The Savannah Bananas and other Sports in my World

Is it ever going to warm up enough here West Michigan for me to set aside my bulky winter clothes? I doubt it. Right now, it's raining, and if you can believe the weather report Alex gives out upon request, it's 47 degrees outside. Inside, I'm still in my long flannel nightgown and bathrobe made out of sweatshirt material and I'm still cold. It's almost time to take my morning pills (10:00) and get my day officially started with what Victorian era women called their "morning absolutions." aka time spent on a chamber pot, taking a sponge bath, or in our time taking a shower, and getting dressed. Being a slave to routines, while on the 'chamber pot'---yes, I just went there, no pun intended---I play three games on my Kindle: one each of solitaire, the New York Times' Wordle and the Daily Quiddler at setgame. I judge my entire day's mental acuity by how well I play those games and I'm happy when I win all three games on the first try.

I've been up since 8:00 drinking coffee and stalking cyberspace for some pop culture of interest. Currently, Savannah Banana Baseball clips keep popping up on my Facebook Shorts.

Dad's team 

Of all the sports in the world, baseball (and golf to a lesser extend) are the only ones I have a passing interest in watching, but even with them I watch more for the memories that connect me to my dad and the fact that I can multi-task while they are on TV. Dad played on a baseball team of adults that was sponsored by local businesses in a city-wide league.

Dad is holding flag

 

 

 

 

 

And with golf, Dad caddied as a kid and it was a life-long passion of his to play and watch. Fast forward to a time when Dad was dying of cancer and Tiger Woods just broke the color barrier in professional golf to go on to win the 1999 PGA Championship. Dad was so proud that he had lived long enough to see America’s race relationships change that much. I read him every magazine article I could find on the Tiger. To this day I can't see Tiger without being grateful that he became a catalyst for the stories my dad shared about his childhood living in the south. Some were hair raising like the time he was a kid hiding in the woods watching the Klu Klux Klan hang a black man. He also saw cross burnings and the Klan raid houses in the Italian neighborhood where he lived, stealing anything of value they could find. His pride in what his generation accomplished is one of those things that makes me so upset with our current president who is set on destroying all the accomplishments I felt my generation was leaving behind.

Back in my early twenties which I call my Chameleon Days because I would change my likes and dislikes to match which ever guy I was dating at the time. I didn't do it on purpose, but it was the early sixties and I must have felt like that was the way the world worked. Wives (or those of us auditioning for the parts) followed the man's lead. Anyway, back then I took eighteen golf lessons and learned that I didn’t like following a little ball around but it earned me a few dates with a guy I liked. Just like it did when I took downhill skiing lessons. Tennis was also a lessons obsession of mine. That relationship lasted a year but my game never improved enough to give the guy a good enough partner on the court. He was an all-round jock and in hindsight I'm glad I didn't end up with him. I would not have liked a life of making game night snacks and having a living room designed entirely around a big screen and puffy furniture. I took the breakup hard. But now I can see the wisdom the universe dispensed when we didn't end up together.

The Savannah Bananas and their archival, the Party Animals, have brought a different kind of energy to the game of baseball and they are fun to watch. Don't pass up watching the 20/20 YouTube video below. It will explain the popularity, vision and history of the Bananas better than I can. But if I have to describe them, I'd say they are like the Globe Trotters are in basketball only the Bananas play baseball.

I once mentioned the Bananas here at the continuum care campus and no one knew what I was talking about. I was not surprised. My fellow residents are crazy about college basketball and football and will talk endlessly about coaches and players to the point I'd like to gag myself with a spoon. They wear their favorite team colors and have flags and memorabilia decorating their doors. Once in a while I'll sign up for a viewing party but will leave right after the food is served. I just don't get it but I'm sure they don't understand how I can spend an hour every morning looking at Facebook Shorts. 

We all like what we like...unless you're stuck in Chameleon mode and I suspect a woman that just moved in with husband is stuck. He taught theology in a Christian college and was also a minister for a couple of decades. She looks at him like Lady and the Tramp looked at one another in their famous spaghetti and meatball scene. I do not think I'm going to like this couple---they seem phony---but she has demoted me from the 2nd to the 3rd fattest person living here so I'm happy about that turn of events. ©

 

Figuring out Our Purpose in Life

Recently I was googling the phrase ‘wise words about life’ looking for a topic to write about that didn’t involve telling tales about my fellow residents here at the continuum care complex. I’ve never been a gossip in my off-line life and I’m not sure I like this new me that has emerged since moving here. I could tell myself I’m just doing my weak imitation of John Steinbeck or Mark Twain or other writers who are known for drawing memorable characters with their words. The difference is---aside from their superior talent---that I’m not just passing through this place. If someone should find my descriptions of them they could get their feelings hurt and I could get ostracized out of the cool kid’s club, so to speak. 

I thought I’d hit on a topic I could get into when I found the following quote supposedly said by Mark Twain: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Since it’s long been my worry that I’d die without figuring out why I was born or what I’ve contributed to the advancement of civilized society that quote spoke to me. But it only took one more google search to find out the phrase wasn’t Twain’s at all. It’s what a website called The Center for Mark Twain Studies calls an Apocryphal Twain quote. I guess there are a lot of them. If you want to know if Twain said this or that, just ask at this website and they’ll do a forensic search and figure it out. In this case, the phrase, “The two most important days in your life...” was first mis-attributed in 2011 when a stand-up comedian and radio personality, Steve Harvey, sent it out in a tweet.

Apparently a lot life coaches and people in cottage industries who make those cute little signs, memes, coffee cups, refrigerator magnets, and message pillows and other for-profit enterprises love to slap Twain quotes on their goods and they do so without first making sure they are attributing them to the right author. The Center for Mark Twain Studies says as a general rule: “If the aphorism in question indicates a sentimental, nostalgic, or otherwise optimistic attitude towards humanity, it probably didn’t come from Twain. As Louis Budd put is, Twain indulged a ‘lifelong suspicion that the mass of mankind is venal, doltish, feckless, and tyrannical, that the damn fools make up a majority anywhere.'”

So I found the meme with the mis-attributed quote on it first---and trust me they are all over the internet---and I got excited about using it for the kind of theme post I occasionally wrote back in my caregiver days that I called (tongue-in-cheek) my Sunday Sermon Series. But the internet being what the internet is I just had to cross-check the source of the quote which blew the topic off my writing table. Boo-hoo! Or did it? No matter who said that about the two most important days of our lives the message is still just as valid. Is it not? I had that revelation while watching a montage of Olympic athletics at the winter games. At some point in their early lives they must have had that Ah, Ha Moment that I’ve never experienced in my almost eighty years---that moment that told them, “This is my passion and gift to the world.” (I’ll bet I just broke The Word Olympic record for using nine ‘thats’ in this short paragraph. Using too many of that word has always been a writing tic I can’t seem to break. If I wasn’t in a lazy mood I’d go back and edit a few of them out.)

What does it feel like to have that Ah, Ha Moment? And maybe my search for the answer is why I’ve always loved movies and books about sports figures at the same time, hating to watch or follow sports. That dichotomy never made sense to me. What comes first? Being good at something and then dedicating your life to it or dedicating your life to something and then becoming good at it? In some cases like Tiger Woods, for example, parents push and bully a kid at a very early age in a direction they may or may not have gone if the choice had been entirely their own. 

When my dad was under Hospice care in the last seven months of his life I read every Tiger Woods article and book I could get my hands on to my dad. That was before his fall from grace and my dad was so proud of that guy for essentially being the Jackie Robinson of the golf world. Since my dad passed I kept on reading books by and about Tiger. While fame gave him a place in sports history it also robbed him on the other end of the human existence. From all indications he’s finally made peace with himself and is living his best life and it all gets down to the second half of Twain’s mis-quote of knowing why we’re all here. The important take-away in Tiger's story? We have to find that purpose on our own, no matter how much we’ve been pushed or pulled in one direction or another we have to know the goals we set are our own. And once we know that, we'll find our purpose whether we ultimately make it to the top of the mountain or we just enjoy the journey through the foothills of life. ©

Fathers and Grandfathers

In my entire life I’ve never met a man as honorable and honest as my dad. He was a good-natured and soft spoken guy with a clear vision of humanity that included compassion for everyone, in every circumstance. For example, one time my cousin and my brother took Dad to a strip club, hoping to shock my dad for a few laughs and prove how grown up they were now that they were old enough to get into places like that. When my cousin asked Dad what he thought about a woman who’d take her clothes off and dance like that, my dad answered, “She probably has babies at home that need to be fed.” When my cousin told me this story years after it happened he said what started out to be a joke on my dad ended up being a life lesson on learning to walk in other people’s shoes. That was my dad---always caring, always seeing the best in others, always teaching without preaching. 

My dad’s formal education ended in the lower grades as did his association with the Catholic Church. His parents were Italian immigrants and he was the youngest of three kids. He lost his mother in the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918/19 and at age eleven he became a latch-key kid in a coal mining town in southern Illinois where one of his jobs each day was to go to the tavern to fetch a pail of beer for his dad when he came home from working underground picking coal in the mines. At the tavern my dad also played the piano by ear to earn a few coins before he was even old enough to wear long pants but even with that background, he wasn’t much of a drinker. At a party here and there but that was it. He was a good, hard working man who always put his family’s needs first, but he gave Mom credit for them being able to build the financial security my folks enjoyed later in life. 

My grandfather died when I was a toddler but I heard lots of stories about how he’d sit on the porch singing opera and playing the accordion in the evenings. Like my dad, he was also a good-natured and fair-minded man and he allowed my dad to drop out of going to church on Sundays with the rest of the family when a priest picked him up by the seat of his pants and his shirt collar and pretended he was going to throw him into an open door on a pot belly stove to teach him about the fires of hell. My grandfather, though, told my dad he still had to go to church just not to same church so every Sunday dad walked alone to the only other church in town. There, Dad learned that “Jesus loves all the little children of the world, red and yellow, black and white.” And he got to build things with a hammer and nails and he spent the rest of his life teaching himself how to build and remodel things.

My grandfather didn’t want his sons to work in the mines so he devised a plan. He raised potatoes and sold them to the local grocery store owner he had befriended. When he’d saved up enough money to buy a bus ticket he sent my uncle up north to Michigan---still a teenager---to work in the factories and between the two of them they saved up a ‘nest egg’ to move the whole family up north. And that’s how my dad ended up working for a quarter an hour crawling inside of hot machines to pull wood veneer sheets out. Somewhere along his work life, Dad learned how to be a tool and die maker and he was so good at it that the draft board during WWII wouldn’t let him sign up. He was deemed an essential worker in an essential industry. So he spent the entire war working 14-16 hour shifts making patterns and prototypes for airplane parts and munitions. But what I remember most about dad’s working years is when he’d come home from the factory he carried one of those black lunch boxes with the rounded top and he always had a few squares of a Hersey Candy Bar inside for my brother and me. And it just occurred to me why each night I have two squares of dark chocolate and I’m never attempted to eat any more. 

I don’t know how my dad picked up his respect for knowledge and education. Except for the newspaper, he wasn’t a reader yet when I was in college and taking classes in philosophy, world religion and logic we could discuss those topics and he held his own talking about Socrates, Plato, mythical utopian cities and the origins of our values and laws. Life was his teacher, I guess. He’d witnessed Ku Klux Klan hangings while hiding in the woods when he was a kid. He saw the unfairness of the blacks, Italian and Irish getting paid less than whites in the coal mines while they all worked side by side. And I’ll never forget the look of horror and disgust on his face on Bloody Sunday 1963 when the nightly news showed the fire hoses and attack dogs that were turned on the black marchers in Selma, Alabama. I’ll also never forget the look of shear happiness that lit up his face when Tiger Woods won his first PGA in 1999. He was proud of Tiger for breaking the color barrier in a game that dad loved his entire life. Dad was the most fair-minded and ethical person I’ve ever known and I know I got the luck of the draw to have him as my father, my teacher and the person who I’ve most admired and loved my entire life. I hope I made him half as proud as he made me. ©

Mom and Dad on their Honeymoon

Snow, Golf and Growing up Near the Klan

Monday was one of those cold Michigan days where nothing was moving in the neighborhood because the snowplows hadn’t been down the side streets yet. We got eight inches of snow over the weekend and I managed to shovel my sidewalk from the driveway to the front door because Amazon was due to delivery that day and few things keeps them from their appointed rounds---or is that the U.S. Postal Service? I have to admit I’m loving their two day delivery service with Prime. When I got the free introductory month with my new Kindle Fire I didn’t think I would keep the plan but now I’m on the fence about it. If you could see the stack of Amazon boxes in the garage waiting to go to recycling, you’d know I’ve been making good use of the service. 

Can you believe it, I played a game of golf this week! Well, not exactly. It was a game of miniature golf at a new indoor place that uses glow-in-dark balls and probably saves themselves a ton of money on electricity by not having to light up the place. It was fun but the psychedelic colors outlining the course, the busy wall murals that glowed in the dark and the god-awful black carpeting with patches that looked like neon barf gave me a headache and reminded me of bad parties in the ‘70s. It was a senior hall event and I tied for second place in my foursome plus I got to brush up on my billiards geometry doing it. Prior to the game, five of us Gathering Girls had lunch together at a popular café near-by that’s known for their good food. We were laughing so much it’s a wonder we didn’t get kicked out. 

I hate regular golf and, trust me, I tried hard to like the game. My dad was a life-long golfer, started out as a caddie before he hit his teens, even taught the game to high schoolers at one point in time and in retirement he played nearly every day, sometimes twice. My brother, niece and various others in the family play and a guy I dated back in my 20's golfed. I was highly motivated to learn. The boyfriend and I even took lessons offered at a golf course and all I learned was that I REALLY hated golf. If I want to take a nice walk I don't need to chase a little ball I can barely see as it flies down the fairway, assuming I’m lucky enough to hit it straight. 

Still, some of my best memories of my father revolve around the game. I don’t remember if we ever golfed together but my best ever movie experience was taking my dad to see Tin Cup with Kevin Costner and Don Johnson playing the lead characters. There was a scene in the film where Costner's character was in the woods and had an opportunity to cheat, but he didn’t do it even though his caddie was encouraging him to shave some shots off his score. According to Dad no real golfer would ever do that. “It’s a game of honor,” he said. “But wouldn’t the temptation be overpowering,” I asked, “when he could have won the tournament?” “He would know,” my dad answered, “he would know in his heart that he didn’t win fair and square and a hollow victory is no victory at all.” He saw the game of golf as a metaphor for life, a game you play against yourself for self-improvement---facing the challenges, knowing how you handled them are the true lessons and pay-off in a game where there's always room for improvement.

Fast forward to a time when Dad was dying of cancer and Tiger Woods had broken the color barrier in professional golf to go on to win the 1999 PGA Championship. Dad loved Tiger. In his last months, I read him every single magazine article I could find about the young golfer. My father was so proud that he had lived long enough to see America’s race relations change that much over his lifetime and we had many deep conversations about what is now labeled ‘White Privilege.’ Dad grew up in a town in Southern Illinois where grown black men would step off the sidewalk whenever a white adult or child like him passed by. He once hid in the woods watching the KKK hang a black guy and when a storekeeper in town died Dad saw him all decked out in his Klan outfit while lying in his coffin which, according to dad, was the only time Klan members revealed themselves.

My dad saw both sides of prejudism growing up. His father, an immigrant from Italy who worked in the coal mines, was paid less than whites but more than blacks and Irishmen even though they all worked side-by-side doing the same thing. In a museum of racial memorabilia I actually saw a sign like the one my dad described seeing at a coal miners' office. It listed the step-down wages paid to six different nationalities and "Niggers." The push-back against immigrants in this country is nothing new.

It might not seem like it when we’re knee-deep in our struggles to make the world a better place for our descendants but when we view the progress made by the generations that came before us it's easier to see that we are creeping closer and closer to a par game in racial equality. And that game is a game of honor, one where we know in our hearts when we’re not playing fair. ©