I was moved—more like compelled—to write this essay in response to watching Houston Texans place kicker Kris Brown miss an extraordinarily high percentage of the field goals he attempted during the 2009 season, many of them from quite close distances, chip shots in the sporting vernacular. We are not talking baseball here, where the mark of excellence is failing to get a hit only two out of every three attempts. Place kicking in football has evolved to the point where it is now considered largely automatic, particularly for kicks of less than, say, thirty yards.

Preamble – How on Earth Did We Get Here? I suggested to an associate recently that it is possible to write a respectable essay on virtually any subject one can imagine, no matter how abstruse or quotidian. I then made the tragic tactical error of inviting him to select any topic at all, in response to which I would strive to craft a collection of cogent thoughts, and possibly even some advice.

Notwithstanding all the tremendously rich and important debates and arguments that take place each day between couples—married or otherwise—about cheating, slovenly relatives, wanting or not wanting children, or whether to work or stay home, I strongly suspect that more relationships fail over one topic than any other, i.e. whether the paper towels and toilet paper should unroll over the top or out from the bottom (hereinafter referred to as the Toilet Paper Issue or TPI).

Outcome without consequence—that’s what it seems to come down to with some kids, teenagers especially. Or at least that’s how it was for the crowd I hung out with back in high school—if, that is, you can call four adolescent boys a crowd. Group would probably be more like it. We most certainly did not comprise a clique, neither in number of members nor unity of purpose or qualification. And we possessed no particular athletic prowess, academic acumen, or entrepreneurial bent that might suggest a logical institution of any sort. Indeed, we were a group only inasmuch as we lived near each other and had more or less congruent views towards authority, sharing a singular enjoyment in the flouting thereof.

Having frequently stood in wonder before the capacious bookstore shelves that pitch Atkins, Scarsdale, Cambridge, South Beach, etc., I have long fantasized about writing a diet book of my own—to be called, cleverly, The Swain Diet. It seems a road to certain riches, and if that plethora of available selections is any indication, it would appear to require precious little thought, preparation, or special expertise to crank one out, just the ticket for someone with my work ethic.

I was raised in a Baptist church in southern Maine, about which upbringing several things are worth noting to help set the context for the unusual narrative that follows. First, and rather important societally, if not directly, to this story, is to understand that being a Baptist in the north bears strikingly little resemblance to being one in the south. These differences are manifest on multiple levels, most notable being the relative scale and grandeur of houses of worship in different areas of the country.