On My Worst Day

by John Lynch

  “Gentlemen, may I see your tickets?”

  We each pulled out our tickets, knowing our dream was over.

  He looked at them. Then he looked at us. Then he leaned his head way back, up to where our seats were. Then he looked back at the tickets. Then he looked at us again. He made a sucking sound older people make with their teeth and lips when they’re considering something. He mumbled to himself. Then, very seriously he spoke, “Follow me.” We did. He walked us down into the great bowl: past the wealthy people, past the players’ wives, past the scouts, past the owners … all the way down to directly behind the third base dugout. The Dodger’s dugout! Without smiling, he looked at our tickets and then at us, saying clearly and loudly, “Gentlemen, I believe these are your seats.”

  By the time we sat down, stared, and realized what had happened, we turned and he was gone.

  We watched a double header from where God sits when he watches the Dodgers play.

  Koufax pitched one of the games. Sandy freaking Koufax! Maury Wills stole a base. Willie Davis dove to make a one-handed catch in center. We bought Dodger dogs and frozen malts. It was a bright, sunny Southern California summer day. We took off our shirts and swung them over our heads. We cheered like drunken sailors on leave. We listened to our hero Vin Scully echoing from transistor radios throughout the stadium. We’d call out the names of the players and they’d wave back. Wes Parker tipped his hat to us. We chased down foul balls. They truly were six of the finest hours of my entire life. Afterward, we waited and got autographs from Willie Davis, Bill Singer and Al Ferrara!

  For thirteen-plus years, life had been methodically teaching me the actual event never meets the anticipated expectation. But this day exceeded all anticipation. The only thing keeping it from being more perfect was the setting sun, sending us onto the freeway onramp and back into our normal lives.

  John, I don’t know who is happier this day—you or me. I’ve seen this one coming for a long time. I lined up Koufax to pitch for you. That was no small feat. He was scheduled to face Marichal on Sunday. I had to give Claude Osteen a stiff shoulder so Walt Alston would be forced to move Koufax up a day.

  I know you’ve already discovered much of life isn’t as spectacular or satisfying as the anticipation. I’ve watched this break your heart. It will actually serve to draw you to me. I’ve built into you this longing for a world which doesn’t disappoint. Today, I only wanted to see you enjoying this life as completely as your being can hold. I love you a lot, kid. I can’t wait until we get to meet. In the meantime, most of the day-to-day will be fine. You’re going to throw a couple no-hitters in high school. Your girlfriend will be prettier than Petula Clark. I’ve got a trip planned where you and a friend drive up the coast to San Francisco in your dad’s Chevy Nova during college spring break. On that trip, I’ll have your car break down near Santa Barbara, because I want you to get acquainted with it. You’ll live on the beach there in Isla Vista during your wandering years. If you’re going to run from me, you might as well live in a nice area.

  1966

  George Schilling. He was my junior high P.E. teacher—the first adult I can remember hating. Each day he entered the gym with a thick wooden clipboard, wearing a baseball cap with his initials written across it. George A. Schilling. GAS. Appropriate. It’s what he gave everyone around him. He was also the first person who taught me the destructive power of appealing to the shame and humiliation of Law.

  When I first saw the play Les Misérables many years later, I sat spellbound at the unflinching, crushing authority of detective Javert. I was suddenly in the presence of coach Schilling all over again. He thought he could make kids behave by appealing to intimidation. It worked on all of us. None trusted him but all feared him. We also rebelled against him and lied to him, if we thought there was a chance we could get away with it.

  He couldn’t understand why we played so robotically for him on the flag football team. It was because no one would dare risk creativity, for fear we’d screw up and be publicly humiliated. He didn’t realize his methods of turning us against each other in humiliating contests, and public swattings with his wooden clipboard, would actually turn on him.

  The power of affirming love is exceedingly greater motivation than what could be gained through intimidation. When we do anything to pacify or appease a disgusted and superior-acting authority, we begin to lose our person. Something sacred inside of us tucks away. We will protect that place more than blocking a blow to our face on the playground.

  Schilling taught me to rebel. He taught me that who I was wasn’t welcome. He could sense anyone who might be funnier, articulate, or more clever than him. Over time, he would systematically put us down enough to rob it from us.

  I won’t hate George Schilling as an adult. He was a product of parents and culture teaching a similar, often well-intended devastation. But the spirit behind what drove him crippled millions from my generation. Here is the most damaging reality of that crippling. When we became adults, we found ourselves drawn to teachers and leaders who motivated from similar motivation. They were more handsome, self-assured, and didn’t have a scary clipboard. They would have a scary Bible. They would appeal to our flesh, our success, our manhood. They would subtly shame us. Many of us, although we hated it then, will buy their crap now.

  1966

  If I tell you only what he did wrong, you wouldn’t know he was a great dad. For over ten years he quietly woke only me early each Saturday morning. Other fathers would take their sons fishing. My father took me into the kitchen, where the two of us would sit at a linoleum-laminated table, eating a thick concoction of Maypo cereal, whole milk, and serving-spoon scoops of crunchy peanut butter. You could spackle a hole in a wall with the consistency of what we ate.

  On summer weekend afternoons, Dad would furtively pull two cans of Vernors out of the refrigerator—like he was handing me a dusty bottle of bootleg rum. It was only ginger ale, but he made it seem so dangerous and forbidden. Each time he’d hand it to me with these words: “Don’t tell your mother.”

  One afternoon, after work, he called me into the living room. He’d put his forefinger through a Dixie cup, and surrounded it with cotton and ketchup. He allowed me to look for a moment directly into the cup, to see a bleeding, wiggling finger.

  “A shop worker down at the plant cut off his finger today in one of the sheet metal machines. He told me I could bring it home and let you see it.”

  He was the most honest man I’ve known. He sacrificed incredibly for our family. He made sure we visited every state and most of the national parks in the continental U.S. He taught me to compute batting averages with a slide rule.

  Before one of our vacation trips, he hid a MAD magazine in the glove box. He knew, at some point driving across the country, he would have to discipline me for something … and he figured we would then both retreat into hurt silence for miles. It, of course, happened. During one hideously long stretch of Midwestern driving monotony, my brother and I began bothering each other in the back seat. He flicked my ear. Twice. So, I tore a page out of what he was reading. He told on me. Dad immediately pulled off the highway. With cars whooshing by us, he completely turned around in his seat and started yelling at me. His face was bright red. He sounded like a TV preacher, bemoaning why they would spend so much money to take vacations so their kids could fight. Next thing I know I was in the front seat across from him. It was all painfully silent and seething … for what seemed like an hour.

  Then, the moment my dad had been waiting for. Driving across the plains of Nebraska, he broke the standoff.

  “You might want to check the glove box. Maybe there’s something in there that might interest you.”

  I found the magazine. … Suddenly, the last fifty miles of angry silence was forgotten. I read him sections all the way into the night, my brother and mom asleep in the backseat, on our way to that evening’s Travelodge.

  … But my father was a child of the Great Depression, the son of an
uneducated immigrant who pushed a fruit cart through their eastern Pennsylvania neighborhood.

  Dad was stunningly intelligent. He became a member of Mensa, “The International High IQ Society.” He was in the top half of Mensa! He vowed to himself that by dogged diligence and intense focus, he would make himself someone much more financially secure than where he came from. He excelled as navigator on the B-17 bombers, whose accuracy hastened the end of

  World War II. He later became deeply respected analytic forecaster at General Electric’s headquarters in New York City. He retired as a distinguished economics professor at what is now Thunderbird School of Global Management.

  So, here is this nearly genius, high capacity, driven man living his entire life with a fear he’ll fall behind and return to the poverty of the Depression.

  Awakening: Parents can unwittingly pass their fear on to their children. It teaches them to perform instead of trust.

  Later I discovered his intelligence reached well beyond his wisdom. He thought intelligence and more education alone would solve the world’s problems. I wonder if many extremely intelligent people fail to learn great wisdom because they lack the humility demanded to receive it.

  I would rebel against his strict demands and his inability to affirm. His approach would allow him to rarely enjoy who his son actually is—a moderately intelligent dreamer, who loves wistfulness, humor, kindness, affection, affirmation, and talking late into the night. I would become student body president, and an All-State pitcher. I would date the homecoming queen. But it was not the “right” success for him. It would not translate into a law degree from Stanford. I spent too many adolescent years resenting and missing out on enjoying him, because he refused to value or affirm who I actually was. He taught me a lifetime of doubting the value of the particular way I was fashioned.

  I may have rejected many of his values, but I inherited most of his prideful fear. Kids from the Depression hated watching their parents be in need of handouts. Dad would not let anyone help him. If someone gave a gift or did a favor, he would quickly try to even the score or surpass it. I’m convinced this transferred fear kept me from letting others in—to see my pain, my weaknesses, my hidden brokenness, and my self-destructive choices.

  Later, my dad and I would both grow up. He became an outstanding grandfather. We grew to enjoy each other with deep and tender affection. He would carry his claim of atheism to the grave. He would continue to mock every men tion of God, but learn to give my family a pass. He would kindly sit by our nonaluminum tree on Christmas mornings and watch impractical gifts being exchanged, without snide comment. In his last few years on this earth he would say to me: “John, you’ve done great good in your chosen profession. I’ve watched how you parent your children and love your wife. You’re living this life very well. I’m very proud of you, son. I love you very much.”

  Not every son gets that blessing. I’m grateful. I wish he could see my children and their own children. He’d be deeply proud of how his name is being lived out in them.

  I love my father so much. I’m deeply proud he was my father.

  … Jesus whispers,

  John, this trust of me you’ve risked—it has been clumsy and sporadic, but real. I have inhabited it completely. But you will continue to be haunted by patterns you thought you’d someday be freed of. Some of these historic illnesses of your family line may follow you until you leave this earth. But your choice to learn to trust me will protect your family and their families beyond what you can understand now. I know. I’ve been up ahead. The legacy is being reformed. It fills my heart with joy and my eyes with tears telling you this.

  … I too have loved your dad. You can’t yet have any idea what transactions people make in their hearts they cannot bring themselves to tell others. Sometimes even Mensa atheists.

  1967

  My dad gets a big promotion in Phoenix. So, the movers come and pack us up. I still remember; we leave Upland on June 24. And my entire world begins to grow smaller and smaller in the side view mirror of our Chevy Nova. I’m in the back, sitting between our dog and a caged, medicated cat. The after-manufacturer air conditioner stops blowing before we hit Blythe. Our headlights go out shortly after Quartzite. In the car, there’s only shocked silence—except for the noise of the highway from our fully opened windows. One of them has my t-shirt taped and flapping in front of it. We soaked it in water back in Blythe. It now forms the centerpiece in our hopes for survival. We must look like a scene from the “Grapes of Wrath.” Eventually we stumble into our new city, feeling as though we’d driven a covered wagon through the outskirts of hell. It’s ten in the evening and still over one hundred degrees. I already hate every single thing about Phoenix. I can’t believe my father would take us from all we’ve known and bring us here to die. … I clearly express this to him this upon our arrival.

  … All this will change in a few weeks, when I meet Jim Adams. He lives three houses down. He owns a bitchen yellow Telecaster guitar and plays songs I’ve never heard before! He is my introduction into music and all things cool. Half the girls in our neighborhood have a crush on Jim. It’s summer and he’s bored playing rock and roll all day by himself. He persuades me to take up drums. Promising my parents good grades, I convince them to buy me a set. Although they are purchased at a pawn shop, the snare is a Slingerland and the cymbals are Zildjian. I have, in one purchase, gone from new kid to cool new kid. By the fall, we’ve formed a band. We name ourselves Metallic Wax. We now must find other musicians worthy of such a moniker. Within several weeks we are joined by Bob Harper on bass and Mark Finezza on rhythm guitar. By the spring of ’68 we’re one of the better new groups in our surrounding three-block area.

  Like kids in open garages all over America, we’re learning to make music. I think I’d trade my car and most of my clothing to experience again what that must have been like. I only remember wanting to play all night, working on a song over and over until it worked. It’s a moment mediocre garage bands have in common with The Spencer Davis Group, Santana, and Miles Davis.

  We play a couple of birthday parties and are promised money for one gig, which later gets cancelled. By March, Metallic Wax has gone the way of Strawberry Alarm Clock. We disband. Sports, girls, and our general lack of talent appear to be our undoing.

  But now I have music. I will live with a soundtrack running in the background nearly every waking moment. I will create internal playlists, guiding me through breakups and moments of anticipated greatness. In the fall of 1975, in Tucson, I am limping from a breakup with a girl I thought I’d marry. Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” mixes with the wind as I wander the desert, searching for the voice of some higher power.

  Music becomes the way I will later communicate my life with Jesus. My most intimate, honest and vulnerable moments are spent out in neighborhoods, on beaches, or in cars, alone, making up lyrics and tunes to God. Nothing is more sacred to me.

  My formal attempts at sitting and talking to God can feel forced and contrived, often degenerating into what I imagine God might want me to say, in a voice and patter even I don’t trust. But when I sing to God, counting on the tune and words to find their way, I am as authentically John as I can be. It usually starts off key and faltering but often moves into a place with God I can find in no other way. I’m trusting God to give me a song so I can stay in the moment long enough to trust him with me.

  I wonder in heaven if we get to see scenes we never captured down here. I’d sure like to see the four of us, playing loud and gritty rock and roll, while neighbor kids stop and stare, in awe.

  John, I’ve got several clips of you rehearsing in Finneza’s garage. Maybe I should keep looking through the archives. I haven’t seen any yet where the neighborhood kids are “staring in awe.”

  … Sorry. I couldn’t help myself.

  1967

  My brother doesn’t join us in Phoenix until later in the summer. He’s been working as a counselor at a Boy Scout camp.

  Loo
king back, how do I tell you about my brother Jim?

  He’s an All-District tennis player, an Eagle Scout, part of the Order of the Arrow. He’s my big brother—good, kind and deeply respected. He’s my magnificent protector when my humor gets me into trouble with older kids.

  Then something happens none of us saw coming. He is sent home from camp early. We thought he’d maybe caught a bad case of flu. But upon his return, we quickly discover something is very, very wrong. Something has snapped inside my brother. He has become mentally ill, deeply psychotic. He suddenly hallucinates, speaks to himself, and has ongoing conversations with others who don’t exist. This truly great human will now become part of the best and worst mental health facilities all over the country. My tenderhearted brother will now undergo experimental drugs, shock therapy and the terrifying life away from his home—locked up with others as tormented as him. Like every other family who has ever faced this, we have no idea what to do. That first summer, hoping I can shock him out of his stupor, I actually slug him in the face. It only scares and confuses him more. I still remember him looking shocked, dazed, and hurt. “John, why did you do that?” His rapid decline radically changes our family. We will never be the same.

  Since that summer, over forty-five years ago, I’ve felt like a ticking time bomb, wondering when the same will happen to me. When I get overstressed or Stacey and I get into a hard enough place, I can go there. I fear one day the people who now respect me and enjoy my humor and insight will talk around me, or more slowly, or more loudly. After all, Jim was my brother. Whatever it was came from our line.

  Jim passed away seven years ago. This once normal, healthy athlete learned to smoke three packs a day inside mental health facilities where nearly everyone chain smoked. Lung cancer caught up with him. Before it was diagnosed, it had spread all over his body. Within six months my brother was gone.