So: This Has Been My Life

At 66 and a half, I now have moments of strict, uncompromising realization: this is now my life; this is what my life has been; this is what I’ve been involved in; these are who, what, and where have formed my time here.

The first time I had such a realization was at a soccer tournament in Bellingham. I had driven Kate and a teammate up. They were staying in an Airbnb that the teammate’s parents had rented. To avoid being a nuisance, I had reserved a motel room a few minutes away. But I really liked the parents, and the first night had some pizza and wine with them. Otherwise it was the soccer games and the motel room.

Kate has played in so many games and tournaments in so many places for Bainbridge Island Football Club, a travel team that played from Bellingham to Bend, Oregon, Whidbey Island to Bothell, that they all fade together. Also, a confession that anyone who has had a conversation with me knows: as a baseball fan, I will unironically state that I find soccer unbearably tedious. Yet I’ve been a faithful dad, going to every game. Finally in the last year, I skipped some of the high school away games and especially the club games because Nancy insisted on going, and I thought that I’d just stay home with the dogs.

But there I was in Bellingham. On what I assume was the last night, I dropped them off at their Airbnb after having an improbable dinner with Kate’s boyfriend and her father, who happened to be in town.

Then, after I got back to the motel, I got itchy. I Googled the downtown: there was a bar not far from me and pretty much on a straight line. I went and sat at a small raised table near the bar. I joked with the bartender that I was uneasy because I was midway between both the front and back doors, and, as a spy, I preferred to have my back against a wall. A dad joke, yes. I drank two manhattans, and then thought:

Ah. Here I am in a bar in Bellingham. My daughter has played in a soccer tournament. This is what my life has turned out to be: watching my daughter play soccer in other towns. So be it. It’s what my life was. It was good: my daughter was happy and was having a good time with her friends. I was, for a change, being a good dad. My life on those terms was OK. I was just fine that this was my life.

Another moment, more like a milestone. My daughter is graduating high school next month. She will be going away to college in the fall, virus willing. This is, actually, the end of my life. My daughter is going away forever—well, she’s already been gone, thanks to that boyfriend, her friends, her school work, her soccer practice. It’s a cliché to say that it’s all happened so fast. But however one puts it, this is it. I’m now irrelevant. So time to take stock?

Partly I’ve had this realization because my life has ironically turned out exactly the way I’d planned and exactly not. I hated being a lawyer, wasn’t any good at it, so schemed to be able to quit early and play tennis and golf and have a writing career. The arthritis put paid to the first plan, and a lack of talent to the other. So now I have absolutely nothing to do. And now my daughter is gone. This, then, has been my life.

What has made it up? What, finally, was important? What pieces of it connect? Am I allowed to connect them?

I sit in a cold hard seat in Mountaineer Stadium with my dad on the campus of West Virginia University, where he was a professor. Out the west side of the horseshoe is a view of the Monongahela, my first river. I watch Roger Staubach’s Navy tromp all over the Blue and Gold. But I also watch West Virginia somehow beat Syracuse with Larry Nance, Floyd Little, and Larry Csonka making up a straight T backfield. There was hot chocolate that tasted like cardboard. I was seven, eight, Kennedy wasn’t dead yet.

We move to Ft. Lauderdale when I’m 11. Those six years are a blank except for standing on the pitching mound with a new baseball in my hand. I am never more myself than when I am throwing a baseball. My elbow throbs between pitches, but I am so into the flow that I don’t even hear people yelling at me. Otherwise, it’s unbearable heat, traffic, sand, stinging jellyfish, and the tar that congeals and washes up on the beaches, dumped by the freighters outside the harbor. I don’t much like Florida and will never go back.

Enveloping the Morgantown and Fort Lauderdale years is Roberto Clemente, the Hall of Fame right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, a constant in my life. As a little kid living 90 miles south of Pittsburgh, I remember sitting in second grade and hearing the third graders upstairs burst into a roar of cheering when the Pirates improbably won the 1960 World Series over the mighty New York Yankees on a ninth inning home run by the smallish second baseman, Bill Mazeroski. A year or so later, my parents take all of us to old, cavernous Forbes Field to see a game. We eat in a diner, and a nonchalant short order cook kicks a napkin away; it seems incongruous with my excitement. The Pirates lose to the Reds, 4-3.

In 1971, Clemente would die in a plane crash attempting to deliver supplies to earthquake-struck Nicaragua. I still thrill to tapes of him running, throwing, hitting—throwing his butt way out toward third, but sweeping his long bat beyond the outside corner to stroke a single to right. He is a wonder, an icon, as good as Aaron and maybe Mays, better than Ichiro.

In contrast, as an undergraduate at Auburn, where my father is again a professor, I stand in an elevator next to Pat Sullivan, the quarterback of the football team; he will win the Heisman Trophy. But he will be a mediocre pro because, as I learn standing next to me, he’s actually no taller than my 5’10”. He stands staring straight ahead, his mouth open, his eyes dull and empty.

James Taylor’s first hits come out then. I listen to those first songs, “Fire and Rain” and “Carolina on My Mind”, over and over, because I had a crush in high school on a girl named Suzanne (still do) and began to conceive of North Carolina as a way out of Alabama. James Taylor and I grow old together. I heard him last in Chapel Hill. He said, “It’s not true I wrote ‘Carolina on my Mind’ here.” Then he pointed over our heads. “It was actually right over there.”

I go to Greensboro, NC, for my MFA in creative writing and learn to drink to excess and learn little about writing because MFA programs are a fraud. Our professor is beloved by everyone but teaches me almost nothing and is drunk a lot: it’s my first real disillusion. I do fall in with wild friends not in the MFA program and play even more basketball and watch UNC’s teams, always profoundly talented, always coming up short.

I go back to teach at Auburn and am very good at it. I play tennis, softball, basketball, drink, write lots of fiction, have lots of sex, propose to a girl, and make great friends, none of whom (save one lover) I’m in touch with today. I watch a lot of Atlanta Braves baseball because there’s nothing else to do, and Ted Turner shows them on his station every night. I begin to think of Auburn as home. This is my second big disillusionment as I’m cast out without any thought after my time is up. I have teaching anxiety dreams to this day: I can’t find my office, or my classroom, or the students won’t sit down and shut up.

Next, like every other humanities major in my generation, I go to law school, find a spouse, get a job—the economy is good and we both have a number of job offers. Law school is a blur, and I never dream about it. Stupidly we stay in Greensboro, which actually was offering the same money as Portland, OR. All of the lawyers obsess over Atlantic Coast Conference basketball, and my wife and I watch as over and over the team underachieves. Someone later writes, “Dean Smith is the only man who was ever able to keep Michael Jordan under 20 points a game.” Just so. No one there likes yankees, so we leave. I have law practice anxiety dreams mixed with teaching anxiety dreams, with their common offices, mail, responsibilities.

Then we move to Delaware, one of my favorite places because it’s so silly. The newspaper holds a contest for the biggest city’s motto, and the winner is: “Wilmington: So close to every place else you’d rather be.” But the people are open, direct, and funny, while southerners were insular, passive-aggressive, and mean-spirited, and we like it right next to Philly. I work at AIG, which is so stressful that I nearly die of heart trouble. I have AIG anxiety nightmares.

While there, a curious thing happens: the Atlanta Braves, who are so pathetically incompetent during the 1980s, suddenly tear off 14 straight division championships behind Hall of Fame pitching (Glavine, Smoltz, and the incomparable Maddux) and serviceable hitting. It is the highlight of a baseball fan’s life: his team wins every year. It is a remarkable run, not much diminished by their being able to win only one World Series in that time. They’re like Dean Smith’s UNC basketball teams; something is simply missing in the teams’ make-up.

Then Nancy has a job offer in Seattle too good to pass up, and here we have been for 20 years. The famed Seattle Freeze (which means that no one talks to each other) is a metaphor for our time here. It’s been a blur. Time really does go faster when you get older, and probably more so when you have a child.

WVU football, Auburn football, the Pittsburgh Pirates, Atlanta Braves, writing, being a lawyer, having a wife, growing a daughter, the awful South, James Taylor, Delaware, is that it? Can a life be summed up so quickly? In any event, these things, some random, some subtly connected, are what were important to me. I feel grateful to have been so taken up with them.