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For the year and a half before he died, my father was bedridden. I visited him often, both to cheer him up and because during that period we had most of the really good conversations that we ever had. He had always been a remote figure, completely wrapped up in making a success of his business, working eighty hours or more each week. Now his confinement opened him up and made him conversational, and I took pleasure in getting to know the man in whose house I had been raised.

Several conversations immediately come to mind, but one feature they all shared for me was a profound period of silence: the silence of knowing that your argument has just caused a friend's perspective to shift, and you can see the wheels turning in his eyes as the parameters re-align; the brittle silence across a scarred kitchen table as you realize that your marriage was just murdered; the glowing silence between two people who can commune their contentment without words.

I was finishing out the last few months of a two-year research fellowship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The research had been extremely promising, but NIST didn’t come through on its commitments to support my work, so I wasn’t able to purchase essential equipment and had to cobble together a kludge that was ultimately inadequate. I went to a job interview at the Naval Research Laboratory, hoping for a more supportive environment. I craved academic freedom more than anything. I spent a few hours talking to the other researchers and sizing up the facilities. At the end of my visit, the head guy sat down with me and gave me a short pitch for the job. “You’ll never get rich working here.

 When I’ve been going for days on end with little sleep and too much work.  When I’ve been getting yelled at by an asshole resident who wants to blame a medical student for not making them look good.  And when I feel I don’t have nearly enough time to study all the mountains of material I need to wade through, I sometimes wonder how I got here.

 When I was three years old I remember laying on my red spread in my room I shared with my two other brothers.  For whatever reason I said to myself in my head "I am three".  I thought to myself that I will always remember this moment.  I can't recall anything special happening before of after the incident that would make it significant.  I just remember being alone in my room and saying to myself..."I am three".

On that note, "I am fourty three!"

My friend Eric and I were walking down the middle of a deserted two-lane road in the middle of nowhere, Georgia at three a.m. I was a college student; he was in high school. Our car had broken down, and there were no cell phones back then. So we walked, hoping to find a phone to call AAA. To amuse himself Eric was tossing firecrackers in the road.

After about a half hour of walking, we heard dogs barking. Not the yip-yip of little chihuahuas, but low, reverberating doberman-size barks and angry growling. “I sure hope there’s a fence between them and us,” I said. Suddenly I could see in the light of a street light ahead the silhouettes of several large dogs coming towards us at a full run. There was no fence.

I was ten years old, playing little league baseball. Early in the season I was in a league in which I was near the top of the age bracket, and thus one of the biggest, strongest, and best players. But someone figured out my birthday was just over the cutoff, so I got moved suddenly to the next higher age bracket, which made me one to two years younger than most other players. The coach and other players didn’t know me and I seemed small and thin, so I was left on the bench nearly all the time, never even getting a chance to find out how well I could play or learn anything.

When I was 7 or 8 years old I used to be very fidgety and could not sit still. Nor did I ever want to go to the bathroom when I was having fun. I played t-ball at the time and I was placed in the outfield because I had a good arm. Whenever I had to go to the bathroom, I'd cross my legs, lean back and forth, turn around, jump up and down, grabbing and holding my penis, all sorts of gyrations. My Dad called it the "Doo-Doo Dance".

I think the irreconcilable difference lies at some very basic assumptions each group makes about life and how people behave as members of society, and the two groups profoundly mistrust one another's underlying assumptions. Conservatives tend to believe in the primacy of the individual, and that the interests of the group will work to the detrement of individual liberty and prosperity. Liberals tend to believe in the primacy of group membership, and that the integrity of society must be protected against unscrupulous individuals. (Soviet-era Communism expands this dynamic of group integrity into group-on-group class warfare, but that has not been the typical experience in the US.)

There was one thing that I was 100% certain that I would never, ever do with my life, even on the brink of starvation: teach. The daughter of a gifted and dedicated college teacher, I spent years watching my mother make a deeper and deeper indentation into the couch. I heard her describe weekends in terms of how many grocery bags of papers she had graded, saw her single-handedly keep the Bic company in the black by purchasing red ink. By the time I knew the alphabet, I was put to work grading multiple-choice tests, and had memorized the curricula for most of her classes before I was ten. Each semester, our family "adopted" a few hundred teen-agers who weren't prepared to go to college any further away from home ("only child," my ***).

What would I be when I grew up?  A mommy, a teacher, a nurse.  Yes.  Any of those would be fine.  Welllll, no.  As life moved on, I KNEW I did NOT want to be a teacher.  After all, my mom was a teacher and we were not at all alike.  I'd like to be a farmer or maybe a cow doctor - hmm - not girl things! 

I enrolled as a Home Ec.  major with a Religeous Education minor at a small Methodist college.  I could be a fine wife for some deserving guy and work in a church - - or purhaps change that minor.  At any rate, I would be able to get married and raise kids, etc., etc. 

My sophomore year in college, I finally got around to taking the required freshman biology course. The study of biology had never particularly interested me: I would rather pet a dog than delve into its morphology, rather look dreamily through a tree's branches than demand that it validate to me the mechanical utility of its green-ness. And so I worked half-heartedly through the first semester, heedless of the textbook's introductory admonition to stay abreast of an extremely fact-filled course that, for instance, required its students to learn more new terms than a freshman foreign language course did. My scores on tests were mediocre and by the end of the semester I needed to do well on the final exam.

Growing up in the Bible Belt of Alabama and Georgia, one of the things that I dreaded most was having to endure relentless evangelizing from my neighbors, classmates, coworkers, or just people who saw me on the street. I had a carefully selected group of friends who sympathized with my dread, having similarly suffered (non-Christians were bad, Hell-bound people in the evangelical Baptist mind).

When I was in grad school I couldn't afford a campus parking permit. But my car had out of state plates, so I just parked on campus anyway and threw the tickets away. One day I came out at lunch time to find my car immobilized by a wheel boot.

I went back into my lab to work, muttering curses as I tweaked my instruments and tended to the equipment. I was so distracted thinking about the boot that I accidentally poured liquid nitrogen on my shoe, freezing it down to -321 degrees Fahrenheit. As I frantically pulled my shoe off to save my toes from frostbite, a light bulb went on in my head. Liquid nitrogen!

It was the last day of school in the 8th grade. My junior high was adjacent to the high school, so over 600 kids were milling about with that freedom of feeling like you can do anything, and unfortunately, some people acted that feeling. 

I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. My friend Nick and I were talking about our fear of heights. I felt a little reluctant to admit to being afraid of heights, but he seemed fine with it. I don't remember what was said before this, but I remember him saying, "Y'know, it's not exactly a fear of falling. It's more like... a fear of jumping."

I instantly realized that described my fear as well. I thought, Damn! That was insightful. I wouldn't have ever thought of that myself, but as soon as he pointed it out I recognized it was true.

I'm not aware of any lasting effect on me from that conversation. My fear of heights was not diminished. But for some reason, it's stuck with me all these years.

When I was about four or five years old I loved to throw the cat. I guess I found something about the cat’s desperate swim through the air funny or fascinating. I was strictly forbidden from doing it.

I have an image burned into my memory from that time: I remember the cat crashing into a lamp just as my father rounded the corner, and feeling a sense of horror as my mind raced to find some excuse or explanation for what had just happened. Unfortunately I can’t remember what happened next, nor what punishment I received. I just remember knowing I was in big f*ing trouble.

um, because they are on opposing sides, of course they do.

Sitting on a plane, the flight attendant asks, "something to drink?"  My neighbor orders coffee and continues to bend my ear as he conducts his chemistry experiment-like preparation of his airline coffee - to get it just so.  One pack of sugar, two packs of sugar, three packs of sugar, FOUR?  No way, not really.  Yup.  Four, five!  It's a little cup.

Me:  "Yum, Yum"

We both crack up.

I started going to a therapist to help me with a sticky relationship situation - torn between two lovers.  During one session, I said, "oh, wait, I know...I need to not be so nice...I've got to work on that."  The therapist said, "no, I want you to be exactly who you are.  If it makes you comfortable to be nice, go for it, own it, revel in it." 

Ahhhhh, permission to be nice - it was the most relieving thing he could have said!

Now a "conversation" is usually two-way arrangement. I am certain that this one was. It is the reply which I remember to this day.

As a somewhat rambunctious teenager, I was pushing my points to try to win my way over parental controls. There had been some of this, and my father (who actually turned out to be quite a philosopher in his own way) had this to say: "Now, you know that this household is not a democracy. It is a little like a benevolent dictatorship. I do think that you deserve to be heard. I will listen. If I am convinced, then I might change my mind. If I am not convinced, then my decision prevails. Are we clear about that?"

I am going through my desk, looking for papers I need in order to register for next semester’s courses. I see a wrinkled copy of my present course schedule. I notice that I registered for a class that I forgot about; I haven’t it attended all semester. It’s a crucially important, required course, and it’s one of the hardest ones I have to take. But it’s too late in the semester to drop it, and I have eight weeks worth of work I haven’t done. There’s no way I can catch up. I’m going to fail the class, a mark that I can never erase from my permanent record. I’ll never get accepted to graduate school. I’ll never get to pursue my passion for science. The worst part is that I always think to myself, “Oh no. I’ve dreamt about this over and over.