Truth or dare and Laura took dare and in the warm yellow light of the garage she slipped her hand down my pants and everyone looked on as she touched my erection. And it was weird and glorious and afterword we never really talked. Because it was just a moment in truth or dare in the garage.

I’m told there are two sides to you. A remembering/story self and an experiencing self. Together they make the coin that is you, but you are only really allowed to be on one side or the other. When you are on the remembering/story side, you string together recollections and either project backward or forward to who you were or think you will be. It is a story flavored by your mood or something in the moment that has brought those memories forward and all they are soaked in. When you are on the experiencing side you are there, in a moment with the world, and all else drops away. There is no reconstructed you from the remembering/story side: there is just what is happening there, then.

When that moment is over, your remembering/story self immediately jumps in and puts the moment in a place, into the book of you — a liquid place where everything is clear and blurred at once, distinct but running together, sharp like the cold water of a river that is never the same no matter how often you stand in the same spot of its bend.

But somewhere in there, that process, there is a nano-second when you are on the edge of the coin. An ever-so brief nothing in time where you are both the story of you and the experience of you.

And when I am lucky, I find that place where the pen meets the paper. An inky moment where the whole of me disappears — and is there at once — and I am both the story that I am telling and the experience of telling it and the listener who is transformed by it.

It is magnificent.

At bedtime the boys go nuts. They are like ping pong balls set loose in a room of corners. They have no center other than each other. Energy ricochets. I ask them to stop. My voice bounces off their rubber ears. There is no hearing. And the kettle inside me boils over and in seconds I am taking away screentime and tv shows and paintball afternoons we haven’t even planned.

And I know I am the crazy one now, not them. And still I cannot help myself.

The NY agent sent her two sides. She printed them out and worked on them for a few days and I’d see her mouthing the words in the evenings. Her hands danced in the air and I had to resist asking her what she was saying. I wanted to know, but also I understood that she needed the space; that puncturing the chamber of her rehearsal would simply distract her from her purpose and bring frustration rather than connection.

Then one morning, she asked me to help her run lines.

She handed me the pages that had become dogeared in just a few days. Yellow highlighter drew my eye like a flashlight beam in the dark.

The first piece was a conversation between a man and a woman at their daughter’s softball game. Between pitches and cheers, they talked about money and jobs and how to pay for pizza. The second piece was a simple monologue about the moment the woman fell in love with her husband. He’d taken her out to a cornfield to look at the stars and made a ring from a firefly for her.

The first piece was like something our friend DK would’ve written. Simple and meaningful and present. The second was like my writing, poignant and vulnerable and true.

I read the sides like I was supposed to, in the voice she will meet in the room where the audition happens: neutral and cold. Passive.

But my heart betrayed me and I could feel the pull of the words and how well they found a place within me. I looked up after and she could see how I felt. About her. And myself. And the world where we met, that we still fit in, and love, and still meet in.

And I could see I wasn’t alone in all that either.

It felt good and soft and tender.

“It’s fine writing,” I said. But I did not stand up to go. I just waited. Looking across the table at her with a brimming heart.

I see the door of my parents room through the frame of my own door. Between our thresholds a staircase leads down to the life of the house, a straight shot to the foyer where everyone passes. But looking at my parents door, the distance seems forever. And as I think of the things that she did here to me, the distance grows. How did they not know? It’s a question I know the answer to: They didn’t because they weren’t there. But I ask it all the same as if the closeness makes it their fault, their responsibility. It’s not. Still, looking at the door, through the eyes of the one it happened to, I feel unbearably sad.

The words come out like a sudden knife and before I can stop them, they flash by and bring blood. They are quick and ugly. But they have beauty in that, too. I spend the next hours and days on the see-saw of defense and mea-culpa. I have no idea where they come from. They were as sudden as a storm on the plain. Still, someone inside me wanted them out. Why? Who is this person? If I never have meet them, how will I know when they will show up again. I can apologize, but I cannot say it will never happen again.

I did not even know it would happen when it did.

I am a memory machine. I string moments together like beads and decide how I feel about the necklace according to how easy or hard the last bead was to thread. My fingers could be bloody from the work, but if that last black pearl slipped as quick as lightning and felt good as it came to its final place, I’m likely to overlook all the sweat and tears and craziness and think, what a great piece of jewelry.

My whole life is held together like that. My whole being.

And that is crazy.

We used to cut through the backyards and cross Pfingston Road. Through the hedges behind Becky’s place we had to pass by the hulking gray shape of the overlarge farmhouse. Shredded curtains were still as the dead in the windows and there was no sign of life. The garage was full of newspapers from days no one remembered and whenever I peeked in, I always wondered if I’d find a paper announcing Kennedy’s death in a big banner headline. But I never got in and we never saw anyone in the windows. Even ghosts didn’t live there.

Now I wonder who’d owned the place. Who’d left it there for kids looking for a shortcut to pass by on their way to a school that probably didn’t exist when it was built.

I remember when she dumped me, sitting on the couch and telling her I’d like to work on it. Telling her that we got along in every way, but in the bedroom. I remember thinking about her whiter than white teeth in the dark and long slender neck twisting with the never getting there. I remember thinking about the night in the kitchen and her hands up on the wall over her head, arched back. I remembered thinking about the day she showed up at the airport with flowers and the night after her French friends came over and I made them laugh and her ferocious approach on the hard wood floor that left her unsatisfied. I remember the strangeness of being wanted and liked but broken within.

I remembered all that and still thought it could be worth it, but she was certain that this had to be it. “I don’t want to work on it,” she said. And I wondered if she’d ever solve it for herself.

And I remembered all that again 15 years later at a show she was doing when she described me to great laughter as a nice man who’d had too much marriage counseling.

But I also remembered the great relief after as I walked away from the warm light of the apartment: this time, it’s not me.

When you come back from New York, you feel like a stranger. It’s only been 10 days, but we are both broken in our own ways. You, physically. Me, still peeling off the armor I built myself around for almost 50 years. It feels too awkward to reach out to you and change the dynamic. But you keep your hand where it is, too, and I take that as a sign you do not want me. I want to blame you, but that is wrong and I am done blaming myself, so I just sit.

You think I’m mad, but I’m not.

I’m just stuck and waiting for the ice to thaw and break through myself to you.

My senior year in high school, I started to take my grandmother out to lunch once a month. At some point, my Dad and Uncle told me I should keep her from drinking alcohol because she was diabetic. So when she ordered some creme de menthe following a meal of oysters and bread, I did my duty and told her she wasn’t supposed to drink because she was diabetic.

“I’m 76 years old and I can have what I want. And besides, creme de menthe isn’t alcohol. It’s dessert.”

I put the line in a couple of plays and it always got a good snort out of the audience.

I went to visit because my sister said he didn’t look good. I was in denial and told myself that my sister was overly-dramatic. But I knew I had to go soon, so I changed my plans and called T, my partner from work, from the airline gate. The call is still a sharp memory for me, maybe because of the way T extended herself so genuinely, telling me to take my time. I can see the early morning light in the terminal. The hard whiteness of it. The blue carpet. It’s all there like an anchor in my mind.

When I got to North Carolina, he was fragile and sleeping a lot. We had not seen each other in a while because he and mom had decided not to come out the year before. Dog shows and social commitments had tied them down. My own children had kept us in California.

The Easter before was the last time. I still have a picture of it from their country club patio, taken when we still squandered time like it was a fathomless body of water we could drink from without thinking of what we were drinking.

I sat in the chair he’d inherited from his aunt Helen when his mother died 20 years before. It’d been re-covered many times since, but was still solid and good, a simple wooden arm chair. light and feminine with restrained colonial carvings. Comfortable. Familiar. Strong. A family chair that held its own stories.

He lay propped up in bed as we talked, mostly about my siblings and my mother. He explained how he split the money up, how it all went to my mother. There was a plan for it all and he drew out the details on an apartment he bought for my youngest brother. He explained how he’d paid off a house for my sister to relieve her finances in the midst of a tough divorce.

And he talked about her a lot. She was still alone then, fighting the father of her children for everything, a man who’d lied to her about who he was and was now hiding everything he had. He worried about her depression, and I read it as a signal to me to look after her, to help her as I could.

He said the only thing he regretted was not being able “to see how it all turned out.” His kids. His grandkids. He enjoyed seeing the story of lives unfolding. And without saying it I knew how deeply he loved them all.

It put a new angle on my respect and love for him that I’m not sure I know how to explain. If nothing else it was a generous and amazing gift of a reminder to pay attention to what is happening.

Anyway, I showed him a film I was working on and he was quiet like usual, keeping whatever criticism he had over it to himself.

Then I left and for the rest of weekend I saw him only when he came out of the room. An egg for breakfast. A visit with the young hospice nurse who was attractive on her own, but wore pants that were painted on and that I could see he was happy to look at. (I’ll admit I definitely gave her a double take.)

By the time I put my bags back in the dark rented Mustang, he’d turned yellow and was beginning to look hollow. It rained on the drive back to the airport.

The last time I saw him was on a Facetime call from the lobby of the church the Shotgun Players had turned into a theatre. H was doing a show and I came in the rehearsal break. It was L’s birthday. He was turning 1. We brought cake to the cast and then my Dad called and I took the call. He sang happy birthday to L who looked wide eyed and cooed at the square of light holding my father’s face. It was a bit chaotic and I thanked him but apologized.

“Love you,” he said.

“Love you, too,” I said and hung up.

H cried after, shaking ever so slightly the way she does when something has happened and shifted in the depths.

He didn’t want a funeral. Or anything close to a ceremony. Even after years of kneeling in a Catholic church, he was unconvinced of anything after. It was not a rejection, but from his bed it seemed more a simple acceptance that even so close to the edge, there was nothing known about what was next except that he would not be in this place.

It broke in pure sunlight like a strange and angry jokester. Thunder first, followed by lightning and a rain of huge warm drops that sounded like stones when they hit the patio. The four of us ran around the house in t-shirts and underwear, joyful banshees. Once, twice, three, I don’t know how many times. But I remember the laughter of my sister and brothers. The way we held our arms up when it was over to keep the wet shirts from feeling cold on our skin in the cooling air that came.

And I remember my parents laughing deeply and freely and together and with us.

The last days of summer. The first days of autumn. We walk the streets we know and yell after the kids who run ahead of us. Central Park is a cake of rock and grass. The ponds ripple with turtles. Little Italy dances for us with pasta and sweets and the boys will ask when we get back home how can we make cannolis.

But it’s in Washington Square park, under a cloud dotted sky, listening to a Chopin piece being played by a shirtless, barefoot man on an upright piano (that has — by some act of insanity — been wheeled out into the freedom of sunlight) that I feel at home. My kids eat their rainbow snow cones and my wife smiles and leans her head back with a deep sigh: It’s worth every minute I’ve lived to get me here.

It’s cold and dark and we are at the end of an evening I don’t want to end. Only a year before I would’ve asked to buy you a night cap to keep the conversation going. But I’m sober now and the old mechanisms are no longer there. At a loss, the question just pops out — “Pie?” I ask. And like a fish caught in the hands from a clear sun dappled stream on an instinct, a flash of a thought that inspires movement and surprise, I catch you with it.

“Yes,” you say and something inside jumps.

And it’s still alive and jumping when three years later I tell the jeweler what should be inscribed in the ring.

Pie? Yes.

She started making snow cones with the blender when, on a lark, she bought a cherry Torani soda flavoring. She piled the paper cups full of the crystal ice flakes and then poured the red sweet water over it until the heap was a melting ruby of tasty wonder.

I could not say when she became a legend in our neighborhood among the few kids who shared the bus stop with G in the morning. But her status as a God could not have been clearer the day one of them stood on the stoop of our door and peered hopefully over our shoulders trying to fish an invitation to the world within by just blinking his dark eyes.

“I think I can smell a snow cone,” he said and looked away like someone caught.

Who could avoid smiling and saying “Me, too!”

Go ahead, she said and put her hands out. I don’t remember the quality of her voice or which of us did the tying, me or M, but we did it and she laid there in the grass of the unmowed yard under the night sky with us. And I don’t remember how the tickling started but I remember it was playful to begin with, but like a delicate fabric that gets stretched too tight, the play began to tear and open up. At moments it was too much and then it would go back to play. And I remember her body, soft and full in the dark, twisting beneath our hands that were tickling one moment and poking another. She was like a wave with swells that we were creating, complete with moments of intensity and rest. I remember her laughing and teasing us. I remember telling her we wanted to take a look. I remember her saying no. And we didn’t. But it was exciting and different and I remember thinking does she really mean no and pressing a bit to find out and knowing there were moments of terror for her and stopping and wondering is this alright, have I done something wrong, did this go too far, is it me or M or her. And while for all the talk of taking a look, and tickling that was too much, and rolling and touching, we all stayed clothed as we were and when we came to a stop and lay quietly together, she finally said, c’mon, untie me, I want to go home. And we untied her and I remember M walked through the bushes with her and got his bike and walked her down the road, past the fields to her house, where her dad was still working in the white light of the open garage on the old Jaguar he’d bought a year ago.

The next day, when it was light, I remember looking at the side yard where we’d been and seeing the grass laid flat in a big area where we’d been.

Every once in a long while, if I go back home, I will see her at a family thing and she says hi and we talk, but in the back of my mind I feel that patch of grass floating and a brief flash of her under us comes to me and I see the part of myself that I am afraid of, looking out at me, wanting out from the place I have put it. And I go cold with the possibility of being the one who did the thing to me that no-one should do to another.

And I cannot believe it is still there.

We rode our bikes down through the city in the humid night. The streets were empty and welcoming, as if the world had opened a bubble just for us to be in and I remember gliding alongside her in the warm mercury street lights and feeling my skin cool as we moved through the air. We got down in the Loop and under the El and swerved our way to the plaza where the Chagall stood as it had for 10 years already as a great tiled celebration of living. We looked at it together, bikes pulled close. She had a militant straight bang cut that gave her an Amanda Blank look before there was an Amanda Blank look. Then we kissed a long summer kiss and everything went away except for us and the figures that loosened from the wondrous block of art behind us to float free in the night among the stars. She tasted like sweet grass to me, smoky and alive and soft. I wanted to lay in that kiss forever. But then the figures floated back to their places in the seasons of Chagall and we were back in the valley of steel and glass and it was over. We rode back to her mom’s house off Rush Street and I went home, content and full.

15 years later I would meet her for a drink in New York and she would look at me over the table, still wearing her Amanda Blank hair, now an art teacher in Bed-Sty, and me a poor playwright moonlighting ad copy to pay for my dinners. She would say to me that I didn’t like fruit when she knew me then and that I was not an open thinker and that I was a closed person. That was not how I remembered any of it at all and so I was unfazed by her remarks and instead was just curious about what she recalled and what it was in her that needed to give it that shape.

And now I live 2,000 miles from that place where we had dinner and she lives not less than 20 minutes away, still teaching art to kids but now in the nickel dime area code. She has a kid and a bald blue eyed good looking husband who would be right at home with loafers and pipe. Or found, frozen and still, in the frame of a painting by a Dutch master.

We are “friends” on Instagram but I have no compulsion to reach out and through that window to her. No need to touch that place beyond remembering. It’s just all mildly funny to me now, for some reason. And that is fine.

35 years on, I sit on a couch for a $140 an hour and remember how I had apologized for three hours before I kissed the girl who’s asked me to her house when her parents were out. I was helpless to tell her that I did not want to be the person who took what they wanted from me without asking. I did not want her to be the boy I had been and who still lived inside me. And the girl was annoyed and uncharmed and her parents came home within minutes of my fumbling ask and I went home feeling like a failure but somehow like I’d done it right.

And when I look up from the memory, I am lost in the tears of my helplessness. I want to help that boy. To let him know that he is not wrong to want. That asking is not a wrong.

I am unable to help myself. Every time the 11 year-old takes a pass on anything that is work, I tell him that he is making a mistake. That life is work and finding the work you want to do is worthwhile. But giving up before anything is understood is to cut short your chance to discover the heart. You have to cut skin and break bone sometimes to get to the beating matter.

But it all comes out wrong and I make him feel stupid and lazy. Okay, Dad, he says. I’ll keep doing it if you think I should.

It is the wrong lesson and I seem unable to learn it.