My wife died, after a two-year battle with breast cancer, in July of 2000.
She died at home, under home hospice care. Hospice counselors had carefully briefed me on how she would die, and they gave me a booklet describing the stages of death.
She died in the afternoon, a Sunday, a little before 4:30. That morning, about 9, she became unresponsive, as the booklet had described. Her eyes were open, she moved and grimaced, and she flailed her arm and could grip my arm with her fingers. But there was no recognition of family or friends who were present.
In fact she had already shut us out, in the two or three days before. The hospice people said that was normal, that a person who is dying goes through a disconnect process and turns inward in preparation for death. I thought that was a beautiful and dignified thing for a human to do, to gather herself up, to wrap around herself in this situation beyond others’ understanding, and it was important to me to honor it.
By Sunday noon it didn’t matter. I worked hard to tend her properly, but she was unaware of my honor or attentions. Her eyes were bright and excited, her breathing was quick, and she was singing. The same note, over and over. For what it’s worth, I have long wondered if the last moments of a person’s life must offer some kind of complete and beautiful vision of life in all its mysteries, as compensation for her loss. It was fascinating, Meredith’s one-note song, but it didn’t surprise me. She did nothing during those hours to take away my own vision of where she might be.
Near the end, the booklet had said, her breathing would change, from quick but regular, to a steady pant that the booklet described as “fish out of water” breathing. From that point, it would be only a matter of minutes. As that transition occurred, she became still, her eyes wide and focused on the window beyond the foot of her bed. She fought for breath as if she were near the end of a race. It was heroic, but she wasn’t the hero. She was busy dying, spun like a leaf on a surging current, but her body was fighting desperately, heroically, to stay alive. There was nothing calm, or peaceful, here. This, also, was noble to me. In fact I was awed by it, to suppose we all are so naturally, unconsciously, valiant.
But then her body gave out. Just unable to continue. The panting stopped, just like that. A long silence, and then a long, deep breath. More silence, and then a second breath, and her eyes started to close. Two more breaths, and then in the clamor of shock and grief behind me, her life in her body ended. In a dreadful twinkling, her eyes, half-closed like a doll’s, became blanker than a doll’s. In a doll’s eyes, it is possible to imagine life. Not in these. It was the hardest part.
And so I watched death arriving. I review these memories today because Terri Schiavo has died, and after all the clamor around her, I wanted some fact-based context in which to imagine the nobility of her dying. People have described her as heroic, a fighter, and her body must have been just so, just as in the hospice scenario. My God, Terri Schiavo’s body fought for years, not just the mere hours I witnessed, through that existence beyond responsiveness.
It additionally occurs to me that my information might be useful as a window into the Schiavo hospice, for people who are curious, after the circus, about how it really ended. I am sure we all put our own spin on our own dying, but my experience of Meredith’s death provides at least an approximation of Ms. Schiavo’s last day, gathered at last around herself in impenetrable dignity. I am also sure that Meredith, where she is, doesn’t mind sharing those hours of her own intimate heroism, and valor, at this hour.
In the first radio reports, I heard someone say something like, “Terri is at last in a place where she can have peace.” It was said by someone who had fought hard to keep her stopped short of that deliverance. It was a blinding contrast. How any person could have fought in these last days and weeks and years to keep Terri Schiavo alive in her deathbed is beyond my understanding. One of these, the politician, Tom DeLay, said, "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” He thought he was talking about the men who let Ms. Schiavo go, but he really was talking about himself.
Two weeks after her death, Meredith knew I needed help, so she came to see me. She was brilliant and happy, green eyes and Brenda Starr hair, beyond pain or sorrow or any other of the human frailties that were wracking me. She didn’t speak, but she gave me a message: “Get on with it.” Easy for a spirit to say, as Terri Schiavo now knows. The Tom DeLays of the world will eventually be forgiven, but it will take awhile.
March 31, 2005
March 30, 2005
Getting Through DST
Every spring, experts offer advice for adjusting to Daylight Savings Time, which begins Sunday.
But I never follow any of it, including the theory, developed by a physician at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, that a human body may very well stay on standard time when clocks switch to DST. That agency suggests that, to counter the “persistence of time” effect, that a body simply get up an hour earlier on the Saturday before DST starts on Sunday.
Thinking about time is tricky. I will go to my deathbed trying to figure out the time difference between San Diego and Sydney, or any other city the other side of the International Date Line. DST is not that difficult, yet it is so easy to think, at 2 a.m., “Well, if I move my clock radio up to 3 a.m., then it will get light sooner.
Of course it does not. It gets light later. My own personal wake-up alarm is set year-round for 5:30 a.m. This week, knowing DST is coming, I look outside at 5:30 and say, “This is the amount of light that next week we will have at 6:30. So, it will be darker at 5:30 than it is right now. Won’t it?”
No one has convinced me that cows worry about things like that, but farmers insist they do. Maybe the cows know as much as the experts. Suppose a cow knows what time it is. Suppose the cow knows for certain that it is 2 a.m. Now you tell the cow, “Okay, now it is 3 a.m., instead of 2.” The cow is going to go on behaving just like it were 2, no way around it.
The result is that the cow will be groggy – farmers can spot these things – for days, even weeks. The OU experts argue this grogginess can be avoided, in humans anyway.
The technique: go to bed earlier Friday night, and get up an hour earlier Saturday morning. Then do the same thing Saturday night and Sunday morning. If you have trouble getting up, go outside, where the sunlight will help wake up your body.
They also say to move up mealtimes one hour Saturday, and to get a lot of exercise to raise body temperature and promote sleep Saturday night.
I never do any of that. If I get up an hour earlier, it is to go either fishing or to the airport. And if I get up at 4:30, instead of 5:30, you just cannot convince me there will be sunlight out there to encourage my body, and I am actually glad. Life is too easy as it is. My ancestors’ bodies knew what time it was, and they had to get up at all hours to deal with erupting volcanoes and saber-toothed tigers and herds of Goth invaders on the rampage, without a sleep behavioralist anywhere in sight to give them helpful tips.
Life has just gotten easier all the time. I have never had to dig a well, never crossed a prairie in a covered wagon, never walked through snowdrifts five miles to school. A few tough things should be preserved, and getting through Daylight Savings Time is certainly one.
But I never follow any of it, including the theory, developed by a physician at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, that a human body may very well stay on standard time when clocks switch to DST. That agency suggests that, to counter the “persistence of time” effect, that a body simply get up an hour earlier on the Saturday before DST starts on Sunday.
Thinking about time is tricky. I will go to my deathbed trying to figure out the time difference between San Diego and Sydney, or any other city the other side of the International Date Line. DST is not that difficult, yet it is so easy to think, at 2 a.m., “Well, if I move my clock radio up to 3 a.m., then it will get light sooner.
Of course it does not. It gets light later. My own personal wake-up alarm is set year-round for 5:30 a.m. This week, knowing DST is coming, I look outside at 5:30 and say, “This is the amount of light that next week we will have at 6:30. So, it will be darker at 5:30 than it is right now. Won’t it?”
No one has convinced me that cows worry about things like that, but farmers insist they do. Maybe the cows know as much as the experts. Suppose a cow knows what time it is. Suppose the cow knows for certain that it is 2 a.m. Now you tell the cow, “Okay, now it is 3 a.m., instead of 2.” The cow is going to go on behaving just like it were 2, no way around it.
The result is that the cow will be groggy – farmers can spot these things – for days, even weeks. The OU experts argue this grogginess can be avoided, in humans anyway.
The technique: go to bed earlier Friday night, and get up an hour earlier Saturday morning. Then do the same thing Saturday night and Sunday morning. If you have trouble getting up, go outside, where the sunlight will help wake up your body.
They also say to move up mealtimes one hour Saturday, and to get a lot of exercise to raise body temperature and promote sleep Saturday night.
I never do any of that. If I get up an hour earlier, it is to go either fishing or to the airport. And if I get up at 4:30, instead of 5:30, you just cannot convince me there will be sunlight out there to encourage my body, and I am actually glad. Life is too easy as it is. My ancestors’ bodies knew what time it was, and they had to get up at all hours to deal with erupting volcanoes and saber-toothed tigers and herds of Goth invaders on the rampage, without a sleep behavioralist anywhere in sight to give them helpful tips.
Life has just gotten easier all the time. I have never had to dig a well, never crossed a prairie in a covered wagon, never walked through snowdrifts five miles to school. A few tough things should be preserved, and getting through Daylight Savings Time is certainly one.
March 20, 2005
Screening for Stupidity
At the airport, going through security.
I arrive at a new machine, not the old metal detector, but a big gray booth that reminds me of the glassed-in booths on the 1950s quiz shows, the kind that Charles Van Doren got caught in. It is open on the side near me, but on the far side is a Plexiglass door, that opens like a clamshell.
The security officer cheerfully reminds me to remove blazer, shoes, etc., and empty my pockets, and I want to ask him, “What does this new thing check for? Stupidity?” But I don’t, because there is a big sign hanging overhead that says jokes are taken seriously. The one place in all the world I want to be taken seriously is in an airport security queue, but the one thing I could say that they would take most seriously would also get me into big, five-to-15 trouble.
I do the security strip and the officer directs me to enter the booth. I stand at the entry. It looks like something you would design to lure a mouse inside, then trap him. I step in and peer through the Plexiglass shield, trying to remember the Best Supporting actor for 1949. Then: Puff! Puff! Puff! Puff! Puff! In rapid succession, puffs of air fired at me, that ruffle my clothes. I don’t flinch, but I get the feeling that I have just been biopsied.
I stand and wait. Red lights turn green, a chime sounds, and the Plexiglass clamshell door opens. I step forward. I am clean, but I have no idea of what. Karen, who went through before me, says the jets are supposed to ruffle up explosives residue, which if present, would be detected, and action taken.
Action taken! The floor opens beneath me and I am dropped through, into an abbatoir, which is the device popping immediately to mind as the only one befitting an individual who has failed a machine devised to sniff out a man with a pound of C4 wrapped around his belt.
Walking on, a vague sense of outrage rises, at such a machine being placed in the way of ordinary, everyday individuals whose only immediate interest in life is getting to Del Ray Beach, Raleigh, or in my case, Kenosha. Of course the booth will have earned its keep if it does detect the one among many who does have the C4 wrapped around his belt.
But if we as a nation are willing to support a machine to screen the masses, it should be possible to support a machine to screen the few. We could in fact use a machine that screens for stupidity. It shouldn’t be any more difficult to detect than explosives. Tweak these booths to do that job and put them between humans and the place they register to become candidates for public office. If they fail, drop them into the whirling knives before they can get through and drop the rest of us into modern airport security lines, and other ratholes.
I arrive at a new machine, not the old metal detector, but a big gray booth that reminds me of the glassed-in booths on the 1950s quiz shows, the kind that Charles Van Doren got caught in. It is open on the side near me, but on the far side is a Plexiglass door, that opens like a clamshell.
The security officer cheerfully reminds me to remove blazer, shoes, etc., and empty my pockets, and I want to ask him, “What does this new thing check for? Stupidity?” But I don’t, because there is a big sign hanging overhead that says jokes are taken seriously. The one place in all the world I want to be taken seriously is in an airport security queue, but the one thing I could say that they would take most seriously would also get me into big, five-to-15 trouble.
I do the security strip and the officer directs me to enter the booth. I stand at the entry. It looks like something you would design to lure a mouse inside, then trap him. I step in and peer through the Plexiglass shield, trying to remember the Best Supporting actor for 1949. Then: Puff! Puff! Puff! Puff! Puff! In rapid succession, puffs of air fired at me, that ruffle my clothes. I don’t flinch, but I get the feeling that I have just been biopsied.
I stand and wait. Red lights turn green, a chime sounds, and the Plexiglass clamshell door opens. I step forward. I am clean, but I have no idea of what. Karen, who went through before me, says the jets are supposed to ruffle up explosives residue, which if present, would be detected, and action taken.
Action taken! The floor opens beneath me and I am dropped through, into an abbatoir, which is the device popping immediately to mind as the only one befitting an individual who has failed a machine devised to sniff out a man with a pound of C4 wrapped around his belt.
Walking on, a vague sense of outrage rises, at such a machine being placed in the way of ordinary, everyday individuals whose only immediate interest in life is getting to Del Ray Beach, Raleigh, or in my case, Kenosha. Of course the booth will have earned its keep if it does detect the one among many who does have the C4 wrapped around his belt.
But if we as a nation are willing to support a machine to screen the masses, it should be possible to support a machine to screen the few. We could in fact use a machine that screens for stupidity. It shouldn’t be any more difficult to detect than explosives. Tweak these booths to do that job and put them between humans and the place they register to become candidates for public office. If they fail, drop them into the whirling knives before they can get through and drop the rest of us into modern airport security lines, and other ratholes.
March 17, 2005
Call this a Blahg...
I absolutely should not be writing it, which is of course the reason I am writing it. It might not make much sense. Right now, the keyboard is a machine gun, and I am firing away at a sea of empty cans and bottles, letting off – what? Steam? Ennui? Yes, ennui. But how do you let off ennui? That is the kind of morning it is.
Across the top of the front page: Scott Peterson sentenced to death. Robert Blake acquitted. Who cares? The “Today” show, interviewing Amy what’s her name and Gloria the St. John’s lawyer. How did they feel when Scott’s death sentence was read? I tell you how I felt. I didn’t feel anything at all, except ennui.
I am using the word “ennui” like I actually know what it means. I don’t want to look it up in the dictionary – I don’t want to look up anything, read anything, hear anything or see anything that has anything at all to do with what we call contemporary “media information.” But of course that is the very reason to look it up, so the Webster’s definition of ennui is: “weariness and dissatisfaction resulting from inactivity or lack of interest.”
By God, I knew what it meant after all. That is almost exactly how this morning feels. Take Scott and Robert and Katie and George W. Bush and Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles and put them in a cannon and fire them to the Moon.
But it’s not inactivity. I have been activer than a one-armed weedcutter. Damn, I meant to have this done in five minutes, and I only have 30 seconds left. But I don’t care. What I need is a pry bar. A handyman came yesterday – we are planning some light renovations, which is something to look forward to. Part of it involves ripping out the absolute heaviest, ugliest, built-in benches ever conceived by man, and here they sit in my breakfast nook.
I told the handyman that I thought I would get after them with my sledge and wedge, just for the fun of destroying something, and he laughed and said that’s always the best part of his job. “My pry bar is my favorite tool,” he said, and this morning I understand him exactly. It is nice to understand at least one thing this morning, and actually care about it.
Incoming emails: from Sylvia, “My boyfriend isn’t impotent anymore.” From Justin: “LowEst prices on ViAgra.” Delicate equipment. Must not shove keyboard through face of monitor. Just give me 15 seconds with Sylvia and her boyfriend and then we’ll see about impotency. Let me get my pry bar between Justin’s teeth and pour in $100 of low-cost ViAgra and hold his jaw shut until he swallows.
Six minutes. Damn. I call myself a writer. I wrote something yesterday that I thought was good, but it wasn’t. If you left it out overnight, you’d have to fumigate the house. You could rip the roof off and it wouldn’t be enough to fumigate the worst 750 words ever to be struck onto paper. The poor paper. Another tree wasted. Screw the trees.
It’s just weariness and dissatisfaction, I know, resulting in lack of interest. What do you do about lack of interest? Yes, I know. You wait. You wait and cover your head against any and all information coming from wherever that passes through a sort of red haze in your head and gathers in your throat until your chest hurts and you just want to scream.
It’s a slump. I am a creative guy, who lives and feeds off information, and today not only am I not creative, I don’t give a damn about creativity. I just want to get on an airplane and fly off somewhere. Which tomorrow, gratefully, I get to do. Did you ever have a morning like this? Do I care? Ennui having fun yet? Wasn’t that awful?
Eleven minutes. I feel better. Oh God, the dog just smacked his lips.
Across the top of the front page: Scott Peterson sentenced to death. Robert Blake acquitted. Who cares? The “Today” show, interviewing Amy what’s her name and Gloria the St. John’s lawyer. How did they feel when Scott’s death sentence was read? I tell you how I felt. I didn’t feel anything at all, except ennui.
I am using the word “ennui” like I actually know what it means. I don’t want to look it up in the dictionary – I don’t want to look up anything, read anything, hear anything or see anything that has anything at all to do with what we call contemporary “media information.” But of course that is the very reason to look it up, so the Webster’s definition of ennui is: “weariness and dissatisfaction resulting from inactivity or lack of interest.”
By God, I knew what it meant after all. That is almost exactly how this morning feels. Take Scott and Robert and Katie and George W. Bush and Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles and put them in a cannon and fire them to the Moon.
But it’s not inactivity. I have been activer than a one-armed weedcutter. Damn, I meant to have this done in five minutes, and I only have 30 seconds left. But I don’t care. What I need is a pry bar. A handyman came yesterday – we are planning some light renovations, which is something to look forward to. Part of it involves ripping out the absolute heaviest, ugliest, built-in benches ever conceived by man, and here they sit in my breakfast nook.
I told the handyman that I thought I would get after them with my sledge and wedge, just for the fun of destroying something, and he laughed and said that’s always the best part of his job. “My pry bar is my favorite tool,” he said, and this morning I understand him exactly. It is nice to understand at least one thing this morning, and actually care about it.
Incoming emails: from Sylvia, “My boyfriend isn’t impotent anymore.” From Justin: “LowEst prices on ViAgra.” Delicate equipment. Must not shove keyboard through face of monitor. Just give me 15 seconds with Sylvia and her boyfriend and then we’ll see about impotency. Let me get my pry bar between Justin’s teeth and pour in $100 of low-cost ViAgra and hold his jaw shut until he swallows.
Six minutes. Damn. I call myself a writer. I wrote something yesterday that I thought was good, but it wasn’t. If you left it out overnight, you’d have to fumigate the house. You could rip the roof off and it wouldn’t be enough to fumigate the worst 750 words ever to be struck onto paper. The poor paper. Another tree wasted. Screw the trees.
It’s just weariness and dissatisfaction, I know, resulting in lack of interest. What do you do about lack of interest? Yes, I know. You wait. You wait and cover your head against any and all information coming from wherever that passes through a sort of red haze in your head and gathers in your throat until your chest hurts and you just want to scream.
It’s a slump. I am a creative guy, who lives and feeds off information, and today not only am I not creative, I don’t give a damn about creativity. I just want to get on an airplane and fly off somewhere. Which tomorrow, gratefully, I get to do. Did you ever have a morning like this? Do I care? Ennui having fun yet? Wasn’t that awful?
Eleven minutes. I feel better. Oh God, the dog just smacked his lips.
March 08, 2005
Outside the Box
Can animals talk?
Sure they can. The most famous talking animal in the world reigns over an international entertainment megalopoly worth billions. He dresses up and strolls the grounds of his entertainment fantasylands from California to France and we happily pay $50 (last time I checked) a head, including kiddies, so the kiddies can find him and run up to him and tell him all their secrets while the parents stand to one side and smile as happily as if their children were talking to the President of the United States. We even try to get a word in edgewise, and at the end we always say, “Thanks, Mickey.”
Believe in talking animals? I cried watching “The Lion King.” People buy insurance from a company whose spokesman is a gecko. But my favorite talking animal is – still is – Hobbes, the charming, witty, erudite tiger in the old comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.”
And it is Hobbes who tells the secret of our affection, and our need, for talking animals. Hobbes, of course, is Calvin’s sidekick. Calvin is about seven years old and lives almost every moment of his life outside the box, in his imagination. It is in our imagination that animals can talk. Calvin and Hobbes can be having the grandest time, and then one of Calvin’s parents comes into the room. When the parent is there, Hobbes is a stuffed animal propped up against a chair. The parent at that moment is inside the box, and Hobbes can only live where imagination lives.
Imagination is so important to us all. Inside a box is no way at all to live. All you can see are the insides of the box. I was in the 32nd grade when I learned I was in the 32nd grade. An adult is living way too boxy a life when he doesn’t know what grade he is in.
Wouldn’t you know, the day I learned that I was in 32nd grade (gosh, that was 25 years ago) was a day I was at Disneyland. We were standing in Main Street, looking up the street at the Fantasyland castle. I think it is Snow White’s castle, but I don’t remember and it’s not important data. What is important is that I had seen the castle before, on earlier Disneyland days, and I was sure its spires soared with all the majesty of the finest castles of Europe and other romantic lands.
But this day, workmen were sprucing up the castle with new paint and other maintenance, and they had scaffolding up. I knew the dimensions of scaffolding, and looking at it now, it looked like a grid of known dimensions overlaid on Snow White’s castle.
And the castle was incredibly small. The grid to me represented a known box – data – and inside the box, the soaring castle was no bigger than a two-story house.
In that instant, I learned something of vital importance that I had not known before, and in that same instant I realized that happened all the time. I had learned things that year that I did not know the year before, and I would learn things next year that I did not know now. I was, and ever would be, in a grade in school. That day at Disneyland, I figured out that I was in 32nd grade. Now I am in 56th. My God, I have learned a lot since then. Just last Sunday, I learned one of the most beautiful lessons of my life, and so now I know much more about love than I did in the first 55 grades.
What I learned at Disneyland, staring at the amazing shrunken castle, was the importance to me of imagination. I was six years old once and, like Hobbes, lived life freely, every day, outside the box. Then I started to school, and I started acquiring data. It was data I had to have – two plus two and so forth – but it was also data that overlaid my imagination and started to contradict it.
Staring at the castle, I knew that I never wanted to lose that imagination. In that moment, I learned that the perfect life would be to have the imagination of a six-year-old, and the wisdom of a 65-year-old. At the time, I had to settle for keeping the imagination and my, what a difference that has made.
But I would have to wait to acquire the wisdom of a 65-year-old. Now, in 56th grade, I am drawing perilously close to that goal, but a goal it still is, which must be why I feel so damn happy this morning. Great God Almighty, I am outside the box.
Sure they can. The most famous talking animal in the world reigns over an international entertainment megalopoly worth billions. He dresses up and strolls the grounds of his entertainment fantasylands from California to France and we happily pay $50 (last time I checked) a head, including kiddies, so the kiddies can find him and run up to him and tell him all their secrets while the parents stand to one side and smile as happily as if their children were talking to the President of the United States. We even try to get a word in edgewise, and at the end we always say, “Thanks, Mickey.”
Believe in talking animals? I cried watching “The Lion King.” People buy insurance from a company whose spokesman is a gecko. But my favorite talking animal is – still is – Hobbes, the charming, witty, erudite tiger in the old comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.”
And it is Hobbes who tells the secret of our affection, and our need, for talking animals. Hobbes, of course, is Calvin’s sidekick. Calvin is about seven years old and lives almost every moment of his life outside the box, in his imagination. It is in our imagination that animals can talk. Calvin and Hobbes can be having the grandest time, and then one of Calvin’s parents comes into the room. When the parent is there, Hobbes is a stuffed animal propped up against a chair. The parent at that moment is inside the box, and Hobbes can only live where imagination lives.
Imagination is so important to us all. Inside a box is no way at all to live. All you can see are the insides of the box. I was in the 32nd grade when I learned I was in the 32nd grade. An adult is living way too boxy a life when he doesn’t know what grade he is in.
Wouldn’t you know, the day I learned that I was in 32nd grade (gosh, that was 25 years ago) was a day I was at Disneyland. We were standing in Main Street, looking up the street at the Fantasyland castle. I think it is Snow White’s castle, but I don’t remember and it’s not important data. What is important is that I had seen the castle before, on earlier Disneyland days, and I was sure its spires soared with all the majesty of the finest castles of Europe and other romantic lands.
But this day, workmen were sprucing up the castle with new paint and other maintenance, and they had scaffolding up. I knew the dimensions of scaffolding, and looking at it now, it looked like a grid of known dimensions overlaid on Snow White’s castle.
And the castle was incredibly small. The grid to me represented a known box – data – and inside the box, the soaring castle was no bigger than a two-story house.
In that instant, I learned something of vital importance that I had not known before, and in that same instant I realized that happened all the time. I had learned things that year that I did not know the year before, and I would learn things next year that I did not know now. I was, and ever would be, in a grade in school. That day at Disneyland, I figured out that I was in 32nd grade. Now I am in 56th. My God, I have learned a lot since then. Just last Sunday, I learned one of the most beautiful lessons of my life, and so now I know much more about love than I did in the first 55 grades.
What I learned at Disneyland, staring at the amazing shrunken castle, was the importance to me of imagination. I was six years old once and, like Hobbes, lived life freely, every day, outside the box. Then I started to school, and I started acquiring data. It was data I had to have – two plus two and so forth – but it was also data that overlaid my imagination and started to contradict it.
Staring at the castle, I knew that I never wanted to lose that imagination. In that moment, I learned that the perfect life would be to have the imagination of a six-year-old, and the wisdom of a 65-year-old. At the time, I had to settle for keeping the imagination and my, what a difference that has made.
But I would have to wait to acquire the wisdom of a 65-year-old. Now, in 56th grade, I am drawing perilously close to that goal, but a goal it still is, which must be why I feel so damn happy this morning. Great God Almighty, I am outside the box.
March 07, 2005
How to Play the Game
On Friday, Oct. 8, 1954, the Abilene High School Eagles beat the Borger Bulldogs, 34-7, at Fair Park Stadium in Abilene, Texas.
I was there. I was in the sixth grade.
The Eagles did not lose another football game until I was in the ninth grade, in December, 1957. In the interim, Abilene High won 49 straight football games and three straight state championships in the large-city classification.
For this, in 1999 the Eagles were named the “Team of the Century” in Texas high school football. Anyone aware of the stature of high school football in the Texas culture will be aware of the magnitude of the Eagles’ achievement.
Last year, the 50th anniversary of that first victory, I researched, wrote and published a book, “Warbirds – How They Played the Game,” to commemorate the streak. There is a copy in the San Diego City Library. The project began as nothing more than a journalist’s assignment to re-create history, restore long-forgotten details of that team and its achievements for a city that remembered maybe five or six highlights of the streak.
But before I was halfway through, I realized the heart of the book was not about football at all. It was about values and principles.
The coach of that team, Chuck Moser, arrived in Abilene in 1953, carried his materials into his 10-by-10 office in Eagle Gym, and cranked up the mimeograph machine. The most important single piece of equipment described in the book is that old blue-ink mimeograph machine, that in February, 1953, started reproducing the philosophy of a teacher of football who didn’t begin with X’s and O’s, but with values and principles.
That philosophy, organized into rules and policies, set into motion the Eagles’ ultimate success before the first football was ever snapped at Chuck Moser’s first spring practice in March, 1953. The system was unabashedly virtuous and a literal manifestation of the sports writer Grantland Rice’s famous declaration made during a more virtuous age: “When the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks – not that you won or lost – but how you played the game.”
Before the book was completed, “How They Played the Game” had become the subtitle, and it describes precisely the content of the book. It tells how the coach gave his team its best chance to win – the best that any coach can do – with a system based not only on rules of football, but rules of living. And the coach lived the system. He knew he had to, but he did it because he wanted to. There is a difference. Very quickly, he was not only the high school football coach, he was a Sunday School teacher, and a civic leader, and president of the local Kiwanis Club.
That was the true history being recreated. Chuck Moser was a teacher for his time, and for any time a people understand the importance to their future of success built on values and ethics, and the threat to that future of success built on greed and manipulation.
Moser’s teaching re-emerged in a time in which winning without principle has become the saddest form of defeat. His story, and the proof of his story in his Eagle teams, is not only for Texans wishing to recall some football glory days. The story comes to a national audience that in 2005 not only knows, but fears, what has been lost to the greedsters, and feels a strong yearning for what might be regained if principle is recovered, and the value of values is practiced once more. It is a history that should be repeatable in America, and in San Diego. We could sure use a winning streak. All we need is a leader.
I was there. I was in the sixth grade.
The Eagles did not lose another football game until I was in the ninth grade, in December, 1957. In the interim, Abilene High won 49 straight football games and three straight state championships in the large-city classification.
For this, in 1999 the Eagles were named the “Team of the Century” in Texas high school football. Anyone aware of the stature of high school football in the Texas culture will be aware of the magnitude of the Eagles’ achievement.
Last year, the 50th anniversary of that first victory, I researched, wrote and published a book, “Warbirds – How They Played the Game,” to commemorate the streak. There is a copy in the San Diego City Library. The project began as nothing more than a journalist’s assignment to re-create history, restore long-forgotten details of that team and its achievements for a city that remembered maybe five or six highlights of the streak.
But before I was halfway through, I realized the heart of the book was not about football at all. It was about values and principles.
The coach of that team, Chuck Moser, arrived in Abilene in 1953, carried his materials into his 10-by-10 office in Eagle Gym, and cranked up the mimeograph machine. The most important single piece of equipment described in the book is that old blue-ink mimeograph machine, that in February, 1953, started reproducing the philosophy of a teacher of football who didn’t begin with X’s and O’s, but with values and principles.
That philosophy, organized into rules and policies, set into motion the Eagles’ ultimate success before the first football was ever snapped at Chuck Moser’s first spring practice in March, 1953. The system was unabashedly virtuous and a literal manifestation of the sports writer Grantland Rice’s famous declaration made during a more virtuous age: “When the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks – not that you won or lost – but how you played the game.”
Before the book was completed, “How They Played the Game” had become the subtitle, and it describes precisely the content of the book. It tells how the coach gave his team its best chance to win – the best that any coach can do – with a system based not only on rules of football, but rules of living. And the coach lived the system. He knew he had to, but he did it because he wanted to. There is a difference. Very quickly, he was not only the high school football coach, he was a Sunday School teacher, and a civic leader, and president of the local Kiwanis Club.
That was the true history being recreated. Chuck Moser was a teacher for his time, and for any time a people understand the importance to their future of success built on values and ethics, and the threat to that future of success built on greed and manipulation.
Moser’s teaching re-emerged in a time in which winning without principle has become the saddest form of defeat. His story, and the proof of his story in his Eagle teams, is not only for Texans wishing to recall some football glory days. The story comes to a national audience that in 2005 not only knows, but fears, what has been lost to the greedsters, and feels a strong yearning for what might be regained if principle is recovered, and the value of values is practiced once more. It is a history that should be repeatable in America, and in San Diego. We could sure use a winning streak. All we need is a leader.
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