by Taylor Black
Do you like the name, Helen, Pops?
It is kind of old fashioned isn’t it?
It was Nana’s name.
She has your big brown eyes and your long brown hair.
She loves hats like I did.
Yes, you really loved to pose in your hats, didn’t you?
So does she. The acorn didn’t fall far from the tree.
It seldom does.
Yes, it seldom does.
So you named her after Nana?
Yes.
The boy looks like a terrible two, a terror in the making. He has a great little cowlick though, that’s for sure. He looks like a Dennis the Menace in training. You named your son after Nana’s maiden name?
Kane? Yes, although it is my middle name, remember. You gave me the same middle name as Courtney. Boy that was creative. Courtney Kane and Taylor Kane. I like Taylor though.
That was your mother’s pick. I picked the middle names. She did all the work so she got to pick your first name. She named you after one of her favorite authors: Taylor Caldwell.
Never read him.
Taylor Caldwell was a her. I never read her either.
Gee, Pops, you were supposed to be my creative parent, the writer and all that, and yet you gave me the same middle name as Courtney. It’s like I was a silly sequel or something. Kane II, the Sequel, coming to a basinet near you. You always said the only the only good sequel was The Godfather II.
I thought naming you with the same middle name as Courtney was different. Unusual. Unique even.
Sure, like George Foreman naming all his sons George. I’m surprised you didn’t come out with a barbeque grill. The Kane-a-que.
It wasn’t that bad. You named your boy after the family name “Kane.” Why didn’t you name him after Jeff?
We’re not into the junior thing.
Beautiful children.
Aren’t they, Pops?
I wish they could visit. I’d like to take them downtown to Hoffman’s for some really good ice-cream.
That’s sounds like what Nana always did with Courtney and me. The trips to Friendly’s in Devon. Those were great times, Pops. Nana was an ice-cream addict. Every night for desert she fed us ice-cream.
Yes, those were the days. I miss those times.
I know, Pops. I know. We’ll be back some other time, Pops. I promise.
Taylor’s Diary
August 18, 2001
Well, I’m all moved in to my new apartment. All 3 of my roommates went home for the weekend but they’ll be back tomorrow. They seem very nice. Tomorrow Henry calls me w/ the results of Mon.’s MRI. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. 60 Minutes is sending a cameraman to film my conversation with Friedman. So, I have to wake up early.
In other news I registered for my classes. The times suck because I was the last group to register, but my classes are pretty decent. I have: Anthropology, Speech, Political Science and Musical Exploration (classical music).
That phone call from Friedman would tell Taylor that the MRI showed her tumor was another millimeter bigger, but it was nothing to be concerned about. But something was there and I certainly was concerned, as was Taylor, although she kept up appearances for the cameras. So it was to be two months for the new chem., then a return to Duke for observation in late October, but the best laid plans of mice and men and neuroncologists sometimes go astray.
Chapter Forty: The Irish Setter
Taylor’s athletic career blossomed and ended on the volleyball court at Stuart Middle School with one magical season. In 8th grade she became a starter on the Stuart Middle School girls’ volleyball squad and, being one of the more diminutive girls, she was selected as a “setter” or a player who “sets up” the ball for the taller and usually more athletic “spiker” whose job it was to smash the sphere over the net so that the opponents couldn’t return it. Since Taylor was one quarter Irish, I nicknamed her “the Irish Setter” which she didn’t seem to mind too much until it got a little old. Still, the position of setter was important as she was responsible for hitting the ball into the air at just the right height so the spiker could “spike” the ball at an angle which would make it difficult for the other team to return.
We had been through the gymnastic period a few years earlier after the ill-fated softball phase. Courtney was a good gymnast, but Taylor couldn’t even manage an adequate forward roll. Somehow, when Taylor tried to do a forward roll she ended up sliding off the mat on her right shoulder, never quite completing the exercise. I didn’t tell her, but I had had the same problem in gym class when I was a boy. I was a failure at the forward roll. I mean, let’s face it, how many times in life is one going to need to do a forward roll? In the army I did quite a few “forward marches” but never forward rolls. It is really a useless exercise. Then again, how many times in life is one going to need to “set” the ball for a “spiker?”
But in 8th grade Taylor found her calling, and she was good at it and proud of herself for finally doing something successfully in the field of athletics. As a proud father I could see the future. She would go on to star at Martin County on Coach Marty Bielicki’s storied volleyball team. Yes, the “Fighting Tigers” were among the elite volley ball teams in the state of Florida and had once been ranked among the Top 25 in USA Today. Then, after a successful career at Martin County, I envisioned a college scholarship for Taylor which would save dad some real money. After college, perhaps a coaching career. Who could foresee the future? My daughter had potential.
Unfortunately the Stuart Middle School team didn’t. The Stuart Middle School girls lost more games than they won and yet Taylor was never depressed about the losses. She didn’t seem to care if her team won or lost, even if there were no dandelions to pick. She was having fun just playing the game and being half-way good at it.
When the season ended we sat in the stands together and I discussed her future in volleyball.
“Are you going to try out for Mr. Bielicki’s freshman team next year?” I asked her. “I think you could do it.”
She looked at me as if I were daft.
“Are you kidding, Dad?”
“No. You have potential.”
“I don’t have a chance of playing for Mr. Bielicki.”
Marty Bielicki and I had been colleagues for years and were good friends, but at that moment I wasn’t above asking for a favor from him. “Sure you do,” I replied. “I could make a phone call.”
“No!”
I realized that such a phone call would be a mortifying embarrassment for her. “Okay, I won’t. But don’t you want to try?”
“Those girls are too serious about it, Dad. I like to play for fun. They’re serious. It’s not fun to them. It’s like a job.”
That was true. The serious volleyball players competed year round in “club volleyball,” traveling all over the state and country to play against the best girls in the nation and hone their skills, all in hopes of a college scholarship. Dedicated parents tossed thousands of dollars into the “traveling teams” to make their daughters the best they could be. They were the athletic equivalent of beauty pageant girls whose parents managed their careers in hopes that Susie might land a modeling career because of a pageant. And with Title IX giving girls more athletic scholarships, there was a payoff to the girls who were good enough and dedicated enough to play volleyball.
Taylor wasn’t one.
There were moments when I watched her play that I remembered my father. He had been a good athlete in college, winning a football scholarship to Shurtleff College in Illinois. He had always wanted his sons to be athletes like he was. My two older brothers had been disappointments so I was forced to play football, but for a baby fat boy who couldn’t even manage a forward roll, how was I supposed to manage a forward pass. I made the kickoff team my senior year, but aside from kickoffs my posterior gathered pine splinters from the bench.
My father taught me one thing though. It didn’t help for a father to press his child to participate in
a sport in which he had only a modicum of talent. I resented my father for not letting me quit the team and I hated high school football, but after my discussion with Taylor, I was determined that we would never bring up the subject of high school volleyball again. I wasn’t going to be my father, after all. She would hang up her knee pads after eighth grade and retire from the athletic world.
Taylor’s Diary
August 26, 2001
Well, I have been here for a week and I must say I think my living situation will suit me well. My roommates are sweet and very easy to get along w/. This was definitely a good idea. I have to do work for some classes. I still have to write a speech for the American Cancer Society. I have a rough draft but it needs to be revised.
In other news, my chemo has been switched to a new one called VP16. I try to stay upbeat but I just wish we could find something that is visibly effective.
In all, I believe that I will really enjoy my classes this semester. I think that I’ll be able to get a lot out of them. I think I’ll get a lot out of this living situation also. I have discovered that through a bad situation more good will come out than you could ever imagine. Honestly, I believe. Let’s hope that I can make some good also. I want to be proactive in my life. What’s the point of pissing it away? That’s what 99% of people do.
Chapter Forty-One: My Little Colonel
Early one Sunday morning, AMC was re-running a Shirley Temple film, The Little Colonel with Shirley playing a tantrum-prone Southern bellette who danced up and down a staircase with Bojangles Robinson. It reminded me of Taylor’s dramatic period when she was the star of child-produced “movies” and I found the videotape of one of them, glad that I had recently decided on buying a machine with both VCR and DVD capabilities, for most of my videos of Taylor are on VCR cassettes.
I had, of course, remembered Taylor as a second Shirley Temple, and was a bit disappointed when I popped the tape to see that the productions were, how shall I say it, “childish?”
Taylor at 8 or 9 was hosting a make-believe formal dinner and greeting her friends as they came—overdressed—to Katie Jordan’s bedroom door. Her long brown hair necessitated constant attention from her hand and she was forever pushing it back lest she wind up like some version of Veronica Lake.
Who’s Veronica Lake, Pops?
Before your time, Taylor.
So were most things. Heck, my life was so short that there were a heck of a lot of things before my time and after my time. We were awful, weren’t we?
I don’t know.
Katie and Karly are so wooden in their acting. At least I seem a bit natural, don’t you think?
Tracey taught you a few things, didn’t she?
Tracey could act, Pops. Tracey could draw. Heck, Tracey is an artist.
You were a poet.
Maybe, I don’t know. I mean I felt like I needed some type of creativity and you had taken the prose writing spot and Tracey had acting and Beth had painting. It’s tough when you are the last kid.
I know. I was too.
Yes, we always had that in common didn’t we?
You know, you reminded me of the Little Colonel when you were four or five. You threw some tantrums.
Yes, I was a brat. That video, boy I had long hair, didn’t I?
A regular Rapunzel. You really liked to mug for the camera, Taylor.
Of course I did. I was half Mom, Pops, remember that. And the red head loved to show off, that’s for sure. But it was you that made me pose for photos for your magazine articles.
You liked seeing your face in magazines and you were a tax write-off for the trips.
Gee, Pops, what did you used to say, I’m divorced and I have two tax write-offs?
You could have been a model.
Not when I went through my fat period unless I did the before for Jenny Craig. I was a real heifer.
Why did you like making plays so much?
Halloween, Pops. Remember how I liked Halloween? All kids like to dress up and be somebody different. That’s why Halloween is so special to children, the candy is only secondary. For one night a child gets to be a goblin or a ghost or a movie star and not just a little kid that no one really listens to. Halloween is the ultimate in play and next to Christmas, Halloween was my favorite day of the year.
I remember that.
I never really got into Shirley Temple, Pops. No child could be that precocious, could she?
I looked at a photo of Taylor on the wall across the living room. She was perhaps ten, dressed in jeans and a jean jacket with a matching jean beret, looking like some Calvin Klein ad, giving a thumbs-up sign.
Yes, I thought, all children are precocious in their own special way. Then again, Taylor loved to play with her Barbies, often joining the Jordan girls in the make believe world of domestic bliss with Ken and Barbie, where Ken was the perfect husband and Barbie had the perfect hour-glass figure that probably contributed to an increase in anorexia and bulimia among the teenage girls who had been Barbie’s buddies in pre-pubescence. Courtney never played with Barbies and I wonder if that had something to do with her choice of keeping her maiden name when she married.
That’s really a stretch, Pops. Are you thinking that you might be the reason for Courtney’s feminism?
I don’t know.
Well, you weren’t, Pops. You weren’t responsible for my playing with Barbies either. Neither was Mom. Feminism means choices, Pops, and I would have been happy with a husband and children. A career for me would have been secondary. Courtney and I were different.
I realize that now.
But you treated us the same.
I guess I did.
Because your father said he treated you all the same.
Yes.
But he really didn’t. He didn’t force your brothers to play football did he?
No. He didn’t.
Pops, you’ve got to let that football nonsense go. It was forever ago. And don’t be so hard on yourself, Pops, or you will need a meeting.
Thanks, Taylor.
Let’s go for a drive in the Tercel, Pops.
Good idea.
Taylor’s Diary
August 27, 2001
A cleansing of the soul began in the absence of my hair
As though it had been a curtain shielding this beauty all along,
Knowing all the while that I would never look,
Now stumbling upon it, and falling hard,
Smacked in the face by bittersweet wonder.
How did I never realize the paradise awaiting,
It’s funny the way you realize,
By being hit by a hurling brick.
Chapter Forty-Two: Lance Armstrong
In the last year of her life, Taylor heard a great deal about cyclist Lance Armstrong and surely his story was truly inspirational, especially for cancer patients. Lance overcame testicular cancer, resumed his career as a cyclist, and went on to become Tiger Woods on a bicycle, winning a number of the coveted Tour de France trophies. From chemo to primo, one might say, but recently he returned to the Tour de France, coming out of retirement and finishing third. Not bad, I thought, for a has-been, and reading the sports section I thought of Taylor, not as a cancer patient this time, but rather as a beginner on her bike, the day we took the training wheels off.
I was teaching at Martin County High School and living across the street from the school in a duplex in a divorced dad development known as Hideaway Place, a catchy name for a place that wasn’t such a hideaway, but rather a series of rentals for fathers who had visitation rights with their children. On weekends the street would be populated by an influx of kids, but by Monday they would be gone, along with a child support check, back to the bosom and the bank account of their mother.
For me, it was convenient, and one Saturday morning Courtney, Taylor and I with two bikes, walked across the main road to Martin County High School to the inside courtyard where I proposed to give little five-year-old Taylor her first lesson in driving un
der the influence of balance.
There was something reassuring for a little child in the training wheels on her bike. They seemed to aright the teetering of a tot in motion as she pedaled furiously down the driveway. This was a time before the obsession with children wearing helmets to ride their bikes. If a kid fell on his noggin, well, he fell on his noggin. In retrospect, it is amazing that anyone of my generation even survived childhood, having had lead pencils, no adult supervision at baseball games, no bike helmets, no seat belts, and a penchant for playing in the dirt. Every boy I knew in childhood was a clone of Pig Pen from Peanuts. But all of us, at one time or another, had had to cross the childhood threshold from training wheels to two wheeler, and I, for one, had a problem with the concept of brakes. As a child it made no sense to me that a cyclist had to suddenly pedal in the opposite direction if he wanted to stop. This, of course, was before the advent of ten speed bikes. I had a three speed Schwinn when I was a kid, and I thought I was the Cat’s Meow, as most of the guys had the conventional one speed bike, and so did Taylor on that fateful day in the courtyard at MCHS.
In something of a small ceremony with Courtney watching, I applied pliers to the training wheels and removed them from Taylor’s Strawberry Shortcake bicycle.
“There,” I said when completed. “A two wheeler.”
Taylor smiled, but I sensed apprehension behind the smile. I knew she was nervous, because she didn’t say anything; Taylor was a chatterbox.
Still, courageously she took a seat on the bike, her little legs holding the bike securely in place.
“I’m going to push you to get you started, Taylor.”
She nodded nervously.
Of course I was nervous, Pops, you forgot to tell me about the importance of the brakes.
You knew about brakes, Taylor.
Yes, but I was trying to maintain my balance and remembering brakes too was just too much for me to handle.
And you crashed into the glass door entrance to the courtyard.
It wasn’t glass on the door; it had glass panels on either side, kind of skinny actually.
And you managed to whack right into one of them and break it. I yelled to you to hit your brakes.