Like you, I worry a bit. Okay, maybe more than a bit. We all do.
We worry about our jobs and money, our personal relationships and whether our kids are healthy and happy.
We worry about big stuff like climate change and politics, we stress over little stuff like our weight or a new gray hair.
Worry, worry, worry!
We even worry about that.
On Friday September 12, 2008, 25 people got out of their beds long before dawn, prepared themselves for work, kissed their families good-bye, left the house and died. They were killed in a freak commuter train crash in Southern California. My KNX radio partner, Vickie Moore, and I told their stories with relative dispassion because that was our job but I never got over the soul-jarring realization that you can walk out of your home one morning and never return.
It happens every day all over the world, of course, but we never imagine it happening to us. Among all the trivial stuff we worry about it never occurs to us to be worried about sudden, dumb luck death.
Caught on video: The explosion in the town of West, Texas, April 17, 2013.
It happened last night in the nearby, very small town of West, Texas, which one resident described on the radio this morning as “a Mayberry kind of place.” There was a fertilizer factory in West which employed and supported a good portion of the 2,600 people who live in the town. It caught fire at 7:30 p.m. and 25 minutes later it blew away everything within a five block radius.
Now, almost 18 hours later, they’re still looking for bodies, alive and dead. Texas officials tend to play their cards quietly. Ten hours ago they allowed that there may be as many as five to 15 deaths. Most likely there are dozens of others who died with no warning, people who hadn’t even been aware of the fire but were close enough to have life literally blown out of them as if they were birthday candles while they finished supper, watched TV with their families and fed their dogs.
When things like this happen and my work day is done I wonder about that. What’s it like to die with absolutely no warning? One moment you can be laughing and the next moment you’re nothing.
There is no sense to be made of this sort of thing.
But today I’m not worried about anything. Nothing at all.
It’s early April. The North Texas wind is, as they say, blowing like a bandit. White, fluffy clouds are scooting quickly and I have that wonderful aching feeling again, the one I’ve had every March and April of my life for as long as I can remember.
Cool, soggy dirt, the smell of new wet grass. It’s spring.
Baseball season is back.
In the early 1960s, when I was a kid of 13 or 14, I spent my summer days on a baseball field on Thomas Drive in North Highlands with my buddy Norm Miller. We always got there right after breakfast and didn’t leave until nearly sundown.
Sometimes we were eventually joined by other kids. Often we were not. Didn’t matter to us. Norm and I would throw baseballs at each other, taking turns swinging for non-existent fences, hearing cheers from imagined crowds.
My hero, Willie Mays
The stars of our daily fantasy were our San Francisco Giants heroes: Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, Marichal, Jimmy Ray Hart, Tom Haller, Jose Pagan, Jim Davenport, and the Alou brothers. We loved them all and paid tribute in our two-kid fantasy game by batting left or right-handed as they did and even mimicking their unique batting stances.
Mays looked at the pitcher with both eyes, not just one. Cepeda held his monstrous piece of lumber straight up and circled it slowly. Matty Alou was an odd duck. He always held his bat head pointing at the ground behind him as if it weighed 40 pounds. He made it work quite well.
As make-believe Giants hitters, we advanced to the plate mimicking Candlestick Park public address announcer, Jeff Carter.
“The batter, number 5, Tom Haller!” We heard the cheers in our heads as we had in our occasional real-life visits to the Stick.
That’s how Norm and I spent our summer days, in baseball heaven.
One day an old man wandered up behind the backstop and watched for a while as I threw slow fastballs and flat curves to Norm, who was always a sucker for any pitch high and away as many of mine were.
Balding, portly, and puffing on a cigar the man behind the backstop watched. We thought nothing of him until he eventually hollered, “Hey, mind if I take a swing?”
In those days it never occurred to any kid to say no to any adult request. It was a weird thing for an old fat guy to ask but we never thought about running home in fear and suspicion. Bad things didn’t happen to kids in the 60s.
He just wanted to hit a baseball and we said, “Sure”.
Together, Norm and I had collected a kid’s treasure trove of baseballs, maybe three or four between us. Some had their torn covers taped shut. Maybe one had all its seams intact. That’s the one I picked up as Norm ran out to center field.
Something told me I should impress this old guy with my best stuff. I was only 13 or 14 but on that particular day I had never been older and I had never played baseball with an adult.
I concentrated, scraped my toe at the non-existent pitching rubber, peered in at the non-existent sign from non-existent Tom Haller, and fired in my best non-existent fastball.
Thwack!
The fat, bald guy slammed it on a line into centerfield and hadn’t missed a puff from his cigar.
Two or three more times I threw baseballs as hard as I could and the old man peppered them around the deepest outfields, left to right. Poor Norman was run ragged chasing them down.
The old man smiled, dropped the cigar on the grass beside him, and got down to business.
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!
He slammed everything I had that came anywhere near the plate. A couple of wild pitches he let pass but had to chase down because there was no catcher. He casually ducked the ones that were flying straight toward his head.
The game ended when the bat splintered. It simply gave up, glued, nailed, and taped together as it had been to begin with.
When the old, fat, cigar-chomper came out to the infield, grinning from ear to ear and offering to pay for the bat, we said nah, it was already broken. We were just amazed at what he had done and asked him, with the ignorance of youth: “Did you ever play baseball?”
He smiled again and took the wallet out of his back pocket. Then he carefully fished out a yellow newspaper clipping nearly twenty years old.
I’m sorry to say it didn’t mean anything to me at the time and I remember nothing about it now. But his wallet also displayed his driver’s license and his name caught my attention.
Wikipedia explains the rest of the story.
Carl Anthony Furillo (March 8, 1922 – January 21, 1989), nicknamed “The Reading Rifle” and “Skoonj,” was a right fielder in Major League Baseball who played his entire career for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers. A member of seven National League champions from 1947 to 1959, he batted over .300 five times, winning the 1953 batting title with a .344 average – then the highest by a right-handed Dodger since 1900. Noted for his strong and accurate throwing arm, he recorded 10 or more assists in nine consecutive seasons, leading the league twice, and retired with the fifth most games in right field (1408) in NL history. – Wikipedia
Did you know that people really do have biological rhythms which define us as morning people or night people? Neuroscientists have discovered some fascinating differences in how our brains are wired.
For one thing, night people apparently get stronger and more energetic as evening grows late. We morning people tend to hit our peak well before noon and then our energy and brain functions level off until drowsiness overtakes us just after the evening meal.
On the other hand, morning people are supposedly happier than night people! Who would have guessed that? I always suspected there was a party starting just as I was going to bed. That’s apparently a large part of the problem for you owls. One study calls it “social jet lag,” a disruption of circadian rhythms caused when you stay up late but are forced by responsibilities to get up early the next morning whether you want to or not.
(And by the way, your grumpiness really puts a damper on our bubbly morning effervescence. Try to keep it to yourself, okay?)
Here’s one final scientific finding that supports everything we’ve long believed: the older we get almost all of us become morning people even if we were night people when we were younger.
Does this sound a bit suspicious to you? I believe the science but the more I read I keep coming back to a physical reality that circadian studies just don’t seem to support.
I’m tired because I’m old. I wake up at four or five a.m. because I fell asleep in front of the TV ten hours ago.
We called her Cricket because when she was a puppy she bounced through the grass.
Cricket, is gone.
I miss her jumping with excitement simply because I’m home from work, and at night when she snuggled in my arm alongside me in bed as we fell asleep together in security and comfort.
She’s not here to gently tap my face with a soft, insistent paw to tell me she’s hungry or thirsty or needs to go outside.
She’ll never lick my nose again to comfort me when I’m sad.
Our baby girl died Thursday.
If you ever had a dog that could make your eyes tear up for no reason but your mutual love; a dog who could lift you from the depths of sadness and pain by simply nudging your face with a cold nose and bright eyes, you are a believer.
For me God has the face and the eternal, unqualified love of a Yorkie named Cricket.
She crawled inside my soul and will live there forever.
Clara Cowell stopped smoking last week and chose her birthday to mark the occasion.
Her 102nd birthday.
The British mother of four, grandmother of nine, great grandmother of 12, and great-great grandmother of four decided, after 89 years and tens of thousands of cigarettes, she might be pushing her luck.
Clara’s 72 year-old daughter is more concerned that her mom might be tempting fate. She says the secret to Clara’s longevity has been a lifetime of cigarettes and whiskey. Why stop now? She said it cheeky but may have a point.
Everybody knows that smoking is bad for your health, it’s not arguable, but when I read a story like this I wonder if our culture-driven fears aren’t at least as hazardous as the actual risk factors.
Why are we all so scared? Because we’re told we must be. We live our lives surrounded by warning labels and bombarded with anecdotal horror stories mixed with rumors and urban legends. We’re scared of cancer and heart disease and every sort of illness whether attributable to poor nutrition and lousy lifestyle decisions or just dumb luck and DNA.
We live in constant fear of things that will probably never happen.
And here’s the kicker, the ultimate damned-if-you-do-or-don’t irony: the same health experts who shake their fingers at us when we eat a Big Mac or don’t get enough sleep insist that stress will kill us deader than anything.
Yes, of course we should be careful when we’re driving and mindful of how much bad stuff we ingest but is a lifetime of worry helpful in any way? Of course it isn’t.
Hand-wringing worrywarts are everywhere. They warn us with no uncertain gravity that sugar and butter are bad for us but artificial sweeteners and butter substitutes may be even worse. They extol the virtues of exercise and then some famous long distance runner drops dead from a heart attack.
Clara and her daughter
Sure, don’t smoke. But, diet drinks? Less red meat? I don’t know.
I think we can be too careful. And when you see a 102 year-old woman giving up cigarettes after 90 years I think there are times when a pound of prevention is a silly concession to cultural bullying.
This morning on my Dallas radio show I shared the story of a woman in Seattle who has gotten some minor national attention for her resolve to eat every single meal of her life this year at Starbucks. Eleven days into the year she’s apparently on track.
The source story doesn’t say why she wants to do this. She says she’s not employed by Starbucks and isn’t making any money for the stunt but I suspect that’s her plan. We all remember the young guy named Jared who became a spokesman for Subway sandwich shops by losing a boatload of weight eating there. If this is what this Starbucks woman has in mind, I kind of feel bad for her. For one thing, it has already been done. And really, Starbucks doesn’t need any help. They’re so successful they’re opening new stores on both sides of every McDonalds in the world.
The other problem is that for every fru-fru croissant and muffin they put in the display case leading to the cash register Starbucks is still basically a purveyor of coffee. Jared didn’t get the best-balanced diet in the world at Subway but at least he got a reasonable portion of veggies and some protein with his caffeine and carbs. Ms. Existence may find her health flagging by the end of February.
Wait, I didn’t tell you her name, did I? It’s Beautiful Existence.
Apparently that is her legal name and if you’re boringly normal like me your first thought is that she’s a nutball. That’s what I thought. But now, a few hours later, it occurs to me that this woman, for whatever reasons related to her life experience, lives on a different plane than most of us. She travels to the beat of a different drummer. A drummer with a banjo.
My good friend Chuck Woodbury spent many years of his young adult life traveling around the western United States in a motorhome gathering and reporting the stories of such people in a wonderful monthly publication called Out West. One story was about a young man Chuck met in some small town in Utah or Wyoming. The details escape me but I think this guy’s name was David. He earned a living as a dishwasher in a local cafe. He spent all of his spare time at home, alone, with one of those adding machines from the 80s that kept running tabulations on a long roll of paper. He started with 1+1=2 and proceeded from there to add 1 over and over and over and over and over again.
David had his house filled with carefully cataloged rolls of used adding machine tapes.
Before I left work this morning I wrote and recorded a radio report about Beautiful Existence for use later in the day. It was a professional, typically sterile radio news story that proudly sucks all the reality and fascination out of life.
But I can’t stop thinking about Beautiful Existence.
She might be a nutball or she might be just a Jared copycat.
David, the adding machine dishwasher, might be a genuine looney from where I sit.
“Crazy” is a slippery word and though I don’t know any of the trials and tribulations of the lives experienced by Beautiful Existence or David the dishwasher, part of me greatly envies them.
They wake up every morning with a plan, they follow through and go to bed each night with a sense of fulfillment.
They serve nobody’s expectations except their own.
If that isn’t life well-lived, what is?
Post script: Beautiful Existence apparently succeeded in having every meal at Starbucks for an entire year. And it seems I misjudged her in my assumption that she was trying to get some big paydays for her stunt. Here’s a follow-up article about her achievement and her future goals. – DW, 2022
And Jesus said to them, Yes; have you never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings you have perfected praise? — Matthew 21:16 (American King James Bible)
Two weeks ago tonight Carolann and I drove to Tracy’s and Martha’s house in McKinney to join their semi-weekly Bible study group. This will come as a surprise to our family and friends in California because we’re not church-goers but we’re not heathens, either. We’re quiet believers.
And frankly, more to the point, we’re new to Texas and have no social life. We need to meet people.
So, there we were, eight or ten of us having snacked and socialized, now seated together in our friends’ living room engrossed in the book of Daniel and sharing The Word.
Tracy and Martha’s eight-year-old daughter Sadie was upstairs in her room, unseen and forgotten.
The Good Book is passed to our new friend, Mike.
(A dog barks in the backyard. Sadie yells at the dog through her upstairs window, telling him to be quiet.)
Mike reads.
MIKE: “Ezekiel describes his vision of God…
(The dog begins baying outside.)
MIKE: “A voice came from above…”
(Upstairs, to the dog…)
SADIE: “SHUT UP YOU RETARD!!!”
We’ll try to pick it up at that point tonight. I’m praying that Sadie is there.
Yesterday I took my first official Texas road trip, not counting the one that got me here in the first place. I drove a hundred miles from our new home just north of Dallas to visit a friend in Waco and I left early enough to stop and see a place I’ve wanted to see for years: Abbott, Texas. It’s a town of 356 people and just one sad little remnant of an old general store as its only operating business establishment. In that, Abbott is like a million other far-flung places in this huge and proud state with one distinction:
Abbott is the birthplace and childhood home of Willie Nelson.
Abbott Methodist, corner of Walnut & Bordon. Willie and Bobbie grew up singing in this church and Willie purchased it to keep it maintained some years ago.
The most striking thing about Willie’s hometown is that unlike similarly distinguished small towns in America it doesn’t display one single word about its famous son. There are no statues or museums or souvenir stores and not a single sign proudly proclaiming, “Birthplace of Willie Nelson!” Not a word. You either know it or you don’t. I suppose the quiet, hard-working Texans who live here prefer not to have their few streets choked with tourists taking pictures of local kids playing in the streets and fields without asking permission. In that respect Abbott maintains its charm and dignity. It certainly looks the same now as it did eighty some years ago when Willie and his piano playing sister Bobbie were born there.
The Depression-era Abbott Methodist Church*, where Willie and Bobbie sang hymns when they were both just knee-high to a June bug, sits directly across the street from the Abbott Baptist Church. These are by far the best-kept buildings in town. They are postcard-perfect visions of Americana brought to life, old yet gleaming white buildings with gloriously pious steeples and neatly trimmed lawns.
I took my pictures surreptitiously, not wanting to draw attention. My self-consciousness was unnecessary. I never saw a person on the street nor outside of the scattered handful of homes in the neighborhood.
It was Saturday and 109 degrees. Cicadas sang love songs.
I went into the Abbott Cash Grocery Market to buy a cold soda pop and just to be able to say I had been there. The store was sad. Most of the shelves were empty. What few items it did carry were all packaged goods crammed together: toilet paper and dishwashing detergent right next to the canned okra and lima beans. No meat or produce. They did carry soft drinks and snacks and a few staples such as sugar and flour that a local woman fixing Sunday dinner might need in a rush. No doubt folks there drive to Waco supermarkets and Walmart for real groceries.
Inside the store I was again struck by the lack of highly conspicuous Willie business. Yes, the word, “Willie’s” hangs discreetly above the awning outside but if you didn’t know differently you’d assume it was the owner’s name, not THE Willie. Fact is, I have no idea what it means*. His voice wasn’t floating out of any overhead speakers. Nothing was. There were no lifesize cardboard cutouts where I might have the lone clerk snap a cute picture of me smiling alongside the Redheaded Stranger. They did have a very short shelf stacked with Willie Nelson t-shirts and video tapes but again, no signs to draw your attention and no explanation as to why the stuff was there if you didn’t already know.
I’m ashamed to admit that I wanted a shirt or a ballcap from this secretly famous old store but was too embarrassed to reveal myself as the tourist I was to give that nice lady some money, which she surely needed. Today I’m sorry about that.
But as Willie sings it in one of his best, lesser-known songs:
“Regret is just a memory written on my brow, and there’s nothing I can do about it now.”
UPDATE: (*In 1976 Willie and sister Bobbie bought the Abbott Methodist Church – shown here – to preserve and maintain it, which he has surely done. At the same time they purchased the General Store and turned it over to the church. That explains the relatively inconspicuous name, “Willie’s” above the awning.)
Late spring sits on North Texas warm, wet and heavy. Sometimes the sky is postcard blue, other times dull and benign.
Sometimes it’s black as dread and just as still.
Sometimes multi-streaked lightning bolts rifle baseball-size hailstones at us. Birds are struck dead in flight by wondrous ice ball cannonade crashing through windshields and 90 degree heat.
Sometimes funnel clouds move around like giant old men shuffling aimlessly through corn fields oblivious to the commotion they cause.
All these times will occur in a single day. Excitement is quite literally in the air.
We check the weather radar before going to bed and then sleep warily, warning gadgets next to our heads.
A few hours later it begins again. Peacefully. Quiet with promise, and just a tiny smirk.
If you ever had a dog that could make your eyes tear up for no reason but your mutual love; a dog who could lift you from the depths of sadness and pain by simply nudging your face with a cold nose and bright eyes, you are a believer.
