At my wife's and my wedding reception in 1984, one of my college roommates said to my mother, "Chris looks terrific. He doesn't have the shakes anymore."

One day in 1999, when I was in Minneapolis promoting a novel, a woman with whom I went to college and hadn't seen in decades studied the cover -- which happened to be an image of my house in Vermont and the church beside it. When I told her that I was a deacon at that church, she burst out laughing. "You?" she exclaimed. "A deacon? I can't imagine you inside a church!"

And even now, whenever I have a story in a glossy magazine, I am reminded of the words of a woman who lived in the same dormitory as me one year. "You'll make it as a writer," she said. "I don't know if you're any good, but you sure are slick. And glossy magazines always want writers who are slick."

These memories have been raining upon me like hail this week. I see an image in my mind, and I flinch. The trigger for these recollections? My 25th college reunion next spring, and a memory book that classmates are compiling.

Among the many things this reunion means is that I will be 46 in 2007 -- an age that is flirting with the far side of middle age. (Yeah, I know 50 is supposed to be the new 40. Don't believe it.) It has also forced me to confront the person I was a quarter-century ago, and I'm not sure he was a young man I would have much liked.

Our class was an impressive bunch. There was a lawyer at whose feet I was worshipping from afar last year when he indicted a pol with a child's toy for a name. There was a housing advocate who won a MacArthur Fellowship. And there was an athlete who would pitch for the Toronto Blue Jays, a gentle soul who died in his sleep far too young.

But mostly my memories have been of my roommate my first year. Like that pitcher, he would also die young. He took his own life his sophomore autumn. He died so young and so many years ago that when I Google his name I find nothing.

And so I must rely solely on specific images I hold in my head. There was the purposeful way he would walk between the library and our dorm with his hands in his pockets and his head down, always, it seemed, bucking the wind. His smile was telegenic, and his gaze was deeply observant. Occasionally, he wrapped the sleeves of his sweater around his neck.

He also might have been the only person on the floor of that first-year dorm who worried about the rituals that surrounded the school's fraternity culture; whether we were making choices nightly that vacillated between stupid and (ironically) suicidal; and whether -- in the midst of the selection process called rush -- we were needlessly hurting people's feelings. His appreciation for reality might, on occasion, have been suspect, but my sense is that his moral compass was unassailable. He worried all the time about all of us.

There's a lot I regret about my behavior at college. I did nothing in moderation, including coffee and beer. There was a reason people recalled me having the shakes. I also had an absolutely Everest-sized ego, and was so self-absorbed that I would have made Lindsay Lohan look like Mother Teresa.

Still, I have forgiven myself for most of the things I did then, and I'm at peace with the reality that I might not have been especially likeable. Or, to be precise, service-oriented. Or spiritual. Or simply present when a young man who would eventually kill himself just might have wanted to share a pizza at 3 in the morning. The truth is, the world knows more about depression now than it did in the Mesozoic period when I was 18.

But I also hope that when my classmates and I gather in May and we look at how gray and wrinkled and paunchy we've all become, we will remember my roommate -- our classmate -- too. He got away before anyone would be able to Google him, and so it's up to us to keep his memory alive.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 31, 2006.)

I am not sure whether this says more about me or about the people with whom I associate, but suddenly I am surrounded by ear candlers. In November, the fiancee of novelist Steve Berry told me that Steve enjoyed having his ears candled. He said this was true, (though, in all fairness, he said it sheepishly). In December, a reader introduced herself to me in Middlebury and asked me if I ever had my ears candled. And then for Christmas, my in-laws gave me a pack of Wally's Herbal Beeswax Ear Candles.

"I had my ears candled this summer and I loved it," my brother-in-law, Clayton, told me. Clayton is the assistant treasurer for ITT, and a serious corporate executive. I mention this so you know that he is neither insane nor especially interested in what might be considered New Age healing practices involving candles, matches and ears. I think his idea of meditation is putting his Blackberry away during dinner.

An ear candle, for those of you who lead normal lives, is a hollow, ivory-colored candle that tapers at one end to a blunt point. You place the small end in your ear and then light the wide end. As the candle burns down, it -- and here I am quoting from the directions -- "helps soften old, hardened earwax and assists the body to excrete excess earwax." The lighted end is far enough from the ear that even if you are a middle-aged man with bear fur in your ears -- whole hair topiaries emerging like button mushrooms in the spring -- it's unlikely you will set your head on fire, (though, I have to assume, that, too, would soften old, hardened earwax).

When I looked at the ear candles, my first thought was, "This is strange." My second? A quote from astronaut Alan Shepard as he sat high atop a Redstone rocket and waited to be shot into space in 1961: "Light this candle!"

And so we did. We read the directions, including the disclaimer about how the FDA hadn't tested these ear candles and the product made no claim to treat or cure anything, and the first person to put a burning candle in his ear was a lunatic. Actually, the disclaimer didn't say that third part. I just think it must be true.

In any case, as my in-laws watched, I was candled. My wife performed the process, draping towels over my head and shoulders, sticking the candle through an aluminum foil pie plate to catch the ashes, and then monitoring the candle as it burned so we didn't singe off what little hair remains on my tress-challenged scalp.

The procedure took 10 minutes. At first it felt like I was holding a wide Q-Tip in my ear. After a moment, however, I heard what sounded like low-level static, a lulling and not unpleasant fuzz. When my wife extinguished the candle, we inspected what was inside the remains of the hollow taper.

Before I tell you what my wife said, I should tell you what the ear candle company says on its Web site: "There is no vacuum. There is no suction. ... Absolutely no earwax is removed from your ear while the procedure is occurring." The wax, if it is going to fall out, falls out days later.

Now, here is what my wife said: "Eeeoowwwwww!"

There in the tube was a caramel-colored hermit crab leg of something that looked a lot like ear wax. It was much darker than the candle, and we were both convinced that it came from my ear. If it was not wax, of course, that means it could be only one thing: Brain matter.

"Can't you hear better?" Clayton exclaimed, and I told him not to shout, because I really could hear better. Was this a placebo effect? Maybe.

Nevertheless, anything that pulls a hermit crab leg out of my skull is, as Martha Stewart would say, a good thing. If I thought I could afford to lose any more of my mind, my earwax, or whatever it was that was in that tube, I might become a serious ear candler, too.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on January 7, 2007.)

Here's a tip for married men with children: The next time you're going to a movie with your mother-in-law and teenage daughter, make sure the film is G-rated. Consider a cartoon. Under no circumstances take them to a movie with an R-rating that has consenting adults doing consensual things -- and I don't mean ice fishing, which might indeed be consensual, but the adults are always wearing lots of clothes and usually they're talking about smelt.

If you do make the egregious mistake of going to an R-rated movie with lots of skin (and the film isn't an educational video for dermatologists), by all means do not sit between the two ladies.

The other night I went to a movie with my 75-year-old mother-in-law, a lovely woman who views ripped jeans as sexually provocative, and my 13-year-old daughter, who certainly doesn't dress like a tart, but already owns more fishnet tights than her grandmother has sensible shoes. Why did I do this? Because, apparently, I have pudding for brains. My family was visiting my mother-in-law in Manhattan, and we had just arrived after a six-hour drive. After dinner we went for a walk, and there was the cinema and there was the movie. It was about to begin, and so in we went. My wife had the common sense to keep walking.

My mother-in-law said she knew nothing about the film, but she thought one of the actors in it was cute. My daughter agreed. Then, in the first few minutes of the movie, my mother-in-law reinforced the rightness of our decision by remarking upon how handsome this actor looked in his sweater vest.

Unfortunately, the actor didn't keep the sweater vest on for most of the movie. Nor did the blonde actress keep on her stylish array of coats and blouses and pants. She did keep on her bra in one pivotal scene (though, in truth, I have no idea why), and I was uncharacteristically grateful. Normally when it makes sense for an actress to take off her bra, I'm all for it.

Right now, the prurient among you are dying to know what movie we saw. Well, after confessing in this very space to having seen "Jackass 2" with my wife this past autumn, there is no way I am going to tell you. People already speculate about whether I have any judgment; there is no point in making it absolutely clear I have none. Besides, I want to leave it up to your imagination, which is more than the director of the film did for me.

Usually, I'm pretty comfortable with nudity in a film, especially if it's relevant to the story. It doesn't have to be relevant to the story, of course. Oh, who am I kidding? It doesn't even have to make sense. The problem this time, I discovered, is that there are some movie moments that are better shared with your significant other than with your mother-in-law and your daughter.

Just for the record, my parents were every bit as incapable of picking appropriate family fare as I am. Among the first movies I saw in a theater? "Goodbye, Columbus." I don't recall any sex in "Goodbye, Columbus," but I do remember a lot of talk about a diaphragm, and when my parents wouldn't answer my whispered inquiries about what precisely a diaphragm was, I finally shouted my question aloud in the theater. My mom whisked me into the lobby for popcorn with supersonic speed.

In any case, I'm honestly not sure whether it was my daughter or I who was most uncomfortable in the movie the other day. But I do know it wasn't my mother-in-law. Why? She had the good sense to use the film as a teaching moment. "Never sleep with a man on a first date," she instructed her granddaughter, who, it was clear, was praying to be abducted by aliens that very second. "You can get away with that in the movies, but not in real life."

Next time? We're off to "The Little Mermaid." At least she wears a bra made of clamshells.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on January 14, 2007.)

It's official: I am now the Most Annoying Middle-Aged Man in Vermont.

It all began innocently enough about two years ago when I was paying for gas at a convenience store. The young clerk handed me the credit card receipt and said, "$18.65."

And I murmured to him, "Rough year for Mrs. Lincoln."

And he asked, "A friend of yours?"

He was completely serious. Hadn't the slightest idea what momentous events had occurred in 1865. He was probably 17 or 18 years old. And so I told him precisely why it was a rough year for Mrs. Lincoln, trying not to lecture him, but no doubt growing more animated than was appropriate at a Mobil mini-mart about three minutes before it closed for the night.

Ever since then, whenever I have purchased anything and the salesperson has been a young adult and the cost has been a year of some historical significance -- 1620, for example, or 1776 or 1963 -- I have used the transaction as a (gulp) teaching moment.

I try not to. But I am unstoppable. It's become an addiction.

I do this, I imagine, because on some level I am a despicable know-it-all who can recall the year when John Winthrop died (1649). Sure, I can no longer remember what I had for breakfast most days by lunchtime, but I can tell you the year the Etch-a-Sketch was invented (1959).

But I also do it because I have come to the conclusion that dates matter.

Young adults often disagree. One time at a multigenerational gathering of family and friends, we debated why it's important to know precisely when the First and Second World Wars occurred.

"Look," a teenage boy said, "I know the First World War came before the Second. That's why it's called World War I. But who cares about the exact dates?"

I thought his grandmother was going to have a stroke. The young man was a sophomore in high school. If I needed any proof at all that I have morphed into something scary and old, I found myself agreeing completely his grandmother.

"Which came first?" I asked him. "The Beatles or Watergate?"

I might just as well have asked him to give me the chronology of the Peloponnesian War. (Just for the record, even I don't know the dates of the Peloponnesian War or who the Peloponnesians were. There are limits.) The sophomore, who is an extremely smart kid and gets good grades, wouldn't even venture a guess.

Last month I saw the revival of "Les Miserables" on Broadway, and I have two principal memories. First, the woman to my left did not stop sobbing throughout the show, and "Les Miserables" is a very long show. Very. Long. At one point I had to restrain myself from telling the woman, "This isn't real. They're actors up there -- honest. For all we know, the barricades are made of Styrofoam." Second, despite the fact that huge dates are projected onto a screen during the show -- 1815, 1823 and 1832 -- I am pretty sure that half the audience thought the musical was about the French Revolution, including, yes, the human watering can to my left. Twice she mumbled through her tears that any moment a guillotine would be rolled onto the stage. The French Revolution, of course, occurred between 1789 and 1799. "Les Miserables?" Different century. No guillotine.

Dates matter for the simple reason that they help us to understand cause and effect. Time is linear, and so is history. Everything makes a lot more sense if you recognize the order.

Consequently, for two years now I have been on my own little mission to teach a date -- and some history -- whenever I can. At the gas station. The pizza parlor. The bakery.

What will be the result of this undertaking? Someday, I am confident, someone is going to slug me for being the Most Annoying Middle-Aged Man in Vermont.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on January 21, 2007.)

I'm glad winter has finally arrived, and we have had snow and cold, and my car has been encased in ice like a bottle of vodka. The vehicle is out now, but it took about an hour to chisel it free, and I need a new ice scraper.

Every year my car gets coated in ice at least once, and I view this as a sign of the changing seasons in Vermont. It's sort of like that first sugar run or that first bluebird, only annoying.

Never before has the ice been as thick and solid as it was this time, however, and never before have I been so close to just letting it sit where it was and either calling a cab or buying a blowtorch. Also, it happened on the same day that I had a serious battle with a vending machine, and so I might not have been quite as patient with the automotive igloo as perhaps I should have been.

What happened, essentially, was this: Two weeks ago tomorrow I gave a speech at South Burlington High School, and then I went straight to the airport to catch a plane. It was snowing, and I parked on the top level, which meant there was no roof over the car. That afternoon, the rain turned to sleet, and then the next day, the temperatures plummeted to the single digits in some areas and well below zero in others. I believe at Burlington International Airport it must have been cold enough to cryogenically freeze Walt Disney's head.

When I returned to Vermont on Wednesday evening, I had honestly never seen anything quite like my car: a sedan-shaped hillock of rock-solid ice, some of it thicker by far than my fist. The plane landed about 4:30. I left the airport at quarter to six. In that hour I hacked at the ice, getting a terrific cardiovascular workout and pleasantly surprised to discover that even now I am capable of forming new combinations of expletives.

In all fairness, my language probably wouldn't have been quite so colorful if I hadn't lost a battle with a bag of Sun Chips earlier that day at another airport. I had slipped eighty cents into a vending machine, and the bag was pushed to the very edge of its shelf. And then it hung there like an icicle. I shook the machine, but it wouldn't budge. And so I found someone who could give me change for a dollar and put another eighty cents in the machine, reasoning that I would either wind up with two bags at a reasonable price, or one very expensive bag. Either way, I would be fine with the result because I was really, really hungry.

Wrong. The second bag edged the first a little farther -- so far that it was clearly defying all laws of gravity -- but neither fell off the shelf. And so I shook the machine. Jostled it. Even turned my back on it, convinced that if I pretended I didn't care and was actually leaving, one or both bags would fall from the perch. Finally I pretended the machine was a football running back and I was a linebacker, but all that accomplished was that I looked scary and insane, and like the sort of person who probably shouldn't be allowed to board an airplane. And then my flight was called, which meant that the next person planning to buy one bag of Sun Chips got three.

I only mention this because I thought about those Sun Chips a lot as I stood on the third level of the parking garage at the airport and hacked at an ice sculpture of an automobile.

Of course, I'm not complaining. OK, I am. But only a little. I had found those first days of January when it was warm enough to ride my bicycle a little unnerving. And so I was downright relieved to come home to the Vermont we know and love: The Land of the Polar Tomato.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on January 28, 2007.)