5

 5

April 2019

 

I am able to push away the thoughts of the newspaper article when I get back. There are over forty e-mails that I need to address and others I need to go through to discard. And I am not that important. I wonder sometimes what people who are in loftier positions and more connected do when they come back from some kind of break.  I’d responded to several messages while I was away but those that I had not addressed and those that had accrued during the flight now awaited me.  So, I didn’t need to dwell on what I knew I had to do because I had all these e-mails to answer.  

I had a meeting at 11 which, unfortunately, gave me time to day dream since the discussion, as is often the case in academic circles, was going around in them.  I’d brought an I-pad tablet with me and pushed some more buttons.  I was able to find magazine articles from the period and a few newspaper clippings that I’d not yet unearthed.  I’m on Facebook and typed in names.  Most came up empty but there were times when I connected.  I looked through the “about” tab on those Facebook profiles I could access. There was even more evidence to support that what I thought I knew, I knew.

A bomb went off a few years ago just about a half mile from where I sit.  During the running of the Boston Marathon some coward destroyed lives by planting a bomb where spectators were huddled watching their loved ones cross the finish line.  I typically go to watch the marathon with a buddy. That year, however, we were lazy in the morning and did not get going towards the finish line until mid afternoon. Shortly after we began our drive into town we heard the news that there had been an explosion.  Three dead and scores of others injured. Ruined lives by a coward.

Let’s just say you knew that a coward was considering hurting another. You were privy to some information and you could do something about it ahead of time. And you didn’t.  Who would be the greater coward, you, or the sick individual who subsequently committed the crime?  Anyone who considers planting a bomb in a crowd is deranged.  And if you are sane, and are listening to someone planning, something insane, are you then more culpable than the perpetrator if you are silent?

A friend I know or knew had a drinking problem. I write “know or knew” because I have not seen my friend in years.  I know his brother and the brother can’t find him either, so I don’t know if my friend is alive or dead. The brother, Harold, told me that the last he had heard from Marty he was living on the streets and Harold was unable to convince his brother to get off them. When I saw Marty a quarter of a century ago he was trying to stay sober, but he told me that he often was unsuccessful. And when he got drunk he would take out the car and drive.  His wife hid the car keys, but when drunk he would scream maniacally and threaten their infant daughter—so she would succumb to the demands and give him the car keys. 

I remember now the conversations that made me nervous.  The driver was talking about something that just flat out seemed to be baloney.  It was a classic what was being said was inconsistent with everything else I could detect.  References to family were muttered with a combination of anger, loss, resentment, and something that sounded like a “just you wait” determination for revenge.  I'd heard this kind of emotional rant several times on the trip. 

My meeting ended and I only realized it when committee members started to leave. I’d managed to grunt at appropriate intervals and nod sagely every now and again so I looked like most of the participants.  I closed up the tablet, went back to the office, and started to make a list.  One item on the list was to call Becca. 

4

May 1974

Becca drives away.  She was teary at the end. I was not.  It has often been the case that I’ve missed out on moments that were precious because at the time I was not wise enough to realize that these moments were so.  In a way I am glad that she is away. I can begin the journey unencumbered. An illusion, that, I realize now.  Our journeys are forever encumbered when we are under the illusion that we are liberated when unencumbered.

The third ride is the charm.  The first was a couple that was off to a suburb no more than ten miles away.  The second was a fellow in a station wagon who was going to Dunkirk, a forty-minute drive from where I stood with my thumb out.  He was a trucker home on a vacation.  He told me that I might be in luck when he spotted a truck parked on the side of the road.  He pulled over and woke up a driver snoozing in the back of the cabin.  These two were apparently buddies as they went back and forth kidding each other. 

“Never going to earn your pay that way, Nelson.”  

“Just practicing what you taught me” is the sleepy response.  

They kid each other for a spell when my ride number 2 asks the sleepy fellow if he will take a rider.  

“Why the hell not? Bet he’s eager to get the hell out of your car.” 

“Yeah well.”

“How ‘bout some breakfast?.” says Nelson.

Nelson’s buddy has a place he needs to get to, so he cannot have breakfast. Nelson says “Your loss, buster.”

I have not been on the road for fifty minutes when Nelson and I drive a few miles, park at a rest stop and go in for breakfast.  Nelson is a big fellow. He reminds me of the Randall Patrick McMurphy character from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest before Jack Nicholson got the part.  Big red headed fellow. Broad shoulders and a belly that suggests he stops now and again for big breakfasts but could have once been a high school football player.  About my height at nearly six feet, but easy 75 pounds heavier.  Got to be 240 pounds with that gut I figure.

Nelson knows a bunch of truckers that are also having breakfast here.  Very gregarious is Nelson.  We join a table of others and they schmooze about their destinations and issues with the union.  I want to get moving, but Nelson has told me that he is going all the way to Denver.  One ride all the way to Denver is or seems to be a godsend.  I wait out the chatter at the breakfast table.

We’re both wary of each other.  I don’t know this big guy. Nelson was concerned too.  He told me that if I proved to be a jerk, the ride could be a short one and said that he once dropped a fool on the side of the road and figured “to hell with him.”  That news was not especially comforting, but Nelson did not seem like a bad egg to me.  And he was going all the way to Denver.

We get back in the truck and I discover over the next few hours that he is a big reader, is divorced, has two daughters whom he does not see enough, loves the freedom of driving a truck, thinks that four wheelers (cars) are driven poorly, and that he has a sweetheart waiting for him in Denver with whom he intends to frolic when we arrive to what he regularly refers to as “Mile High.”  I also discover that this guy likes to eat and talk. We stop at many places on this first day of my journey and in each, he eats a big meal, knows someone or other from his crisscrossing the country, and can carry a conversation without a problem.

I have calculated the distance to Denver and I figured, before I discover how many times he likes to stop, that I might get to Denver in the afternoon of my second day and could conceivably make it to Salt Lake City by the end of day 2.  Not a chance, as it turned out, given this guy’s personality and appetite.

Nelson does not like unions.  He’s an avid fan of Ayn Rand and when he discovers that I too have read The Fountainhead and can converse about the novel, he’s relieved of whatever tension he had previously about the content of my character.  I think he is a pussycat, but am unnerved when he talks about busting the heads of anyone who tries to take away his freedoms. He makes a point of commenting that the unions, despite their claims, are as enslaving as the bosses.

I figure we could have been in Nebraska when he decides, for the fourth time since we met, to stop—this time for an ice cream. There, just over the Iowa border, he encounters what I think of now as groupies. Teenagers in Iowa who know Nelson and have waited for him knowing, pretty much, when he is likely to stop by.  He knocks Iowa with them moaning and groaning about his depiction of their state.  Their parries about Colorado miss the mark but it does not seem to bug them.  

We get back on the road and it is now dark. We are only half way through this very long state when Nelson declares that he is too tired to proceed.  He pulls off to the side of the road, hops in his cabin.   I lay my sleeping bag behind the truck protecting myself from traffic and flying pebbles by the enormity of the vehicle. I have not done much but listen and sit all day, but I fall asleep fast enough and awaken an hour or so before dawn.

3

April 2019

Lately, I have begun to view mundane phenomena as metaphors that might be meaningful. 

If the traffic is bad on the way to work, I wonder if my life is essentially a series of stops and starts, a bumpy impeded journey. And I consider how I might pursue a less trammeled life.  If I get behind a garbage truck, I think that on our life journeys we are, periodically, compelled to smell something foul. If shifting the manual transmission becomes annoying, I wonder about the merits of living a life on automatic without having to bother making adjustments.

The flight is bumpy on the way back to Boston.  And even though we were warned by the pilot, still, two hours into the trip I am jarred by the turbulence.   The flight becomes comfortable after we pass Denver but when we hit Chicago we’re again told to check our seatbelts and not move around the cabin.  We are sure to get jostled by this or that.

There are similarities between this flight and my path.  I'm comfortable. A tenured professor. A nice roof over my head, steady income, people who love me, an enjoyable job...but I know that something is not quite right.  It is as if I have a meter in my heart and head that registers the extent to which I am self-actualized and that meter has been at a mid point for some time.  A comfortable ride lending itself to periodic jostling.  Things settle for a spell and then I am reminded that I am not what I could be and fear that what has kept me from what I could be is the courage to take the steps that would get me there.  I wonder if I have not done the right things at a number of crossroads and have just taken a paved route. Not necessarily an evil path, but one that is not entirely ethical either. 

And now I see an article in a newspaper and I know that I can do something and should do something that will be difficult.  It will take me out of my comfort zone.  And I also know that if I don't do what I should do the comfort zones for me will be forever illusory and I will be reminded with a jolt now and again, that there is something I could have and should have done.

Where I am and where anyone is can be a result of luck. I was in a restaurant with my nephew one day sitting across from him at the table. He was sitting there because decades prior I needed to buy a book and decided to buy it at a particular moment.  I got on a line at the university bookstore and stood behind a woman I’d never seen before. She liked my hat. The line was long and we talked.  We got the books and decided to meet the next day. We started dating. We each had younger siblings. We introduced them. We broke up. They got married.  My nephew is sitting across the table from me.  Had I gotten on the book line thirty minutes later the kid is not there.   

Yet where I am and where anyone is can be a result of conscious decisions we have made as well as luck. I didn’t have to talk with the woman on the book line. She could have decided not to comment on my hat.  I saw the newspaper in the airport. I noticed the article. I read it. Now what. 

1

{This serial mystery is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events is coincidental}

April 2019

I am at the Las Vegas airport. McCarran.  I am here in plenty of time for the flight and am sitting in the waiting area by the gate.  A woman across the way from me has no fewer than four bags around her, set up like some sort of barricade. Apparently, the one piece of carry-on rule has not had the desired effect.  Behind me a man sleeps and snores with his head sagging to the right as if someone snuck behind and clubbed him.  A kid about eight is doing frenzied laps around a row of seats. He is, in no time, going to take a header tripping on one of the suitcases surrounding my neighbor. I imagine the launch and enjoy the image. A fellow standing to my right is talking to himself, or at least twenty years ago I would have thought so.  Now I know that he probably is talking to someone else using a wireless gizmo. Still he looks funny walking two steps one way and then shuffling in another direction.  

If I had something to read I probably would not have noticed the characters.  I consider getting up and buying a book or a newspaper, then scan the seats to see if someone has left a magazine or something behind. Not much around.  This is a sign of the times.  People don't read newspapers anymore. I have one of those phones that has Siri in it.  If I really need to know what is new I can just ask the librarian in my pocket.

There is one discarded Las Vegas paper nearby. It’s not all in one piece. I see something on a page that makes me go and pick the paper up more quickly than I would have otherwise.  What has got my attention is an article about an elderly couple well into their 80s.  They're trying to find their daughter who disappeared forty five years ago next June.  They swear that before the anniversary of the disappearance they will find the person who ruined their lives.

It's a long article and I read it through.  The couple is from Nevada.  There's a photo of the daughter.  I read the article again more carefully.  I take out my computer and punch in some information. Then I ask Siri a few questions.  Then I spend time Googling this and that.  Then I no longer focus on the woman with the bags, or the guy who is asleep with the sagging head, or the kid doing laps or the guy to my right talking to himself doing a fox trot.  

I know that this couple will not find their daughter, and I am chilled and perspiring because I know why.  And then, I wonder if I will have the courage to do anything about it.

2

May 1974

I am standing by a ramp that leads to the New York State Thruway near Buffalo.  Exit 50.  I'm with Becca.  She and I are kissing and muttering nothings.  That we are standing here together given the argument we had the night before is a testament to our attraction, something inexplicable since we are an unlikely couple.

I met Becca after classes one day in a parking lot at the University of Buffalo.  I'd seen her in class once or twice and, on the occasion of our parking lot meeting, she pulled her red Pinto up to where I was standing with another woman, a mutual friend.  She got out of her car ostensibly to say hi to the friend.  The friend introduced us and there was enough there to make me think of calling her.  I did, we went out, and there proved to be a reason for the initial spark.   

When you try to explain how love can evolve despite an absence of similarities, you could use Becca and me as an example.  She was very structured, I haphazard.  The bottom of her car was spotless. You wouldn't want to know what could be at the bottom of mine.  She studied for our exams very carefully.  I went about preparing in a way that regularly caused her to roll her eyes.  Still, when we went out we felt physically connected and that force always seemed to trump the tensions that regularly surfaced because of our differences.  I have not seen Becca for decades but if we both were in the same place at the same time, and allowed natural forces to have their way, I think we might stare at each other for a spell, let out some air, and then figure we better get on our way before we got into trouble.

Becca had short blonde hair, very blue eyes and strong opinions. She wondered aloud, when confronted by what she considered incompetence, how a barber, policeman, service station attendant, or chef could have received a license.  She came by this honestly. Her dad was unequivocal about everything and her sisters outspoken. June shocked me, even though I had been warned, when at the Thanksgiving dinner table on the occasion of my first meeting her clan, she stared at her sister’s chest and said, "Are you on the pill, Becca?. You’ve gotten so big.” June, I'd been told, would say anything at any time. But this took the entire family aback. All laughed nervously.  "Have you met my daughter, June?" her father said trying to move the conversation along.  But where could we move it?  After a moment her mother asked me if I was enjoying Buffalo.  

Our argument that preceded the kissing at the Thruway had taken place after we'd gone to a dinner party the night before.  The dinner was a bon voyage gathering of sorts. I was leaving in the morning to hitch-hike across the country.  The whole idea of this trip did not seem wise to Becca and she had a point.  I had gone about my business getting ready for the journey on my own and she had muttered all week about how I was not prepared.  When someone at the dinner asked me what I had in the way of a backpack, I said that I’d be using a laundry bag.  This did not seem like the best vessel to Becca and while she did not say much I knew her well enough to see that she was steamed.

When we left the party she opened the door to her clean car and said, “Get in”.  I took offense to the harsh directive and right there on the street we discussed the wisdom of back packs versus laundry bags, the concept of preparation, and the merits of shouting "Get in" to one's boyfriend as if he was a child.  What constituted who was, and what was, childlike then got some play in the discussion.  

Eventually I got into the car and we rode, in silence, back to her apartment.  There, despite the lingering anger, our passion took over though you couldn’t call it love making.  In the morning she drove in a mist to the exit ramp.    

“Be careful” she said after our last kiss.   I told her I would be.  She left and I held up a sign.  Shortly thereafter I got my first ride.

Remote

 When I was a young man and started teaching I would walk into the class with several items on a piece of paper. I'd write the items on the blackboard and use the outline as a guide.  Probably took me about a half hour to create the outline and review my notes.

Now, many more years around the track, with much more experience, having taught some courses dozens of times--it can take me, easily, two hours to prepare for the same class. And then subsequently an hour or two to process what took place and get ready for the next time.

Add to this the fact that I am teaching remotely during COVID, and at the end of a day when I have only one 100 minute class I am whipped, and on the days when I teach two 100 minute classes, I am ready for the sack at about 930, 10 at the latest.

This is my second semester teaching remotely.  Last March when the world changed, I had no idea how to do it. I had, in fact, taken a remote course on how to teach remotely, and did just fine in the class--but it was like taking Russian in high school and then being plonked down in Moscow.  I needed to learn how to speak Russian in Russia.

For both the Fall and Spring terms I had to start a half month ahead of time to prepare the documents that go on CANVAS, and to arrange my class sessions to have them make sense in a remote format. I think I have it now, though I am still learning.  (A tip of the hat to our I.T. people who have been stunningly patient--particularly given how ornery I imagine some faculty can be).  I have some very good students this semester and the students last semester were similarly responsible.  The students are responsive to the assignments and come prepared to discuss the content each day.  Yet for 100 minutes I am on. Remote teaching requires engagement and interactivity that is not necessary to the same extent in on ground teaching--at least it seems to me.  If I had weak students I don't know if I could make it through a semester.  

The good news is that my commute is an hour less and I don't have to pay the otherworldly charges for parking.  I nearly have to remind myself how to fill the gas tank when, every few weeks, I am near empty.  Also, I am not standing for an hour which, for a fellow in need of a hip, is a blessing.  Our campus is compact, but still one can have a class in a building half a mile away from the next one you are scheduled to be at.  

It will be interesting to see how I feel when I go back in the classroom.  For now, I am grateful for the opportunity to learn the new technology, though of course wish the reasons were different.  I wonder how 26 year old me would have handled the same challenge. Coming in with an outline that I worked at for a half hour, would not be a viable approach.

Shooting from Long Range

 I watched the last three quarters of the Nets Clippers game tonight. Then I saw the first few minutes of the second game of the double header with the Celtics playing the Warriors.

When the NBA first initiated the three point shot in 1979, most teams commented that the three was a shot that would be implemented only in situations when a team needed a three to tie a game--likely at the end of a game.  Teams identified players who could take the three--Chris Ford was such a player on the Celtics--and setting up for the shot was often a result of a set play.  The ABA had used the three previously, but when the NBA adopted it, many coaches and players thought of it as a gimmick.

The next time you are on a basketball court with your ball, go to the college three point line and attempt to hit a shot. If you are a shooter and you are warmed up, you can make an acceptable percentage.  But even if you are a skilled player, but not a shooter, it is a long shot. It was the type of shot my coaches would tell us not to take because it was low percentage. Of course my coaches told us not to take the shot when it was worth only two points.  My guess is that, if not immediately, my coaches would have been less discouraging when the goal was worth three--but only encouraging those who had a decent outside shot.  Before I became an old man, I could hit the three, but not automatically at all.  Even twenty years ago when I would play pick up, and the three in schoolyard games was worth two you did not take the three--often because the chances were that you would miss it, the opponents would get the rebound and--in a game when there was a group with winners (there was a team waiting to play and would play the victorious team) you did not want to lose and sit, so you discouraged a teammate from taking the three unless you had a shooting stud.

Now go back to the college three point line.  The court may also have the pro three point line, but if not take a few steps back and you will be in three point territory for professionals.  Unless you are a real stud or played some serious basketball, that shot is a heave.  A real heave.  I played in a league when I was in my late 30s, that used the pro three point line.  I was the guy who--when we were desperate at the end--they wanted to take the three.  If I was hot, maybe I could make one out of three, but typically it was more like one out of five or six or even eight. It is a heave from pro three point land. Excellent division 1 college players have trouble hitting the pro three. 

The Nets and Clippers players tonight were tossing up threes as if they were layups.  Not just the stud shooters, nearly everyone with a uniform was bombing up the threes. And in the Warriors/Celtics second game, Steph Curry hit three threes in a row without breaking much of a sweat.  If he was open it was automatic.

So, what is the point.

There are a number.

(1) When my dad was alive and we were watching a game he would often marvel and say, "these guys are so good." He was so right. Sure, they are the best of the best, but a three is a long long shot, and they are putting them up effortlessly and successfully. Gone are the early days when the shot was only used in an emergency. Now, it is used as if the game was more like warmups (and warmups during which players were not practicing good shots) than a competitive contest.  This leads me to the second point.

(2) The game, at least during the regular season, is losing some of what makes basketball great.  Perhaps the contests tonight are aberrations, but gee, we are talking run and gun--and little to no defense. There was a stretch about twenty-thirty years ago when it was difficult to break 100 points in a game. The three was in play then, but so was defense.  It is true that now players are taking threes off of fast breaks, eschewing high percentage shots for lower percentage shots which can gain the team an extra point. In these cases the players are earning their opportunity to take uncontested threes. But gee, it sure seemed to me that sometimes in a possession, very quickly into it, some player would bomb up a three and nobody was really giving the player a hard time.

(3) The most significant point is this. The game has changed because of the three such that the game of my childhood is a different game.  Not commenting with this comment that it is for the worse--point here is that it is different.  So different that some of the great players of the 50s and 60s would not be stars in the 21st century. Bill Russell was the greatest player in the earlier era. He was a shot blocker and great rebounder. He could not shoot a lick. Wilt Chamberlain was a force--once AVERAGED 50 points a game for a season.  He parked himself down low and was so strong that he could take the defender and the ball to the hoop. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had more of a touch than either Chamberlain or Russell, but his points were all around the basket. These three greats would not have been central to their teams' success in the 21st century. You don't really need a big guy, unless the big guy is like Kevin Durant who can shoot from the moon as if he is dropping a peach into a basket.  Look at the teams who are successful.  They are led by shooters--Steph Curry who scored nine points tonight in what seemed like less than a minute. James Harden, Kyrie Irving, Kawhi Leonard--sure they can drive and finish, but they can also hit the three.  LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Jayson Tatum.  All shooters. How many teams in the NBA have their games centered around a center?  Bill Russell would not be the most valuable player in today's NBA. Neither would Abdul-Jabbar.  When the Bucks drafted Jabbar in 1970 they immediately went from the worst team to a playoff contender.  Draft a big guy with a hook shot today, and you get a bounce but not a huge bounce.

All games evolve, but the implementation of the three point goal has not resulted in basketball's evolution as much as it has created a different game.