The Big Thing--remembering my father

 When I was in junior high school, a Big Thing happened in the high school across the street. Really Big. The football team, the Ramona Bulldogs, won the California State Championship. At the time, I didn’t know anything about leagues or levels or any such official classifications. I realize now that we had to have been in a league of small high schools. The smallest. All I knew then was that we were #1 in the state. The best! The winners!

Ramona was definitely a football town with the Friday night games the biggest event of the week. Even for away games, people filled buses and cars to get there and yell.

The thing is—my dad was the coach. He was actually famous. His picture graced the front page of the Ramona Sentinel more than that of the president of the United States, whose name I don’t even remember.

The night the mighty Bulldogs growled, clawed, and scrabbled their way to the championship went down in history. At the noisy conclusion of the game, the team carried my dad off the field on their shoulders. Everyone was yelling and stomping and throwing their hats in the air. Pretty impressive for an adolescent daughter. I just sat in the bleachers, feeling warm and happy. I knew Dad was pleased.

The thing is—I never liked football all that much. I thought it silly how all those big boys in their stupid outfits ran around bumping into each other, then throwing other big boys on the ground and jumping on top of them. The rules didn’t make sense and sometimes people really did get hurt.

The thing is—my dad knew I thought this way, but he never seemed to hold it against me. 

He was also the Senior class English teacher. He was a writer and he liked literature even more than he liked football. He admired classical Greek culture and he told me once his job in the high school was a good Greek job. He loved the old Greeks plays and epics and he admired the Greeks for beginning the Olympic Games. He said the motto of the Greeks during their Golden Age was “a sound mind in a healthy body.” He reasoned that when he combined sports with literature, he was like the Greeks. A real Renaissance Man.

As was required of high school teachers in California, he took classes during the summer for professional enhancement. Instead of coaching or sports classes, he studied literature. He favored the University of Arizona as his sister lived in Phoenix. One summer he drove across the country to Massachusetts to study Shakespeare at Harvard.

I took Senior English from my dad. I remember as a class we read through “Romeo and Julliet” out loud. He made it come alive. Even the football players in the class became lovers of Shakespeare.

Actually, he was mostly like himself. And he let me be like myself, even though I was not Greek-like, nor did I enjoy football. For my 16^th birthday, he gifted me with a poetry book and wrote on the flyleaf, “To Nancy, for being Nancy. Love, Dad.”

So, I felt OK about the football team carrying him off the field. I would have liked it better if a bunch of writers could have carried him on their shoulders for writing the Great American Novel (a phrase he sometimes used). That never happened.

On Father’s Day I have no problem celebrating my memories of Dad. I recognize that many of my friends and colleagues have to work hard at forgiveness, at facing and bringing peace to their memories of fathers that were not so loving or appreciative. I feel privileged and blessed.

I’m grateful.

 

Always a mom

 Life seems to be a series of stages, one after another, characterized by changing relationships. One pattern, the one I’m most familiar with, starts out with a single baby in intimate dependence on its mother, a gradual growth out of dependency, followed by blessed independence (!), and then marriage (an interdependence at best), motherhood (reversed dependence), up through the empty nest and a new freedom as persons in our own right. Then we end up again dependent on others for the slow journey to the end of life.

Only that’s a little too neat and orderly. My own life seems more mixed and messy, without a clear transition from one stage to the next.

Take motherhood, for example. Now that my kids are grown and with grown children of their own (and soon to be grandparents, amazingly enough), my raising/nurturing/disciplining tasks should be long over. And, indeed, they are, thank God. But it doesn’t always feel that way. While no one calls me “Mommy” any more (again, thank God), I still sometimes feel a keen sense of responsibility and a need to protect. I still have a compulsion to stand between my daughter or son and any real or imagined monster that would threaten them. I want to exchange my safety for their peril. My health for their illness.

I sometimes still wake up in the night with a nightmare of some threat to their well-being. I find it harder to pray with faith when one of them faces danger than I do to pray with faith for peace in Ukraine. And that’s ridiculous!

Today, in mid-January, the houses, trees and hills outside my window are covered in white. The first snow of the season always amazes me with its beauty. But beauty isn’t the first word people use to describe the snow this year. It’s slippery and dangerous outside. And more so in the mountains where my daughter and her family live.

On Saturday it wasn’t snow; it was freezing rain that fell all day and stuck to the trees surrounding their house on the McKenzie River Road. Electricity went off in the morning and a downed tree blocked their long driveway up the hill. That night as the temperature dipped and the winds blew, Kristin, her husband Jon, and their son Peter huddled all night in the living room, listening to the sound of tree branches cracking and falling.

By morning, branches had broken through the ceilings in a bathroom, the hall, and their dining room. The front porch and back deck were damaged and the yard a tangle of fallen trees and branches. The largest tree on their property, a giant Douglas fir, had completely toppled.

They were blocked in most of Sunday by the downed tree. Some friends met them at the bottom of their driveway and took them home for showers and a hot meal. Jon and Kristin elected to go back to their house to spend last night, partly for the sake of their animals (two large dogs, three cats, and a tortoise), and partly to take care of their house and keep the water system working. Hal and I were awake, off and on, all night praying and worrying (which did a lot of good, I’m sure).

This morning they informed us they had made it through the night with no adventures. Even the cats came out of hiding and slept on top of Kristin. Today it’s still a world of ice outside and extremely cold, although sunny. Electricity is still off. The danger has not passed. Quite a few trees around the property could still fall, and tomorrow the forecast predicts more freezing rain.

The tree company just informed them that the cost of removing the trees that have already fallen on their roof and property comes to $13,000. They were planning on staying another night but Kristin just texted, “We are really needing to consider getting out of here as we were told by the tree company that it may get worse. It’s just so complicated with the animals. Jon may be realizing the trailer, boat, water system, and house just may not be worth keeping.”

Even if nothing else happens to the house, it will take several months at least to repair the damage. They’ll have to work out the details with their insurance company and find a place to rent in the meantime.

So why am I going into all this detail? It’s because it feels like it’s happening to me. If it’s happening to one of my kids, it’s happening to me. I don’t know if every “old” mother feels like this, but I suspect many of you do. I don’t even know if I should feel like this. Maybe it’s a sign that I haven’t matured enough to pass on to the next life stage. But I need to recognize that this is where I am so that I can face it.

Once a mother, always a mother, I guess. At least in the sense of deep empathy and a sharing in bearing the emotional burden. Maybe that’s not so bad.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is another day, with its own dangers, blessings, and answers to prayer.

(I’ll let you know how this story plays out in a future installation.)