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WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME
Youmeand
everything.
A collection of autobiographic short stories, essays, and poetic reflections by Thom Kudla
Copyright © 2008 by Thom KudlaAll Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of AmericaPublished by LuLu
ISBN-13: 978-1-4357-2054-1
Designed by Brad WicklundProofreader: Kathryn Williams
This is a work of fiction. Though inspired by the author’s own life, including the people and events he has encountered, this book should be treated as fictitious. Any references to actual names, people, places, events, and things should be treated as
coincidental or otherwise inconsequential.
WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME
“This is the great private problem of man: death as the loss of self. But what is this self ? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus, what terrifies us about
death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life.”
– Milan Kundera
I first considered my own mortality as a 10-year-old standing
next to a stop sign, waiting for the school bus early one morning. The
sun sleepily draped itself in clouds just above the horizon. I grabbed
the pole of the stop sign and repelled myself backwards and forwards,
side to side, between arms, preoccupied with grandiose deliberation
upon mortal recognition and spiritual revelation. Seemingly contrary
to this, I had a good childhood. I just liked to think more, that’s all.
Of course, thinking isn’t always a good thing. As a child, I celebrated
thought with each curious gaze and innocent question. Life was so
much more fun that way. As an adolescent, I revered thought with
every academic venture and poetic adventure. I was deeper than the
rest. My motto became, “There is no greater freedom than that of
thought,” because I had yet to be set free by love and because I liked
the presumed intellectual sophistication of the placement of the word
vi WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME
“that” in such a mantra. And, finally, as an adult, I regretted thought. It
made me anticipate what could go wrong at any moment. It burned my
brain until my body could no longer function. It made me remember
everything I didn’t do. I didn’t ask that bubbly brunette out on a date
during high school. She always liked talking about ideas. I bet now
she’s married to an artist like me. An artist like me. I didn’t continue
playing basketball in high school. I could have gotten in better shape. I
could’ve maybe even gotten an athletic scholarship to college or, at the
least, I would’ve had a healthy reason to stop thinking. But these stories
are not about what could have been great during my first 25 years of
life – these stories are about what was unforgettable.
It was so very odd. I was an imbecilic runt for the longest
time and then, without any warning or hints to growth or other such
foreshadowing, I became who I am today. I suppose neurologically
there is some explanation for me crying because I was unable to add
single digits one day and being able to complete multiplication tables in
the fastest time in my class the next, or me struggling to speak one day
and being capable of complex sentence structures in dramatic orations
the next. Regardless, I like to think there was something spiritual behind
it – some divine spark. I think it was like that first divine gust when God
breathed life into all of us. I think I was dead until the day I discovered
intellect. It’s mostly sad and pathetic, though, because it took me a little
more than a decade to cultivate and later control an intelligence higher
WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME vii
than that of a certified idiot. They always said late-bloomer. I don’t know
much about that. I do know I focus on fictional realities and spiritual
planes beyond that of this world more often than most, and I cherish
every moment to which I can ascribe such meaningful profundities.
Interestingly enough, before my intellect had even begun to
develop exceptionally, my parents would always ask me how I had
answers to certain questions, or how I knew odd things, or why I was
asking specific questions, and my response was always the same: My
brain told me.
“Why do I have to go to school tomorrow?”
“Who told you to ask that question?”
“My brain told me.”
“Well, your brain needs to grow bigger so it doesn’t have
to ask questions like that anymore. That’s why you have to go to
school tomorrow.”
“There’s no Santa Claus.”
“How do you know that?”
“My brain told me.”
“Did you have fun at school today?”
“School was shitty.”
viii WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME
“Where’d you learn that word?”
“My brain told me.”
“We’re having macaroni for dinner tonight.”
“Oh yeah? Who told you that?”
“My brain told me.”
“Do you like your class at the church?”
“Hell no.”
“Where’d you learn that word?”
“Sunday school.”
“I would’ve preferred that you say your brain told you.”
“OK, my brain told me about ‘hell.’”
Awhile back, I started writing personal stories as gifts for people.
At that time, I was fully cognizant of the fact that my memory wasn’t
always accurate. What my brain told me to write always seemed to differ
from what actually happened. And yet writing these stories – some
more fictional than others – has helped me remember the people, the
places, and the times that comprise who I am. I decided to write about
some of my favorite moments in life up to this point because I never
want to forget any of this, because I want something to look back on
during my dying days to remind me of the life I’ve lived well and the
WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME ix
world with which I’ve been blessed. I want to show my gratitude to
those who have inspired both me and these stories. Most importantly, I
want to share myself with the rest of the world through this memorial
of, and tribute to, my most youthful years. And so I present to you what
my brain told me. Hopefully, my brain recollected what matters most
and filled in the rest with the best of its excited imagination.
“Thom, who are you, really?”
“I am what my brain told me.”
– Thom Kudla, 2008
LEGACY
“I just want to talk about a good father. … Men need examples and that’s not holy men – all of us are helped by examples. But it does seem that as men we feel better when other men show us that they are man enough to do whatever it is that we have hesitancy in doing. … So it would certainly be a fair question, on this Father’s Day, to ask, ‘What do you know about a good father?’ Now, when I say ‘father,’ I am
speaking of one who is the guardian or biological male in your life, who takes you out with them, who teaches you and gives you the instructions to follow. … A good father
is more than one who provides shelter, food and body coverage.” – Pastor Williams
My dad was always so strong. I hadn’t seen any weakness in
him, from the steadiness of his arm as he caulked our home’s side
door to the booming commands of his voice as he told me how to
throw a football. He was Hercules to me; he was Einstein to me. He
was some sort of superhero capable of extreme feats of strength and
intellect, simultaneously, never hindered, never faltering. Serious issues
would arise, like our friend’s bout with a brain tumor or my grandma’s
death, and my mom would be a nervous wreck while my sisters would
be disillusioned, but he would sit there, hands behind head, chuckling
– unfazed, unworried, resilient. I admired this strong foundation for
our family, this pillar of stability and security. (Of course, it wasn’t
until much later that I realized his way of coping with nervousness led
to those curious grins and chortles.) Whenever my sisters or I brought
10 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME
home positive school reports, he always pointed to the side of his
slightly disproportionate head, eyes and mouth wide with glory, telling
us we were lucky to have inherited his “superior intellect.” He was my
intellectual role model in that sense, though it did take me quite some
time to see beyond the lack of dynamics and liberalism in the books
he read. His stoicism kept me calm, even when I knew in the back
of my mind that repressing emotions was ultimately unhealthy. When
he told me to ask girls on dates, I said I wasn’t interested, but he kept
encouraging me, egging me on like a peer. I took this social criticism
seriously until his brother told me what a failure at flirting my father
had been. That was fine, though, because he was still all-powerful in my
mind. He was all these things to me. And I often thought he believed
the same things about himself, especially when I caught him flexing
forcefully in front of mirrors or furiously flipping through the pages of
dense readings. Then, when I was 14, I realized that he was vulnerable,
that he was human like the rest of us, that he also suffered from the fatal
conditions of this life.
What he left me – other than the obsessive self-consciousness
and the precocious intelligences, or the photographs of joyless smiles
and the memories of insecurities scintillating off the basketball court
with each awkward dribble, or even the money for a college education in
a poor man’s field – was that scar on my fingerprint, that little black dot
surfacing from my right index finger’s soft pad as if having been pricked
LEGACY 11
by a sharp pencil. That was the most important thing my father left me
with. And I could not have asked for anything more profound.
The day before the surgery, my dad guided me through a tour of
our house. He showed me what I had never seen; he showed me what
I had seen numerous times but never considered. There was no energy
in the house, at least other than our pet dog whose stubby tail wagged
in syncopation with her pulsing tongue. Everyone else maintained grim
lethargy. My mom kept silent as she balanced her checkbook. Dusty
yellow light reflected from the silver chain of her glasses. Her lips jutted
out from her plain and flat face in pouted pretense. She didn’t seem to
be thinking hard about numbers and accounting. She also didn’t seem
to be mad or displeased with anyone. I assumed she was thinking what
I was thinking: what was to happen the next day on the operating table.
We hadn’t any legitimate conclusion to what we were intellectualizing at
that moment, but my dad seemed to know exactly what was to happen.
“Sure,” he’d say, “this may be that cognitive distortion, that
fortune-teller error, but I think there’s good probability for this to
occur.” Cognitive psychology had not given him a better way of dealing
with life. It seemed to simply provide him with new labels for things he
had always thought about.
He had it all planned out. He left the door to the basement open,
allowing darkness to pervade our earthy family room. This darkness
from below, from where my dad had gone and remained, overtook
12 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME
what little light of the vibrant sun that accidentally slipped through the
motley-shaded browns of our family room’s blinds. My father would
not allow clear skies today. In the same vehement voice I had grown to
take comfort in, he asked me to join him downstairs, suggesting there
were a few new lifting exercises for me to consider on the weight bench
down there. I looked to my mom’s tired eyes, their focus and emotion
emptied onto the figures of her receipts like tears upon cold shoulders.
Was she composed? Or disinterested? Or both? I had not the time to
consider such things. My dog’s eyes were playful, hopping from each
corner of her vision in anticipation of the next comforting pat on her
bushy head. Comfort.
My dad persisted. I didn’t want to hesitate any longer. Besides,
I had insisted since middle school that I was a serious lifter. So I walked
down into the darkness of the basement, with each footstep seeing more
light of the lonely bulb dangling from the ceiling. Upon looking down
on the third to last step, I realized for the first time that the bluish-gray
basement stairs had no vertical panels between each rung. I was bound
to lose balance with such a lack of light, but it hadn’t happened all those
times before. What allowed me to walk up and down that unfinished
stairwell without troubles and without ever noticing how unsafe it was?
As my shoeless feet touched the cement basement floor, contorting to
accommodate the rough and rocky clumps of its crumbling surface, I
saw the answer to my question in the sole thread of gray hair dwelling
LEGACY 13
just above my dad’s watery eyes, irises sinking below wrinkling lids.
“What exercises have you been doing lately?” he asked, drained
and throaty.
The musty air filled my lungs with yellowish book chapters,
moth-ridden clothing, and long-since deceased ant exoskeletons. The
basement was never this unsettling. It was difficult for me to breathe
out fresh words describing my upper body work when I felt my airways
disintegrating into the dankness of the basement. With my mind failing
me, I reached for a red and black dumbbell hoping that my body would
at least remember. Some curls. Some reverse curls.
“Okay, good, good, that’s real good,” my dad said, such improper
phrasing for a distinguished professional. “Did you think to try this
one?” My dad then spread his body across the bench, his head nearly
off the edge, as he held the bell with both hands. He moved it back-
and-forth from behind his head to his neck back to eye-level. He had
shown it to me before, but for some reason I felt compelled to act as if
I had never seen him, or anyone else for that matter, show me such an
exercise. As he continued lifting, he offered more directives. “In order
for this lift to be most effective, you’d need to load up the bell with a
lot more weight.” He stopped lifting, put the dumbbell softly onto
the ground, and then he reached for the bar with jagged rust scattered
across its weights on each end. “I’m sure you’ve been using this to
bench press,” he said, noticing my approving nod. “I know that’s my
14 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME
personal favorite lift. But you have to keep in mind that the lower body
needs a workout too. This bar can help you with that.”
“Deep knee bends? Toe raises?”
“Yup, those are both good. There are others you can do at
the gym, but for the basement, those two are your best bets.” Silence.
Reflective silence. He got lost for a second in the weight, his entire
demeanor immovable and satisfied as he watched me nervously move
the bar to where I wanted it on the bench. He scratched the top of his
head and lifted himself to alertness with a contemplative gaze at the small
uncovered window at the very top of the brick wall in front of him. “Let
me show you some important things that you’re gonna have to know some
day.” I knew there had to have been something else. As though giving
a lecture, my father explained himself. “I’m going to show you all the
things I do around the house in case the surgery tomorrow prevents me
from completing such tasks.” His tense index finger constantly pushing
glasses farther against his face contrasted with the monotony, and the cold
robotics of his voice accentuated his bookishness. He walked under the
same stairs I feared losing step over and placed a small flashlight between
his teeth. The light shined upon the item below the stairs but above his
head as he reached his hand up. From far away, it looked to me like he
was about to catch a butterfly on a sunny spring day. He grabbed onto
something with his left hand and, with his right hand, motioned for me
to walk over next to him. My mind still on insects and other wildlife
LEGACY 15
creatures, I thought for a brief moment that the cylinder containing a swirl
of fiber-like mesh was some sort of beehive or bird nest. Upon seeing
the flashlight’s beam reflect from the transparent plastic surface of the
cylinder and upon noticing a black pipe’s continuous tubing interrupted
by the “nest,” I realized that it had something to do with plumbing. “This
is the water filter,” my dad said, showing the cylinder to me as if it were
a specimen in a hands-on science class. Always teaching. “You’re gonna
want to change this about once a year or, if the water starts tasting or
smelling sulfuric or metallic, more often depending. You can buy this
stuff at home improvement stores. It’s real easy to install.” He motioned
to imply that the carbon filter can be slipped in and out of the plastic
cylinder with ease. Then he decided to get Socratic. “Do you know what
the purpose of filtering is?”
“Uh, to filter out the bad stuff in water.”
He laughed under his breath. “Sure, it filters out ‘bad stuff ’
like chlorine and other bad tastes and smells, purifying the water.
But there are filters for many things. Here’s another example.” My
dad walked to the massive metal rectangle by the nearest wall. It had
a large rumpled tube flapping out of its side like an accordion made
of foil. He pulled a screwdriver out of his shirt’s pocket protector,
unscrewed the corners of one of the sides of this metal box, and
then proceeded to lift out a thin screen of blue fuzz. “This is a
furnace filter. It does a similar thing, but with air instead. It catches
16 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME
dust, microbes, fungi, some gas, and all kinda other nasties in this
electrostatic filter so that the air and heat we get across the house
is fresh and good enough for us. This is washable and permanent.
You should clean it every 3 months. I have instructions right here if
you ever need them.” He handed me a short booklet from the tiny
wooden table near the furnace. I shook his offer off with my hand,
overwhelmed with the thought of having these new responsibilities
as of that day. He put the filter and cover back on the furnace. He
dragged his feet toward a strange metal box imbedded in that same
wall. “This,” he began, swiveling the door of the box open with
dramatic and drawn-out control, “is the load center where all the
circuit breakers are. Doing the wrong thing with this stuff could be
a catastrophe, so I suggest you consult an electrician.” I cracked a
smile and shook my head in disappointment. “But, if you have guts
like I do, then you’ll figure out which breaker is assigned to which
outlets and from there you’ll turn it off or on to reset the circuit and
solve your problem.”
I caught a glance of the inside of the load center’s door, and
it had all the information I needed pasted right on there. He then
closed it quickly. I didn’t tell him that he made it sound like a more
difficult and impressive achievement than it really was. I’m not quite
sure why I didn’t tell him that. It just seemed appropriate to keep my
mouth shut. Once back upstairs, though, I felt a bit more talkative.
LEGACY 17
“How do you feel about the actual air conditioning and
heating interface?”
“The thermostat?”
“Yes,” my dad confirmed, pride in me, his son, seeming more
like jealousy.
“I got a good handle on it.”
“This is a newer one. I may need to show you a few tricks with it.”
I followed him to the thermostat where he began showing
me certain new features in this particular thermostat. My sister, still
in her comfortable sleeping attire, a Nirvana T-shirt and baggy gray
pajama pants, approached me with her hands up in the air and her head
shrugged out over her neck. As he “worked the interface,” my sister
asked him what he was doing. I explained in the exact same words he
used to explain himself to me.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “The surgeon seems really confident.
I don’t know where you’re coming from here, Dad.” My mom yelled
something in an enthusiastic tone, some incredible bit of gossip she
just heard on ET. I figured it was her way of getting my sister off my
dad’s case. I wasn’t really sure why she wanted to do that. Maybe he did
need to hear how ridiculous he was being. Regardless, something did
hit him, because he started fumbling through the thermostat’s controls
with nervous uncertainty. His frustration revealed itself in sweat traced
on the digital screen of the thermostat and a face reddened with what I
18 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME
imagined to be a dooming sense of failure.
“Well, this is brand new,” he said, “so I’m not sure I know all
the new features of this thermostat. There’s an instruction manual in
the kitchen drawer under the microwave that you can look at if you
ever need to.” He didn’t seem as threatened by this lack of knowledge.
From that point forward, he put forth a lot less effort in the tour.
“You’ve been doing lawn work for me more often in the past
few years than I’ve been doing. I’m guessing you don’t need my expert
advice regarding that.”
I tried to bring back my father the teacher. “Any advice would
be great, Dad. I’ve spent years doing things the wrong way before in my
past. Maybe you know things I don’t.”
“I taught you everything I know. At least about mowing, that is.”
I wanted so desperately to ask him what he knew about other
things that he didn’t tell me or what he knew about other things that he
never planned to ever tell me. I wanted to know why he thought it was
so important for me to go through this tour with him. Did he really
think he was going to die on the operating table? Or be paralyzed? Or
watch the cancer eat away at his throat until it reached a fatal peak in his
lymph nodes? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe all of those things.
“You already know how to handle the ash pit and the fireplace,
but how about chopping wood for the fires during the wintertime?”
I heard him singing “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” at
LEGACY 19
that moment, a tune he would gruffly attempt to make harmonious
during many Christmas Eves when we would listen to the fire crackle,
smell my mom’s pumpkin pie bake in the oven, and watch Jimmy Stewart
listen to angels getting wings. No, it was not winter yet. It was not that
dead season of skeletal trees and hibernating creatures and migratory
birds. It was still spring, a hopeful time of blossoming flowers, fresh
breezes, and soothing lively sunlight. It wasn’t his time to go. It couldn’t
have been. “Dad, I don’t think I need to know how to do that, but I still
want you to show me.”
A subtle closed-mouth smile. “Here we go then. It’s important
to wear gloves, heavy gloves like these because, after all, when touching
wood, especially fairly untreated and uncut wood, you never know when
your hand might get a splinter or something worse. I keep most of the
wood in the backyard, near the swamp on the blue tarp. You can call the
lumber company from Aurora about getting more of that wood, should
you need to.” He placed thick yellow gloves on his hands, made of a
fabric petrified enough to seem almost furry. In the garage, the gasoline
lit my nostrils on fire with sensory memories of stops at gas stations
on long family road trips. Numerous lawn care tools hung on iron wall
hooks near the long aluminum ladder. Some shiny and clean; others
rusty and dirty. Some with finely polished wooden handles; others with
chipped-away wooden poles. Hedgers, hacksaws, and other unsafe adult
tools were scattered amongst basketballs, hula hoops, Frisbees, soccer
20 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME
balls, and a Radio Flyer wagon. He lifted an axe from the corner of the
cluttered garage. “I use this axe to break down the logs both to make
transporting them into the house easier and also to make stacking them
in the fireplace a lot more safe and sturdy. Here. Check out this axe.”
He handed me the axe. Its top-heaviness caught me off guard. For so
long I had thought it took more force from the person to use an axe,
but in actuality it seemed then to me that all I had to do was have the
strength to lift the axe and then let gravity do the rest. I was looking
forward to chopping up firewood. My dad took the axe back, probably
feeling a bit concerned with the way I was holding it so loosely in my
hands, letting it swing in small movements like a pendulum. “Could
you go around back and bring me some logs so we can both take a few
swings at this?”
This was to be a great father-son moment, no doubt. Considering
how great this was, I scurried to the backyard and searched for the biggest
log I could find. I avoided the ones with moss. When I found one large
enough without moss, I didn’t notice the shattered edges creating small
splinters of wood jutting out at different points. A prick of pain hit my
right index finger like a dot of blood being extracted onto a diabetic’s
glucose test strip. I saw a slight sliver stuck in the pad of my finger. I
tried to get it out myself, doing everything from pushing against my skin
to sucking on my finger, but nothing seemed to work. So I went to my
dad for guidance.
LEGACY 21
“Oh, you forgot the first rule: Wear gloves!” he said with a smirk.
“It’s fine. Just an accident. No problem.” He went inside and brought
out some kind of manicure tool that I wasn’t quite sure of and popped
out the splinter. “That’ll probably leave some sort of mark like that.
Maybe even for the rest of your life.”
“Just from that splinter?”
“Possibly. But you know what?” I raised my head in expectancy.
“Sometimes things like that remain to remind us that no one’s perfect.”
It didn’t really make sense to me at the time, but he was right.
I saw him so vulnerable at that time in his life. It was sad and almost
pathetic. It was also beautiful in a way, this strong and powerful and
heroic figure in my life becoming tender and in need of reassurance,
in need of an affirmation of all the typical, common, crucial things he
had done for his family each day. It was less that he was preparing me
to become “the man of the house” – to me, he had become human.
And I no longer had an unattainable ideal to seek. And, for once, I
could make mistakes and never have to think that in doing so I was
so completely unlike my father the “superhero” and unworthy of his
presumed superiority. After that surgery, whenever he looked in the
mirror to flex like he used to, he would see a large scar across his neck.
During those moments, I would point with my once splinter-afflicted
finger and simply say, “Nobody’s perfect, Dad.”