The Expansion Chamber

   Men ought always to pray and not to faint. Luke 18:1 KJV   When I was in the second grade, one of my best pals was nicknamed Dirt. He was still in first grade . He hung out with the older bad boys at the pool hall my Uncle Tony owned. I'm not sure how that happened or why, since they were a decade his senior. He was tough as nails, for a first grader. They'd do cool stuff to him, like put their big leather belts around his neck and pick him up and hold him a foot off the ground. He just wiggled about like a pinata and protested while they laughed and pointed. Dirt already knew how to inhale. He smoked Marlboro Reds, just like Father Gilbride down at the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We both attended our Catechism classes there together. At 6 years old, Dirt already had the faint beginnings of a mustache.  But second grade is where you make big changes, having already learned a ton about life in kindergarten and first. That's when I tried changing my name from 'Raymon...

I've had some rough Christmas Eve's.  When I was 20 years old, I was living in North Atlanta with my two buddies in a ramshackle lake house. They both had families and left a day or two before Christmas. My car had a water pump problem that rendered it inoperable, but my buddy Steve left me the keys to his little Yamaha RD200. Just in case I needed eggnog or wanted to try ice racing on the frozen lake. I spent the morning of Christmas Eve watching the puzzled Canada geese crash landing on the ice and around noon the phone rang. It was my mom. She had moved to Florida to be closer to her brother after I left home and told me she was invited to Christmas at Gary and Faye's out in Lawrenceville, GA. My uncle had married Faye's mom and she was the one who had hired me as a draftsman at Scientific Atlanta. She let me know she had just arrived at their house and asked if I wanted to have dinner with them. In Lawrenceville. Lawrenceville was 39.3 miles. 1 hour 16 minutes from ...