Breakthrough (2 page)

Luke and I blurted out different patterns of numbers.

“Zero, three, seven!” Luke shouted.

“One, four, nine!” I chimed in.

We would know who got the right answer by the compliment from my mom that followed, which usually sounded something like “Great job, Luke,” followed by an overly exaggerated sigh huffing out of me.

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be like my big brother. It seemed like anything he set his mind to he could accomplish, especially if it involved computers, video games, math, or building things. Especially building things. Luke, who had a two-year head start on me from birth, had always loved engineering. Even as a kid, he walked around the house with his little Phillips head screwdriver, taking things apart and trying to put them back together. Sometimes he'd disappear outside, only to show up a few hours later with a broken radio that someone had tossed out in the trash.

On Saturday mornings, when most kids were watching cartoons, I woke up to find Luke hiding away in a corner working like a mad scientist. When I toddled my way over to see what he was doing, he looked at me like a mischievous cat that had caught a mouse and was determined to protect his prized catch from outsiders. I knew he didn't want to be disturbed, so I'd plant myself a safe distance away and watch. Watching Luke in action topped cartoons any day.

By the time I was ready for elementary school, Luke had taught
me how to play Chinese checkers. I was so competitive and wanted to beat him so badly. In addition to harnessing the concepts of strategy, playing against Luke also gave me an opportunity to test my death glare. I fantasized that my stare could penetrate his skull, blocking his mental powers and handing me my first victory. I played and glared and glared and played, but no matter how hard I squinted, I always lost. After defeat, I glared at him some more. He'd just laugh and pat my shoulder.

“Maybe next time,” he'd say. Both of us knew he didn't mean it.

While his cheerful manner just made me angrier, he didn't seem concerned. He was always moving on to his next intellectual conquest.

On rainy days, my brother and I fought for control of the family computer. It was a big desktop and I loved watching the letters and numbers I touched on the keyboard show up on the screen in front of me. By the time I was in third grade, I was able to open different programs that allowed me to paint or type stories. It wasn't long after I mastered opening and closing my browser that my uncle Ted first turned me on to the powers of the internet.

“Use your technology,” he always said. “It goes well with your brain.”

He was right. It did. I couldn't believe the wealth of information inside that machine. To eight-year-old me, it seemed like I could discover the entire knowledge of the universe if I hit the right keys.

My uncle Ted and I had a special connection. Actually, Ted wasn't even my real uncle, but since I had never known life without him, he was family. Some of my favorite childhood memories are the summer mornings when Uncle Ted picked me up and took me crabbing. The night before a crabbing day felt like Christmas Eve. I'd lay all my clothes out on my dresser and set my alarm a full hour early, checking it and double-checking it to make sure it was set, before climbing into bed. But it didn't matter how early I set my alarm, I always woke up before it. I'd get dressed quickly and stare out my bedroom window, waiting to see the headlights of Uncle Ted's beat-up blue car pull down the driveway.

When he finally arrived, I'd jump into the passenger seat. Uncle Ted was a big, stocky man, and his brown hair almost touched the ceiling of the car.

“Good morning, Jack. You ready?” he asked, smiling.

“Yeah!”

We'd spend the hour-long ride to his crabbing boat planning the most effective way to catch as many crabs as possible, arriving just as the sun began to rise over the Chesapeake.

When Uncle Ted found a good spot in the bay, we took out our crab pots, which are about the size of medium dog cages, and baited them with chicken necks before dropping them into the water.

The next several hours we spent cruising around the water, talking about anything and everything. Especially the future.

“Have you decided what you are going to be when you grow up, Jack?” he asked.

“I'm going to be a doctor,” I told him.

“Why?”

“I want to help people get better,” I said proudly.

He smiled.

After giving the crabs enough time to crawl into our pots, Uncle Ted looped the boat back to where we dropped the first pot, and I helped him haul them up to the deck. The pots were now dripping and heavy with crabs. Sometimes a little crab would squirm its way to freedom, scurrying across the deck of the boat, and it was my job to track them down. Luckily, I was quicker than the crabs. If they were very small, I threw them back into the water, where they hit the surface with a tiny smack before disappearing in the waves.

There are few feelings more satisfying than the drive back after a hard day's work of trapping crabs. When we got home, Uncle Ted steamed the crabs and I covered the outdoor tables with newspaper. That night our families gathered around to tell stories and eat crabs. We used mallets and little forks to dig out the tender meat until our tables were a mess of crab shells and the smell of steamed seafood. From my perch at the kids' table, I could hear Uncle Ted's booming laugh. Even when I couldn't hear exactly what the adults were saying, the laughter was contagious. I would fall asleep tired and full, listening to the sound of crickets outside my window.

Our house was surrounded by forests. There were trails in every direction, and Luke and I spent our evenings and weekends exploring them, especially the dark and twisty ones. We saw everything from groundhogs and squirrels to snakes. One of the trails led to a creek where Luke and I hunted for salamanders. They liked to hide under the rocks, and we took turns pulling up the rocks and trapping the salamanders in our hands. Their bodies were wet and sticky, with bright spots of color, and we examined them closely, watching the way they squirmed and how the light reflected off their skin, before releasing them. After a long day of exploring, we would arrive home to find warm macaroni and cheese waiting for us. We quickly discovered that macaroni and cheese from a box was all that my dad knew how to make.

My mom was often away when I was in elementary school. Our town of Crownsville, Maryland, is just outside Annapolis, and about an hour north of Washington, DC, but my mother did not work nearby. Every Saturday my family piled into our station wagon and drove her to the airport so she could catch a flight to Cleveland, Ohio, where she worked as a nurse anesthetist. Five days later, we'd pick her up.

The idea that my mom was a sleep doctor fascinated me. As soon as I was old enough to talk, I began begging her to let me fly to Ohio to watch her in action. I wanted to see a real-life surgery in the worst way. I had spent hours online pulling up videos of surgeries.
Watching doctors open up people was even more interesting than watching Luke open up radios. I wasn't grossed out by it at all. However, when my mom finally did decide to let me and Luke fly along with her to Cleveland, it wasn't for a field trip to the hospital. Instead, she dropped us off for a week at a farm. Seriously. “Kids love farms,” my mom said as she waved good-bye. “You will have a great time!”

I had a terrible time. My brother and I worked these crazy twelve-hour days shoveling cow poop while trying not to freeze to death or get buried in the six-foot-high snowdrifts. I had never wanted to get back to Crownsville so badly. At least I knew I wasn't going to be a farmer when I grew up.

The next year, when my mom took a job in Washington, DC, I was ecstatic. It wasn't only because the closer commute meant more time together. More important, now that her work didn't involve airplane tickets, it meant I would finally be able to watch a real-life surgery!

I was in second grade when the big day came. I got all dressed up in green scrubs and washed my hands with special soap. The surgery was a simple procedure. A doctor was removing a clot from someone's foot. My mom's role in the whole process seemed anticlimactic. She basically stood watching a sleep-medicine machine, which wasn't all that exciting. What did amaze me was the skill and precision of the doctors around the operating table. The entire surgery lasted only forty minutes, but I was transfixed for each second.
The doctors looked so calm as they cut into that person's foot.

The more I learned about surgeries on the internet, the more my mom's job became an endless source of fascination. I sat cross-legged in my footy pajamas, listening to her talk about her work, and it was better than story time! She explained the chemistry of how the different elements of the anesthesia integrated with the body to make people fall into a kind of deep sleep where they didn't feel the doctors' knives cutting their internal organs. It was hard for me to grasp—I was sure that I would feel it! It also inspired a great sense of wonder. I asked question after question.

Some of the most interesting stories my mom had were about the people she had met. My favorite was the one about the very, very large lady who showed up at the hospital with chest pains. The doctors decided that they needed to put her in surgery, and everything was going as expected, until the moment when the procedure had been completed and the woman woke up. The staff saw her inexplicably digging her hand deep beneath one of her flabs of flesh. When her hand reemerged seconds later, she was clutching a Twinkie. The horrified medical team stopped what they were doing and stood in awe as the lady stuffed the Twinkie into her mouth. The staff later learned it was a game she and her husband played where they hid sweet treats in different parts of their bodies. Her explanation to the doctors was simple enough: she had woken up hungry from surgery, so why not?

It didn't take long for Mom to begin implementing her core parenting philosophy that kids should be signed up for every activity under the sun, then be allowed to choose what they like.

“Life is all about finding your passion, Jack,” my mom was fond of saying. It led to a lot of experiences—and failures.

It began when my parents bought a piano for Luke and paid a conservatory-trained Russian lady to come to our house and give him lessons. I decided to give it a try. To my delight, it appeared to be the one thing my perfect sibling couldn't master, and the more he hated the piano, the more I liked it. The thing I liked best was the thought of beating my brother at something. The moment Luke announced he was quitting piano, I stepped right up and volunteered to take his place.

At first I loved it. I practiced all the time—although never enough for the conservatory-trained Russian lady—but more than enough to get polite applause from the room full of proud parents at recitals. After a while, though, I realized that since I had proven I was better than my older brother at
something
, much of the excitement I had felt over playing started to fade.

Next, my mom thought it was time to sign me up for sports, which quickly proved to be an epically bad idea. Baseball ended when it became clear that I was far more interested in daydreaming and making daisy chains off in right field than hitting or catching the
ball. Tennis, which my mother affectionately referred to as a “lifetime sport,” was even worse. It was scorching hot, and all the other kids had already had years of lessons and were much better. The ground was made of sand or hard dirt, so there weren't even any daisies to make chains with. If the goal was getting my face smashed by the tennis balls, then I would have been closing in on winning Wimbledon by now. Lacrosse, which was also my mother's idea, was almost as bad as tennis. My mother figured lacrosse would be a good choice, mostly because I could use Luke's old equipment. I spent most of lacrosse camp scarring my coaches by singing off-key into my lacrosse stick and trying to avoid getting knocked down.

Learning how to kayak on the Nantahala River

The only sports I seemed to like were kayaking and white-water rafting. I had always been fascinated by the water. My parents had met on the river, so perhaps it was simply in my blood. On the weekends, my family often went to Pennsylvania or West Virginia,
where my parents dropped us off so they could kayak the Cheat, Youghiogheny, or Gauley rivers. After they finished, they picked us up to raft a calmer section.

For me, kayaking was a rush. My favorite spot, the Cheat Canyon, has over two dozen rapids rated at least Class III and even some Class IV and Class V rapids, which are for real experts only. My parents guided me down the easier spots. I felt like an action figure in my bright orange kayak, navigating nature's obstacle course. The river was its own living, breathing organism, with plenty of mood swings. Sometimes, it seemed smooth and calm, and then suddenly the water would pick me up and toss me like a leaf and I would go spinning in a new direction. I stared intently downriver, examining the rapids and trying to find the best path downstream.