 Growing up, I had a strained relationship with my father. He was stern, and when one Friday afternoon in high school, I pitched my municipal baseball team to a big victory, but then walked home after the Jewish Sabbath began. He wouldn't talk to me. To better cope, I built a shanty in the back of our New Jersey yard, and I lived there off and on for three years amidst the squirrels and the raccoons. And then when high school ended, I was ready to head off to Israel for a year to get far away, and I did. And I read, and I studied, and I came to admire my father's careful practice of religion and medicine too. And then I decided to get very strong as well, and I did thousands of pushups and got very, very strong and grew five inches as well. And when I came home to see my parents for Passover, they barely recognized me. The month we then spent together was restorative, and I was ready to go back to Israel when I asked my father to have a catch with me. So we went into the backyard, and we took our mitts, and I asked him to make me dive, to throw a ball to the right and to the left of me, and he did. And I dove for every ball, my body parallel to the ground, my mitt outstretched, and I got the ball, and I threw it back to him so damn fast that his mitt popped and his hand hurt, and he called me Jake like he did when he was really happy, and I saw that my father was marveling at me. And then after our catch ended, I went to the way back of the yard, and I took down my shanty, and I lay its molded pine boards out by the curb, and I flew back to Israel. I was 19 years old. Two weeks later, I was sitting in the back of a bus on a way to Jerusalem. Unknown to me, there was a truck heavy with tons of floor tiles that lost control, and it slammed at great speed, flush into the back left corner of the bus where I was sitting. My head snapped back, and I broke my third and fourth vertebrae, and they hit my spinal cord, and suddenly I was sitting in my red vinyl seat, and I could barely move, and I could barely breathe, and I could barely talk. Steroids and surgery lessened the swelling in my spinal cord, and my body enlivened. After one week, a bicep flickered. After two, a quadricep flickered. After three and four, I could breathe and urinate without mechanical help, and then I saw that my body was hemiplegic. I was divided in half, and then I looked in my hands. They were caked in dead yellow skin from the wrist to the finger, and I asked a nurse to soak them, and she did, and she rubbed them with lotion, and black logs of dead skin came off. And suddenly what had been yellow was pink, and I said, wait, this skin that was now on my hands had not been part of me when the crash happened. They'd never held a ball, these hands. And what about my hair and my nails that had grown since the crash? And then I thought, will there be nothing left of me, the me that was whole for 19 years and 35 days? Four months after my crash, I walked out of the hospital, but walking was still a great difficulty for me, and so I used a wheelchair, and I used the wheelchair for four years, and then college ended, and I rose from my chair, and I became a journalist, and I used a cane and an ankle brace to walk through six continents where I did 100 stories and wrote two books that I typed with one finger at a time, and every May 16th on the anniversary of the crash, I thought back to who I had been, and it was a great comfort to me that my body had spent more time not disabled than disabled, and I started to wonder of the faraway day when I would have lived exactly as long after the crash as beforehand, and I started to call that moment my half-life, and it loomed ahead as a sort of uber anniversary, a great hinge in my life. I was born at 2 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, on April 11th, 1971. My neck broke at 12 noon Israel Standard Time on May 16th, 1990. I had thus lived one metonic cycle, the 235 month cycle of the Hebrew calendar, plus 35 days and zero minutes. I asked a friend to pinpoint for me when I would tip, when I would have lived exactly as long after the accident as beforehand, and he told me that that would happen on June 20th, 2009, at 5.15 in the morning, and I said, well, what should I be doing at that moment? It struck me that a half-life ought to be lived pertinently. Should I be riding in the back of a bus? Should I be riding? Should I be having sex? Should I jump from an airplane? And then one month shy of 38 years old, as I contemplated who I had been at the age of 19, I had a comforting thought. I thought of the half-life of a substance. The amount of time it takes for a substance to decay to half of its value is asymptotic, and what forever divides by half will never fully disappear, and so there would always remain in me pieces of my past. At 5.03 a.m., on a Saturday in June, three years ago, I walked into the backyard with my father, and we brought our mitts, and we walked where we had walked, and we stood where we had stood, and I put the mitt on the hand that I had not then worn it on, and the sky started to lighten, and I threw the ball to my father, and he threw it back, and then time passed, and I knew that we were done. My half-life had passed, and so I caught the next throw, and I took off my glove, and I picked up my cane. Thank you.