Shadows

They want a tuberculosis test.  Were I inclined to panic attacks, that would be the trigger.  I thus begin the department head meeting with a question; where can I find the closest licensed health care professional to fill out my TB assessment form?  Varied perspectives on how sick I’ll get by walking into three or four different places are offered, and then some vigorous coughing erupts from the other end of the table.  Perhaps we could carpool?

Tuberculosis was no joke in the Malin household.  Dad got taken off to the TB sanitarium and my brother and me got dropped off at the orphanage when I was ten or eleven.  It's not the kind of thing you try to remember exactly.  Years would pass before the family came back together, and dad was never able to work again.  The disease was the undoing of any normalcy from my pre-teens through grad school, and probably why normalcy still feels a little strange all these years later.

The paperwork to volunteer as a high school baseball coach in California is slightly more cumbersome than securing access to nuclear launch codes.  The TB assessment form is premised on a conventional life, with easy check boxes. One or more signs or symptoms?  No.  Birth in a high TB-prevalence country?  No.  Been to high TB-prevalence country for more than a month?  No.  Current residence in a correctional facility?  No, and wouldn’t that sort of disqualify you to be a coach anyway?  Perhaps, fencing? 

I don’t have TB, and I don’t need anyone to tell me I don’t.  I know what it sounds like, looks like, smells like.  But the form must be completed, and that means checking the box for history of a positive TB test.  Forty some years ago I tested positive, and would again today with a conventional skin test.  But I was put on a one year pill regimen as a kid to be certain I could never contract full onset TB or transmit it in any form.  OK, did you bring the paperwork?  Smile.  You’ve never been to an orphanage, have you?  How bout we just crank up the x-ray machine and get this over with?

The crossroads of memory and the future approximates the present, and sometimes the present sucks.  So it was in the orphanage, and thus the orientation to craft a future of my own making.  Memories are shadows, and shadows are longest just after dawn and just before dusk.  The father is taken away family is blown apart days occurred in the dawn of my life.  That casts a long shadow, which I’m not sure I’ll ever quite escape.

I’ve found escape from shadow in my own family, and resolve to be sunny, unaccountably so at times.  The unnaturally positive approach finds expression in the volunteer work that necessitates the form.  I have no memory of playing catch with my dad.  His capacity for athletic endeavors was taken from us before I reached the age of remembering such things.  I’ve more than filled that gap with my brother, my son and hundreds of other young ballplayers over the years.

Or did I?  Can I ever?

Who knows?  Let's play two.