General Essays

Pontifications, pomposity and other pretentiousness

My Part in the Downfall

/ djgourdoux / 1 Comment

For a few years now, I have been hearing and reading about generation Y, people born after 1980, and the complaints from my generation, the baby boomers, that this new generation isn’t willing to work hard, and expects to be pampered and treated as “special”.  Much of the blame for this is placed on people like me, people who coached this generation in youth and recreation league sports, where everybody got to play and winning wasn’t emphasized.   Apparently, people like me drove the competitive will out of these young minds and replaced it with the namby-pamby “oh, well, at least I tried hard.  I’m still special!”

I coached co-ed recreation league softball and boys basketball for most of the years my sons were growing up.  I have always loved sports, and played little league baseball as a child.  I was too small (I was basically a year younger than most of my classmates) to go out for football and not good enough to make the middle and high school basketball teams, but I played back yard and pick up games with other neighborhood kids every chance I got.    I became a rabid sports fan and developed a life time love for all three games. 

Early on in my sons’ lives, I noticed that, at least in my little corner of suburbia, the landscape of childhood had significantly changed.   In the post urban sprawl spread of real estate development of 1990s suburbia, neighborhoods as defined in my childhood were a thing of the past.  Kids no longer found other kids in nearby backyards and began playing together.   Instead, with neighbors further away, with technology like gaming and the internet driving kids inside more often, with parents working more hours and obsessively worrying about sexual predators, playtime had to be carefully scheduled and coordinated.  Kids had to be driven to and picked up from their friends houses.  As a result, spontaneity was largely removed, and kids had fewer opportunities to explore places and discover new friends than when I was a kid.

The largest casualty of this was the backyard or driveway pickup game.   With so many logistical factors to coordinate, getting enough kids for a game together on short notice became impossible.  Organized sports became the only way kids could play baseball or softball or basketball.

 There were two types of organized sports kids could choose from – competitive and non-competitive.   The competitive options included traveling teams, which have grown to become a unique phenomenon, and little league.  Little league wasn’t as demanding as the travelling teams, but you had to try out to make a team.

The non-competitive leagues were run by the village or the local Y.  Everybody who signed up was guaranteed a roster spot, and there were minimum playing rules to ensure that everybody played.  It wasn’t as namby-pamby as many of the critics like to exaggerate.  Score was kept, each game had a winner and a loser, and standings and season ending championship tournaments were usually tracked.   As someone who loved sports, and wasn’t good enough to make most of the teams I tried out for as a child, the non-competitive leagues were an attractive option for my boys.  We signed them up and I quickly became involved in coaching, first as an assistant  on my oldest son’s softball team, then as the head coach of my second son’s softball and basketball teams.

Going into coaching, I knew all of the different strategies and philosophies that I thought would make a great coach, and what my teams may have lacked in talent or skill would be made up for by my brilliant tactical approach to the game.  This dream lasted about as long as it took the ink to dry on my coaching sign-up form.  I soon realized that not only were these little kids with short attention spans, but that many of them had never played the game before. 

In basketball, for example, instead of implementing post or perimeter offenses or zone defenses, my time was spent trying to figure out which player could dribble the ball past the half court line, and trying to explain that unlike volleyball, you don’t have to slap and swat at the ball, you can actually catch it, or trying to convince a kid that he can’t catch a pass or get a rebound or play defense with his hands inside his shirt (this last example was made more frustrating by the fact that the kid with his hands in his shirt was my own son, Nick.)

So our weekly practices were exercises in riot control.  First and second grade boys who had been cooped up in their homes in the cold winter months were suddenly let loose in a gymnasium with about 10 other boys and a bouncing ball – their energies were as broad as their attention spans were narrow.  The chaos would be paused at the end of the session, only to be picked up where it left off on the Saturday morning games, where despite all my shouting they would still dribble into the corner and the other nine players on the court would follow, as if magnetized to the ball. 

But every now and then something amazing would happen – the ball would actually travel airborne in the general direction of the basket.  Even more amazingly, three or four times a game, it would actually go in!  The kids would jump up and down and scream, which they pretty much did all the time anyway, while in the stands, the proud Mother and Father would beam, the Mother thinking how cute my little Billy looks, while the Father began silent deliberations on Duke or North Carolina. 

Co-ed softball was even more of a challenge.   There was the second grade girl who practiced her ballet during games in the outfield.  There were the missed throws that resulted in extra bases that resulted in more missed throws.  There were fly balls that bonked outfielders on the head.   There was one of my all-time favorite players who, for reasons that will forever remain unexplained, always travelled with a portable DVD player and a copy of the film “Ghostbusters”, which he’d watch over and over while sitting on the bench between innings or waiting his turn to bat.

In both sports, in both practices and games, there was an abundance of short attention spans, confusion, frustration, and general mayhem.    And I grew to love every minute of it.   They were not only as fun as a barrel of monkeys; they actually were a barrel of monkeys.  Once I realized they were never going to comprehend a pick and roll or a suicide squeeze, I had to determine what if any value any of us, players and coaches, could get out the experience.   In time, I realized that they were just kids, and like the girls in the Cyndi Lauper song, they just wanted to have fun. 

This then became my mission – I wanted every kid on my teams to have fun.  On the surface, nothing seems easier, because kids are built for having fun.  Fun is the only reason for existence that a child has.  But after spending some time with my teams, I quickly realized and remembered that it’s not that simple.   Some kids weren’t as good as others, some weren’t as smart, some were small, some were overweight, some lacked social skills, and some came from difficult family situations.   It became apparent that for some of these kids, fun was a rare experience if not an alien concept.   

My strength was a sense of humor that isn’t as well developed as I’d like to think it is – in other words, it remains at about a fifth grade level.  This may make me come across as juvenile and sophomoric in the adult world, but it served me very well with children.   I found that the one thing that would at least momentarily hold their attention was my potential for goofiness.  They may not have listened when I tried to explain which base to throw to from the outfield, but if they thought they might hear me say something stupid, they were a rapt and attentive audience.  I think that all kids, for a myriad of reasons, love hearing adults say really stupid things.  Once I realized this, it became my secret weapon.  I’d say enough stupid things to get their attention, and then, every once in a while, I’d slip in some coaching.   They’d remember verbatim every stupid thing I’d say, while maybe 25% of the coaching seeped through – but hey, that was progress.

Knowing now how to get at least a minimum of their attention, and knowing how much they enjoyed the stupid things that I said (and did), I realized an amazing thing.   The kids would all listen to me and laugh at me together.  A really good player might be sitting on the bench next to a really bad player, and they’d both be laughing at me.   They may have had nothing else in common, but they shared the common experience of being sentenced to listen to my corny silliness.  The year would always begin with separate cliques of kids from the same schools or the same neighborhoods, groups of familiar faces unfamiliar to the other groups of familiar faces.  There would always be a kid or two alone on the outside.  My job became to break down these groups and meld them all together into a team, a team that may or may not have won many games, but a team, and all that means.   Above all else, I loved watching those early season cliques dissolve, and I loved it when the good players would cheer on or try to buck up the bad players, and even more, when the cool kids found something interesting in one of the un-cool kids. 

I coached for I think eleven years, until Nick was out of high school.  Over the years, I actually had some teams that were good enough to win championships.  I also had teams that failed to win a game.   The one consistent thing was, I believe, despite the fact that no statistics were kept, and regardless of our won-loss record, every year my teams lead the league in laughter.  

Every year, I’d watch these collections of kids become a team, and that is what these leagues were all about.  I don’t mean to imply that I was a brilliant motivator or supremely skilled in developing young people.   Most of the other coaches were just as effective, using their own methods and skill.  It was the structure of the leagues and their mission that everybody gets a chance to play and learn the game that allowed teams to develop.  More than that, it was the kids themselves.  Adults have a tendency to take credit for too much; that these kids were able to overcome their own differences and preconceptions is ultimately a tribute to the open-mindedness that young children still possess.  It’s adults who close these minds with fear and suspicion and distrust. 

Now these kids, whose minds I helped fill with unreasonable feelings of self-worth, are young adults starting their careers.  We keep hearing how demanding they are and how they expect to be treated as if they are something special.  They apparently believe the “everybody is a winner, everybody is special” philosophy learned in our sports leagues.  Baby boomers have difficulty understanding this, thinking, I’m not special, I’m lucky to have a job, and if I have to work 60 hours a week to keep it, then that’s what I’ll do.  What makes these kids think they are so special?

Maybe the generation Y kids will continue to insist they are special.  Maybe they won’t stand for their jobs being outsourced.   Maybe they’ll feel the job is lucky to have them.  Maybe they won’t put up with all the crap the baby boomers assumed was owed to their bosses.

One topical book refers to this generational difference as “Hard America” vs “Soft America”;  that the baby boomers of “Hard America” are driven by competition and accountability, while the “Soft America” of generation Y, having been coddled all these years, is inherently weaker, and needs the protection of government regulation.  I’d argue that this is ridiculous and short sighted.  “Hard America” may be driven by competition and accountability, but anyone who has ever had to suffer the obnoxiousness of an overly competitive family member who sulks and pumps his chest through games of Trivial Pursuit or Pictionary knows that weakness and insecurity lie not far below their surface.  It is this weakness, this fear of failure that has allowed this generation to take the world’s strongest economy and slowly destroy it.  Where families were once headed by a single wage earner, now two or more family members work two or more jobs and still struggle to make ends meet.  The competitive win at all costs mentality has been exploited, and as a result, we work harder for lower relative wages with fewer benefits.   The people who run the corporations love this, while everybody else suffers.

The values taught to “Soft America” place value on the individual and his contribution to the team.  Ask anyone who has ever been a manager who they want on their team, the overly competitive and aggressive ladder climber, or the good team player.   If members of generation Y truly believe that they are special, then there may be hope that they will demand the simple respect that the baby boomers have given away.  They may be the only hope to fix what we, their parents (who instilled these values in the first place), have destroyed.   

(P.S. – my time as a coach was all volunteer, so, unlike those pesky teachers, my contribution to poisoning young minds was at least tax-free)

Father’s Day

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June is a contradiction.  It is the brightest month, with the most daylight, as the days grow longer than any other time of the year.  Yet despite this brightness, June is dominated by the darkness of the shadows cast by the green leaves and trees against the late afternoon and early evening skies.  As the night approaches, the shadows lengthen, and we can sense the emergence of the ghosts that their darkness conceals. 

The most recognizable sound of June is the sound of a screen door slamming, the sound of ourselves as young children, with unbounded energy and time at our disposal, running outside in the warmth of the late spring days, freed from the confines of school.  As we grow older we recognize this sound to be the doors of memory slamming and locking in experience.   Everything that has ever happened to us is stored in dark and dusty corners of our brains that wait to be exposed by the flash of recognition.

Tonight I am in my cabin in northern Wisconsin, some 330 odd miles to the northwest of my home in Pleasant Prairie, where the days are even longer, with shades of daylight becoming evident shortly after 4:00 AM and not completely fading until sometime around 10:00 P.M.    Up here, as the sun slowly descends in the west, the trees cast shadows of the fading today that gradually lengthen and disappear, only to be replaced, on clear nights, by the shadows of the silver moonlight that light up the night sky and haunt the landscape of tomorrow.   

It is in the lengthening shadows cast by the setting sun that I see myself as son to my Father, nearly 85 years old now, and in their darkness and mystery I see myself and him, then and now, and the slow parade of forgotten days that have left the marks of age on us both.   When the sun completes its descent and the shadows are consumed by the night and die, our time as Father and Son will end, and the whole of our experience will lie hidden by the vast and all encompassing darkness, reduced to shapeless and random fragments that we occasionally stumble upon while walking the blind path of memory.

But then the moon rises, and in its new shadows I see myself as Father to my sons and daughter, and those same random fragments are illuminated.  They take shape and their meaning begins to form.   The shadows of the dying day inform the moon lit shadows of night, and we realize the path we are walking is headed east, toward the new day. 

I have tried to be as good a Father to my children as my Dad has been to me.  I have always recognized this to be an unattainable goal.  I’ve always loved, admired and respected my Dad.    Everything I know about and aspire to be as a Father I learned from his example.   Despite his flaws and imperfections he is, above all, a good man.

The new day arrives on the familiar streams of ultraviolet light that pass through early morning windows.   I get out of bed and look outside.  The sun is shining and everything is bright and green.  It’s going to be a beautiful day, warm and dry with a pleasant breeze blowing out of the north.  The sun is beginning its ascent.   It’s going to be a long day and there is much to get done before the evening shadows and their ghosts emerge again.

Once in a Lifetime Movie

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One of the projects I’ve been working on recently is a novel.   Not long ago, I completed a chapter describing the back story of one of the main characters.  I felt it was important to describe how and why he arrived at the point in time and space where he became involved in the story I want to tell.  The chapter essentially described the history and eventual dissolution of his marriage.  I completed the first draft and put it aside, pleased at how it turned out and the additional, unplanned details it discovered.

Then one day last week I found myself, as I am prone to do, idly flipping thru channels on the television when I chanced upon a deliciously bad Lifetime channel made for TV movie.  Although this was apparently one of the rare handful of such movies that didn’t star either Meredith Baxter Birney or Jaclyn Smith, I found myself blissfully relishing the over emoting of the anonymous, soap opera caliber actors and the cliché ridden dialogue.  The woman was breaking up with the man, and as I smugly marveled at how terrible it was, I was suddenly jarred by something the woman said.  I won’t reveal the offending line, but it was, I kid you not, almost verbatim the same as one of the lines I had written for the ex-wife in my transcript.  Suddenly, I didn’t feel so smug.  Suddenly, I was filled with doubt.  Is my attempt at a “serious” work of fiction in reality no better than a Lifetime movie?

So the rationalizations began.  First, I rethought the Lifetime movie.  Maybe the writing really wasn’t that bad after all.  Maybe it was the delivery of the actors, or the staging by the director, or the lighting, or the theme music that made it bad.  I then thought of perhaps the best screenplay ever written,  by Julius and Phillip Epstein and Howard Koch for “Casablanca”, and remembered that instead of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, the studio’s first choice for the roles of Rick and Ilsa were Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan.  Without Bogart or Bergman or Claude Rains, such lines as “round up the usual suspects”, “here’s looking at you, kid”, and “we’ll always have Paris” would probably at best be long forgotten, at worst, in the hands of less capable actors, be remembered as cheesy camp. 

Be that as it may, this Lifetime movie was just bad.   Whatever ultimately made it bad, it certainly wasn’t the intentions of anyone involved with the production.  No doubt the writers intended to write a compelling story, while some of the actors were likely convinced they had landed their big break, and that this was the vehicle that would propel them to stardom.  Nobody starts out with the intent of creating a bad film or painting or story. 

I’ve always had a morbid fascination with really bad movies and music.   It started when I was a kid in the late 60s, when on Saturday afternoons they’d show some of the many bad sci-fi movies from the 50s.   I loved the ridiculous and silly plot lines, the cheap and cheesy special effects, and how the actors all looked so serious as they battled with the evil monsters in their incredibly bad costumes.  There were so many, my favorite being “Brain From the Planet Arous”, in which an evil brain from, you guessed it, the planet Arous, inhabits the body of the great bad actor John Agar, the Laurence Olivier of bad sci-fi films and one time husband to Shirley Temple.   Even as a child, as I laughed at what was supposed to be frightening me, it occurred to me that these were real people acting, and that real people had come up with the story, and I wondered, did they realize the result was as bad as it was?  Did they realize that a floating and talking brain was strange enough, but to have a second brain, a good brain, inhabit the body of a dog?  Didn’t this strike anyone making the movie as just plain silly?

I think Tim Burton nailed it in his biography of possibly the worst movie director of all time, “Ed Wood.”    In it, Johnny Depp portrays Wood as someone who has an intense and insatiable appetite to create.   Like so many great artists, he has internal demons and eccentricities that drive him on.   Unfortunately, he has none of their genius or artistic instincts or talent, and his output is laughably bad.  But as told byBurton, that isn’t what matters.  While the film is consistently funny, it is also touching, especially the poignant relationship between Wood and the dying Bela Lugosi (in an incredible performance by Martin Landau) – I dare anyone, after seeing Burton’s film, to watch Lugosi’s scenes again in “Plan Nine From Outer Space” and not think of the human being that Landau brought out.   There is a wonderful scene in “Ed Wood” near the end when Burton imagines a frustrated Wood storming off of the set and walking into a Hollywood bar, where he encounters Orson Welles, and the two have a conversation about their frustrations dealing with the studios.  In the end, Wood’s spirit and enthusiasm triumph over the mediocrity of his output.    

It’s this spirit, the ability to be so moved by art that one is driven to create, that I think is at the core of being human, and it’s too elemental and universal to be restricted to only those who have talent.   Too often the fear of creating something bad suppresses the need to create.  I realize this now, and am spurred on to finish my novel, even if it never gets published, even if it ends up unintentionally riddled with clichés and stranded sub plots and cardboard characters, and even if it ends up being made into a Lifetime movie.   Whatever it ends up being, when I finish it, it will be complete  and it will be mine – and hopefully I’ll be motivated to create another one.

My Time in the Big Leagues

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Reading the news that Former Minnesota Twin hall of famer Harmon Killebrew passed away the other day, I was taken back to my own brief career as a major league baseball player, in the summer of 1971. 

I became a serious fan of the major leagues in 1968, which was smack dab in the middle of that time between the Braves leaving Milwaukee for Atlanta and the Seattle Pilots becoming the Milwaukee Brewers.  Not having a local team to root for, my friends and I had to choose which major league teams we’d swear our allegiances to.  Most of my friends became Cubs fans, because Chicago was the closest city geographically, but not me. I had become a Packers fan the year before and recognized the Bears as our fiercest rival – there was no way I was going to root for any Chicago team in any sport.

So I picked the St. Louis Cardinals, who just happened to be the defending world champions at the time.  I read everything I could, until I knew everything there was to know about Brock, Flood, Cepeda, Gibson, Shannon and the others.  I checked the Milwaukee Journal sports section every day and poured over the box scores.   My second favorite team became the Minnesota Twins, with Rod Carew, Tony Oliva, and Killebrew.   I still believe the Twins of the late 60s to early 70s is maybe the greatest team to never appear in a world series.

This was years before anything like ESPN, so we had to rely upon daily box scores and the Sporting News for our information.   When we weren’t reading stats or playing Strat-O-Matic, we were outside playing the game, in backyards and in little league.  1971 was my last and best year in little league, playing on a team that played in the league championship series (we lost), and earning a nod as the starting shortstop in the all star game.

There were three baseball fields the Union Grove little league played on, the one on the old Grade School property, the field at the bottom of Boxer’s Hill by the town dump, and the brand new Middle School field.   The middle school field was the best.  Not only was it the newest, but it had a grass infield.  And it had stadium lights. 

The all-star game was played on a Thursday night in early August, and started at about 8:00.  It was just getting dark enough as the game approached that they turned on the lights.  We warmed up in the infield, and returned to our bench.  The bleachers, with a capacity I’d estimate of 50-75, were filling up, and looking back, I could see my Mom and Dad sitting in the top row down the first base line.  Then a disembodied voice over the PA system welcomed the fans to the all-star game and introduced the starting lineups.  The west team was introduced first, each player running out when their name was called, and lined up between 2nd and 3rd base.  Then it was time for the east team, the team I was on.  I had been waiting nervously, wondering how badly the announcer would butcher the name “Gourdoux”, and making sure my shoelaces remained tied so as to avoid an embarrassing trip.  Finally, the moment came, and I heard through the crisp evening air, “Starting at shortstop, David Gore-Dough”.  I ran out on the field under the lights, pleased at the correct annunciation of my name, my shoelaces still tied, and took my place next to my best friend Tom Andersen, the starting catcher.  As I basked in the glow of the stadium lights, with the sound of the announcement of my name over the PA system echoing in my head, I became aware that I was grinning, ear to ear, and that the Union Grove Middle School baseball field had transformed into Busch Field or Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park, and that I and my friends had finally made it to the major leagues.

The game began, and I remember being very nervous in the first inning as I fielded a sharply hit ground ball.  I bobbled it for a moment but was able to recover in time to control the ball and toss it to the second baseman and get the force out.  I don’t remember much else about the game except that it was nine innings and everybody played, so I was on the bench after the first three innings. 

Sometime around the sixth or seventh inning, a front moved in and the temperature dropped a few degrees.  A slight but cool breeze blew in from the north.  I didn’t notice it much as I was with my friends, goofing around on the bench.  The glamour and luster of the event had faded into a familiar comfort, and while for that moment of the introductions under the spotlight we may have been major leaguers, by about the second inning we were just kids playing baseball again and that was fine with us.

I think it was in the eighth inning when I looked up to the stands and saw my Mom and Dad, their jackets on now.  They were talking to each other, absent mindedly watching the action on the field and obviously not paying much attention, when it occurred to me that the reason they came, me playing, had ended in the third inning, and two thirds of the game remained.  My Mom, of  course, had been to all the games.   My Dad, on the other hand, had no interest in baseball, and his job driving eighteen wheelers by night had made it impossible for him to see any of my games.

Every year, my Dad had two weeks of vacation, and he always took them at the beginning of August.  We’d spend those two weeks at our trailer up north, near where he grew up and where much of his family still lived.  Vacation was two weeks of swimming, fishing, canoeing and visiting his sisters and their families, the only two weeks out of the year he’d be able to do such things.  In 1971, those two weeks up north were cut short by half a week, so that I, the third child of four, could play in the all-star game.  The image of that moment in the eighth inning, when I looked up from my goofing around at my Mom and Dad sitting in the bleachers remains etched in my memory.  It was one of the too few moments when I realized how blessed and lucky I was.  My Dad had cut four days off of the 16 days he had for vacation to watch me play three innings in a game he wasn’t interested in.  I’m sure that in conversations that will remain forever private, my Mom had told him that this game was important to me.  At that moment in the eighth inning, as he sat in his jacket in the bleachers, I knew he was cold and bored.  I knew what he had sacrificed for me.  I also knew that he’d never complain about it, never throw it up to me that I cut his vacation short.  And I knew that I was more important to him than those four days up north were.

My career as a major league baseball player lasted for about 15 minutes, or however long it took for the starting lineups to be introduced and stand under the lights on that early August night.  I may not have had the talent or the athletic gifts or the determination or drive to ever make it close to the real major leagues.  But thanks to my imagination and the love of my parents, I was able, for those 15 minutes or so, to proudly stand under the lights of an all-star game at the side of the likes of Mays, Brock, Gibson, Clemente, Seaver, Oliva and Killebrew.

Mother’s Day

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I think the Bible got it wrong with the whole Adam and Eve thing.  I just can’t believe Adam was created first.  To believe that Adam was able to get along for all that time without a woman is to believe that he stumbled through Eden with mismatched socks and a hangover.    The whole idea of Eve being created from Adam’s rib doesn’t make sense, either.  Burps and farts, that’s what typically comes out of men.   Then there’s the idea that man was created in God’s image.    Have you taken a good look at your typical man?  Do you really believe that is what God looks like? 

 To me, there is evidence of the divine in the female form, the smooth skin, the soft curves, the soulful eyes.   There is grace in the walk, music in the voice.   It is no accident women were created as such exquisite, sensual beings – so that man is motivated to not only perpetuate the species, but has reason to get up off the couch and turn off Sports Center every now and then.

 Anway, tomorrow is Mother’s Day, the day we honor the first person we ever knew.   My Mom is no longer with us, having passed away nearly seventeen years ago.   I miss her terribly, and it hurts me to know that my sons were too young at the time to have any lasting memories of her, and my daughter wasn’t born yet.  

Much of the first five or so years of my life was spent making my Mother’s life miserable.  Easily distracted and hyperactive, I seemed to save my worst behavior for public outings with my Mom, simultaneously embarrassing and exhausting her on a consistent basis.  There were episodes in grocery stores, the one where I went up to a strange old lady, stomped as hard as I could on her foot, taking her pained reaction of “oh, my corn” as my queue to stomp even harder a second time.  There was the time when I was running up and down the frozen food aisle when she was finally able to grab me by my arm, prompting my dramatic plea, “No, no, I’m too young to die!”  There were episodes in Doctor’s waiting rooms, toy stores, anywhere there was a public gathering.  I had a fascination with trains, and I remember one time, she took me to the train depot to watch one come in – looking back on it now, I wonder if she had plans of throwing me in front of it, but lost her nerve at the last moment.  No juror who had ever witnessed my behavior would have convicted her.

Eventually, I largely (but never really completely) outgrew my need to be the center of attention, and for the most part learned to behave myself.  I made up for all the grief and embarrassment I caused when I was little by keeping out of trouble when I was older.  I turned out to be, thanks to her firm patience, a pretty good kid.

 My Mom and Dad were both blessed with wonderful but different senses of humor that blended perfectly, so they were lots of fun to be around.  Their arguments were legendary and better than anything on television, my favorite being the on-going debate around my Dad’s theory that hot water froze faster than cold water and my Mom’s exasperated repudiation of his fractured logic and fabricated science.   My Dad enjoys being the center of attention (explaining much of my behavior as genetically influenced), and has a very broad sense of humor and penchant for mischief.  My Mom’s sense of humor was a bit more subtle and sophisticated.  I always loved making my parents laugh, especially my Mom – she was so damned smart, if she laughed, then you knew it had to be good.

 One of my favorite things was getting my Mom to do stupid things.  When I was 17, I had a Polaroid camera and went through a phase of staging intentionally bad “avant-garde” photos that I would put together in an album as a collection of stupidity.   There was the photo I shot of one of my Mom’s bowling trophies strained through the webbing of a tennis racket (titled, “The Ghostly Bowler”), the photo of our bathroom plunger set on top of the piano bench juxtaposed against the forest tapestry that hung on the living room wall (titled, “Plunger in the  Wilderness”), there were a series of shots of my tennis shoe clad right foot against varying backdrops.   But my favorite was the morning my Mom came out in her yellow bathrobe and her hair in curlers.   In a burst of inspiration, I handed her the vase off of the dining room table, and she held her pose as I went and got the camera and captured the image, a slightly confused but pleasant expression on her face.   With her standing in her robe and holding the vase like a torch, I had no choice but to title the photo, “Mom of Liberty”.  Upon viewing the photo, she sighed her familiar exasperated sigh, and asked again, “Why do I do all these stupid things you ask me to?”

 I remember my Mom’s last Mother’s day, in 1994.  We had gone up to visit her, all of her kids and grand kids were there.  I remember her getting a big kick out of my son Nick, not quite four years old, telling his favorite joke over and over (“what’s yellow, lives in a tree and says “meow”?  A very mixed up banana”), the same way she use to laugh at my big joke when I was that age (“why did the fire engine wear red suspenders?  To keep its pants from falling down”) She was already sick and deteriorating, but she was able to enjoy having everyone there.  It was a beautiful day, and one of the best of her final days.  

 Now, my kids are older, and I’ve had the opportunity to watch them grow up and observe their relationships with their Mother, my wife.   I see many of the same things I experienced, and when I see the joy they clearly experience when they make their Mother laugh, I’m reminded of my own Mom.  The only difference is that now, through my wife’s eyes, I can also see the happiness those same moments bring her,  and looking back on my Mom, I know now that those goofy moments we shared meant as much to her as they did to me.

I take great pleasure and comfort in knowing this.

On the Death of Bin Laden

/ djgourdoux / Leave a comment

                The big news this week of course is the death of Osama Bin Laden.   It triggered for me, like I’m sure it did for everyone, the “where I was at the time of the 9/11 attacks” memories.

                My memories of 9/11 and the days that followed are dominated by images of brilliant blue and cloudless skies, the sky the planes flew through as they crashed into the twin towers, and the sky here, near the Wisconsin Illinois border where I live.   Ten years is long enough to test the accuracy of memory, but as I recall it now, the sky here was just as blue and empty, not only the morning of 9/11 but for what seems like the rest of that September.

                It was a Tuesday.  I had just gotten to work in our offices in McGaw Park, near Waukegan, Illinois.   Linda Lo, who at the time worked in the cubicle next to mine, asked me if I had heard anything about a jet crashing into one of the trade centers.   I had not, but soon a buzz was moving across the floor, and internet screens were displaying the first crash.   I can’t remember the exact order of things, but there were reports of the Pentagon being hit, the second tower, there were reports of planes targeting the White House.   It soon became clear that we, the United States, were under attack by some unidentified but very real enemy.

                The day went on, and we were all glued to the internet or the televisions that were set up in the cafeteria.   We saw both towers fall; we saw the horrifying images of people plunging from windows to their death.   We saw the hand held films of dust and debris flying everywhere and coating the Manhattan streets.  We watched incredibly heroic accounts of firefighters sacrificing their own lives attempting to save others.  We watched, we all watched, and we watched together.

                When I got home from work, we all watched some more.   I was 42 years old at the time, my wife 40, my sons Jon and Nick 16 and 12, and my daughter, Hannah, just two weeks away from her 7th birthday.  The footage was graphic and traumatizing, but it was also an undeniably historic moment, the 21st century’s version of Pearl Harbor.  Jon and Nick understood what was going on, we tried to explain very carefully to Hannah what was happening and shield her from some of the more graphic images.  She understood most of it, but didn’t seem too traumatized, at least not any more traumatized than any of us were.   When I tucked her into bed that night, Hannah, with her typical flair for the dramatic, told me to leave the light on in her room.  “That way”, she said, “if something happens, they’ll know there was a little girl in here.”

                Whenever I think of 9/11, there is one specific image that comes to mind.  It was Thursday morning, two days after.  I was driving to work on Delany Road and waiting for a red light to change before I could turn left on Highway 41.  As I sat there, I looked at the car in the lane to the right of me.  Behind the wheel sat a pretty woman, probably in her early thirties, crying, visibly sobbing, a wad of Kleenex in her hand.  I had no idea what specifically she was crying about, I tried to imagine that maybe she had a relative who worked in the towers, maybe something on her radio had moved her, but I doubt that it was anything like that, because I felt like crying, too, and I knew that I and everyone else was dialed in to a collective sadness, a shared mourning and grief.   We were all experiencing different levels of anger and fear, but the sadness was universal.  We all felt it, and the woman crying behind the wheel at the stop light was for me the perfect articulation of that sadness.

                For a short period, in the days immediately after we had been attacked and violated, we were bound by that sadness.   In that short period, there were no Democrats or Republicans, we were all just Americans.   When President Bush stood on the pile of rubble at ground zero, speaking through a megaphone and putting his arm around the shoulder of one of the firefighters, we were all moved.  We were all an American family, and we ached for the loss of our brothers and sisters.

                But now, ten years later, that family, like families do, has fractured and split, and we are divided.  We no longer see ourselves in each others’ eyes.   Instead we see something cynical, something we distrust, something we don’t recognize.  

                The news of Bin Laden’s death was unexpected and jolting.  For ten years, as he eluded us, he drifted further and further from our consciousness.  President Obama’s eloquent announcement was jarring, it was welcome, it was a relief, but it is too soon to determine if it was cathartic.

                At first, when I watched the news reports of the country’s reaction, I had mixed emotions.  On one hand, I felt like being out in the streets with those celebrating, as the SOB got finally got what he deserved.  On the other hand, it felt a little uncomfortable watching Americans celebrate the death of an individual with such fervor.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing the US for killing him – this was not murder, it was an act of war, in response to his open attack on our nation, and there is no legitimacy to those who cry he was denied due process.  It’s just that on some level, it made me uncomfortable watching U.S. citizens celebrate the killing of even this asshole – we always, rightfully I think, watched with a critical eye when radical regimes in other parts of the world behaved similarly.

                But before we judge ourselves too harshly, let’s take a look at what this SOB did to us.   The most obvious is the taking of thousands of innocent lives on that infamous day.  If that was all, it’d probably be enough.  But look a little deeper, and see what’s happened to us since then.  Our economy is in tatters, and while all of our economic woes cannot be traced to 9/11 it no doubt had an impact.   The airline industry has never really recovered.  We are fighting two expensive wars, and while you can argue whether the wars were really related to 9/11 or not, at a minimum, 9/11 was the catalyst.   Either way, as is always the case with war, there have been incredible human costs in terms of lives interrupted, damaged, and lost.

                More significant than the economic cost of the terrorist attacks has been the damage to our psyche.   Bin Laden planted seeds of fear and suspicion and distrust in our consciousness, manifested by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the naming of threat levels.  We arrive at airports earlier now and we take off our shoes and have our bodies scanned.   And we have debated whether or not we should torture detainees, as terms like water boarding and enhanced interrogation tactics have become part of our vocabulary.   Whatever your views are on this, the fact that these debates are openly taking place in the highest levels of our government would have been unthinkable prior to 9/11.

                We have also seen that short period after 9/11 where we were all Americans dissolve into increasingly competing and confrontational ideologies.   Debate and respected difference of opinions have dissolved into hatred and intolerance.   We categorize each other into shallow two dimensional labels.    We question the motives, the intelligence and the morality of those with differing views.  There is more vitriol and harsh rhetoric in the air than ever before.  Some of this can definitely be traced to 9/11, and the manipulation of raw emotions by insincere leaders of both sides.

                President Bush once said that the 9/11 attacks were attacks on our freedoms.  I think he was right, but more specifically, I think it was an attack on our core beliefs and our cohesiveness as a nation.  Now Bin Laden has been killed, and I agree with President Obama’s decision not to release the death photos that could be used by martyrs and zealots and opportunists – “that’s not us”, he said, and he’s right.   But at the same time, when you look at what happened to us on 9/11 and in the years since, we are right to celebrate this moment, so long as we celebrate it as Americans, and recognize each other as brothers and sisters, not political stereotypes.   If we can use this moment to bring us a little closer together and bridge some of the gaps that have developed, then this moment becomes the moment when we didn’t just kill Bin Laden, but the moment when we defeated his life’s mission, and emerge stronger in the larger, on-going attack on human dignity that his like will undoubtedly continue to wage.