[Read the first installment here. -Scott]

When I was a boy—yes, another post that begins with those dreaded five words—I realized at a young age that I was blessed with two main talents. Talent One was my gift for committing the weekly TV Guide listings to memory. Talent Two was the ability to turn the smallest of concerns into insomnia-inducing, hand-wringing worries. In short, I was a prematurely anxious child who could reliably tell you when 60 Minutes was on (Sunday, 7 p.m., channel 5).

Yes, I was quite a piece of work.

I was sickly growing up—I had everything except rickets—and attribute, at least in part, my prodigious nerves to this fact. I saw dozens of doctors back then, including, most memorably, a bald man with a bushy, Ayatolla-length beard who gave me painful allergy shots in my upper arm every other Thursday. Or, maybe my talent for worry was the byproduct of having a self-proclaimed “hard-ass” for a father, whose own talents included Door-slamming, Throwing His Boots When He Got Home From Work, and Making Everyone Around Him Feel Bad About Themselves. Whatever it was, I could always find what to my mind were extremely sound reasons to worry about pretty much anything—the hostage crisis in Iran, the small piece of glass I once carefully placed underneath a car’s tire in a laundromat parking lot (I scoured the local newspaper for months, certain that I’d find a story about a driver who, after enduring a blown tire, had lost control of his vehicle and died in a firey crash) (I never did, of course), the piece of chewing gum I’d inadvertently swallowed yesterday (what would it do to my insides?), etc. My mother’s refrain to me during those years was to try not make “mountains out of molehills,” an expression which angered me because it implied that I had some agency in this situation.

There were two primary molehills that kept me awake. Molehill One: I believed that shambling monsters came out of the woods each night, scaled the side of our house and enjoyed moonlit strolls on our rooftop. I could hear them, the awful creatures, directly above my head in my upstairs bedroom. A few years later, an older, marginally savvier me would deduce that what I was actually hearing were not the footfalls of gravity-defying “shamblers,” but the sounds of the house’s steel roof and wood frame contracting in sub-zero temperatures. Molehill Two (and this one was worse than the visits from the shamblers because it was based in reality): That I would oversleep and somehow miss the backroads school bus that picked me and took me to school each morning.

Once or twice a year I still have the familiar old panic dream where the school bus is parked in front of my family’s house, and I’m 12 years old again, and the laces of my winter boots are in a knot that David Blaine would have trouble untangling, and the bus honks once—BEEERRNNNTTTT—sounding for all the world like the cruise ship on The Love Boat announcing its imminent departure to Peurto Vallarta. Then, at the very moment that the laces finally become untangled, the driver puts the bus into gear and pulls away.

Whenever I have this dream, even now as a middle-aged man, I wake up clutching my stomach and feeling hopeless and doomed for some reason.

My younger brother, with whom I shared a tiny bedroom for 18 years, slept like a little elf in a woodland glade each night. Of the two of us, he was the fortunate one who was born without the yoke of worry around his neck. If anything, my brother, as a boy—and now as a man—had the exact opposite talent that I had: he could turn huge, gloomy mountains back into tiny, manageable molehills. I spent many lonely hours listening to his rhythmic boy-snoring in the dark, and fantasizing about one night putting a pillow over his handsome face while saying the words, “You were not meant for this world. Shhh. Go to sleep now. That’s it. Go to sleep.”

I have fortunately turned out to be a fairly tall man by today’s standards yet sometimes I can’t help but wonder how tall I might have been—eight, maybe nine feet? could I have perhaps played for the New York Knicks?—if all of those compounded sleepless nights, which left me blinking at the ceiling like an owl, had not stunted my growth.

As I took my place at the tail end of the hundred-person-long line in the terminal, I realized that it was the school bus-panic dream that I was reliving in that moment. I looked at my watch. I still had a full 10 minutes to get my ticket, find my luggage, and catch my plane to Syracuse. Ten whole minutes! It was both possible and utterly impossible at once. I clutched my stomach and experienced the all-too-familiar mixture of hopelessness and doom. A baby’s lung-inverting wail echoed in the rafters of the terminal. Around 60-percent of the people in line in front of me were now sitting or stretching out on the cold floor, resigning themselves to the fact that the line wasn’t going to be moving for quite some time. I watched a woman openly change her infant’s diaper. She deposited the crap-packed diaper in a nearby trashcan. Whenever the air vent cycled on, I had no choice but to cover my nose with my jacket’s collar. Some of the line’s “men folk”—the dads, the husbands and the boyfriends in each traveling unit—were, like Early Man himself, constructing tent-like shelters out of winter jackets and carry-on luggage. The terminal began to resemble a makeshift refugee camp.

I was sure that it was only a matter of time—maybe another hour or two—before laundry was being strung up between the extendable roller-bag handles.