I'm no numismatist, but I do like coins. Of all the humble, ordinary objects that are a part of our everyday existence, they are among my favorites. I enjoy the jangle of change in my pocket, the durable thinness of a dime, the palpable heft of a quarter, the smooth circumference of a nickel, the tiny visage of Lincoln's statue within its memorial on the reverse of a penny. I take comfort in their familiar ubiquity, their inevitable presence scattered along the tops of dressers, loitering within desk drawers, and accumulating in every tray and compartment between the driver and passenger seat. The jaded among us cast spare change aside as though its monetary worth were its only value, but small children, unhampered by experience, will treasure a penny as a highly desirable object. There is a primal satisfaction in the possession of these virtually indestructible metal tokens with their perfectly circular shapes and curious iconography.

As I said, I'm no numismatist, but I have collected coins. If the uniformity of our solid currency has ever appealed to you, then you might also have found yourself attracted to that shelf in the hobby store with the assortment of deep blue Official Whitman Coin Folders. Each trifold portfolio of sturdy cardboard contains a matrix of paper-backed holes labeled by date, mint initial, and the number of millions that were produced. Unlike other historical chronologies, the Whitman Coin Folder is unencumbered by interpretation or nuance. It is truly nonpartisan. Everything has its own little place, and that's that. And well before the popular preoccupation with video games and their motivating multilevels, these collector's folders hooked the anal retentive with visions of completeness. The rows and rows of holes are just begging to be filled with their corresponding coins.

Whitman makes coin folders for just about every piece of domestic change that ever saw the inside of a cash register, but simple economics dictated that I could have a lot more fun by starting with the Lincoln Head Cent portfolios and working my way up from there. Right away, when you take one of those penny folders home, you get a lot of bang for your buck. A lot of holes can be filled by simply sifting through every household crevice and container that has accepted change over the years. My initial enthusiasm was fueled by just such a scavenger mission. The second stage is a little more work but nevertheless frequently rewarding, and it consists of closely examining all monetary exchanges for needed coins. I plugged quite a few folder holes doing that. Eventually, however, one reaches an equilibrium that reinforces the concept of rarity. Generally, though not always, the older the coin, the rarer the find.

Every time I completed a previously unfilled year, it brought a tingle of excitement. 1943, with its silvery wartime steel pennies, was especially rewarding, an island of cool, gray stoicism in a sea of common copper. But longer and longer intervals stretched between such finds. This is the point, I believe, that separates the numismatic novice from the true hobbyist. Are you willing to go beyond simply searching through spare change and start paying far more than face value for the coins you need to complete your collection? I pondered that question when I had time to kill at the local mall, wandering off to a lonely wall aisle of Woolworth and perusing its automated coin case. A couple dozen rectangular trays were arranged like Ferris wheel cars around a rotating drum. Customers could press buttons to light up the cabinet and bring the tray of their choice to the top of the case for closer examination. I thought it was great, and I frittered away many minutes familiarizing myself with the Woolworth collection.

Sooner or later, every penny collector yearns for a coin from 1909, the first year Lincoln head cents were produced. 72.7 million were produced without mint initials, by far the easiest variety to find. 28 million were struck with the letters VDB in recognition of the coin's designer, Victor D. Brenner. Merely 1.8 million carried just the letter S, the mark of the San Francisco mint. But a scant half million combined the San Francisco designation with Brenner's intials. Today, a 1909 S-VDB penny in fine condition is valued at $1,000. Yes, that's one thousand dollars. Stop and think about that for a moment. Just over a hundred years ago, plenty of people were walking around with one or more of these pennies in their pockets. Little did they know that had they merely kept it in a safe, dry place, that penny would have skyrocketed to one hundred thousand times its face value over the next century!

I can't remember whether the 1909 Lincoln head penny in that Woolworth case was an S-VDB or the much more common VDB variety (now valued at a quite affordable $13.50 in fine condition), but I do recall marveling at its presence and shaking my head at its unattainable price. Really, when you're a kid who's used to filling your collection at almost no cost, it almost doesn't matter whether a collectible is merely expensive or absurdly expensive. Either way, it's out of reach, at least when the price of a rare penny is as good as a whole lot of candy, comic books and baseball cards. I was destined to avoid serious numismatics.

Kid that I was, though, I found an affordable alternative that appealed to me nearly as much as the true rarity. True collectors would no doubt disregard it as a crass item of little to no value, but I thought it was cool. I pressed the button for customer service. There in the same row as the expensive 1909 coin was a novelty penny that had just been minted in 1981. Someone had struck it a second time, leaving an impression of the Liberty Bell etched within the tight space between Lincoln's nose and the perimeter of the coin. It couldn't have set me back more than a couple bucks. I took my treasure home, opened my Official Whitman Coin Folder, and pressed the altered penny into one of the empty holes marked VARIETIES.

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Priceless proof in the absence of memory.

My paternal grandfather died at the age of 86 when I was twelve years old. Given the fact that he lived just around the next block during the entire time I knew him, it seems only natural that I would have many memories of our brief time together. Yet, sadly, I cannot recall any specific moments that we shared. I only remember what it was like to sit quietly in his tiny living room when Dad and I would stop by for a visit. The two of them would drone on about topics that did not interest me at all, and I would pass the time by rocking in a swivel chair and scanning the latest National Enquirer that had been left on the end table. Sometimes there would be something interesting on the TV, but most often not.

I can only remember Grandpa as a mysterious and taciturn widower, Grandma having died when I was six. He did not live alone, though, as he had a faithful dachshund named Gidget for companionship. A highlight of visiting Grandpa, one might think. But as much as I found my grandfather to be remote, his little dog was completely unapproachable. Apparently she had once suffered abuse at the hands of youngsters, rendering her hostile toward anyone who happened to be in the same peer group as her former tormentors. Between Grandpa's perpetual frown and his vicious wiener dog, I didn't care to linger when we visited.

Not that there weren't subtle signs that there was far more to this man than his introverted nature suggested. The white tank top undershirts he favored in summertime revealed a faded rose tattoo, a real curiosity in an age when getting inked was a badge of nonconformity. I tried not to stare at it, just as I averted my eyes from his hand that was missing half of its pinkie finger. For many years I mistakenly believed that it had been mangled in a train coupling. Lord knows where I got the idea, as the dull truth was that Grandpa had simply got his finger caught in a factory machine press. Perhaps my brain just embellished the romantic character that started to form in my mind as I grew older and heard tales of my late grandfather.

Raising half a dozen kids during the 20's and 30's could not have been easy, and Grandpa did whatever he could to make ends meet. Most famously, desperate for a job to support his family, he managed to secure a job as a typing instructor despite the fact that he did not know how to type. How he got the job remains a mystery, but he apparently managed to bluff his way through the obligation by a regimen of self-instruction that kept him one lesson ahead of his students. During another lean period, he was literally down to his last dollar, which he gambled on a tip book from a bar. Amazingly, the investment paid off handsomely enough to get him by.

I learned that he eventually was a successful seller of cemetery plots, a somewhat ghoulish profession for which he was once rewarded with a tie tack in the shape of a shovel. He had a spotlight mounted to his car in order to find house numbers while canvassing neighborhoods in the evening. Somehow the very idea evokes the melodrama of an old EC horror comic book. I can only guess that anyone who could manage to make a living persuading people to open their doors at night and buy a cemetery plot must have been born to sell.

I found out that against all stereotypes, it was Grandpa who cooked breakfast for my father when he was young, setting a hot plate and a steaming mug of coffee before his youngest child every morning. I laughed at the story of Grandpa's ire upon finding his car blocked by a double-parked vehicle, which he subsequently removed by starting his own automobile and pushing the obstacle out of the way. But I'm glad I wasn't around to see the legendary poker night when he is said to have expressed his disgust at a bad game by hauling all of the gambling paraphernalia down to the basement and tossing it into the coal furnace. I am told that one of my cousins possesses evidence of the incident by way of a collection of singed poker chips.

So much I could have asked him, if only I had grown a bit older before he died. But we never had a whole lot to say to each other, or at least that's how I remember it. For the longest time, well into my adulthood, I had the impression that I was barely noticed by Grandpa. I was, after all, the last of his twenty-two grandchildren, and surely the novel thrill of grandfatherhood must have worn off by then. But then I found a trio of letters, written to me during his annual wintering with my aunts and uncles in California, that tell a different story. Perhaps he never did say much to me in person - maybe he never felt comfortable doing so - but he took the time to put into written words the very things that any grandchild would want to hear:

San Diego, Calif.

Jan. 8, 1977

Dear Bobby:

I liked your letter with the drawing of a ten dollar bill. Did you deposit your Christmas money in the bank?

I'll bet you received a number of nice gifts on Christmas Day. Did you get a sled? I hear that Lima has been getting a lot of snow, so a sled will be a lot of fun.

I wish you could be with me when I take my walks along the ocean. There are many big ships coming and going, and also many jet passenger planes and Navy planes. Many people take their lunches with them and either lay in the sun or go bathing, and the children play in the sand.

There has been a lot of snow in the mountains, and a lot of parents take their children up there to play in it.

I will look for another letter from you soon.

A big hug and kiss for you, and love and best wishes to all.

Grandpa

P.S. I ma learning to use Norma's new electric typewriter, so please excuse mistakes.

Have you made any more plans to capture Bigfoot?

How funny it is for me to read that letter today. I don't even remember writing letters to Grandpa, which I'm guessing I might have done only at my parents' urging. Why I would have drawn a ten-dollar bill is beyond me. I do, however, recall my boyhood fascination with Bigfoot. I took it for granted that he was real, and I once detailed how I might take him captive with the aid of Dad, Grandpa, and the hostile hound Gidget. I am certain that Grandpa's dry humor went right over my head when I first read his letters.

San Diego, Ca

Dec. 14, 1977

Dear Bobby,

I enjoyed your nice letter and the interesting drawings. Thanks a lot for the Christmas seals.

We went to Richard's house in Oceanside last Sunday, and Gidget was very happy to see me. She is a lot of company for Richard, and he will hate to give her up when I return to Lima.

Richard and Dave and Lee Ann and their kids are coming for a week in San Diego, and we will be at Lee Ann's parents home for Christmas dinner.

I hope you will get everything you want for Christmas.

I read in the newspaper that Bigfoot has been seen in Oregon. I will watch for any more news about him, and let you know. It does not seem likely that he will be in Ohio until about next summer.

Glad that you like the snow. People with children drive up in the high mountains here and bring snow home in the trunks of their cars. Rather silly, I think.

Thanks a lot for the Christmas seals.

Write again real soon.

Love and best wishes,

Grandpa

P.S. You are a very good letter writer.

Why, that isn't the Grandpa I remember visiting! How could I have read words like those and so quickly forgotten them? But then I was quite young, too young too see the humor and too unsophisticated to appreciate how carefully my grandfather had written in a style that was easy for me to understand. The thought that he took the time to write when he could have spent a few more moments relaxing in sunny California would never have occurred to me.

The last letter, written within two years of his death, reflects a change in tone. Grandpa recognized that I was a little more grown up, being ten and all, and perhaps it was time to address me differently. He still, however, took delight in providing me with Bigfoot updates.

San Diego, Calif

March 12, 1979

Dear Bob:

I enjoyed your recent letter and am glad you are doing well in school, even tho you do not like it too well. It is best to have a good education.

It looks like bad weather is about over in Lima, and you can have a lot of fun with your bike. Are you going to play ball this summer?

The last I heard about Bigfoot, he was seen somewhere in Idaho. If he ever comes to Ohio, we will put Gidget on his trail.

We took a long ride in the mountains yesterday. Many wonderful things to see.

I have reservations for my trip home on the 7th of April. Will be happy to get back.

Love and best wishes to all,

Grandpa

I regret that I never knew Grandpa better, but I am very grateful to have the letters that he wrote to me so long ago. Not only do they prove to me that my grandfather did, indeed, have great affection for me, but they also provide me with a valuable lesson. It's always a good investment of time to put your love of others into writing. You never know when those words will communicate what you no longer can.

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The forlorn, former home of Cans 'n' Stuff

The street on which I was raised runs nearly three quarters of a mile, a straight line along its entire length. We lived almost dead center, whence I could pedal my bike a satisfying distance in either direction. On the west end of the avenue lived Big Ed and Little Ed, a father and son whose nicknames reflected their seniority but not their relative size. Big Ed, as I recall, was a quiet, gray-haired man of small stature. Little Ed, however, was bigger in every way, from his large frame to his frizzy, black hair, which framed a happy-go-lucky countenance. They would have been an odd couple under any circumstances, but for a brief period of time they were business partners. They ran their unique venture from a tiny and disheveled storefront at the eastern terminus of our street.

Cans 'n' Stuff was surely one of the stranger establishments to have emerged in my hometown. Its eclectic stock was an outgrowth of its proprietors' respective hobbies. Big Ed collected beer cans, a fad of rising popularity in the seventies. Little Ed collected record albums, singles and related memorabilia. Naturally, they opened a shop that sold used records and beer cans. It was, perhaps, one of the greatest moments in the history of entrepreneurial zeal executed without so much as a shred of market research. What, after all, was the target demographic of Cans 'n' Stuff? Whom did Big Ed and Little Ed envision as their customers?

Herein was a lovely irony, for it so happened that, despite the presumably limited appeal of Cans 'n' Stuff, the quirky endeavor held great appeal to another pair who lived smack in between the Eds and their silly shop: my father and me. I don't know that Dad and I had a whole lot in common with Big Ed and Little Ed, but we did share their peculiar elder/younger - beer can/record album preoccupation dynamic. Imagine, a little bit of father-son heaven opening up right at the end of your street. I was too young to recognize its improbability. I just knew I liked it, and so did Dad.

Long before the term man cave was admitted to the popular lexicon, Dad had created a peaceful refuge of sorts in a corner of our unfinished basement. A work bench sat under the darkened window that use to look out over the back yard before its view was obstructed by the crawlspace of our addition. Plenty of illumination was provided by a hanging bank of fluorescent lights. Though the furnace, water heater and fuse box surrounded the space, Dad added little touches of manly decor that made his "workshop" comfortable. He nailed old license plates to the exposed floor beams and taped calendar images of faraway places to the sides of storage boxes. Stacks of National Geographic and Popular Mechanics filled a utility shelf. And somewhere along the way, Dad decided to paint the wooden shelves affixed to the upper half of the foundation walls a vibrant orange. Within these eye-popping display units he assembled his beer can collection.

"Someday," Dad was fond of intoning as he gestured toward his collection with a sweep of his hand, "this will all be yours, son." It took me a few years to discern his wonderfully dry and gentle sense of humor. He never took his hobby seriously, although it is true that some of the rarities he possessed had the potential to escalate in value. As was the custom among collectors, Dad's cans appeared to be full, their pull-tab tops unmolested, but their concealed undersides had puncture holes that allowed for the draining and enjoyment of their contents. For my father, half of the pleasure of a beer can collection was the opportunity to try new beers, and the other half was derived from the colorful and often amusing packaging art. Any monetary value was just icing on the cake. Or perhaps foam on the beer.

Among the more memorable brands I recall was Olde Frothingslosh, a tongue-in-cheek product of Pittsburgh Brewing Company featuring Iron City Beer in a series of novelty cans emblazoned with retro cheesecake portraits of the hefty Miss Olde Frothingslosh. From the same brewery came Hop'n Gator, a lemon-lime flavored beer said to be inspired by a mixture of suds and Gatorade. Dad also had the requisite can of Billy Beer, the shameless self-exploitation of President Jimmy Carter's notoriously backwoods and beer-swilling caricature of a brother. Alongside a beer calendar and a festive St. Pauli Girl poster, the collection added a cheery touch of whimsy to the otherwise drab basement. On many evenings, Dad could be found contentedly puttering away down there to the tinny sound of a baseball game or classical music on his portable radio.

Meanwhile, I was starting to look beyond the records I had found in the house and began exploring my own musical interests. Little Ed, long admired by me since the days he had been a jaunty high school chum of my big sister Diane, graciously heralded the opening of Cans 'n' Stuff by presenting me with a promotional gift: an 8x10 black-and-white glossy of the Ed Sullivan Show-era Beatles and a 45 of the KISS standard Rock and Roll All Nite. Unsophisticated as I was, I quietly disregarded the photo while prizing the single, which I errantly spun on my turntable at 33 and 1/3. Having only seen yet never heard KISS, the resulting monstrous sludge that thudded from my speakers seemed credible enough, bizarre as it was.

Soon Cans 'n' Stuff became a regular destination for Dad and me. Big Ed and Little Ed must have loved it when we walked through the door. Fathers and sons enjoyed a few moments of enthusiastic talk about fields of interest that seemed to captivate no one else. In fact, I do not remember ever seeing another customer in the shop, though surely it must have attracted its share of curious passers-by. Perhaps I was always too occupied by the business at hand. Dad and Big Ed chatted about cans while Little Ed promised to keep an eye out for the records I coveted. We always left a few cans and albums richer.

In the end, however, our occasional patronage could not sustain the short life of Cans 'n' Stuff. I can't imagine it ever turned a profit. But for an all-too-brief season, Dad and I knew a place down the street that seemed like it had been created just for us. Big Ed and Little Ed, your business may not have succeeded in the traditional sense, but you certainly were a hit with us. Even now, I smile to think of the time we spent idly perusing your bygone establishment. And believe it or not, we still have those records and cans.

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For years, Brian and I had little to say to each other due to the icy chasm of our eight years difference in age. We had few common interests, after all. Not until I reached adolescence did our cold war start to thaw, a more or less civil diplomacy emerging in the unlikeliest of venues: on the virtual football fields, baseball diamonds and tennis courts of pioneering Intellivision video games. It was my older brother, who followed sports and occasionally actually played them, versus his nonathletic and sports-illiterate sibling in highly competitive contests of manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination. Countless battles unfolded on the color screen of our wood-paneled console television as we stretched out on the living room floor and blindly manipulated the controllers, keeping our wide eyes locked on the action.

Sometimes we were woefully mismatched, as when we faced off in football. Clearly Brian had the far better grasp of strategy. I had only one effective weapon in my pitiful strategic arsenal, a potentially devastating play that I called The 9929 Twenty-Yard Fadeback. Named for the four-digit code one entered into the controller to call a play that included a receiver going long, the scheme exploited a curious anomaly of Intellivision Football: its quarterbacks never threw too short nor tossed the ball out of bounds, instead firing off passes that would spiral all the way off the scrolling screen if they were not caught. By some strange compromise of gameplay design, those golden arms could accurately throw the length of the football field.

The 9929 worked like a charm, provided that I could entice a prolonged rush. I simply ran my quarterback twenty yards backward, made sure Brian wasn't in between me and my offscreen receiver, and let 'er rip. One 80-yard pass later, my isolated receiver would dash alone into the end zone. Unstoppable if you didn't see it coming. Of course, it soon became impossible for me to entice Brian into a prolonged rush. As soon as my quarterback retreated more than five yards, my brother was on the alert to abandon the rush and intercept the ol' 9929. I don't think I ever won a single game of football.

I fared much better in baseball, which required no strategic decision-making beyond deciding what kind of pitch to throw and when to swing the bat. The rest was all reflexive. If you had the chops to instantly activate any of your fielders by touch, then you were as good as anybody. Consequently, neither of us dominated in baseball. Brian would win one, then I would win one, all to the primitive, 8-bit approximation of an umpire growling Yer Out!, which actually sounded more like some sort of digital belch.

It was tennis, though, that brought out our most intense competition. We were bitter rivals on the court, and if a sportscaster had sought a narrative suitable for dramatizing our struggle, it would have been the underdog story of the little brother who won games against big brother but never managed to take a set. Serve after serve, back and forth the advantage went, yet Brian inevitably emerged triumphant.

As the older brother, Brian usually took the high road even in the heat of battle. However, he was not above ragging his opponent when necessary, nor was I above being rattled by it. Most unfortunately, I could never match his intimidation, and he knew it. If his circumstances ever turned desperate, he could recover lost ground by shrewdly hammering away at my psyche. This was the situation he found himself in one afternoon when I made the unprecedented personal accomplishment of winning the first four games of a set. It was time for Brian to bring the mental heat.

"Thankyousomuch!" was his first volley, a smugly delivered rush of syllables that he let loose with an icy smile after winning a point. I didn't even know that I was being messed with at that point, focused as I was on continuing my streak in order to win a set for the first time ever. A few plays later, I heard it again. Thankyousomuch! And here I made a colossal mistake. I gave my opponent a sidelong glance that conveyed my annoyance. I might as well have slathered my leg with beef broth and kicked a junkyard dog. It was all the provocation he needed.

Now that he knew I was irritated by his new verbal tic, it was time to take the intimidation to a new and lower level. He waited until I made an error, somehow failing to return a ball that was hit right to me. Thankyousomuch! He was taking credit for my mistake! I was incensed, yet little did I know that my fury was the beginning of the end. While I fought harder and harder to keep my advantage, Brian was pulverizing the foundation blocks of my mental game. He knew what he was doing, but I couldn't see it. I turned to him and unleashed a torrent of protest that was mere fuel for the fire.

"Oh, come on! I made a stupid mistake! You didn't win that point, I lost it!"

Brian just flashed a Chesire Cat grin and chuckled, and his complete lack of remorse only deepened my indignation. I was already off my game, but I lacked the maturity to compose myself and see my lead through to victory. He won the game, then another, and though he should have been the one sweating bullets, I was the one who felt like I had everything to lose. My play became sloppier. I missed more points that should have been mine. Brian took another game. I flailed about under the fear of what had the potential to be my most embarrassing loss ever. I made another stupid mistake, and then Brian let loose another one of his infernal proclamations of Thankyousomuch!

"Thankyousomuch! Thankyousomuch!" I blurted out in exasperation. Brian said nothing but began to laugh gleefully. "It doesn't even mean anything anymore!" He clutched his side and vibrated with mirth at my outburst. "You might as well be saying..." I grasped furtively for random words, "...tablechair!" My brother roared with laughter, but I was serious. He was about to get a taste of his own medicine.

The first chance I got, I unleashed my lethal non sequitur. Gloating over an ace, I attempted an ironic smile and vindictively whispered, "Tablechair!" This tactic failed to achieve its desired effect. Far from being intimidated, my brother was merely amused. He knew the set was his. I was clearly self-destructing. He could have remained silent for the rest of the set and won without further provocation.

But its hard for an aggressor to resist another twist of the knife, especially when he finds it funny. As so Brian stopped saying Thankyousomuch! every time I made a mistake. Instead, he said Tablechair!

Brian won the set, 6-4.

Shameful? Perhaps. But as John Lyly observed over four hundred years ago, "The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war." Never was it more true than on the virtual battlefield of brotherly rivalry we called Intellivision Tennis.

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Kneeling at the altar where one day their children would be served tater tots.

A big cafeteria. That's what you need if you're planning on running an institution that teaches children from first through eighth grade. St. Gerard, my elementary and middle school alma mater, met that requirement with room to spare. As a little kid, our cafeteria seemed like a cavernous space, an immense and spare rectangular room so large that its flat and featureless ceiling was supported by more than half a dozen pillars. If the prospect of attending a school that included students twice your height and age didn't already make you feel small, being herded into the cafeteria for the first time erased any vestiges of pride.

For a hall that admitted plenty of sun through great windows along its length, the St. Gerard cafeteria was run with chilling efficiency. To this day, if I were to walk through its far entrance, I could show you the exact path that we were expected to follow as we wound along the perimeter in single file toward the serving area. There we would pick up the molded plastic trays upon which a small group of cafeteria ladies - some nice, others indifferent, and a few downright intimidating - would deposit the various components of the day's meal. We picked up our milk last, dutifully inserting the half-pint carton into its designated tray compartment, and proceeded toward the seating area.

That was where they assigned their sternest and stoutest personnel, I believe, no-nonsense disciplinarians whose directives would be followed without question. It was they who marshaled us down the farthest seating row until it was filled to capacity, then subsequent rows would be seated in like fashion. Due to this system, you always knew who would be sitting immediately to your left and right, but there was no telling who would be sitting across from you. Consequently, students tried to manipulate their place in the lunch line to ensure proximity to at least one friend, or else it could be a conversationally awkward lunch. If things turned out badly, you might even find yourself sitting opposite strange kids from the grade above you.

There was one day during one of my earliest years at St. Gerard when, through no fault of my own, I was detained at the beginning of the lunch period, thus preventing me from lining up with my peers. To my horror, I arrived at the cafeteria as the eighth graders were approaching the serving windows, leaving me no choice but to meekly take a spot at the end of their queue. The seating area matron ensured that I followed the conventional arrangement, and I spent that lunch staring down at my tray and wondering if the eighth graders were laughing at me, or maybe they always laughed at everything.

I recall being a fairly happy kid when I was very young, but somewhere along the line I endured a brief period of socially crippling neuroses that may have had their genesis in the St. Gerard cafeteria. To the adults in my life, it seemed absurd that I should worry about "getting in the wrong lunch line" at school, but the specter of total ostracism was a real and reasonable fear to me. Soon my paranoia was manifesting itself in truly irrational ways, leading me to such bizarre suspicions as the idea that my own breathing might not be involuntary, and if my respiration really did depend on a certain degree of consciousness, I might expire in my sleep on any given night. It was a challenging time for my poor parents.

Crazy or not, I was responding to an atmosphere that certainly had its oppressive qualities. For example, there was a total segregation of students who packed their lunches from those who purchased a school lunch. Why, I have no idea, except that to do otherwise might have thrown a wrench into the precision mechanism of the rigidly enforced seating system. Packers sat at a totally separate set of tables, and because they were only a small minority of the student body, there was a measure of pathos in their lonely uncrumpling of lunch bags. I felt sorry for them. I eventually befriended one of the packers in fifth grade, and though we became good friends outside of the cafeteria, we were destined to never share a lunch conversation.

Students were generously allowed seconds of certain items now and then, I imagine because of unintended surpluses. Generally they were dessert items like peanut butter bars or cookies. Midway through my St. Gerard career, in a rare moment of assertiveness coupled with an embarrassing misunderstanding of leftover distribution, I gratefully accepted some sort of confection and brazenly announced, "I'll have another one."

Teachers and other adults who work with children, remember to err on the side of caution when you suspect impertinence from your charges. A quick and kind explanation of why my request had to be denied would have sufficed, but the grizzled hag whom I addressed eyed me with the outrage of Dickens' Mr. Bumble regarding Oliver Twist begging for more gruel. "Oh no you won't!" she snapped, and my cheeks flushed with shame. Taking a cold seat at my assigned row, I silently vowed to never again phrase a request in such a presumptive manner.

Even if every adult who staffed the cafeteria had been as gentle and caring as Mr. Rogers, any kid can tell you that the greatest threat to one's well-being exists in the unpredictable actions of other kids. Stan Smithers put me off white milk for at least a year when he inexplicably picked his nose and deposited a morsel of snot into my open half-pint. I remember that he did this gleefully and without the slightest duplicity. He seemed to deeply enjoy the look of sheer revulsion and anger that I must have assumed upon witnessing his transgression. It took me a long time to get over it. Every time I raised a glass of milk to my lips, I couldn't help imagining a gooey, green glob floating invisibly within it.

Remarkably, I ate eight years worth of lunches in the St. Gerard cafeteria without ever knowing the profound personal significance of my surroundings. The space looked sterile and utilitarian at best to me, with one particularly garish wall upon which was mounted an electronic BINGO board. I was totally ignorant of the fact that our lunch tables rested where rows of pews were once bolted to the floor, that our trays were filled where an altar once stood, and that decades before we wolfed down tater tots, my parents had walked down an aisle between the pillars as a newly wedded couple. How was I to know that my home rooms through fifth grade were situated above and below the modest sanctuary where Mom and Dad were married? It never occurred to me that the building I knew as the church was not yet built when they attended St. Gerard.

I never found out about this fundamental piece of my own history until many years later. I wonder if it would have made a difference had I known the former sanctity of the space we called our cafeteria. Maybe it would have made that day with the eighth graders a little less scary. Perhaps I would have shrugged off the tart reprimand of Mrs. Bumble. And if only I had known that Stan Smithers was putting his snot in my milk in the very room where my parents had exchanged vows, I might have given the kid what he deserved.

That's right, Stan. I know you're out there, and I haven't forgotten. You might want to keep an eye on your milk.

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Why learn to balance on two wheels when you don't have to?

I don't remember exactly when I learned to ride a bicycle, but I'm pretty sure I was the last of my peers to acquire the skill. I have a vague notion that it wasn't even necessarily my idea. Somehow we ended up borrowing an old and rusted girls' bike with training wheels, a literal vehicle for shame and embarrassment. I knew that the whole world was watching me as I wobbled up and down the sidewalk. Ha, ha! Look at that kid who hasn't learned how to ride a bike yet! I kept my head down, tried to keep my balance, and wondered how I had unwittingly fallen behind the rest of the pack. Like every childhood drama, it seemed terribly important at the time.

My first experience with self-propelled vehicles was the classic tricycle, which by all accounts I heartily enjoyed. It was the standard, all-metal model with a runner between the back wheels. I am told that it was stolen from our front yard one night, a heartless thievery that I do not recall, yet I am willing to cast blame upon the anonymous robber for activating latent neuroses. If ever I am called to plead my case before a jury, I'm blaming whatever I did on the tricycle thief.

I never had another metal tricycle, but sometime shortly afterward I became the proud owner of a Big Wheel, the definitive tricyclic transportation of my generation. With its ultra-low seat and right-wheel handbrake for spinning out, I had great confidence in the coolness of my ride. It made a wonderful noise as its hollow, plastic wheels sped across concrete, a sound so distinctive that my grandfather once claimed he always knew that Dad and I were coming around the block for a visit when he heard the distant rumbling of my Big Wheel. I was perfectly happy with it, but there did come a day when I was physically too big for it. Marx Toys, maker of the Big Wheel, was ready to meet my needs, ready with a product that was to the Big Wheel what the Big Wheel was to old-school tricycles.

The Green Machine was a beautifully engineered contraption of elegant design. A recumbent tricycle with a bucket seat, it featured a broad axle in the back and a simulated mag wheel up front. It looked really sleek. But the coolest thing about a Green Machine was its absence of a steering wheel. In its place was a pair of side-mounted, stick-shift controls, which rotated the rear axle. Pull the left control back while pushing the right control forward, and you would turn left. Shift in the other direction to turn right. Although the pedals were fixed to the front wheel just like a Big Wheel, the rear-steering mechanism of the Green Machine meant that its front wheel was always straight as the plastic chassis. Consequently, one never had to deal with the annoying variation in pedal distance that accompanied every Big Wheel turn.

Oh, how I loved my Green Machine. Taking it out for a spin was the purest of joys. Sitting so close to the ground while getting the most out of its efficient drive design gave a thrilling illusion of speed. Its left-right shifters allowed an economy of motion that could not be afforded by a steering wheel. Truly, the Green Machine returned maximum locomotion for a minimal investment of effort. For someone like myself, a natural adherent to paths of least resistance, it was a blissful marriage. I was comfortable. I was cool. I was one with my Green Machine.

Since the distant days of the ancient book of Ecclesiastes, mankind has noted the transitory nature of all things, whether painful or pleasurable. "To everything there is a season," wrote its author and much later sang The Byrds, and all the turn-turn-turning of that front wheel, albeit never to the left nor right, eventually took its toll. There is only so much stress that plastic can endure. My last ride on a Green Machine came to a rolling halt immediately after I felt a strange lack of resistance in the pedals. Suddenly my legs were pumping like crazy, yet I was decelerating. The shaft of the pedal assembly had broken loose from the wheel's worn core. It was a devastating impotence.

Dad knew how much I loved the Green Machine and did everything he could to restore its operability, but the strongest compounds he applied could not withstand the force of pedaling. At that point, I don't even know that you could buy a Green Machine anymore, just as Big Wheels were disappearing from toy department shelves. Nor were replacement parts available. Alas, not with a bang but a whimper, my Green Machine was totaled. As with my stolen tricycle and outgrown Big Wheel, it was time to move on, whether I wanted to or not.

Surely I knew how to ride a bike by the time my Green Machine died? I would like to think so, yet the chronology is hopelessly jumbled in my mind. It is quite possible that I failed to learn this basic skill simply because I didn't have to. Really, with the comfort of a cool, recumbent tricycle at one's disposal, who needs to bother learning how to balance on two wheels? Having no other choice, I had to conquer my ineptitude. And believe me, riding a rusty girls' bike with training wheels is a strong motivator, so strong that I barely recall the learning process. One day I couldn't ride a bike, and then one day I could. Or at least that's all I remember. Perhaps I've repressed the struggle.

But I do remember my Green Machine. I know the exhilaration of neighbor's lawns whizzing by and the roar of the wind in my ears. I can still feel the rear axle responding to my grip on the stick-shift controls. I can summon vestiges of the pure joy I experienced speeding along as the sun set on many a summer evening. And the child inside me, for better or worse never far away, still hopes that one day he'll ride again.

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I imagine that Dick Ireland, were he alive today, would be surprised to learn that a former student fondly and frequently recalls his old geometry and physics teacher nearly thirty years later. Once our mortarboards arced through an overcast spring sky and clattered onto the asphalt parking lot, I never returned. Nor did I bother to contact any of the instructors who were an integral part of my life all those years ago. Somehow the thought of keeping in touch with my alma mater and its faculty seemed like moving backward instead of forward. Yet in a minor irony that I never foresaw as a teenager, I eventually became a teacher myself.

Like most educators, I wonder about the lasting impact of my instruction and guidance. I hope that when I sign off on my last report card, I will have made a net positive difference in the lives of my students. But I'll never really know. Students move on, just as I did. It took me years to truly appreciate what the best of my teachers had given me, just as I had to reach a certain level of maturity to understand how and why the worst of my teachers had shortchanged me. Good or bad, my lasting impressions of them have little to do with the content they labored to teach me.

Mr. Ireland was too eccentric to fade from any student's memory, but I have remembered him more often since I have taken on the responsibilities of a teacher. In fact, there are three distinct triggers that summon his visage. Whenever I draw a circle on the board, I see Mr. Ireland with chalk in hand. If a student happens to gasp in a moment of sudden, dawning comprehension, I hear his gruff baritone. And on those occasions when I take notice of the clacking keys of my laptop as I rapidly transform thoughts into processed words, I remember some of the best advice that I was given in high school.

"Hunt!" he barked in his customary fashion of addressing students by their surnames. He was talking to my brother Brian, eight years my senior, some time well before I ever set foot in his classroom. "Is there a limit to how thin a bubble can be?" Brian thought it over a moment and answered affirmatively, whereupon Mr. Ireland expanded upon his correct response with a lengthy lecture about molecules and the building blocks of matter. My brother's attention soon wandered to his lab table's empty post hole, which was a receptacle for mounting Bunsen burners. With a small wad of paper at the ready, it also made an excellent mini-golf green.

Perhaps twenty minutes elapsed before Mr. Ireland finally reached the end of his educational monologue. With a lawyer's flair for drama, he sought to wrap up his argument with a theatrical reiteration of his original premise. "So," he asked almost rhetorically, "is there a limit to how thin a bubble can be...Hunt!"

Only my brother had not been listening. He was somewhere on the back nine, lining up another putt. The room fell silent at the mention of his name, and he looked up to find Mr. Ireland staring at him expectantly. Brian's intuition told him that he was expected to answer a question, and weighing his chance for success at even odds, he took the plunge and replied, "No."

"WHAT?!" roared a wide-eyed Mr. Ireland. Like the thinness of bubbles, his patience had a limit.

I had heard many Mr. Ireland stories before the day I became one of his pupils, tales of melodramatic moralizing, salty language, and legendary classes in which his passion for delivering life lessons eclipsed any curricular content. I was not disappointed. He was as unconventional and entertaining as promised. In addition, he knew his stuff, and he radiated a humble self-confidence in his academic knowledge. Even addled as I was with the self-absorbed mindset of the typical teenager, I perceived Mr. Ireland as someone to whom it was worth listening.

Circles were a prominent focus of our geometry lessons, and Mr. Ireland was forever inscribing them on the chalkboard. Although he had a large, wooden compass that was probably a product of the same ancient purchase order that procured his oversize protractor, he preferred the rapidity of drawing circles freehand. It was marvelous to watch. Over the years, his right arm had become its own compass, and the ovals he produced were stunningly regular, their beginnings and ends overlapping to form invisible seams. Sometimes after stepping back to admire his work, he would note that a circle is, by definition, the set of points equidistant from one point on a single plane. Then, with a smirk of satisfaction, he would boast that his freehand circles were as close as you could get to the real thing without using a compass.

Mr. Ireland spoke reverently about what he called the Aha Experience, that moment when you suddenly realize that you understand something that was only moments ago a mystery. He promoted it as a transformative experience, the very essence of education. To that end, he was always chiding us to stay on the alert. "Get your brain in gear!" he would thunder whenever he sensed that we were losing focus. It was a helpful admonition in geometry, which I grasped easily, but it wasn't as applicable for physics. No matter how hard I tried to kick-start my grey matter, it never produced the level of success I was able to attain by allying myself with a smarter lab partner.

Perhaps because his duties were divided between the disciplines of geometry and physics, Mr. Ireland seemed unable to resist going off on a tangent. Our eyes snapped to eager attention at those times, because the longer we could encourage him to talk about something other than math or science, the less energy we would have to expend on learning. His war experiences were a reliable source of distraction, and they could be deeply entertaining, disturbing, funny, and sometimes all three at once. No one who heard his graphic depiction of the ravages of wartime syphilis (on his comrades, let me clarify) is likely to forget it. Though we welcomed his tales because we preferred them to the rigors of a challenging course, it was during one of those yarns that I absorbed advice for which I have been forever grateful.

At that time (the mid-1980's), the more visionary members of our high school faculty observed the advent of the personal computer and foresaw the likelihood that our professional lives would be intertwined with the digital domain. Mr. Barnhart, our algebra and calculus instructor, even pioneered an extracurricular class teaching BASIC programming on old TRS-80 computers. In a nod to our changing world, the administration changed the name of the typing class to keyboarding. But aside from using some early typing education software, we were still buying correction tape and clacking away at IBM Selectrics. Keyboarding was a recommended yet elective class, and I wondered why I should trouble myself with it.

Mr. Ireland had an answer, though far from being visionary, it was rooted in his military service. Apparently there came a decisive moment when a secretary was needed for some strategic purpose. Among the rank and file, Mr. Ireland was the only one who happened to know how to type. He was immediately chosen for the position, a fortuitous circumstance that he claimed kept him out of combat. He urged all of us to sign up for the keyboarding class, because we could never know when that coveted skill might give us the leg up on our competition.

And here I am, my hands resting comfortably on the home keys as they obediently take my mental dictation. Thanks to Mr. Ireland, I can effortlessly record my thoughts almost as quickly as I think them. It's a practical skill that has served me well over the years. It hasn't yet kept me out of combat, but it has saved me plenty of time. And on more than one occasion, it has earned the admiration of my elementary school students.

"Wow!" one of them will exclaim as they see me dash off a sentence lickity-split. "How do you do that?" I can't help but smile and think of Mr. Ireland, just as I do whenever I see one of the kids having an Aha Experience, or whenever I construct a Venn diagram by drawing a pair of overlapping circles on the board. And I try to pass along a tiny bit of his legacy.

"I learned how to type. You can, too. You'll never regret it. In fact, you may not believe this, but I once knew someone whose life may have been saved because he knew how to type..."

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Thank you, Marshall Brodien...

Illusionist Penn Jillette recently revealed to Tuscon Weekly that his estimation of magic was changed by James "The Amazing" Randi, who taught him that it is an honorable profession provided that audiences are fully aware they are being deceived. I suppose the vast majority of those who bothered to tune in to The Rock 'n' Fun Magic Show, a gaudy spectacle featuring Bill Cosby, Doug Henning and the Hudson Brothers that aired in the fall of 1975, were cognizant that they were being exposed to illusions rather than manifestations of the supernatural, Henning's wide-eyed proclamations that "anything is possible" notwithstanding. I, however, was only seven years old, an age at which I accepted almost everything at face value. Even though I understood that all magic was some sort of a trick, I totally bought into the false drama that Henning employed to heighten the effect of his most dramatic stunt.

"Not only is this the first time this escape has been attempted since Houdini did it, it's the first time it's ever been tried on television," intoned a sober host as he stood before a glass tank filled to the brim with water. "And remember, it's being done live at this very moment. If this looks dangerous to you, believe me, it is." Henning then emerged from the wings, striding purposefully in a rust-colored robe with the confident air of Christ on his way to give what-for to the temple desecrators. Stripped down to a pair of orange trunks, he was hoisted by his padlocked ankles and dangled over the tank. "And now, Doug is going to take four deep breaths - and hold the last one."

As Henning was lowered into the tank, a digital timer was superimposed upon the proceedings. A pair of assistants secured the lid of the compartment and descended from the platform, allowing a curtain to rise and envelop the tank. This was when the host really earned his paycheck.

1:00 "Now remember, it's twice as hard to get a deep breath when hanging upside down, and don't forget - don't forget that this is live."

1:19 "As far as I'm concerned, this is scary."

1:25 "I can hear churning water, but I don't know whether he's out of the manacles or not. I really don't know."

1:43 "How can anyone hold his breath this long?"

Just after the two-minute mark, a robed attendant darted offstage and returned seconds later holding an axe.

2:14 "Two minutes, fifteen seconds. Doug can only hold his breath for two minutes and thirty seconds. This man standing  here is our emergency squad. If anything goes wrong, he's ready with his axe. Let's hope we don't really need to use him, but time is running out!" 

2:35 "Something's wrong - get the axe, go up there. Smash the glass! Drop the curtain!"

At two minutes and thirty-nine seconds, with the robed attendant having already taken his backswing, the curtain dropped to reveal an empty tank. Silence. Expressions of awe and laughter, then vociferous applause and a standing ovation when the axeman dropped his implement as well as his robe, revealing the mustache-framed, goofy smile of Doug Henning. I could almost hear my racing heart as I exhaled sharply and fell back into the couch cushions.

I didn't like being cruelly misled into thinking that someone I admired was on the verge of death due to an escape stunt gone awry. I also felt a little stupid for having believed it. On the other hand, I was impressed by the illusion and the degree to which I could be distracted by artful staging and patter. Obviously, Henning was free from the contraption long before I even suspected it might be possible. That element of magic, the misdirection and subsequent surprise, enchanted me. I thereafter embarked on every introverted young boy's required rite of passage: a little dabbling in prestidigitation.

I started slowly, consulting children's library books that detailed basic tricks that required only household objects and a little practice. Soon I became proficient in the mystifying art of pushing thumbtacks into balloons without popping them, but I lacked the dexterity and patience to do the necessary preparation for peeling a pre-sliced banana. After trying out these tricks and whatever else I was able to accomplish with the likes of matchsticks and handkerchiefs, I was ready for stronger stuff.

I found what I was looking for in an amusement park gag shop, nestled in a bin next to the rubber pencils. The finger guillotine was a sleek little prop that was cheap and easy to use, plus it allowed any kid to create a seemingly impossible illusion. Its instructions advised stoking an audience by using the unsharpened blade to thwack a carrot in half, which was easy enough to do if you took care to avoid the thicker carrots. Once you convinced folks that the device could render anyone a digital amputee, you stunned them by placing your index finger in the hole and passing the blade clean through it. At least that's how it worked provided that you set the trick blade to "finger" instead of "carrot". I forgot to do that once, and it's a wonder I didn't break my finger. I'm not surprised that you don't see too many of these gizmos being peddled to kids these days.

Observing my passion for sleight-of-hand, my parents indulged me with a generous order from the Marshall Brodien TV Magic Catalog. Though one of the gags proved to be a dud (Smoke From Your Fingertips was nothing more than a tube of clear goo that was supposed to effervesce from your artfully waved hands), I was thrilled with the rest. There was a hollow, metal cylinder that looked just like a stack of nickels when you put a real one on top of it, allowing me to thrill spectators by changing nickels into dimes. There was a pair of plastic bowls with a clear disk of the same diameter that enabled me to apparently change water into rice. A cleverly designed coin chamber gave me the ability to seemingly push nails through a half dollar. The inarguable highlight, however, was the magic box.

The magic box was a red and black, cardboard cube with doors that opened on the front and top. Thanks to a mirror that crossed the interior diagonal and concealed half of the cube's volume, it was a snap to make any small object vanish or unexpectedly appear. It was an absolutely great illusion, one that looked so good it could stupefy the skeptical. It also required very little practice to employ effectively. Ultimately, it was my unwillingness to commit myself to more than a half-hour of practice that ended my brief experience as an illusionist. That and the fact that I began to perceive most magicians as more annoying than entertaining. My magic box went on the shelf.

But it didn't go away. I just moved it to a different shelf - one within a cabinet at my elementary school. In the world of education, I've found that the occasional illusion can keep kids thinking. It can also help smooth over awkward moments. Just this year, I had to confiscate a small item from a student who would not put it away during a lesson. The day ended with both of us forgetting to resolve the incident. When the next morning arrived and I remembered I had something that belonged to that student, I had a hunch he would mention it the moment he walked in the room, and so I concealed the contraband in the magic box. Sure enough, my unwitting student entered the classroom, approached my desk, and politely asked if I would return what belonged to him. I maintained the soberest demeanor, while inwardly I was as delighted as a little boy whose shipment of Marshall Brodien magic had just arrived. Without saying a word, I produced the magic box, opening its doors to reveal its apparently empty interior as my student looked on quizzically. Then I closed the front door, reached in the top, and withdrew the item he had requested. His expression was priceless.

Word got around the class about the trick, and I've since pulled a few more things out of the box and made a few things disappear. Perhaps it would be most educational if I were to reveal the perceptual science behind the illusion, and maybe I eventually will. For now though, I'll maintain that I'm still on honorable ground. The kids know they're being deceived; they just aren't sure how. And me? I get to amaze a captive audience with little to no practice required.

Take that, Henning.

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Look, Ma - no graph paper!

My father-in-law was an engineer for General Tire, not long retired when we first met. His natural flair for design and problem solving demanded expression whether or not it was earning him a living, and thus he filled his leisure hours with an assortment of engaging projects, from fashioning his own golf clubs to creating custom stained glass windows for his front door. He wrote with a precise block printing style suitable for labeling blueprints or lettering comics. And always, there was graph paper handy to work out the next challenge.

Having mastered his profession before the dawn of personal computers, Dick's first impulse when contemplating a task was to grab a pencil and a scrap of graph paper. Sometimes the printed grid was necessary, sometimes not. I remember the draftsman's zeal with which he tackled the chore of assigning seats to guests at our wedding reception. Out came the graph paper, upon which he sketched a scale blueprint of the reception hall and began to maneuver cutout banquet tables until he determined the optimal arrangement. When he was finished, we had a little map featuring the thoughtful arrangement of each guest according to his or her familial and social affiliations. He might have achieved virtually the same end without having applied such methodical precision, but I think the process of working it all out was what he truly enjoyed. His was a world of pencil-and-paper solutions.

One of the things that I admired most about my father-in-law was his capacity for using his talents to see a passing whimsy through to its completion. There is the legendary story of his quest to create a Worst Golfer trophy for the annual company outing. His idea was to apply a propane torch to one of his own trophies (he had amassed quite a few over the years) in the hope of disfiguring its miniature golfer with a horrible stance. He melted his first victim beyond recognition, achieved varied comical effect with others, but not until he went through a couple dozen trophies did he finally perfect his vision, a bow-legged duffer with a drooping club and a twisted torso.

Then there was the time that he learned, to his gentle amusement, that his future son-in-law did not know how to tie a tie. In fact, I had been using the same knot for years, carefully preserving it in between weddings, funerals, and job interviews. He tried to show me the proper technique himself, as had my father, but my attempts to memorize the sequence were as successful as carrying water in a sieve. I couldn't watch someone do it and translate the mirror image to myself, nor did it help to have someone reach around me as if I were tying my tie with an extra pair of arms. But Dick was not dissuaded. The next time we met, he gave me a small plaque adorned with lengths of ribbon that he had manipulated into eight stages of the tie-tying process, complete with numbers and instructive labels. His ingenious, three-dimensional tutorial did the trick, and I was no longer a slave to pre-tied knots.

It wasn't until the summer of 2004, nearly three years after Dick died, that I ever came close to emulating his creative engineering. I had somewhat foolishly volunteered to be the creative director responsible for coordinating a church's worth of thematic decoration for Vacation Bible School. Foolishly, I say, because once I committed to the endeavor, I became vainly preoccupied with realizing an idea that was more elaborate than the event required. The theme, part of a packaged curriculum that was being used all over the country, involved the setting of a volcanic island. A quick search online revealed that many churches were using large, papier mache volcanoes as an altar centerpiece. Noting that our sanctuary soared to a height of approximately 30 feet, I thought something more dramatic was in order.

The youth education director showed me a well-circulated plan for an 8-foot volcano created by draping fabric over a frame made of PVC tubing. It looked simple enough. Then it occurred to me, why not re-engineer these plans for a volcano twice the height? This, too, seemed fairly simple, but it required quite a lot of PVC pipe and fittings for the frame, yards and yards of industrial plastic table covering painted brown for the rocky skin, and concealed guy wires to keep the whole shebang from toppling over.

Recalling how Dick created a schematic of our reception hall, I went to the sanctuary and took detailed measurements of the altar and its many contours. Upon returning home, I plotted the dimensions on sheets of graph paper and roughed in my design, noting with satisfaction that the altar rail could provide both an extended frame for the volcano as well as a secure anchor for the guy wires. The unwieldy contraption came to life one Sunday afternoon with a little help from fellow congregants. The education director provided red rope lights to simulate flowing lava, and the puppet ministry loaned their fog machine so that our volcano could occasionally belch a puff of smoke. It was silly, fun, a little over the top, and totally in the spirit of how Dick burned his creative energy in his autumn years. I think he would have enjoyed hearing about it.

I thought about Dick just the other day as I mulled over the potential transformation of a corner of our unfinished basement into a comfortable home office. A rough concept was forming in my mind, but a little measuring and drafting was necessary in order to assess the practicality of my ideas. Would everything fit as I envisioned it? Were there any drawbacks that I had not anticipated? Once again, it was time to get out the graph paper.

Or was it? Times have changed quite a bit over the last decade. In 2004, I thought I was ahead of the curve simply because I was printing my own graph paper to custom specifications. Now, armed with an iPad, I wondered if there's any project that can't be tackled more efficiently with a tablet app. So instead of reaching for pencil and paper, I searched the App Store for something that would allow me to graphically represent my concept to scale. For nine dollars, I found an app that did that and much more. Not only could I quickly assemble a rough draft of my plan in two dimensions, I was also afforded the luxury of manipulating a 3D model or even performing a first-person walk-through of my design. All of which took about two hours, including searching for and purchasing the app, as well as taking the necessary measurements of the basement and our furniture.

Would Dick have approved? I'm sure he would have looked over my shoulder with admiration at this sleek virtual assistant to home renovation. He might even have enjoyed fiddling around with it himself. But something tells me that if he were here to help plan my basement office, the old engineer would start the ball rolling with a friendly scrap of graph paper. Sometimes making things easy just takes the fun out of it.

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You've been through this before. There is a valuable object that you must physically attain, but it's going to take a little bit of bureaucratic interaction to make it happen. An indeterminate amount of waiting may be involved. In this case, the treasured item is a West Campus parking pass for The Ohio State University, a necessity that your daughter ordered online. Armed with a day off, you are charged with the task of picking up the pass in the morning so that she may use it to attend her first college class that evening. You take the precaution of calling ahead to confirm that you are permitted to retrieve the pass on your daughter's behalf. You look over a map of West Campus and find the small visitor lot where you've parked before, the one that is a short stroll from the Traffic and Parking offices. You double-check to make sure that you have your daughter's university ID card and a printed receipt for the parking pass. Then, satisfied that you have taken all reasonable preparatory measures, you embark on your journey.

Your destination is a popular one on this first day of Winter Quarter, but several spaces open up after you circle the visitor lot once. There is a "Pay and Display" system in place that requires the purchase of a timed pass from an automated machine. You approach it and fish out the coins you brought along for this purpose, depositing three quarters and three dimes. It's 9:00. There are more coins in your pocket, but the machine says that you have just bought 42 minutes of parking time, which seems more than adequate for the purpose of picking up a previously purchased parking pass. You chastise yourself for the wasteful habit of padding parking meters with unnecessary time simply due to an irrational aversion to the unlikely prospect of purchased time elapsing. Next time, you think, you'll spend a little less instead of fattening the coffers of Traffic and Parking.

Though it feels as though you have all the time in the world to accomplish your mission, your paranoid mind tells you that there is no sense in taking any longer than you must, and so you eschew the right-angle path in favor of traversing its snow-covered hypotenuse, gaining perhaps a minute in the process. Shortly you find yourself opening the door to Traffic and Parking, and there is the long, customer service counter, nearly empty but for a pair of customers receiving service. Again, you reprimand yourself for buying a ridiculous 42 minutes of parking time. There is a large sign nearby, and it notes that you must walk past the counter in order to reach the end of the waiting line. Peering down the hall, you see just one person standing at that point, the intersection with a perpendicular hallway. You stride confidently past the counter, and as you approach the corner, you note that there are, in fact, several people waiting, but no matter, as you have plenty of time to spare. Then you round the corner and try not to betray your astonishment at the sight of thirty or more people waiting along the length of the hallway.

Taking your place at the end of this grim and eerily silent line, you realize that you were not paranoid about buying parking time, that you should have pumped all the change you had into the stupid machine, and that you have just set yourself up for a pins-and-needles wait that might last well beyond the 42 minutes you had allotted. You are familiar with the university's Traffic and Parking enforcement officers, who patrol lots like vultures circling the sky in anticipation of the magic moment that a dying desert traveler becomes carrion. You know that there is no irrationality in fearing that one of them may pounce on your Civic at minute forty-three. And then what? A ticket? Would an appeals officer see the irony in your plight, that you ran a few minutes over your purchased 42 minutes of parking time because you were waiting in line to pick up your daughter's previously purchased parking pass? Were you to intercept a ticketing officer just as he is about to slip the notice under your windshield wiper, would he listen courteously to your story and graciously tear up the ticket? Perhaps. But you have been here before, and in all your experience with Traffic and Parking officers, you have never known them to show any flexibility. Nor to smile.

So you sigh and try to accept your fate without worry, noting that the line has already moved a little, and thinking that there might just be some sliver of hope that you will return to your car either before your time runs out or before a Traffic and Parking officer notices that your time has run out. Others in the long line hold postures that suggest either nervous tension or slouched resignation. Someone apparently thought it amusing to apply a dashed yellow median along the length of the hallway floor. The line snakes along, incongruously, to the left of the line, as mandated by nearby signage. Other attempts have been made to brighten up the windowless hallway. Safety posters and an enlarged aerial photo of campus adorn one wall. A life-size "Pay and Display" machine has been awarded a prominent space. From the ceiling hang a pair of silent TV monitors, one of which is showing a succession of weather graphics, the other featuring a morning show chat with a bedraggled and effusively gesticulating William H. Macy.

The thick silence is broken by spontaneous conversation halfway up the line: a cheery young man with a broad face and recurring smile has struck up a conversation with a pleasant young woman whose blond hair flows from beneath a knitted winter hat with hanging tassels. You can hear every word they say - everyone can - and though their talk is amiable and altogether unremarkable, you cannot decided whether their public discourse is an annoyance or a welcome distraction. For just beyond them, at the far end of the hall, is the LED marquee that advises aspiring customers to have all forms ready, lists accepted forms of payment, and periodically flashes the time. 9:20. You count the people in front of you and decide against applying mathematical reasoning to the situation, as your numerical intuition tells you it doesn't look good. Instead, you hang onto the undeniably promising fact that one person who was in front of you has left, apparently unwilling or unable to wait any longer. If only several more of the sad sacks in this line follow his lead, it just might work.

But who are you kidding? There is no way that you will have concluded your transaction and returned to your vulnerable Civic in time. It is merely a question of whether or not the transgression will be noticed by the Gestapo. And you know it will, you just know it. And you further know that they will not give two buckeyes about some fat, old alumnus who was too cheap to plunk all of his change into a parking meter. They will be merciless, just like the time you failed to remove your father's Oldsmobile from the stadium parking lot before midnight, the deadline by which they started to tow vehicles in anticipation of the sacred marching band's dawn practice. Not that you're still bitter about it. But you hold no illusions about their charity. It's now 9:25, and those buzzards have probably already made note of your 9:42 expiration. Time to face the music. You were stupid! Stupid!

And then...a miracle. An angel appears. Admittedly, there is nothing angelic about her rather ordinary appearance, but she whisks down the line and calls out like a carillon's worth of church bells, "Did anyone already pay for their pass on the Internet?" You are nearly too stunned to speak, and the angel almost turns away, but you recover your senses in time to thrust your arm upward and croak, "I d-did!"

You reach your car at 9:33, alive with adrenaline and a deep gratitude for the unexpected windfalls of intervening fortune. Others, you know, will not be so lucky. Like the absentee owner of one of those cars across the lot, that line of vehicles under surveillance by an expressionless officer sitting inside an idling Traffic and Parking cruiser. He was coming for you next, you think. But not today. Not today.

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