Fathers & Sons

SCOREBOARD

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scoreboard

Every pickup basketball game has “That Guy.” Never the best player (who can’t bothered to be bothered) nor the worst (who is too busy working his ass off to notice or at the very least admit it out loud), “that guy” is the guy who has decided long before he took the court that he’s going to keep score.

After every basket or possession, he’s calling it out. Quick to correct those who have it wrong. Repeating it ad nauseum _ particularly especially when his team is winning _ to serve as a reminder that there must be a sense of place in the universe and (with god’s grace and a couple of 3-pointers) his team’s place is on top, not yours.

I am that guy. I have always been that guy from the day my dad paved part of our backyard and turned it into a 20 x 20 court with one of those upper-end glass backboards in hopes that I would use it to become the kind of player that made him a pretty good junior college forward (before life got in the way) and my uncle an even better one at Penn State (before being 20 got in the way).

While I loved to play, genetics and a decided lack of ability relegated the idea of me making a last-second shot for the Washington Bullets to the goings-on inside my head. I topped out at 5-11, a good seven inches shorter than my dad (and if we’re being honest here, a deck of cards shorter than my little sister). I made up for my lack of height by having no talent whatsoever other than the confidence to jack up any shot from anywhere no matter the circumstances.

We’ll pause here to give anyone who has ever played with me a chance to avoid vertigo while they finish vigorously nodding their head.

But dammit, I could add and subtract. Maybe it was simply a byproduct of all those imaginary games I would hold when noone was around, the ones where Jeff Malone or John Stockton or whoever I wanted to be on a given day was always open from 15-feet as the buzzer sounded. And yep, you can bet I was “fouled” if for some ungodly reason that shot had the temerity to clang off the rim.

It was my court. I figured it was my job to keep order. I can’t tell you I did it on purpose, but hey, nobody stopped me. Looking back, it’s hard to not laugh. During those countless afternoons spent honing a shooting stroke that still stops by every now then at 40 (and hopefully sticks around until 80) I was a walking/talking/jump-shot heaving abacus.

Not much has changed. While I technically don’t get paid to keep score (though I do anyway most nights) I am paid to tell you who won, who lost _ and perhaps most importantly _ what it all means. Some days, I’m pretty good at it. Some days I stare at the screen waiting for inspiration to strike and _ when it doesn’t _ pluck my right eyebrow furiously and hope I can “fool’em again” as the great Jim Murray used to say.

If only the scoreboard fixating was limited to my work. And that’s the problem. I have too often turned every part of my life into some kind of endless track meet. I can tell you my weight without getting on a scale within a pound or two (and no matter how high or low the number, it’s never low enough). I haven’t balanced a checkbook in years but I know what the balance in my account is within a buck or two (and no matter how high or low the number, it’s never high enough). I can tell you who has done the last five loads of laundry, who called who last in (insert relationship here), and who sent me a note on Facebook on my last birthday and who skipped.

The funny thing about this is, I’m losing. I’ve been losing for as long as I can remember. The blessings bestowed upon me are so countless it would make most people puke. Every problem I have is a #firstworldproblem. And I’d include my cancer on that list. This week the FDA approved the use of a drug that could turn something I worried would eventually kill me a year ago into something that requires one silly pill a day. (Downside: this means playing the “but I have cancer” card to win any argument I’m losing may be coming to an end).

I have treated every single aspect of my life like a game. I read the wire to see which of my colleagues is writing what, who is traveling where and wondering why I’m not. I read both newspapers in my town and send texts/twitter shoutouts when I see something I like while at the same time wondering how I could (or have) done it better even if in many cases that’s probably not true.

It’s even worse in my house. For too long I viewed my marriage like a competition. I kept mental tabs on who was doing what/when. If I cleaned the litter box a half-dozen times before my wife got to it, I made damn sure to passive-aggressively let her know. (“Oh, you know where the litter box is? I thought you’d forgotten” stupid stuff like that).

I am the player who – with his team down 30 points in the last minute – drills a 3 and hoists his arms in the air. You know, kind of like this:

The irony _ even on the days I want to admit it or not _ is that I am down. Big time. And yet I create scenarios that allow me to find a category in which I somehow have an advantage. I have known my wife for nearly 14 years and she has devoted herself to me selflessly and relentlessly, sometimes against her better judgement. She does not need to keep score _ hell, it probably has never even occurred to her to try _ because this isn’t some contest. This is life. There is no scoreboard. There is only the day to day. How we live and who and what we devote our lives to is what matters.

It’s a lesson that I have spent the last four years trying to beat into my head, with mixed results. Parenting has taught me a lot (actually, it’s taught me just about everything) by forcing me (at long last) to grow the *%# up. I see my two kids every morning and wonder how some schlub like me has managed not to screw them up yet.

This is usually the point where I would throw in a “but there’s time” in order to get a laugh. But there are still moments when that obsessive competitiveness seeps out and finds its way into my son through some strange osmosis. He’s 5 1/2 and he absolutely hates to lose. It doesn’t matter if it’s a video game or a race around the house or brushing his teeth, he absolutely cannot come in second (and heaven help you if he comes in third). I have used that drive as a motivator when he doesn’t want to do a chore or get dressed, often pitting himself against his sister in a sprint to see who can finish what task first.

This morning it led to tears, my 3 yo crying because her brother tugged on her arm in the scramble to reach the top of the steps so they can finish a mad dash to get dressed. The moment soon passed, but they are becoming a bit more frequent than I would like.

I have no idea how to change it and I’ll admit I’m probably not quite ready. I played pickup hoops on Wednesday night. The first game I happened to be guarding a friend of mine. He got the ball. A small skirmish that may have resembled defense ensued. He called a foul and I immediately became a fourth-grader, making a joke about his height and disrespecting the call. What an idiot. While the call was debatable, my immediate reaction was not. It was dumb. And I’m getting too old to do the same dumb stuff I’ve done for the last 40 years.

I imagine I could start by trying to set a better example, to take some TNT to the ever-counting scoreboard in my head _ the one that reads “Will 2, Life 1” with “Dude, when are you gonna stop doing that and realize you’re one lucky bastard and just get on with it” scrawled beneath it like some sort of advertising sign _ blow the thing up.

Pass me the detonator. it’s time, don’t ya think? At least, after this one last game …

Hey, Rome (and the eventual deconstruction of my ego) wasn’t built in a day.

A little new school for this space, but hey, times change:

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The Invisible Man

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Me and Dad

I didn’t call him enough. I can see that now. That’s on me.

Instead, I ran, just like I always did. I took the path of least resistance with my father because, well, that’s just the way Tom Graves wanted it. In the 59 years he walked the earth, in particular the 35 he spent with me in his life, you could count the number of times things didn’t go his way on two hands. Maybe one.

So when he diagnosed with stage 3 esophageal cancer in the fall of 2009 I did what he wanted. I let it go. Treated it as just another thing on his plate, like the property flipping business he started in retirement. A chore he would take care of on his own terms, thanks for not asking.

So I didn’t. He began chemotherapy in September, 2009 and I made exactly zero change to our routine. I think during his first four months of treatment we might have talked twice.  And when we did, it wasn’t about cancer. What questions I did manage to squeak out (note: my father remains the toughest interview of my life) were met with a simple “Oh, dad’s fine” and the unmistakable subtext that trying to work on a followup was completely unnecessary.

Being 600 miles away in Kentucky and preoccupied with a job and an infant son, I was only too happy to go along. I could hear the frustration in my sister’s voice when she talked about her inability to communicate with him and I wanted no part of it. Better to pretend that everything is fine rather than deal with the messy emotions that come with true honesty.

It’ll be fine, I convinced myself. This will be just another one of those things that he handles alone, like the three heart attacks he suffered between his mid-40s and early 50s. The ones he basically walked off like a bad cold.

He was so fiercely private about his health I literally had to invent an excuse to come home when he underwent surgery in January, 2010 for what he kept referring to as a “blockage” in his intestine. When I surprised him in the hospital, I lied and told him I was in town because a high school friend was having a bachelor party. Seeing him laid up in bed, his body dulled yellow by chemo and nausea forcing him to spit up into a wastebasket every few minutes was jarring. The 6-foot-6, 235-pound in his prime monolith I remembered couldn’t have weighed 170 pounds.

And still, the charade continued. I hung out with him before he went into surgery. We talked about my upcoming Olympic assignment. We talked about Colin, his grandson. We talked about the Redskins (because we always talked about the Redskins). We kept it light.

The day I flew back to Kentucky, I stopped by the hospital to chat. He appeared exhausted but OK. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be the last time I saw him alive, but it kind of felt like it was. It was pleasant but my most vivid memory was how I basically tried to get him to tell me he was proud of me. I needed to hear it. He obliged (kind of) but it wasn’t quite the heartwarming “movie” moment that I’d fantasized about. It felt forced (by me, not by him). I hugged him and left, already preoccupied with thoughts of the Vancouver Olympics.

Barely a month later, he was gone. It wasn’t the cancer technically. His heart, weary of the fight, gave out. I spoke to him a couple of days before that last heart attack. He was back in the hospital and high on pain medication. He thought I was his girlfriend when I initially called. I think the entire conversation lasted 97 seconds. Enough time for one last “I love you” from both of us. While I was able to get home and be in the room when they turned the life support machines off, there was little doubt he was already gone.

Four years later, I still don’t know what to make of his death and how it impacted my life. It’s funny. I miss him more now than I did two years ago. Maybe it took cancer (in some small way) to find the common ground that we failed to reach as adults.

My cancer is different (thank God). I’m not going to die. Not even close. While the first cycle of treatment was a little bumpy (I’ll blog about that later) I’m amazed at my body’s ability to handle constant bombardment of medicine, whether it’s Velcade or the Rituxin that is treating the cancer or the fistful of pills I take daily to ward off the side effects. The early numbers are encouraging. And while I may be in treatment longer than anticipated, my resolve _ thanks in large part to the support of my wife Ellie _ has only strengthened.

Yet sitting in a chair for hours on end (my Rituxin days are a good 7-8 hours long, as are the days when I receive blood transfusions) gives you time to think. I can’t shake the idea of what treatment must have been like for my father.

The thing that has frustrated me the most since this thing has started is the knowledge that I can’t predict on a given day how I’m going to feel. I’ve called out of assignments on my way to them because I’ve been hit with a sudden fever or weakness. I can’t imagine how difficult and painful ceding that power from his mind to his body must have been for dad, who never met a situation he couldn’t find a way to immediately take control of. I imagine it was infuriating and agonizing. I’ll never know, though. I never called to ask. I happily took ‘no’ for an answer.

I shouldn’t have.  I wasn’t a kid when he went through this. I was 35. I was a husband and a father. I was a professional with a career. Yet the balance of power in our relationship never evolved. In many ways I was still the 10-year-old who famously told him once that I didn’t have to do my homework anymore because I was  a big kid. He responded by grounding me.

I fully understand that some of this is on him. That he kept nearly everyone, from his parents to his brothers and sisters to his children, at arm’s length. And because he had a force of will unmatched by anyone perhaps on the planet, we didn’t fight it. We should have. I should have.

The guilt of failing to do that ebbs and flows. I don’t feel it quite as acutely as I did in the immediate aftermath of his passing. Instead, I just miss him. I would have liked to see him as grandfather. He saw his grandson Colin once. He never met my 2-year-old daughter Catherine. I bet she would have owned him. The thought of it makes me laugh.

One of the blessings (if you can call it that) of this illness is that it has forced me to empathize with him. The differences and distance that had us reach out from neutral corners most of the time has disappeared. I feel closer to him in a way. I was wide awake at 4 a.m. last week (thanks steroids!) when I envisioned him walking into the bedroom. He filled the frame (he always did). I didn’t hallucinate but the image was so clear that I started to cry. For years during young adulthood he was on the periphery of my life. Now that I finally have the courage to want him to be a part of the nucleus, he’s gone.

Colin asked Ellie this morning who my dad was. She politely responded “Grandpa Tom” and the name didn’t register in Colin’s ears. Part of that’s on me. I haven’t talked about my dad enough, perhaps because I never talked TO him enough.

Yet Colin needs to know about his grandfather, even if I’m still learning. He needs to know that the reason I do what I do for a living isn’t because it’s cool or because I think I’m good at it. I do this because sports was the one thing my father and I could talk about.

He took me to my first football game when I was 8, the 1982 NFC championship between the Redskins and the Cowboys. Three decades later I can still hear the crowd at RFK chant “We Want Dallas.” The Redskins won. My father was joyful. I was hooked.

I have no idea how my relationship with Colin will evolve over the next 30 years. I want us to be friends when he’s my age. (Hell, I want to be alive when he’s my age). I hope we’re close. I know one thing’s for certain. I won’t raise him to take no for an answer from me. I won’t let him be satisfied if I try to keep him at arm’s length. If that’s the lesson I take from my father’s death, so be it.

Thanks Pop. Sorry I didn’t call enough. For both of us. It won’t happen again.

Dad was a big Motown/R&B guy. I’ll let Marvin show you out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph0aELhsQoc

Will