June 18th

'I need to tell you, the US State Department doesn't allow its employees to undergo general anesthesia without specific permission.'
'I understand,' and she drove the needle into my arm.

I was in Johannesburg, South Africa, a few days into a two week visit to the city, all expenses paid by the US government, to find out why I was sick. It was March and I'd already dropped fifty pounds off of a fit twenty five year old body and I was sleeping most of every day, too exhausted to pedal to my teaching post on the edge of the village. My Peace Corps doctors, a pediatrician and a cancer researcher, were overmatched and gave up after a few months of blood tests and hitchhiking forays from my village in the north of Botswana to the capitol of Gaborone in the south. The last visit was the clincher.

'Chris, how is your marriage going?'
'My marriage?' I saw over his left shoulder a framed picture of him with one of his patients, a research monkey at the University of Florida.
'Fine. Do you think my high white cell count, anemia and severe weight loss are psychosomatic?'
Pause. 'I think we need to send you to a specialist in South Africa.'

I woke up in a hallway. Dim lights and dull beige painted walls. I was looking at the ceiling and the last thing I remembered was the nurse giving me a shot. My throat was sore. What time was it? I had joked about them doing the proctoscopy and colonoscopy in the correct order. Now I was worried that they hadn't. One has to be careful about what one jokes about in Africa.

I told this story to my colleagues in the office earlier this week. I had turned fifty back in January and I had been delaying the required colonoscopy for months, mainly because of the last colonoscopy I'd had twenty five years earlier in Africa. I knew it would be better, easier, more prepared, but the memory of waking up disoriented in a hallway a few hours later, with a sore butt and sore throat, lingered.

And the doctor's office suggested June 19th for the procedure, meaning that June 18th was going to be a day of fasting and awful purging with the 'kit' they'd assembled for me. This June 18th was the fortieth anniversary of my afternoon spent making time stop back in 1974 and for some reason I figured that time would slow down again, perhaps for different reasons, and this seemed to fit the day very well.

For the last forty years, this day has been for stopping and thinking of important things. And, except for one occasion, in a German philosophy class when we were discussing Nietzsche and existentialism, I've spoken about it only to a very few people. As an older adult looking back at that ten year old in the bedroom staring at the ceiling, coming to grips with mortality before life had really begun yet, I smile at his earnestness, his need to think and talk about important things, his desire to live as much as he could in such a short time. In six years he would fall in love for the first time. In fourteen he would travel to Botswana. In fifteen he would get married and in twenty three and twenty five years he would have his children.

Somewhere during that time he figured out that life wasn't about the number of years (or the number of breaths, if you are a yogi) that one received. That was a random number, factored by genetics, dumb luck and a few life choices. What was important was being awake for the ride and conscious of the beauty flying by in every moment of joy and pain. What is important is seeing the colors and understanding how the light of the morning is different than the light of the late afternoon. What is important is that one embrace all of it, that one loves.