I spent twenty-eight years teaching active duty and retiring military for Saint Leo University on the Little Creek Amphibious Base here in Virginia. Some became close friends. Some fought in the Gulf War, nearly all spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some never came home. Some came home altered—physically, mentally, certainly emotionally.
No matter how exhausted I was from teaching twenty-year old community college students all day who didn’t want to learn, my energy returned when I went through the base gates and into the education building where instead of calls of “Hey Dude!” from students I heard, “Good afternoon, Professor. Glad to see you again, sir.” Instead of late papers that didn’t meet the requirements, I collected assignments days before the due date and rarely gave less than an A. I once expressed my concern about that to my supervisor, that I gave all A’s, and she replied, “Welcome to St Leo’s Little Creek, Bob. These are the most disciplined and appreciative students anywhere.”
One day at the early job a student who missed almost two weeks came to me and apologized—she couldn’t find a ride and lived nearly two miles from campus. I’m not making this up. That same night a student who had missed three weeks came to apologize (even though I received a letter from her command that she could not be in class); she had been TAD for that time—Temporary Active Duty—in Kabul.
Veterans show up. They find out what needs to be done and do a little bit more.
Some significant people in my life are veterans, including but not nearly limited to my two Uncle Tom’s, Uncles Ed and Bob, my cousin Tom among others in the family. Tim O’Brien, Tom Montgomery, Mike Kweder, Jose Roman, Brian Turner, Bill Mullis, and Kay, who I drove to the airport for her flight to Lackland AFB a hundred years ago; it is one thing to know people and love them, but another thing entirely to respect them for their sacrifices which can be quite literally life or death. One of the most emotional moments for me was watching a swearing in ceremony at the airport in Pennsylvania. That’s right, they swear you in right before you get on a plane and leave. Smart. But it is an emotional moment for all involved. If you’ve never heard or read the oath, it is quite something to watch someone with their hand in the air declaring their lives are no longer their own, but are to be sacrificed if need be. Wow. Your heart is somehow broken and filled with pride at the same time.
We have Memorial Day to remember those who sacrificed everything for the country. Please understand that tomorrow is designed primarily for the living; it is a chance to thank those who put their lives on the line, those whom even when they came back from a warzone fine, never came back the same.
On base, I’d sit at the front desk before class and listen to them. The first day was always interesting, particularly in both the early ‘90s and then the early 2000’s. Someone would walk in and call out someone else’s name with excitement, and they’d embrace, having last seen each other in Kuwait or Lebanon or Baghdad. Over time I learned military lingo, which consists mostly of a long stream of acronyms. I learned to recognize rank, and I came to see the innocence behind these young—young—men and women who are all at once both skilled technicians and terrified young adults hoping for the best.
Thanks are not nearly enough.
I spent 28 years teaching an average of 220 students a year at St Leo’s. That’s almost 7000 students—all of them military. The cool part was I taught fun courses—not the required gen-ed ones. We laughed through Art History, Fine Art Studies, and Creative Writing. One can better appreciate the beauty of a Mozart symphony or a painting by Pissarro when the class presentation is delivered by a student whose job it was to determine the severity of an injured soldier. And in Creative Writing, tissue boxes were standard since I mostly taught memoir, and stories of a trip across Siberia by train pale in comparison to a run across a compound at night while a sniper is on the hillside.
A writer friend of mine wrote of how much he discovered about love and what is essential in life by serving two tours in Iraq. And of course there’s Tim’s The Things They Carried, which if you have read you already know is not a war story—it is a love story.
When I see people disrespect Veterans, I think of my students and those I love and know we will never comprehend their sacrifices or the danger they faced. When I was young, I didn’t quite comprehend someone’s enlistment as anything other than leaving; it took years to understand that this kind of service is nothing short of a calling.
So thank you Veterans of the Armed Forces for your service; thank you for traveling to some of the most dangerous conflicts on the planet without question.
The naming of things often mystifies me. I get the planets; apparently the ancients liked Gods, but for their own planet they separated Earth and State and pulled an old Germanic word for “ground” or “soil.” How original. They should have just called it “Here.”
We looked at the stars and planets again the other night, and Saturn hung just to the left of the nearly-full moon, both just under the scales of Pisces. Pisces the Fish. And that’s where you lose me. When a dear friend gave us a beautiful telescope and deep space binoculars, my brother bought me a book about space stuff, including the constellations, and other than the dippers, which really do look like kitchen utensils, and Orion, which I recognize because of the old Orion Pictures reel, I don’t see Bulls or Crabs or Fish. Some ancient astronomers stretched it to be sure. I suppose if I lived in a Dark Sky area, the dominant stars of any particular constellation would pop and I might say, “OH! okay, look, Twins!” But no, not so much. And there are eighty-eight constellations, none of which share stars. That’s a boatload of sky and necessitates some serious imagination.
Look at Pisces above. The blue guide lines of my Space App show me where the “fish” is, but honestly, no–it’s not a fish–a tadpole at best. Taking the blue lines only it more resembles a penis, but I suppose the Penis Constellation would not stand up to scrutiny and no one needs to hear “Constellation Penis is rising in Virgo tonight.” But look again. Not a fish.
And here at soil level we’re not doing much better. Euphemisms abound so that I can’t recognize what the hell some people are trying to say, leaving way too much room for interpretation. In April of last year I was at my sister’s in Pennsylvania when our mom’s nurse called. She quietly and respectfully told us, “Your mom is transitioning.”
What? Honestly, for a split second all I could think of was, “Now? She’s ninety-one! But Go Mom!” It was only a heartbeat later I understood the very new (to me) diction of death. “She’s dying” is apparently not acceptable anymore. I think the reasoning is if they tell us Mom is transitioning, they’ve delivered half the message, and when our minds convert “transition” into “dying” we end up, oddly enough, telling ourselves what is happening, letting the nurse off the hook. Granted, I’m not sure I would want Dr. House to come in and go the other way with it. “She’s just about dead, Bob” probably wouldn’t help at all.
Pets cross the Rainbow Bridge after they are put to sleep. People are between jobs not unemployed, unhoused not homeless, horizontally challenged not fat. I could go on but I am trying to avoid being honest to a fault. Or Rude. Same thing.
Here’s one: Last week a student on campus committed suicide. Wednesday morning, early in the building where my classes are, he killed himself. But the community did not know that. What they were told by the college (and I suppose the police) was that there was an “incident” involving a student and death, but no one else is in any danger. This narrative should have only remained for as long as those in charge needed to verify what happened. At that point, everyone had a right to know exactly what happened. Instead, euphemisms relegated us to some vague interpretation at best, a complete misinterpretation at worst.
Officials then made the news of this tragedy worse by treating suicide like something they literally refuse to even mention by name to be addressed and discussed. Instead, rumor mills ran wild while students and the community wondered how he died, if someone else was involved, and on and on, because “incident” makes the truth as unrecognizable as the Constellation Penis. “A student took his own life today” should have been the first words (after the truth was verified) from the college, and absolutely the lead on any story in the media. Life is too complicated and moves too quickly for euphemistic speed bumps. Everyone wins when everyone knows exactly what everyone else is trying to say.
Ironically, Pisces is actually represented by two fish swimming in opposite directions to represent reality and fantasy. Diction-wise that translates to “being blunt” swimming past “beating around the bush,” I suppose.
But I still can’t help but believe that some Babylonian shepherd standing nearby the Pisces founder had to say, “Oh come on. What fish? That’s messed up. I’ll tell you what I think it looks like.”
I received an email yesterday from a woman from Marseilles who now lives in North Carolina who knew Letty decades ago, and when she returned to the states was so excited to catch up, but the phone number she had didn’t work. Of course. So she Googled her and came upon my written memorial to her. She was devastated and wrote a lengthy email expressing her sorrow and condolences as well as remembering when they were both so young and full of energy. I haven’t responded yet–I will–and I’ll avoid my thoughts about the fact email works all over the world, including Marseilles, as do cell phones and how we have more free time than we would like others to believe to be able to call and say, “Hey I only have one minute but you are on my mind and I just wanted to say hi.” They’ve been warned it is a quick call. But I won’t say that because I’m just as guilty. Not as guilty as I used to be, but just the same. I wait until after it is too late to say what I want to say, even if all it is might be “Hello, I’m thinking of you.” The world is more chaotic than ever in human history and taking a moment to spread thoughts of friendship and love can go a long way these days.
I receive emails fairly often from friends of people I’ve written about. I’ve received dozens referencing Cole Young as I might be the only one other than art critics who has written often about my dear late friend who succumbed to lung cancer twenty years ago. He knew a lot of people, mostly artists, and they tend to look him up–Cole had a personality that might very likely reach back at you from the beyond to say, “Think of me now, Kunzinger!” So emails about Cole are common and not at all a surprise. It has, in fact, put me back in touch with some artists I knew back in those days.
The weirdest email was from “Eton Churchill.” Mind you, that is the name of my friend, playwright, professor Eton Churchill, who steered my Penn State Graduate degree and performance to a Pennsylvania Humanities Award. He died many years ago at a young sixty-two, so when I received an email from “him,” it did somewhat freak me out. It was, in fact, from his son who at the time was living in Asia. In fact, the first line was “I bet it is strange to receive an email from Eton Churchill. But I’m his son.” He also had read a tribute I wrote to his father and wrote to reminisce more than anything else. It reminded me of the time at my father’s funeral a man Dad used to work with came up to us with articles about my dad that this man had saved. He explained that none of my father’s coworkers had ever been to New York, let alone Wall Street, and Dad was the Yoda of their workplace; they all looked up to him and respected him. It is a moment I will never forget and will always appreciate. That’s a perspective we never get to hear. So Eton Junior’s email was more about appreciating that others appreciated his dad. Yes, we did. Very much. I’m just sorry I didn’t express that to him when he was alive. He passed away too soon. They always did.
Fr Dan knew our relationship well; we were more brothers than friends, and while he died unexpectedly, I never felt like I should have said more. I just wish I had. My college friend Dave, however, I had so much I wanted to say, so many thanks and memories to exchange, but he denied others the chance to say, “Hey, my life is better because of you. Thank you for forty-five years of friendship. I love you.” I wish I could have said that, and the “he knew that, Bob” comments are not sufficient. We know that doesn’t matter. It needs to be said. We need to give people the chance to tell us these things.
Letty knew exactly how I felt, of course, as did my mom and dad, but not so for Eddie, not Bobbie, not the other Dave and the other friend’s who left so much unspoken. I’ve received letters from friends of all of these people because of something I had written. The common denominator is their regret at having not told the person how they felt while they were still alive. Instead they told me. Which is nice, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
I’ve learned from these letters, however. I am glad I had a brief, lucid conversation with my dad. I’m glad my mom’s eyes were open long enough for me to say, “I love you, Mom,” as they welled up with tears and an hour later she was gone. I’m satisfied she knew. And I hope she knew I understood her love for me.
So then why do we wait? Why do we put off telling others how much they mean to us? It is simply speaking truth and demands no response at all. We can even tell them that: “Don’t respond, but I love you and I’m glad you’re in my life.” The closest we come now is “I appreciate you.” When this expression burst on the scene less than a decade ago (depending upon where you are from), I was resistant at first. I don’t appreciate them, I appreciate what they did. Someone holds the door open for someone else and they say, “I appreciate ya.” No. You appreciate not having to open the door yourself; you don’t even know the person holding it.
But yes, I’ve changed my tune. I do appreciate anyone who is nice these days in a world where anger and blame and aggression and excuses, lying and deception and downright rage is rampant. Maybe it is all the cellphone and Wifi waves in the air around us screwing with our nervous system; maybe we are losing faith, maybe we are losing hope. So the “I appreciate you” comments are not only welcome, they just might be necessary. Where else do we find hope and support anymore?
This work was originally published in “Barely South Review” about twelve years ago. It has since been anthologized and often pops up around 911.
“Death plucks my ear and says, ‘Live. I am coming. Live now.’”
–Virgil
I went to the local hardware in Hartfield and bought a sickle—a huge rake-like piece of steel only instead of a rake at the end there is a double-edged sharp, wavy blade made to rip through branches, thick weeds and other bone-like growth. Eighteen dollars.
The front of my property is wooded, and on a few acres toward the river, I spent some time clearing out brush and unwanted vines. I piled it up to haul away, but before that could happen, other more tenacious weeds—small trees really—took over the area. Some I pulled out, some I mowed, but I couldn’t grasp to tug out the tougher ones—so the sickle. One warm morning while alone I put on shorts and flip flops, grabbed the sickle and walked the six hundred of so feet through the woods to swing away at a small grove. None would rip out easily, so I aimed for the fences, came down from my right with major-league force and tore through the vines like an axe through balsa. I attacked one after another, muscles taught so that sweat came fast, and I made progress. Then I stepped to swing at what looked like a thick, knotty growth at the bottom of the stump. It was a Virginia creeper vine. Sometimes these monsters look rooted but aren’t. But what do I know; I’m from New York. So I swung at it like A-Rod. The blade passed through as if the weed were nothing more than a figment of my imagination, and with all my energy plus a good deal of inertia, the metal blade ripped into my left ankle.
I like flip-flops. I grew up on the beaches from Long Island to Virginia, so I’ve been wearing them since I’m a kid. I actually had one pair for ten years, sometimes rigged with a thick paperclip to hold them together. My feet from April to October have a thick white stripe across the tops seen only when my flip flops are off. I teach in them. I walk in them. I even mow the lawn and chop wood in them. Despite what many have said, they are not the cause of the blade Tarantino-ing my ankle. I don’t remember my foot slipping. I do remember almost not going out to cut the underbrush to begin with because I couldn’t find my flip flops. What a different story this would have been had I not come across them on the back porch.
When it happened, blood exploded like water in a hose that’s been held back by bending and then released. My ankle, foot and flops looked as if dipped in bright red paint. I hobbled the six hundred feet to the back of the house to wash off the wound, bandaged it, then went back out to cut more wood; I was wired from adrenaline, my ankle didn’t hurt too badly, and to be honest I had a lot to do.
That night I iced it. I kept it clean. I was fine. Really.
A week later my leg was pitting a bit when I pushed my thumb into my shin. Excess fluid I figured. Prior to the whacking, I had been running up to eight miles a day, prepping for the Rock and Roll Half, so one evening when I was feeling a bit more hyper than usual, and the swelling moved to both legs—a feat I could not comprehend from injuring one ankle, but I don’t have a medical degree—I stopped at Kroger and spotted a blood pressure machine. This can’t be right, I thought, when the first reading came up 270 over 190. I did it two more times and both readings came pretty close to the same. At the checkout I let them know the machine was broken. We all laughed at my numbers—even the bagger laughed and put the laundry detergent on top of the bread. It was that funny.
The next day, worried about my ankle, I washed off my flip flops and went to the doctor. He took my blood pressure. Again. Again. He asked why I was stupid enough to wear flip flops while doing yard work. I pointed out I wacked myself above where any shoe would have come anyway. He asked if I were doing cocaine, heroin, or any other substance, asked if I had shortness of breath, dizziness, if I had thrown up, fell down, or otherwise felt corpselike. He took my blood pressure again. He asked how long I felt hyper. “Years,” I said, and he took my pressure again. Then he sent me to the emergency room. Average BP—260 over 175. Tests. IVs. Tests. On and on it went for several hours. Nurses came, two doctors stopped by, some punk there to visit a friend who had overdosed came by to check out my vitals because my blood pressure was the talk of the ward. The nurses upped the meds. Finally the doctors said based upon my blood vessels behind my eyes and various tests, my blood pressure had apparently been that high for probably some years, and that if it wasn’t for the fact I’m totally healthy otherwise with excellent results from blood and other tests, I’d have had a major stroke.
I asked the cause. The doctor shrugged. Genetics; in a high stress situation for far too long; a combination, he said. They brought it down to 190 over 95 and sent me home with meds to bring it back to normal. They told me to keep exercising and that because of my medicines I could do the marathon, but to be clear, I’m going to be very weak for awhile until I adjust to a life where I’m not pumped on triple doses of double shots coursing through my veins.
A few weeks later at a follow up where my pressure was at 110 over 70 the doctor told me in complete agreement with the cardiologist and another doctor, had I not gone in, I’d have most likely had a major stroke trying to run the half, and probably would be dead. I asked why I didn’t have one while doing the eight miles a day prior to the Great Sickle Incident, and he was quite professional about it: I don’t know, he said. I really don’t know. You should have. Good thing you wacked your ankle, he said.
Yeah, thank God I wacked my ankle. And I thought how often that happens. Good thing I went back for the keys. Good thing I stopped for coffee. Good thing you kept me on the phone, or I’d have been at that intersection just at that moment.
“Good thing I watched Monday Night football on the 10th and overslept: I work on the 85th floor and I’d have been right there,” the stock broker said in the street to the television crew. As the towers tumbled, he counted his blessings.
Good thing Larry Silverstein, owner of the lease of the World Trade Centers, has a wife who made him go to his dermatologist appointment that morning instead of yet another meeting in the North Tower.
Good thing Chef Michael Lomanoco of “Windows on the World” broke his glasses and had to stop at Lenscrafters that morning to get them fixed.
Good thing Lara Clarke stopped to talk to her friend, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, in a chance meeting down in the village that morning making her late for her job on the 77th floor.
Thank God singer Patti Austin, booked on flight 93, had to leave Boston a day early because her mother had a stroke and she had to get back to San Francisco on the 10th instead. “I went back and forth all day about when to leave,” she said.Thank God actress Julie Stoffer and her boyfriend had a wailing fight that morning and she missed Flight 11.
Actor Mark Wahlburg is still haunted by that same Flight 11 to LA, which he missed at the last minute when an 11th hour invitation to a film festival sent him to Toronto instead. He has nightmares thinking about who took his place on the flight. He would have been sitting next to Family Guy creator Seth McFarland who also missed that flight when his manager gave him the wrong boarding time and he was fifteen minutes late. He, too, still has bad dreams, he says. But thank God, he says.
It’s chance. It’s the phone call, the caught light, the traffic backup. It’s changing your mind. It’s sticking to the plan. It’s oversleeping, insomnia, an upset stomach. It’s a few seconds. It’s the wrong shoes. It’s the stroke of luck.
If life happened in a day, and Einstein is horrifically more accurate than we would like, then let’s make a 6 am sunrise birth and place death around a 9pm sunset. I’ve always preferred summers for the extended daylight hours.
And if we break a life of ninety years (I’m an optimist) into a day, we live about six years an hour, or a year every ten minutes. Goes fast doesn’t it? In fact, my clock reads 5 pm. School’s out, lunch has been made, eaten, and cleaned up, and the morning hours are so long ago I barely recall them anymore. I am just checking out the fridge to see what to make for dinner.
If life happened in a day, we’d make sure we didn’t miss much, no matter the weather or how tired we are. We’d call our closest companions and ask them to join us—we’d go through this together. It is too bad we can’t do this again, we’d admit. I don’t want to miss any of it, we’d say, suddenly aware of how fast time goes by, how many moments we let slip away. In fact, just talking about the fleeting morning might make us miss those hours of the day’s youth when discovery is ripe and exploration is new. Those hours of life when no one but us has yet discovered the forest out back, the rapids in the creek down the road, or the view from the bent branches of a birch. We would remember what it was like to not be afraid to take chances, before the midday sun sucked the optimism from our marrow.
Looking back at my own day, around 10 am I lived in Massachusetts in a yellow house next to a reservoir. It was a quaint village surrounded by a larger town, and across the street was a small post office and an antique store. Just up the winding road was an apple orchard where I bought bags of apples and where my neighbor the postmaster would buy me an apple pie for shoveling her driveway. I loved then, and I often talk about how I wish it was 10am again, and I again was leaving work to head to the mountain to hike to the summit to see kettles of hawks.
Just an hour later, I was gone, living in a different latitude and finding myself finding myself once again. Love was easier than it should be and shorter than I had hoped, and the lessons learned so late in the morning stole my energy for a while. Exhaustion isn’t always only because of age; sometimes it is a sudden lack of momentum. But time passes. I’d give the next six hours to have a few minutes back, but we can’t. We must look forward. If I spend too much time regretting what happened at 11 this morning I’ll blow right through the afternoon without noticing the way the light of the sun can bring everything to life no matter how late it is getting.
At noon I walked to the river with my son on my shoulders, and we laughed our way through the early afternoon, hiking through woods and eventually continents. It was just about three this afternoon we trained across Siberia, and ten minutes later hiked across Spain. If my clock battery broke between three and four, I’d consider myself a lucky man. Luckier than most, actually. Cole never had the chance to watch the five o’clock news, and Dave and Eddie hadn’t yet kicked off their shoes after work. At least Fr Dan was settling back for an after dinner drink before he left the party, but Letty never even got to pour that wine with dinner, so fast was her exit, so shortened her time. I am lucky that both my parents were headed to bed anyway, but too many people I’ve loved not nearly enough barely had a chance to finish dessert.
What a day it has been so far. I can’t recall a single hour of my life I’d not do again. From sunrise on I’ve had a great time trying to stay one clip in front of the bend, with golden moments I couldn’t have scripted myself. Maybe that’s why the day seems so fast—I’m really having a great time.
Did you ever stop and just recall a moment from years ago like it had just happened, just now? I mean so that you can taste the meal and smell where you were, feel it, so real like it just happened, just now–complete clarity. That happened to me today, over and over and over, and now it is five o’clock, and it is happening again. Thank God it happens to be five; I need a drink.
Tonight, from 6 to 9, I’m going to take my time and do the best I can. In fact, while I know the sun is well into it’s evening slant, I’m putting on my sunglasses and flip flops anyway and go see what else there is I can do before I pass under “sleep’s dark and silent gate.”
When my brother suggested I watch “Ted Lasso,” I trusted his judgement. He had already nailed it with a few other shows, including “Eureka.” The first time through I enjoyed it immensely, the acting, the writing of course, the timing. It took a few episodes to understand this was not simply a series of set-up/punchline comedy, a method I despise. And it took a few times through the entire three seasons to recognize the primary overall theme at the heart of creator/producer/writer/star Jason Sudeikis’ efforts: This show is all about fathers and sons. And now it returns this week for an unexpected Season Four.
When I struggled with transitioning my book The Iron Scar from the “who gives a shit” stage to the essential-to-be-published “readable and relatable” stage, the answer came while in a writing seminar in Ireland where I had been formulating the final draft of a series of letters from myself to my dad while traveling with my son across Siberia. Writer Elizabeth Rosner, almost as an aside, asked me why the chapters are formulated as letters. “I don’t know,” I told her. “Bad bad answer” she said. I pulled together a response about wanting to have three generations on board, and the reality of my son becoming an adult and moving on in the world the same time my father was approaching his final days. But I still couldn’t answer so I came home from Connemara and chopped my manuscript to small pieces. A few weeks later in a conversation with a friend in Texas, I said, “Tim, I’m losing focus on the theme.” He responded, “I’m not. This is all about fathers and sons. About moving on while trying to hold on. And the metaphor of the train is nothing more than setting.” Between the time my son and I rode the train and the time I wrote the book, my father died. I heard once that the loss of a parent is the greatest loss of security we can face, even at fifty-five years old. Not because we aren’t able to handle the turmoil of life on our own but because that foundation has been rocked.
So I rewrote the entire book as a narrative that takes place on the trans-Siberian railway, with all the characters and unknowns that trip entails, but that’s not what it is about. It’s about relationships, about being between two generations who are about to transition.
Back to Ted.
Sudeikis masterfully weaves every possible father-son relationship into what on the surface is a comedy about an American football coach hired to the helm of a British premier league football club.
Right away we have the estranged father as Ted Lasso separates from his wife, and his young son remains with his mother. We also soon learn the powerful impact his own father had on him and the fallout from his father’s suicide when Ted was just sixteen. In England we meet the team, including Jamie Tartt, whose father is physically and verbally abusive, Sam Obisanya, whose father is more of his best friend and mentor, Nathan Shelley, whose Dad is demanding of his son’s talents and seemingly never satisfied, Leslie (male) Higgins who is the proud and dotting father of five boys, Roy Kent, who becomes a surrogate father to his niece, and of course Ted himself, who moves into the father-role to the entire team, the individual players with which he has various degrees of parental conflicts and resolutions.
This is listed as a comedy, but it absolutely fits the bill as a drama as well, placing it in the same vein as shows like MASH which walks that thin line between laughter and tears.
Both the Mother and Father figures in our lives have served to keep grounded the best efforts of humanity throughout history. We need either to recognize the example or play the part. Almost all aspects of society rely upon those roles to set the strong example with seemingly unconditional love as we push through difficult moments. When hope seems fleeting and one feels “lost in a pathless wood” as Frost proclaims, that Maternal strength or Paternal guidance is almost always enough to help us keep going, knowing that whatever happens we’ll be okay. Even if we lose, we suffer those losses together, and we move on.
Sudeikis so thoroughly designed the first three seasons of the show to investigate all possible Father/Son relations, he completes the first three seasons with a montage of the characters’ post-Lasso lives with Cat Steven’s “Father and Son.”
There seems to be a lack of parental symbolism in the world, in the nation, in our lives. In fact, more often than not those who should be in those roles these days are appearing more like Jamie Tartt’s abusive and untrustworthy father. It would be perfect if we could always rely upon Sam Obisanya’s Yoda-like dad to turn to, but that’s not the hand we’ve been dealt. In fact, it feels like we’re a player down right now and this time it’s the captain of the team who is absent. That loss of security can be overwhelming. Ted Lasso’s season four comes just in time.
Watch Ted Lasso again starting Wednesday for Season Four.
As for this coachless world in which we find ourselves, well, we might have to switch our game plan, but we’ve got each other’s backs, and that might be enough.
I miss the last millennium. I miss when students had to register by coming to the college and meeting with an advisor or faculty member or dean. The day registration opened, a line would form around the admissions building by six am, and some would be there for hours on end hoping to get their schedule. When I was a student, we all showed up to the basketball arena where tables were set up with members of various departments holding cards for each class. We’d be called down by seniority, and on the floor I would walk first to the Journalism faculty where one of the profs would give me a card for their course. I remember distinctly going to the Earth Sciences table where I asked for a card second semester senior year for a class I should have taken freshman year. The professor gave it to me and laughed. “When did you figure out you can’t put this off any longer?” he asked. “I’m still working on it,” I said, not kidding.
But in those seats waiting to be called to the floor, or in line wrapped around the buildings and often clear out to the lake on campus, students talked to each other with time enough to have deep conversations about where they’re from and what they are hoping to do with their lives. Friendships were made. My first day freshman year I came out of the dean’s office and a beautiful woman my age in a tie-dyed t-shirt and cut-offs leaned against the building trying to figure out her schedule. She looked up and said, “Hi, I’m Liz. Did you just see Dr. Jandoli?” I said I had and she asked for help. We talked for a few hours and I suggested some courses she might need to take, and the following Monday she found out she was in every single one of my classes. That was forty-seven years ago and she is still one of my dearest friends. The thing is, we talked, and by the time classes started I had a half dozen relationships already underway. And likewise at the college where I taught, I’d walk into class that first day and everyone was chatting away the time, having met and bonded while waiting in line. There is value in waiting, in having no device to occupy your time. But those days are gone now.
I miss those days in that long ago millennium when I might not see a friend or relative, or often enough a sibling or a parent, for weeks or months at a time, and when we did finally see each other again having not had the ability to communicate in any way other than what was not yet known as snail mail, we would practice the lost art of “catching up.” We’d sit into the small hours of the morning and swap stories about people we met and what others we knew were doing. We’d talk about mishaps and adventures, about what we missed and what we discovered. There was tremendous value in being out of the loop for months on end. You found out just how much you missed someone, you found out just how much you can handle on your own.
If the devices available now were available then I might never have lost touch with some people, one for twenty-two years, and we would have remained close and never learned just how much we value in each other, we never would have discovered how much we needed to learn on our own. Friendships can be destroyed by overuse. Certainly they can burn out. But in the last period of the second set of a thousand years, you looked for payphones, your asked directions, you waited in line for coffee, for meals, for God’s sake for everything. You understood the need to yield to others, you waited for the green, you waved someone else in, you had long periods of absolute silence. Silence is dead now, and when I asked my students how many minutes a day were they in complete silence other than what is heard outside such as cars or birds, only a few had any silence at all and even then for only a few minutes.
I miss the last millennium for the music I discovered by sliding up and down the radio dial while a friend drove us absolutely nowhere in particular. I miss the need to go to a theatre to see a movie without the option to simply stream it at home. I miss having no idea where I’m going and needing to ask for directions, during which I found out more about where I was and where I should go. Before GPS a friend of mine and I were doing readings in Cornell, New York. We got lost and discovered Vladimir’s Book Barns which could contest the most historic of bookstores anywhere, including Strands. Vlad suggested we find Dave’s Fish Fry to eat, which we never would have found on our own or, for that matter, online. By getting lost and not having a cell phone for directions or assistance, I have met indigenous people in the Sonoran Desert, talked for an hour to a Gambian in line at a post office in Senegal while waiting to use a phone, and wandered around a Virginia Beach college campus looking for a phone to call AAA to come get my car and ended up with a job.
We have lost the art of getting lost, of asking for help from others. We stopped stopping people on the boardwalk to ask them to take our picture only to find out where they’re from and what we might have in common. I have friends all over the world, and the vast majority of them are because that’s what we did during the last millennium–we talked to strangers, we hitchhiked (that’s an early form of Uber where you didn’t have to pay anyone), we walked inside Chick-Fil-A and Starbucks, we turned to the student next to us and asked her major, where she was from, her name. I once asked my students during the last week of classes what the names were of the people sitting next to them and not a single one knew anyone else’s name.
We may not have been nearly as technologically savvy during the last semester, but we were human, and we could use more humanity these days.
Sandy stands at the cash register waiting for Jimmy to finish pumping gas. She knows he will come in and ask for two packs of Marlboro Lights, make some off-color comment, look her up and down, smile his creepy grin, and wink as he leaves, calling, “See you later, Babe.” So she gets the cigarettes ready and is glad for customers getting coffee and picking out food from the grill. She doesn’t need to be nice to him for very long if there’s a line.
Harry is standing at the rack of novelties near the door; trinkets such as lighters that look like fishing poles, key chains with toy turtles, and some stuffed animals on the lower shelves where kids can see them and grab them with slushie-coated hands and the parents will have to pay. Harry reads the headlines in the paper while sipping his coffee which he rests on top of the stack of Gatorade cases, and when it gets crowded, as it does every morning around seven, he carries his coffee and paper to the counter, places down exactly two dollars and eight cents (never in her hand, few people are polite enough to actually hand her the change, she thinks), says, “Thank you Sandy,” and walks out to talk to the younger watermen in the parking lot gathered around Billy Ray’s truck backed up to the pile of bags of logs for sale. It’s like this every morning. If it rains, they sit on the logs under the overhang.
“See you tomorrow, Harry,” Sandy calls back to eighty-something Harry, and is sorry he leaves before sixty-year-old Jimmy comes in since Harry usually engages the creep long enough to distract him so that by the time he turns his attention back to Sandy’s twenty-five-year old body, she’s waiting on other customers.
Jimmy enters and gets to the counter just before another customer, Patty, with her coffee and a small bag of donuts, as usual. Sandy puts the cigarette packs in front of him and rings them up. “Anything else, Jimmy?”
“Oh darling!” he says, a slight sound of drunk in his slur, but it’s just his way. He turns to Patty, “Look at how my girl knows me! No darling, just the cigs today.” He pays and starts to talk when Sandy looks toward Patty, who places her donut bag on the counter in front of Jimmy. “See you later, Babe,” he says and leaves, a chill running down Sandy’s spine.
Every damn day.
Tracy the manager mingles with the customers near the cooler getting their cases of Corona and Bud Light and only once in a while some dark beer worth the money, with her small iPad strapped to her neck like a server’s tray at the old fifties style roller skating drive-in restaurants. She scans sandwiches and bagged pickles and some small cakes. The chips and soft drinks and alcohol are counted when the men who carried those cases in and out deliver them, like the chip guy, Gus, who rolls in six or seven cases of varieties of bagged potato chips in familiar and disgusting flavors. He leans on the boxes waiting for Tracy or Sandy or anyone willing to take a few minutes away from the constant line of customers at the counter so they can count the delivery and he can be on his way. “I’m leaving in three minutes” he might mutter sometimes, but, really, no he’s not. It just makes him sound more in control instead being forced to wait for the old woman at the register holding a twenty-dollar bill who seems to gain gratification by standing over the lottery tickets for far too long, saying, “Sandy, I’ll take a number three. How much is that? Oh, no, no. Maybe instead a number twenty-five. None? Oh okay, well let me see then…” and a line forms, so Sandy will say, “I’ll be right back,” and she counts Gus’s bags, sends him on his way, opens the other register and gets others on their way, sips her Red Bull and moves back to the old woman who still hasn’t landed on a number she likes. Eventually, the woman says, “Oh just give me the number three anyway. I came in for that so I should know what it costs!” and everyone in line lets out a sigh of disgust.
It is eight-thirty am. It should slow a bit now, briefly.
The last customer to check out for now is Casey. A “true gentleman” Sandy always says, both to him and to her coworkers who have a penchant for making fun of every single person who enters the store. “He always buys the same damn thing,” one will say of whoever just left. Or, “He never buys the same thing twice.” “He is such a smoker!” “What an alcoholic!” “Dear God! I wish he’d shower! He smells like fish all the friggin time!” and on and on. Sandy stays silent, most of the time, except for the more than occasional exhales of exasperation when dealing with guys, and the occasional woman, hitting on her.
But there are some, like Casey, who make it worthwhile. He’s always polite and always has a compliment. Today it was, “My Sandy, you really have beautiful eyes, and today they seem more alive. Enjoy your day!” and she smiles. Casey isn’t that old, fifties perhaps, still too old for Sandy. But there’s something about him that makes anyone who hears him know he isn’t trying to pick her up. He is just a nice guy. There are others, too, both men and women, a scattering of fine customers who like it when she works and make it known to Tracy. Part of it is how sharp she is and how she can clearly correct a problem almost instantly, and part of it is her pleasant disposition and even-temper despite those problems and despite the jerks.
There are moments when their rudeness gets the best of her. She might ring something up twice by accident, or, worse, tell someone they are out of something the customer is determined to have, and, of course, it is Sandy’s fault and they’ll let her know what a crappy human she is. Once, when she came in to work late, Brenda, a co-worker, though usually on a different shift, asked if everything was okay at home, knowing it almost always isn’t since Sandy’s boyfriend, Tim, usually rags on her each morning. Sandy said, “Yeah, sure, Tim let me know how lucky we are now that we must wear masks since my face looks gross in the morning. I cried for twenty minutes.”
“Geez,” Brenda said, “you can get that abuse here!” and walked out to head home after her shift, but when it slowed down and Sandy stood sipping her second Red Bull and watched a woman fumble with the gas pump, she thought, No, no. At least here, Casey comes in, or some of the other guys who always say how nice I look. Or that lawyer who comes in sometimes and tells me this job is fine, but I have it in me to do so much more. And even Jimmy, the pig, clearly thinks I’m attractive. There’s some good here, some chance to feel good about myself. Not at home. Luckily, she is usually too busy to think about it since her sharpness and friendliness placed her right on the busiest parts of the day. No, she likes it here. She is needed and appreciated here and it gives her a sense of purpose, which, at twenty-five, can be gratifying, but, as Sandy is beginning to figure out, can be a death sentence. For now, though, she enjoys her job.
Until Ben comes in at noon for his shift, the POS as he’s referenced when he is not in the store. Not because Ben isn’t nice—he calls all the men “Brother” and all the women “Ma’am,” no matter the age—something left over from his military service and subsequent jail time, his early release for good behavior, and his subsequent non-violated probation. But he is known in the convenience-employee crowd both here and at several stores up and down this stretch of highway as the Piece of Shit because, as Brenda likes to point out, “No one, anywhere, ever, knows more than this prick.” How to do inventory, how to check people out faster, how to pick the best lottery tickets (“you really have to watch the news to see what’s going on and find the equivalent reference in the cards”), how to lose weight, how to talk to your boyfriend at home when he is constantly putting you down, or in the case of Brenda, how to raise three boys properly since he raised a teenage girl for at least a couple of the years he was around. He knows it all. What’s more, they will point out, it doesn’t matter how correct one of the employees is about any given subject; he absolutely must outdo. If Brenda tells a customer that the beef and cheese tacos on the grill are fresh, Ben needs to let the customer know not only the same, “Yes, Ma’am, they are absolutely fresh, freshest we’ve had in a while,” but he has to add his imagined contribution to that: “I was just telling Brenda we need to make sure we only serve the freshest ones so she went ahead and made them for me just now,” even though that never happened and he has less seniority than anyone else in the store save Old Peg who comes for four hours every day to make coffee and clean the counters, and has been there since it was a “Dave’s Stop and Go,” back in the sixties when there was nowhere else in town to get anything to eat except the IGA.
Sandy, to the point, does not like working with Ben. It isn’t the work—Ben is efficient and can be left alone to do most anything, and, she likes say, at least he can count, unlike many who have spun through this job. No, she doesn’t look forward to shifts that overlap Ben’s because he both gives her a headache and makes way too many personal comments to her, especially about Tim. Tim may be an asshole, she thinks, but he’s my asshole.
Other than that, they all get along well. Ben has to be there because no one else will hire him, and this is walking distance to his home, albeit a long walk, and he doesn’t drive. He is there because he accepts his fate that this will pay the bills and he has learned to live on what me makes. Brenda is terribly smarter than the job, smarter than this life she’s living with overdue rent and three kids who constantly need things, one of whom is special needs, but she knows that, and has, to her credit most people say, taken it on one hundred percent. She will be manager someday and is already assistant, which means she makes a bit more money than she used to, and is given more responsibilities, like access to the larger bill section of the safe, the ability to check in deliveries and make orders, and even the ability to hire if they need help. Tracy is there because she started there in high school, worked her way up, proved to be efficient, honest, and desperately even-keeled in any situation, and never had ambitions to do more, though managing a corporate convenience store is demanding enough—she loves running the store, gets paid well, and even won Manager of the Year at the annual corporate convention in Orlando, which came with it a generous financial reward. She treats the other workers like offspring, and she is still young enough at fifty to work for many more years. Her and Brenda make a great team.
Then there’s Sandy who simply shouldn’t be there, knows she shouldn’t be there, everyone else except Tim knows she shouldn’t be there, but like so many twenty-somethings in the last twenty-something years, had trouble emotionally moving much past high school, just eight miles away. She has always lived in the small town, knows everyone and everyone knows her, has been with her boyfriend forever, and is respected and appreciated by Brenda, Tracy, and everyone that comes in, and a position like that in a small town on a peninsula far from any city doesn’t always happen. God knows what it might be like down in Richmond or up in DC, she thinks. No, this works. “Someday” is her mantra. Someday. “If Tracy cared about her,” one regular, a lawyer who works over in Richmond, said one day to Harry at the Gatorade cases, “she’d fire Sandy and force her to move on, find her potential.” But Harry has observed far too much for far too long, and since the lawyer has only been in the area for fifteen years, he’s still a come-lately and doesn’t know better. But Harry does, and told him plainly, “Tracy isn’t the problem. Not even Tim’s the problem. Sandy’s the problem.” They both nodded at that cold truth.
Sandy glances at the clock to note her shift ends soon, so she offers to help Tracy do inventory after work for some overtime. Tracy says okay, not because she needs the help or because Sandy is that ambitious, though both of those things are true, but because Tracy understands Sandy simply doesn’t want to go home.
At the coffee counter, Peg wipes down a spill and complains about how messy everyone is these days and it wasn’t like this even during the sixties, and she starts ranting about how much more courteous customers used to be, and an afternoon is dedicated to this subject. Every day it is a different rant—sometimes the way people are dressed or not dressed, sometimes the cursing so common in convenience store lines, and sometimes about how the shelves are left in disarray. Her voice grows louder to outdo the rattling of the drink machines, and Sandy regrets her offer to stay noting a headache coming on. Ben comes over to explain to Peg how to better clean the counter, but Peg, the woman in her eighties who just a few days earlier complained about the cursing, tells Ben to shut the fuck up, and Tracy and Sandy laugh so hard they lean on each other, and suddenly Sandy knows that is exactly why she stayed; the laughter she doesn’t have at home. It takes her mind off of her pointless relationship. But, damnit, she thinks. It’s hard to get motivated when everyone’s fine with where they are now! The watermen are content. The old men and women who come in for coffee and lottery tickets are all content. Her co-workers, her boyfriend, hell, even Jimmy is content. She sees this and knows being surrounded by so many satisfied people is going to destroy her. She needs to quit. For now, though, she counts egg salad sandwiches.
It is January 3rd. Again. Spins around every winter, and over the last few years it seems as if we dropped a few summer months, maybe some weeks in October. Because it is January again, and my chances of reinventing myself are growing fewer.
Like anyone else, I would do a lot of things differently, especially over the course of the more recent years. But I can’t. The best I can do is start now, and keep starting. As many times as it takes.
Because, honestly, life is beautiful, but we insist on talking about the ugly. And as Confucius pointed out: Life is easy, but we insist on making it complicated.
Much peace my friends.
If I had my life to live over
by Nadine Stair
******* If I had my life to live over, I’d dare to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day.
Oh, I’ve had my moments, And if I had it to do over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I’ve been one of those people who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.
We used to meet at either 77th or 78th street, depending on who went first and when they graduated (or would graduate). I was in the class of ’78 so I would park across Atlantic Avenue and walk across the dunes to the beach and spread out the blanket and then swim. I was not a fan of laying around soaking up sun. I preferred to throw a frisbee or walk down the beach to the tourist areas from 42nd Street down. But when everyone showed up, usually by late morning, we’d all hang out and talk, music on some transistor.
And we’d swim, body surf, wade at waist level talking, the occasional jelly fish finding one of our calves. I remember several years of almost always having salty lips and hair, the soft, warm feel of sun on my shoulders and neck. This was how I grew up, at least during my high school years. When in the water, though, I spent most of the time scanning the horizon. Spain, Portugal. Africa. They were out there. The war in Vietnam had ended my sophomore year and when I graduated, Ford was president. None of that mattered. No, what mattered was where we’d meet that night, whose house, and should we keep it to ourselves or should we let everyone know, like the time fifty or more people showed up to Dave’s house over on Broad Bay, and an equal amount at my house once when my parents were off to a convention. It was all very innocent, and no one had to call the police. We were teenagers figuring it out, and the best I could figure, what I wanted was out there somewhere, across the horizon, past where Robin Lee Graham and Joshua Slocum had sailed. Down the beach toward the places Jimmy Buffett talked about in his early music we and other beach-dwellers were listening to ten years before the rest of the world. He spoke of margaritas in mason jars and friends from Monserrat. Jonmark would get out his guitar when he got home, noting exactly how the songs were played, whereas I would get out the maps noting exactly where I planned to go. Funny, JM still plays and I still navigate my way around this globe. And we’re still dear friends. Yeah, who we are is tethered very much to who we were.
At 77th Street, though, back when we went there, there was an old huge, two story house with first and second floor covered wrap around porches right on the dunes, and I wanted that place so bad. At the time I believed I could have spent the rest of my life on that porch, walking to the water, back to the house, put on some music and talk to friends. I thought that was a pretty ambitious plan. And, in fact, it was, but I was missing the ambitious part. Go figure.
Anyway.
I was at the bay this morning watching a long “shelf” cloud settle in from the north, and the water was glassy, the sun almost above the clouds in the southeast, but not yet, and I understood something with an acute sort of clarity—sitting out in nature with someone, or alone, but with someone is far more engaging, with enough to make the day comfortable—some water, some food, a comfortable chair, is my Minimum Acceptable Required Stuff.
It turns out that after several million miles it is all I need. Oh, and music playing. When I was young I was certain I needed to “make it” in the world, not yet knowing that my true ambition would be to end up where I started. Gotta love irony.
Here’s what I’ve learned since then: nothing. I know a lot more than I did at that time, of course. I’ve been around the block and that kind of experience alone prepares me for what’s next. But the only lesson I absorbed since then is that I really didn’t need to go seek happiness; I needed to create it where I already was. It reminds me of my young college days when I was in constant search of peace of mind in a place I was having trouble adjusting to, and one night I wandered into a friend’s apartment in the dorm—Fr Dan Rily—who was sitting with three or four guys from the floor, and I joined them for a few hours where we talked about nothing at all, but we laughed a lot, and when they left I stood up and told Fr. Dan that I hadn’t been that much at peace since I had arrived on campus, and he smiled his wide, mustache-covered smile and said, “Bobby, that’s because tonight you brought the peace with you.”
I won’t stop traveling; it’s in my blood. I just might stop looking for something else. A hike to some snow covered trail or a morning trip to the bay to watch the geese wing by or the dolphin surface on their way back to the ocean is enough to mark the day. Then it becomes easier to allow that “Sweet Surrender” John Denver sang about back during those beach days take over.
New Year’s Resolution List: To eliminate everything from my life that doesn’t make me feel alive and present. I don’t have enough time anymore for the rest of it. I think Ill head down to 77th street this week and see if that house is still there.
“My” cottage at 77th Street. Built in 1917 by fertilizer magnate F.S. Royster.
