1) The last lines of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:
Willy Wonka: But Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he he always wanted.
Charlie Bucket: What happened?
Willy Wonka: He lived happily ever after.

and

2) This visualization of the appropriate work/life decision-making process.

Go show her some love.

The trip to the doctor, in our Plymouth station wagon, started out with Jon asking if I was going to get a shot this visit. Speculation, trepidation, and discussion about shots loomed large in my household. Jon, two years older than me, used to get massive doses of allergy shots. Jeff, five years senior, was largely out of the vaccination woods. For me, it was the tetanus booster.

Jeff: Oooh, the tetanus shot. That’s the worst one!
Jon: You’re gonna cry.
Me: Come on, it isn’t that bad, is it?
Jeff: Sometimes they use a shot that is so big that it goes all the way through your arm.
Jon: You’re gonna cry.

Immunizations and vaccinations have become a thing nowadays. For the tetanus vaccine, side effects include headaches, body aches, tiredness. Oh, and “crying for three hours or more (up to about one child out of 1,000).” Yeah. Crying.

In the doctor’s office, I freaked out. I started crying and squirming some before the doctor unwrapped the needle, so they called in my dad to help calm me down. I kept wiggling and began bawling loudly , so they called in a couple of other nurses to hold me down. Then the screaming. In the end it took the doctor, my father, and 5 nurses to hold me down while they gave me the obviously largest, most painful shot in the whole world.

I have been unreasonably afraid of needles ever since. I didn’t get blood drawn via a needle until college, preferring instead to have someone draw it by pricking my fingertip. The lure of sex and the fear of HIV pushed me into regular screenings. I’ve never given blood, though I know that it could save lives.

This is also one of my earliest, most vivid memories. I can hazily recall the house I grew up in, we used to have cats, but I don’t remember much about them. Faces, events, things all swim around in a soup of affect and snapshot. But the trip to to the doctor for my tetanus shot, that I remember.

Thing One: my mom died when I was 6 years old.

For years and years, I used to say that my mom died when I was seven years old. But I recently noticed that I was six. Here’s the obituary, from the February 25th, 1978, Chicago Tribune:

It’s interesting how 80 words sums up a situation: died at 35, leaving a husband and three boys. She died of cancer I’m told. Initially lung cancer, maybe doctors or parents telling me they discovered a brain tumor when they prepped her for surgery on her lungs. She didn’t smoke much. Although I could be wrong about this, I think it was less than a year from initial diagnosis to death.

My father, faced with the prospects of raising three boys aged 6 to 11 by himself, kind of freaked out. I think we ate a lot of hamburgers and pancakes, the only things he really knew how to cook. I began slipping a bit in my school behavior, to the extent one can do this in first grade. My father wrote a note on my report card that it was a trying time and my talking too much in class was not something he thought he needed to worry about, thank you very much. My brothers and I went to overnight camp that summer, for 8 weeks. In North Carolina.

The “I’m told,” “I think,” and “maybe” are all very much in keeping with my lack of memories of her. I poked around a bit and learned that episodic memory before the age of 4 or 5 is pretty unusual (for what brain people know, which isn’t as much as you might think). It’s known as Childhood amnesia, with explanations ranging from Freud’s belief that we suppress childhood trauma to biological-developmental explanations. Maybe we get emotions, but it’s unclear that we have episodic memory.

I have almost no memories of my biological mother that are unconnected to a photograph, a film, or a story told to me by someone else. I think of her as unfashionable, but that’s because of a particular set of photographs. It’s a little unfair to get branded by the 70s. An earlier set of photos from her junior high school prom shows her and my dad as the high school sweethearts they were.

My father re-married a few years later, to a woman I have called ‘mom’ for almost three decades. I love her. She, my two brothers, and I adopted each other pretty early on, both socially and legally. But I think surprisingly often about often about Ilene. I’m older than she was when she died, and she had three children by then. I’m not sad, truly, it’s been too long and my life has been too good to be sad about it. But my fundamental worldview is shaped by fragility in a way that is often hard to explain.

My dad told me a story not too long ago about her. It was winter in Chicago. He was in the Caribbean islands, as a young tax lawyer, at a conference of some sort, when she called him up:

Ilene: Oh my god, are you ok?
Bob: Um, yeah. Why?
Ilene: I’m looking at the news, and it says there is a massive hurricane over the Caribbean. It’s right on top of you!
Bob (looking out the window at impeccably blue skies): I don’t see anything. It looks completely beautiful outside, no rain in sight.
Ilene: Well, it’s 10 below zero here, and freezing rain, you jerk!

And then she hung up on him. My kind of woman.