When I reminded Adams of our backyard adventures he was quick to fill in some of the details I’d forgotten. Loons on the lake occasionally interrupted us with calls to each other. The loud, distinctive sounds they made demanded that attention be paid to them. They were pleasant distractions to an enjoyable discussion.
It was too dark on the dock to clearly see my friend, in spite of being within three feet of each other. We lay on our backs, two sets of eyes firmly focused in the vicinity of Sagittarius and Orion. The blackness all around us had reduced us to familiar voices. I’ve been told that to meaningfully converse with someone you must look him in his eyes, but I’ve always found conversations in the dark to be the most powerful. Perhaps it was because of whom I had shared them with up until then: Maggie and Adams.
“Tom, I’ve been thinking about the things we talked about last night. Maplewood’s been on my mind today. Did you ever read The Prince of Tides?”
“Yes,” I answered. I reminded Adams that Pat Conroy was my favorite writer, that I had lent him my copy of the book fifteen years ago and suggested he might like it.
“God, I guess you’re right.” He probably shook his head and made a face. Adams continued: “Anyway, he starts the book by writing, ‘My wound is geography. It’s also my anchorage, my port of call.’ That impressed me when I read it. In some ways Maplewood was a great place to grow up. But the place gave us too much time to think. And we always seemed to have alternatives when we were challenged. We solved too many of life’s wonderful mysteries because we had time and space to anticipate them, to plan and prepare. The more I learn, the more I read, the more I see and hear, the more doubt I have about heaven and hell—that anything can accurately be described in terms of black or white, right or wrong, good or evil.”
Silence intruded on Adams’s thoughts. He took a deep breath. “It’s in my best interest to get this Doubting Thomas thing straightened out sooner than later. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left.”
He laughed quietly, then slightly changed the subject. “I’m a little bit confused by how so much misery can be perpetrated by people who call themselves true believers. A lot of hateful things seem to be done in God’s name lately. I’m sure God isn’t too happy being constantly thrust into the middle of our power grabs and the messes we make.”
Adams’s remarks reminded me of a Lincoln biography I had just finished reading. I told him so.
“Abraham Lincoln was confused and bothered about this same thing during the Civil War. Each side claimed to be acting with God’s blessing and according to God’s will. But surely God can’t be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the end, Lincoln figured that whatever was God’s purpose was probably something different than his purpose and Jefferson Davis’s purpose.”
“Maybe Lincoln’s opinion is worth consideration. His opinions usually are,” Adams responded. We both laughed. “I wonder what Old Abe would have thought if the Confederates were God-fearing Muslims.”
A long pause followed. I ended it with a sermon based on theology I borrowed from American Indian culture: “There’s evidence all around us tonight that God’s here. He’s everywhere, if you want to take the time to look. God’s the Creator; he’s not the Enforcer. And we’re supposed to be the Maintainers. Someone in your class this morning mentioned the concept of historical symmetry, remember? I think that’s how God tries to teach us lessons about how to get along. He keeps throwing the same stuff at us over and over again until we finally figure out how to handle it. That’s the extent of God’s role in the affairs of men. It’s not about God taking sides.”
Adams laughed. “You know, Walker, you’re smarter than you look.”
He changed his position on the blanket. He was lying on his side, facing me. I saw his outline in the starlight.
“I’m impressed,” he continued. “You apparently know a little about historical symmetry. Not much. Just enough to toss it like a hand grenade into a conversation.”
We both laughed at Adams’s attempt to release air from a topic that was ballooning into something larger than we were capable of keeping under control. Half a long, silent minute later, Adams was sitting with his legs crossed, pointing the beam of his flashlight toward Mars, high above the tree line on the opposite shore.
“How do we deal with guilt? How are we supposed to handle people we’ve wronged? How about forgiveness? Is it important?”
I lost myself in the stars, looking for inspiration. I finally formed a response.
“Forgiveness is important to two people—you and the person who was hurt by what you did, or who hurt you. Forgiveness trumps guilt. If you forgive or you’re forgiven, guilt goes away. Why should it be more complicated than that? Except in a situation that has legal implications, why should anybody else be involved in absolution? Whose business is it, anyway?”
As soon as these words were out of my mouth, I wanted them back—not the opinion I expressed, but how I’d said it. I sounded like I was reading a contract.
Adams picked up on it. “Well, that’s definitive,” he answered. “If I disagree with you slightly, or want to know if what I’m thinking about has legal implications, I guess the only place we can address this subject further is appellate court.” We both laughed. “But, seriously, I think you’ve made a good point.” Adams shifted his position on the dock again.
“Tom, I gave Pamela Drake way too much credit for being a major influence on my life. I want to replace her with something else.”
“You’re allowed,” I graciously offered.
“You know what was really memorable? Jim Breech’s visit yesterday reminded me of it. I’ve thought about it a few times since he left.” Adams’s voice became serious. “It was being part of that basketball team our senior year in high school. I hardly played that season, except those two weeks when the Asian flu benched Breech and three other starters.”
Adams scored the only points he made all season during that glorious fortnight of his varsity basketball career when a flu epidemic swept through Maplewood and somehow spared him. He reminded me that Maplewood won three of its four games those two weeks.
“We put the town on the map that winter. It was our fifteen minutes of fame. Free haircuts at the barbershop and free chocolate milkshakes anytime we wanted at the Dairy Queen. Our team picture hung in all the store windows. The farther we went in the state tournament, the more the town, the more the region, the more the state of Ohio embraced us. That was my first taste of the benefits of being a winner and being part of something successful that’s bigger than me. It taught me that success shared is sweeter than success individually earned.”
Adams paused. “I’m sitting here tonight trying to think of a situation I’ve experienced since that was similar to being a part of a team of ten boys from a little high school in northeastern Ohio who somehow made it all the way to the big-school finals of the state high school basketball tournament. There are precious few circumstances today that can produce that kind of feeling, Tom. But it’s different today. Individual achievements are more celebrated these days. Watch ESPN tonight. I rest my case.”
Adams didn’t stop; he pushed his point harder. “That’s too bad. It’s hardly comparable, but that basketball team was the closest I’ll ever get to knowing what my father must have felt like being part of an army that won a world war and saved civilization; what my grandfather must have felt after he pushed and pulled and prodded my mother’s family safely, intact, through twelve years of the Great Depression. We’ve not been challenged as a generation until now. We’re in the middle of a mess that’s going to require a whole lot of shared sacrifice to clean up. It’s our generation’s moment—it’s our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to define ourselves. And we’re squandering it by wallowing in arguments about self-protection, distribution of wealth, and what it means to be truly American—instead of manning up and accepting our social responsibilities and sharing our ble
ssings.”
My friend was animated; he was rediscovering himself.
While he turned a few more thoughts over in his head, I picked up his last one and carried it forward a bit. “You’re right. Think about the history we lived through. How’d it impact us? Take away the civil rights movement. It didn’t involve many white boys like us growing up in the suburbs. What’s left for milestones and turning points before the economic collapse in 2007-2008?” I answered my question: “John Kennedy’s assassination, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and 9/11.”
“They’re all catastrophes,” Adams noted. “We argue about nuances affecting each of them: what happened, why it happened, who’s responsible; we draw no real lessons from any of them—even 9/11.”
“I agree,” I said. “Our finest hours were the Cuban missile crisis and the moon landing. They’re thousand-dollar questions on Jeopardy because nobody remembers the details.”
Adams was slipping into his professorial mode, seasoned by a political perspective that sometimes salted too much of what was in his head and came out of his mouth. “Those big headline events made us lose confidence in the political institutions we were taught to respect in civics class back in the ninth grade. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Rather, ask what you can do for your country.’ That doesn’t resonate much in conversations with my students and my colleagues in the state legislature. We’ve been celebrating unbridled capitalism and individual accomplishment since Reagan was president. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that it comes at the expense of our collective conscience. Nobody wants to talk about social responsibility.”
The lake’s quiet swept over us as we tried to absorb what both of us had said. Adams continued, in a softer, fatigued voice: “It’s so damn hard to get people to think beyond what’s in it for them. It’s almost always the case that more of something for some of us means less of it for everybody else. Resources are finite, even in flourishing democracies.”
Adams pointed out how difficult it is for a contemporary politician to hold progressive ideals and project Frank Capra-style optimism. “If you’re in a leadership position, out there all by yourself, you can’t afford to make a mistake. There’s such a premium on winning,” he said. “Failure has too high a price attached to it these days to convince most of us to take chances.”
I butted in. “Always remember, my friend: ‘There can be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat.’” I was hoping I might change his Christina calculus or persuade him to rededicate himself to a career in politics.
“Now, where did that come from?” he asked, his astonishment discernible even in the darkness.
“Attribute it to David Lean, Peter O’Toole, or Lawrence of Arabia,” I answered. “I’m not sure which one.”
Adams asked me to remind him to write the quote in his black book when we got back to the lodge.
“Our free-flowing discussion has produced a sense of urgency in me. It’s caused me to acknowledge my mortality,” he confessed. He told me that his lawyer had called him last week and suggested he needed to amend his will. Adams asked that I remind him to do that, too. We’d finally become like an old married couple, I thought. I had been assigned a job: remind
Adams of things he needed to do, to record things he thought were important. I liked my new role—Boswell to Adams’s Johnson.
“Did basketball and baseball really produce so many life lessons for me?” Adams asked, genuinely perplexed. He knew he could expect an honest response from me.
I theatrically stroked my chin, but I doubt if Adams could see. “It’s hard to overestimate their importance when we were growing up,” I offered. “All our male role models in Maplewood were anxious to bestow on sports the mystical ability to teach us what we’d need to know to successfully handle every challenge we’d ever face.”
“Playing basketball and baseball seemed hardly as important to you as it was to me. You seemed to have turned out okay. How’d that happen?” he teased.
Joke aside, Adams had given me the chance to talk about one of my own Maplewood life-changing moments. I described it in excruciating detail.
We were ten years old. It was the Maplewood Little League championship game. Baseball played at that level is obviously very different from baseball played at the major league level. The bases are closer together in Little League. The distance between the pitcher and home plate is shorter. The game lasts six innings instead of nine. But no one can ever convince me that a major league baseball player in the seventh game of a World Series has ever felt more pressure than I felt that day.
It was the first week in August. Our seasons always ended in early August. We could play a full schedule with a full roster and families still had time to load up their station wagons and go on vacation before school started the Wednesday after Labor Day. Our Martin’s Amoco Dodgers were playing the Briggs Hardware Tigers for the league championship. An injury during the game and the Byrd brothers having left a week early for a two-week vacation in Florida combined to throw me into the game in the fourth inning.
Weak players were usually hidden in either right field or at second base. I was the second baseman in the bottom of the sixth and last inning. The bases were loaded with Tigers. There were two outs, and a left-handed batter, David DeMarco, was up. He was a good hitter who almost never struck out. We had started the inning leading 6-2. The score was 6-5 when DeMarco walked up to home plate.
The stands were filled with screaming parents. Sweat was pouring down my face. I looked around the infield and outfield. Most of us were saying the same silent prayer: “Please God, don’t let DeMarco hit the ball to me.”
I could tell what my teammates were thinking by the frozen looks on their faces and the way they were nervously pounding their fists into their baseball gloves, yelling that stupid chatter before every pitch: “Hey batter, hey batter, swing!”
Our coaches taught us to use the time between pitches to figure out all our options to make a putout if the ball was hit to us. We should consider how many outs there were, how many runners were on base, the capabilities of the batter and the pitcher, the angle and speed of the batted ball. Our mantra was the game’s most basic defensive fundamental: know what you’re going to do with the baseball before you get it. I tried to do that, but my mind couldn’t handle anything beyond my incessant internal plea: Please don’t hit the ball to me.
Adams was playing shortstop, to my right, on the other side of second base. DeMarco hit the first pitch Keith Jones threw to him. It was a hard-hit ground ball—coming right at me.
God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Everything began to move in slow motion— everything except the baseball. I didn’t move. I couldn’t—I froze. The baseball found me, hit my glove, bounced off my knee. I was frantic.
Adams had run to second base, ten feet away. Everyone was yelling, but all I heard was his calm voice: “Pick up the ball. Flip it to me.”
The runner from first base was almost past me, on his way to second base. I dove for the baseball, grabbed it, and pushed it more than threw it in Adams’s direction. His glove speared the ball on its first bounce, an instant before the runner’s foot touched second base. The umpire crouching next to me yelled, “You’re out!” and signaled the same with the thumb of his right hand. Sprawled face-down in the dirt a few feet from the base, I buried my head in my baseball glove and offered a two-second prayer of thanks.
Whether we got that third and final out at second base before the runner from third base touched home plate was an open question. A dozen screaming Briggs Hardware Tigers parents were still arguing about it after we’d left the field. I don’t remember the name of the kid who was running from first to second base, but I thanked God that he was slow.
Anyway, we got the out and we won the game.
Technically, I suppose it could be claimed that I was an important part of winning the championshi
p. It was a terrifying experience. I skipped Little League the next summer, announcing to everyone who could hear me that I was dedicating the spring, summer, and fall of 1961 to getting my star badge in Boy Scouts. Since then, I’ve involved myself in high-stakes sports the way most American men do—vicariously.
Adams reveled in my story. We analyzed every aspect of it like CIA Kremlinologists used to pour over Khrushchev’s speeches at the annual Communist Party Congress in Moscow. At first our purpose was to wring whatever laughs we could from it, as adults do when they recall excruciatingly embarrassing childhood incidents from the perspective of decades of distance. We speculated about what might have happened to the rest of my life if DeMarco’s ground ball had rolled through my legs. We decided I would have either turned out to be a homeless heroin addict or in prison for some anti-social thing I couldn’t help doing to some poor innocent soul.
After we had laughed long and loud enough to cause lights to be turned on in the cabin closest to the dock, we concluded that both of us had overestimated the influence those kinds of experiences could have on people’s lives. We said it, but neither of us believed it.
Finally, Adams and I speculated about what kind of fathers we would have been had we pursued the experience of parenthood.
“Kathy and I had a plan,” Adams explained. “We’d put each other through graduate school, then we’d raise a family—no more than two kids. I was still in school when we separated.”
“It’s the only thing I’d change if I had a chance,” I confessed.
“Me, too,” he said.
After a few minutes of thoughtful silence, Adams stood up and shined the flashlight on the blanket. It was my signal to fold it up.
We walked back down the pier, along the lakeshore, toward the lodge’s lights.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Adams let me drive the Porsche back to Minneapolis the next day. We broke camp at the lodge at eleven o’clock, after he and his Democrats had spent three more hours that morning working through the details of what everyone but Adams thought was a winning campaign strategy for next year’s election cycle. The maid woke me at ten, wanting to clean the room, tapping on my door with her key. I had slept through good intentions of jogging around the golf course at sunrise and having a hearty breakfast at nine. I had just enough time for a shower and shave. Adams was standing in front of my door, ready to go.
Byron's Lane Page 13