Saturday, October 30, 2010

Thanks for Everything, Saturday

Saturdays aren’t supposed to suck. Saturdays are supposed to be awesome. They’re supposed to be the day you get to sleep in, They’re supposed to be the day that you transfer from the bed to the couch where you lounge until Saturday morning cartoons are over and then flip to TNT or TBS with hopes of finding a classic 1980’s movie to watch until you’ve formulated some semblance of a plan in your mind for how the rest of the day is going to shake out. Saturday is not supposed to be a day for life lessons.
This morning I informed my 12U softball team that after four years of coaching them, I was walking away. I tried my best to make sure that they understood I wasn’t walking away from them but that I was saying goodbye to the game and my role in it. My words were meant to simply say this: Thank you for letting me be a part of your lives, even if for some of you it was only for a short time.
I cried. I knew I would. I’m the reason people like Nicholas Sparks and Nora Ephron have jobs. I tried my best to get through it unscathed, but as I delivered my speech - which was really nothing more than a silent prayer to whoever was listening to please get me through the next few minutes with my dignity intact - I swear I heard a women walk up behind me and say “Look honey, some poor guy dropped his man-card. We should probably turn it in to the Lost and Found.”
Telling the girls goodbye was hard. I knew it would be, but I was ready for it. I thought I was ready for it. I’d performed a trial run the night before by telling Kacie and her cousin Camille when we got home from practice. I’m not sure Camille knew what to make of it, but Kacie did. She barely looked at me the rest of the night.
The game itself isn’t something that I really remember much of. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that I was snapping photos of the girls every opportunity I got, but in that single game I relived the highlight reel from every other game I’d been a part of over the course of the last nine seasons. I remembered all the girls that had come and gone and wondered how they were spending their Saturday mornings. Were they sleeping in? Watching cartoons? Still playing softball?
When our final inning to play defense arrived, Kacie was forced to sit bench rather than play shortsop as I originally penciled her in for because of some bonehead snafu I’d made in the defensive positioning. I found her standing against the dugout fence, ready to cheer her teammates on, just as I’d preached to the team every game since they were eight. Kacie had always been a loyal soldier. A faithful soldier. But at that moment, she was a crying soldier.
I went to console her – something I’d never really done in all our time together on the diamond – and apologized for my miscue. She shook her head and simply said, “It’s the last inning.” Tears were welling up in her eyes.
Like most kids who play sports, she never wanted to sit out, but she also understood that sometimes she had to because like hitting and fielding, it too was part of the game. Today I wanted her to be on the field as much as she wanted to be on the field. I wanted to watch her, not as her coach, but as her father. For one inning out of all of the innings that had added up over time, I just wanted to be dad.
“I know,” I said.
I hugged her. She resisted. I hugged her again. She resisted again.
“No, daddy. It’s the last inning.” She could barely catch her breath. Her tears were making a jailbreak from the confines of their imprisonment. “Our last inning,” she finished.
I hadn’t prepared myself for that. I had no words to make things better. All I had were my own tears to keep hers from becoming lonely. Kacie and I stood side by side and watched the fruits of all the previous seasons together unfold on the field in front of us. We were two heavy hearts whose worlds, it seemed, were coming to an end.
As I write this, I’m desperately resisting the urge to send an email to the team with a subject line that reads: Sike! The email would disclose that I was only teasing and that I of course will be back to coach the girls in the spring. Perhaps that would be the easier solution to a decision that has me feeling like crap on a Saturday. But I know that no matter how hard letting go might be today, it’ll only be harder tomorrow, and even harder the day after that.
What I was unaware of when I woke up this morning, was that this particular Saturday had a plan for me that didn’t involve Scooby Doo, a bowl of Frootloops, and the last hour of Sixteen Candles. You see, I thought that Kacie and I restoring the Mustang together was just my last ditch effort to fill in the missing pages of time that I lost out on spending with her because I’d let a hundred-and-one other things get in the way. In some ways it is, but now I understand that this rebuilding process is, in its own way, also preparing both of us for how to eventually let go.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Dear Tom Hanks: You Were Wrong

Last night, like any 34-year-old man about to start his period, I was an emotional train wreck. I’d had a long day at work, Kacie’s 12U softball team was playing a make-up game that I wasn’t able to coach due to school commitments, the Texas Rangers were fighting to make franchise history after what looked like a guaranteed trip to the ALCS just five days before, and I was stuck in an Interpretation and Analysis class helplessly interpreting and analyzing “A&P” by John Updike while my thoughts were completely consumed with what was happening between the lines both in Frisco, Texas and St. Petersburg, Florida.
The plan was for my wife to update me by text every half inning on how the girls were doing. Like most instructors, my English professor had a strict no texting policy in class, so this was going to require a certain degree of secrecy. While understandable on the surface, texting is no more of a distraction than the guy in the back corner of the class who gets up every thirty minutes to go outside and smoke a cig. The way I see it, those texting in class are really only distracting themselves – Chain Smoking Guy is a distraction to everyone. Alas, I’m getting off track….
Her first series of texts noted that our girls had jumped out to a 4-0 lead after one inning, but because the team was short three players they started the second inning with an out since we didn’t have a number nine hitter. One run was all they could muster in the top half of the second, so our pitcher had to take the circle again hoping to duplicate a phenomenal 1-2-3 first inning.
Chain Smoking Guy was in the middle of one of his “I’m smarter than you” speeches. I was in serious need of an update to drown his voice from my head. It’d been thirty-three minutes since the last one. Had she forgotten about me? I’d somehow managed to allow myself to become part of the classroom conversation when the little green indicator light on my phone started blinking. I stopped talking and covertly opened the text.
“OMG! Dropped 3rd strike…brianna took the runner from 3rd OUT at home.”
I have no clue what this meant. I didn’t even know if my wife knew what it was she was trying to convey to me, but nevertheless I was right there with her in spirit. But then came eight long minutes of radio silence. From 7:10PM to 7:18PM I got nothing. The break in communication was worse than the previous, even longer one. I’d begun to think that maybe the offense had kicked back in and the girls are going to put the game out of reach.
“Started 4th with 2 minutes left, we went 3 up, 3 down…now we have to hold them 5-8,” she texted.
My nerves weren’t in any shape to handle the stress of a game like this. Even though I don’t smoke, I thought about bumming a cigarette from Chain Smoking Guy; I wanted a plausible reason to leave class and call Traci. I desperately needed to know what was happening.
A few anxious minutes later her final text came through noting the girls held on to win 8-6. I started to cry. Here the class had moved on to stating and restating each other’s thoughts on something by William Faulkner and I was choking back tears – not because I was sad to have missed the game, but because I was happy for the eight girls who showed up and fought through being short-handed to win the game. I was proud of our pitcher who at times has felt like she’s had to unfairly carry the weight of the team on her shoulders. I was emotional that our team was finally starting to turn things around.
The blond kid to my left stared at me. He saw that I was crying. Too late to check myself – I’d already wrecked myself. Oh well.
By some miracle of either Hell freezing over or donkeys learning to fly, class let out twenty minutes later – a full hour early. I raced to my car which was strategically parked only six blocks away. I got in and searched for the Rangers game on the radio. I could easily have gone to one of the many bars around campus and watched the game on TV, but I needed something familiar at that exact moment. I needed Eric Nadel's calming voice to come over the radio and tell me that everything was going to be okay in St. Petersburg just as my wife had done in Frisco.
I’d pretty much watched all of the previous four games on the radio, so I settled in for the car ride home knowing that my trusted friend would call the game in a way that allowed me to vividly see it in my head, just as he’s done every summer since my family moved to Texas in 1983. I had front row seats to the most important game in Texas Rangers history from the driver’s seat of my car.
My forty-seven minute trek home was over in thirty-one, and that’s after stopping at the gas station to get Kacie a newspaper for some class assignment that I had no knowledge of. I sprinted upstairs, threw my backpack on the floor, plopped myself on the couch, and flipped on the TV, just like any anxious child does when getting home from school. My wife and kids gathered in the living room to see what the commotion was about. After seeing the game on the TV, they too knew that something special was happening.
Our family togetherness lasted all of an inning – Brady opted to watch PBS Kids in our room where he immediately fell asleep in our bed. Kacie fell asleep on the living room floor before the 8th inning. Neither one of them got to witness our team’s baseball history or their father cry for the second time that night.
Traci didn’t make fun of me for crying like she had fourteen years earlier when the Rangers lost to the Yankees in their first playoff appearance. She understood after all these years that I loved the Texas Rangers long before I loved her. She got that I loved the game of baseball – and now softball – for reasons I’ll never fully be able to explain.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the television. “Even Nolan Ryan is crying.”
I looked. There he was – one of the greatest legends in Texas Rangers baseball history - on my TV standing next to his wife, fighting to control his own tears. I guess sometimes there really is crying in baseball.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Can't Stand Sitting

I know a lot of four-letter words. My wife thinks I know too many. There are some I tend to be very liberal with depending on the circumstance, and there are a few I don’t use nearly enough. Hope is one of those four-letter words that falls somewhere in the middle.
For me, the word gets thrown out there like a catch-all. I hope my wife knows just how much I love her. As I wrote in my last post, I hope that my kids will grow up to make good decisions when I’m not able to make those decisions for them. I also hope to one day not have to work a 9 to 5 job and instead am able to provide for my family as a writer. But I fall into the same trap that many well-intentioned people do when it comes to hope. I simply just hope.
Life for me is a constant battle of remembering that Traci will never know just how much I love her if I don’t make time to say the words, or more importantly, show her. My kids run the risk of becoming someone they shouldn’t if I’m not part of the steady diet of what influences them. The world will never be able to judge me as a writer if I don’t make a conscious effort to write every day and submit something to it to be judged by. Without being proactive, hope is no more powerful than any other word in the English language. It becomes just another four-letter word that gets thrown around at a time of convenience. At some point we all have to realize that for hope to work, we have to do something. We can’t stand sitting.
A year ago our family lost a good friend to pancreatic cancer. Even though Mark had been diagnosed fifteen months prior, it didn’t make the reality of his death any less devastating to my wife and her family. Upon his diagnosis, Mark’s doctors initially gave him a few months to live; they said he’d be dead by summer’s end. The Weitzenhoffer family hoped the doctors were wrong, but they continued to live their lives by becoming advocates for finding a cure rather than waiting for a miracle to happen. The Weitzenhoffers had hope that Mark would get just a little more time to spend with his family and friends, perhaps not to say goodbye, but to say thank you to those that let him share in their lives. And Mark hoped, even at a time when most people would feel like hope itself had abandoned them, that one day a cure would be found and no other family would have to endure what his was.
The American Cancer Society estimates that nearly 37,000 people in the United States will fall prey in 2010 to a disease that seems to get little air time when talking about the ruthlessness of cancer. Both breast and prostate cancer awareness have increased tremendously in the last five years and even receive invaluable support from major sporting leagues and associations. But pancreatic cancer has yet to see support on that kind of level - still it’s the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths, and according to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network has the highest mortality rate of all the cancers. This is also where I tell you that pancreatic cancer research receives only 2% of federally funded cancer research money.
Pancreatic cancer is a different monster altogether; it knows no gender boundaries. It doesn’t care that in 1989 you played the part of a bad ass bouncer at the meanest bar on the outskirts of town in Road House, or that you taught eighth grade science for thirty years at the middle school up the street, or that you worked for the FAA like Mark had. Pancreatic cancer is an equal opportunity grim reaper; it’s only content as long as it’s taking someone’s life. This monster has to be stopped.
To aid in the local fundraising cause, The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research will be sponsoring the 2nd Annual Margaret Wilson Memorial Walk for Pancreatic Cancer Research on Saturday, October 23rd at The Katy Trail at Reverchon Park in Dallas, Texas. For more information on how you can sign up and participate in this event, please visit the Pancreatic Cancer Research Walk website.

If you’d like to help make hope more than just another four-letter word and support Her Living Room Hero in the fight against pancreatic cancer by making a donation, you can do so by visiting Weitzenhoffer's Walkers for Hope and selecting my name. Please don’t prevent yourself from donating because you think something as small as a couple of dollars won’t help. It will. Every penny counts and lets your voice be heard. Those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are dying for your voice to be heard.
- Brad