Flashes of Panic

(I have other things to post about, but they’re long and complex. This is short and may amuse some people who know the character in question.)

At the swim meet this weekend I was talking, briefly, with one of my former track coaches (also a swim coach) and a College classmate who swam for him. I mentioned another swimmer who had been my first-year roommate. “How did that work for you?” the coach asked. Well, I recalled, I looked at his desk once and saw all the books perfectly squared with the desktop, and realized he held himself to a standard I just couldn’t reach. I also remembered the time I was leading a tour group of prospective students around campus, and shortly after I had explained how we were one of the few undergraduate colleges with a Neuroscience major, and that at fifteen courses or so it was probably the toughest course on campus, I spotted him coming by and waved. “I just declared my major!” he shouted. “What?” I asked, and he replied, gleefully, “Neuro!” Whereupon the entire tour group laughed.

“Well, he had to let loose in other ways,” reflected the coach.

One year, I was sitting in my office on the day before the Williams meet, shuffling events and pulling my hair out trying to figure out our best scoring strategy. [My roommate] came in to this little office by the side door, and before greeting me, picked up the starter’s pistol from my desk, and pulled the trigger.

Without checking to see if it was loaded.

I jumped right across my desk and just about wrung his neck. When my hearing came back, he was yelling, “I quit!”

I think he quit the team at least three times that day.