The Luckiest Woman on the Face of the Earth

Yesterday was Old Timer's Day at Yankee Stadium, and it got me thinking about the great, understated courage of a woman I feel fortunate to have known. If that seems like a convoluted six-degrees-of-separation thing for emotions instead of people, well, maybe it is. Bear with me.

Old Timer's Day is always a lot of fun: legends and non-legends I'd seen play, and others I've only heard about. Watching is like hearing a Beatles song on the radio; not reliving a particular moment but rather peeking in on what we thought and felt in other eras of our lives. Eras that feel simpler now though, in actual fact, they probably weren't. For fans, baseball has always had a lot of emotion tied to it. Aside from this being the Yankee's last year in this historic stadium (something I'm not as worked up about as a lot of other people seem to be - they're only moving across the street), there were the losses this past year of two very beloved Yankees, the fine gentleman Bobby Murcer only a few weeks ago, and the fun and colorful Phil Rizzuto. Seeing Mrs. Rizzuto throw out the first ball to Derek Jeter, the future legend currently at her husband's old shortstop position, packed something touching and human I don't think you have to even be a baseball fan to feel or understand.

There's something I've been wanting to write for some time, waiting for an appropriate moment, and it occurred to me yesterday that this was it. It has to do with how20Old Timer's Day originated. It's an often-told story, and you may have heard it, but the tradition goes back to when the Yankees invited old team-mates back to join in an on-field tribute to a terminally-ill Lou Gehrig at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939. That was the day Gehrig gave that unforgettable speech in which he mentioned all the wonderful things in his life and, with great and understated bravery, said he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. (There aren't a lot of speeches, particularly by athletes, that people still remember nearly 70 years later.)

A Washington Post reporter who attended wrote this: “I saw strong men weep this afternoon, expressionless umpires swallow hard, and emotion pump the hearts and glaze the eyes of 61,000 baseball fans in Yankee Stadium. It was Lou Gehrig, tributes, honors, gifts heaped upon him, getting an overabundance of the thing he wanted least—sympathy. But it wasn’t maudlin. His friends were just letting their hair down in their earnestness to pay him honor. And they stopped just short of a good, mass cry.”

 

Fast-forward to July, 2007. Denise, a woman I knew only from on-line conversations but liked very much, was in her early-to-mid 40's and diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast and liver cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes. Although we exchanged a number of letters, this is from the one that stands out most:

 

"Please beg your wife to have mammograms. If nothing else comes out of this, at least I know my friends are all getting checked now.

"I have been on chemo for 3 months, I feel I have the best care possible. With treatment and prayers I hope to live to see my only child graduate from High school next May [2008]. I just want to see him become a man. He is a great  kid and I am truly blessed.

"I have learned in all of this that I have wonderful loving friends, a loving family, and many people who touch my life everyday to let me know they care.

"I do not see this as tragedy Ben, I see it as a gift. I will have no unfinished business, nothing left undone. Tragedy is getting killed by a drunk driver. I am given the gift of knowing that I need to take care of business and make sure I talk to my son about everything I want him to know in life. That is a gift when you know. Nobody is promised tomorrow but I am living as though everyday is precious and a gift."

It's one of those things we know and still can be reminded of once in a while: there is an everyday brand of courage that doesn't involve battlefields or daring rescues from burning buildings. Gehrig had it. So did Denise. We know others; for this journal-community, surely Kim comes to mind as well. (I shaved my legs for this? )

I've asked around but never got any official word about Denise. An e-mail I sent a few weeks ago was returned undeliverable: her account has been canceled. In the context of what she wrote, even I can figure out what that means. I share this now with the feeling she wouldn't mind. And in the hope Denise knew how much respect and admiration she inspired, even when all she had really set out to do was address a difficult situation the best way she knew how.

Beyond Reason

Sorry, folks, but I really have to rant.

This morning I was watching television news coverage of that horrible church shooting in Tennessee. (For international readers, over the weekend a gunman walked into a church during a youth performance and opened fire, killing two adults and wounding seven others.) The news reporters gave some details of what happened, interviewed some witnesses and then, to no one's surprise, said that ridiculous thing news reporters always seem to say when covering tragic events like this: we still don't know the reason he did it.

I can end the mystery right now. Here's the reason. The man walked into a church with a shotgun and started shooting people because he's a frigging nut! Is there really any other reason, any valid thought process, that leads someone to enter a church and start blasting away?

It's a lazy reporter's cliche I first noticed when another psycho walked into an Amish schoolhouse a couple of years ago and started shooting little girls. Shaking their heads sensitively for emphasis, the newsmen reported they discovered why the gunman struck: he had had some kind of social rejection once upon a time and felt anger toward school girls.

Is what triggers some psychopath's individual demons really the "reason" he attacks? And are the news people somehow suggesting there are degrees of senselessness in those reasons for shooting people in churches and classrooms? Obviously, these reporters would never try to make a joke out of this tragedy; that would be disrespectful. Here's my point: is it any less so for them to infuse the event with artificial drama and a complete unwillingness to think about what's being reported? 

 

Not-Sure-If-Related Item: We Respectfully Request the Honor of your Going Ahead and Making Our Day

With the foregoing rant still fresh in my labanza, I saw this item today in the local newspaper, or what passes for one. Around dinner time this past Saturday night, a local woman, aged 60, was arrested for approaching her loud-partying neighbors with a handgun. According to the article, the woman "admitted bringing the gun out but denied pointing it at anyone, saying she had politely asked the family to keep the noise down because she was trying to sleep."We can only guess what Emily Post would suggest as a polite way for asking a neighbor to keep the noise down while you're holding a handgun. Maybe she had her pinky up while reaching for the trigger. In any event, for the next several months she'll no doubt be dividing her time between working with her attorney to prepare her defense, and writing thank-you notes to all those nice people at Smith and Wesson.

 

Totally Unrelated Item: I Have a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore

A while back I wrote about some favorite movie quotes. I'm shocked - shocked! - to discover I somehow left out one that should have been at, or at least very near, the top of the list.

Wizard: As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don't know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they're unbreakable.

Tin Man: But I still want one.

 

It's Always Something

I wanted to end this on a positive note. This past weekend I had the most wonderful time working at an event - the annual "Noogie Carnival" - with an amazing group of people at a local Gilda's Club chapter. For anyone unfamiliar with it, Gilda's Club is a network of community-based support groups for people touched by cancer; that's everyone from the patients themselves to their families and friends, adults and children. The environment there is welcoming, well thought-out, and just plain phenomenal. They don't provide medical care, but complement it in the most warmly human way with emotional and social support. [Housekeeping note: I borrowed a good bit of that description from their mission statement.]  Named, of course, for the great Gilda Radner, it was started after she passed away by her husband, her cancer psychotherapist, and some friends who wanted to carry on the kind of community-based support Gilda herself had found comfort in during her illness. These are great people doing really important work. I've never used this space for this kind of item before (at least I don't think so), and I have no intention of making a habit of doing so, but in this case I'm happy and proud to make the exception. If you check them out - www.gildasclub.org - I strongly suspect you'll be glad you did.

And that's a rant I'm glad to share.

 

Teach Them Well and Let Them Lead the Way

"I'm living my life based on decisions a 17-year-old made." (Stew, "Passing Strange")

 

The young men - I'm going to have to get used to not saying "boys" anymore - are now 18 and high school graduates. (They actually graduated a couple of weeks ago, but it takes time to get to things sometimes, you know?)

 

If you've had the experience, you know it's a time of great joy, and great emotion. There's seeing a fast-forward version of the maturing of your own children, of course. And having that underscored by seeing their classmates, the ones you've watched grow since kindergarten, as adults themselves. And realizing that along with growing older yourself, you've grown and changed in almost as many ways as they have. What you heard all those years ago really is true: adults don't make children. Children make adults. And it's a process that ends only when you do.

 

The ceremony itself was fun, dignified and mercifully short. The mayor spoke (zzzzzzzzzzz), as did the superintendant of schools, who expressed dismay over how much he was having to pay to send his own children to college. (Must be hard on that $200,000 a year salary, Mr. Superintendant.) My mother and sister came with us, as did my father-in-law and his friend. I thought of my dad. At my 40th birthday party some years ago (ok, a big bunch of years ago), I told my father, who had not been well at the time, how great it was that he was able to be there and he said, "If I had to crawl to be here, I would." As I sat at the graduation looking upward, hoping he was getting to see his cherished boys graduating, I heard the words: "If I had to crawl to be here, I would." It still brings tears.

 

Afterward, we went out to a nice dinner at a Japanese restaurant, one of those places where the chef cooks at the table while juggling the food, the knives and anything else he can get his hands on. The highlights included embarassing the boys by having the waitstaff parade around singing "Happy Birthday" with the maitre d' leading them wearing a dragon head, and listening to my father-in-law, speaking loudly and slowly, trying to order a Beefeater martini on the rocks from a waiter who barely spoke English. I have no idea what he ended up getting, but it didn't look much like a martini.

 

Now, those two little babies - the ones we once struggled to get two-ounce bottles of formula into and who now take down small mountains of pizza, mac-and-cheese, and all the other basic teenage food groups - prepare to go off on their own and make their way in a brave new world of responsibility and independence. (I speak, of course, about them going to their first Bon Jovi concert, though I suppose college is kind of a big deal too.) The pride, fulfillment, and faith I'm feeling in the future of the world are more than I have words to express. It will be an adjustment for us in September when they're living on campus, I think more so for a father who generally doesn't get to spend as much time with them over the years as a mother does. I'm hoping to keep my mind off the sudden quiet by keeping busy with household projects like converting their room into a hot tub.

 

I've often fretted for the future of the world, especially now that our president has declared the new Russian president is a "smart man who understands the issues," thereby giving the Russians two big advantages over us. The men and women of the Class of 2008 really do leave me hopeful for the slowing down of the descent of this handbasket we're in. In particular, I've enjoyed reading the quotes some of the graduates selected for their yearbook to memorialize where they feel they are at this touchstone moment. As one of the students quoted J.K. Rowling, "It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." From the Class of 2008 come these fine selections:

 

"Never make someone a priority when all you are is their option."

 

"In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider: surely God has appointed the one as well as the other." (Ecclesiastes 7:14)

 

"Ask me about my vow of silence."

 

"Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards."

 

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"I do not fear a man who has practiced 10,000 kicks only once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. (Bruce Lee)"

 

"To love is to risk not being loved in return, but risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing at all." (Leo Buscaglia)

 

"The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."

 

"He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which." (Douglas Adams)

 

"Being uncomfortable is one of the secrets of the universe."

 

Take heart, dear readers. I've seen the future, and it's looking up. On the left, the future at 9 years old. On the right, at 18 years, as well as the past or present or something at an age we won't discuss...

 

           

 

Brilliant Anarchy

The world is now down two great thinkers and, let's face it folks, there weren't that many to start with.

Tim Russert and George Carlin present an interesting study in contrasts. Russert got us thinking by learning his subject's points of view and then taking the opposite position with a flow that was totally natural. He could move seamlessly from right to left and visit everywhere in between, all with an unassuming enthusiasm that often belied his questions' underlying toughness.

George Carlin never varied his position for the situation. Liberal anger and combative nonconformity were the swords he handled deftly. Mercilessly, too. No attitude or institution was safe. I didn't always agree with what he had to say - part of me wants to say I rarely did - and he frequently made me very uncomfortable and wanting to speak back to the television or radio. And I am grateful for that. I can't think of a single case in which he changed my mind about something, but he had a genius for making you push your emotions through the filter of your intellect, the way an espresso machine forces water through the coffee under pressure and you end up with something richer and stronger. When George Carlin got on a roll you had no choice but to gel and verbalize ideas you were satisfied with only feeling instinctively before that. It was no longer enough to figure out what you thought; out of self-defense you were driven to figuring out why you thought it. He recognized the irony of instant information becoming a superficial cover-up for an epidemic of unexamined lives, and he would have none of it.

A few years back, when Richard Pryor, another seminal comedian, passed away, some pious friends expressed mild outrage that such a fuss was being made over this comedian known for using crude language. I tried explaining that, well, there was content in between the salty expressions, but was rebuffed with some out-of-context biblical quote about "the word." Regular readers know matters of faith are important to me. That said, I am firm in my belief that you should run, and fast, from people who use expressions like "the word" with a self-satisfied, hands-folded piety that oozes the very divisiveness and hatred they say they're railing against from high atop their sanctimonious pedestals. (Not that I'm bitter about it.) I'd love to hear what they have to say about George Carlin.

Musings at the End of a Father's Day

From the great songwriter Harry Ruby came this:

"Today, father, is Father's Day, and we're giving you a tie.
It's not much, you know. It's just our way of showing you we think you're a regular guy.
You'll say that it was nice of us to bother, but it really was a pleasure to fuss.
For, according to our mother, you're our father. And that's good enough for us."

As one might reasonably expect, I'm thinking of fathers today. My own, of course, missing him much. Thinking good thoughts too for Mary, whose fine journal is one of my favorites, and of this being her first Father's Day without hers. And of other fathers I've observed, and the nature of fatherhood itself. Odd as it may seem, I was reminded of some of this by recent news coverage of a convicted hedge-fund swindler who, on his way to report to prison, parked his car on a bridge with a suicide reference written on the hood . No body has been found yet, and I'm fairly certain that when authorities do find it the heart will be beating and the body temperature will be something like 98.6 F.

Why does this remind me of fatherhood? It starts with my having the peculiar distinction of having known, or at least having been acquainted with, a man who spent nearly two years in the mid-1980's as No. 1 on the Federal Marshall's Most Wanted list. No joke. Multiple journal entries could be devoted in their entireties to his adventures/misadventures. For now it will do that while he was awaiting sentencing for taking about $2.2 million from a Teamsters pension fund (remember, back then that was a lot of money), the news reported he had disappeared in a scuba-diving "accident" and was presumably killed. Now, the reaction you'd have if you heard most people you know were killed in a diving accident would be something like, "Wow. That, really terrible. How sad." In this case, my reaction - and that of most people to whom I spoke who also knew him - was "Yeah. Right." He was eventually found - tan, smiling, and running a chain of successful scuba-gear stores on the appropriately named Maldive Islands. (I suppose if a guy is dumb enough to steal from the Teamsters, he's dumb enough to live a conspicuous life while on thelam.) After his capture, I was struck by a newspaper article's mention of the love and loyalty his daughter, a lovely kid I knew while in high school, continued to demonstrate. I know she had to feel great hurt and shame, and yet - he was her dad. This was more than 20 years ago, and I still think about that. Not so much in terms of him, but in terms of her.

More fatherhood stuff, oddly timed too. In my office there's a bookshelf where people bring books they've finished reading so other people can borrow them. This past Friday, I saw someone had brought in Tim Russert's "Big Russ and Me," a book I'd been wanting to read about his relationship with and admiration for his father. When it was time to leave I picked up the book to put it in my bag, and stopped to read the forward. Thinking about my own father, I teared up a little at Russert's account of accepting an award at the American Legion in Buffalo, and calling his father up to give it to him instead in thanks for the values and courage he and this room full of old soldiers have lived and given us. Suitably moved, I left the office, and on the ride down in the elevator saw the item on the video screen about Russert's sudden passing at 58.


At Last I Understand

This started with song lyrics. Here are some more to finish. (I'm providing a link since the lyrics are under copyright.) They're from Bobby Russell, whose better known lyrics include "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia," "Little Green Apples," and the inexplicably successful "Honey." These are from "Saturday Morning Confusion," one of those songs - "Is That All There Is" and "It Was a Very Good Year" being two others that come to mind - that you really don't understand till you get a whole bunch of years under your belt. Fatherhood in a nutshell...

http://www.themadmusicarchive.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=153

And this to close...

A few weeks ago we were pulling out of the church parking lot after the service and were trying to decide where to go for lunch. My sons wanted Taco Bell.

Me: Did you bring your driver's licenses with you?
Them: No.
Me: Then we can't go to Taco Bell.
Them: Why not?
Me: Because if I eat at Taco Bell I'll keel over and die, and without your licenses you'd have no way to get home.
Them: You mean if we'd brought our licenses we could have gone to Taco Bell?

Happy Father's Day, everyone.

Learning By Trowel and Error

Finally, and with about three weeks advance planning, this past three-day Memorial Day weekend provided a  great opportunity for relaxation and recreation. Or it would have, if I hadn't had a backyard makeover project that's been in a state of partial completion for about three years. The yard had not been touched since the end of the last growing season, so that alone tells you something about what kind of shape it was in as we entered the weekend.

Some background to clarify. About three years ago my all-concrete back yard had deteriorated to the point at which anyone going back there risked serious bodily injury. More importantly, they might sue me. Even in those cheap-oil days, the cost of concrete had skyrocketed to where the cost of repaving the entire yard was far beyond the budget, assuming (incorrectly) that there was a budget. Since I'd been gardening for years in planters, we decided to save on concrete - and, for that matter, planters - by repaving only about half the yard and keeping the rest exposed so I could remake it into an in-ground garden in all that spare time I have. In the ensuing three years, I learned some valuable lessons:

Lesson 1. Hand-digging the heavy clay soil found in this part of New Jersey is a bear.

Lesson 2. Lesson 1 is not helped by the presence of large, heavy rocks and construction debris left behind by the guys who built the house about 60 years ago. (They've probably gone on to that great construction project in the sky by now. My heartfelt wish is that they spend eternity laying in heavy clay soil with large rocks and construction debris.)

Lesson 3. Placing, one-by-one, a pallet and a half of stone pavers so they form a level network of walking paths throughout the garden is a really big bear.

Lesson 4. After said pavers have been placed, sweep sand into the cracks immediately. If you wait, oh, say, 3 years, weeds and grass grow between them with roots that extend down to around the earth's molten center. Pulling them out is an absolutely enormous bear.

Lesson 5. Hauling half a pallet of 80 pound bags of soil (or, as we call it in Jersey, "dirt") is no big deal for a tall strong guy who over the years has made sure he kept himself in shape.

Lesson 6: Hauling half a pallet of 80 pounds bags of soil is quite a big deal for a short, skinny middle-aged technocrat whose main form of exercise is pushing a pencil.

After far too long of tellingmyself I was sure going to finish this project "someday," my biological clock had had enough. (Yes, men have those too. Ours have us feeling we have to earn large sums of money or complete manly projects by a certain age.) I entered the three-day weekend with but one goal: finish the yard. A doctor friend I shared my three-day plan with advised me to get the Advil ready. I consider it a sign of prophetic cosmic approval that as I left to go home for the weekend after work on Friday, the Advil folks decided to hold a promotion and hand out free samples on the street. I got four or five packets, and was ready.

Having been neglected for more than half a year, a good bit of the yard was so overgrown with weeds you might have thought it an abandoned lot. The lawn, or rather the 10' x 18' patch of grass that passes for one, symbolized how the yard looked like an unkempt vagrant badly in need of a haircut. Introducing my two teenagers to the idea that manual labor is not a guy in their Spanish class, we got off to a good start that had the yard looking like a semi-kempt vagrant with a bad haircut in no time.

My boys took immediately to the task of weeding the areas that hadn't been planted last year and that had the most weed growth. Mostly they were enormously entertained by the variety of insect life forms one encounters while digging up old soil. By the time we got to developing the last planting sector I was unable to bear the thought of hauling one more bag of soil or laying one more stone paver. Solution: put up a steel arch-type trellis from a kit, put a hanging basket of something-or-other (petunias I think, but who was paying attention by that point), and mulch the living daylights out of that heavy clay soil.

By the time we ran out of daylight, the only remaining work was the weeding of a portion of the pavers, and some normal-maintenance weeding that actually has nothing to do with the makeover. And oh yeah, I have to find some way of getting rid of all those old planters. With only enough energy left at the end to run a hot bath and open a cold beer, I couldn't help feeling that life was a pretty good place.

Should you be interested, dear readers, here's the progress. The photo on the left is the old planter garden, arranged with great artistry in a 4 x 4 grid that may not seem like much to normal people but that engineers think is beautiful. On the right is the 2008 version. (The grass area is where the planters were in the photo on the left.) Please disregard my neighbor's Mesozoic-era fence that we hope to cover with one of our own some time soon.

    

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Graffiti

Back in high school, a good friend (who went on to write professionally) wrote a column called "Graffiti" in the school newspaper. It was a collection of short, odds-and-ends items, and I was reminded of that title while gathering the mini-rants below.

Britney's mom must be feeling kind of slighted right now

A mothers organization in Long Island, NY has given Lindsay Lohan's mother a "Top Mom" award. No, really, I'm serious, and so, apparently, are the members of the mothers organization. I'm cheering Lindsay on in her recovery efforts, but let's face it, folks: giving Dina Lohan a mothering award would be as ridiculous as, say, George Bush offering his administration's expertise on responding to a natural disaster. And how dumb would THAT be?

Heck of a job, George

The hearts of any civilized human being have to go out to the people of Myanmar, and everything humanly possible that can be done to help them should be done. That said, am I the only one who finds a cruel irony in our current president offering his administration's expertise for responding to a natural disaster?

Do they still have to attack if he calls it "nucular?"

This past Tuesday morning, the Today Show had a piece where Al Roker got to go into one of the top-secret underground silos from which nuclear attacks would be launched. Roker asked some interesting questions of the dedicated soldiers who - quite literally - have their fingers on the buttons, exploring how they'd feel if a strike were ordered, but forgot to ask this one: are they concerned that the person who could order a nuclear attack is a self-absorbed, morally bankrupt, short-sighted, self-righteous, self-deluding fool who can't handle the complexities of putting a subject and a predicate together to form a sentence?

While on the subject of the president, please join me, dear readers, in offering heartfelt congratulations to his daughter Jenna for her wedding day. And in praying, really hard, that they don't procreate.

Here's looking at you, kid...

Want to know what's wrong with the world? I'll tell you what's wrong with the world. The current issue of Vanity Fair has a cover story about how Robert Kennedy's evolving thoughts on the Viet Nam war influenced his decision to run for president. It's hugely powerful stuff that has enormous relevance today. And does anyone even know the article is there? No, because the same issue has two photos of entertainer Miley Cyrus that are much more important for us to talk and write about.We do it to ourselves, folks.

Iron Chef Freedonia

A couple of weeks ago I had the great experience of seeing Duck Soup, my favorite Marx Brothers movie, on a 50 foot screen at the beautiful old Loews theater here I've written about previously. I couldn't have been the only person there who thought Zeppo had an eerie resemblance to Bobby Flay.

(A semi-unrelated item I couldn't resist sharing: Around the time Duck Soup (which takes place in "Freedonia") first came out, the upstate NY city of Fredonia complained about the use of so similar a name. From Groucho came this response: "Change the name of your town. It's hurting our picture.") 

Gratuitous American Idol Item

So now we learn that a good bit of the the "live" comments given by the judges for each performance are prepared before the show based on rehearsals. Who could have guessed the judging process on that show wasn't completely proper? I certainly don't see anything wrong with people being judged on their ability to stand at a microphone and sing by a panel of people, not one of whom - and I'm including Paula in this - could themselves stand a microphone and sing. Nor is there anything wrong with contests being decided by an uninformed general public voting multiple times in the same election. It's done all the time here in New Jersey.