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I wasn't kidnapped as a child, never abused, abandoned, beaten, or sold to the highest bidder. My parents didn't lock me in the basement. The cults never got hold of me--not counting a pretty wacky Bible camp. I wasn't transgendered, interracial, or multinational. No president denied that I was his love child. No aliens abducted me (although sometimes I wished they would). I wasn't blind, deaf, mute, epileptic, dyspeptic, or unable to digest milk. I wasn't an altruistic autistic. No one in my family was a psychopath or a sociopath, but a few of my cousins definitely went down the wrong path. My worst disease was mumps, and the closest I came to physical tragedy was a bee sting on the lip.

I'm not a celebrity or related to one or sleeping with one.

I breathe air, drink water, eat food.

But on a Tuesday afternoon in fourth grade, I realized for the first time that I was only "mostly normal."

I was singing with my classmates in music class. My voice was years away from changing, high, sweet, and boyish. I would never make the Vienna Boys' Choir, but I wasn't awful.

Halfway through the class, the school secretary came into the room and whispered mysteriously to Mrs. Claudio, my music teacher.

Mrs. Claudio then pointed toward several spots around the classroom. "I need you and you and you and you and you to please go to the speech therapy room near the main office." She pointed quickly as if conducting a more talented class of singers, and her slightly crooked index finger left in doubt exactly which students she had singled out among my mumbling classmates.

After a moment, a few kids ventured forward with their heads down. All of them spent most of their school day in what at the time was called "special education"--"special-ed" for short or "sped" if you wanted to be cruel. They were mildly retarded or had pretty serious versions of what we now call "learning disabilities" and only joined the rest of us for lunch, recess, gym, and music. And they each spoke with a speech impediment--convenient ammunition for the jerky kids who liked to tease them-so the school had recently hired a part-time speech therapist.

After these kids dutifully gathered at the front of the classroom, Mrs. Claudio said, "John, please join them. Do you know where the room is?"

I nodded.

"Good," she continued. "Then you can take them there."

This was a very proud moment. Mrs. Claudio had appointed me to show the less advanced students where they needed to go for speech therapy. Clearly, she recognized my leadership potential and responsible nature and entrusted me to escort these kids to their speech therapy session. So I led the way, feeling very pleased with my new role as "teacher's assistant"--not "teacher's pet," a label that would have doomed me for a decade to come.

I walked the other kids to their assigned room, made grown-up sounding small talk along the way, and then pointed them to the door. Helping these kids was a pleasure. I liked them and was glad I could contribute in my own small way to their education. Speech therapy might help them fit in better and feel less isolated.

Beaming with accomplishment, I walked back to music class and returned to my place among my friends.

Mrs. Claudio, inexplicably, stared at me. "John," she said, not hiding her impatience, "why are you here?"

"I took them to the room like you said," I replied, confused. This was no way for her to speak to her new assistant.

"No, John," she said, striding over to take me by the elbow and hustle me toward the door. "You were supposed to stay there with them. You need speech therapy too!"

"Too, too, too . . ."

Her words echoed around me as I staggered into the empty hallway.

"Thpeech therapy?" I said to myself, stunned. "Thee thays I need thpeech therapy too."

From that day on, I missed an hour of fourth grade music class each Tuesday afternoon to attend speech therapy. The drills with the therapist eventually helped me learn to stop substituting "th" sounds for my "s" sounds--a problem I didn't know I had until then. And I learned an even more important lesson that first day of speech therapy: it hurts to be singled out because someone thought I didn't belong with everyone else in school.

I never again used the word "sped" . . . or "thped."

Missing so much music class that year might have adversely affected my singing ability. If there had been treatment centers for the singing-impaired, I would have been sent to one. Dad and I were by far the worst singers in church, back when I still went to church. My sisters rolled their eyes when we sang, then asked if I sang badly on purpose. In a way, I guess I did because I decided as soon as I hit puberty that I had a very deep voice. I dipped my chin into my collarbone and lowered my voice as much as I could, trying to sound like my naive perception of a very talented opera singer. Instead of praise for my rich tones, all I earned was a sore throat from the strain.

When my class chorus sang at our sixth grade graduation ceremonies, I was one of a handful of kids not allowed to sing with the group. Ironically, the only other people banned from singing were my fourth grade speech therapy friends. We sat in the audience while our classmates stood on stage and sang some dopey song about how we were all "blossoming" into young adults.

Mom asked me after the ceremony why I sat with, "those, um, kids, um, you know, the 'slow' bunch." I didn't really mind not singing with everyone else. Instead, I enjoyed the reunion with my speech therapy friends. We reminisced about our year of Tuesday afternoons and joked about how I thought I was just escorting them to therapy.

"The look on your face when you came back . . ." one of the kids said. I made that face for them again--an expression of overwhelming disappointment. We all laughed. Then we watched our miserable classmates up on stage as they muddled their way through dreadful practice sessions.

Maybe we couldn't always talk and sing as well as everyone else in our class, but we were certainly happy to be spared from taking part in that stupid blossoming song.

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We've all seen the soap operas where a character discovers her "real father." It turns out that the man who raised her and whom she called "Daddy" all those years is not her real father at all--just some guy who made an "honest woman" out of her mother decades before. Her real father is actually the town drunk or the murderer recently paroled from prison or the town's richest oil baron or even--uh, oh--that nice older gentleman she started dating last month.

My story is not nearly as dramatic. For most of my life, I had a sneaking suspicion that Mom was not my "real mother." As a teenager, I had Dad's eyes and high forehead and muscles and usually calm temperament. Mom sometimes seemed to be an alien creature so much more like my sisters than me. Don't misunderstand me--she was a wonderful mother, dedicated and kind and generous and funny. But she wasn't like me. She was softer and rounder, had an unpredictable temper, a lack of patience, and an inability to drive a car effectively.

Dad was definitely Dad, but how could this woman be my real mother?

I understand that the biology behind this fantasy made no sense--not even soap opera sense. Finding out that your Mom is not your real mother is something that happens only in Psycho sequels. Because Mom told so many stories about what a difficult pregnancy and birth I had been, she clearly thought I was her biological son. And I have a twin sister, obviously Mom's child. The whole thing was beyond my powers of explanation, yet I held tightly to the not-my-real-mother fantasy for much of my life.

It took two unrelated moments in my late-thirties to put away my childish fantasy. One afternoon while I backed my car out of a parking space at the gym, my workout partner chuckled. I asked what was funny, and she told me that I backed the car "like an old lady." I immediately had a flash of Dad harshly criticizing Mom's driving. When I pondered that memory later in the day, I realized that I never criticize anybody's driving. People drive the way they drive--different styles for different drivers. Dad and I may have the same shaped hands, but when it came to criticizing drivers, we took very different roads.

Of course, the relative I resemble in the car is Mom. Her driving used to make me crazy even before I could drive myself. She was well into her forties when she finally got her license. Even at age twelve, I saw that she had very little idea what was going on behind her. She seemed content to travel down the interstate at forty miles per hour, confident that she would never run into anything or anyone. She was right. She never hit a thing with her car, but the drivers screaming past her and shaking their fists were running the risk of head-on collisions. This was a woman who stopped at green lights because she was afraid they would turn yellow. Mom was completely safe--just a terror for everyone else on the road.

I maintain and sometimes even exceed the speed limit when I'm on the highway, so that's not where the connection is. It's backing up. Mom inched backward a millimeter at a time, looking frantically over one shoulder, then the other, then back and forth again until she was dizzy. I'm not that bad, but I admit that I always make a tight U-turn in the driveway so my car points headfirst toward the street. And I'll walk an extra half a mile at the mall to find a "pull-through" parking space that requires no backing to enter or leave.

Not long after the driving revelation, I decided to shave the beard that covered my chin for nearly twenty years. I'd started growing it in my late teens and endured all the jokes about how scraggly it grew. Eventually, the bald spots filled in. People only occasionally ask me what I'm hiding behind my beard. I usually claim that I don't like shaving or that I'm tired of being a baby face.

The day I shaved it, however, I found what I had been hiding. As I wiped the steam from the bathroom mirror, I saw Mom's face staring back. I still had Dad's forehead and eyes and the top half of his nose, but from there down, I was my mother. In my amazement, I uttered a few soft curses and even saw Mom's words in the shape and movements of my mouth. Good lord, I thought to myself at long last, she is my real mother.

Maybe I don't back the car quite like an old lady, but I started growing my beard back that same day.

When I first started dating Stephanie, a black woman, my mother asked me if I cared what other people thought about our interracial relationship.

"Not really," I told her. "But I am interested in what you think."

"Well," she said, studying the floor, "I guess if you're in love and happy, that's what's important."

Five years later, I picked my mother up at the Columbus, Ohio, airport. I was twenty-eight years old and about to marry Stephanie. We drove ninety minutes to Stephanie's parents' home in rural Ohio where the wedding would take place. Mom was talkative as we drove through the darkness on unfamiliar country roads.

"Does Stephanie's family have many white friends?" she asked.

"Sure," I replied. "It's a mostly white town, so they have lots of white friends."

"I just was worried that I'd be out of place at the wedding," she said.

I laughed. "Well, if you're out of place sitting in the audience, imagine how I'll feel up in front of everybody."

"Is it strange to be marrying someone so different?"

"Stephanie isn't really that different," I said. "We're a lot more alike than different. She grew up outside a small town and went to a small high school, just like I did. Her parents worked, just like you and Dad. Their family wasn't rich or poor. She has lots of the same interests as I do. Race is about the only difference, but we're both human."

"I guess," Mom said, and then she was thoughtful for a moment.

Then she asked, "Do you remember your cousin Danielle?"

"The one who's a kindergarten teacher?"

"She bought a house," Mom said. She was always fond of telling me mundane information about people I hadn't seen in at least a decade.

"Uh-huh," I said.

"She's not married," Mom continued.

"Uh-huh," I repeated.

"She bought the house with a friend of hers who works at another school," Mom said.

"Her boyfriend?" I asked.

"That's the funny thing," Mom said. "It's another woman. They're both in their thirties, never been married, no kids."

I remembered Danielle fondly. She was a great athlete even as an adolescent. We played basketball when she came to visit, and she always beat me even though I was already taller than she was by the time I was nine and she was thirteen.

"Do you think they're a couple?" I asked.

Mom turned toward me. "What do you mean?"

"You know," I said. "Are they gay?"

"No!" Mom said, pushing her back against the passenger door. "That's just gross. I can't understand that whole thing. It just makes me sick."

"What?" I asked.

"Two women together--that's just sickening," she said.

"Well," I continued, "there are people who think it's sickening that Stephanie and I are together."

Mom was quiet.

"In fact, it used to be against the law for me to marry Stephanie. And there are still people in the world who would kill us if they could get away with it, just because we love each other."

"But they're two women," Mom said. "It's unnatural."

"There are plenty of men and women together who aren't very 'natural.' Men who hit their wives, women who scream at their husbands--that doesn't sound very 'natural.'"

"What kind of lives can they have together?" Mom asked. "What do they do with each other?"

I chuckled. "I imagine they do pretty much what every couple does. They worry about the bills and watch TV, sit on the porch at sunset. They argue about stupid little things. When one of them is sick, the other one takes care of her. They go to weddings. They complain about their bosses. Pay the mortgage. Gossip about relatives. They love each other."

"But when I think about them in bed," Mom said with a shudder, "it's sickening."

I laughed again. "Then don't think about them in bed. Besides, there are plenty of things that straight couples do in bed that a lot of people think are sickening. But those couples are allowed to do what they want. Suppose somebody told you and Dad that the love you felt for each other and the way you expressed that love was 'sickening.' Suppose they told you that you shouldn't be together, that your love was wrong and evil. How would you feel about that?"

"Grandma felt that way about us," Mom said.

My dad's mother had objected to the fact that Mom had a child from her first marriage when she and Dad got married. It didn't matter to Grandma that Mom was a young widow. To her, it was still a scandal. Mom and Grandma didn't really become friends until after Dad died.

"How did that make you feel?" I asked.

"I didn't like it," Mom said.

We drove a few miles in silence. The wipers ticked away a steady drizzle. After a while, I started wondering about something. "Is she nice?"

"Who?" Mom asked.

"Danielle's girlfriend."

Mom laughed. "You know what? She is. She's funny and smart, and she likes to tease Danielle about her short hair. They seem really happy together."

The next evening, after the wedding, Mom sat at the kitchen table with Stephanie's mother and her relatives and friends, all of them women between fifty and seventy-five, half of them black, half white. Mom happily joined in the discussion of pride and disappointment in all their many kids, some of whom were within earshot and rolled their eyes each time their name came up--me included.

Nobody felt out of place at all.

I hardly uttered a swear word before I went to college, and I still don't swear nearly as often as most people I know. But when I turned fifteen, I decided my time had come to say bad words. On the way to becoming a grown-up, I thought I should sound like one.

For privacy, I walked down to our barn and climbed up into the hayloft. To be sure no one could hear me, I situated myself way back in the corner farthest away from our house and from the church just beyond the hill.

I started small, using some words that weren't really swears but were the closest I came in my everyday language.

"Darn," I whispered. "Darn it," I continued, a little louder. Then, in a voice about half my normal volume, "Darn it all to heck!"

At the sound of my voice, a group of crows took off from a rafter and flew out a high window. They startled me so much I said, "Shoot!"

Darn? Heck? Shoot? Was I a toddler?

"Damn," I said. This one didn't really count because I had heard it in church, but it still sounded pretty harsh in my own voice.

"Hell," I continued, but this was just another church word. I had to try a real curse word to see if I could do it.

"Sh*t," I spat out quickly, and then looked around. No birds flew, and my parents didn't burst through the barn door telling me I had said something horrible. I repeated the word a few times, saying it louder and more drawn out each time. After a few tries, I sounded just like one of my older cousins when he swore and spat a stream of tobacco juice. "She-yit."

I tried the few other swears I could think of that day. First, the basic insults: "bit*h" and "basta*d." Then the general anatomical terms: "a*s" and "a*s ho*e." Then some gender specific bad words: "di*k," "co*k," "t*t," and "pus*y." I went back to my religious roots and expanded on them: "go to he*l," "da*n you," and "g*d da*n it."

Finally, I went for the big one . . . the "f" word. To make it a really well-rounded experience, I even practiced giving the finger to some "a*s ho*e basta*d kid on the g*d da*n school bus who threw fu*king chewing gum in my hair."

After a while, I got bored with saying swear words. They rang dull in my ears after a few tries. So I left the barn, walked to our vegetable garden, and pulled some carrots for a snack.

They tasted livelier than any curse.

"What's brown and yellow and screams?" my cousin Gene asked for the second time, not hiding the grin that spilled into a cackle. This was a joke, I assumed.

My father stared at the floor, as did Gloria, joke-teller Gene's wife. I was twelve years old and had just picked a bushel of sweet corn from our garden in the dwindling summer dusk. We always gave relatives vegetables, even though most of them had gardens of their own. We may have been poor in money, but we were rich in vegetables.

"I give up," my mother said politely, breaking the silence. She and I looked expectantly at Gene because we were the only ones in the kitchen that evening who had not heard this joke before. My father and Gloria continued to study the pattern in the linoleum.

"A school bus load of nigger kids going over a cliff!" Gene hollered before breaking into a spitting fit of laughter.

My mother, ever polite, shook her head. "Good one," she said before turning her attention to something in the vicinity of the stove. I think her sarcasm was lost on Gene.

Out of a general subservience I felt when around adults, I coughed out a half-laugh, then quickly cut it off as I made a mental image of the joke: screaming schoolchildren plunging to their deaths . . . horrifying.

Gene slapped both his knees with both his hands, then clapped me across a shoulder blade, clearly mistaking my deference for appreciation, perhaps even approval.

There were no black people in Hyndman where I went to school. In fact, only a few dozen black people lived in all of Bedford County. I didn't actually see a black person up close until I was in junior high and went on a class trip to Washington, D.C. At the Smithsonian, a black tour guide smiled at me and asked a group of my friends what we thought of the Apollo spacecraft exhibit. We stared at him like he was from the moon. He just chucked, probably thinking to himself, Okay, another busload of hillbilly white kids from the sticks. He would have been at least partly right.

One summer, I rode my bike to Hyndman to play basketball at the high school courts. An older guy who was maybe twenty told us between games that he had played basketball with some "darkies" in the big city where he had found a factory job.

"Some of them are kind of okay," he said. "But most of them smell funny and will cut you up for the change in your pocket."

"How many did you meet," I asked.

"Three or four," he said. "That's enough to know."

Most white people I knew growing up had what I later called "TV Negro Disorder." The only black people they had ever seen were on television, so they thought the whole race consisted of drug dealers, athletes, and Huxtables. Some of these white people would say things like, "They're just too lazy and dumb to get jobs or make something of themselves." Then these same white people would cash their welfare checks and use their foodstamps to buy cigarettes.

Even at the mostly white college I attended after leaving the farm, I met dark-skinned people from Africa, Jamaica, South America, Australia--even exotic places such as Ohio and New Jersey. I discovered that I needed to meet a lot more than three or four to be "enough to know" about them. My ex-wife is African-American, and I loved getting to know her wonderful family. Racial differences had no effect on our marriage or divorce. I've now had the pleasure of meeting thousands of black people as my life has opened up, and I know that they are as diverse as I am different from my cousin Gene.

The other day I saw a television show about racist jokes. One of the ones examined went like this: "Question: What's worse than a bus load of niggers going over a cliff? Answer: One seat being empty."

As evil as this joke is, there's an ugly, mean intelligence behind it. You have to think for a fraction of a second to get it. The sense of negation and lost opportunity to do away with one more hated black person who could have been in that empty seat shows a mind at work--twisted and sick, but reasonably intelligent. Such an intelligence is rare among bigots. Cousin Gene's black-and-yellow-and-screams joke--that's just dumb.

I was an ignorant country kid. I grew up not knowing anything about people of different races because of geographical and cultural isolation. But my brain worked well enough to understand that people have differences--but people are people. Most bigots are a lot like my cousin Gene was that day in my kitchen all those years ago--not only ignorant, but too stupid even to tell their racist jokes correctly.

As a growing farm boy, I ate as much meat as anyone else. Beef and venison were my favorites--but butchering was not. The strongest person in our family from about age fifteen, I was also the most sensitive. I hated butchering more than any other farm task. I simply couldn't bring myself to cut into an animal carcass, so my job was limited to heavy lifting. I hoisted the dead-weight animal up to a hook and hung it there by notches Dad had carved between the bones of its lower hind legs. Then I went away and waited to be called when more lifting needed to be done. Dad recognized all of the other hard work I did on the farm as a kid, and I felt grateful to him for respecting my wishes not to be a full participant in the butchering.

We butchered one of our cows every other year or so. Our cousin Blaine, a butcher, came to help us in exchange for a quarter of the beef. Blaine thought a normal, healthy boy like me should be interested in cutting chunks out of livestock. Each time I hoisted part of the cow up to a hook, then walked away, the way Blaine rolled his eyes showed that he thought I was kind of a sissy, but he was too polite to say so in front of Dad.

My last summer at home before college, I decided to show Blaine that I was more of a man than he thought.

We were preparing to butcher the largest bull we had ever owned. Despite his size, he was gentle enough for children to pet his enormous snout. Mom had christened him "Suzie" for his calm nature. Blaine arrived at seven one cool Saturday morning in early summer, and he and Dad sipped coffee and chatted on the porch for half an hour while I listened to their country banter. Then Blaine reached into his truck window and pulled out his rifle.

"I guess I'd better go shoot this big fella so we can get started on him," he said.

I stood and spoke my first words of the morning. "How about if I do it?"

Blaine looked surprised. "I thought you didn't go for this kind of thing."

"I'd like to give it a try," I said.

Blaine turned the stock of the gun my way. "Okay, young man. It's already loaded for the job. Just put one right between the eyes."

I took the gun and walked the fifty yards or so toward the field where Suzie was contentedly chewing dewy grass and swishing his tail to fend off the flies that were already out that early in the morning. I didn't want to shoot this fine animal whose company I had enjoyed while feeding him cornstalks and green apples for two years. But today would be his last morning on earth--that was certain--and at least this way, he would die in the company of a familiar face rather than Blaine, a stranger to him. Besides, I was eighteen and wanted Blaine to stop thinking of me as a little softhearted boy.

Suzie glanced up at my approach, and I spoke quietly to him while raising the gun. As I sighted on the middle of his forehead, I kept talking, telling him that he was a good bull, the best bull we'd ever had. Then I squeezed the trigger.

The gun jerked a little, but I didn't really hear the shot until it echoed off the mountain a second later. Suzie didn't even flinch. For a confused second, I thought I must have missed--but I couldn't have missed from six feet away. Then I noticed a small red circle and a trickle of blood forming right where I had aimed at his forehead. The bull snorted twice and shook his head, as if shaking off an annoying fly.

With my heart hammering and my ears ringing, I pulled the bolt back, ejected the shell, and brought the gun back up to aim at the same spot. This time, when I pulled the trigger, Suzie's legs crumpled so quickly that they seemed to disappear. He landed with a meaty thump.

By then, Dad and Blaine had walked up behind me.

"What the hell happened?" Dad asked.

"It took two shots," I said, sounding calmer than I felt.

"I'll be damned," Blaine whispered. "I ain't never seen that before."

He took the gun from me and picked up the ejected shell casings.

"You hit him with the first one?" Dad wondered aloud, still puzzled.

"He sure as hell did," Blaine said. "Boy, you are one steady son of a gun. You shot him twice like you been doing it for years."

The rest of the morning was a blur. We tied the bull to the back of the truck and dragged him to the barn for butchering. I did my lifting when called, and this time Blaine didn't chuckle when I walked back to the house. The rest of the time I sat on the porch and looked at the spot where the bull had fallen.

That was twenty-five years ago. I haven't touched a gun since.

One morning, near the end of tenth grade, our school bus stopped a few miles down the road from our farm, and the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen climbed the steps into view.

She was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, like almost everybody on the bus, but she stood out. She was tall and slender with light, honey-blonde hair cut well above her shoulders, feathered across the back. She also had bangs that set off her fine-boned features and blue eyes. All this was in sharp contrast to most of the girls in our little valley, who wore their dark hair long and flat and parted in the middle.

As the entire bus gawked in stunned silence, she smiled shyly, glided down the aisle to the nearest empty seat, and slid in next to the window. She leaned her head against the glass and gazed out at the passing scenery. Soon, curiosity overcame caution, and the other girls on the bus mustered up the courage to talk to her. Within minutes, they were leaning toward her, pulled into her orbit.

I found myself leaning too.

I watched with admiration as she fielded their seemingly endless questions, laughed when they teased her about her bangs, and charmed them with questions and compliments of her own. My friend Chris, who was sitting beside me, was impressed too. One moment we were talking about the Pirates' chances for success this season, the next we were staring, speechless.

New kids in school were a rare treat. People rarely moved to our rural valley because jobs were scarce. New arrivals were usually connected in some distant way to families already living in the area. Permanent residents like Chris and I were used to looking at each other day after day. We knew everything about one another--when someone got glasses, who had thrown up in the hallway last month, and who had peed his pants on the playground in first grade. New kids had no past. They were mysteries waiting to be solved.

By the time we got to school that morning, the buzz had filtered back to Chris and me that the new girl's name was Claire. I'd never known a real person with that name before. Only people in radio love songs and on TV were called Claire. To my inexperienced ears, her name sounded mature and exotic, mysterious and worldly. But that name was all anyone knew about her.

I admired Claire from a distance that day as she made friends with other girls. No boy could talk to a new girl, of course, and no new girl could talk to a boy for weeks--that would violate a strict rule in our unspoken awkward teenagers' code of behavior. But at one point in the middle of history class, Claire turned in her seat, saw me looking her way, and smiled. I nearly fell out of my chair but managed to smile back before looking away. For the rest of the day, I confined my admiration to corner-of-the-eye glances for fear she might see me watching her again.

Over dinner that night, Grandma asked me, "Did you see your cousin in school today?" Grandma was Dad's mother, nearly ninety, and the family matriarch. We were lucky to live in the house she had owned for more than sixty years. Her place atop the extended family meant we had a steady stream of visitors seeking her counsel and wisdom.

"Which cousin?" I asked, assuming she meant one of the dozen or so garden-variety cousins scattered through the school like weeds among the cornstalks.

"She just started school today," Grandma answered as she exchanged a look with Dad that I didn't understand. "Claire Schettler."

My mouth dropped to the floor. The most beautiful girl in the world was my cousin--third cousin to be exact--closer to being a sister than a stranger.

As I lay in bed that night, I realized that our family tie was a mixed blessing. Even for us country folks, the incest taboo included cousins. So I would never marry Claire or be her boyfriend--but so what? The chances of that happy happening weren't good even if we weren't related. In a way, knowing she was off-limits romantically let me think of her as a complete person, not only an object of my teenage desires. Most important, because we were family, I had a reason to march right up to her in school and say hello.

On the bus the following morning, I told Chris that I planned to talk to Claire at some point during the school day. He was skeptical, knowing my shyness with girls. So I bet him five dollars (money I didn't have) that I would talk with her before the bus took us home that afternoon. He took the bet instantly. Of course, I didn't tell him anything about discovering that Claire was my cousin.

When she saw me on the bus that morning, she smiled and waved before sitting with some new girlfriends near the front. Someone at her home must have asked her if she'd met any cousins in school. Chris stared at me and swore quietly. I calmly looked out the window as if beautiful new classmates waved at me every day.

Inside, I was blooming.

As lunch was winding to a close, I said to Chris, "Well, here goes." I walked from my boys-only table across the cafeteria to the girls-only table where Claire was finishing her lunch. The other girls glared at me, but Claire turned and beamed.

"Hi John!" she said with the warmest smile I'd ever seen. She patted the empty seat beside her, and I sat down. "My daddy told me we're cousins. I'm so happy to have family here." When the girls at the table realized I wasn't putting the "moves" on the new girl, they stopped throwing me the stink eye.

Chris and my other friends stared at me from their table, amazed that I had the guts to talk to the beautiful new girl. As I pointed out my sisters and other cousins to her, Claire and I talked like we were old friends. I wasn't used to a girl who enjoyed my company and didn't care what other kids would think. The way she leaned towards me, touched my arm, and laughed at my comments made the rest of the cafeteria fade away.

We walked back to class together with lots of eyes staring at us. We made quite a ripple through the hallways, even after people learned that we were related. I enjoyed knowing that my classmates saw me as someone other than the goofy farm kid who got good grades.

Chris approached me later and held out a five dollar bill. He hadn't heard yet that Claire and I were cousins. I didn't often see that much money, but I told him that I couldn't take it. When I told him why, he said, "Your cousin? You lucky dog." He was right. I was lucky to have such an easy way to get to know Claire.

Claire and I became good friends during the final month of the school year. She was a deep thinker, so we talked about life and death, war and heartache, family and God. She was the first person I knew who loved figure skating and had even competed at her previous school.

"They make it look so easy on television," she told me the last day of school as we waited outside for our bus. "But it's as hard as any other sport. I trained for three hours every day, but there's no rink around here. I really miss it."

"That's as much as we practice basketball," I said, impressed that she would work as hard at her passion as I did at mine.

"I wish we'd moved here earlier so I could've seen you play," she said. "I bet you're good."

I laughed. "Well, I played junior varsity most of the year. I hardly ever got into the varsity games because I don't score much."

"But basketball is more than just scoring," she said. "I heard you defend and rebound really well."

I was amazed at her interest in my basketball career. My own sisters hardly noticed that I played, never mind that I could rebound.

"What's your favorite part of skating?" I asked her.

She looked off into the distance at the hills rising above our school building. "I feel so free when I'm on the ice. It's like I've got nothing holding me back, no one pulling me down, no past."

Her eyes grew watery and unfocused for a moment, and she gazed over my shoulder as if looking into a past that she couldn't share--but then she roused herself and laughed.

"Let's make a pact," she said. "I'll teach you to skate if you promise to wave to me from the court before every basketball game."

"I promise," I said, and held my hand out for her to shake. Instead she gave me a hug that drew a few stares from the kids around us.

A week into summer vacation, Claire and her parents came to our farm to visit Grandma. Claire and I sat on the porch swing for a while, then walked out to the garden where I picked sweet corn for her. She told me that she'd really like me to visit her house. Her parents were going away that weekend, and she wanted my company. She had pictures of herself ice skating to show me.

That Saturday morning, I set out on my bike for Claire's house. She lived beyond Cove Road, miles from the pavement, far up on the hillside along a deeply rutted dirt path that I couldn't imagine traversing in a car. Several times, I got off my bike and pushed it, afraid that I would fall off, flatten a tire, or break a wheel. When I finally reached her house, I thought I had made a mistake.

I'd heard the term "tarpaper shack" before, and I'd seen run-down houses plenty of times throughout our valley and up in the hills. But the building before me was literally made of tarpaper. The windows were empty holes covered with blankets. When I finally realized this was the right house, I knocked on the door. It rattled so much that I worried I might knock it off its hinges. When Claire opened the door, she had to lift and drag it inside to keep it from scraping against the dirt floor.

My parents were far from rich. In fact, I learned in college that we lived below the official poverty level for much of my childhood. But we had real floors, real windows, electricity, furniture, a television, and indoor plumbing.

Claire's family didn't.

She invited me in to sit down on a couch made of wooden crates padded with rugs. The house was one large room. Sheets had been hung to create separate living spaces. Claire must have seen the look in my eyes although I did everything I could to hide it. Before I knew what was happening, she rushed into my arms, crying and begging me not to tell any of her new friends about the way she lived.

Through her sobs, Claire told me how her father lost his job at a steel mill in Pittsburgh and her mother developed cancer. Her mother's health had eventually returned, but the family was deeply in debt from the medical bills. The bank had foreclosed on their home, their possessions were taken and sold, and they fled to the hills to escape creditors.

For a family like theirs, being in debt was as bad as being a criminal. Rather than face the humiliation of bankruptcy or accept charity, they had gone "underground" in these isolated hills. The owner of the shack home was another distant cousin who was letting them live rent-free and keeping their presence hidden from outsiders. Claire had begged her parents to let her finish the year at our school. She originally registered by promising to have her records sent from her old school. Those records would never arrive. Claire's parents were in another state that weekend, scouting out better job prospects and trying to convince another family of cousins to take them into their home.

We visited for a long time that day, talking about her situation for a while, and then purposely avoiding the subject. We talked about friends at school, the beauty of the woods, our hopes for the future, and which older boys had tried to get Claire to go to the prom with them. None had succeeded.

I asked if her parents would consider moving in with our family, but I knew the answer before I posed the question. "Your parents have enough to worry about," she said. "We could never impose like that." She quickly changed the subject by showing me her album of figure skating photos. I could have spent hours with these photos. In one of them, Claire was a goddess on the ice with one long leg lifted behind her, her arms extended like wings, her gaze fixed somewhere in the distance--more graceful and intense than I could have imagined. After a moment, She gently pulled the album from my hands.

I left as night was falling. Claire promised to write if her family moved away. This time I cried too, and we held each other for a long time. I'd only known her for a month, but I felt closer to her than I'd ever been to anyone but my parents. I walked my bike down the dirt road in near darkness, sad but thankful I'd been so close to such a wonderful person.

That was the last I heard from her. The following weekend I biked back to her house and found it deserted. Grandma had no idea where they went after they left our valley, and if my near-omniscient grandmother didn't know, no one would. The following school year, a few people asked me about Claire, but her memory faded as everyone moved on with their lives.

I never forgot Claire, even after twenty-five years. Surely her house has collapsed by now, the walls and roof rotted into the dirt floor. But each spring I send a wish for happiness to my beautiful cousin--the goddess who once lived in a tarpaper shack.

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I mostly enjoyed the parts of four summers that I spent at New Life Bible Camp during my teenage years. We played lots of sports, sang lots of songs--and a few girls thought I was cute and smart and funny. But the camp's religious philosophy taught that we should think of God first, others second, and ourselves last. I've always had an altruistic nature, but the camp drilled into me the idea that doing anything for myself was sinful because that selfish behavior didn't serve God or my fellow human beings. More than twenty years later, I'm still trying to shake that idea and take care of myself.

The camp also taught some monumentally screwed-up ideas. I remember a fellow camper asking about Jews and little babies who had never heard of Jesus.

"Do they all go to hell?" she asked.

"Well," the counselor replied, "Jesus does take care of little babies, but Jews are definitely going to hell, and so are Arabs, Chinese, Black Africans, Indians--the ones from India and on the reservation--unless, of course, they accept Jesus into their hearts, in which case they can turn from their sinful ways and be washed in the blood of the lamb."

This counselor was some college guy only a few years older than I was. His summer job was sending about three-fourths of the world's population to hell. Each time I heard, "blood of the lamb," I pictured Jesus with gray skin, a long black cape, and vampire teeth--ready to leap off the cross and chomp someone in the neck. That's not how I wanted to think of the Jesus I knew from reading the New Testament, and I fretted that I would go to hell for having such a sinful Jesus-as-vampire vision.

Another counselor bragged about her years as a hard-drug addict who fornicated with strangers and stole from her parents. Jesus had saved her from that life. After listening to her, I felt a little inadequate and defensive that my life was so ordinary. Her point seemed to be that any conversion from "mostly normal" to "saved" wasn't as important as one from "horrible" to "saved." I thought she had simply traded one addiction for another--heroin for Jesus, her own personal hell for the right to condemn others to hell.

One day at lunch, the head counselor threatened to ship one boy home for "taking the Lord's name in vain." The boy had mumbled, "Gosh darn it" because his hot dog was cold. The head counselor got so worked up that he spilled his lemonade onto my tray. He apologized, and I said, "You are forgiven" in a failed attempt to lighten the moment with a little humor. He turned on me and snapped, "I don't need your forgiveness because I've already been forgiven by Jesus."

A definite anti-woman thread ran through much of the preaching at New Life Bible Camp. Most of the female counselors had very minor roles, in keeping with the Apostle Paul's admonition that women be quiet in church. The head counselor even told us that a woman could only truly serve God by getting married, obeying her husband, and bearing children. A woman on her own was so unnatural, he told us, that single women got pet dogs not for companionship or protection but for sex because they didn't have men in their lives. I didn't know the word yet, but I still recognized misogyny when I heard it.

The camp even had its own brainwashing theme song, "New Life in Christ," which I can still remember:

New life in Christ, abundant and free, What glories shine, what joys are mine, What wondrous blessings I see.

My past with its sin, the searching and strife, Forever gone, there's a bright new dawn, For it's new life in Christ.

Before New Life Bible Camp, my sisters and I had gone to Camp Sequanota, an hour's drive away, for a week each summer. I enjoyed Sequanota much better than New Life, but my parents liked the idea of us being only a couple miles down the road. Sequanota was a church camp, but religion was more of an interesting background theme rather than the myopic focus that hung like a bad smell at New Life. And I enjoyed as much sports and fun and girls at Sequanota.

The worst thing that ever happened at Camp Sequanota was that I once lost my glasses. For three days, I staggered around with limited vision but still had a great time hiking and swimming and playing a ball game called "foursquare" that no one at home knew how to play. Still, my parents would be very upset if they had to buy a new pair of expensive glasses simply because I misplaced them. Just when I started scripting a lie about an epidemic of stolen glasses, another camper found them on the soap dish in the shower. I guess that says something about our hygiene habits that summer. We were having so much fun that we didn't wash for three days. In fact, our funk probably made those three days even more fun than if we'd been clean.

New Life Bible Camp, of course, had regimented bathing times each night before its next attempt to get us all "washed in the blood of the lamb." The camp motto could have been "Cleanliness is next to Godliness is next to Fascism."

Camp Sequanota even had a better song than New Life Bible Camp: "They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love," by Peter Scholtes. With our counselors' blessings, we revised the original so that it focused more on love and less on God. Here are the parts that I remember best:

We will walk with each other, we will walk hand in hand. We will walk with each other, we will walk hand in hand. And together we'll spread the news that love is in the land. And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, Yes they'll know we are Christians by our love.

We will work with each other, we will work side by side. We will work with each other, we will work side by side. And we'll guard each ones dignity and save each ones pride. And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, Yes they'll know we are Christians by our love.

We are one in our spirit, we are one in our love. We are one in our spirit, we are one in our love. And we pray that all unity will one day be restored. And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, Yes they'll know we are Christians by our love.

You could substitute "Christian" with "Buddhist," "Muslim," "Jew," "Hindu," or even "American" and "Iraqi"--and this would still be a great song. Or insert "human" or even "sentient" if you want to get technical, and this could be a great theme song for the whole planet or even the universe. We'll be known by our love--what a perfect theme to live by. My teenage spiritual quest was always much more about love than getting saved or condemning anyone else to hell. In fact, it still is.

When I went to college, I joined a few Christian organizations, but I didn't last long. Early in my sophomore year, I mentioned that I enjoyed studying Islam and Hindu beliefs in my religion classes because they helped to put my own faith in perspective. That statement drew lots of blank stares from the Christian group members. A week later, I discovered that my comment landed my name on a list of "back-sliders" who needed to be prayed for lest they tempt the fires of hell. The prayer list included President Carter, among others--pretty good company. I went to very few meetings after that, and when Dad died halfway through my junior year, I stopped going altogether.

I just didn't see the point any longer.

New Life Bible Camp was also the scene of the most traumatic medical crisis of my young life. A week before camp when I was fifteen, I took a walk in the woods. At one point during the walk, I unzipped my fly and took a pee. I didn't know it at the time, but I must have touched some poison ivy not long before relieving myself.

The next morning, I woke with my hands, arms, and lower legs covered with the familiar rash and blisters of an allergic reaction. I'd had bad cases of poison ivy many times before, so I knew I faced two weeks of itching, creams, sprays, and weeping blisters all over me. When I went to the bathroom that morning, however, I encountered the shock of my life.

I stood over the toilet and lowered my pajama bottoms. When my penis popped into view, I nearly fainted. It was swollen to twice its usual size--and not in the good way. The shaft felt lumpy with blisters, and the end was puffy and inflamed. It looked like the hammerhead shark in our biology textbook. As I stared with horror, the thing suddenly began to itch. Then, as I peed, I experienced a burning sensation like nothing I had ever felt before (or since). I nearly lost my balance and peed all over the floor.

That morning at breakfast, Mom saw the rash on my hands and gave me a tube of lotion to ease the itch.

"Mom," I said haltingly, "I think this case of poison ivy is worse than usual."

"Is it farther up your arms and legs?" Mom asked.

"Sort of," I replied. "I got it on my . . . umm . . . thing."

"What thing?" Mom asked.

"You know," I replied without meeting her eyes, "my thing."

"Oh, your thing," Mom said, finally getting the point. "Well, how did you do that? Were you rolling around naked in the woods or something?"

"No!" I protested. I had done my reading on poison ivy. I knew the rash-inducing particles could be transferred from one part of the body to another. "I got it on my hands, and then . . ."

"Were you playing with yourself?" Mom asked.

"No!" I responded, honest for once about this subject. "I took a pee in the woods yesterday. It must have happened then."

Whatever doubt Mom had about my explanation, she kept it to herself. "Well," she sighed, "let's call the doctor."

I got a shot in the butt that day from a very cute young nurse with a very large needle. As I lowered my pants for the shot, I kept my little hammerhead concealed. For some reason, I thought that the poor nurse might faint at the sight of such a monstrosity. It didn't occur to me that she must have already seen plenty of penis problems in her brief career. Like most teenagers with embarrassing conditions, I assumed no one else in the world ever had such a problem.

A few days later, I went to New Life Bible Camp for a week. The shot had cleared up the rashes on my arms and legs, but, unfortunately, my smallest extremity was more stubborn. For the entire week of camp, I fidgeted uncomfortably and spent lots of time in the restroom scratching where I shouldn't have been scratching. My only relief came during swim time when I lounged in the shallow end of the pool, basking in the soothing cool water and chatting with cute girl campers who had no idea the terrible secret lurking just beneath my swimming trunks.

I couldn't tell any of the camp counselors about my problem because they certainly would have told me God was punishing me for lust. But if God really punished teenagers for that, then there must have been many more rashes under many more swimming suits than my own. In fact, considering what I saw some of the counselors doing that summer, they probably had rashes all over their bodies.

By comparison, my little hammerhead wasn't so bad.

Grandma was a brilliant woman, but she sometimes had trouble remembering what happened an hour before. She could, however, tell stories with vivid detail about events that took place before our old farmhouse had indoor plumbing. Her favorite subject was "Old Billy Hessong," a friend of the family long ago when Grandma was a young wife and mother. He rented the family log cabin and helped my grandfather take in crops, tend the farm animals, and cut trees for lumber and firewood.

Throughout my childhood, I heard so many of Grandma's stories about Old Billy Hessong that I became convinced I knew him. He died a decade before my birth, but I felt in my little-boy imagination that I had been by his side for dozens of adventures.

The Old Billy Hessong in her stories was both larger than life and completely human. He was a war hero many times over, a great prankster and master storyteller, a crafty woodsman who could live off berries and shrubs for as long as he liked, and a legendary hunter who bagged more deer and bear than anyone in local history. Grandma's tales also revealed a man with human flaws. Once he disappeared for a year and didn't tell anyone where he went, leaving one day without a word, then returning as if he'd never been gone. She even once told us that he slipped tiny slivers of lead into the ginseng roots that he sold to city slickers--more lead, more weight, more money.

As a child, I thought Grandma was the oldest person in the world. She had lived on our farm for more years than I could comprehend and had been a widow longer than my own parents had been married. Her stories seemed to be from another age of the earth, and I pictured them in the grainy black and white of distant memory. I once asked Grandma if she knew Lincoln, a question that did not go over well with her. Her grumpiness was legendary, and my sisters and I knew not to cross her. She scoffed at our first experiences with girlfriends and boyfriends, calling our early romances "silliness." She refused to carry a cane but walked around our farm leaning on a garden hoe, occasionally chopping at the ground to prove to anyone who might be watching that she could still work as hard as she always had.

She also had a soft side, which, unfortunately, her grandchildren didn't really appreciate. She often walked through the door connecting our kitchen to hers and ran her fingers through our hair while we ate our breakfast. We flinched at her affection and wolfed down our cereal before running to catch the school bus that wasn't even due for half an hour. She made us pick bushels of vegetables for any visiting relative--even though they had overflowing gardens of their own at home. With the railing in one hand and her garden hoe in the other, she climbed to the tub in our upstairs bathroom to take a bath every week. When she kissed us each night before she went to bed, and we called out, "Goodnight Grandma, see you in the morning," she walked away murmuring, "Oh, if I live that long. It's a horrible thing when a body gets old . . ." her voice trailing off as she shuffled away to her bedroom.

One night while sitting at the kitchen table, she told me the story of how Old Billy Hessong had a stroke and spent the last twenty years of his life unable to walk or talk, confined to my little upstairs bedroom--in the very same bed where I slept each night.

Of course, Grandma told me this particular story right before my bedtime when I was nine years old, an age where the borders between fantasy and reality are blurred, to say the least. As I lay awake in bed that night, I was unsure of only one thing: Could the ghost of Old Billy Hessong read my thoughts? That his ghost existed, I was certain. That his ghost was there in my bedroom, I was certain. That his ghost could see and hear me, I was certain. That his ghost had been present in my room every night of my life up to that point, I was all too certain.

Hello ghost of Old Billy Hessong, I thought in my terrified brain that night as I stared at the ceiling, taking care not to look around the room for fear of seeing his ghost--or to close my eyes, giving his ghost the opportunity for a sneak attack. I've heard lots of stories about you from Grandma, Mr. Ghost, and I feel like I know you. I'm very sorry you had a stroke and had to stay shut up in my room in this bed for twenty years until you died. I wish you could have gone outside to hunt bear and collect ginseng roots. I like you very much ghost of Old Billy Hessong. I hope you like me too. I'll try not to close my eyes and fall asleep tonight, but if I do, please, sir, please don't kill me.

In case his ghost couldn't read my thoughts, I repeated the whole speech in a strangled whisper, loud enough for any ghost to detect, but soft enough for my sisters, parents, and grandmother asleep in various rooms of the house not to hear.

Eventually, I did drift off to sleep that night, and, to my amazement, the ghost of Old Billy Hessong didn't kill me. I survived the next night as well, and the night after that, and every night that I slept in that little bed in that little room until I packed up and went to college at age eighteen. Over the years, I came to a truce with the ghost of Old Billy Hessong. In exchange for him not killing me in my sleep, I would occasionally mull over his stories, reflecting on his life and keeping him alive in my memory and my dreams. Not long after I left home, my twin sister June (who apparently either never heard Billy's story or didn't believe in ghosts) dropped out of college and took over my room, replacing Billy's stroke-bed with her own.

As I have grown into adulthood and early middle age, the stories of Old Billy Hessong have faded. I no longer feel the same sense of having known him that I felt as a child. When I think about him now, I mostly think about how childhood imaginations can be strange and amazing things. But Old Billy Hessong's story has never completely left my thoughts, and recently I've begun to think of him and Grandma in a new way. I've realized that no one takes a casual friend into her home for twenty years. Such an act requires an immense commitment of time and resources, to say nothing of the psychological dedication of giving your life over to the long-term care of another human being. He must have had some family to care for him after his stroke. There must have been a hospital or institution that could have taken him in. But instead, Grandma, a young, recently widowed woman with a house full of kids, brought this bed-ridden man into her home.

I needed more than thirty years to understand something that I couldn't at age nine. Only one kind of person would take in someone and provide twenty years of care. After decades of Grandma's Old Billy Hessong stories bouncing around the edges of my consciousness, I've finally realized that my prim, prudish grandmother and Old Billy Hessong must have been lovers.

No one in my family, least of all Grandma herself, would have mentioned their relationship. My family's gossip was one of two types: rumors about people outside our family that could possibly be true, or rumors about people within the family that were extremely unlikely. Something that might be true about someone in the family simply wasn't proper gossip material. The fact that Grandma's relationship with Billy was never mentioned around our house serves only to give it more credence. The whole situation was probably something that all of the adults knew about but simply did not discuss when they gathered around the Thanksgiving dinner table while I sat eavesdropping on the grown-ups from the kids' table in Grandma's adjoining kitchen.

Now that I'm an adult too, the whole situation makes me see Grandma in a different light. She's no longer just the grumpy family matriarch holding court at mid-summer family reunions--"Grandma Sheirer" as she was known to nearly everyone in the area. I now also see her as "Annie," a young woman who had fallen in love, married, bore five children, outlived three of them, became a widow at the tragically early age of forty-two, built bombs and bullets in a World War I munitions factory, founded her own one-room schoolhouse, discovered love again, and then lived a different tragedy when her new love soon fell victim to a debilitating long-term illness.

Not long after Dad died, Mom told me the story of moving into our home when she married Dad after her first husband was killed. Dad brought her and her toddler son to live in his childhood home down the hall from my bedroom where Old Billy Hessong lay slowly dying. For the first few months, Grandma wouldn't even speak to Mom, who assumed it was because, in those days, a young man marrying a widow with a child was a minor scandal. Now I know the real reason Grandma was cold to her. Mom got a second chance at a full life and true love after her first husband died--Grandma's second chance turned into a lifetime as noble widow and two decades as nursemaid to a broken man. Grandma and Mom only became real friends after Dad died and Grandma saw her as an equal in widowhood.

If I could go back to my childhood knowing what I know now, I would be less inclined to pull away from Grandma's touch and sneak to the other room when she repeated her stories for the fifth time. I would try to connect with her and her mysterious past, to let her know that I knew about her pain and that I knew she was so much more than the shriveled old woman she had become late in life. I would have let her know that she could tell me all about it, that I would keep my mouth shut. I'd have let her know that I loved her more for the secret we could have shared.

When Grandma was in her early nineties, she broke her hip--a death sentence at her age. She had been descending the stairs after her weekly bath. Near the bottom, she lost her grip on the railing and tumbled only a few feet, but that was enough. The doctors did what they could, but Grandma needed full-time care, much more than Mom could provide as she approached age seventy. So Grandma spent the last year of her life in the "rest home" operated by one of our distant cousins. Her mind and memory, so sharp for so long, quickly failed during that painful, final year, her stories replaced by crying and begging to go home.

Shortly before her death, I went to see her. By then I was nearly thirty, a full-grown man. When I told my confused Grandma who I was, she had trouble believing I wasn't the little nine-year-old boy who listened to so many of her stories. She seemed upset by her confusion, going from tears to slurred curses and back again in her frustration and pain as she writhed atop the bed. I rose to leave so that she could calm down and rest, but just for a moment her eyes cleared, and she was herself again.

"Billy," she said in a strong voice, grabbing my hands. "It's so good to see you again, Billy. Oh, I love you, Billy."

I assumed she thought I was my father, her son William, Jr., dead for nearly a decade then, or her own husband William, Sr., gone for more than fifty years. We held hands, gazing into each other's eyes.

After a moment, I said, "I'm glad to see you, Annie. I love you too." Then she sighed and lay back on her pillows and drifted off to sleep.

A month later, she died. I'm still not sure which Billy she saw that day. It's most comforting to think she had one last chance to say good-bye to a young and healthy "Old Billy Hessong."

His voice was a bad combination of loud and nasal, adding another level of irritation as he taunted me for a third time: "Whatsa matter, farm boy? Are ya chicken?" Remembering that voice still makes me cringe twenty-five years later.

My sister Pam's boyfriend Mark was twenty, two years older than she and four years older than I. He was a big, obnoxious city jerk who liked to tease me for a variety of reasons: because I was younger, because I did well in school, because I spent my summer vacation helping Dad tend crops and cut firewood for winter. Of course, I would learn a few years later in my first college psychology class that he teased me primarily because he didn't like himself very much, but I didn't have that perspective at age sixteen. Instead of sympathy for his emotional weakness, I mostly felt disgusted with him.

Mark had spent a good portion of the evening proving his manhood by beating Pam arm wrestling several times--his idea of the perfect date. He toyed with her each time, pretending to be working hard as she pushed with her tomboy strength. Then he pounded her arm down on the coffee table and leaped to his feet in celebration, pumping his fist in the air and prancing around the living room, singing a bad rendition of Queen's, "We Are the Champions." Pam would too quickly forget her pride and the sting of defeat and tell him how strong he was and how he was her hero--an early example of the kind of mistake I would eventually see too many strong women make with weak men.

So Mark and I took up positions on either side of the little wooden coffee table and planted our elbows. He gave me his best evil-eye and assured me that I was "goin' down, sissy-boy" as he wrapped his fat hand around my bony one in the macho soul-brother handshake of arm wrestling.

We were both close to six feet tall, although he weighed more than two hundred pounds (at least fifty more than I did in those long-ago teenage years), but I noticed his soft and doughy middle. He had quickly given up the one time he condescended to help Dad and me load firewood into the old pick-up, claiming a football injury as he limped back inside the house. Dad and I just smiled and kept working. In contrast to Mark, I was thin but strong from years of outdoor work alongside Dad.

Mark pulled away from my hand three times to make adjustments, claiming that he didn't want me to cheat with an illegal grip. Pam was clearly rooting for him, but the fan support evened out when Dad walked into the room and saw what was going on. One corner of his mouth turned up slightly, and he gave me a wink. I didn't need a word from him to know that he wanted me to kick Mark's ass from one end of the living room to the other.

Finally satisfied with his grip, Mark counted, "one-two-three-go," jamming "three" and "go" together to try and catch me off guard. His pale arm vibrated with more strength than I'd given him credit for. My arm quickly became a knot of muscle, matching his every push with equal force. Realizing that this wouldn't be the easy victory he anticipated, he lifted his elbow, a clear foul, and nearly put me down. With the same strength that could throw a wet bale of hay into the barn loft, I recovered and bent his arm back an inch per second, gradually pushing him toward defeat. With his arm nearing the table, he pulled away and jumped up, claiming a cramp and rubbing his arm with a hurt look on his face.

Dad and I exchanged "what-a-jerk" looks as Mark stalked out of the room, Pam following closely behind. "Good job," Dad said. I thanked him and was about to say something bad about Mark when Dad did a curious thing. He got out of his chair and knelt down on the opposite side of the coffee table. "Wanna try me?" he asked as he put his thick arm on the table. "Okay," I replied automatically, used to saying yes to any request from Dad.

Dad once told me while we rested in the middle of some outdoor project how glad he was that I worked with him on the farm because my older brothers hadn't always helped. My mouth fell open because I hadn't known I had a choice--although I would have chosen to join him anyway. It wouldn't have occurred to me to refuse to go out and repair a fence with him or pick a dozen ears of corn for dinner. Likewise, it never crossed my mind that I could refuse to arm wrestle with him, so I locked my hand into his.

I thought Dad would beat me without much trouble. All my life, I had been a bit ashamed of not being more like him. He was only five feet, seven inches tall but very strong, a man with well-defined pectorals long before tax accountants and soccer-moms went to the gym five times a week. His arms seemed as big around as my legs, his neck as thick as my chest. He played semi-professional baseball and was a star on his high school football team, playing a mythic position called "scat-back," where he could either overpower or outrun any opponent. In contrast, I was a gangly kid, with a body built for basketball but a temperament for chess. Dad came to every home game to see me rebound and play defense, and he didn't seem disappointed that I scored fewer points than most of the other sons.

Because Dad was so strong and vital and alive, I could easily forget that only five years earlier he had suffered a near-fatal heart attack. One winter afternoon during fifth-grade math class, I heard the school principal summon my sisters and me over the loud speaker. Mom picked us up and drove us to the hospital where Dad had been taken that morning shortly after we left for school. We were assured that he would be okay, but I was shocked to see his usually wind-burned bronze skin so pale next to the hospital-issue sky-blue pajamas and starched white bed sheets.

A few weeks after that, Dad came home. But he couldn't go back to his job as a construction steamfitter or to work around our farm. In fact, we put a hospital bed in the living room because he wasn't even allowed to climb the stairs to the bedroom where he had suffered his heart attack. For six weeks, Dad slept in our living room, watching television, reading the paper, and mostly being miserable because he couldn't get outside and work. Eventually, the color returned to his face, and he began venturing to the porch and up the stairs. Soon he started sleeping in his own bed again, and a cousin came and hauled the living room bed back to the hospital.

Dad never returned to his real job, but he always found plenty to keep him (and me) busy on our farm. We got by on his veteran's benefits and disability from the union, and Mom eventually got a job as a clerk in the gift shop of an authentic recreated pioneer village. Mom wore what we called "granny dresses" to work three days a week while Dad focused most of his attention on cutting wood to feed our furnace now that coal was a bit beyond our means. Tending a few cows, chickens, and a garden always kept us well stocked for food, and Dad soon grew strong again, his muscles thickening over the course of a few years.

To my surprise, Dad didn't force my arm down right away. In fact, I held my own very well. At first, I just tried to avoid having my hand slammed down instantly, but soon I realized that I had a chance to win. Pushing with all my might, I thought my nose might start to bleed from the intense pressure. When I looked at Dad, I saw him straining too. His eyes bulged in a way that I had never seen before, and sweat formed on his upper lip. When I looked at his arm, the arm I had so long admired and wished that mine resembled more, it looked wrinkled and creased near the crook of his elbow. The muscle didn't leap out as I had seen it do so many times while he worked his chainsaw. His hands, I noticed for the first time, had age spots.

At that point, I once again saw Dad in the hospital that day five years earlier, pale under the harsh lights, looking small and frail to my eyes for the first time. Suddenly it dawned on me that Dad might not be the strong man he had been, that the strain of arm wrestling might be too much for him--even just arm wrestling his skinny, semi-sissy, teenage son. I realized that I might be hurting him, making his damaged heart work too hard--maybe even killing him.

I faced a choice. I could let myself weaken a fraction so that he could win quickly. Such a tactic might be easy because we were so evenly matched despite his heart condition--my growing youthful power and his mature adult strength. If I eased up a little but kept the strain showing on my face, he probably wouldn't even know that I was faking it. Or I could bear down with all my might and try to put him down as fast as I could. I wasn't sure that I had the strength to carry out this plan, but I knew I could give it a try.

Something important hinged on my decision as I moved toward my manhood and Dad faced the decline of his. Should I let him win so that he could keep his pride, or should I try to beat him and see if his pride in me would overcome his own disappointment?

Five years after that pivotal arm wrestling match, Mom called me at the tiny college apartment I shared with three other guys. "Oh Johnny, Johnny, Johnny," she sobbed over and over until my aunt took the phone from her to tell me that my father had died that afternoon while plowing snow outside our home, this heart attack so swift and severe that he died before he could even shut off the truck or reach for his medicine. Everyone was relieved that he was taken without pain while doing work he enjoyed. At the funeral home, when someone remarked how natural he looked in his casket, I said that he had never looked so dead before. Then I quietly went to a rest room and cried for half an hour.

When I think back on that evening of those two very different arm wrestling matches so long ago, I'm still not sure what to make of my decision to pin my father's arm to the table. It had taken all of my strength. I can still see the moment of surprise as he watched his arm being bent down by the son he had carried home from the hospital. Did the years between my infancy and that evening seem to him as compressed and impossibly brief as the years between that evening and today, more than two decades later, seem to me? Did he think to himself, Good lord, this boy is stronger than I am. When the hell did this happen? Why didn't I notice? When his expression quickly turned to pride, did he really feel it, or was he using it to mask his own disappointment in himself at that moment? Or did he think, I probably won't live much longer if my own son can beat me arm wrestling?

I am now not far from my father's age when he had his first heart attack. I tell myself that I don't have his risk factors. My last cigarette was one I swiped from my father's pack a few years before I arm wrestled with him. I'm the first man in my family line to have a job where I go to an office rather than a work site. I get my exercise on a stationary bike and a pec-deck. I drink bottled water and eat ground turkey instead of my father's beer and steak.

Every now and then, when I can't sleep at night, I ask myself why I didn't let my father beat me at arm wrestling. I've told myself for years that he would have known if I had faked it and would have lost respect for me because he would have believed that I had lost respect for him. But doubt comes creeping. I beat my sister's jerk boyfriend because I wanted him to know that I was stronger, more important, more valuable, a better person than he was. I've always been called laid back and low key, just like my father--but at that moment I burned to let Mark know that he wasn't my equal.

When I sit in my office or teach my classes or ride my stationary bike and live my civilized life, can I allow myself the thought that I beat my father simply because I wanted him to know that I could?

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