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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Just kidding. Mugging for the camera this summer with my brother's chocolate cake.

As 2010 drew to a close, I sat on the couch and watched revelers in Times Square while gobbling down handfuls of M&Ms and despising my gluttonous nature. My chronic overindulgence inspired an end-of-year post in which I confessed a lifelong habit of overeating as well as bouts of draconian self-deprivation. I concluded my observations with a noncommittal suggestion that I might try to forgo chocolate for the entirety of 2011, as it had become a rarity for me to go even a day without it. Fellow chocoholics, I stand before you now to report that I am less than 48 hours away from having endured a year without chocolate.

Hold your applause, please. For though I am certain that I shall imminently achieve my goal, I am hardly a changed man. No, my gluttony persists, as you shall soon learn, a vice redirected to other heathen avenues. But I suppose there is something to be said for pulling off a stunt like this in a fattened society where chocolate is as prevalent as our basic necessities. I am here to tell you that, though it may seem as daunting as survival sans oxygen, living without chocolate for prolonged periods of time can be done.

I decided that if my sacrifice was to be pure and meaningful, then it had to be precise, because the world of chocolate has many gray areas. What exactly does it mean to give up chocolate? Are we talking about only the solid form as used in candy bars and M&Ms? What about chocolate brownies? Chocolate milk? Count Chocula? There are too many potential boundaries where the line can be drawn, and so I concluded that the only way to give up chocolate properly was to avoid it in all of its forms, even the most remote and least satisfying. Nothing that claimed to be chocolate in any way would pass my lips. Not so much as a Tootsie Roll. Not so much as an allegedly chocolate Necco wafer. Not so much as a mocha coffee. No sir, I could not accept any edible as kosher unless it was 100% devoid of chocolate both in actuality as well as in intent.

In a strange and unexpected way, this zealotry actually made my challenge easier. There was never any question in my mind about whether or not I was permitted to have any chocolaty item. It was forbidden. As long as I could maintain that mindset, my rejection of chocolate was automatic. In turn, I discovered an unanticipated form of relief, the perverse freedom of self-denial. I no longer subjected myself to internal debates over whether or not it was acceptable for me to indulge my appetite for chocolate. It simply was not acceptable. And so there was rarely any sensation of temptation. I wistfully scanned the candy bars at the checkout counter, but I never considered buying one. When the odd gift of chocolate came my way, I no longer thought about its deleterious effect upon my health. I wasn't going to eat it, and that was that.

However, a routinely obliged sweet tooth does not cease its chocolate addiction without demanding something in return. I still experienced the almost daily compulsion to eat something sugary, especially after a meal. There are so many ways to satisfy a craving for sweetness that I think my diet may have become less healthy after I gave up chocolate. Foremost among my sins was my consumption of pounds - yes, pounds - of Reese's Pieces this year. They are devoid of chocolate, contrary to what many people assume, but the rich flavor of sweetened peanut butter combined with a texture and mouthfeel nearly identical to M&Ms provides a very satisfying sensation. On many occasions when I felt like eating chocolate, I took solace in the joys of peanut butter.

In addition to the lowly goober, I owe another nut a measure of thanks for helping me to diminish chocolate cravings. I have found that hazelnut creamer, when combined just so with coffee and aspartame, creates a rewarding flavor profile, the complexity of which rivals that of chocolate. A regular breakfast of a Honey Nut Cheerios Breakfast Bar with a whipped hazelnut coffee has capped off my mornings with a sugary exclamation point that gives me the temporary sensation that all is right with the world.

Reese's Pieces and hazelnut coffee may have been my chocolate crutches, but I had additional help from many supporting dietary villains. Pixy Stix, Smarties, Laffy Taffy, Nerds, Maple Nut Goodies, fruit pies, glazed donuts, Popsicles, Pepsi Throwback, and white cake made multiple appearances in 2011. I even found fatty satisfaction in combining vanilla ice cream with Raisin Bran Crunch. As I said, the sweet tooth does not like to be denied, and it will find a way. To a large degree, these substitutions are the reason why my chocolate abstinence has not been accompanied by any weight loss.

Despite all of my sugary indulgences, I still wanted to eat chocolate. How it wrenched my gluttonous heart to see bags and bags of holiday candy marked down to almost nothing in January! When was the last time I sailed through Valentine's Day without eating a single piece of chocolate? How strange to have Girl Scout Thin Mints in the house and watch them disappear without helping! To visit a Graeter's ice cream shop and not order a flavor with chocolate chunks! To have no chocolate cream pie at the Kewpee during Marchocolate! To pass by plates of chocolate chip cookies! To take a vacation and not indulge in the local chocolate creations! There was Halloween with its endless supply of candy bars, Thanksgiving with its Texas Sheet Cake, and now the nonstop proliferation of chocolate that accompanies Christmas and New Year's Eve.

Yes, through it all, I have wanted to eat chocolate. In my dreams, I did. Half a dozen times this year, I experienced dreams in which I innocently ingested some M&Ms or a piece of cake, only to realize with horror that I had inadvertently sabotaged my challenge. I awoke rattled by the scenarios, armed with a heightened awareness of the chocolate dangers that surrounded me. Once, upon leaving a restaurant with my brothers, I was about to follow their lead and enjoy a complimentary pair of spherical mints. With the fine-tuned instincts of a paranoid spy, I asked one of them to bite his mint in half, a precaution that revealed a thin layer of chocolate under the candy shell. Alas! I had come so far, and I was not about to be undone by an after-dinner mint.

So, fellow chocoholics, it can be done. I suppose I could carry on my abstinence for as long as I wanted, but let's not be stupid about it. Chocolate is a part of life, at least until your doctor tells you that it's not. I am looking forward to watching the Times Square ball drop tomorrow night, knowing that the shouts of "Happy New Year!" will herald the end of my theatrical self-denial. Aware of this momentous occasion, my daughters gave me for Christmas a pound box of Anthony Thomas Melt-Away Mints, an old and rarely indulged favorite. We also picked up a pound of chocolate-covered pretzels from Findlay's Dietsch Brothers, one of the finest candy shops anywhere. And my sister Chris, who has followed my no-chocolate challenge and knows my love for the absurd, gave me a one-pound package of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups that contains precisely two peanut butter cups (that right, the oversize cups are half a pound each!).

Happy New Year, fellow chocoholics! I know mine will be.

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Forget the soft illumination of red safelights. THIS is what I used to see.

I used to work in total darkness. Not all of the time, mind you, but I experienced the complete absence of light for an average of an hour every working day for a few years. And no, I wasn't sleeping. As the manager of a micrographics department within a small records management firm, it was my responsibility to handle raw film stock and process every exposed reel. As a result, I spent a fair amount of time squirreled away inside a darkroom.

Our digital age is rapidly transforming the very notion of a darkroom into an antiquated concept. Forthcoming generations will grasp the idea only through its representation in old movies and television shows, with their romanticized, red-tinted photo labs inhabited by outcasts who discover startling evidence upon retrieving an enlargement from a chemical tray. Such a cliche never once happened in real life, I guarantee you. Dramatic moments of unexpected revelation might occur when a photographer is projecting a negative with an enlarger prior to exposing a sheet of photo paper, but unanticipated compositional elements never emerge from a fixer bath. I guess the truth is too complicated or dull for visual narratives. In any case, that isn't the kind of darkroom in which I worked.

My darkroom had no red-filtered safety lamps. There was no need for them, as I never worked with photo paper. We bought our unperforated 16mm microfilm on 100' reels, which had to be wound by hand into the lightproof cartridges that were inserted into our cameras. After a reel was exposed and rewound, the film had to be extracted from the cartridge and placed on a much larger reel for processing. Both of these processes had to occur in total darkness, or else we would compromise the carefully calibrated exposure of up to 3,500 document images on each roll.

When I was first trained to do this, these routine tasks were daunting. To load a roll of film into a cartridge, for example, required performing a sequence of precise movements without looking at what you were doing. First, attach an empty cartridge to the special receptacle on the left rewind of a loading board. Find the trailer and extract it from the cartridge. Then grab a box of film stock, tear off its label, and remove its reel. Peel the safety paper off the film, then attach the reel to the right rewind, making sure that the film spools to the left from underneath the reel. Next, take the leading edge of the film and hold it so that it abuts the end of the trailer. With a free hand, pull off a tab of splice tape and secure the underside of the connection, then pull off another tab and secure the top. Ensure that the film is positioned underneath the guide roller, or else it may get scratched on the lip of the cartridge. Now you're ready to reel! Turn the crank on the left rewind counterclockwise until all of the film has spooled into the cartridge. Now find the end of the roll and pull it out of the cartridge. Take the end of a black leader and hold it so that it abuts the end of the film. With a free hand, pull off a tab of splice tape and secure the underside of the connection, then pull off another tab and secure the top. Wind the leader into the cartridge, and voila! You're done. Easy, right?

Actually, it was easy, but only after you established a routine and got used to it. Consistency was the key. Provided that all of the necessary materials were gathered and placed in designated locations prior to turning out the lights, everything went smoothly. I was surprised how quickly I could adapt to the utter lack of visual information, but soon my darkroom tasks became as automatic as tying my shoes. The danger was the tedium. As dull as it could be to sit in darkness doing the same task over and over, I couldn't afford a lapse in concentration. A bad splice on a cartridge trailer could result in a couple hours of wasted microfilmer labor due to the exposed film remaining stuck in the camera (its retrieval requiring its exposure it to light).

A worse fate was possible if I mishandled preparing exposed film for processing. It was cartridge loading in reverse, with up to 14 rolls of film spliced together onto a single reel that was then concealed within a light-tight magazine. For splicing, the rolls had to be overlapped in a particular manner and secured with five staples. Failure to do this within a certain measure of accuracy would cause a splice to become jammed between the magazine and the processor, a harrowing occurrence of costly potential. Despite my best efforts and those of the employees I trained, a jam would occur now and then, and I became as attuned to the call of my processor alarm as a new mother is alerted by the wailing of her infant. Disaster was avoided many times, but it was far easier on the nerves to take the time to make precise staple splices that were sure to travel smoothly through the mechanism.

Maintaining a diligent focus on quality control was challenging in a silent darkroom, which is why a radio tuned to the local NPR affiliate became as essential as a fresh roll of splice tabs. The thinking part of the brain needed to stay active in order to keep the automaton awake. In this manner I wound and rewound hundreds of thousands of feet of microfilm whilst blind and pondering the state of current affairs. It actually became a rather enjoyable part of the day. Everyone knew that when I was locked behind the double doors of the darkroom, I couldn't interrupt my work for anything short of an emergency. Alone in the dark, I could toil away to the accompaniment of Morning Edition and the soft gurgling of our deep tank film processor. Sort of a single-sensory deprivation therapy.

Not that I miss it. It was mindless robot work. I'm happy to never again have to sightlessly manipulate microfilm. But I do credit my years in the darkroom with what is perhaps an above average level of comfort in low-to-zero-level lighting environments. It does not bother me to traverse my home in the middle of the night without turning on a light. The mind adapts easily to operating blind within familiar spaces. Descending the steps, maneuvering around the couch, and grabbing a water glass from the kitchen cabinet? It's as easy as making the next microfilm splice.

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November 24, 1983: Muddied combatants pose before heading home for Thanksgiving dinner.

It was a sacred tradition for a number of years, a ritual no less important to its participants than the national holiday on which it occurred. Every Thanksgiving morning at 9:00, a ragtag group of brothers and friends assembled on a frozen field at Robb Park for a spirited game of touch football. Victory with all of its bragging rights was awarded to the first team to score five touchdowns. By that time, great patches of dormant grass would be stripped away, leaving a muddy pit as testimony to the annual battle. Soaked through, sore, and grimier than any other time of the year, the players trudged home to clean up in time for heartily appreciated turkey dinners.

The Turkey Bowl began as a smaller affair, nothing much more than my three older brothers and a few of their friends running some plays on Thanksgiving morning. Things changed when my brother Richard taught 7th and 8th grade math and science at his alma mater, the same Catholic school that I attended.

"I told students I was a tight end at Cal Poly Pomona," acknowledges Richard. "They didn't know any better."

Thus the game was transformed into a contest between two mismatched teams: the students against the Hunt brothers and their friends. Although all of my peers played on the student team, I tagged along as a member of the Hunt team by birthright. Given my athletic skills, my peers must have been delighted.

"Oh, the memories," recalls student team veteran Dave Ruen, who lived just down the block from the Hunt household. "Years and years of training, defeat after defeat. That was enough to motivate us youngsters against the elders. It was classic David and Goliath stuff."

Teammate Dave Moskwinski concurs that the middle schoolers were fighting an uphill battle in those early days. "I remember Mr. Hunt being like a lightning bolt when he got the ball! We were fast at our age, but he was a step faster!"

As years went by and the game got bigger and bigger, so did the student team players. The age advantage enjoyed by the Hunt team was leveling out, well on its way to becoming a liability. One year during that transitional era, my brothers and I were rummaging through an overstock discount store looking for the warmest hats and gloves that we wouldn't mind having caked with mud. To our delight, we discovered a cache of cheap football cleats. Not only did it enhance our traditional, two-block walk from our house to the park with the staccato cadence of a military march, it helped us on the field.

"The only thing I remember," student team member Dan Hickey told me, "is not having any cleats and the field being six inches of watery mud. During one play, your brother David pushed me completely off the field, which at the time was embarrassing since David was only about half my size."

Ah yes, the mud. No one forgets the mud. "The weather always played a big part of any Turkey Bowl I was a part of," says Joe Landwehr, who played for the Hunt team. "The weather was never good; snow, cold, rain or mud. Sometimes two or three of them."

"How could I forget the endless number of prayers I would start saying the week of Thanksgiving just for snow or rain?" asks Ruen. "The crappier the weather, the better the walk of fame...or shame. The endless times my mom would ask about getting all muddy and then having to wash the clothes two or three times."

My brother David speaks of the messy aftermath back at the homestead. "We'd be covered in mud and go straight down to the basement to get out of our muddy clothes."

Though the mud was a constant, a victorious Hunt team was not.

Neighbor and Hunt team perennial Jeff Felkey remembers the tide turning for the elders. "I recall beating the students Richard taught until they got bigger, stronger, and older; then they kicked our butts."

Richard Hunt agrees: "Once they went to LCC (Lima Central Catholic High School) and learned how to play defense, we were cooked."

Indeed, a proper defense proved to be a daunting obstacle for the Hunt team, which had often profited from distracting the opposition with strange and unpredictable formations. The Turkey Bowl was notable as much for its unconventional plays as it was for its utter lack of officiating.

"Penalties? What penalties?" Ruen summarizes succinctly. He recalls a game rule that required the offensive line to count off five seconds before rushing, observing that it was never followed. When it came to the Turkey Bowl, there were few prohibitions and even less enforcement.

"The adrenaline and excitement to try plays and positions that may not have been allowed on an organized team," rhapsodizes student team player John Gillotti at the thought of some of the ploys that were well outside of regulation football.

One gem involved Hunt team offensive lineman Dave Shine, who purposely fell to the ground at the start of the play, waited until his defensive counterpart dropped his guard, then sprinted forward to catch a pass as planned. Then there was the classic Roman Candle, a single-file vertical formation that dispersed all but the quarterback into wild receiver patterns. When things got really desperate, juvenile humor was occasionally effective.

"My favorite play was the 'Balls, Balls, Balls' play," admits Felkey,"where upon the hike we all stayed still and chanted 'balls, balls, balls' while covering our privates with our hands, before going out on our routes." It may not have worked in the NFL, but it was novel and naughty enough to incapacitate a few adolescents.

The Turkey Bowl continued to grow in popularity, especially as the student team began to trounce the Hunts. One year, more students showed up than there were members of the Hunt team. To even things out, one of the extra guys was handed over to play for the Hunts.

"I don't know if you're aware of this," confided newcomer Mike Saylor, "but I'm the LCC quarterback."

"That's okay," deadpanned Richard Hunt, "we'll take you anyway."

Tongue-in-cheek trash talk was all part of the game. Student team player Garry Tabler (TAY-BLER) was routinely put down by my brothers, who made a habit of mispronouncing his last name and referring to him as "the Tabbler girl." Garry always took it in the spirit with which it was intended. Whether it was verbal sparring or the game itself, a lighthearted atmosphere prevailed. "Nobody took it seriously," says Richard. "Everyone was just out to have fun."

I can attest to that. I had no business being on a football field, but no one ever gave me a hard time about being there. The better players ragged on each other and let the worst players alone. "It was inclusive and fun," remembers Gillotti.

"As I recall, I was always the MVP," proclaims my brother Brian, demonstrating the swaggering confidence that was part and parcel of the experience. He describes a play in which he rushed the quarterback, tipped the ball into his own possession, and continued downfield for a touchdown. "It sounds more impressive than it was," he adds, explaining that one of the least experienced students had been permitted to step in as quarterback on the play.

Even so, the Turkey Bowl was a game that sometimes granted genuine elation to its players, as well as genuine suffering. David Hunt experienced, if not the ABC World Wide of Sports' thrill of victory and agony of defeat, at least the joy of a perfect play and the searing pain of injury. As for the joy, David remembers a touchdown pass that Brian threw to him. "What made it special was that as we lined up, I told the defense what my route was going to be, and that Brian was passing to me. At the snap, I ran straight ahead, and when I passed the goal line, I went right five or six steps, turned, and the ball was right there. I dropped to my knees and caught it. Touchdown!! Brian threw a perfect pass. The best thing about it is that after all these years, we still talk about it whenever we talk about the Turkey Bowl."

But all was not roses for the star receiver. One year, "I broke a bone in my left hand. An innocent enough play, but I stumbled forward and fell into an opposing player, my left hand split on his thigh - instant pain. And for the rest of the game, throbbing pain, especially if my hand was below my heart. I sucked it up and played the rest of the game, but later that day I went to the ER and found that I'd broken a bone in my hand."

Eventually, like all good things must, the Turkey Bowl came to an end. I was one of the first to bow out, leaving sometime in the late eighties, my lack of athleticism having rendered me increasingly ineffective even though I was the youngest member of the Hunt team. Others retired not long after, though some carried on for the long haul.

"I bet we played for twenty years," estimates Felkey. "I think my last one was circa 1997 or 1998. Forget what I did, but it was at least a bruised rib. I think it was then that my body was saying enough is enough."

Though the cherished tradition is long gone, it has not been forgotten. "I remember it was magic!" says Gillotti. "Especially as a young kid, being able to take on the mysterious and magical elder Hunts."

"The Turkey Bowl was the most fun we all had as young men!" enthuses Moskwinski. "It would be fun to have a Turkey Bowl Reunion - Old against Older!"

"It was always fun playing in the mud," recalls Richard Hunt.

Perhaps Ruen puts it best. "Man, did I love the Turkey Bowl."

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Jim...there's something funny about the walls and floor...

Star Trek or Planet of the Apes? That was the paralyzing decision that I had to make one afternoon in 1975. I stood transfixed before brightly colored boxes, my brow furrowed with the anxious knowledge that whichever option I chose, it would come at the expense of forfeiting the other. Star Trek or Planet of the Apes? Both playsets looked fantastically inviting, especially when accessorized with a quartet of eight-inch action figures. I studied the pictures and tried to envision what exciting scenarios I might be able to create with these tantalizing toys. Did one of the choices offer more hours of fun? Might I grow tired of one of them sooner than I imagined? Did one road lead to sustained happiness, while the other ended in unforeseen regret? My nostrils flared. Star Trek or Planet of the Apes?

My mother and father stood nearby, patiently observing their youngest child's angst. We were standing in a long aisle within the vast establishment known as Children's Palace. The mere sight of its turreted facade had thrilled me to my very capacity for excitement, for I had seen television ads for the store and yearned to visit it like a prospector dreams of El Dorado. In my hometown of Lima, toys were confined to a small department within stores that sold an array of goods. The concept of a big box retailer dealing exclusively in toys was like hearing tell of a swimming pool filled with chocolate milk. Yet here in Columbus, I was standing within a genuine Children's Palace.

Children of today have no point of reference to comprehend this wonderland. A modern simulacrum would be Toys 'R' Us, yet its wares lack the charm of a Children's Palace at the dawn of the disco era. In 1975, toy store stock did not include endless titles for rival video game systems, nor did glossy boxes concealing computer software line the shelves. All of the items for sale offered a tactile experience, and to see row after row of board games and bikes and models and Hot Wheels and Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots and many gizmos hitherto unseen was overwhelming in the most euphoric way. Not to mention dolls, Barbies, and all things pink, if you liked that kind of thing. It was like a preview of heaven.

Both of the items I coveted were manufactured by Mego, the same firm that would later unleash Captain and Tennile and KISS action figures upon a jaded public awash in the peculiar trends of the Seventies. The outfit would have made Eli Whitney proud, minimizing production costs by sticking different heads onto interchangeable articulated bodies. Apparently in some cases, overstocked heads for unpopular lines were reused for later products. According to collector Michael Rogers, that is how the Paul Stanley figure came to be topped with the painted noggin of Daryl "Captain" Dragon. One can only wonder what happened to the heads of Toni Tennile.

In hindsight, the most amusing thing about my childhood dilemma is the fact that I am not, nor have I ever been, a Trekkie, a Trekker, or whatever it is that devotees of the U.S.S. Enterprise like to call themselves. Neither can I lay claim to any enthusiasm beyond casual amusement for the Planet of the Apes franchise. Yet the merchandise beckoned to me with all the persuasive power of brand name recognition. At a list price of about $15 for either option (no small sum in '75), I had to choose carefully.

I considered the "Planet of the Apes" Treehouse. A little spare in design, but it included a barred cage in which to detain prisoners, which looked like fun. The open architecture offered plenty of opportunities for violent confrontations that would end with a character plunging to his death, which also sounded fun. A hatch in the roof provided further possibilities for high-altitude hijinks. But the coolest thing about the playset was that it was meant to be inhabited by Planet of the Apes action figures. There is something fundamentally irresistible about talking simians wearing bandoliers and brandishing rifles. Really, who wouldn't enjoy owning a set of eight-inch, articulated apes?

The Star Trek action figures, on the other hand, were far less interesting, though the resemblance to their TV counterparts was impressive. The U.S.S. Enterprise Action Playset was a vinyl-sheathed hexagonal box that opened to reveal a rather crudely interpreted bridge set. Minimally detailed furnishings included a bulky captain's chair, a pair of stools that looked more like snack tables for the captain, and a boxy object with symbol-laden decals that was meant to represent a complex control console. A slot behind the viewscreen was intended to receive any of a dozen cardboard inserts featuring illustrated scenes of mediocre quality. Overall, it was a less enticing package.

But...it had one redeeming quality that I found absolutely fascinating. A rectangular box housing a rotating cylinder represented the famous transporter room. Like a closet with its door removed, the space was enclosed on three sides. The cylinder had a panel of its exterior cut away, allowing one to place an action figure inside a quarter of the interior. Opposite this was an identical compartment. The outer surface of this container was plastered with dazzling, black and yellow, op-art stickers. Atop the whole affair were three buttons. By setting the cylinder spinning with the center button, you would perceive what appeared to be an electrical pattern superimposed over the action figure. The other buttons stopped the cylinder cold at either the occupied or empty compartment, enabling a convincing illusion of disappearance. It was a great little magic trick, and I could not resist it.

Only eBay knows what price I might have commanded one day had I kept my U.S.S. Enterprise Action Playset and my Kirk, Bones, Spock and Klingon figures in decent condition. As it was, I handled them roughly, popping off the characters' heads and extracting the rotating cylinder from its transformer room housing for closer inspection. I lost the guns and the utility belts among the assorted detritus of my toy drawers. Even if I could have located all of the various components, it would have taken some effort to restore everything to collectible condition. I guess I just didn't have a sufficient amount of respect for the Star Trek crew.

All these years later, I am older and wiser. In my maturity, I realize the decision I should have made. Keep the U.S.S. Enterprise, but man the spacecraft with Dr. Zeus and the rest of the denizens of Planet of the Apes. Now that would have been cool.

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I grew up believing that the first President of the United States was George Worshington. Oh, I knew it wasn't spelled that way, but that was how I said it. Similarly, I knew my home was equipped with a worsher and dryer, which we used to launder all of our clothes and linen, including the worshcloths. I inherited this peculiar dialectical preference and used it for years without the slightest notion that it was a deviation from standard English. Then one day, in the midst of questioning every other facet of my adolescent existence, I realized that there was no justifiable reason to pronounce wash as worsh, and I was appalled. I had been betrayed by my upbringing, tarred with a rube's tongue, and I vowed to eradicate the vulgarism from my speech at once. It took a few weeks of consciously correcting my bad habit, a learning curve akin to knowing how to use a foreign phrase with the aplomb of a native, but I eventually became forever worsh-free.

The transformation led me to tackle other linguistic abominations as they became apparent to me. I began to enunciate all four syllables of interesting in an effort to combat the gross contraction intresting. I put the first r back into library. I even started adding a g at the end of progressive verbs. Yet I was not a budding usage curmudgeon. I found no pleasure in the superiority of the language police. I simply noticed things that made no sense to me and adjusted my speech accordingly.

Unfortunately, I also developed a smug prejudice against people who either spoke improperly, as judged by yours truly, or whose accent corresponded to any backwoods stereotype. Never mind that I exhibited many linguistic traces of my Midwestern origin, I was convinced that dialects different than my own were simply inferior. This is why it is important for young people to meet a good variety of folks with diverse backgrounds of varying education and income levels. I had to have my ego taken down a few pegs before I could acknowledge the arbitrariness of our language standards, enabling me to observe that one's manner of speech is not a reliable indicator of intelligence. I am ashamed to have once dismissed the intellect of people simply due to their inherited dialects.

Nevertheless, I continue to refine my own speech, not out of snobbery but rather in the effort to excise those oddities that I have persisted in uttering only because I have always said them that way. A borderline example of this is my use of the word coupon.

It came as a revelation to me when I realized, several years ago, that not all of the United States refers to the ubiquitous money-saving certificates that fill the Sunday newspaper supplements as kyoo•pons. Admittedly, this variation that I have spoken for nearly all of my life appears in my dictionary as an alternate pronunciation. The standard koo•pon, however, is listed first. As my ears began to discern the difference and I noticed the koo syllable employed by such reputable authorities as public radio commentators and television commercial narrators, my psyche went into defensive mode, and I rebelled initially. I regarded koo•pon as elitist, an affectation muttered while drinking tea with pinkie aloft by the very sort of prude who would never condescend to use crass discounts in the first place.

But then I began to think it over, and I couldn't come up with any other word in which ou is pronounced as yoo. On the other hand, words like troupe and coupe employed the oo sound. This provoked the thought that the only reason I had for pronouncing coupon as kyoo•pon was that I was raised to say it that way, a dubious rationale. I concluded that kyoo•pon was therefore another colloquialism to toss onto the verbal scrap heap.

I have learned not to be cocky about usage proficiency, as it's never too late to get one's comeuppance. One of my chronic mispronunciations went unchecked for nearly four decades before I was gobsmacked by an educational worksheet that listed our and hour as a homophone pair. That could not be, according to my fragile worldview, because I knew our to be a homophone of are. In fact, I had the dictionary to back me up. Only I didn't. To my chagrin, I discovered what mincemeat I had been making of sentences like, "These are our options." What's worse, I still can't quite get my head around this unpleasant reality. I have to make a determined effort to pronounce our properly, and it feels so unpleasant to my palate that I inevitably revert to my old habit. Sometimes I'll issue the mental directive, "Just say hour," but too much metacognition gums up whatever I was trying to say in the first place. Like a verbal scar, it keeps me humble.

Humility is an asset in the education profession, as it fosters patience with peculiarities and tolerance of differences. In my first year of teaching, I was thrown by some regional dialect that was new to me. It started when someone asked me for some crowns. Baffled, I paraphrased the request, only to have my inquirer nod enthusiastically. I must have looked absolutely idiotic as I stood there before my young charge, who looked at me expectantly while waiting for me to produce a box of crayons. Finally my overloaded brain recognized a colloquial contraction. Why bother with the time and effort of enunciating cray and on when the one-syllable crown is available?

Even stranger to my ears was the use of the term collar to specify hue rather than shirt style. Really, it's not so different from standard pronunciation, merely substituting a short o for a short u. However, when a kid is trying to tell you what color crayon he wants and your head is dancing with Victorian tiaras and neck ruffles, it can be confusing. These children recognized two homophone pairs that I never knew existed. For them, it was possible to issue the directive, "Collar the king's crown with the same crown you used for his collar."

The kids I taught that year are adults now. I suspect the students who collared with crowns will have their own revelation some day, if it hasn't happened already. Perhaps it will occur when they are caring for their own children. They'll be watching their little one scribbling away at a coloring book. Their eyes will absentmindedly wander across the box of Crayolas, and suddenly they'll utter, "Wait a minute..."

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My wife and I bought our house nearly twenty years ago. It's a small two-story built by an outfit that kept prices affordable by using the cheapest materials allowed by housing codes. We've made some significant quality upgrades over the last two decades, installing a durable roof, buying a better furnace, replacing every window and door, and encasing our home in vinyl siding. Incredibly, however, we are still using the original, economy-grade water heater. Aware that our basement houses an aquatic time bomb that could blow at any time, perhaps leaving us without hot water on an arctic January morning, we decided to be proactive and solicit some replacement estimates.

"Now, I'm guessin' here," boomed a garrulous contractor as he surveyed our basement, "that you guys have two and a half bathrooms?"

Guess again. My wife and I traded smiles provoked by the perverse joy that comes with puncturing false assumptions. "One," I corrected him. He was clearly taken aback by this information, as though we had revealed that we do all of our cooking over a boiling cauldron in the fireplace. Yet we spoke the truth. It is the secret shame of modern suburbia. You can't tell just by driving through the neighborhood, but there exists here and there the odd house that has...[insert dramatic sting here]...only one toilet.

Now let us hop in our time machine and emerge in the early 1960s, where we observe a home that has not yet welcomed the birth of the author of this post. It is a modest build. Three adults and five children living in a two-bedroom house with a tiny kitchen. The small attic is finished, but the basement is not. The dining area is as cramped as the kitchen. In fact, it is the kitchen. And there is one - and only one - bathroom. That was the uncomfortable reality for my family before I came along. Somehow they managed to make it work. But eventually, they applied some hard-earned savings to make a sorely needed expansion.

As a result, I grew up in comparative luxury. Our house had doubled in size thanks to an addition that provided a relatively spacious family room, a third bedroom, and most importantly, a second bathroom. I rarely knew the inconvenience of waiting for a bathroom, especially since most of my sisters and brothers had moved out of the house before I was even a teenager. Immediate access to a shower, sink and toilet was a perk that I simply took for granted. When one bathroom was occupied, you just headed for the other one.

The transition to college dorm life was not without its challenges, among which was coping with the loss of privacy that is a consequence of sharing a communal restroom with 15 other guys. Still, we had four shower stalls, four sinks, and an array of toilets and urinals at our disposal, and unless you happened to stumble into the facilities during peak usage (say, fifteen minutes before a ten o'clock class), there was very rarely a wait.

Even the small apartment that my wife and I shared was generously appointed for just the two of us. Just outside the standard full bathroom, there was an additional sink and mirror, sparing us any arguments over what to do should we happen to simultaneously desire tooth brushing.

We anticipated having children when we started looking for a house. Actually, it was one of the motivating factors in our decision to move on from apartment life. So we knew there would come a time when there might be anywhere from four to six people using the facilities on a given morning (Hey, we were young and idealistic!). Our realtor assuaged our concerns about the single bathroom in our prospective new home by noting that the plumbing for a second bathroom was already roughed in down in the unfinished basement. It sounded reasonable enough. In a few years, after we got on our feet and the money starting rolling in, we'd finish the basement and have our second bathroom.

Well, somehow that second bathroom got lost in all the kerfuffle over windows and doors and furnaces and roofs and siding. Along with doing something about that aging water heater. Meanwhile, we had two girls, who have now grown up to be teenage occupants of our sole existing bathroom. Somehow, we manage to make it work. Yet we would truly benefit from a sorely needed expansion. If anything should go wrong with the bathroom plumbing, we'll be in a crisis until it is fixed. And now that we have waited this long to do anything about our lavatorial shortage, other big-ticket disasters are looming like expensive monsters ready to emerge from hiding. Before we invest in a finished basement, we must also consider the current health of our water heater's elderly companions, the 1992 vintage washer, dryer, oven and refrigerator.

But there is hope. When a solution does not present itself, one must do the proverbial thinking outside of the box. Or in our case, the toilet outside of the bathroom. For what is the bare minimum that would alleviate our competition for scarce bathroom resources? A toilet and a pedestal sink. You can find basic models of both items for a total of less than $100. Hire a plumber to run a water supply and attach the new porcelain to the roughed-in plumbing (because Lord knows, I can't do it), and you have the very simplest half-bath there is. Unconventional, perhaps, but will it not get the job done?

In fact, the more I think about it, the more advantages I see to having an open half bath in an unfinished basement. The ladies of the house will consider it to be, at best, an unattractive option. Whereas I, having no such hesitation, will once again find myself basking in the glory of 24/7 access to, if not a shower, at least a toilet and a sink. I envision a little privacy partition fashioned by arranging the basement bookshelves into adjoining walls. And really, there's no reason why a little flat-screen TV couldn't sit on one of those shelves, maybe with an old DVD player or video game console hooked up to it. Perhaps a little dorm fridge in the corner and a place for my laptop...

But I get carried away. When you grow up in luxury like I did, it's hard to stay humble.

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The human brain, that incessant maker of meaning and perceiver of patterns, is wont to seek engagement rather than endure monotony. Even when there is little at hand to provide mental stimulation, the mind will resourcefully make do with whatever it finds. I am reminded of a particular instance of this phenomenon that occurred, of all places, high in the balcony seating of a sold-out pop concert.

We had been enjoying an entertaining set by Elton John, who was touring to promote his 2004 release, Peachtree Road. It was a great and engrossing performance until we heard the opening lyric, "She packed my bags last night, pre-flight." The audience responded predictably, greeting Rocket Man with a resounding ovation, but we were less than thrilled. Having seen Sir Elton a few times before, we knew that he had just embarked on a journey that would, indeed, last "a long, long time."

Not that there's anything wrong with Rocket Man, a nicely crafted hit when it clocks in at its originally recorded length of 4:45. I will also acknowledge that it can be great fun to hear a band stretch out and improvise a few variations on a familiar theme, even if that results in a song lasting several times longer than it otherwise would. However, in the case of Elton John's titanic concert renditions of Rocket Man, this is a bit of shtick he's rested on for so many years that it must be inconceivably pleasurable for him to execute, as any less enjoyment would surely drive a man mad after so many years.

Not to belabor the point, but the Economy-Size Rocket Man includes several peaks and valleys, a few frustratingly false codas, and in its moment of grossest excess, a four-bar, letter-by-letter spelling of its title. It's great the first time you hear it, interesting the second time, tedious the third time, and generally intolerable after that. You sit there and start thinking about two or three other Elton John songs that you might have heard but won't thanks to this interminable exhibition. You wonder if there's time to make your way to the restroom and return before the next song, then you kick yourself when the end finally arrives, and you realize you would have had enough time to leave the arena for a quick repast, all without missing anything of interest.

The routine is inevitably a hit, which is apparently why Sir Elton keeps doing it. This places me solidly in the minority, but I know that I am not alone. Sitting next to me was my brother Brian, who sighed and looked at me with a weary gaze as though we were colleagues asked to break out the Post-It notes and chart paper for a team building exercise. I tried to make some enjoyment out of the varying stage light display, and when that failed to occupy my attention, I passed a few minutes following the tangled paths of catwalks along the arena ceiling. When I glanced at Brian, I saw that he was not looking at the stage. Instead, his expressionless gaze appeared to be fixed at some point above us, where there was nothing except the reverse side of several sponsor logo signs. He appeared as vacant as Seinfeld's David Puddy on an intercontinental flight.

"Do you realize," he said to me at length, "that you can rearrange the letters in Giant Eagle to make eating a leg?" And there it was. My brother's brain, its functioning threatened by the mind molasses that is fifteen minutes of unrelenting Rocket Man, clung to survival by anagramming the first words it found. It was a moment of salvation for me, too, for although I was ultimately unsuccessful, I spent the rest of the song trying to come up with an even better anagram. Agile gnat left me with a stranded e, and elegant IGA wasn't as funny. Still, it was a lot better than that cursed R-O-C-K-E-T-M-A-N.

Brian is a formidable Scrabble player, at least within our amateur circle, so generating anagrams comes naturally to him. I find it somewhat difficult to do without having tangible letters to move around, which frees my mind from having to keep track of what letters I have and have not used. When I think I've come up with a brilliant anagram solely through mental effort, I usually find that I've left out a letter or added a duplicate.

Nevertheless, what better testament to the playful eagerness of our brains to simply think is there than the mind's capacity and thirst for anagrams? Other than achieving one's own amusement, it's a pointless exercise. As amusing, pointless exercises go, however, it's a great time filler.

During a lull one weekend afternoon, I picked out my name in Scrabble tiles and started moving them around, looking for credible aliases. My favorite anagram for Robert Gerard Hunt is Arthur T. Rodenberg, which sounds like the namesake of a liberal arts grant benefiting NPR. (Funding for "Morning Edition" is provided by the Arthur T. Rodenberg Foundation, a tax shelter with an attractive veneer of philanthropy.) I also found the mysterious Garrett Durrebohn (a German spy, perhaps?), Darren R. Butterhog (whom I envision as the wealthy founder of a pork rind franchise), and Brother Andergurt (a menacing monk). Plus, my name can also be rearranged to form the phrase darn hotter burger, though I'm hard-pressed to explain why anyone might utter such words.

Of course, one man's anagram is another man's complete waste of time. I received Brian's brilliant eating a leg with admiration, whereas many would respond with a flat "Big deal" (which, by the way, can be rearranged to make I Be Glad or GI Blade). Those of us who enjoy the odd anagram now and then have come to recognize stony silence (Tony's license or Let's ice Sonny) as the universal signal of anagrammatic discouragement. So in the interest of risking no further alienation from valued readers, I shall anagram no further.

Except to note that the letters in Elton John can be rearranged to make a cautionary message regarding the handling of poultry (Jolt no hen.)

Okay, I'm done. (Nook may die.)

Sorry.

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I hesitate to add my voice to the clamorous din of narratives and opinions examining the legacy of the 9/11 tragedy on its tenth anniversary. The notorious event was born on the dawn of media saturation, and not even the enormous towers themselves could have contained the last decade's voluminous reporting about their destruction. It seems like every news organization, whether national or local, is compelled to produce copious coverage of the milestone, as though to do anything less would somehow be unpatriotic. It has reached the point where the mere mention of the words, "a look back at 9/11" is enough to make me tune out, and we haven't yet reached Sunday.

It reminds me of an item I saw buried in the back pages of a community newspaper several years ago. A pair of teenagers had come through town in the course of their marathon walk across the state. The purpose of their trek, according to the reporter, was to raise awareness about 9/11. That's a little like staging a publicity stunt in order to call attention to the heliocentric model of our solar system, but kudos to them anyway, as I'm sure their intentions were sincere.

Surely all but the youngest among us need no decennial hoopla to keep the memory of that infamous day alive. It's there every time we see an airplane cruising along at low altitude, involuntarily evoking images of doomed flights. We're reminded of it as we deal with ever-tightening security measures at airport terminals. Government statements requesting vigilance against potential terrorist action are now commonplace, and suspicion of terrorism accompanies every random act of senseless violence. The consequences of 9/11 have permeated our culture to the extent that we define events on our national timeline as those which either preceded or followed the attack on the towers.

What can be said that hasn't already been expressed? All that I can add is my personal experience of that bleak occasion, which was surely not too different from that of many other Americans. I did not know any of the people who lost their lives that day, nor am I acquainted with anyone who responded to the disaster scene. I've never even been to New York City, I'm embarrassed to say. So while I was intellectually aware of the magnitude of loss, I could not truly comprehend the horror of those who were directly involved, nor could I fully understand the anxious terror of their families. I was over five hundred miles away from Ground Zero, immersed in the small details of an ordinary day.

It was my first year of teaching, and even though the academic year had barely begun, I was running on fumes. I had naively assumed that my pedagogical training had thoroughly prepared me to teach a lively group of fifth graders, only to discover that my education had just begun. The double-wide trailer that was to serve as my classroom was not yet serviceable, and so I was forced to begin my inaugural year instructing my students in the library. The less-than-ideal setup was certainly a detriment, compounded by my lack of experience. Everything I had learning about teaching had sounded theoretically doable, yet I was finding that implementing all of those ideas was keeping me at school more than twelves hours a day. I felt like I barely knew what I was doing, and I was exhausted. That was the hazy lens through which I viewed the events of 9/11.

I first became aware that something was amiss when I entered the teacher's lounge and found a few staff members gawking at the television. "A plane just flew into the World Trade Center," one of them informed me. Preoccupied with my duties, I glanced at the TV while making copies of a language arts activity. Most of my brain was working on how I would successfully teach my next lesson, but a few thoughts about the developing story formed. It was tragic, of course, yet presumably accidental. Obviously fatal for the people in the plane and those unlucky enough to be near the point of impact. A horrible news story, yet comparable to other aviation disasters. An isolated incident. I gathered up my copies and headed back to my classroom.

By the time I returned to the lounge for lunch, there was much more news. A second plane had hit the other tower, a third plane had struck the Pentagon, and yet another had crashed into a Pennsylvania field. The towers themselves had collapsed. The FAA had grounded all flights across the country. Our nation was the victim of a coordinated terrorist attack, executed by hijacking our own commercial airplanes. It was riveting and mind-boggling, and in my state of perpetual exhaustion, it was also surreal and unfathomable. I was still taking the day minute-by-minute, just trying to make it through the next lesson, while this extraordinary chain of events was unfolding. No one was quite sure what it all meant, yet the responsibility of caring for and educating our students remained. We tried to carry on as normally as possible, but that became increasingly difficult.

One by one, students from my classroom were called down to the office as parents arrived to request their early dismissal. By the end of the day, I had only half of my class. The building was nearly vacant soon after the last bus departed, but I still had my standard evening routine ahead of me. My makeshift classroom needed to be put back in order. There were papers to sort and grade, files to update, copies to be made. Plus, I had to figure out what on earth I was going to do the next day, making sure that it adhered to the curriculum guides and honored the philosophies of Gardner and Piaget.

I did it all to the drone of the library TV, which I could finally turn on now that the children were gone. The sobering news was all the more troubling to my tired mind. Even before that day, I had been feeling as though I was keeping my head just above water. Now it seemed as though all of America was overwhelmed.

It was 10:00 before I left that night. My gas tank was almost empty, and I was annoyed and alarmed to find lines of anxious citizens at the gas station. I just wanted to get home and get as much sleep as I could before the next day started.

Before going to bed, I looked up at the stars above our house and noted the absence of air traffic. We live right along the flight path to a major airport, and we had become accustomed to hearing the roar of planes coming in for a landing. That night, all was eerily quiet. But unlike much of America, I had no trouble sleeping. I was too exhausted to be kept awake by the horrible news, and whatever was going on in the rest of the world, I had to be ready for another day of teaching, taking it minute-by-minute.

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