RUGator

Not the question mark kind. Of huh, that is. More like in a statement. That says too many things.

Sent in the form of an instant message; the kind of huh that I’d have to say in person in years past. And I used that word to say something that we’d both understand. Because we’d been through things.

I didn’t even know where Adam was. He lives in Chicago, but for the Thanksgiving holidays? Who knows.

After the game (Florida vs. Florida State- Gators 37 FSU 10), I’d send an instant message.

“Huh,” was what it said.

And “uh huh,” was what I’d get back (in North Carolina for the holidays).

And we both knew.

Because we never left.

You know it really doesn’t matter how much we talk about the games we watch. I’m thinking particularly about this year’s ALCS between the Yankees and the Angels. But it could be any sporting event.

None us knows how these things are gonna play out. And it drives me crazy (doesn’t take much). The uncertainty. I watch the pre-game shows, listen to the “experts.” But you know what? None of it matters. It’s all nonsense because until the game is played, nobody knows anything for sure. There’s no certainty. It’s all grey. The ball still has to be pitched, hit, and maybe fielded. All bets are off once the games begin.

Sort of reminds me of……

I’m having a particularly hard time with this photo tonight.

That’s me, third from the left. Surrounded (and protected?) by friends I’ve known since 1978. They came up to visit over the summer. On the far left, is our 9th grade football coach. I hadn’t seen him in over 30 years.

What do I do with all of this? I’m not sure if it’s the idea of time passing or the missing it part. Tough to process.

Things are good. Teaching is great. Love my children.

But I get overcome with emotion sometimes (a lot of the time). When it comes to the struggle between my heart and head, the heart wins out. Every time.

I guess I wouldn’t want things to be different. I’m an up and down person. Feeling the pain and the joy. No in-between. Not much grey.

Just too much black and white.

For me it’s about once a month.

And that’s enough.

A migraine headache and its curse.

They haunt me. Always just on the horizon. Lurking. Waiting to take a few days from me. Usually it’s some combination of lack of sleep, not eating the right foods in the right amounts at the right times, and changes in the weather.

Barometric fluctuations (usually from high pressure to low pressure, i.e., “good weather” to “bad weather”) are my nemeses. Today, in the northeast, I faced my body’s perfect storm.

So I came home from the golf course (where I caddy and don’t play), loopless after a five hour rain induced wait, with the onset of a migraine.

Into a hot shower (running the water via shower massage on my temples) and into bed.

Migraine sufferers know too well the other “pain” of these headaches. Trying to convince your beleaguered family that you’re again under its spell. They often just don’t understand. It’s so frustrating.

To myself (and after having to hear about “another headache” from mama bear), I mused, “What would I like to do on this fine day? Let’s see. Relax with my family and perhaps watch some football or crawl under the covers with ice on my head and my brain pounding away pleading for sleep? I think I’ll opt for the latter. Just because. Yeah, that’s what I’d rather do.”

And now, hours later, I feel as though I spent the previous night losing a quarters match with some 27 year old German Octoberfest guzzling triathlete named Sven.

Tomorrow the weather clears. But I’ll be forced to play catch up with this curse’s after effects.

I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beauty

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A noonday light and truth to thee.

Ellen Sturgis Hooper

The Dial (July 1840) p. 123

I had hoped to do better.

But that’s the best I could do. For them. I wanted to say something pithy. But I had nothing. And as they looked to me, for answers, I felt inadequate.

1. “On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting. ‘Twas only that when he was off was he acting.” Oliver Goldsmith

2. “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.” Mark Twain

3. “My parents only had one argument in forty-five years. It lasted forty-three years.” Cathy Ladman

4. “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.” Groucho Marx

5. “The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.” Ambrose Bierce

Another time ago, I sat at a desk.

I was a substitute teacher. In for a middle school science teacher who’d gone off for a week or two to find himself. As I sat there, I wrote down on a piece of paper how much I dearly wanted to have license to sit there. Without the word “substitute” attached.

It seemed so far off.

I was in another job. One I hated. It paid the bills. But at what cost? My soul?

So I tried to plan. With all the obstacles in the way, it seemed a daunting task.

Now I sit at another “desk.” My own kitchen table. With the reality of another school year staring me down tomorrow.

That other time was 15 years ago.

When I began my teaching career, I hoped for a time when I could call one of my students “colleague.” Hoping to inspire a young person to follow the path I had fought so hard to go after.

And just last week (during an in-service staff meeting), I heard my name called out from across the room.

Turning toward the voice, I found that student.

She had gone off to high school and college, and now she had become a teacher. And she told me of something I had mentioned to her another time ago.

“You’d make an excellent teacher.”

And with those forgotten words uttered by me, she had set forth too.

In case you were wondering, that’s what I do. Well, that’s what the gentleman who I was blessed enough to caddy for today told me. Yeah, God’s work. 

See once he found out that I was a teacher, he deigned my work to be that of a higher order.

“We need more people like you in the world, Mike,” he told me.

And he thanked me for doing such noble work.

As I cleaned his clubs.

And watched him drive off in his Bentley.

This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw further. He never forgot a kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to sit down for a long talk with them (“gas” he called it) was as much his delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. And when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, “God! you can all but speak!”

–from The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Flown in from some phantasm and contrasted against the melancholy grey clouds of another Valley like black-cloaked Bedouins on the white sands of the Sahara, came forth the Order. For payment on a line of credit signed by their own hands. Trying to get it right.

With sect-like stature amongst its devotees, The Order of the Horn wrested itself out from beneath the sand scrub fields like some flushed out springtime worm; its membership capped at inception.

And now that the deed’s been done, I don’t know what to do with it. Walking the thin line between friendly embellishment and doing it justice. Wishing I could expand the time we were engaged; knowing right from the start (we even acknowledged it), that it’d be gone in an instant.

Just cut my heart out.

Go ahead and cut it right out of my chest. Cut it out and and just stomp on it.

Might as well.

One: The Mentor. Scratch the surface, and you’d unearth an Orange and Blue before the Treys and Ashelys of Madison Avenue perverted its pill with a callous disregard for historic preservation. Like the others from Neptune Beach, Clewiston, and The Devil’s Milhopper he was a pure breed from the Dickey, Graves, and Pell lineage. He might have been one of Shug’s Plainsmen or perhaps even a Junkyard Dawg. Didn’t matter. Make much difference. He’d outwork you. You do that when you’re from the outside looking in. Not quite good enough. Come up just a yard short. Wait ’till the next year that hadn’t come. Wouldn’t come. Else the story’s end would change. No Hollywood Urban legend here. This was old school. Gimme some Skoal and Turkey and I’ll meet you inside Florida Field (sans Ben Hill Griffin).

He rode in on the Chandler, Reaves, Galloway, Brantley, Hutchinson, and Little steed. It’s all he had.

Given no choice; they’d do. Would be his alter egos on the Sandlewood back lot of his boyhood field of dreams. And he could state with certainty that in Athens and on The Plains was aroused in him the hardened reality that but for some cruel Mephistophelean geographical anomaly, he’d been spared the fate that would forever shackle him to a life he wouldn’t alter for even a sniff of the non chalance that could have been his. That’d be too easy. He had a chip on his shoulder. Gotta want it. Have some pride about yourself. And quite frankly, he was glad for it. Kept it honest. Run hard, run scared. “Oh, look at the sugar falling from the sky! Look at the Sugar falling from the sky!”

And he was just one. And he taught us things. Like caring, pride, and of course, the health benefits of liver.

Two: The Brain. Born as some sort of anachronistic Old Hickory and hamstrung with that same unholy triumvirate of acumen, lack, and tenacity. Back then (in the Valley of our collective youths), he could have gone on to a life of mediocrity. Mailed it in. Become beige. And no one would have blamed him. Cared. He had the built in excuses. Dragging for wayward balls in some non-descript Vedra lagoon (“hush, hush. Here comes T-hop”). For McDonald’s Monopoly tokens? Or maybe even a Big Mac. Take what you can. What was it that would drive him? Carry him forward even after having been dealt an unplayable hand (lie?). Plying his nascent wares on the grasses of Thousand Oaks and the “not so” Tru-Courts of The Fountains, there was an internal boil which festered unnoticed to those outside of The Know.

But he knew.

And so did The Heart.

He knew too because he had returned his serve. Had been on the receiving end of the chip-in par at dusk which squared the match. The dawn’s dusk. When all they had was an eccentric set of unmatched clubs and beat up, cat-gut Donnay rackets, handed down from club members who had no use for them (or maybe filched out of an unknowing locker). Two parts of a whole. And they’d go on in later years, fighting battles within (and without) trying to make some sense too. Just like I’m doing now.

It was the trip to Tallahassee that probably was to blame.

Gone off to Boy’s State to return to Man’s Country armed only with the standard issued tee-shirt and a roll of quarters (spending money from the sending VFW post). Hearing the Great One speak about commitment, integrity, and hard work. Didn’t have to tell him. Just an affirmation of the storm already burning inside. Some shoeless Guatamalan boys and girls thirty years later grateful for Bowden’s speech and quarters collected from grizzled ex-GI’s.

Three: The Dealmaker. He was the one with the heart of gold. A shirt off his back riverboat gambler. What was his was yours. Nothing less then; today. Rolling the dice. Winning more than losing (like a Mark Twain tale gone awry). Riding on the back of his motorized bike, he took me with him. Gained me access to places I had no right to be because that was what he was about. Showed me that the other half wasn’t as whole as I had been led to believe (they had bad breath, could lay a deuce, and left hair in the sinks too). The Rec-Room of youth. Matches in hand. You were one of his. And I was grateful. Indebted. And perhaps, he never even knew. A big man then; bigger man now. Could give him your keys and carte blanche. Good night Irene, that dog will walk. With a hearty laugh that belied an even heartier heart, he knew no bounds. In all things. And as I write these words now, I wonder how much’ll find its way home.

Four: Finally, The Heart. Equal parts broken and mended; wending his way back and forth on some self-imposed journey of reconciliation; stage right in his mind’s eye. Saw those orange helmets back when the snow covered the ground of some disguised northwestern Jersey town kept him physically inside. That was ‘77 and in El Paso’s Sun Bowl was unleashed his burden.

They’d take a trip along the Valley side of A1A in an attempt to find his father’s dreams which, while never fulfilled, would nonetheless open other doors. Doors to his dreams which lie latent yet primed for torment. And those same dreams would begin to manifest themselves on University Avenue, on the banks of the old Raritan, and even on some open yard in Central Park. In a whiffle ball game played three decades later. During a ruse that would bring them all back to the time when Rams roamed free. And the Order of the Horn could assemble once more.

1. Caddies DO talk about the players they caddy for. And it’s usually NOT flattering. We know you’ve “never played this badly,” that you “shot 75 two days ago,” and that you’re going to “take care of us.” We’ve heard and seen most of it by now.

2. Never pick up a discarded towel on the golf course. It’s laying there for a good reason. You don’t want to be “Squeezing the Charmin” on the golf course.

3. Curse words function as every part of speech.

4. We are not discriminating eaters. Wait up to 6 hours BEFORE your loop and see how good road kill looks. If we drink any more energy drinks, eat another energy bar, and or have any more caffeine, we’ll blow up.

5. Powder, cards, socks, and tobacco are staples.

6. Carnival workers and caddies are not too distant cousins.

7. Personification of body parts and bodily functions define our speech patterns.

8. Truth is stranger than fiction in the caddy yard, i.e., the turd in the cup, the caddy who lives in a tree, and finding “lost balls” are all realities.