Clifford Dolan

An early memory I will always cherish is the day, in first grade when the entire school met outside on the playground to hear our principle give his yearly farewell address, his last opportunity of the year to tell his students how proud he was of them and to put the fear of God into them if they even dared to disrupt his "No Appreciable Accidents" record he had maintained this whole long year. And the year before. And the one before that and so on, so seemingly deep into the past, that a young mind imagined caves and clubs and saber tooth cats. There were roughly twenty days of school left and if any of us engaged in even the most minimally "risk-associated" behavior we would never, ever hear the end of it. This was our man's most prized award and he coveted it with a fervor that would make the most ardent parent-cum-football coach blush. We were reminded to not run in the hallways or the parking lot or on the sidewalk home, to ensure that reflectors and lights were installed on our bicycles, to watch out for slippery ice in the wintertime, to watch out for cars and look both ways before crossing the street. His nerves got frayed at this time of the school year. The end was near and so was the prize. "And so kids, just remember the importance of staying accident free", quipped the principle. "Safety first", and with this last utterance Mrs. Kruger, who taught the kindergartners and had done so for so many years that she would reminisce with a look of both disgust and quite resignation, choked on a piece of chicken from a serving she had brown-bagged on this day. She looked a bit startled at first and she tried to cough the offending bite of fowl from her throat but to no avail. She began to look around crazily. She began to heave, the muscles of her diaphragm desperately seeking relief. She became stunned and then started to panic, considering each staff member standing, facing the students, behind our principle. She began to become terror stricken when at last someone broke the mesmerizing spell Mrs. Kruger had cast. As the teacher dropped to her knees, Mr. Whitson, the handy-man, janitor and fill-in gymnastics instructor, lifted her up like a rag doll, put his arms around her midsection, held his own hands tightly fisted just beneath her rib cage and gave her a quick, defining squeeze. The offending piece of chicken flew from Mrs. Kruger mouth, sailed several yards through the air before striking poor Theodore Everett Young directly in the eyeball; his right-side eyeball if you were Teddy. The chicken piece, containing a bit of chicken bone, scratched Teddy's eyeball so badly that after being rushed to the hospital, the doctor on call in the emergency room that day declared young Theodore lucky, in that he hadn't been permanently blinded on his right side by the incident. Our principle was left downtrodden, exiled to the island of despair, where prizes weren't awarded for anything much at all.

I was raised in Topeka, Kansas and moved to Denver with my family when I was twelve years of age.