Childhood Dreams: Stories about youthful aspirations

When you’re a kid, anything seems possible, whether it’s becoming an astronaut or a princess, or even convincing your parents to get you that puppy. In this week’s episode, both our storytellers set themselves some lofty goals when they were young.

Part 1: On the top bunk in her childhood bedroom, Kayla Hernandez makes plans to escape her home life and become a scientist.

Kayla Hernandez is an electrical engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Collider Accelerator department. You can find her mentoring students, advocating for women's issues in STEM, and on Habitat for Humanity build sites across Long Island.

Part 2: As a teenager, Marc Abbott dreams of finding a wife and having kids, but a case of testicular torsion could ruin it all.

Marc L Abbott is a Brooklyn based author, actor and storyteller. His horror short stories are featured in numerous anthologies including the Bram Stoker Nominated horror anthology New York State of Fright, Hell’s Heart and Hell’s Mall and most recently Even in the Grave. He is the co-author of Hell at Brooklyn Tea and Hell at the Way Station, the two-time African American Literary Award-winning horror anthology. He is a Moth Story Slam and Grand Slam Storyteller winner and one of the hosts for the podcast Beef, Wine and Shenanigans.

Find out more about him at www.whoismarclabbott.com

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I'm 15 when Child Protective Services asks my dad to leave. I thought things would get better but things weren't getting better.

I'm sitting on the top bunk in my little sister Lindsay's bedroom and I can hear my mother and my middle sister fighting downstairs. My mom runs up the stairs, slams the door to the bedroom and then, after weeks without it, I could hear his voice. She gave up. She called him.

My father and I never really got along. Ever since I was eight, we had fundamental disagreements about what it meant to be a parent, to be a daughter. I know I should have been scared. I know I should have been angry. But sitting on that bunk, I was just calm.

It was months later when he would start kicking me out. It would be after I worked a late long‑night shift closing the local Dunkin Donuts, but then nights turned into days, turned into weeks.

But if you knew me when I was 15, it wouldn't surprise you to know that I had a plan. This was always a possibility so I had several plans, complete with backup plans and sub plans. I really started plotting that day on the bunk bed.

The gist of all of those plans went something like this. One, and this is the most important, work as many hours as humanly possible. God, I worked a bit. And then, two, graduate high school early.

High school was inconveniently held during most working hours, which interfered with step one.

Step three, I had to scrape together all the money I could for Aps, SATs, college applications.

Kayla Hernandez shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in September 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.

And then, four, I had to lean into my friends and my family. I had to start calling people, figure out who I could stay with and for how long.

So when I was ready to leave, I had all of my stuff in a garbage bag. You know, clothes, books, toothpaste. I had my bike stashed in the garage. And this wasn't a decision I made lightly. I'm not standing here trying to convince you guys that if you have a disagreement with your parents, you should run away. That's not a good idea. This was really my last stitch. This was the last effort.

Growing up with my parents, it wasn't easy to be a person, much less succeed as a student. I knew that if I made it work in high school, I was probably going to be okay. But I thought if I wanted a shot at being anyone, I had to go.

All that was left to do was to decide my major. And like I said, growing up with my parents, it kind of felt like your soul was being squished into a box a few sizes too small. In my high school science classes, I learned what it felt like to take up a little more space. My teachers, the other students. they all encouraged me. STEM gave me a place to be after school and the people in STEM, they're what held me together. When everything else was falling apart, science always made sense.

So I participated in Science Olympiads and I also was in a research program underneath my high school's very own resident botanist. But when I graduated high school early, I had to leave all of that behind. I knew when I chose my major, I wanted to land in a community like the one I had in high school.

At first, I thought I'd be a scientist like my research teacher, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics reminded me that most botanists don't make livable wages until after they complete their postdocs, so scientist was a no go.

I needed something fail-safe. Times like these, people like me end up enlisting. But I could not imagine the Department of Defense treating me gently so I thought next best thing, Peace Corps. And they were looking for engineers.

My research in high school was in biology. My Science Olympiads events were all in earth science, so environmental engineer felt natural. That’s sort of like botany, right? So I was off to Stony Brook.

I enrolled as a commuter student and I’d commute six hours a day. I would wake up at 5:00 AM and bike to my 8:00 AM class. I'd get there at 7:30 AM from whatever attic or basement I was staying in at the time. By the time I got to my 4:30 environmental science lecture, I was dozing off and it was hard not to compare myself to the other freshmen who got things like meal cards and eight hours of sleep. I was running off Munchkins and ____ [00:06:31]. And I still had my half‑a‑shift closing the local Dunkin Donuts waiting for me when I got home.

Then I made it work for about a semester.

After I received my first C and had a rainy day run in with an SUV at a particularly busy intersection, I knew it was time to switch to Plan B.

So I enrolled in a local community college and I started taking night classes. I told myself this is temporary. I just had to get on solid ground, prove myself and become more palatable to big universities, secure a better scholarship and I did.

A year‑and‑a‑half later, I was all set to transfer to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute when, the last semester in community college, I took an electrical circuits analysis class. At the start of my 6:00 PM woefully unair-conditioned class, my professor was usually exasperated with us. But when he talked about his career as an electrical engineer, something in him shifted.

He was exuberant. He gushed about his scrappy beginnings and ultimate rise to success and, oh, man, did I want that to be my story. The passion. The excitement. Working on big projects with brilliant people, always at the edge of what they knew. That kind of joy seemed like a distant luxury.

In the meantime, I wasn't sure I could succeed in a circuits class. But something about the way he talked about building things made me want to try. And once I dove in, I fell in love. We joked that I learned to speak the same language as the electrons.

But nothing could prepare me for when, one day, he pulled me aside after class and told me about a job opening for a technician at Brookhaven National Lab. I didn't understand. I made him repeat himself. It took all of my strength and concentration to keep a straight face when this man said, “The group leader is going to owe me a bottle of champagne when he finds out about you.”

Whether or not my professor was losing it in his old age, really, the only explanation I could think of for an interview opportunity I was being offered a chance at that joy I had seen in him. And no one had ever bet on me before so I knew I had to try. I figured, at the end of this, everyone would realize they made a really big mistake and that I should just be grateful for the opportunity to see the lab.

In the end, I interviewed with eight people in a big conference room, one right after the other for four hours. But then they took me to see the lab I could be working in and it was incredible. There were gray, blue, yellow cables hanging everywhere. It was nothing like the labs I worked in in at high school. There were fans humming, instrumentation buzzing. It was chaos personified. That was kind of perfect because, at this point, navigating chaos had kind of been my thing.

When the deputy group leader sat me down in his office, which was just covered with pictures of his family, he said, “ you must be worn out,” and then he offered me a snack. I knew right off the bat I wanted to be someone like him. So if that's what working at Brookhaven National Lab meant, getting to figure out what all those cables do and about all that instrumentation and ending up someone like Tom, I was in.

But all that said, I didn't have my hopes up. I went about my life. I was planning on moving upstate. I was actually arguing with my magnificent boyfriend about how we were going to make the long‑distance thing work when I got the phone call from the lab letting me know I got the position. I didn't even bother negotiating pay. An emphatic ‘yes' just fell out of me.

Before I knew it, I've been working at the lab for four years and it was the middle of a pandemic. I was begging a senior engineer, Kevin, to teach me how to capture gold beam from a particle accelerator into a particle collider. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or RHIC is an atom smasher.

And, no, I'm trying to be careful. It's not Story Collider. It's the other collider, the one on the east end of lovely Long Island and not the one in Switzerland. Come on, guys. What? You guys didn't know we had one of those? We do, to the power companies’ dismay.

Ultimately, beams traveling the speed of light are steered into each other in a giant detector that captures bits and pieces of the aftermath so that physicists can piece them together and glean some insights about what our universe is made of.

When there's no beam in the machine, when the machines are not running, teams of people work tirelessly in tunnels, in office buildings, meticulously repairing and upgrading the crazy network of machines.

When we start up the collider after a shutdown, the main control room is buzzing. Operators seem to communicate telepathically. But with the COVID restrictions, Kevin had been setting up the machine remotely. When he finally agreed to let me watch, I was ecstatic.

I spent hours setting up my own mini control room in my apartment. I went over and rechecked and checked again the list of important parameters to know. As it turns out, accelerators are finicky beasts and timing is critical. Everything has to go right. Hundreds of thousands of parameters have to be set correctly in order to inject into RHIC's rings.

I opened up windows with all the signals that Kevin had said to keep an eye on. I pored over email explanations. I try to commit every calculation to memory. We stayed up into the early hours of the morning adjusting timing and phasing. In the end, beam was happily circulating and my head was filled to the brim with new insights and understanding.

I started working at Brookhaven National Lab in 2016, just a few days after Christmas. In 2020, I became an electrical engineer, like Tom. Last month, my boyfriend of eight years and I, we bought a house. I'm only 40 minutes from the place I grew up in but I don't think 15‑year‑old Kayla, for all her planning, could have seen any of this coming.

When you meet people like me in high school, me, a freshman on Stony Brook, disheveled, a little sleepy, but excited to be there and to learn, be patient. You'd be surprised what they can accomplish when given enough time and space.

And if you're listening and you're like me, from a hard place and you need a nudge, take the leap. You are worthy of that joy I thought was luxury.

Part 2

It's 1987. I'm 15 years old and it's Regents week. I have the week off, so you know what that means. At 15 with the week off means I'm going to hang out with my friends. We've already planned the next day. The following day we're supposed to get together, go to the movies, go uptown to Central Park, hang out there, then hop down to 34th Street where there's an underground arcade. Because at this particular arcade, that's where all the girls are.

Marc Abbott shares his story at Caveat in New York, NY in September 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.

See, I'm a nerd boy. I like everything nerdy. And the only type of girls that would go to this arcade are nerd girls. And my goal in life was to meet, just like everyone in my mother's side of the family who's been married for 40, 50 years, you meet your sweetheart in high school. You'd get married. You push out a couple of kids. You get a house. It's great. And that was what I wanted for myself. I'm like I need to find my teenage love because, so far, that has not been working well. But I'm going to find this person.

I was really excited about going to this arcade the next day except, when I woke up that morning, something wasn't quite right. I woke up and I had this horrible pain in my balls. I'm like, “What the hell is this?” I mean it hurt. I can't even begin to explain this pain. I couldn't even get out of the bed.

And then when I looked to see exactly how bad this was, it looked like a speed knot that a boxer would get from getting hit too many times in the side of his head and I'm like, “Oh, Jesus. This is not good.”

I'm trying to think what did I do? I didn't do anything the night before. I didn't do anything yesterday. So I'm panicking because my parents aren't home.

I can't call my mother because she teaches and she's not going to leave her class to come to the phone. But my dad who's a cop and a desk sergeant, he'll answer the phone.

I call him and I explain what happened and he says, “You know what? Just soak in some Epsom salt for about 30 minutes, you'll be all right. It's not a big deal.”

So I took his advice and that was wrong, because no swelling went down and it still hurt. So I limped into my parents’ room. I find my mother's phone book. I go through the phone book looking for the family doctor. I can't find him.

So I open the Yellow Pages. Yes, the Yellow Pages, and I find my pediatrician. I call his office but they're like, “Well, you're not really one of our patients anymore.” And I explain what's going on.

So she says, “Hold on.” She puts him on the phone and he goes, “Okay, explain to me what happened.”

I say, tell him everything and he goes, “Huh. Hold on.”

Puts me on hold. A couple of seconds, he comes back. He goes, “Okay, listen to me. You have what's called testicular torsion. You need to get to the hospital right away. This is very serious.”

I'm like, “How serious is very serious?”

He goes, “Who's the person that can get to you the quickest?”

I'm like, “My dad.”

“Give me his number. I'm calling him. You go lay down.”

So now, I'm in panic mode. I'm shaking. I'm thinking I'm about to die. I don't know what I'm going to do and I'm laying down.

My father comes home, breaks through the door, rushes upstairs, throws some clothes on me and we run out, get in the car, get to the hospital as fast as we can. We get into the ER. He explains to them this is what the situation is.

They take me to the back. A doctor comes around. My father's talking to him and he comes over and he's like, “So, listen. This is what we have to do.

“What has happened is that there's a cord that supplies blood to your testicles. That cord has now tied into a knot. What we're going to have to do is cut you open, go in, untie it, then we will suture your testicles to your scrotum and then close you back up.”

And I'm like, “You're going to take my balls away?”

And he's like, “No, that's not what I said.” He said, “We're just going to cut you open and turn and untwist this and you'll be fine.”

And I'm like, “The hell!”

And I'm looking at my father and he's…

And I say, “Okay. Well, how serious is this?”

And he goes, “Well, if we hadn't caught it in time, there was a possibility you would never be able to have kids.”

Now, I'm 15 and I'm like, “What do mean I can't have kids? I can't have children? You mean I'm not going to have kids one day?”

“I didn't say that. I said we caught it in time. You should be okay.”

So, my dad, he gives me the reassurance it's going to be okay. They put me on the gurney, take me to the OR. I'm laying there and the last thing I remember saying was, “Has anybody in this room ever seen Re-Animator? The story about the mad scientist that brings the dead back to life? This room looks just like…” and that was it.

I wake up to my mother laying at my side crying. And I'm like, “Ma, are you all right?”

And she's like, “Oh, my God, he's up. Milton, Milton, he's up. He's awake.”

I'm like, “What happened? I'm so thirsty. Can I get some water? Somebody help me over here.”

My father comes in with the doctor and the doctor's like, “It was a success. You'll be fine. You're going to be sore for a while. It's going to take some time to get used to walking again but you'll be good.”

And I'm like, “So I'm fine? I'm straight?”

And he goes, “You're going to live a beautiful normal life.”

31 years later, I finally meet my nerd girl. I didn't meet her in high school, like I had planned, but I met her anyway. We realize we have the same interests. Her name is Ben and we get along famously. So as a birthday present to me, she takes me to see Les Miserables her favorite show.

As we're sitting there, we're watching the show and she leans over and she goes, “You know, I always loved the name Cosette. If I ever had a little girl, I would name her that.”

And I said, “You know, I like that name too. I agree.”

We hadn't talked about marriage but, already, I'm telling this woman that I would name my child the same name she would.

But things do work out. We get married. We decide we're going to have children but we put it off for a while. And then finally when we decided to try, we were just having a really difficult time.

One of our doctors suggested IVF, so we started the IVF process. But for whatever reason, we just couldn't get pregnant.

Finally, we decided to move from this one place because we had heard about this place in Brooklyn that basically was miracle workers. You will get pregnant being with these people, so we went to them.

They did something no one else did. They had me take a sperm sample. The doctor comes in and she goes, “Okay, so we looked at the sperm sample. You're low. Did you do anything or have you had any injuries or anything?”

And I was like, “Well, when I was 15 I had testicular torsion but…”

She goes, “Ah, that might be it.”

I'm like, “What do you mean?”

And she said, “Well, even though they caught it, there's a very strong chance it affected you enough that the sperm count is not high enough for you to have children.”

I'm like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They told me it was fine. They fixed it. Everything was fine.”

She's like, “Well, don't panic. We'll give you some vitamins. We'll put you on a regimen. We'll see what happens.”

So, over time, I'm taking all of these things but the sperm count will not go up. Maybe up a little bit but not enough for things to take.

And now, I don't know what to do because I want kids and this doesn't look like it's going to happen.

One of my friends finally said, “Well, hey, what about adoption?”

I'm like, “No, I'm not adopting children. I want my own.”

And he's like, “I know how you feel.”

I said, “No, you don't understand how I feel. I didn't meet my high school sweetheart. I didn't have the two kids that I wanted to have. I never got the house that I wanted. I'm not giving up having a child.”

And my friend sent me the links anyway.

I put off looking at these links until, one day, I said, “You know what? Let me just look.”

And those little faces started looking back at me and now I started to feel guilty, because all of these little children needed a home. They needed a father. They needed parents. Why couldn't I be one of those parents for these kids?

So I have this uncomfortable conversation with my wife about this, because even though I don't want to do this, this might only be the option we have. So we agree that if the next IVF session doesn't work, we would now look at adoption.

Several weeks go by, we never hear from the clinic again. I click on one of the links and I start filling out the forms. And when I finish, I go into the stairwell where I'm working and I just start crying because, now, I realize this next phase is something I don't want but may be my only choice.

And when I finish getting all of that anxiety and everything out, I go back to my desk and my co‑workers are like, “Your wife called.”

I call her back and I said, “Listen, I know we discussed this but I've already filled out the forms for adoption.”

She said, “Well, are you sure that's what you want to do?”

I said, “No, it's not, but it may be the only solution. We just want to be parents. We just want to have children.”

So she said, “I understand. I did call you because the clinic called because they need to see us about what happened with the last IVF.”

I said, “Okay. When do they want to see us?”

“Can you get off work today?”

I said, “I probably can leave earlier today. Did they say what happened?”

“Yes.”

I said, “Well, what did they tell you?”

“You're going to be a dad.”

Nine months later, we have Cosette. And there are days where I look at her and I just stare and she will be playing on the floor and look at me and go, “Why are you staring at me? Why are you doing that?”

And I'll say, “No reason,” which in father terms means ‘I'm happy you're here and I can't believe we finally had you.’

In hindsight I realize that I actually did get the things that I wanted. See, I met my wife through two friends from high school. The apartment we're in is in my grandmother's house. And, adopted or not, I have a child. I became a father.

And I came to the understanding that sometimes the plans you make don't go down the road you expect, but you will always end up in the place you're supposed to be.

Thank you.