David Turns Into a Grumpy Old Man

Stories of insensitivity and cluelessness abound, for all of us, and I could easily fill a book with aggravating examples. People walking slowly down the middle of supermarket aisles with shopping carts, effectively blocking people behind them. A woman in the airport security line, barely conscious of her two small children running around, let alone of the people backing up behind her as she fails to move her container of shoes and bags forward on the table to give us room to unpack behind her, or to move her things after the x-ray to the end of the table so people can grab theirs behind her. People talking on or listening to their phones at full volume on busses, or in libraries, or coffee shops.

 

Just now, on my flight to Ohio that took off around 6:45 am, the guy with the window seat kept it closed throughout boarding and taxiing (in violation of FAA guidelines, for what it’s worth, but it’s not that that bothered me). Only as we started to generate speed did I finally sigh, smile, and say, “excuse me, but could you open the window? I like to see what’s going on.”

 

(“What’s going on” is … a pretty poor paraphrasing of what I would have liked to say to him, which was something like, “it’s dark, and I’d like some natural light, and we’re in a beautiful part of the country, with mountains and desert, and why do we have to sit in a cave even now, at take-off, and in any event, couldn’t you at least ask me, the person in the aisle seat, if I share your uncommon (as all the other windows on the plane seem to be open) preference?”).

 

He looked a little confused, but he turned to the window and opened it … half-way. Which worked for him – he was happy, it turned out, to stare out the window to watch us taxi and take off and circle above the mountains – but because of my distance from the window, the half-closed shade forced me to hunch down or lean as far back as I could to see the mountains. He never even looked at me to notice. Then, after about 5 minutes, still without looking at me, he concluded he had done all he possibly could, closed the shade fully, and turned back to the movie on his laptop.

 

I wonder, sometimes, whether the level of courtesy and simple awareness of others was higher back in the 50s and 60s – were people trained in it? – or, just like now, did some people have it and some not? And if it was higher … what happened? Was it advertising, marketing, and pop culture, which started suggesting that sacrificing any individual rights or preferences in favor of sensitivity to and concern for the needs of others could only constitute weakness? Is it something else?

 

I’ve noticed in tennis in recent years that players at the professional level and down through college are actively encouraged to scream and pump their fists at successful points. Long gone are the days of Arthur Ashe and Stefan Edberg. We now prioritize loud demonstration over quiet dignity. Indeed, I can only conclude that professional coaches encourage loud self-expression, perhaps on a two-fold basis: 1) that your primary responsibility is to stay as focused, positive, and energized as possible, and not to worry in the least about how your opponent feels; and 2) indeed, to the extent that your screaming and emoting gets in your opponent’s head, all the better.

 

This is true in other sports as well, of course. Don Larsen no longer calmly walks off the mound towards the dug-out before being ambushed by Yogi Berra, who jumps on him. Instead, now, we get players falling on the ground in tears or proudly pointing to the skies, or popping their own uniforms, apparently overwhelmed by the moment. 

 

“Me!” we shout to the world. “Look at me!”

Was Danny Boy a Dick?

As a counterpoint to yesterday's grim story, three separate-but-related anecdotes about my grandfather that make me smile, all from late in his life.

First is related to his dramatic "softening" late in his life. He would often tear up at unexpected moments in family gatherings, finally starting to take note of what special people his children were. Frequently, he would ask for and start to cry at "Oh Danny Boy," the traditional song so beloved by the Irish. It happened, once, during one of my final visits to Lawrence during his lifetime, for his and my grandmother's 50th wedding anniversary, which we celebrated in a private room at a local restaurant. As the music played and he began to weep. I leaned over to my Mom and asked her, "um ... are we Irish?" She smiled. "Nope!"

Not My Flag

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A couple years later, in 1998 or 1999, the entire family — 15 of us or so, from four generations (I was in the third), including a few spouses — gathered at my Aunt Kathy's house in Topeka the morning after Christmas. Our family is talkative and good-humored, and family gatherings were ... not known for extended silences. This was a typically laughter-filled and energetic morning, as we sat in a big circle sharing stories and laughing. At one point I made some comment or told some (I thought) humorous story. My grandfather, reacting to the laughter, leaned forward, looking directly at me from across the room, and said, "David, has anyone ever called you Dick?"

A quick silence immediately fell over the room as we all tried to process that comment, and all I could think was that, not only had I been directly and firmly reprimanded for being overly-talkative by my grandfather, but that he had done so in the coolest and hippest way possible. None of my college friends would ever, even jokingly, have thought of insulting me by asking if I had ever been called Dick, and it stunned me that my approaching-80-year-old grandfather would have used this particular construction to make his point.

Still, I immediately got serious, and said, "no sir, but I understand." (I had never called anyone "sir" in my entire life, and have not done so since.). 

My mother and her sisters — my aunts were stunned. Everything got quiet. Silence reigned supreme.

Then, however, everyone jumped in trying to make sense of what had just happened, and it soon turned out that ... in seeing me wave my hands as I spoke my grandfather had been reminded of the basketball commentator Dick Vitale, and was simply trying to make a joking reference. The relief that swept the room was palpable, as none of his children could even imagine him using that kind of pointed and off-color language, let alone towards one of his grandchildren.

My friend James — a best friend from the Peace Corps, who had, in the interim, met and married my cousin Allegra, thus joining my family — was in the room that day, and he has never let that moment slip from his memory. To this day he sometimes asks if anyone has yet called me "Dick." 

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Finally, although I wasn't there at the time, I am told that, on his deathbed a year or two later, somewhat delirious, my grandfather called my cousin Sarah over to him, and instructed her clearly and firmly to "stay out of jail." Sarah, a nice young woman in her early 20s who had not ever been to jail but, let's be fair, up to that point, had not devoted much mental energy to avoiding it, promised him that she would.

Delirious or not, that has always seemed like a good final instruction to give to your grandchildren on your deathbed. My generation could have avoided a lot of trouble, it seems to me, if they had been told, in their youth, in no uncertain terms, to stay out of jail. 

A Painful Drive Down a Lawrence Country Road

As I did yesterday, I'm guessing a bit at the year here. Let's say ... 1975 or 76. I'm seven or eight years old, it's summertime, and I'm on a country road outside Lawrence, Kansas, with my mother in the backseat of a car driven by her father — my grandfather. I assume my grandmother was in the front seat next to him, but I don't remember. It might even have been my father, or an aunt — I just don't remember.

What I do remember is seeing, as we sped down that country road, two small birds — maybe just sparrows — chasing each other playfully in front of us, swooping down and around. As we caught up to them they swooped down right in front of our car, and when I turned to look out the back window to make sure they were all right, I saw, receding behind us, one of them lying dead on the road and the other perched next to it, looking at it.

I gasped, horrified, and spun around with my mouth open to say something. I may even have gotten a word or two out — "hey, we ...!" before my mother put her arm on me, pulled me back to the seat, and shushed me urgently, shaking her head. We continued on our way, my stomach hurting, starting immediately on a fruitless life-long effort to erase the scene I had witnessed from my memory.

My grandfather grew up on a farm, in a different time, of course, and there's little doubt that he would have waved off my concern, and maybe even have laughed at it. I don't know. He loved me, and I was comfortable around him, but I knew that he was from a harder time, and a harder world, and that he had little time for ... childish worries about dead sparrows on the side of the road.

More importantly, my mother had had a fraught relationship with him all of her life, and there's no doubt that she certainly expected his reaction to be ... unpleasant, and not what a sensitive little 8-year-old boy would have wanted or hoped for. She had been on the receiving end of his "discipline" throughout her childhood, and she saw him more as a bully than a caring and loving man. In restraining me, I knew even then that she was protecting me from what she fully expected to be a dismissive, a callous, and maybe even a mocking response.

And I appreciate it. I appreciated it even then. I knew immediately that he certainly hadn't done it on purpose, that there was nothing anyone could have done about it, and there was nothing to be gained by expressing my horror at what happened — and I knew that my grandfather's reaction would not have been sympathetic.

But ... it hurt. It still hurts, if I'm being honest. So much was involved. The abrupt injection of death, for God's sake, into what had been a happy family drive. I couldn't help thinking — I continue to think — about the initial confusion, then the immense pain of the bird's playmate, sitting on the side of the road, trying to make sense of his partner's death. My mother's traumatic upbringing, immediately brought to bear — and her instinctive desire to protect me from the pain she had experienced so frequently in her own childhood. My grandfather's Depression-era childhood on a farm in Western Kansas. And of course a child's observation of and participation in all of this. 

I should emphasize that my grandfather loved me, and my experience of him was never anything but positive, though I certainly was aware of his temperament and inclinations. He also relaxed noticeably — dramatically — in the last decade of his life, becoming unexpectedly sentimental and good-humored. I do not mean to castigate or indict him. That's not the point. 

Still, the memory of that drive still brings up strong emotions in me. Of sadness for the birds, of course, whose playful flirtation was immediately and unfairly ended in the most violent way. Of sympathy for my mother and recognition of and appreciation for her instinct to protect me. Even a little wincing recognition that the transition from childhood to a more callous adulthood is not easy, is not painless. 

Nasty, brutish, and short, indeed.

Little Bits of Weirdness

One thing I've always been amazed by in writers is the ability to capture unexpected and unnecessary details. I remember the Woody Allen - Bette Midler movie from the early 1990s, Scenes from a Mall, where, for some reason, Woody's character ends up carrying a surfboard through the mall for most of the film's duration. A reason was of course given, but it wasn't a reason that was central to the plot. It was just ... a little bit of weirdness, for no other reason than sometimes, in life, that happens, and some guy carries a surfboard through a mall, while everyone around him tries to make sense of the story.

I have always been attracted to those bits of weirdness in life. Seeing people walking down a street carrying a tuba, say, or even that young man in the cinema bathroom I described several weeks ago. Those moments are entertaining, and valuable.

So it's ... let's say, 1980, and I'm in the passenger seat in a friend's car (although I was 13, he was 19), and we're driving somewhere on Washtenaw Avenue between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan. It is, say, 3 pm in the afternoon. (All details are approximate, at this point, 42 years later).

As we're driving along, we pass a guy riding his bike on the sidewalk on the side of the road to my right, with a grassy hill sloping up immediately to his right. As we pass him, he slowly comes to a stop, for some reason ... but rather than putting out his foot to the ground, he simply ... slowly ... toppled over, sideways onto the hill, as we drive past. There was no sense that he was injured, or that the wind had pushed him over, or that he had hit anything. He just slowly coasted to a stop, then gently fell sideways onto the hill, keeping his feet on the pedals.

That story has stuck with me for these 40+ years. Indeed, to a larger extent than you might imagine, that story is the primary reason I wanted to start writing this blog. To capture those moments of oddness. I always thought, if I were writing a novel, I would want to have a little journal full of these moments, just to drop them in at the right time.

Because of course everything we see is ... unexpected. Why is that woman to my left in this coffee shop wearing a purple top? Is purple her favorite color? Did her husband mention to her once, 30 years ago, that he loved her in purple? Is it laundry day? Who knows? That's the magic of the lives of the people around us.

I hope that rider was ok, then (and remains so today).

The Better Angels Take the Day Off

Despair

My friend Doug told me once that one year in his childhood in Ann Arbor, he responded to the University of Michigan's annual disappointment in the Rose Bowl by destroying his bedroom, tearing down all of his posters of Michigan players, banners, photos, etc. Finally his father had to pull him aside and instruct him, solemnly, that "we do not destroy our rooms when our sports teams lose."

To which I've always thought a good answer might have been, "excuse me, but the evidence is that we certainly do."

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The subject of self-directed sports-related frustrated rage is one that comes up fairly often with me and my tennis friends. It's a familiar phenomenon: When things go badly on the court the overwhelming instinct can arise to slam your ($200!) racket on the ground or fling it over the fence, to scream at yourself, and otherwise ot act like an absolute ass. Your opponent — who is, by definition, having a much better time — will stay silent, in recognition of the phenomenon, and sometimes will offer "helpful advice" after the match along the lines of, "don't take each point so seriously, you're playing really well, you just need to focus a bit on x."

Which makes sense until the next time he is going through one of these frustrating periods, when he inevitably he does the same thing.

We regularly, when laughing about these outbursts of self-loathing, have conversations trying to explain to ourselves what it is that prompts them. It's not losing — or it's not just losing — as we can (and do) lose regularly without feeling any desire to slam our racket on the ground at all. But it's not just playing badly, either — it never happens when we're winning, for instance. It tends to happen, I think, when ... things are going badly, and you're simply not able to hit relatively simple shots that you normally can and do, and you don't know what's going wrong. Things just ... have stopped working, and you don't really know why.

It doesn't happen often, of course. I have only slammed a racket straight down on the ground once, and that was (seriously!) more playful than anything else. Still, I can't say it has never happened, and I have several times over the years forced myself at the last moment to throw my racket horizontally, generally into an open field or nearby bush.

My most dramatic and explosive outburst came last summer, during a social match with my friend Danny up at the posh La Paloma resort in Tucson, where he is a member. 

My game, more than anyone else I know, goes through ups and downs. I think that's because I didn't learn from a coach, and I didn't learn with proper mechanics and technique. As a result it's very easy for things to slip, and I regularly go for months — sometimes four or five months — feeling desperate and overwhelmingly frustrated at my inability to hit the ball hard without hitting it out. My defense, quickness, and competitiveness remain fairly high, of course, so I still generally win more than I lose, but ... going for months at a time without being able to hit a winner (which means, in tennis, hitting it hard past your opponent), when I know there are times when I certainly can, can be extremely frustrating. Having them whizz balls past me, without me being able to do that to them, is embarrassing and frustrating.

I was three or four months into one such spell when I played Danny at La Paloma last August. A year before I had gone through a spell of playing really well against him, but at this point I hadn't beaten him — hadn't even taken a set off him — for about four months. Still, although I lost the first set this day, I was playing ok in the second set, and actually managed to recognize a mechanical mistake I was making and fix it, putting me up 5-2. One game away from winning my first set against him over the last six matches we had played, over four months or so.

At which point ... God decided I hadn't ... done enough penance. Suffered enough. Whatever.

We were playing on the clay courts at La Paloma, which have lines made out of white tape (vinyl, or whatever), not chalk. The upside is you don't have to repaint them, but the downside is that when the ball hits the line it can slide, not rising up at all, or —rarely, but occasionally, when the ball hits the front lip — pop way up high. That doesn't happen often, though — maybe two or three times a match. And having it jump so high and so quickly that it literally jumps over your racket without you being able to adjust in time, happens maybe ... once every four matches.

So at 5-2, over the next two games, that happened to me twice. And Danny hit a net-cord winner (i.e., a shot that hits the net and then falls on the other side so close to the net that your opponent can't get to it). And two of my balls hit the tape on the top of the net and fell back on my side. But I stayed calm.

Then, I finally clawed my way to my first set point in four months, at 5-4, 40-30. And on that first opportunity in four months, Danny hit a ball that hit the tape ... and literally rolled over and dropped down a couple inches over. But even then I maintained my cool. 

He went ahead to win the game. 

Next game, at 5-5, I hit a ball that clipped the top of the net and then bounced out, and I still kept my cool. But the pot was starting to boil, as I started to whine that it's not fair that his keep falling over, but mine ... before I stopped myself mid-sentence and turned back for the next point.

And then, then, at 30-40, I crushed crushed crushed a backhand down the line, and ... it hit the tape on the top of the net, and slowly fell back on my side.

And man, I l-o-s-t it. I exploded. You would not have recognized me.

The frustration of the previous 4-5 months was impossible to contain, and it raced out of me, as did my confusion about what lessons God was trying to teach me, and just absolute rage. I screamed two f-bombs as loudly as I could — I mean, loud (with a nice couple happily playing on the court next to us looking over, alarmed) — whipped my racket at the fence, and when Danny tossed the ball to me to start the next point I whirled, turned, and whipped it over the fence and as far away as I could.

That seems to have drained some of the adrenaline out of me, but I was still almost shaking as we switched sides to begin the next game, so I raised my hand and said we should stop. "I know I'm going to be really embarrassed about this tonight," I said. "In fact, I'm embarrassed about it already, right now. But if we try to keep playing I'm just going to try and hit the ball as hard as I can with every swing, which won't make either of us any happier. Why don't we just stop right now." He agreed.

I texted him that evening to apologize, and he responded that he understood, but pointed out that it was pretty embarrassing for him, as a paying member of the club, where kids were playing in the resort swimming pool nearby, etc. I winced and said I understood, and promised that it wouldn't happen again. (And it hasn't).

(Amusingly, and helpfully, when I wrote about it that evening to my former tennis coach, Tad, who had moved to Florida eight months earlier, he responded by laughing, noting that it happens to everyone at some point, and waved it off. That ... was good to hear.)

Honestly, I'm not quite sure what prompted the outburst. It was frustration with my tennis skills and results, of course, but it may have also reflected some frustration with circumstances outside of tennis, and ... oh, who knows? It was certainly way out of character for me, to say the least, and I wonder at it.

I am, interestingly, back into a better tennis groove these days, but I'm acutely aware how fragile that is, and how quickly it can all disappear. I hope I hope I can retain perspective next time this comes up and avoid this. I'm pretty sure I can and will. 

Still, if someone pulls me aside in the future and says, "we do not respond to misfortune by screaming and throwing things," I think I might have to say, "with all due respect, I'm afraid the evidence is, yes we do."