The Time of My Life

by Bryan Woolley

  Which brings me to Jack Pardee.

  Even big-city know-nothings have heard of him. He was an Ail-American linebacker and fullback for Bear Bryant’s Aggies and played fifteen years in the National Football League—thirteen for the Los Angeles Rams and two for the Washington Redskins. After he retired from the field, he became an assistant coach with the Redskins, then head coach of the World Football League Florida Blazers, then head coach of the Chicago Bears, then head coach of the Redskins, then assistant head coach of the San Diego Chargers, until he retired from football entirely to become vice-president of a drilling mud company in Midland. If you know anything about football, you know about Pardee.

  But I and the other Indians learned about him before most of the rest of the world, and in a more painful way. As a Christoval High School senior, Pardee weighed 195 pounds and ran like the Wabash Cannonball. He could also pass, kick, block, and tackle. We played Christoval for the regional championship in 1952, and they beat us, 80-52.

  Now fifty-two is a lot of points, even in a six-man game. But eighty is even more. The passing years have dulled my memory of that night thirty years ago, especially my own role in it. Probably what I did was try to stay out of Rudy’s way and Pardee’s way. Staying out of Pardee’s way couldn’t have been easy. He was running, passing, blocking, tackling all over the field and seemed to be crossing the goal line every few seconds. All these years, I’ve remembered Pardee as scoring all but one touchdown of that eighty points. My only other clear recollection was of a particular play just before halftime in which 120-pound Rudy and 195-pound Pardee, both with throttles set at Full Speed Ahead, collided at the line of scrimmage. The awful noise of that crash must have been heard into the next county, and both Rudy and Pardee were carried off the field. “Dear Lord,” we prayed, “we hope Pardee ain’t hurt real bad, but please don’t let him come back tonight.”

  The Lord paid no heed. Christoval won, Pardee went on to his subsequent gridiron glory, and I retired from football. Wondering if Pardee still remembered that little podunk six-man game after making All-American and playing fifteen years in the pros, I called him up the other day and asked him.

  “I sure do,” he said. “That was some kind of wild game, wasn’t it?”

  “I’ve always believed that you scored all but one of Christoval’s touchdowns that night,” I said. “Is that true?”

  “Naw, I scored only five or six of them,” he said. “But I had a good year. I scored fifty-seven touchdowns altogether.”

  “But it seemed like you were crossing the goal line every time you got the ball,” I said.

  “Aw, some of those were my buddies,” he said. “We had at least three other guys on that team that were as big as I was—pushing two hundred pounds. We all had pretty good speed, too. We were all the boys in the senior class, and we had played together all the way through school, so we had it all together.”

  “In any case,” I said, “we gave you quite a tussle. I guess you had a lot less trouble with your other opponents that year.”

  “Well, actually,” he said, “that Fort Davis game was the most points we ever scored. We scored thirty or forty points in some of our games, but never eighty.”

  Determined to salvage some Indian pride from the interview, I asked, “Do you remember a skinny little guy named Rudy Granado hitting you at the line of scrimmage just before halftime?”

  “Yeah, I sure do,” he said. “It was a good lick right in the thigh, and was one of the hardest licks I ever took in football. In fact, it was the only time in my whole life that I ever had to leave the field after a play because of a lick somebody gave me. I don’t remember Rudy being a little guy, though. I thought he was pretty good size.”

  “About 120 pounds,” I said. “But fast.”

  “Oh,” Pardee said. “Well, by the time halftime was over, I was okay again. It was a fun game, wasn’t it?”

  The only fun I remember that night was during halftime, when Pardee was nursing his wound and I was on the field, marching with the band. We showed Christoval what a class act looked like. They didn’t have a band.

  September, 1982

  The Time of Our Lives

  THE OTHER DAY, a guy I know received a wristwatch as a gift. It’s the first watch he has owned in his thirty-four years. He had never worn one before as a matter of principle. He refused to become the slave of a little machine strapped to his arm. A bare wrist made him feel freer than the people around him, always glancing nervously at their Seikos and Bulovas and Timexes and Rolexes.

  This was a delusion, of course. He’s a modern man, an urban man, an executive in a business governed by deadlines. He has meetings to go to, appointments to keep, planes to catch. Before he got his wristwatch, he glanced at wall clocks, phoned the time-and-temperature number, asked a watch-wearer to tell him what time it was. He was no less ruled by timepieces than they. Yet, he feels diminished somehow by his new watch. The watch also has made him philosophical. “How fast life is!” he said. “We’re always rushing through life—to do what?”

  So many conversations these days are full of regretful references to time. “I don’t have time to…” “I wish I could find the time to…” “When I get the time, I’ll….” We amass libraries of books we don’t have time to read, gather travel brochures for trips we don’t have time to take, buy dogs we don’t have time to train, skip meals we don’t have time to eat, neglect spouses and kids that we don’t have time to love.

  Some of us don’t even have time to think straight. Several months ago, I put my kids on a plane at D-FW and stood at the gate awaiting its departure. The luggage and all the passengers were aboard, but nothing happened. The plane just sat there. In fifteen or twenty minutes the passengers came trooping back up the ramp. The airplane door was broken an wouldn’t latch. The passengers were told to wait i the terminal until the airline could bring up another plane. While I was rejoicing that my children hadn’t been taken away in a defective plane, a half-dozen passengers swarmed around the flight attendant at the gate, complaining loudly and bitterly that they were going to be late to their destinations. “I don’t give a damn about the door!” one of them shouted. “I want to get on that plane and get out of here!” He was willing to risk a hundred lives—including his own—to save an hour. For what?

  When we pause to catch our breath, some of us long for the old days when, in our imagination at least, life moved more slowly and sensibly and there was time for everything. “To every thing there is a season,” said the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, “and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance….”

  It sounds so idyllic, so leisurely. But students of history know that until recently nearly all the world’s people had to spend nearly all their time trying to find the means to survive another day. Most of the world’s people still do. The time for planting and plucking up—or wishing they had something to plant and pluck up—is a lot more plentiful for them than the time for laughing and dancing. It’s only in lands with lots of wristwatches that people have time to worry about time.

  Most of the mechanical and electronic inventions during the past century have been intended to help us get our work done faster and with less strain on our muscles. The tractor plows the field faster than the mule. The telephone carries messages faster than the mails. The chain saw cuts faster than the ax. The jet plane moves travelers faster than the locomotive and the steamboat. The typewriter wrote faster than the pen, and the computer writes faster than the typewriter. The electric range and the microwave oven prepare meals faster than the old wood stove. So much human ingenuity has gone into freeing us from as much labor as possible, so that we might have time for more enjoyable, more rewarding pursuits.

  We all know the classic images of leisure. Sitting befo
re the fireplace on a cold winter night, your faithful Irish setter at your knee, reading some long, great book that you’ve intended to read for years. War and Peace. Or Moby Dick or The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Or sitting at the chess board with some dear, calm friend, sipping brandy or coffee between unhurried moves. Or snoozing on the river bank while waiting for the fish to bite. Or sitting under an oak on a mountaintop and watching a hawk in the bright sky. Or just thinking. Ruminating. Woolgathering. Letting the mind wander where it will.

  But it hasn’t worked out that way for most of us. As the machines have speeded up work, they’ve also increased the number of tasks that the people who use them must do. Instead of spending a day doing one task well, we spend it doing twenty tasks efficiently. And we’ve been robbed of some of the pleasure that labor—even hard, physical labor—used to provide the laborer. When a furniture maker spent a whole week or longer making a single chair, he got to know that chair very well—the grain of its wood, the snugness of its joints, the beauty of its design—and could take a personal pride in it when he made it well. But when a man spends forty hours a week with a power saw, cutting hundreds of identical parts for hundreds of identical chairs that are assembled by somebody else, he doesn’t give a damn about chairs, or about his work, either. Plowing a field behind a mule was brutal work, but the plowman observed the land that he was trudging, knew it, and loved it, and talked to his mule, a living being who listened. The tractor driver sees the land from on high and spends his days washed in the noise and poisonous fumes of his engine. The traveler gets from coast to coast in a few hours, but sees nothing, talks to no one, learns nothing, has no adventures along the way—unless he’s on a plane with a broken door. The writer of former days would learn the personality of his typewriter and its eccentricities, sometimes grow to love it, and spend his career with a single machine that he thought of as a partner in his enterprise. But every plastic computer terminal is like every other plastic computer terminal.

  And our frantic, noisy work has made our pastimes frantic and noisy, too. The book has yielded to the TV set, with its hysterical din of situation comedies and cop shows and commercials. The chess board has yielded to the video game, with its frantic movements and rackets. We usually play them alone. Even our dance is to frantic, noisy music now, and the dancers almost never touch each other or whisper in each other’s ears.

  This lonely new way of life began somewhere else. It is only recently that it came to Texas and the South. A few years ago, a transaction at a sales counter or a bank window in Dallas normally took several minutes, for the clerk or the teller exchanged a few words with each customer. Drawled words about the weather, or how the day was going at work, or how the kids were getting along. Nothing important. Newcomers from other places considered it a phony kind of friendliness and a waste of time. It wasn’t phony, but it was old-fashioned—a holdover from the days when our towns were small and all the clerks and customers knew each other and our hours and days seemed longer. A thing that was done “in a New York minute,” as we used to say, was done faster than was normal. To Texans, a New York minute was unnaturally short and passed unnaturally quickly.

  But we’re catching up with our times. Our store clerks are becoming curt and impersonal. Our banks have installed electronic machines that do our business marvelously fast and without a word. A minute lasts no longer in Dallas than in New York now.

  Some of us don’t want to give up the old ways. At the minibank of InterFirst where I make my deposits and cash my checks, the customers may choose between doing business with one of the three human tellers or one of three electronic machines. Often the line at the tellers’ windows is ten yards long, while the machines are idle, blinking their cold little computer instructions to no one. Lately, however, many of the people in the line are glancing at wristwatches.

  “If everything’s done so quickly,” said my friend with the new watch, “why do we run out of time?”

  “Time,” wrote Marcus Aurelius two thousand years ago, “is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away, too.”

  And the river runs faster now than it used to, and we’re less sure we know where it’s going.

  February, 1983