We feature new essays every Wednesday. Make it a habit to return for new content. You’ll find links to our most recent essays below and more on our contributors page. Thanks for reading. If you enjoy the work we present on bioStories, please share pieces you’ve valued with your friends.
In this week’s essay, Curtis C. Morgan looks back on a the powerful impact of a high school coach.
Weekly Featured Essay
Dead Heat: The Race Jim DeMoss Engineered
by Curtis C. Morgan
I didn’t know it yet, but in the spring of 1961 I was about to get a lesson in coaching strategy that would take me sixty years to fully digest. I was a college runner at Butler University in Indianapolis—in shape, I thought, real shape—and I had returned to my old high school, Northwood in the D.C. suburbs, where I had finished fourth in the state 880 yards the previous year. Coach Jim DeMoss was running his team through spring practice, and he spotted me standing at the edge of the track.
“Why don’t you run an 880 with Buzz and Tom?” he said.
Buzz Lawlor and Tom Rabenhorst were sophomores. I was a college runner on a track scholarship. I said sure.
Overconfidence was about to bite me on the hind parts. More precisely, I didn’t know what Jim DeMoss had already seen in those two boys—and what he was about to show them about themselves.
READ MORE
MORE ESSAYS
Parade Life
by Kate Farrell
For as long as I can remember, my father has assured me that the Fourth of July parade in our hometown is a celebration of my birthday, one day early. I am ten and stand breathless on the curb of our main street, watching our high school marching band play.
Dad puts a flag in my hand and says, “Don’t forget to thank them!” He’s swallowed into a circle of neighbors who slap him on the back and laugh about stories I can’t hear.
The majorette tosses her baton in the air, blows her whistle, then points right at me when she catches it. I wave my flag and am thrilled to have a summer birthday.
Dad can do anything. He leads the congregation in song every week at the ten o’clock Mass. He’s never off-key. He gets a perfect score when he and I do “How to Increase your Word Power” as soon as the Reader’s Digest arrives. I believe him when he tells me freckles are a sign of beauty and when he was disappointed in me when I took five puffs of a Virginia Slims 100 with my cousin.
ASD: Awe-some Delight
by Sharman Ober-Reynolds
We watched autism long before we recognized it. When Andrew was a toddler, he’d been spinning objects for half his life, and he was a phenomenon. He favored the colorful, plastic doughnuts that children stack by size on a rocking white column, but he wasn’t a stacker. Instead, he crawled forward, spinning rings on the entryway tile of our Tempe house, mesmerized by their sound, vibration, movement, color, and by the air on his face. He’d do this for hours until we stopped him. Andrew worked on his technique and learned to launch the perfect spin with his fingers, appreciating all of its subtle variations. If Andrew couldn’t find rings, he spun coins, cups, plates, and the lids of pots from our kitchen cabinet. He once spun a baby doll on its head. Years later, I related my experiences to a mom whose autistic son tried spinning an abandoned car tire in their weedy backyard.
Andrew walked on his hands and feet, his bottom in the air like a soft, padded hinge. Sometimes, he would go forward, sometimes backward, sometimes in a circle, looking back between his legs to see if he’d left a “twiddle toy” behind. He was constantly in motion, his thick hair swinging like a spangled gold curtain above his eyes, dark as embers. I would find him, grab him, and squeeze him tight. Andrew would laugh and sometimes stiffen his body and shake, so we called him Franken-baby. We also called him Thunder-thighs because of his delicious, plump, dimpled legs. Andrew now uses Thunder-thighs and Franken-baby as computer usernames. Who knew he was listening back then?
Just as Important
by Steffi Gauguet
The cardiac ICU phone buzzed on my hip. Again. Relentless. All the time. This time, a text from the nurse in Room 804. Again. THIS MOTHER REALLY WANTS TO TALK TO YOU. NOW.
All caps. Again.
ASAP, I sent back. I meant it. I really wanted to talk to her, too. She was concerned about her seven-year-old son being in too much pain. He had undergone a coarctation of the aorta repair the day prior. In comparison to what most of the other patients in this unit were going through, this was peanuts. He was extubated, awake, alert. His heart was working great, his blood pressure acceptable. All was good as far as his survival was concerned, unlike many of his neighboring patients in the cardiac ICU. They were all my patients. And as their doctor, a pediatric intensive care fellow in training, it was my job to take care of them all, as best as I could. No, better said, as best as they deserved. Not easily reconcilable standards.
The Open C Major Chord
by Matt Rosenberg
“To my left,” I said, “stands a very small man with a very large guitar. I, on the other hand, have nothing to overcompensate for.”
It was a cheap shot, and not even an original joke. Also, it was just plain mean. But it landed. The audience loved it, and I won the bout of between-song-banter.
The insult was not unprovoked. The lead guitar player had just made a dig at my choice of instrument and by extension, my musical ability.
The humorous friction that exists between us, on and off stage, is evident in the picture that we present simply by performing together. He is, indeed, a very small man, not much more than five feet tall, and he does wield an enormous guitar. I am much taller, broader, even a little chubby. I play the electric ukulele. Visually, we are a study in contrasts, just like the instruments that we play.
When I tell acquaintances that I play the electric ukulele in a rock ‘n’ roll band, I elicit a wide variety of reactions. Some people weigh the information, along with my age and rumpled-though-presentable appearance and contrive to intuit my entire life and personality. They make snap assumptions based on underinformed conjecture. Their preconceived notions about me are shallow and unfair. They are also frequently accurate.
In the Rumor of Forests
by Jeff Beyl
I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmonies.
—Gustave Flaubert
Prologue
The sky was low and leaden. Rain bombarded the landscape. The truck tires spun and slipped and splashed along the muddy, potholed logging road. Rain washed like surf against the trucks’ windshields. Mud splattered the bumpers and the sides of the trucks. The forest was cloaked in dense, grey fog. The heavens collapsed. A torrent. An onslaught. A barrage.
The woods in winter.
Dramatis Personae / Who We Were
We were the Reforestation crew of the United States Forest Service. The FFS. Short for the Fucking-Forest-Service. Some of us had degrees or were pursuing degrees in Forestry but, times being tough, most of us just needed a job and we had promises to keep. During the summer months, we cut trees down, thinning the forest so other trees could get more light from the sun and nutrients from the soil and room to grow bigger. Like pruning a houseplant to create better growth. After a stand was logged, we went through during the winter months and planted new trees in the clear-cut swaths. Future Timber.
Enjoying these fabulous essays? Click on a cover to read more:
