It was late Spring of 1992 when I first recollect being the me who I am now. It came as a result of my fifth life crisis. I was alone in our house, precisely halfway between Central Baptist College and the First Baptist Church in Conway, AR.
At the time there was the previous me, trying to make a go of life and an unformed thought of the me of now, both inhabiting the same biological structure.
Previous Me was undergoing his fifth nearly terminal event. He wasn’t prepared. He’d thought that since it had been 17 years since the last event, he was safe. Maybe he would have been, but stuff happens.
As in Crisis 4, the “stuff” concerned The Woman who had rescued him from Crisis 3, The Woman whom he had married and who had conceived his daughter. But she was trouble, that one. This time she had been arrested for embezzling from the university which employed them both. As had been the case much too often in his life, he had felt obligated to pay for her transgression. And she had repaid him by obtaining a boyfriend.
So he was feeling cold and lonely in their house and it felt like the walls were closing in. Too much damn pressure. He’d tried to release at least some of it by Dancing to the Oldies with Richard Simmons, and had seen his weight retreat to its 1976 level of 155 on his 6’3″ frame, what he had weighed when he was rowing lightweight crew at Penn. But it wasn’t really working anymore. The walls still seemed to want to crush him. He felt as if he could stand in the center of the living room and spread his arms to touch both of he walls.