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I’d like to get a copy of my permanent record,” I told a woman who answered the phone for the Clay County Unified School District 379. I was prepared to demand access via the Freedom of Information Act, but the woman wasn’t much of a stickler for bureaucracy, and within a week I was holding the much-feared repository of all bad acts from school, the grammar-school holy grail, my permanent record. The contents had been a mystery for three decades, and when I opened it I was instantly horrified. There they were—my pretty good grades, the total number of days I was absent, and nothing else . Where was the bad stuff? My single detention, turning the hall into a giant Slip ’N Slide, or the senior prank release of four chickens in the library. Where was the history of my hijinks?
    The threat of the permanent record had always been a significant deterrent to keep us from doing something really stupid. “The permanent record is a myth from cartoons,” my daughter Mary informed me, and she was correct.
    â€œWhatever happened to that lady in the one-room schoolhouse?” my wife asked one night when we were watching To Sir with Love, about the inspirational teacher. “Did you ever tell her thanks?”
    Embarrassed that she’d meant so much to me when I was younger and yet I’d said so little since, a few days later I dropped a three-pager in the mail. About a week later I got a letter in exactly the samepenmanship I’d seen twenty years earlier. “Stephen,” she wrote, “I saw you on television recently and the word media is plural, and you’ve been using it incorrectly.” Although she was right, I was a little insulted that she was picking on me. But then I realized she was still teaching. “I know your parents are proud of your accomplishments, as I am. You have grown to be the kind of person of whom every parent and teacher dreams.”
    I am covered with the fingerprints of Mrs. Lloyd and other teachers as well, like Mr. Denny and Ms. Chesser, Mr. Booth and Miss Corwin. I went through the list of every teacher for every grade as I flew back for my twentieth high school reunion. Before the half-hour slide show that would feature before and after photos illustrating dramatic hair loss and weight gain, I was situated at the bar with my best friends Bill and Gary. With a few giggles the absolute two cutest girls from my graduating class, who never spoke to me in school, sauntered up with a copy of our yearbook. The blonde started thumbing through it to what I imagined would be a mortifying photo of me—there were six in that annual alone. She flipped to the very back and revealed a single black-and-white photo held in place by yellowed tape: an archival photograph of a stunned 118-pound freshman wrestler caught from the rear and buck naked.
    I was momentarily dazed. The brunette spoke in a hushed tone as if it might be illegal for thirty-eight-year-olds to be in the possession of the same kind of shot you’d see today on an Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bag. She whispered, “Nice butt.”
    In appreciation of the compliment, I nodded, because when somebody’s right, she’s right.

3
Duty
    Young Men in Uniform
    E arly I wanted to join the army like my father, but then I saw pictures of my uncle Phil in Korea and I wanted to be a marine, until I watched a movie where deeply tanned navy guys consumed beverages out of coconuts while native girls cooed nearby. Eventually I enlisted in the only paramilitary organization that would take a ten-year-old, the Boy Scouts of America.
    I felt the urge to serve my country because the sixties were a scary time in America; college campuses were ablaze and the nation was at war. It was a time of free love and dope that could kill an elephant but not Keith Richards.
    My father thought some marching and encamping would be good for me, so the second Tuesday each month he’d drive me after supper the