About Me — George Randall
Twelve moments in my life (and one fun fact)
One
Sometime, about midway between the ages of three to seventeen — the years I lived on a salt-water canal — I had an experience that kept me from becoming a cruel wild boy, a la Lord of the Flies.
That day, I pulled my crab-trap from the water and didn’t find a crab, but an ugly puffer fish. The bait was gone, so I decided the puffer fish would replace it — crabs eat anything dead. I pulled out my fishing knife and haphazardly stabbed the fish, since I didn’t want to touch it with my hands. And again. And again. But it wouldn’t die easily.
As it twitched and squirmed, I began to actually see it and recognize what I was doing to it. It was an entity and I was not respecting it. I felt guilty and sad as I watched it slowly die. From that time on, though I continued to fish, I was no longer so cavalier about my role as predator. I still killed fish to be eaten, but did so with gratitude and mercy.
Two
One Saturday morning, my decade-old body was feeling very tired and lazy. I just wanted to stay in bed, but my mother reminded me I was supposed to be working for my father on the home construction project on the next street. I wasn’t too skilled but could do menial work and was pretty strong for my age, so I might do cement mixing or sod-laying or moving material or holding framing while it was nailed. No doubt I whined a bit as I got out of the house as if in slow motion and trudged the half-mile or so to the construction site.
When I got there, my dad first chastised me for the late arrival, then instructed me on the sod installation. I had only put in a few of the heavy pads of thick black dirt and grass when I complained that ants were climbing up my pants leg and biting me. My dad yelled at me to take the pants off, roughly helped me brush them away and then seeing my inexplicable helplessness and confusion, told me to go home. I was of no use the way I was acting.
I dragged myself back home to bed, collapsed into sleep, and woke up hours later to find that I had a high fever from my case of the chicken pox. Dad was very comforting and apologetic…oh and after I felt a bit better, I responded to my older brother’s pleas for social distancing by chasing him around and threatening him with my cooties. Yeah, he got it too.
Three
Roughly this same age, I had developed a healthy understanding of school education. Academics were easy for me and I was in a small, rural, public school — so I quickly understood that there was no benefit in doing more work than necessary to get an A.
It was almost the end of the year, and I had done all my homework in some particularly boring class throughout the year. I thought I deserved a pass, and knew it wouldn’t affect my final grade. So I turned in the worksheet, having only done the front side and ignored the reverse. Later that day, that teacher grabbed me in a rage and sat me down to finish my homework. I lied, saying I didn’t notice the work on the back of the sheet.
A few weeks later, at the school awards, the reason for her anger became clear as she gave me the ‘most dependable’ award and mentioned I had completed every homework except one was a little late. She didn’t cure me though — at university, I always made sure I balanced my workload to just try to get as low an A as plausible.
Four
When I was a young teenager, my grandma passed away. She had been a great play buddy, always had a smile, a laugh and was ready to engage in whatever games her grandchildren had in mind. I loved her deeply. Her death seemed unfair to me; it shouldn’t have happened then.
I ruminated on it for some time and the result was a lousy but heartfelt poem about death and how it always happens too soon, regardless of when it is. This is the first time I recall writing poetry when I had deep emotions that I couldn’t otherwise express, and I still will be moved to poetry at times, but I am now, recently, much better at openly expressing my feelings.
Five
As my thirteenth or fourteenth birthday approached, a school friend of mine gave me a cryptic and unexpected warning: ‘Stay away from my sister. I can’t tell you why, just stay away.’ I had never had any interest in his younger sister, probably twelve at the time; didn’t even know her. I was very confused.
But prophetically, his request became quite difficult as she and her parents were suddenly seemingly intent on getting us together. She brought me a cake for my birthday and relentlessly flirted with me at a dance. She was wearing a red sparkly mini-dress. Somehow, the two of us were maneuvered somewhere quiet and I told her I liked her outfit. “You should see my birthday outfit,” she said. I ignorantly responded, “Oh you got a nice outfit for your birthday? What does it look like?” Her outrageous flirting fell flat on a child’s ears.
Later, we were intentionally trapped together in the back of a police car for long enough that my friend’s warning could have been ignored. Fortunately, I was too confused and too innocent for anything to happen — or maybe the warning was just enough. Anyway, the short version is that the young lady was already pregnant and the family was intent on finding a dope to pin fatherhood to. Whew! Close call.
Six
A couple of neighborhood friends and I were at the beach, swimming, body surfing and generally being teenage boys. One of my friends was the boy who cried wolf. He liked nothing better than to make up a good story, just to get someone to fall for it and revel in his amusing prank.
So, as we were leaving the beach at the end of the day, we headed up a small trail through the underbrush up the dunes. My friend shouted, “Look out! There’s a rattlesnake.” Well, I certainly knew better than to fall for that, so I stubbornly refused to look down as I continued along the path. My two friends, who had been right behind me, didn’t continue. I turned around and looked to see that I had stepped over a big rattlesnake lying across the path. I doubt it was a lesson for my friend, but it was for me.
Seven
Early in my college career, I was in an honors literature class even though my intended major was in engineering. I enjoyed the class, read the novels, did research in the library and near the end of the term discovered to my surprise, that I was the only person with an A in the class and the instructor typically chose to read aloud to the class what I’d written.
This seemed wrong. Engineers can’t write, right? I wondered if I was making a mistake with my future career. I went to see the professor and told him my dilemma. He asked my major, then asked if I was good at it and whether I liked it. I told him, yes, I thought I was pretty good at engineering and enjoyed it. He decisively responded that literature was a fine hobby. That has been my mantra since and I can’t complain — I’ve made a great living in the STEM field and write for fun.
Eight
My first year in the engineering college, I went to my departmental adviser and informed him that I wanted to do something in the biomedical engineering area. He informed me that there wasn’t such a program, and furthermore, I didn’t really want to do medical. I wanted to do something in the defense industry. That was where the jobs were.
I don’t think I was slack-jawed at the time, but looking back, the gall is quite impressive to try to get someone interested in helping people to get well, to work on making better, faster missiles and radar defense systems. In any case, I stayed resolute and he reluctantly informed me I could do a pre-med version of engineering, which I happily did.
Nine
About a year later, I was walking through the physics building and saw a scientific article posted on the wall that was about a new medical device that arose from a chemical analysis method that I’d learned about in my pre-med organic chemistry. That was cool. I dug up the courage to walk into the author’s office and ask him about the topic. I didn’t understand much of what he said, but he was very nice and generous with his time. He gave me a reprint of the article and suggested I return when I wanted to do a senior project.
A year and a half later, I returned and opened the conversation by stating that he probably didn’t remember my prior visit. He pointed to his blackboard where I saw my name had stayed written those eight-teen months. That began a great relationship that completely shaped the direction of a thirty-year career. I’m glad I recognized the opportunity and was brave enough to seize it.
Ten
When I was around thirty-five, I was visiting one of my university engineering (and work-out) buddies in Arizona. We took the day to wander around the desert, kids in tow, to see the remains of ancient Native American cliff dwellings and the epic scenery.
When I finally got to our hotel, I was exhausted and collapsed on the bed. My wife curled her lips in disgust and informed me that I’d been wearing that t-shirt all day and it shouldn’t be in the clean bed. I sighed and slipped it up and over my head, but as I did so, I felt a sharp sting on the side of my neck.
“Something bit me,” I yelped as I jumped out of bed and stepped on the folded-up stroller in the near-total darkness. My wife now started laughing at my antics, unaware of the blood dripping from my foot and the venom in my neck. At the desert museum we had seen the small but deadly scorpion of the region and I imagined the worst.
When my wife finally understood what I had said was not, “I forgot to pee,” she looked in the bed and found a spider. After I bandaged my foot, I examined it and didn’t recognize it as any particularly poisonous arachnid. I went back to bed…until I felt my throat closing up and then went in the bathroom to see a very swollen neck.
I called poison control and described the spider. They agreed it didn’t sound like it was a deadly species and, after hearing that it had been at least fifteen minutes since it bit me, informed me that I would already be dead if I was really allergic to it. That was reassuring. After a few minutes, I sweated profusely, then the swelling went down and that was it. Now it is just a near-death experience and my ex-wife’s favorite funny story.
Eleven
In another near miss, I was trying, with the aid of a small young woman, to get an antique family heirloom piano up a broad flight of stairs and into my house. I used some plywood for a ramp up the stairs, put a rope around the piano and attached a come-along winch to it and to a tree.
Everything went smoothly until the piano was at the top of the stairs. Cranking the winch wasn’t pulling it up over the edge. I paused, examined the situation and turned and pushed with my legs, back against the piano and told the woman to crank the winch a bit more. I strained and pushed but no luck.
Realizing, I would have to work some other way, I left the piano and found a sturdy two by six as a lever. I got the board in place leaned into it and told my working companion to crank the winch some more. Snap! The rope broke but fortunately, I was now holding the weight of the piano with the leverage of the board. I imagined one more crank on the winch when I had my back to it would have resulted in me becoming a flattened, stair-shaped cartoon character. There was another strong rope ready to go, the winch was reattached and we were able to get the piano into its new home. And I survived.
Twelve
A couple of years ago, a friend, seriously in the grip of depression and drug addiction, took temporary refuge with me in my apartment. I introduced him to my best friend, a young woman with whom I had a deep but platonic relationship. During those few days, he held nothing back and he asked me why I hadn’t had an affair with this woman, seeing as how my wife and I had lived on different continents most of the time for the last two years, plus he hadn’t seen us happy married in years. He couldn’t understand it.
When he died of an overdose a few weeks later, I think it was one thing that opened my eyes a bit to the fragility and shortness of life. I didn’t take his advice, but within half a year, I had started divorce efforts and now, I have a beautiful new baby with my best friend and life partner.
FYI
I skipped the chain-saw related to near misses, and getting by for months with a catfish spine in my foot so that I could have exactly twelve moments.
Fun fact: I have mild sidonglobophobia.
My stories on Medium
If you’d like to read more about my life, you can find some of my other true stories here:
If you’d like to read a bit of my short fiction, you can find my solitary serious fiction story on Medium here:
…and my Mad Libs style humor story here:
If you’d like to read about those mysteries of the world which I find to be of great interest, you can read the first couple in a series here:
If you’d like to read a potentially controversial take on American politics, you can find that here:
