Wake Up Call

Death made direct contact with me for the first time ever last week.

Until I got the call, I'd been...not oblivious exactly, but insulated. My parents, still alive, were significantly older than normal when they had me, and while I was self-conscious of this growing up, aware of their mortality to a greater depth than, say, children whose parents were barely through their twenties, it also meant I never knew their parents, thus, had no grandpas and grandmas to have to say goodbye to. Three of them were gone before I was born; the last, my mom's mother, I have only sketchy memories of: an old lady, sitting in a chair like a portrait of an old lady hanging on the wall, watching and listening, but never (rarely) speaking.

Until recently, death kept its distance. It was no match for me or my family, and it knew it. My parents enjoyed good health, as did my brother and me...nothing chronic, nothing ongoing. No hospital visits or surgeries or medication regimens for any of us, no reason, much less inclination, to become one of those people who can tear down even the most auspicious gathering by talking endlessly about what ails them. But early last year, my dad, at the age of 80, suddenly found himself being rushed through winter snows to a hospital an hour away for a heart condition that came out of nowhere. Late last year, unexpectedly, his best friend lost a battle with cancer that he was hardly given a chance to try fighting. This hit my dad hard, particularly on the heels of his own 'cardiac event'. and to top it off, my parents have - in general - really started to look, and feel and act their age in a way they never used to. They were always just Mom and Dad...now it's clear in no uncertain terms that they've joined the ranks of the elderly.

They've lived a good long life, and no one - including them - is feeling robbed of anything, necessarily. It seems a certain resignation burgeons the longer the twilight lasts. But being resigned to death in old age doesn't make it any less unnerving or heart-breaking to deal with, this slow and steady - and now more apparent than ever - march into that good night. Lately, it seems, death is getting cocky, closing in, looking for a opportunity, smelling something on each of us that's whetting its appetite.

Nothing could have prepared me, however, for the news I received last week, that a friend I'd known for two decades had taken his life at the age of 37. In recent years, he and I had lost touch, but there was a time when we were close, when I shared a bond with him I've never shared with anyone else and probably will not again. I had just seen him a month before, for the first time in quite a while; he didn't seem well (that's not 20/20 hindsight talking...), and it was shortly afterward, but before his death, that I found out he was suffering from severe mental illness.

It's amazing how reliable the 5 stages of grief are. I was given the news while I was at work and got down to the business of 'denial' right away, keeping myself busy, avoiding what I had just been told as though believing if I ignored it, it would tire and go away. After that, I went through an 'anger' phase...anger at him for what he did, anger at myself for not being there, for letting us drift apart, for all the times I thought about giving him a call and didn't (though I know there would have been nothing I could have done to help him). And of course, there came short but powerful moments of 'depression' that took my breath away in an instant. The only stage I escaped was 'bargaining'...maybe because at the end he and I weren't as close as we'd once been, maybe because the last time I saw him I knew right away he was not the guy I'd once known, or maybe simply because I knew there was no point.

His funeral was only the second I'd ever been to, the first for someone I actually knew well. I delivered his eulogy, and this prompted other people to come up and say a few words, and there was definitely a consensus about this guy, a consistency to what people remembered of him. No doubt, he will be missed.

And now, all that's left is that hollow, orphaned feeling that comes in the aftermath, that settles in my gut like water flooding a basement. This, accompanied by thoughts of my own mortality, and an impulse to cling to those I've shared my life with more than ever. No question, depression is hanging on.

Here, as I wait for 'acceptance' to finally make an appearance, I present his eulogy, both as an ode to a friend, and a cautionary tale:

---------------

"I first met Adam 20 years ago, spring of 1994. I was the manager of a restaurant in town, and there were two things I noticed almost immediately about the guy who came in for food every single Friday night:

1) His metal-studded leather jacket and long pony-tailed hair; a look that - even before I knew him - didn't seem to match his glasses and quiet demeanor.

2) The fact that he always ordered the same thing, every time. His exact special order escapes me, but his methodical manner doesn't. Like clockwork, he would call it in ahead of time, and pick it up ten minutes later, like clock work.

Several Friday nights' worth of this came and went, until eventually I was nodding and smiling when he came in, and he back at me, knowing that I knew that he was 'that guy' with 'that order.'

Eventually, he turned in an application, and I hired him, and it did not take long for a close friendship to grow out of our working relationship. Adam and I just clicked, effortlessly; we shared the same way of thinking about things, had the same sense of humor, same way of expressing it. We were both creative people, and it was through this kindred spirit that we ended up creating a cartoon character of all things, called Pickle Boy. Pickle Boy was a 7-foot-tall dill pickle who just happened to be the real defender of the American way of life, and went out of his way to make sure everyone knew it.

Early in our friendship, we spent a lot of nights sitting at a local diner smoking cigarettes. Well, I smoked, and more or less blew it in his face, but he tolerated it, and together we sat late night after late night, penning those single panel cartoons. Sometimes he wrote up the idea and I would illustrate it; sometime I wrote up the idea and he would illustrate it. But we were so much alike, neither of us strayed from our original vision, and Pickle Boy became, like all great ideas in the minds of their creators, larger than life, an extension of ourselves, a third person in the act. The cartoons were dry, they were witty, they were at times a scathing review of the very American priorities and values Pickle Boy was sworn to defend. And they would only deepen the bond between Adam and me.

Over time, we drew up about a hundred of these cartoons, and in the earliest days of the Internet, like '97 or '98, he built an elaborate website from which to promote our cartoon and sell Pickle Boy tee shirts. Website building was a big deal then; there was no dragging and dropping with ease, like today. No Facebook, no MySpace...it was done pretty much by hand, one HTML brick at a time, but Adam taught himself how to do it, even created a bunch of animated GIFS of Pickle Boy in action, which blew my mind. He was like Bill Melendez to Charles Schultz back in the day - animating our cartoon character, yet managing to preserve the look and feel. It was amazing.

The website was as much a money-making scheme as a creative endeavor, I guess, but we didn't care. Pickle Boy was real in our minds, and we were confident he was going to be the next Dilbert, the next South Park, the next something...

We sold just one shirt - to a girl in Georgia - a few more if you count the friends we guilted into buying one...we got some fan mail here and there, from people who discovered the website. We even got some hate mail from somebody in Australia, who actually called us, 'talentless American wankers.' And we shared those moments - of excitement, triumph and embarrassment - in a way only creative collaborators can.

I miss those days with Adam. Moreover, I miss the days when my dreams were driven largely by an energy fueled by fearlessness fueled by a certain naiveté that's found only in youth. I could collaborate with someone right now and go on to fame and fortune, and it would never feel like it did at age 24, at the very moment the Pickle Boy website went live, or when we received our first order on-line, or when we proudly posted our hate letter on the website, folding it into the Pickle Boy narrative, as though the character had received it.

Adam was quiet; he tended to lurk on the periphery of any social situation, watching and listening. This was too bad, I think, because it prevented people from knowing not only that he was uproariously funny, but a hell of an improviser, and not afraid to play the spazz. We drove to New York City once, to visit my brother, 1500 miles there and 1500 miles back, and on the way out we road dogged it, went 17 hours before stopping. By the 14th hour, somewhere in Ohio, we were spent physically and psychologically. I was at the wheel, slapping myself to stay awake, or maybe just for something to do, Adam was slouched down in shotgun staring out at the road as it whizzed by, and I don't know if it was exhaustion making him loopy or what, but out of nowhere he started doing a voice, a woman's voice, a woman with a severe speech impediment; at least that's what it sounded like to me. I had no choice but to respond in kind, with my own verbally challenged character, and so on and so forth, and pretty soon we were acting these two women out, lending them lives and stories to tell in a style and at a pace that would have blown the doors off any improv class, and I was laughing so fucking hard at what he was coming up with, I couldn't breathe.

There were other similar moments after that, and from these other characters arose, always one for each of us to play off the other: Edith and Fran, Larry and Dennis, Ed and Barnabus.

These names, these 'characters', don't mean anything to anyone anymore, but to me, they are as alive, and animated, and memorable - as 'classic' - as anything that's ever appeared on Saturday Night Live, anything Chris Farley ever came up with. They truly enriched my life.

As time went on, things beyond our control caused Adam and me to drift apart, but he was never not there. He was always around. We saw each other at parties, or out at the bars once in a while. He taught me how to ride a motorcycle one of those summers...actually trusted me with his little Honda (his Harley, hell no...), with only the slimmest assurance that I wouldn't lose control and rocket that thing down into a gully. He let me borrow an old helmet too. It was full of road rash, and bright white; he called it 'the egg.' I seem to recall him and his brother getting a good chuckle at the thought of me wearing it. But wear it, I did. I haven't ridden since, never ended up getting my motorcycle license, but I know how to ride. I could get my license if I wanted to. And that's because of Adam.

He was an intelligent, multi-faceted guy. If you had a problem, you called Adam. He was a kind of jack of all trades. He just knew stuff, or if he didn't, he could almost always figure it out. Beyond being a cartoonist and a killer improviser, he was a musician, a handyman, a computer technician, a mechanic...definitely a mechanic. He was the one who bought my gutless 1981 Camaro that I wrote about on this page last year, with its factory 8 track player and rainbow striping, and turned it into something that chewed up pavement.

He also networked all the computers at my office once, seven of them in total, running between two floors, spinning CAT 5 cable like gold, getting them all communicating with each other, correctly, efficiently. It seemed he was always repairing or installing something for me or someone in our group of friends. This, in spite of the fact that we'd let Pickle Boy and other great ideas fade away over time, and had drifted apart. Adam was always around, always willing.

Several more years passed before I saw him again. He was painting by this time. Painting had become a kind of calling, a siren song, a natural evolution from cartooning, I'd say. I was writing newspaper articles by then, and this time, he got a hold of me. He asked if I would be willing to write up a story about an art exhibit he was having at a local coffeehouse. I said sure. Admittedly, I was hesitant at first. More than once in my life I've had friends and family read my writing and been told only how neat the typing was.

But I was impressed, legitimately impressed, by his work. And fairly amazed, not just by his technical ability, which all things considered was not too surprising, and not by what I still consider to be the ingenuity of his artistic vision, but by the sheer complexity. I was - and I am - amazed by the thought of the hours he must have spent creating those intricately woven images. They are testament to the complexity of his personality and his thoughts.

That was 2006. After that, we drifted apart again, this time more permanently. I moved out of the area where I'd grown up and lived most of my adult life in 2008, and haven't been back much. I've let more than a few friendships slide. I didn't see Adam again for six years - until just a month ago - when I had the opportunity to have dinner with him, and two other people, two buddies who were part of the crew back in the day and knew Adam as I knew him.

He and I said hello, shook hands. He looked older, a little tired. So did I. I said let's keep in touch, and he said, yeah, it's been too long.

And he was right. It's been too long.

There's nothing I won't miss about Adam, and there's a lot to look back on. I have an unlimited supply of memories in the form of photos and video and cartoons to smile and weep for, and I do. And I will. But I think what I will take with me from this point forward will not be just the memories of what he and I were once, or what we did together, but what we let ourselves become: deeply in-tune creative collaborators who over time dissolved into distant acquaintances. I want to go out of my way to make sure that doesn't happen with anyone else I've shared my life with, and I like to think that will be how he'll continue to enrich my life.

Goodbye Adam. Wherever you are now, wherever you got to, I have no doubt you've already made it a funnier, more intelligent, more interesting place."

-----------------   

From my own personal Darwin Diaries: how a school safety campaign actually proved a useful tool in the face of my boundless stupidity

My first obsession, first rebellion, and hell, maybe even a little my first dalliance with an impulse control disorder, came on strong when I was thirteen years old. My best friend and I were on that precipice between childhood and young adulthood, dangling perilously between our fears and our impulses, our common sense and our restlessness, and for three months in the summer between my 7th and 8th grade years, we became pyromaniacs of the highest order.

It started when Ron found a lighter between the sofa cushions in his living room, either his older sister's - she smoked cigarettes (and looked pretty hot doing so) - or one of her many friends, always milling around when I came over. They were awkward, brace face teenage girls of the Clearasil set, but they were women in my young eyes, older women no less, women of the world, painting their nails, smelling like cigarettes and gum, simultaneously watching MTV and looking like they could be on it, tweaking both my desire and self-consciousness.

The big deal was not so much that Ron had the lighter, but that it was not missed by someone. It became our lighter, a possession as thrillingly illegal as it was permanent, and before long we were wielding it with the same sense of discovery and newly hatched empowerment early Man must have felt the first time he kept a torch going long enough to cook his food and illuminate his night.

We burned paper - notebook, construction, toilet...paper plates, paper towels, paper napkins...any kind or brand we could get our hands on. We burned leaves. We burned the ends of sticks, the caps of pens until they melted, any cardboard box unlucky enough to be caught sitting around with nothing to do. We burned a baseball cap we found in the alley, a tee shirt that didn't fit Ron anymore. We even torched one of his sister's Barbie dolls with as ceremonious a flair as we could muster. I suggested leaving its charred remains on her pillow as a joke (yeah, I guess I was that kid, a little...), but Ron wasn't comfortable going there, and looking back, that was probably a good thing. He was already pretty nervous about the lighter, certain we'd be discovered at any moment, and quickly regretted what we'd done to the doll, not so much for how torching any kind of human representation might read to others, but for monkeying around in Kate's room. He wound up guiltily stuffing Immolation Style Barbie in a box of books we found in the old barn behind his house, hoping Kate wouldn't notice one of her collection missing. As far as I know, she never did, and the doll and box might still be there.

That lighter became not just a source of unlimited power in our minds, but brainless amusement, wholly befitting two brainless thirteen-year-old boys. In the dark of his bedroom during sleepovers, we would spark it up and hold the flame under our chins in an effort to look as 'freaky' as possible. On a dare, we'd run the flame across the new hairs on our arms, or swipe the tip of our finger straight through it, to see - and prove - what we could take. Inspired by the fantastically hilarious stories that had made the rounds of our classrooms, locker rooms and campfires as far back as we could remember, we tried to light our own farts.

We failed (I guess that too was a good thing...), but Ron had something that was almost as cool. He'd learned from someone how to fill his cupped hand with fumes from the lighter, then ignite it in a fiery display without doing any damage to his hand or fingers. He spent fifteen minutes showing me this parlor trick, another fifteen passed before I summoned up the nerve to try it myself, but once I'd mastered it, it became as reliable a method for whiling away a boring summer afternoon as whittling or bouncing a ball against a wall. I did it so much, I used up all the fluid in that lighter. When Ron informed me that disposable lighters are not refillable, and with no reliable way of refilling it anyway, and having dug my way into their sofa cushions up to my elbows to no avail, I demanded he sneak into his sister's room one more time. There was surely a lighter to be found, probably in plain sight. Quick in, quick out. Come on, Ron, don't be a pussy.

Bold words from someone who would not have dared set foot in his older brother's bedroom, but Ron obliged reluctantly. Not to appease me, but to appease the gods of fire. That summer, we were subservient minions to the gods of fire. It was our first real - as in structured and ongoing - rebellion, our first taste of doing something we knew we weren't supposed to be doing, right on the doorstep of adulthood. He wanted it just as badly as I did.

In June, we almost burned his fricking barn down, stupidly setting fire to a bin filled with hay and firewood, just to see what would happen, and only barely - barely - managing to put the flames out after they started to lick their way up the wall as if consciously trying to get away from us. No joke, we were seconds from disaster that time. That whole two-story barn, which had probably stood for a hundred years (built when his residential neighborhood was still farm land, his residential street a county road), might have gone up had the garden hose not reached.

On the occasion he and I discuss that incident, some thirty years later, we still cringe at what might have transpired.

It was sobering, but unfortunately not enough to get us to stop playing with fire. By July, in keeping with the quantum universe theory that everything that can possibly happen does (or maybe the Murphy's law version...), we had started seeking out new applications for our pyromania. And that was when the red gas can in that barn, used by Ron's older brother to fill the lawn mower, became of keen interest.

We were duly cautious with the fire water at first, indulging only in small sprinkles on the sidewalk that produced small flames undulating hypnotically off the concrete. But that soon felt inadequate. We evolved, just like early Man, started to write out words.

At first, 'SOS' or 'HELP', for astronauts in orbit we told ourselves (I think I was inspired by an old episode of Gilligan's Island).

Then we got sassy: 'EAT ME', 'BITE ME', or other typically witless 13-year-old expressions were flashed into the twilight heavens.

Then we got artistic (if still witless): smiley faces, a middle finger, a pair of breasts, a penis...hey, we were thirteen years old, and it was great comedy, and dare I say an invaluable experience - never to come again quite the same way - to see a burning penis about four feet in length light the gathering darkness of a July evening in northern Wisconsin at that age, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

But we didn't stop there. In an eventuality that proved Darwin's theory, the words 'Molotov cocktail' floated between us, and by mid-July we were feeling a strong desire for something more epic to appease the gods.

By then we were entirely cocky about our abilities marshaling fire. We'd gone almost the entire summer without being caught, causing a catastrophe or hurting ourselves (oh yes, we were fully aware of the danger of our behavior; that was a big part of the allure...), and felt we had earned a certain lack of discretion. At least, that's what I tell myself to try to explain what happened one late morning in early August, in front of Ron's house, in broad daylight, with traffic going by and someone mowing their lawn across the street.

Unwilling or unable to walk away from the Molotov cocktail idea, seriously believing that bigger fire made for bigger men, Ron and I placed a plastic fast food cup on the ground beside a tree, and filled it three-quarters full of gasoline. He knelt down and carefully lighted a paper wick sticking out of the cup like a straw. He scrambled away hastily, and we both stood there, one of us on each side of the cup, watching, waiting.

I'm not sure what we were waiting for...some kind of fireworks-style explosion to delight and amaze, maybe? It was pretty disappointing, actually. No explosion, no fireball, just flames starting to climb their way up the side of the tree with quickening determination as the cup collapsed in on itself and gas started to leak out.

When the fire started to wrap itself around the trunk of the tree, we gave each other a nervous glance, then Ron, gripped by the same second thoughts as I, stomped down on the cup with his shoe in an effort to snuff the fire out. That's when I got my fireball - a wall of bright orange coming straight at me with a roar.

Suddenly, the entire front of my shirt was on fire.

Suddenly, I was screaming.

Suddenly, I was running.

Suddenly, the gods of fire had become vengeful.

In that moment, I remembered a safety cadence I was taught in second grade, and had barely listened to at the time. Stop, Drop, and Roll. If I ever found myself (in so outrageously unlikely a scenario as to be...) on fire, I should stop, drop to the ground, and roll.

Actually, I can't say I consciously remembered it. It was more of an auto-response, which perhaps is testament to the effectiveness of that particular safety campaign. Though I took off running at first - a fight-or-flight response if ever there were one - I had the presence of mind to stop on a dime, drop, and roll like a barrel through the grass in Ron's front yard...made it a little way into the neighbor's yard, in fact, just enough to put out the flames. It's only in hindsight that I remember being on fire at all. At the time, there seemed to be no time between the moment right before Ron brought his shoe down, and hoisting myself up from the grass fifteen yards away.

I walked back to the tree and stood before Ronny in what was now a tattered Yankees tee shirt, a hand-me-down from my older brother I would never wear again (which was fine; I'm a Braves fan). I will never forget the surprised look in his eyes. Not horror, but surprise. I'm sure it was the same incongruous expression I had on my face. Neither one of us could really wrap his brain around what the hell had just happened, much less be upset by it. A car went by. The neighbor was still mowing his lawn.

It seemed the world had not heard my screaming.

"Are you okay?" Ron asked finally, and in his voice, if not on his face, there was a supreme disquiet.

"Yeah, I'm...I'm..." I wanted to say I was fine, but that would have been laughable. I reeked of gasoline, there were grass clippings and dirt in my hair, on my face, and though the flames had been extinguished, my chest felt as though it were still on fire. "I'll probably just go home."

All I remember of the bike ride home was being afraid to look at my chest and afraid to face my parents, and having a sense that the two things were going to be connected soon enough. I arrived at my house and was greatly relieved to discover nobody home. I made a hasty bee-line for the bathroom, locked the door, removed the Yankees shirt with the stiffness of an 80-year-old man, and gasped at what I saw in the mirror.

There were three burns. Two smaller ones didn't look that bad, but the third was twice the size of the others combined, an ugly charred sore shaped like an arrow head, as though the devil himself had smeared the flames across my chest with his hands. It was about two inches wide, four inches long, untouchably tender and oozing continuously. My heart sank. This was not something I'd be able to take care of myself with first aid cream and a bandage. I was going to need medical attention.

But by then shock had set in, and the fact that nobody was home prompted me to withdraw even further. I went upstairs with the Yankees shirt in my hand. I threw it in the waste basket in my room, laid down on my bed, above the covers, and found sleep blessedly easy to come by.

When I awoke, the sunlight had shifted in my bedroom. My parents were home now, I could hear them rummaging about downstairs, putting away groceries, maybe cobbling together lunch, like a thousand days before and a thousand days after. (They too had not heard my screaming.) The big burn was the color of grape jelly on my white fish belly, as tender, bubbled and sticky as ever, and now it was announcing its presence with a resonant, blowtorch pain, as though someone were trying to iron me. The two smaller burns seemed worse than they had been before...darker, blotchy, painful to the touch and oozing that awful fluid that stains bandages in amber colored rings. The entire room was saturated with the smell of gasoline.

Taking a nap hadn't made anything better. I still needed medical attention. I still had to tell to my parents.

I shouldered into as light a tee shirt as I could find, hunched my shoulders forward so the fabric would stay off my chest, and went to my dad, rather than my mom. My dad could be strict, but he was the more level-headed of the two, the one I could trust to not freak out (this would prove to be the case time and time again in my teenage years...).

He was upset though, visibly so, no question about it, leaning down for a closer examination of the big burn with a look of horror and revulsion I rarely saw from him. As he drove me to the emergency room, he asked repeatedly what happened, probing for the truth, and sighed with just a little more frustration for every evasive answer I gave.

The doctor in the ER, too, had plenty of questions as he treated my second and third degree burns. I fed him the same bullshit story I did my dad, and though it seemed the doctor's questions reached the level of interrogation at one point (augmented by my dad standing behind him, looking a little like a cop who could go rogue at any moment), I stuck to that story:

Ron had been mowing the lawn, I said, and I was filling the gas tank for him, and as I carefully poured it through the can's long red nozzle, the gasoline had just spontaneously erupted into flames and engulfed me, ignited, I theorized, by the hot metal surface of the engine, or maybe the bright sunlight.

Ridiculous, but intended to safeguard what little of my dignity had not been burned off that morning. This was an accident, my story claimed, as if straight from the cover of a tabloid, it was not the result of vulgar recklessness and stupidity (and a little hubris), for which I had been violently smitten.

Neither my dad nor the doctor believed a word of it; I think the doctor even smirked once or twice (or exchanged a look with my dad...). Like a horse fallen through the ice and unable to clamber out, the more I squirmed and thrashed, the worse it got, but I stuck to my story, too proud to admit anything out loud, especially with my dad standing there. The 'rogue cop' look I saw on his face wasn't really hostility, or even disappointment, it was shame, outright embarrassment, for what a jack ass he knew his son had been that day.

My dad knew. He'd never get the truth, but he knew. And it was mortifying.

The rest of that summer played out as a slow recovery. I remained bandaged, and mostly indoors, through the dog days of August and into September...into the new school year. Each changing of the dressing came with jolts of pain and discomfort. The burns - especially the big one - took forever to heal. Once they started healing, I endured weeks of agonizing itchiness, and whenever I succumbed to the temptation to rake myself, which was frequently, the healing was forced to start all over.

Eventually, I recovered physically. Psychologically was a different matter. The incident could not have happened at a worse time. Like all newly hatched teenagers, I'd been full of all sorts of plans for removing myself from childhood once and for all. Many were embarrassingly calculated poses, but some were accurate glimpses at the adult I would become. I started to really discover girls that summer, or care enough to understand them. I discovered new music, new movies, books...that was the summer I read my second Spenser novel and officially became a fan, watched Monty Python's Flying Circus and 'got it', felt for the first time capable of chiming in on the kind of conversations that went on between my dad and brother, where before I had only listened (or lost interest). It was the summer I renounced cartoons. It was the summer I got a new bike, a ten-speed, put the old banana seater, which I'd been pedaling away on since 4th grade, out to pasture. It was the year I awakened to the notion that I'd lived long enough to have memories to look back on, that 3rd and 4th and 5th grades, and my middle school years, were part of my 'past.'

Looking back, the 'fire gods' bullshit was not actually a new rebellion on my journey toward becoming an adult, it was a last vestige of being just another dumb ass kid, and I paid for it. Everything was put on hold while I recovered, set back to zero. Not permanently, but enough so to feel like a jarring throw down nevertheless.

I know it could have been much worse. I was beyond lucky that the Napalm spray Ron created when he unthinkingly brought his foot down on that Hardee's cup hadn't gone right into my face. And I am convinced that stop, drop and roll is the reason the fire didn't spread.

I could have wound up permanently disfigured.

But those psychological effects are still there. Not in obvious ways. I'm not afraid of fire; it ranks fairly low on my list of scariest ways to die. The smell of gasoline - thick and sickening as it was in my bedroom that afternoon - does not bother me, nor does the sight of a red gas can, or a fast food cup. In other words there are no blatant triggers to remembering that wall of fire or its unpleasant aftermath.

The triggers are far more insidious. An otherwise late summer day can still haunt me, if conditions are just right, if temperature and light and wind and ambient sounds conspire, I can at a moment's notice be given pause, flung back to those last few seconds of my childhood watching as Ron lit that makeshift wick, and left, with fairly abated breath, wishing we'd burnt his barn to the ground.

Hawaii stowaway story is serious business, but also downright astonishing

When I was sixteen years old I was full of piss and vinegar - about what I knew, what I was capable of, what I was willing to do - but like most middle class, Midwestern teenagers, it was just that: piss and vinegar. Truth was, I never strayed much - if at all - outside my safe zone, and my rebellions, my surrenders to impulse, were for the most part garden variety and PG-rated. One time I drove my new car (a '77 Chrysler Newport that didn't always start) three hours to Minneapolis, though I'd only been driving for a few months and didn't know Minneapolis (or city driving) at all. This event was on a short list of things I did in outright defiance of my parents back then, and though it was kind of thrilling, when I returned home safely with nothing terrible having happened, as my parents worried might, I couldn't help feeling as relieved as I did vindicated.

News last month that a 16-year-old California kid snuck onto an airport tarmac, climbed into a wheel well of a Boeing 767, and survived a five-hour flight at 35,000 feet to Hawaii deserves some serious inquiry, but also, quite frankly, some serious applause.

The obvious questions, born of grave concern, arose immediately: How was the boy not spotted by someone?  Airport security? Baggage handlers?  And if this kid could do what he did, what's to stop someone with ill-intent from doing the same thing? And of course, the most obvious: how the hell did he survive subzero temperatures and virtually no oxygen for such a period of time?

The questions about airport security might never be answered. The only proper (and possible) response would seem to be to tighten up the game at all of them (every facet of the airline travel industry should forever be in a state of 'tightening'...) And I'd be willing to bet the boy will have no answers as to how he survived the journey. So far, doctors seem to have done little more than shrug and talk about the possibility (however unlikely) that he went into a state of 'hibernation' during the flight, which saved his life.

If I had a chance to sit down and talk to this kid, I'd have just one question, and it would not have anything to do with surviving it physically. I would want to know how he pulled it off emotionally, and psychologically? Where in his psyche did he have to dig, and how deep, to not only figure out how to do it, but then actually do it?

Sitting there waiting for something to happen would be the worst. It's one thing to imagine him getting there, climbing over the airport fence in the dark, approaching the massive aircraft, grabbing hold of an enormous tire and climbing up into the wheel well. But what mysterious force enabled him to stay there, crouched in that cramped, uncomfortable space, heart and mind racing, breaking out in wave after wave of cold sweat, trying to control his breathing, counting the seconds and minutes until take off?

What went through his mind when he heard rummaging and thumping going on in the cabin directly above his head, as the plane was boarded and prepped?

How did he not panic into fleeing - in a jackrabbit sprint back across the tarmac - when he heard the engines fire up for the first time, or when the plane first lurched into motion...?

And what in the name of all that is holy went through his mind in the moment - poised motionless at the head of the runway - when the aircraft first rushed toward take-off speed? Take-offs freak me the hell out when I'm safely buckled into seat 27A!

'One question' can't help but lead to another, and another, and another.

Reportedly, he was homesick and wanted to see his mother in Somalia. Okay, that's powerful stuff, especially when you're a kid, so I guess the impetus is not hard to figure out.  But what kept him motivated on the follow through? He's sixteen years old!

At sixteen, no matter how much I missed my mother, I would not have had the wherewithal to even know how to go about plane hopping, much less the stones to actually do it. I'd have tired and given up, or pussied out (to use age-appropriate lingo) really quick.

And what of the prep time required? That alone would be a major undertaking. There clearly needed to be a lot of studying, a lot of careful calculation and plotting, a familiarity with the airport layout, with flight plans and schedules and so forth, to bridge the gap between reading about it and doing it.

At sixteen, I struggled paying attention in gym class and wasn't too keen on concentrating long enough to wrap my head around directions for hooking up a VCR.

Make no mistake, I am not saying what this reportedly 'quiet teen' from San Jose, California did was right. I am neither condoning it, nor dismissing the seriousness of it just because it didn't cause a catastrophe (which it easily could have). But man, there's no denying it's impressive. People train for things like this: they train for marshaling their fears of speed, height and distance. They go out of their way to prepare themselves psychologically for the pushing of boundaries through extreme behaviors, extreme sports, and they're usually not sixteen years old when they do.

At sixteen, my sixteen, all the 'piss and vinegar' in the world could not have hidden the fact that I didn't think there were too many reasons to get out of bed in the morning, or that I fully expected there to be cereal (Fruity Pebbles) and cold milk waiting for me downstairs in the kitchen when I did, or that I would get a little bitchy and bratty if there wasn't, and likely use it as an excuse to go back to bed.