Memoirs

Status Report

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Over the past few months, I’ve been tweaking my memoirs project, getting rid of things that didn’t work, changing things that needed changing, adding new material, and experimenting with the ordering and grouping of the individual pieces that make up the collection.    For the longest time, I wasn’t getting anywhere and was beating my head against my desk.   I was having difficulty putting together a coherent sentence (a possible outcome of beating my head against my desk), and whatever words that would come to me would be even clumsier and more nonsensical than usual.

One of the problems was the main character.  When writing a book of any sort, it always helps to have an interesting main character, not just to advance the story, but also because as the writer, you and this character are going to spend a lot of time together.  This has been a problem on the memoir project – the main character is me.  I’ve become so sick and tired of myself that I can hardly stand to look in a mirror.  Putting my shoes on, I am disgusted with the sight of my feet – so you can imagine how bored and impatient I grow spending so much time in my head,  exploring my memories and my perceptions and observations of the world around me.

Then one day, a couple of weeks ago, things started flowing, and the progress that had eluded me for weeks suddenly occurred.   I have a couple of chapters to revisit, but the bulk of my changes and additions are complete.  I have no idea why the dam that had been blocking me suddenly burst, but it did.   There will be time later on to figure out how and why, for now, I am happy to ride the current and see where it takes me.

I have assembled a new list of agents to submit query letters to, and I hope to begin that process this week.  I am also exploring alternate publishing methods.  For those that aren’t aware, I thought I had completed the project earlier this year, and had sent sample chapters to a respected New York agent, who responded very enthusiastically and asked for the entire book.  I sent him what I had, and for whatever promise he found in the sample chapters, he found the book as a whole lacking and backed out.   It stung badly, but I recognized what he found to be missing, and I reluctantly went about applying his cryptic remarks as constructive criticism.

Objectively looking at the version of the book I submitted, I now see how right he was.   There were large passages that were overblown and pretentious, and in fact had little to do with the overall story I want to tell.  Simply put, the manuscript wasn’t nearly as ready as I thought it was.   In poker terms, I had fallen in love with my cards, and over played their value.  It’s very easy not to see the flaws and mistakes in your own writing, especially when you know that parts of it are good.  This is exactly where I was – the parts I recognized as being good were blinding me to the parts that weren’t.   Only after the agent’s rejection was I able to begin looking at my work more objectively.  Whether I’ve been objective enough remains to be seen.   This is one of the lessons I have learned – you need to be brutally honest and unsentimental when reviewing your work, because potential agents and editors and publishers, who are reviewing literally thousands of documents, have no choice but to be brutal in their assessment – and you only get one crack at each of them.  The other thing I’ve learned is that once you get past your own ego, and recognize and address the flaws, your document will be indisputably better.

Despite the flaws that still surface in my frequent reviews and the self loathing I am too often subject to, I remain convinced that the assembled collection has a worthwhile story to tell.  My affliction with Parkinson’s disease has changed me and the way I view the world and my own past.   It has taken my life’s journey on an unexpected and dark detour.  My hope is that, for the reader, my book can shine a light, however dim, and help illuminate the dark paths that are as unexpected as they are inevitable in everybody’s journey.

So, as Walter Cronkite used to say …  that’s the way it is.  Stay tuned for additional developments …

 

My Part in the Downfall

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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.

Dad

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(This is an excerpt from my memoir project)

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things”                                                                          –   Corinthians 13:11

 “You’re just like your Father.”

When I was very young, I heard this all the time, often times from my Aunts, most often from my Mother.   It was usually after I had gotten into trouble of some kind, so it really wasn’t meant as a compliment.  But that made no difference to me because, when I was small, I was like many other young sons in that my Father was my hero.

When I was small, I thought there was nothing my Father couldn’t do or hadn’t done.   He could fix anything, and he’d been everywhere.   He was strong, he was smart, and most of all, he was funny.  There’s never been anyone who could make me laugh like my Dad.

One of the best things I can say about my Dad, and one of the best compliments I can think of giving anyone, is that he’s always been good company.  As a small child observing him interact with other adults, it didn’t take me long to notice that the others were often laughing and almost always smiling at something my Dad had said.   They may have been scratching their heads in confusion, but they were almost always smiling.

My Dad is a master storyteller.  He made his living all those years driving eighteen wheelers by night across the Midwest.  As a truck driver, he knew he wasn’t paid for showing up at some destination.   He didn’t earn his pay when he pulled into the terminal in Cleveland.   He was paid instead for the journey, for navigating all the miles between Milwaukee and Cleveland, for living in the lonely dark hours before sunrise when the rest of America was sleeping.   It was this knowledge of the road that informed his storytelling.  Those impatient to reach a destination, those unimaginative souls looking for a point to my Dad’s stories, would wind up frustrated and disappointed.   But those of us who had learned to strap ourselves in and let him take us on the meandering off-ramps and detours his stories inevitably took would discover the wonderful and unexpected treasures that existed in the back roads of his mind.    We’d watch as some small place or minor event would be recreated in incredible detail, waiting more often than not in vain to see if it actually had anything to do with the outcome of the story, and then, after stringing us along for so long that we’d forget just what the Hell the story was about in the first place, he’d pause, stare off into space, scratch the side of his bald head, and get that quizzical look on his face that we all recognized, that told us, here it comes, grab a hold of something quick, because the payoff is coming, and then, with a master’s timing, he’d deliver the punch line, usually self deprecating and almost always hysterically underwhelming for all the buildup we had endured.  And we’d laugh, and he’d laugh with us, and one of the things I admired about him more than anything was that he was usually laughing at himself.  If there was ever anybody who didn’t take himself too seriously, it’s my Dad.

As with many other sons, when I was very young, my Dad was my hero and, as with many other sons, the older I got, the less need I had for heroes.  I began, like every child does at some point, to see flaws in my Father.   Some of the same things that were sweet and charming at age five at age 14 were embarrassing.   As I grew older still I noticed other flaws, such as occasional insensitivity and awkwardness in dealing with those situations that demanded an honest emotional response.    Don’t get me wrong, I recognized that these were minor character flaws, and the same undying love I always had for him continued unchanged.  It’s just that by this time, I was a full grown man myself, making my own way in the world, and the need for heroes had been put away with other childish things.

Then, in March of 1993, when I was 34 years old, my Mom was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer.  In November of the same year, my Dad had quadruple heart bypass surgery.  The following March, my Mom was hospitalized with a stroke that signaled the beginning of the end, she returned with a hospital bed to the living room of their house on Tower Road to die at home.   My Dad, only four months removed and still weak from heart surgery, and my Sister Jenny and Sister-In-Law Sue took turns keeping vigil at my Mom’s bed side for the more than three long months of pain and decline that were her final days.   I’d come up and visit on the weekends, but the heavy lifting of the care giving was administered by my Dad, Jenny and Sue.

Finally, one weekend in May, when my Mom was doing relatively well, my Dad convinced Jenny and Sue to both take a long deserved weekend off and return to their homes and families.  If things got too bad, we reasoned, I’d be there to help out.  They reluctantly agreed, leaving Saturday morning and coming back late Sunday, leaving my Dad and I to hold down the fort for a couple of short days and one night.

Saturday came and went, pleasant and warm, my Mom sleeping a lot and in relatively good spirits most of the day.  Then night came, and my Mom was sleeping soundly, so I left my Dad sitting in his chair by my Mom’s bedside and went off to sleep in the camper he had parked in the front yard.  The camper had been equipped and tested with the same walky-talky monitors Deb and I had used when Jon and Nick were babies; my Dad would call for me over these airwaves if he needed any help in the night.  I quickly fell into a deep sleep.

Sometime around 3:00 I was awakened by the static filled voices of my Mom and Dad over the walky-talky.  As I gathered my wits about me, I listened, and realized very quickly that my Mom was having a bad episode.  I had heard about these episodes from Jenny and Sue, but I hadn’t witnessed any.   My Dad, still weak from the surgery, was doing his best, keeping his cool, trying to calm her down.  I got dressed and slipped my shoes on and put my hand on the door handle of the camper, ready to climb up the driveway and help my Dad, but, as I listened in horror to the events on the radio, I froze.  I couldn’t bear to see what I was hearing, to see my Mom in that state and I stood there, my hand on the door handle, for an eternity while the sounds of my Dad taking care of my increasingly agitated Mom echoed through the night air.  My  Dad, who, despite the fact that his already fragile heart had to be  breaking into a million pieces, never once asked for my help and remained patient and calm and loving and strong throughout.  Somehow, he eventually got the situation under control.   Once all had quieted down, I tried to go back to sleep, but the sounds of what I had just heard and the shame I felt for not helping my Dad would allow no such thing.

Finally, sometime after 5:00, the sun rose and I was still awake.  The baby monitor was silent and still, and seemed to be staring at me, accusing me.  I couldn’t stand it anymore and went up to the house.  The grass of the lawn was wet with dew and I heard the waking songs of morning birds.  I quietly opened the backdoor and carefully made my way through the kitchen to the entry of the living room.  There, the soft early morning sunlight shone on my Mom, peacefully sleeping in her hospital bed, the same way it shines on still fields after a night storm passes through, concealing the violence and turmoil that the dark had allowed.  And next to my Mom’s bed, in his chair, the same place I had left him the night before, sat my Dad, also peacefully asleep, a hand’s reach away from my Mom.   As I stood there in my Mom and Dad’s living room and absorbed the quiet beauty of the moment and everything it represented, a funny thing happened to me:

My Dad became my hero again.

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

/ djgourdoux / 1 Comment

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.