The Difference

I was doing lunch with a bunch of guys today and one turned to me. “What’s the biggest difference in your life since you retired?” That might require some thought but, before I could engage my brain, I heard myself reply, “I no longer hate Sundays.” Really? His arched brows reflected that he was surprised as me by the answer. So, I had to think to explain. Let’s go way back to school. The weekend was two days of bliss. Actually, three if there was a game Friday night. I was long on having weekend fun but short on doing homework. So, as Sunday crept into evening hours, I began to contemplate the recriminations I would receive with the termination of the weekend. I could go from Friday night hero to Monday morning whipping boy. Astute readers might suggest that I could’ve just cracked the books instead of agonizing about the browbeating, but that would’ve been against my policy. But, school doesn’t last forever. Playing all weekend does. And, the latter half of Sunday evoked thoughts of going back to the grind Monday morning. This was compounded by the fact that it never seemed I wound up working within the same hemisphere as home, so an unpleasant commute also loomed in the offing. True, I did enjoy some jobs and mentally never punched out. But, as an entrepreneur, I was usually facing a desk full of challenges. In a nutshell, Sunday was the gateway to Monday and the anticipation was worse than the experience. Now, it’s just another day.

Mind over matter

It was a great summer for my combat roll and other paddling technique. For the uninitiated, the combat roll is righting your capsized kayak or canoe after a wipeout. It differs from the “pool roll” in that it occurs under actual conditions of necessity, as opposed to a controlled and anticipated situation. The alternative to rolling is swimming. I haven’t had to do the latter in years. For many of us, once you’ve mastered the roll, you’re not home free. It isn’t like riding a bicycle. If you don’t practice every time you’re on the water, it can go away. And sometimes, even if you do. My basic roll got sloppy about a month ago. And, barehanded, offside and other more advanced variations went away. Why? Obviously, I was doing something differently. It was frustrating, especially considering everything had been going so well. And, the more frustrated I got, the worse it got. This hints at the root cause, which is in the mind. That all changed last night at indoor pool practice. I was nailing the roll and all the fancier variations came back with relative ease. I discerned one bad habit I had fallen into and someone pointed out another fatal flaw. So, that was it. Maybe. On the other hand, I was using a kayak I had owned years ago and had just retrieved after three intervening owners. It’s a well behaved craft, but not magic. It does inspire confidence and I believe that was the key to success. Mind over matter. It works in paddling and just about everything else.

Legacy

The internet has connected me with friends, classmates, business associates, etc. from the past that I otherwise might have never heard from. Once in a while, someone will bring up something I said, wrote or did decades ago that no longer resided in my conscious mind, if ever. That is, one of these inconsequential (to me) things stuck with them and is vivid enough that they can quote it or describe it in detail. I’ve been on the other end of that, but it still makes me ponder about the tracks I’ve left. I’m thinking of this today because I was in a pre-holiday exchange of good wishes and remembrances with some friends of my youth today. One of them cited a quote from ninth grade, “You can’t stuff a marshmallow into a piggybank.” The fact that it was greeted by a chorus of LOLs (and variations thereof) told me it was tattooed in everyone’s grey matter. Mr. Allison was our football coach, but he also taught safety education. You didn’t have to be Roget to figure out that this was a euphemism for sex education. While it was needed in the Philadelphia school system, they probably encoded it to minimize the ruffling of feathers. Early in the course, a boy asked Mr. Allison about the physical reaction he had sometimes when around girls. I suppose this question emerged every year because Mr. Allison was obviously ready with the aforementioned quote for a response. I’ve run into people who graduated before or after me and this has come up, so I’m sure it wasn’t just our class. Since it came up today, I was trying to recall one other thing Mr. Allison ever said in class or on the field. I came up dry. I emailed a few of the guys and they struck out. So that’s it. Thirty (or whatever) years of teaching and coaching, and that’s your legacy. The marshmallow. Hope I fare better.

A modest proposal

I belong to a group that meets monthly over dinner to debate the topics of the day. The members are informed, intelligent and mostly liberals. That is not to say it’s monolithic, but the discussions are civil and witty. I consider myself an independent and evaluate each candidate and bill on its own merits. In this past election, my voting went about 60/40. Given the track record of resounding failures produced by socialism, economic and social, I generally oppose strategies that lean that way. This emerged in a tax-the-rich discussion around the dinner table. In the face of ardent proclamations that the principle is based upon fairness (if Karl Marx is synonymous with that), I made a proposal. We each bring our most recent tax return. The half that records the highest pays all the dues. The others pay nothing. No takers.