As I completed the sudoku puzzle this morning, I found myself realizing I was about to finish and not wanting that to happen. 

My coffee was just out of the pot, the dogs were lying in their pet beds next to me, the sky was just beginning to present light, the only sound in the house was the hum of the furnace in the basement and the whisper of warm air pushing through the grates. 

My reaction was to start counting backwards from ten. 

Ten . . . 

There have been two main reasons I have found myself not wanting moments to end over my fifty-seven years: one based on fear, one based on enchantment.

My sudoku moment this morning was based on enchantment. I don’t think this is just mindfulness or a result of meditation, though I only encounter these moments of felicity when I am truly living in the moment and my senses are acutely aware of my surroundings. 

Mindful moments are not always enchanting but enchanting moments are always mindful.

Nine . . .

On the other hand I sometimes grip moments tightly because I know moments upcoming are going to be miserable, or painful, or unbearable, or more likely, a way that I cannot describe with a word, or any words perhaps, dark moments devoid of light, moments of paralysis, of muscles clenching without control, of being trapped underground in a cave, my body wedged into a crevice I have to get through but which I am too big for, the weight of rock above and abyss below all that fills my mind. 

Eight . . .

My fear of water has ebbed at times, but not so much. I took swimming lessons in Marion, Indiana back in 1975. As nine-year olds my own children were winning swimming medals but I was hiding under my bed desperately hoping not to be found, not to drive to that echo chamber and that room full of metal lockers and wooden benches bolted to the floor and the steel turnstile that only turned clockwise. 

Perhaps I drowned in a previous life, or perhaps it was the instructor who took to calling me a baby when I wouldn’t let go of the side and attempt to tread water in the deep end, who said look at your sisters, do you want to be a loser your whole life, don’t you know that if you don’t learn to swim you could die someday, that holy shit, dan, do I have to work with this little bitch again, he won’t even try, he’s a little sissy, how about I just toss him in the deep end and do this the old fashioned way.

Seven . . . 

When I was born in 1966 in Huntington, Indiana, the doctor placed a little basketball in my hand and told me not to shoot until I could dribble blindfolded with both hands. Every boy born in Indiana those years got one, and many girls.

In high school we all played. I had a hoop hung off the two story garage in our backyard with acres of concrete. Paul, Scott, Craig, and Eric would at various times come over for games, two lights high on the garage, one light on the back porch of the house, and well into the night we would play two on two or twenty-one or pig or horse or just shoot.

We would never stop until a game was over or someone broke a bone. One late night in the spring of 1985, my senior year, playing two-on-two, Scott and I had the game in our hands, almost to ten, each shot worth one point. The air was dry, the sky clear, the wind rattling maple leaves just appearing, cool enough to not sweat, but it was almost midnight and I knew that if we won basketball would be done for the night. Would be done, in just a few months, forever.

So, I made sure we didn’t win. I missed my shots. I waited for Paul and Craig to catch up then kept the score within one point, back and forth, a win needing a two point margin, up by one, tied, down by one, tied, down by one, tied, up by one, tied. 

Total enchantment. 

Six . . .

My dad cried the day the last time he told us we were moving, this time away from our ten-acre farm in Marion, from our creek and our barn and our above-ground pool and our sledding hill and that rusting chain in the woods that surely was attached to some treasure buried underground.

We had moved a lot until Marion–Huntington, Dearborn, Baltimore, Canton, Cleveland, Mansfield. I had not been in the same school district until fourth grade, had not had the same group of friends two years in a row until I was eleven. Now, in July of 1980, just before my eighth grade year, we were moving again.

I held onto the leg of the baby-grand piano for a long time one night, trying to make time stop, thinking that somehow gripping something tighter, refusing to release it, shutting my eyes and holding my breath might make a moment last longer. 

Five . . . 

Summers at Camp Billings in Vermont lasted eight short weeks, eight exhausting glorious weeks full of yelling and running and competing and counseling and singing and staying up as late as possible every single night. I was well past camper age when I started going to camp in May 1987, Paul and I driving his VW Rabbit fourteen hours to the shore of Lake Fairlee.

At the end of that life-changing summer, that very last Saturday, the campers all gone from our cabin, not quite time to bring the docks in, I laid down on a picnic table in the late August sun, my arms instantly heavy, tension flowing out of my muscles onto the wood then the sandy grass then the heart of the earth, knowing that the current of my life was changing course in some magical way I had not expected.

Four . . .

My family had gathered at our apartment in Peninsula, Ohio that first year I taught in 1994. It was a weekend full of laughter and games, Wendy and I not yet engaged, my nephew Nathan just turned three and his brother Logan just born in June, the only rancor that weekend the arguments about who got to hold him next. 

As the weekend drew to a close I felt the weight of teaching on Monday sinking into me. I could not sleep, the height of the weekend collapsing into the terror of whatever might happen that week at school. I called in sick that Monday morning then sat with Cara who delayed leaving to be with me, knowing I was in trouble, soon calling Wendy and then the emergency room as I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be safe alone. 

Three . . .

Discovering that I loved to swim was miraculous. I learned to swim when I joined the high school swim team my junior year along with the entire cross country team. At first I couldn’t even put my face in the water and then there it was, rotary breathing and flip turns and swimming laps. 

The summer of 1989 I was stationed on the high dive float one windy afternoon. The dock began to swing out toward the middle of the lake, one of the two anchors obviously snapped. Anne asked me if I could reattach it and there I was, goggles on, a perfect pike surface dive, blowing out air to decrease my buoyancy, then standing on the bottom of the lake next to the massive concrete anchor, sunlight in streaks through the fifteen feet of water above me, the weight of that water wrapping around my heavy limbs, pulling the nylon rope through the eyelet, warm, content, fearless.

Two . . .

Dad’s heart attack and surgery caught everyone off guard. A vein from his leg bypassing four arterial blockages, his sternum cracked, his chest cavity stapled back together, his chance of survival less than fifty percent, he someone came through, the larger danger three months later when he found himself outside our house in Marion waiting for the tornado to pick him up and carry him away.

I found myself listening to his self-hypnosis tapes as much as he did, learning to count backwards from ten, taking in deep breaths and progressively relaxing my muscles from my feet to my head.

Late that August before the start of my seventh grade year, a year before we moved away from Marion, the fear of school starting building day by day, I pushed the tape into the rectangular tape player, began my relaxation, and desperately tried to hypnotize myself to wake up five years from then, those miserable years of fear and loss and anxiety passed over like a dream, awaking confident and fearless surrounded with close friends, my family healthy, those years of worry and fear but a nightmare lost to the fog of morning.

One . . .

In both cases, of course, time does not stand still, nor, it has taken me too many years to realize, would I want it to. I survived the pool, the start of school, my dad’s dark days and the act of counting backwards from ten has now become an act I turn to both during moments of stress and magical moments I want to sink into. 

I don’t try to hold onto moments out of fear anymore, not in decades, not since I realized that there are always enchanted moments around the corner, minutes and hours and days of sitting at breakfast tables laughing and waiting in roller-coaster lines chatting and overcoming long and short-held fears of water and speaking in public and possibly failing at things, and of weddings and babies and kittens and pop-up trailers and throwing frisbees and building fires and walks on the beach with my wife and puzzling over the joy of dogs sleeping beside me and sunlight filtering into the dining room, breathing in, breathing out, four, three, two, turning magic into memory, the shapes and sounds of enchantment tucked in around me against whatever cold, dark moments might lay ahead.