, childish risk aversion and to do something bold. I thought through how I would need to pull up on the handlebars, to land squarely on my back tire, to continue peddling the instant I landed.
All went brilliantly until my front tire touched the ground, on a small patch of sand, and slid out from under me. The next thing I knew, I was on the pavement with my legs tangled in the bike frame, and I couldn’t move. I didn’t feel pain per se, but I couldn’t move.
Luckily, a younger neighbor had been out riding her bike, too, and she quickly happened upon me. I asked her to go to my house, and to tell my mom. I needed help.
Quickly thereafter, my mom arrived. My grandfather drove over in his silver Ford Escort hatchback, just a short distance, thinking I might need a ride. Yet I wouldn’t be riding in a car. I needed an ambulance, because I couldn’t move.
Oddly enough, my only visible injury amounted to a small, slowly growing patch of blood on the left sleave of my long-sleeved shirt. No skinned knees, no scraped face, just that slight bit of blood.
Soon enough, and all this remains rather patchy in my memory, I found myself in the back of the ambulance—the, because again in my small part of Lincoln, there was just one, and known to us because of my brother’s volunteer service—headed to the hospital in Providence. Somehow, my mother had the foresight to request that they take me to The Miriam, not the closest one, and not even the Children’s Hospital, because she knew they had the best orthopedic care. I remember one moment, feeling every bump and pothole in the road. Then I must have passed out; shock.
Next, I found myself under the glaring lights of The Miriam emergency room, where lights glared in the way only emergency room lights can glare. To confirm my mother’s incredible foresight, an orthopedic surgeon with a specialty in elbows happened to be in the hospital, and he tended to my care.
The left sleave of my shirt must have been cut off at some point, and he examined my wound. He held my arm ever so gently. He quickly determined that it couldn’t bend, it couldn’t move at all. He must have known, from experience, the extraordinary pain that even the slightest touch might cause. Yet, he said, I need to determine if you’ve had a compound fracture, if the bone pierced the skin. I didn’t know what that meant.
Could I have some Tylenol, I begged, could I have anything for the pain?
No, he replied, as kindly as he could: you might need surgery, and soon, and you can’t have anything in your stomach.
Worse, I need to determine if you’ve had a compound fracture.
This, as it happens, meant using a blunt, sterile medal tool to probe that ever-so-small slit on my elbow, to see if the probe would reach my bone, confirming that it had passed through the skin.
I felt pain beyond what I imagined pain could feel like. More than thirty years later, I cannot fathom that pain.
Again, shock. In an operating room, an anesthesiologist asked me to count down from ten. I think I got to eight.
Then I awoke and I saw my mom and dad and they cried. I remember I tried to pull the IV out of my arm, I tried to pull out this odd drain that wound under this huge, heavy plaster cast on my left arm: they felt itchy. No, no, no, you can’t. Then I went back to sleep.
Eventually, when I could finally eat, I discovered that the hospital had ice cream. Albeit crappy ice cream, but ice cream still, and the nurses looked after me with tremendous kindness and care and they would get me ice cream whenever I asked: they must have appreciated the gravity of my injury, far beyond what I appreciated, and also the unique power of ice cream to help us heal.
I started to get better, with the quickness of a young, healthy boy, and after the better part of a week, once the risk of serious infection had passed, I got discharged. I think it might have been a Sunday, because I remember, after getting home, I got to miss school for one extra day, a Monday. Though the doctor had said, there’s no reason I couldn’t get back to school.
I returned in a fog of exhaustion. My wonderful classmates volunteered to carry my book bag, with all those books and notebooks, the ruler and calculator and scissors I had finally realized I needed to have at the ready. I couldn’t carry anything myself. I could barely walk straight. Day by day, though, I felt better. The fog started to clear, and because I had started eighth grade with a determination to do well in school, I got back to homework and taking notes and preparing for the quizzes that the teacher would talk about and which I would mark on my assignment pad.
Fourteen days after I shattered my elbow, on the morning of the 19th of October, a week after I had left the hospital, my father took me to see the orthopedic surgeon who had, miraculously, screwed and plated my elbow back into something that might eventually bend and twist like an elbow. Ever so gently, he removed the hulking plaster cast; ever so gently he held my arm for X-rays: I still remember how he suited up in a led vest, in a lead collar, because he knew he had to hold my arm just so, to position the X-ray plate just so, to avoid causing excruciating pain while still getting the films he needed. I remember that kindness, just as I remember his self-satisfaction at the sight of his handiwork revealed by radiation passed through: everything remained where it ought to be, and he could tell with a surgeon’s eye that my arm could again function normally, if after a tremendous amount of physical therapy. He removed the surgical staples that had been stapled into my arm at the end of my surgery. I remember how he showed me the way the tool worked, saying there wouldn’t be too much pressure, there wouldn’t be too much pain. Nothing more than the slightest pinch, and one by one those staples clinked into a metal tray. I got a new, lighter, cast, and I went home. I think I even went to school that afternoon. My dad went off to work.
When I got home at the end of the day, I sat in the kitchen as my mom prepared dinner. My sister had gone off to college; my grandfather had moved back to his house; my brother had a life of his own. So just my mom, my dad and I would eat together; we would eat chili. My dad arrived, we had a nice meal, and afterwards he said he needed to go back to his office. I think he might have been preparing for a trial. Not typical, but not entirely unusual. After we cleaned up, he headed out, and later I went to bed, my mom went to bed.
Four or five hours after that, probably two or three in the morning, my mother awoke and realized my father had never come home.
At some point, she woke me up. At some point, my brother appeared. At some point, we got in the car and drove to Providence, to my father’s office.
Blur. Shards. Imperfectly perfect videographic memories.
When we arrived, a police officer met us at the front of the building. No, we didn’t have a key. Another attorney was en route to open the door. No, my father had never not come home before. The officer looked into the garage, and his car was still there. Any problems at home? Ever so subtly suggested: any chance he might be with someone else? No and no. But I can’t fault the cop: a decently well-to-do middle-aged lawyer with three kids, married for twenty-plus years: what’s the likeliest scenario?
Blurs and shards.
My father’s colleague arrived with the key. He, and the police officer, went up to the office, while my mother, brother, and I waited in the lobby.
All I remember next: a cascade of sirens, a growing intensity of flashing lights, a street full of emergency vehicles.
D.
O.
A.
Dead on arrival.
Cause unknown.
Phone calls, questions, arrangements.
Blurs and shards.
As dawn broke, we drove home.
I went to my room, with my mother and brother. On my CD player I played Peter Paul and Mary’s Puff the Magic Dragon, and their version of Blowin’ in the Wind, and my mother and brother and I held each other, and we wept.
My mother needed to call my sister, now in Berkeley. I can’t begin to understand how hard that must have been for both of them.
Family and friends swooped in with kindness and care. Unlike my grandmother’s well-anticipated passing, my father’s death left us entirely lost, both in terms of immediate needs—a funeral, finances—and the irreplaceable absence of someone who supported so much of our day-to-day life.
Tom Alburn, the minister of the First Unitarian Church, who we’ve encountered earlier, arrived at our home. I remember his own tears, because he and my father had been good friends. My father had been President of the Church in 1979 and remained a dedicated member—a refuge from the way his own father and stepmother had wielded Judaism so cruelly against him, rejecting his love for my Protestant mother and renouncing the bonds of kinship.
Tom admitted his own anguish. He ministered through vulnerability. He guided us through the practical as it crashed into the profound. A funeral? Calling hours? Who ought to speak at the memorial service? How do you say goodbye to a husband, a father, a brother, a son?
I can only see and hear very particular moments from that time, layered and consolidated in the weird ways of memory.
So many people wanted to help. Meals arrived, groceries appeared, cooking, cleaning, the care of community instantly, silently ensured every need had been met, except the greatest of needs that could never be met. I cry remembering that care.
Many hundreds of people called on us at Bellow’s Funeral Chapel, less than 300 yards from our home. Two hours in the late afternoon—a good time for those who just finished school, and for older people, we were told—and then two more hours after dinner, for those who worked until later in the day. Friends, politicians, classmates, people I had never met before, hundreds of them called and I know all that’s meant as an expression of kindness and a testament to love but I just wanted to run away and rest. But there I stood, arm in a sling, shattered elbow, now shattered soul.
Some gestures do stay with me to this day: a man brought a photograph taken when my father had clerked on the Rhode Island Supreme Court. All the clerks had donned their Justices’ robes, arranged themselves exactly as their justices had stood, and then they replaced the actual photo that hung in the court with this new imposter. Apparently quite some time passed before anyone noticed, or they finally revealed their trick. I never would have known that my otherwise cool, calm, deliberate, rule-abiding and sober-minded father could have partaken in such naughtiness. Others spoke of the quiet, never-advertised favors he had done. Some just cried and hugged us.
One thing I did realize, in the conventions of mourning, some expressions, while meant with true feeling and honest good care, ring entirely hollow in the nature of the words used. Don’t say “I’m sorry,” unless you actually killed the person. “Sorry” has no circumstance. Apologize for how I feel? Or worse, tell me how lucky I was to have had such a wonderful father? The one lying over there, dead, in a casket? So lucky: FUCK YOU.
Rage, wrath; tender, fragile sadness; an instant of shocking joy; confusion, that the kids who never spoke to me at school now wanted to touch my pain: all I could try to do is to feel what I felt, with no expectations as to what feelings ought to feel like.
We had a lovely memorial service, thanks to Tom. I made two contributions: one, I wanted to have sung Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And, as the recessional, I wanted the organist to play, with heart-pounding volume, zippity-do-da, zippity-yeah, which often followed Sunday services at the Church. If we had to say goodbye, we could at least give my father something joyful, that I knew he loved: so many of the times when we did attend Church, I remember him clicking his heels, smiling, holding my hand as we heard that song.
Sometimes we need Quaker silence, other times thundering chords.
We buried my father next to my grandmother in Swan Point Cemetery, where we would, in less than three years, bury my grandfather, and where in fourteen years my mother would return, one last time, to her own grave.
Whatever studious rebound I had achieved after my broken elbow disappeared in an instant, and at best I just went through the motions of school. If I hadn’t had those classmates carrying my bag—because I still couldn’t carry much of anything—taking me from one room to the next, I’m not sure I would have even known where do go. Plus at least three days a week, my grandfather needed to take me to physical therapy, because if I ever wanted to use my arm again, the doctor said, I needed intensive and sustained physical therapy.
In some ways the physical pain brought relief.
Can a thirteen-year-old understand what it would mean to live the rest of his life with a crippled arm? I couldn’t have. Though I sensed the limitations: it’s hard to shave with one arm, the other still mostly immobile. It’s even harder to masturbate, because hormones: the hormones didn’t go away, they just became infinitely more confusing. It’s hard when, to complete even the most mundane of tasks—can you open that bottle for me?—you need to ask for help.
I needed support, and many, many people supported me, if in other ways I didn’t know how to articulate what I needed. I didn’t even know what I needed.
My grandfather moved back into our house. He helped us to survive.
We had to do so many things: certified death certificates. Insurance policies. My father’s leased car, which we no longer needed. His clothes. Titles and deeds.
Despite being an otherwise well-ordered person, none of these things had been left in much of any order by my father. My mother knew hardly anything of our family finances. She had dyslexia or something like it, and struggled with simple arithmetic. I remember one time she came home from the supermarket and broke down in tears because she thought we had run out of money, that she had just written a check that wouldn’t clear: instead of subtracting something like $108.45 from the balance, she had subtracted $10845 which, yes, would have been a bounced check. But the hundred and change, I assured her: no problem, mom, it’s ok.
Because I could, because of all those lessons and time spent with my grandfather, I took on far more responsibilities than anyone at that age ought to. Now fourteen, I opened all the mail and organized all the bills. I would write out all the checks and order them for my mother to sign. I learned about mortgage insurance and term versus whole life insurance. I learned about social security survivor’s benefits. I learned that many adults will dismiss a child, even if they know what they’re talking about, what they’re doing, because who expects a fourteen-year-old to run into the bank to deposit a $25,000 life insurance check, or to negotiate the price of a new car.
I learned all this, but none of that knowledge got me an A in school.
If 7th grade had been disaster, eighth grade became a complete void. I only passed my classes because I got some special accommodations and basically my guidance counselor was sensible enough to tell my teachers, or at least any of them too emotionally stunted to understand, this kid has been shattered in ways none of us can even comprehend and so if you think he’s a failure, FUCK YOU.
That winter, even with counseling, with the darker and colder days, I lost myself. I blamed myself for my father’s death, and I felt it as a judgment on my own emerging manhood. The otherwise ordinary shame that’s imposed on sexuality became something irrevocable. I blamed my father. I wondered if, not having been there when he died, like I had been there with my grandmother, I wondered if he had actually killed himself to punish me—for what? For everything, for being me. I wondered if, had I not broken my arm, had I not needed to go to the doctor that morning, had my father not needed to go back to work that evening, maybe he would have been at home when he had had his heartache, rather than alone, and maybe he could have been saved. I had grief-stricken, recurring anxiety dreams. I dreamt he was still alive, that he had left us, that he had a new life with a family he loved more than—had he even?—loved us. Because who loves someone and then dies? Who abandons a kid with a shattered elbow?
Therapists assured me of the normalcy of these feelings, but I just felt them too intensely. One afternoon, I went outside, to sleep in the snow, because I just wanted to sleep forever. I dozed off, only to be awoken by our dog licking my face, my mother having let him out to go to the bathroom. Our dog likely saved my life. (If you’re considering suicide or self-harm, get help. Do not kill yourself. Do not do it. Find someone, anyone, talk to them, sit with them. Let a dog lick your face.)
After that, my mother brought me to a youth psychiatric facility, and I spoke to some people and I took some tests. No, I didn’t want to hurt others. No, I didn’t have any thoughts of violence. Yes, I did not want to continue living. Yes, I had a clear plan of how I would end my life.
Apparently, I got an A on those tests, because I spent the next two or so weeks in intensive in-patient therapy. I couldn’t have shoelaces, but I did get to hear from other young people working through horrific pain. A girl who had been raped by her stepfather, I think it was. A boy who had been beaten, and beaten, and beaten again by his real father. Plus a number of ordinary kids who just had very real struggles with mental health. I got to share the raw honest horror of my own pain.
It worked, too, which is why, if you’re considering suicide or self-harm, get help. Do not kill yourself. Do not do it. Find someone, anyone, talk to them, sit with them. Let a dog lick your face.
I’m not sure if any of my classmates ever knew where I went for those couple of weeks, but I know all of them were kind enough not to ask or to even mention it. As the days grew longer and warmer, I really did start to feel better, and to see some hope in life. I could bend and rotate my elbow again, and I could carry my own bag. Through all of that excruciating physical therapy, I had regained nearly 90% of the original motion I had possessed, and hardly anyone would even be able to guess I had sustained such an injury. To this day my right arm, my already dominant arm, remains significantly stronger, and some things, like pull-ups, or rock climbing, or using an oar to paddle, still lead me to confront physical limitations. I have some slight nerve damage which means the two smallest fingers on my left hand don’t quite grasp as they might, don’t have the same dexterity they once did. But most every day and for most every task I want to complete, I have no problems. I have learned, though, about scars, and about things people carry on the inside, and how it shapes their lives in ways we might never see, no less comprehend. I learned about imbalance and how the slightest variations can cause enduring stress.
By late spring of 1994, I really had started to feel better, to regain a sense of myself well beyond the total collapsing cloud of depression. I might have even started doing some homework again.
Our school hosted an “Eight Grade Social,” the first dance to which boys would invite girls, for which boys and girls would get dressed up, in which some formal structure would be given to all those confusing impulses we felt about bodies, our bodies, others’ bodies. Still peak heteronormative structure, but that would change, eventually, too, as most of us grew up and became more understanding, accepting adults.
I decided I would ask a girl to go with me! I would ask the cute girl who I found as kind and beautiful as any girl could ever be, and so at lunch one day I walked over to the table where she was seated, and I asked her. Being kind and beautiful, and since I was really, really late in having decided to attend the dance, of course she already had a date. She was super gracious and said something like, Chris, honestly, I would have loved to go with you, but I already have a date. (Apparently once you have a date, he or she wouldn’t look kindly on you changing your mind, or getting an extra date to come along: who knew?!?!)
Undeterred, because I really wanted to go to the dance, and inspired by how nice I had felt when this kind, beautiful girl had been nice to me, I thought of another equally, if differently, kind and beautiful girl and I marched over to her table, and I asked her if she would go to the dance with me. Same story. Someone had already invited her, and she had said yes.
Undeterred, I headed over to option three, again, at lunch, in front of everyone.
To my great good fortune, at that moment a few girls staged an intervention, maybe even including those two girls who I had just asked.
Chris, they said, this isn’t how it works. We know you mean well, but you need to realize. Girl number two knows—everyone now knows—she’s girl number two, and girl number three, and so on: everyone only wants to be girl number one. You can’t do it like this!
Who knew asking someone out could be so hard and complicated?!?
I just wanted to go to a dance with a beautiful, kind girl. I had no ulterior motives. How had anyone ever learned any of this?
My first attempt at courtship: I definitely did not get an A on that test.
Even more kindly, as they intervened, those classmates asked—do you like this other girl? Because she doesn’t have a date yet. And we can help you ask her, and to ask her in a way she’ll feel like girl number one, and before you ask her, we’ll have a pretty good idea she’ll say yes.
Holy hell! What superpowers did they possess? Because I had been absent the day, the month, the year all that must have been taught. My mother had explained pubic hair and menstruation and erections and ejaculation and we learned about some more stuff in health class, but all that couldn’t even come close to the extraordinary social and emotional complexity of simply asking a kind, beautiful girl to go to a dance. I had zero intuitive grasp of romance. I could refinance a house, but dating: no.
Despite countless crushes (and maybe even some people who might have had a crush on me, but which I couldn’t understand, or for which I wasn’t ready), it wouldn’t be until I was twenty one before I had an actual girlfriend, before I experienced the sort of love that involves intimacy and adoration and the projection of yourself, of what you might create with another person, into the entirety of the rest of your life.
Along the way, too, because no one had explained any of this to me, I realized I needed to understand for myself the feelings I felt, and why I felt them.
Where did attraction come from?
What about bums and boobs and bare midriffs made me turn my head and stare? Why did I fantasize about being the boy with the six pack abs, with his hand on the bare shoulder of the skinny girl in a sports bra and short shorts? What about lips made them something to kiss, with which to kiss? How did a head rub, or a foot rub, become something sensual, foreplay for a foray into the regions between head and toe? When did eyes let you look into someone, as they looked into you? How the hell did you flirt?
I had to wonder, too, what made certain people sexy, or ugly, in the cruel world of high school. What forces of media, even well before Instagram, led us to see in the ways we saw? What pivotal and inescapable power did hierarchies orchestrate, of our desperate need to order and rank? How did all this fuel resentment and envy, and allow those cool and sexy people, in some cases, to get away with being assholes, simply put? What did that do to them, as people: how did it shape their sense of self, and who they would become, as adults, as parents, as futures wielders of enormous power and privilege?
I’ve come to realize few people ask these questions, or at least consider them as an essential element of who they are as a person, or who we are as people. I think in part, the fear of so-called divergent sexuality, the fear of homosexuality or transsexuality, arises in large part because of this: if we had a truly honest reckoning with the extraordinary complexity and variability of even supposedly normal desires, we would discover a great deal of uncertainty and discomfort, but we would all be much better off because of it. Not least for feminism, for challenging the abiding power of misogyny, but more so because, quite simply, I think we would have a hell of a lot more fun with our bodies. We might come to embrace our bodies rather than to fight against them, to reckon with the inescapable conundrums of vanity and desire, and above all, the desire to be desired, mind and body, as a bundle of innately human contradictions rather than as some idea of perfection, toned and credentialed, taken as “the one” rather than an evolving, intersubjective self.
When I get older, losing my hair
Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a valentine,
birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
Any innate biological imperative has only the smallest of roles to play, given the radical conditioning of culture, personality, and individual experience.
I learned little of that in high school, whether in any sort of romantic or even sophisticated analytical way, though I did learn how to invest myself in my community. In large part, escape, yes, but also because I realized I could do many things easily, like planning, communication, the well-ordered execution of tasks, that I could help to bring people together.
Managing a class budget of ten or twenty thousand dollars sounded easy compared to the complexity of our family finances, so I ran for class treasurer. I won, and for the next three years I ran unopposed. I had gotten my first Macintosh computer, and so I learned about spreadsheets and databases and page layout. Technology really could simplify things—some things, at least. I joined the yearbook, and the school newspaper, and any number of other clubs and activities. I purchased the food for the concession stand used during football games, I ordered the new monitor for the publications office computer—because I had a credit card, because I had access to and an understanding of resources that most high school students did not, and it was tremendously faster than the arcane purchase order and requisition procedures of the school district.
Yet I remained a mostly private person, with the vast majority of my life passing under the radar of my friends and teachers. I knew I needed community, I needed the strength and purpose that comes from being known, from knowing others, and since my family life continued to go from bad to worse to intolerably horrific, I ran away to find an alternative.
8-11 August 2025