Let’s put it this way.
There was a massive, entirely unimpressed oak tree where the dashboard used to be. The van’s engine was sitting on the floor between the front seats, and it was still running, a fact that somehow unnerved me more than the blood on my sister’s face. My mom was climbing over everything to get back to us. My sisters were crying with an odd lack of enthusiasm, like bored school kids practicing for a Christmas play. I was a lot farther forward in the van than I’d been a few seconds ago — having gone through the bench in front of me, more than over it — which meant Mom was about to cross my path. As she did, I put an arm around her neck and give her a kiss on the cheek. It was the first and only kiss I ever recall in my family that didn’t involve spouses or a baby. My mother would call it the one good thing that happened that day, but perhaps with a little too much determination.
So, no, we were not a touchy family.
Grandma’s theory was that I was going to massage school to find a wife. My actual goal had been to supplement my writing income without even more desk time, but given that I ended up not doing massage or writing afterward, if I had met someone in massage school, Grandma wouldn’t have let anyone hear the end of it.
I liked being in school again: syllabi, tests, new skills. My favorite class was Deep Tissue, even though the real deal proved to be stupefyingly painful. The teacher was a short, hysterically droll Ben Stein clone (“Bueller. Bueller.”) who seemed to have even more fun than we did. He covered (and uncovered) more in an hour than any law school class, and he inflicted a bruise on hundreds of us that no amount of Biotone cream could have mitigated when he lost an abrupt battle with cancer one year after graduation. The string of the ubiquitous disinfectant wipes that he gave my partner and I after our final exam — signed with phrases like “you have reached the pinnacle” — is still among the very small pile of personal possessions that I would rescue from a burning apartment.
My main partner was a small, dark-haired woman, a recent college grad who sought to humiliate me on every exam (at least I hope she did, or I’ve done her memory a very great disservice) and who kept me on my toes in class and on the table. We had as productive a friendship as I’ve had with the fair sex, and nobody agreed more than her boyfriend, who would remotely detonate our partnership shortly before graduation.
Spending several hundred hours around people in sheets desensitizes you thoroughly, but something weird about the hot-stones classes — the late hour, or the very enthusiastic teacher, or the fact that my prior relationship with rocks had consisted of stacking them on walls, not backs — kept me from getting into the right headspace for that one. Shiatsu was easier to absorb than I might have guessed, qi meridians and pressure points arranging themselves politely around computer commands, Bible verses, and masonry tricks in my head. Oscillation was a lot of fun — gently shaking people loose — but the one thing I couldn’t seem to shake in that class was the teacher’s conviction that I always tried too hard. That ruined the class for me, because really, I was in school to win.
That win-all mentality would eventually be adjusted, but not at the hands of a teacher. Massage school wrapped up with 150 hours in the school’s working, public clinic. We were told to practice only our basic Swedish massage, and the clients were told they could have any type of massage they wanted as long as it was a basic Swedish massage. Madness! I’d just finished 500 hours of anatomy, physiology, modalities, science! I wanted to check in with every muscle, predict every response, address every issue … not give people an oil rubdown! Then one day, a client — still in her sheet — asked me to take a picture of us so she could tell her friends what she’d done for her birthday. And just that quickly (and just that slowly), it occurred to me that massage was more about making birthday presents than earning As on exams that nobody was giving.
So that was the end of massage.
I graduated, got my license, and put it on the shelf for a better, future Tom.
Which means, to Grandma’s chagrin, I came out of massage school without anything tangible to show for it, as is my habit. A habit that is a curse, but also occasionally a blessing, like with the car accident. My sister was not as fortunate as me that day: she still has a scar across her forehead from striking the ragged edge of the baby seat in front of her, a defect in the seat design that could have netted us Big Bucks, according to the lawyer who appeared briefly in our living room after the accident. I remember him clearly. He wore an ugly tie. He sweated heavily. When my parents sent him away, he retreated loudly and without grace. My parents told me they loathed lawyers. That was my first impression of the profession of law. Ten years later, I’d go to law school.
I’ve never heard Grandma’s theory about that one.
(photo: Working World)