A trail of green and gray runs a dusky line across the middle of my left forearm, a mark indelible as a tattoo and integral to my being as my callouses and bruises from baseball. A mark I earned from hours of pain, and one I will carry for the rest of my life with pride. It is my bow scar.

I have been a longbow archer for years, since my father first let me try shooting a bow and arrow when I was about eight years old. One lucky bulls-eye that day made an addict, a junkie for fletch and feather itching for his next hit. My obsession for getting an arrow airborne overrode any concern for methodology until I learned the difference between compound and traditional bows. Once I learned a compound bow holds the string back for you, at least to some degree, I lost interest in modern archery techniques and dug deep into traditional archery forms. I can still remember my first D-Flex longbow, made by PSE, called the Legacy. Slick black with red wood in the grip, I put hundreds of arrows through it  before I found a crack in the handle and had to send it back. They sent another one, and it developed the same problem. I thought my overlong draw was the issue, but a few years ago I tried to find the bow online and did not come up with a single one. It would seem the design flaw extended far beyond my problems.

My next chance to own a longbow came after my brother and I discovered PVC bow making. One heat gun purchase later found me on the ice cold floor of the garage melting a length of pipe to make a bow. The limbs and grip took shape beneath my over-eager, slightly incompetent fingers. The finished bow was not well balanced or perfectly symmetrical, and some of the dirt from the garage floor made it into the white PVC, but it held a string and cast an arrow, more than enough for me to take on a real target.

It also turned out to be almost more bow than I could handle. I made a string myself out of old string my grandfather had used for trot lines. I twisted two strands into a bowstring, waxed it with Crisco, and clipped on a brass string nock. Slipping the string into place took as much strength as a store bought bow, bespeaking a hard shooting weapon.

My first shots still stand out in my mind as pure success juxtaposed with pure surprise. After stringing the bow and feeling the suppleness in its limbs, I figured it would have a respectable punch, but realistically did not expect it to have the same kind of power my professionally made recurve did.

My first shot taught me better. The cedar shaft jumped from the fiberglass, its crimson feathers spiraling. The silence of the bow almost allowed me to hear the hiss of the shaft as it buried its field point in my target, a one foot by two foot square of multiple card board sheets glued together. Add to this the string slapped my  forearm with vicious force, and I knew this do-it-yourself project was a complete success. The welt rising from  where the string bit me hurt, to be sure, but my pride soared, and repeated shots yielded a form correction, and that meant more bulls-eyes and fewer slaps.

I shot that bow for weeks, learning the art of shooting the arrow of my knuckles. The wooden and aluminum shafts left black scores across my bow hand, proof that I was constantly shooting. But those marks were far less alarming than the welts that grew into blisters, and the blisters that erupted after an especially viscous bite from my bow string. I also began to wear the skin off my pointer finger on my string hand, and soon enough it also started to bleed. I shot so much my arms weakened, and any archer can tell you tired arms mean poor form. Unfortunately, being a hard head as well as an obsessive archer, I refused to end on a bad shot, or a bad slap either, so I kept shooting until sunset or suppertime drove me inside.

One afternoon the blisters began to run with blood, a phenomenon I had dealt with before, but this time something felt different. Looking down at my bow, I realized the limbs and grip were spattered with my skin and my blood. The string also had a red stain where there had been white before where my fingers were bleeding; my bow dyed with the fruit of my limbs and fingers. My archer’s heart swelled with pride, although my more practical side realized just how much I had been shooting that year, and somewhere in my head a voice whispered, “Your mom is gonna notice that blood.”

The voice was right.

To this day, I am not sure when or how she stopped to look at my bow long enough to realize what was splattered all over it, but notice she did, and at that point my parents asked me to wear my vambrance. The open weal on my arm, which had turned green at this point, probably also helped give me away. But the damage was done, or the medal awarded, depending on who’s asking. And my efforts yielded some nice results. A few weeks after my first adventure, I got a chance to try my bow on some 3D targets at a friend’s range. Using wooden shafts and my PVC bow I buried arrows so close together in a model deer you could cover the tips with a quarter. My scar, which at this point the string rarely if ever marked, was now a badge of competence, a graduation certificate into an echelon of archers who use eye and hand to project shafts with lethal, instinctive efficiency.

I kept shooting that bow, firing to the point my home made string began to fray, and I had to buy a new set of shafts. Weeks turned into months and spring gave way to summer. I still remember the heat on the last day. Sweat poured down with the sun while I plugged away at a cardboard target in the side yard, when the bow bent back like a peeled banana in my hands, the string draped over my arm like a dead snake. I stood there a moment, nonplussed at what had just happened and reeling at the friend I lost.

Future attempts to make a PVC bow ended in failure, until I got myself an English longbow, a fearsome weapon that can cast heavy shafts close to 200 yards. It too has a viper in its string, but now when its fangs caress my scar, the old callus only glow a dull angry red, a reminder of the bow I earned my scars on. My fingers have toughened to the point that they only tingle unless I shoot over three hundred arrows in one day, but they too bear the marks of my old PVC longbow, and the rattler that lay coiled in its limbs.

Two weeks of sitting on my hands and swallowing copious amounts of fear and bile have come to an end. Having left my television news  job, I find myself in the dubious position of being free to  write for myself, but with no one offering to pay me for my efforts. Thankfully the freelance market is alive and well, and I have elected to throw my hat in the ring.

Considering how I have never been good at taking orders, I am not sorry to find myself a true writer for hire. I now have the power to choose who and what I write about. The inconvenient inverse: my potential clients can accept or reject my offer to write for them at will, but I am still taking my shot at freelance writing. Ironically, I have been calling myself a writer for hire these past few months to simplify explaining my responsibilities as a  television news producer. I am not a producer anymore, but I am most certainly a writer, and with any kind of luck I will be soon be making my living at the tip of my pen.

I have said a dozen times in the last year that I would never see myself unemployed, from an official standpoint anyone. I have had a job of some form or another, with a boss, time card, and W-2 since I was 17. 7 years of working for the man, and now I am my own boss.

What a terrifying position to be in, and here I thought choosing the right classes in college was a tough decision.

In any event, I am  headed into uncharted waters, for me anyway.  More than a few great writers started out as journalists or correspondents, Winston Churchill, Jack London, and Charles Dickens among them. Take a wild guess at who some of my favorite authors are.

One thing I have already learned as a freelance writer, choosing the right job can be as critical as using the best word in a sentence. For example, I applied for a freelance writing job about politics and debating, something I should be familiar with given my history in television news. The whole thing sounded straightforward until I noticed payment comes in the form of INR, or Indian Rupees. The job was for an Indian news service, as best I can figure anyway. Imagine my surprise, but a lesson learned on my first day I will not be forgetting.

What a  sensation, being self employed and looking for work at the same time. A glorious juxtaposition, but one that can result in huge piles of bills if I do not find a source of income soon. To that end, I have decided to take a full time job wherever I can find one, whether that will be in a hardware store or a pizza delivery place. One decisive advantage those jobs have over being a producer: I have no contract to break. That by itself, coupled with the feeling that my words are no longer coupled to the pleasure of investors on my program, makes  writing a bit more gratifying. Writing in the broad daylight is also a plus, although I must admit some of my best work came down the line in the dead of night. Still. a late night bedtime is a welcome change to a man used to trying to snag a few hours sleep every mid-afternoon.

This is the first step on a pathway that even experienced travelers will admit does not have plain markings to guide the way, but from all I gather those with initiative and true grit stand a fair chance of making a good mark on the veritable fields of paper waiting for new ink. Anyone with advice on how to find work that pays, and assignments that gratify, please let me know what you find. My hours are my own these days, so if you have something good, hit me up. If I am asleep, I’ll be forgiving if what you have to tell me ends in a good lead, or even a thread to something good somewhere else.

This is the second entry at Freedom’s Kindling, Checkpoint Infinity. Here’s praying a few sparks of hope can become a blaze of results.

This morning I didn’t want to get out of bed. Surprising, given this is my second day off this week.

But then I did bowl til midnight last night. That was an adventure let me tell you. Made a new friend who stomped me at bowling and gave me one more reason to get seventy pushups done every afternoon. I am getting ahead of myself here.

My name is Thomas Dale Miller, and I am from Memphis, Tennessee. I am a writer for KY3 news, and I want another venue to ply my craft. What you will find here are verbatim accounts of adventures, mishaps, hard falls, and heart breaks that I recall from my twenty odd years rolling along in this world. I call this moment Checkpoint infinity because there is no turning back from this moment, declaring myself a writer to the wider world, but also because the nature of infinity is that it encompasses all that has passed as well as all that will be. This blog will be a juxtaposition of past and present, with a perspective that keeps the future in mind while not over fearing it or worrying about its portents overmuch, for it these adventures I relate to you tell me anything, it is that you never know where you are going to end up. The most meticulous planner has at most a good idea what tomorrow’s lunch is going to be, and if he pretends otherwise he is blowing clouds of smoke.  So sit back and enjoy the ride. All of the events you read actually happened; there is no embellishment to be found. There is none needed, for the trials and triumphs to be found here thwart the most vivid imagination. You could only write these things if you lived them, and I did. So thank you for joining me here at Checkpoint Infinity. I hope what you find makes you smile, laugh, and cry at least a little. If I fail at that, let me at least impart the truth of what has happened to you, the way it happened to me, and the devil take the hindmost.

I stood in the Memphis sun, towering above the infield at 5′ 10 and eleven years old. My green hat, gloriously clashing with my hay colored hair had dyed itself several shades darker with the sweat and humidity. It was a practice session, but I took the moment as seriously as Game 6 of the 2011 World Series.

I wish I could say the same thing for my catcher. Something about him didn’t seem quite right. His form looked good; in fact he had a better squat going than most of our ball games, and he was staring right at me. But his eye, boring into mine, didn’t seem to comprehend that I, with my lethal fastball in my fist, was standing ready to throw. Our coach was off to the side giving him instructions on his form, and he was listening, but it was almost like he was paying me no mind. But I was a pitcher first and a philosopher later, so I reared back and released the ball.

It felt good before I even let go, and I knew as I threw the ball it was headed right for the catcher’s face. And then all my misgivings burst into full light. He wasn’t wearing a mask. He never caught without a mask, not even for practice. He had no clue that ball was coming. He was looking right at me but did not know I was throwing the ball right at him. All of this took the half a second that ball spent flying for my friend’s face. I didn’t have time to call a warning, to say I was sorry, there was no stopping it, so there I stood in perfect follow through, waiting for what I knew was coming.

The smack was delicious. There is no other way to describe the perfection of the noise of leather slapping hide.

But it was topped only by the expression on my catcher’s face. The surprise mingled with shock and a little terror that overcame him as he stared at the white baseball that had flown straight into his waiting mitt. He had just been the recipient of the most perfect pitch thrown in baseball history, and he hadn’t even seen it. He looked from his now sanctimonious glove and then back at me, standing on y rubber with a wide grin on my face, the air of a gunslinger who just one a fight hands down. That smirk dissolved into relieved laughter as my catcher kept turning his eyes from the glove to me, shaking his head. No words came. There were none to be said. That was a good season; we finished in second place after I pitched seven innings over two games. Not bad for an eleven year old, but then I had thrown the best pitch in the game that year.

These memories came back after another pitch to another unsuspecting target, although I must admit my intentions were far less noble the second time.

My two siblings and I were playing in the frozen lake, a poetic name for the half filled mosquito trap that sat next to our house. We wished it was a lake, and we hoped each frog strainer that passed through would be the one that filled the hole enough for us to have a place to fish right next to our house. But for now it was an ice pit in the middle of February, and we we were marveling at the fact that the seven foot wide four feet deep trench I had dug was now frozen solid. I had wanted to dig a whole breastworks and have mock battles down there, but every time it rained the mud and rising water pushed me back like I was an invader and my shovel an oppressor’s weapon.

So there we were in the ice and frozen mud , looking over my glaciered handiwork. My interest waned, and to liven the moment I pulled from my pocket a snow ball my brother had been keeping in the refrigerator. I’m not sure why he had it in there, since it would have survived the temperatures outside just fine, but it served my purposes all the same. A pitcher’s love of throwing knows no season, and there was a perfect target, my brother with his back turned. I wound up the ice ellipsoid and fired it. The air was so cold you could almost see the frozen trail the ball left in the air as it winged its frozen way to glory.

I knew it was going to hit him the moment it left my hand. I was no stranger to successful hits with snowballs, but my experience with Arctic warfare did not prepare me for what happened next.

A well made snowball makes a popping sound on contact and leaves a circular imprint on the target’s clothing. I expected something like that to happen when I took my shot. What I saw was the ice ball, for that is what it had become during its internment in the fridge, connect with my brother’s spine and make a ringing thudding sound.

It did not dissipate upon contact, but bounced off and rolled away in one piece.

My brother’s knees went out from him like he had been shot, and he staggered around to stare at me with eyes like plates, his face white from pain and his lips crimson from anger. But then he had saw I had reloaded with a second weapon of similar destructive capabilities and abandoned any plans of retaliation, replacing them with a pure desire to escape me and survive. My laughter rang through the frozen holler, and the three of us retreated from the burning cold to the house, where my brother’s ready tattling led to my immediate discipline, which I took with the usual stoicism of, “I might be in trouble, but I never beg Mom to top him from beating me up.”

That thought would rear its head the first time I fought my brother on even terms.

It was the better part of ten years later. Our bodies had turned into men behind our backs, and we had just begun to realize it. We were both in college, going to different schools at the time, and the whole family was gathered at my cousin’s house for Christmas Eve.

Our cousin had recently gotten into fight training to get in shape, and he wanted to share his new training and workouts with us, that is to say, he wanted to show off in front of us. That was fine with me, for he had boxing gloves and my brother and I wanted to try them out. Years before, my brother and I had boxed with gloves, and I connected with his face once, sending him to the ground. I thought this time would be no different, and we strapped on the helmets and gear.

There was no ring, but our cousin and father were outside with us to make sure no one got hurt, and their presence made it impossible for either of us to back out. We got the signal to start, and I waded in. It was dark that night, but even in the gloom as I approached my brother I took him in for the first time as something besides my sometime best friend, otherwise punching bag. His shoulders were broader, and he was not shuffling around like a coward. He was moving in with his fists up. All this I took in as we traded a few jabs, and then he reached right past my guard with a solid straight to my face. I saw a flash of light and fell to the ground. I didn’t stay down long, but I did plenty of thinking in those few seconds I was down. I knew two things: He was not going to run away this time, and he knew more about fighting than me. I stood up and waded back in, more wary this time. He was excited, he had taken me down, in front of our father no less, and he wanted more. But he didn’t lose himself with wild swinging, and after a few traded punches he got my head again. At that point our blows became a flurry, and through the pop of vinyl on face mask I heard my cousin yell out, “Thomas has more points!”

“How?” I thought. “I fell, and he has at least two head shots on me.” As I wondered how anyone could think I was winning this match, I reached out with a right hook and connected with my brother’s head.

He went down and sat on the ground, saying, “I’m done. My head hurts.”

We took off our gear and headed back to the house, and he kept shaking his head, saying “You hit so hard.”

He never knew what I was thinking the entire fight. I could have lost that fight, and I do not know that I would have minded. I knew better than anyone he had a right to whip me. But there I was, victorious in our first fair fight after years of bullying my younger brother. He had a headache most of the night from one punch, but he felt better Christmas morning and mostly forgot the whole thing a month later.

I can still feel his punch that put me on the ground, and I still remember how my brother looked the moment I realized he was my equal, in life and on the battlefield.

Matthew has many advantages over me, the greatest of which is he is infinitely cooler than I will ever be. He put this on display the first night I played on an adult baseball league in Memphis. He had volunteered to play third base coach, and he was out there directing the game as if these thirty old glory chasers were his high school charges. And they were letting him. If I had tried it on like that, they would have run me off the field. One of our best players was at the plate, and he hit pulled a line drive up the third base line.

Aimed straight at Matthew. He saw it coming, and with an adroit shifting of his feet moved out of the way, the ball whizzing through the space his head had been the moment before. Both teams erupted in cheers and applause, overcome with relief he was alright, mingled with that unexplainable male tendency to celebrate and hail the skill of the brother who has just cheated death or injury by the thinnest of hairs or the dumbest of luck. One of the guys, our team captain Timothy, yelled out, “That man looked death in the face and he LAUGHED!” We kept laughing and Tim kept talking.

“I would have died. I like death.” Both teams were chortling over Matthew’s win even as my team, the Memphis Pirates, cruised to an easy win. And in one minute my brother, who had not even come to play, was the envy of the team and the coolest guy on the field. And I would not have had it any other way.

Matthew beat me one more time that season, at a practice game.

We had our ten guys there to play, but our opponents could only field seven. We took the forfeit, but no one wanted to go home without playing, so we struck up a scrimmage game. I actually arrived late from work that day, and when I got there Matthew was on the other team, filling out their outfield. By the time I got in the dug out and warmed up, we were back in the field, and the guys told me to pitch to get in some practice. Two outs two base runners in, it was Matthew’s turn to bat against me.

He didn’t want to.

Matthew had joined the team at this point, and his bat was cold as the ice ball I had plugged him with years before. I could throw harder now, and he knew it. Not that he was afraid of being hit, but he did not want to fail again, and to me no less.

I had no problem striking him out, but I wanted to beat him at his best. I didn’t throw right away, trying to think of how to get my brother to put his heart into this at-bat.

Because you see, I had diagnosed his problem weeks ago. He swung from his ankles, always too early even against the slowest pitcher, trying to push the ball with his bat. He was afraid of striking out and of course he struck out every time.

I knew how to beat him at his own fear. There was only one way to get him to swing with authority, and that was to throw it as hard as I could at him, in a hard to hit part of the strike zone, one that he hated. And I knew just which part that was.

I fired the ball, a cutting fastball on the inside of the plate. It moved inwards on him as he swung, and I can still see etched in detail  his hips and wrists moving through the swing as he brought his bat around instead of jabbing it over the plate.

I saw in a gleaming moment his eyes follow the ball all the way in, right to the bat, and he connected with a resounding, victorious clang of metal. The ball jumped away towards the shortstop, and Matthew sprang in the opposite direction towards first base. He made it on, and he sat on that bag hooting and yelling trash at me, smiling as I had not seen him smiling in years.

And our father was watching.

He though he was happy. He thought he was proud. He never knew, and to this moment does not know, there is not a man alive more proud than me that he hit that ball. It was the first and last time he faced me as a batter, a man in front of other men, and he emerged victorious. I would have it no other way. And yet I gave him nothing. I threw the pitch I knew he wanted the least as hard as I could, knowing he was afraid of losing to me, challenging him to beat me on y terms, and he succeeded. I still look back on that at bat, and it swells my chest like I was the World Series Champion perusing his collection of rings. But my victory is my brother’s triumph, and my treasure is the glowing memory that will never lose its luster, coated though it may be by the dust of age and the sands of time.

This is the first installment of Checkpoint Infinity. My name is Thomas Miller, writing for Freedom’s Kindling.

This blog will touch on a myriad of subjects, but in the main will be retellings of life adventures I’ve had. As I have said, they are all true, and none of them are embellished. Names might be changed depending on the content of the narrative, but everything you read here actually happened. Thanks for your time, and I look forward to the next installment, A Dog and Her Boy, Their Finest Hour.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton