Teenage Kicks

Every Saturday my favorite radio station, The Current, runs a show called Teenage Kicks programmed and hosted by Jacquie Fuller. It’s a two hour blast of nostalgia heavily influenced by the music I love from my high school and college years. This past Saturday a listener who’d won a contest programmed the music for the show, and I found myself a bit envious. For as much as I love the show, I hadn’t really thought about what I would play if I had the chance to take over for a show. Now I felt compelled to put together my own two hour block.

The task proved more daunting than I expected. At first I started scrolling through my library and, without much filtering or deep thought, put songs onto the playlist that immediately struck a chord with me. It wasn’t long, however, before I was bogged down by the emotional freight I attached to many of these songs. I found myself amid a sea of records and memories, like John Cusack’s character, Rob, in High Fidelity when he reorganized his record collection in autobiographical order after Laura left him for Ian.

Timelines were blurring. I was having trouble weeding out songs from the past that I discovered during my high school and college years and songs from much later that I attribute to people I met during those years. Depeche Mode recorded Somebody in 1984, but I wasn’t introduced to it until 1988 when a girlfriend put it on a mix tape for me. A friend I met in college in 1989 turned me on to Old 97’s in 1999.

I realized it’d be easier to program 100 hours of music instead of just two. If I were to get this playlist done, I was gonna need some limits. I settled on two; the songs had to be released between 1987 and 1993 and there could be no more than one song from each artist. As an additional guiding principle, I would try not to overload the playlist with obvious hits. While these limits helped reduce the problem of the overall playlist size, it didn’t eliminate all of my challenges. Most dastardly of which, how was I going to pick only one REM song from Document, Green, Out of Time, and Automatic for the People?

So here are my Teenage Kicks. I think it’s a good representation of me, kinda like a cross-section from a tree. Cut me somewhere else, you’d probably get a whole different playlist. But there’d be little doubt it came from the same tree.

Have you ever been shot?

I overheard part of a conversation between two men at the pharmacy today. The older of the two asked, “Have you ever been shot?” Before I could hear the other man’s answer, I flashed back to a moment from my college days…

As the events unfolded in slow motion, reality seemed to emulate a Hollywood movie. The sounds of the city faded away as I watched the opening of the tinted passenger side window of a slow rolling vehicle. A young man leaned out of the window, appearing like some post-modern mythological creature, half-man, half-Oldsmobile. Two glints of light appeared as the street light gleamed off the young man’s half crooked smile and the barrel of his gun.

As I saw the recoil of the gun, I had one thought – “I’m gonna die today.”

I was startled by the sound. It wasn’t so much of a BANG as it was a pfft. The slow motion dissolved as the car peeled away. The sounds of West Philadelphia rushed back into my ears, along with the cackling laughter of the young man. A sharp, searing pain struck my right hand, as a wet warmth spread down the back of my hand, between my fingers, and off my finger tips. My heart began racing so hard I could hear the sound of blood whooshing in my ears.

Shocked, standing and staring at no place in particular, I began to take stock of the situation. I looked around to see if there were any more slow rolling cars.

None.

I panned the sidewalks on both sides of the street looking for witnesses.

None.

I looked down toward my feet, taking notice of my text books splayed along the sidewalk, curious about the odd splatter pattern on their covers. Rather than the maroon stains of blood I expected to see, the splatter was… pink? I raised my right hand in front of my face. Instead of an entry wound, I saw a giant welt on the back of my hand, and it, too, was covered in pink.

I wasn’t gonna die today. Panic turned into hysteria. Unable to process anything mentally or emotionally anymore, I plopped down onto the sidewalk, half-laughing, half-crying. This naïve Minnesota boy, already witness to two drive-by shootings in his brief tenure in West Philadelphia, had “survived” a paintball shooting.

… I quickly returned to the present as the pharmacist at the register beckoned me forward. I can’t say, “Yes, I’ve been shot.” But I’ve briefly experienced the fear of it. Those brief moments etched an unconscious skittishness that’s lasted 20 years.

It saddens and angers me that soldiers need to be sent into harms way during one tour of duty, let alone the six or seven tours that today’s soldiers experience. While my brief scare lingers with me to this day, its rough edges were quickly rubbed away, minimizing its damage to my psyche. However, the rough edges of fear, borne by a life lived under hypervigilance in a combat environment, don’t  rub away so quickly or easily.

It’s been 46 years since my father served his country in Vietnam. The Fourth of July remains a difficult holiday for him because the smell of the powder and the boom of the fireworks instantly transport him back to 1966. When I was in high school, I could never sneak into the house after curfew. Despite the hearing loss my father suffered as a tank commander, the turning of my key in the deadbolt lock would wake him from the deepest sleep because it sounded too much like the bolt-action of a rifle. I remember watching my father walk out of the movie theater during Forrest Gump and wondering what was going on. He later told me that he purposely avoided movies with realistic war scenes, but was caught off-guard because he hadn’t heard about these scenes in Forrest Gump. Decades after experiencing the trauma of war, my father’s controlled emotions turned raw by unexpected sights, sounds, and smells. While he learned many ways to cope, I don’t think he’ll ever truly heal his psychological wounds.

People in the military make tremendous sacrifices for their county. Much of it we see; lives and limbs lost, and families left behind. But there is another sacrifice, a hidden sacrifice, that they make and carry with them. A soldier is asked by his country to sacrifice a piece of his humanity in order to kill another human being, if necessary, to defend his country, his platoon, himself.

I am very fortunate. I have never been in combat. I had a momentary scare and was able to easily move on in my life. While my experience pales in comparison to what my father and many of our veterans faced, and continue to face, it has given my a greater sense of empathy.

Removing the causes of fear will help their psyches heal, but we owe it to the people who’ve lived under these conditions a lifetime of care to help minimize their impacts later in life, to heal the wounds that we can’t easily see. That’s why I was happy to hear a report from NPR this afternoon detailing the VA’s new approach to dealing with PTSD.

But we, as a country, need a new approach to this as well. In the vast arrays of “interests” in Washington, PTSD is considered a veteran’s issue. It needs to become a national issue. To that end, please consider supporting an organization like IAVA – Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

My Daughters

Originally posted April 29, 2008.

I had just finished a long day – six hours of driving roundtrip for a one hour meeting – but I was finally home. No sooner had I set my briefcase on the floor when my wife says, “I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you, but I’m going out with my girlfriends tonight. Dinner is on the table. Bye.”

Not a problem, or so I thought. I would soon learn that our seven year-old and four year-old daughters had been at each other’s throats all day. And all dinner.

And our eighteen month-old daughter NEEDED some daddy attention. Exclusive daddy attention. Yell-and-scream-at-your-sisters-for-even-trying-to-speak-to-daddy attention.

And then, little did I know, the vomitting would soon start.

When our seven year-old and four year-old fight, they fight about everything.

“She’s looking at me!”

“Her foot touched me!”

“She’s chewing too loud!”

When it gets this bad, we put them in separate rooms to cool off. But it was dinner time, I was hungry, and I was just too tired. I was, however, losing all control of the situation. Their bickering turned to yelling, and no cajoling by me would get them to settle down.

Suddenly the four year-old got up from the table, ran to the middle of the living room, declared, “My tummy hurts!” and then…

Do you remember that Monty Python sketch in The Meaning of Life with Mr. Creosote?

“Better get a bucket.”

Of course, we had the latte-sipping liberal version of Mr. Creosote’s vomit, complete with soy milk, pealed cucumbers, diced peppers, baby spinach, whole wheat pasta, and organic tomato sauce.

In a voluminous stream.

Projecting six feet through the air.

My four year-old is crying because she just got sick. My eighteen month-old is screaming because I’m paying attention to someone else. And she is running straight for the debris field. Meanwhile, my seven year-old is describing, in excruciating detail, the smell, consistency, color, trajectory, and splatter pattern of her sister’s emesis.

I stood there, stunned, defeated. Everything was spinning out of control. And I didn’t know what to do. Well, other than clean up, of course.

So I scooped up the screaming eighteen month-old in my one good arm.

Oh, yeah, I didn’t tell you about the one good arm, did I? It’s a long story. And kinda funny. But I’ll keep it short. It was the result of a terrible butt-wiping incident. And no, Larry Craig was not involved.

I was helping my four year-old clean up after some loose “business” when I tripped over her and fell over the step-stool in front of the sink. So one surgically reconstructed wrist and one ulnar nerve transposition in my elbow later, I am wearing this Transformer-like contraption on my left arm, rendering it nearly useless.

Where was I? Ah, yes…

So I scooped up the screaming eighteen month-old in my one good arm, made a quick trip to the kitchen to get The Bucket, ran back to the living room to give the four year-old said Bucket, pleaded with the seven year-old to please stop describing the vomit and come upstairs with me.

I put the baby in the crib and asked the seven year-old to find a way to keep her inconsolably crying sister entertained while I cleaned up the four year-old. And so I went back downstairs.

To the crying four year-old.

With vomit everywhere.

And as I began to clean her up, a funny thing happened. The crying upstairs stopped. It had turned into… laughter.

After cleaning up the four year-old (and the living room), I set her in her bed and told her I would be back after putting her baby sister down for the night. I went into the baby’s room and thanked my seven year-old for helping me. I asked her to finish up her homework and start getting ready for bed.

I got the baby changed and settled into her crib. When I came back out, I saw that my seven year-old, instead of doing as I asked, had gone into her four-year old sister’s room and started reading her a bedtime story. There was no more fighting. No lingering bitterness. Just the love of two sisters who were able to settle their dispute. Without daddy. They knew what to do all along.

An Evening Stroll

Upon an evening stroll, I come across a scene I’ve witnessed countless times. Men with grizzled faces, each wrinkle its own story, sit on the little stoops in front of their homes on the tiny side streets of Baltimore. The low light from the setting sun reflects off the Formstone facades of their narrow rowhomes, encompassing the neighborhood in a warm golden glow. The men settle down with a beer in hand to listen to the sounds of the Orioles game coming through an open window from the kitchen radio.

The men do not gather together around a single stoop to listen to the game, rather they set up each stoop as if it were his own throne, and the street was a shared living room. The chatter among the men starts with the optimism of an O’s win tonight, but turns, as it always does, into a report of the daily progress of their medical maladies and family woes.

And I finally realize that this nightly summer tradition isn’t really about the O’s. It is a way for men of a fiercely independent age to check in on each other. The warm golden glow I felt from the setting sun turned out to be an illusion. That warmth came from the enduring ties that make a neighborhood more than just a collection of houses on the same street. That warmth came from a sense of community that turned each house into a home and each neighbor into his brother’s keeper.

The Sound of Summer

As I watched baseball highlights on SportsCenter tonight, I heard the news that Ernie Harwell, the great Detroit Tigers broadcaster, had succumbed to cancer. To know Tigers baseball meant knowing Ernie.

The news of his passing made me think of the voice I most closely associated with my team, the Minnesota Twins. Herb Carneal was the voice of my youth.

I vividly remember being 9 years old, lying in bed at night, listening to Herb Carneal’s play-by-play of the Twins games on a small transistor radio. We didn’t have air conditioning then, so my bedroom window would be open in a futile effort to find relief from another humid Minnesota summer. The sound of chirping crickets coming through my window and the whir of the small fan aimed at the foot of my bed created a soothing background to Herb’s call of the game. With my eyes growing heavy, I would struggle to stay awake – failing more often than not – just to listen to the final outs of my beloved Twins.

That was the final summer baseball was pure to me. The following season would shatter my sporting naiveté. The 1981 baseball season was interrupted by a players strike and marked the end of the old Metropolitan Stadium. Baseball never held quite the same fascination for me after that. The Twins moved to the soulless Metrodome in 1982. That move, along with the strike, exposed me to baseball as a business, not a sport. A little bit of my childhood died that year.

Oh sure, I kept cheering for the Twins and was thrilled with their World Series victories in ’87 and ’93, but it never lived up to memory of those summer nights in 1980.

This year finds the Twins playing outdoors once again with the opening of Target Field. Yet another business move, but this time a move toward baseball the way it was meant to be played, a move toward rekindling the baseball of my youth.

I imagine some lucky 9 year old out there today drifting off to sleep, listening to John Gordon’s play-by-play, and discovering the sound of summer.

The Majesty of Spring

Parachutes open overhead as waves of paratroops land in Holland during operations by the 1st Allied Airborne Army., 09/1944 Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archives

As I walked my kindergartener to the bus stop this morning, a lone helicopter seed from my neighbor’s maple tree lightly wound its way to the ground in front of us. My daughter laughed and asked, “Daddy, did you see that? I love those seeds.”

I laughed along with her and replied that I, too, saw that and loved those seeds. Then I pointed up to the treetops to show her the thousands of seeds dangling from the maple trees just waiting for their turn to take flight. And as she looked up, a big gust of wind hit the maple trees. At once the skies filled with hundreds of helicopter seeds gracefully descending like WWII paratroopers in those old newsreels.

We must have stood there a good thirty seconds, heads turned skyward, watching the many paths taken to the ground. Were it not for the low rumbling of an engine breaking our trance as the bus turned the corner onto our street, I imagine us being caught in the moment for a very long time.

The simplicity of nature’s design on display. Another lesson in the majesty of spring.

Luck

Last night’s episode of Miami Medical featured a “lucky” patient named Fortunato (the word itself means fortunate in Italian). Our “lucky” patient is caught inside a large wedding tent when a microburst of wind tears apart the tent and sends a metal pole through his body, entering from his right shoulder and extending through his left flank just above his hip. Throughout the episode we learn of Fortunato’s life, and how many episodes of bad luck in his life have silver linings or lead to better fortune. And this accident is no different. As the doctors near the end of a highly successful thoracic surgery to repair the internal damage caused by the pole, they discover an arteriovenous malformation near Fortunato’s lung – a ticking timebomb that would take his life when, not if, it burst. Out of misfortune, Fortunato finds luck once more.

Fortunato’s tale instantly reminded me of a classic zen koan:

A farmer’s horse ran away. His neighbors gathered upon hearing the news and said sympathetically, “That’s such bad luck.”

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The horse returned on his own the next morning, and brought seven wild horses with it. “Look how many more horses you have now,” the neighbors exclaimed. “How lucky!”

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next day, the farmer’s son attempted to ride one of the wild horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. “How awful,” the neighbors said. “It looks like your luck has turned for the worse again.”

The farmer simply replied, “Maybe.”

The following day, military officers came to town to conscript young men into the service to go to war. Seeing the son’s broken leg, they rejected him. The neighbors gathered round the farmer to tell him how fortunate he was.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

Our view of luck is oftentimes an instant snapshot in time. But as we accumulate snapshots over time, the slideshow of life may reveal a new narrative. The luck of our yesterdays – both good and bad – gains greater context through the experiences of our today and our tomorrows.

The nature of life unfolds in many ways. The outcomes can not be known with absolute certainty. The closing of a door need not signify the end, but may usher us toward a path otherwise unseen.

The view of my today, both personally and professionally, is dreary in almost any objective regard. The certainty of my “now” feels so bad that it makes it extremely difficult to remain open to the possibilities I may be afforded tomorrow.

Here’s to hoping I find the maybe in my life.