When I was 14, after we graduated from Markham Place School at a ceremony by the gazebo on the hill by the baseball fields, there was a party for my eighth grade class with pizza and a six-foot-long sub from Danny's and a DJ and stuff. We were euphoric, as kids are at the end of every school year—and even more so this year, it being the end of grade school in its entirety, and us having recently returned from an overnight class trip to Washington D.C. that had seemed to engender good feelings all around. I was a dork in 8th grade, not invited to many of the [...]

Dear Jon Pack,

Sorry for using you as a moving target.

It happened pretty regularly for a while there that summer, 1981 or 1982, I’d think—when you were eight and I was ten, or you were nine and I was eleven. It was a game we invented, your older brother Chris and I.

When I was maybe seven or eight years old, my parents took me to a zoo that had a snake-pit. It was a circular hole in the ground, ten feet deep or so, with a cement floor writhing with rattlesnakes. It was totally cool, I remember you could hear the rattles rattling. Looking down, leaning over the fence, I turned to my father and said, "What would you do if I jumped in there?"