Minutes to Memories

Separating from the timeline, just barely, to revel in the big ticks of life's clock

Before a recent corporate speech, I was asked for my walk-up song, akin to the tune blared in a big-league stadium as a hitter walks up to home plate. It was an easy decision: Minutes to Memories by 1980s rocker John Mellencamp, a.k.a. John Cougar.

My serious fandom of Mr. Cougar barely survived the last time I saw him in concert, at a plain amphitheater long since abandoned, half-heartedly mouthing his most saccharine radio hits and cashing his check. Unlike some of his catalog, this one tune, Minutes to Memories, has come to mean more to me over time, mostly because of a few dark hours exactly five years ago tomorrow night.

September of 2020 was the deepest part of the pandemic and I was in a race through diagnostic tests to get eligible for the complex surgery to remove a malignant tumor from my sinus. I had begged my way into an extra MRI appointment at 10 pm on a Saturday, six days before a surgery slot was open.

The technician who had immobilized my arms was about to wedge my head into position with sponges on the machine’s sliding slab and secure it with a hard plastic cage, barely larger than my skull. Before he could crank the screws on the face frame, I was told I had to put on a surgical mask underneath to comply with Maryland’s COVID restrictions.

I snapped.

How could I get any more socially distanced than being inside an MRI coffin? How might I contaminate anyone when I had taken a COVID test to be eligible to even enter the facility? How would whatever I breathed onto the tube’s interior on Saturday night matter to the next Monday morning patient, after a deep disinfecting of everything in the room? None of it made sense and I was edgy and hot.

After several minutes inside, I stopped the test and tapped out, newly aware I was claustrophobic. But leaving the MRI – ordered to build a map to steer the surgical knife away from any unplanned collisions with my brain – meant giving up my surgery slot too, and postponing the tumor resection. Keeping cancer even one unnecessary day is motivational, so I started over and started bargaining.

First, I rewound the movie in my mind to my kids’ births, then to the big moments of their young lives. Walking. Sleeping in their own beds. Starting school. Learning to read. When I ran out of moments, I imagined future milestones, sequentially asking myself: would I buy a ticket to that? The price of each “ticket” was bearing a few minutes in the clanking MRI tube encasing me, caged, masked, and immobilized.

Shadowed by a statistic I was trying to avoid, I was trapped, with no control, in more ways than one. With no Valium on hand, the available escape was a cruise past two futures I could only imagine. First dates - how awkward, and for whom? First football games - with tiny bits of sweet cut grass suspended in hot sticky air. Learning to drive - jerks, resistance, panic, surrender. School plays: how might she command the stage? Moving into college - who’d be more scared? Weddings, with sounds of organs and laughs, and more. Some flashes were mundane, but each one, played out with my eyes closed tight, summoned a few minutes of sedation.

That tactic did not seem like a gift at the time. I stomped out of the imaging facility at midnight cursing and thrashing in a way that startled my friend Bob Brooks, who was waiting in the parking lot to drive me home. I had gotten through it, but terror possessed me and left me “madder than a wet hornet,” as Bob recalled.

It took months to realize that night’s coping mechanism had altered my approach to other things. Because I was born in the 1900s and not the 2000s, I grew into a haphazard multitasker instead of medically addressing my attention issues. Staying in the moment is not my inclination. But having used freeze frames of prospective joy as a mental rope ladder, I began to look for ways to pause life’s tape in real time.

Far luckier than almost everyone else with a high-grade tumor, the only cancer consequences I have today, that I know about, are in my thoughts but not my brain. You cannot escape hearing that your own body, your most personal possession, is trying to kill you. The disassociation will not be undone. Its lone benefit is a gained ability to separate the conscious from the timeline, or seem to, for a few stray instants.

Letting my mental engine disengage like my fuel-saving pickup truck does at red lights has expanded my reveling in those snapshots. I will never master stillness, but some minutes-to-memories now wash over me unexpectedly, as a wave from behind. Others, the big ones, I can see coming.

When my son first stepped on the football field for a scrimmage this summer, I smelled cut grass - just as I projected. A tractor mower chugged along a few hundred yards behind me, but the action in front of me would have triggered an imagined smell even without it. My daughter’s dorm room was as dusty and petrifying as I expected it to be on day one. Explaining the fundamentals of driving, with a teenager steering the death machine for the first time, has lived up to its thrill billing. Seeing my wife’s exhilaration at her 50^th birthday surprise party was something I would bottle and buy.

These keystones will not always turn out as projected as life plays out for real. But I will do my best to slow down to find out, and when necessary, as Mr. Cougar admonished, suck it up, tough it out, be the best I can.

“Days turn to minutes and minutes to memories. Life sweeps away the dreams that we have planned. You are young and you are the future, so suck it up, tough it out, be the best you can.” John Mellencamp, Minutes to Memories, 1985

In Case You Missed It: Higher education has a problem. Group think has created Petri dishes and it threatens our cultural coexistence. Check out FORK IN THE QUAD from earlier this week.

Camp Mystic: No column on The What For got as much emotional reaction as RIVER OF DOUBT. I long coached youth softball and one of my favorite players was later a counselor at Camp Mystic that awful night. She’s running the Houston Marathon to raise money for the families of the 27 girls who perished. I’ve donated and want you to have the opportunity here.

The Archive: All 46 columns are available at The What For website, along with a readership leaderboard. The two most recent pieces delivered to your inbox chart in at #14 and #7, respectively, so far.

Speeches: I enjoyed my time speaking to the Transportation Intermediaries Association last week and this week I debate at a housing summit with my good friend from CNN, Paul Begala. Does your corporate meeting need a speaker? Information is on the website.