Old Songs in a New Cafe

by Robert James Waller

  More time on the dirt in the summer. “Ya, I’ll be in for supper in a minute.” Can’t quit until I hit ten in a row from twenty feet.

  Sophomore year. It’s a winning season. I start every game. We upset Rudd, a powerhouse, in the county tournament, and the world is colored good. Merlin shows up smiling when I rattle the gym doors on Saturday mornings.

  The back-porch light burns late in warm weather. Can’t quit until I hit fifteen in a row from twenty feet. My dad has taken an interest in the whole affair by this time and has the telephone wire moved out of the way. Mother worries about my schoolwork and cooks as if I am a one-man harvest gang. I am five feet ten without warning,

  Junior year, new coach. Paul Filter has a low tolerance for dolts. He smiles a lot, but his starched white shirts and neatly pressed suits give him away. This is a serious guy. Serious about teaching history, serious about getting young boys in short pants ready for basketball and for life beyond, a life I cannot conceive of.

  We have lost most of our starters and struggle through a break-even year, improving as we go, while Filter lovingly calls us “clowns.” But the jump shot is there, game after game, in the hot gyms. On some nights twenty of them go in from far outside.

  Paul Filter begins to see what I am up to and designs a training program for me in the off-season. Roadwork and push-ups (no high school weight-training programs around in those days). 1 do 140 push-ups at one time and grow to six feet. It’s getting serious.

  Something, though, is at work that I do not completely understand. This is more than a game. I think deeply about the art and physics of the jump shot and ponder these while I practice. The search for perfection, the ballet-like movement, soft release, gentle arc, the reward.

  My last year rolls up, and I ride the momentum of years of steady practice. The jump shot floats through the Iowa winter nights. The points mount up game by game—39, 38, 45, 34. I play with two people guarding me in most games, three one time. But the roadwork, the push-ups, and, of course, the jump shot are there with enormous force. The other teams are not prepared for someone training at a near-professional level. Mo Parcher and Bill Mitchell grab rebounds, Tommy Ervin sets screens for me, and we win our first twenty-three games.

  Filter keeps teaching. He has long conversations with me about getting athletics into perspective. He is aware that I will have offers to play college basketball, and he is trying hard to get me ready for something more. I sulk when he takes me out of the St. Ansgar game at the end of the third quarter. I have 39 points and have just hit nine out of ten shots in that quarter as we bury the Saints. I want to stay in and break my own single-game scoring record. Filter moves me far down the bench and refuses to even look at me as he coaches nervous and eager sophomores. The next morning he talks long and hard to me about sportsmanship, perspective, and life.

  It ends against Greene in the tournaments. We have beaten them twice before, but they dig in and go at us. My long jumper goes in and out with no time left. Over.

  A few days later, a letter comes from Bucky O’Connor, coach at the University of Iowa. Can I come to the campus for a visit and see the Fabulous Five play?

  My dad and I spend the day with Bucky, go to a game, and exist in the realms of the privileged. Bucky will recruit four players this year, and he wants me to be one of them. My dad soars. He has spent a lifetime of evenings listening to the Iowa ball games.

  We sit at the kitchen table and fill in the scholarship forms. Dad and I laugh and talk about jump shots in the Iowa fieldhouse. Mother says only one thing: “I think this boy should go to college to study something, not to play basketball” What? We verbally abuse her, and she stops talking nonsense.

  My first jump shot at Iowa is a memorable one, Early-season scrimmage, and I confidently move down-court. All the old rhythms are in place. I stop, go into the air, perfect timing, great release, and the tallest person I have ever seen knocks the ball back over my head to the other end of the court. Some adjustments will be necessary.

  I don’t know much about playing defense or even team basketball. The kids from the cement playgrounds of Chicago and Louisville do. “Okay, Waller, you don’t get to play on offense anymore until we say so. Whenever the ball changes hands, you go over to the defensive side.”

  The jump shot is silenced for a while. Nonetheless, the coach says I am the greatest natural shooter he has ever seen. I grin at the word “natural” as I think of those seven o’clock mornings in the gym. Somewhere, Merlin the janitor also grins.

  There is, however, something more going on in my eighteen-year-old head. The feelings are not clear, but they have to do with the words of Paul Filter and my mother. I like Tom Ryan, my humanities teacher, and also a strange little man who teaches literature. I do poorly in school, though, and blame it on basketball My freshman year drifts by. Everybody exclaims about the jump shot while waiting for me to develop other areas of the game. And Bucky O’Connor is killed in an auto accident.

  A ruptured appendix in the summer, a broken finger, and a nasty knee injury early in the fall get me off to a slow start the next year. I am now haunted by these other feelings. I am close to falling in love with a young woman whom I will marry eventually. And the old curiosities from my boyhood, when I read most of the books in the Rockford library, are surfacing.

  Other things bother me, too. Somehow a boy’s game has been turned into something else. Grown-ups outside the university actually care about our sprained ankles and the quality of our man-to-man defense. I cannot attach the level of importance to winning that seems to be required. Practice and films and practice and films. Locker-room talk in which women fare poorly leaves me cold. The special study sessions for athletes where amazingly accurate information about upcoming examinations is handed out are repugnant. On principle, I refuse to attend these sessions and am laughed at for it. There is something wrong, deadly wrong, and I know it.

  I drop out of school. My father is disappointed and hurt in ways he cannot even express. A few months of menial work, and Iowa State Teachers College takes me in. No scholarship, no financial aid. My parents send money, and I work at a local bank. Good basketball in a lower key.

  Norm Stewart comes to coach. He teaches me more about defense in three weeks than I have learned in a lifetime. Mostly, aside from keeping your rear end down and staying on the balls of your feet, he teaches me that defense is pride and gives me tough assignments in the games. I like that. It fits the way I am starting to think about the world,

  The purple and gold bus rolls through the mid-western winters with Jack at the wheel. I stand up front in the door well and gather images for the songs and essays to come. The jump shot is still there. But things are different now. I am studying literature, playing the guitar, spending Saturday mornings reading Clarence Darrow’s great closing arguments to his juries, and wallowing in all the things that college and life have to offer.

  I am so deeply in love with a woman and with music that basketball becomes something I do because people expect me to do it. Seldom do I reach the levels I know I can touch with the jump shot. Oh, there are nights, in Brookings, South Dakota, and Lincoln, Nebraska, when twenty-five feet looks like a lay-up, the way it used to look in Riceville and Manly, and the baskets are there for the taking. Mostly, though, the old magic is gone.

  Still, my dad drives down from Rockford on below-zero nights to watch what is left of it. He sits along the west sideline in the old teachers college gym, and, moving downcourt, I can pick his voice out of 4,000 others, “Go get ‘em, Bobby.” He was there with the same words, years ago, on winter nights in all the Corn Bowl Conference towns.

  He calls on a March morning to say that I have made the All-North Central Conference first team. He heard it on the radio, he is pleased, and I am pleased for him. I ignore my remaining eligibility, take some extra courses, and graduate.

  There is one final moment, though. The University of Iowa seniors barnstorm after their season is over. Another player and I
team up with a group of high school coaches and play them at the Manchester, Iowa, gym for a benefit. It’s a good game. We are in it until the last few minutes when our big center fouls out, and I am forced to guard Don Nelson, later of the Boston Celtics. And, for one more night, the jump shot is there, just as it once was. Twelve of them go down from deep on the outside.

  The jump shot, with some 2,500 points scribbled on it, has lain unused for over twenty years. It rests in a closet somewhere, with my old schoolbooks and Flexible Flyer sled. I got it out once to show my daughter, who asked about it. It took a few minutes to shine it up, and she watched it flash for a little while in the late-afternoon light of a neighbor’s back yard. I put it away again. It was a boy’s tool for a boy’s game, for growing up and showing your stuff. Merlin knew that.

  More than anything, though, and I understand it clearly now, the jump shot was a matter of aesthetics, an art form for a small-town kid—the ballet-like movement, the easy release, the gentle arc over a telephone wire through the summer nights of Iowa, while my mother and father peered out the back-porch screen door and looked at each other softly.

  The Turning of Fifty

  ______________________________________

  In my late forties, I came quartering down the years and forgot how old I was. When asked to give my age, I would run a quick cipher: “Let’s see (mumble, move lips slightly) … born in … present year… subtract …” Was this a simple inatten-tiveness caused by the distractions of a busy life, I wondered? Or maybe, I wondered again, if some winsome sleight-of-hand by the mind itself was at work, the balming of harsh reality by a man growing older.

  In any case, others noticed it first. My turning fifty, that is. A few months before my birthday, people started speaking to me in peculiar tongues, saying things such as “Hey, hey, Bob-O, the BIG ONE’s coming! How are you going to celebrate it?” “I’m too busy to have a birthday,” I countered, shuffling away from the subject.

  That was not good enough. Indeed, I was told, this is a seminal occasion and deep, indelible markings should be tooled upon the hours of August 1. So, when pressed, I would claim the day to be mine alone and declared I would spend it sloshing around in some quiet swamp with my cameras.

  But I dawdled, made no plans, and others kindly took over. My friend Scott organized a small birthday party held two days before the actual date. Old friends were generous enough to attend, I sat in a lawn chair with red balloons tied to the back of it, and Scott took a class picture. That was as wild as it got. We had a genuinely good time, in a quiet way, and the affair fit my approach to things. Well, the balloons seemed a little out of character for me, but I thought afterward that everyone ought to spend at least one day a year sitting in a chair with balloons tied to the back of it.

  I drove the sixty miles up to Rockford the evening before my birthday and took my mother out for dinner. Lifting my glass as she lifted hers, I grinned, “Thanks for getting me here.” She smiled back, said she was proud of me, and told me again how the delivery took place in the middle of an Iowa thunderstorm and how the hospital lights failed just before I was born. I leave the significance of those latter two events open to various interpretations.

  On the day itself, I put aside my low-fat, semiveg-etarian tendencies and ate two Maid-Rites. That was rather like an act of homage to my youth. For it was in Roger Dixon’s Charles City Maid-Rite where I first lunched as a young boy, and I have retained a nearly religious zeal for the loose-meat sandwiches since then. As part of this, trips to Des Moines often are scheduled in such a way that a stop at Taylor’s Maid-Rite in Mar-shalltown is not only possible, but inevitable.

  There are, you see, few rituals more sublime than slowly spinning back and forth on a counter stool and watching sandwich makings being scooped from the steam table of a true Maid-Rite cafÉ. Truth in this case flows from a purity of undiluted purpose, a place where nothing other than Maid-Rites are served, except for the essential milk shake and graham cracker pie.

  After the Maid-Rites, I took a nap, did my three miles on the road, read for several hours, and watched a movie. No “Over-the-Hill-Gang” T-shirts were purchased, no champagne was chilled, and bad jokes about getting older were avoided entirely. My wife wrote me a lovely note that said, “Pm short on words, but long on love,” which I thought, apart from the sentiment, was a model of good writing and deserved a steel guitar lick underneath it. She also gave me a small crystal embedded in silver made by a local craftsman, and upon the silver were etched a fish and a falcon to represent my love of things wild and free. That was it, and it was just fine.

  Still, the gentle lash of my friends and relations about the day’s significance had its effect. In the midst of my reading that afternoon, I began to drift, thinking about time and the curious spiral dance of which I am a part. If I am just one of a long file of travelers, how about the rest? What were they doing on some other August 1 ?

  Galileo, for example, in 1633. In April of that year, the Church had forced him, under threat of torture, to recant the conclusions reached in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems that Ptolemy had been wrong and Copernicus had been right: earth was not the center of all things heavenly. So I imagined Galileo Galilei in Florence, afraid, angry, and alone on a warm August day.

  How did a shepherd ranging over the hills of Sumer, 2,000 years before Galileo, feel on this day? Did the flutter of light and shadow cause him to stop and think of a woman in a nearby town or how life is passing strange? Was the Rev. Thomas Bayes working on his famous probability theorem on the first of August in 1760? The beauty of his proof, which is taken by some as the beginning of modern statistics, consistently has escaped my students.

  And Socrates. Where was he on a fine August evening? Making his way home with other guests from a night at Xenophon’s, I suppose. The music was fading, but there was yet enough wine in the blood to stir their tongues as they moved through the quiet streets of Athens, the conversation still lively, still centered around matters at the heart of things.

  Was Alexander out on the desert with his armies? Where was Geronimo a hundred years ago? And how did the infantryman walking along the French hedgerows in 1944 feel? On some August 1st was Charlie Parker practicing scales in E-flat major and Gertrude Stein holding court in Paris and Dali twirling his moustache? Was Swinburne writing “The world is not sweet in the end” on my birthday somewhere in the cool of England, while a black woman stared through a haze of Alabama heat at distant rain clouds?

  Swinging around in my chair, I looked at what surrounded me and imagined a future archaeologist, perhaps some alien blob of magenta protoplasm, carefully brushing away the crust of five thousand years and making notes on what it found. “Computer keyboard—primitive method of data entry.” “Guitar—well-preserved example of mid-twentieth-century instrument building.” “Stapler—used for fastening papers together prior to the invention of laser bonding.” “Camera—one of the last models predating portable, digital imaging.”

  Next, I reviewed my list of ways I do not want to die. For example, I have noted “In a hospital.” And, “Tail-ended by a 74 Cadillac in front of K Mart while a blue-light special on men’s underwear is commencing.” Then I turned to the acceptable list. “Falling off a cliff in northern Iowa on a foggy morning while adjusting my tripod.” Or, “A spear in the chest on the African veldt” (first preference).

  I also remembered that, following his orders, the bones of Genghis Khan were carried about by his armies in the field after his death, as a kind of memorial. That’s what morticians like to call “pre-need planning.” Personally, I’ve always thought that Khan pushed things a bit, overstayed his welcome, as it were.

  That was all good fun, but it took me no closer to anything fundamental than where I had been at the beginning. So I dug in a bit, started things running back and forth across the corpus callosum, and got down to basics, while the overhead fan turned slowly. “All right,” I said to myself, “Im gibbous, more than half-ro
unded, a long run from the chrisom and the breast. So what can be made of that? What do I know and feel here on a summer afternoon with a half-century stretching out in back of me?”

  Ontologists searching for the meaning of existence generally leave me behind in their quest, at least in their writings. I suppose, as with other such matters, it would have helped to have been there, at the Cafe Flore with Sartre, de Beauvoir, and the rest when they gathered to deal with the foundations of being.

  For me, Fm content with Waller’s Second Conjecture: Existence takes on meaning only when you give it meaning by making it meaningful. And how do you make it meaningful? By listening to those almost-secret voices within you that, at certain critical times, whisper, “This is me.”

  In those moments, it’s important to consciously note what you’re doing and to do more of it, a lifetime of it, in fact. I think this is what Joseph Campbell means when he speaks of “following your bliss.” In case this seems a little too narcissistic, a little too thin and self-focused, I also believe that the meaningful life must include a concern for things beyond yourself, including our animal friends, rivers, trees, and other humans.

  For twenty years I have had the following verse by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore hanging above my desk:

  The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day

  I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.

  The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set;

  Only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.