Falling Down

I fell through the ceiling in my hallway tonight. I was carrying a stupidly heavy box of books from my packed up office (a box that was so I heavy I actually thought to myself: I should probably just leave these downstairs), and since my attic doesn’t have decking (but does have a high number of obstacles to easy walking) I missed one of the joists and my left foot came crashing through the ceiling below.

It’s a good thing my butt already has a crack in it – as it is, I almost gave myself a second one. Luckily, nothing sensitive got injured, and all I ended up with was a three foot square hole in my ceiling and a baseball sized contusion on the right side of my butt (which was helpfully treated by my sitting on an ice pack for 20 of the most awkward and least attractive minutes of my life).

For someone who just quit his job and has a limited income right now, this was not a welcome experience. Doubly so since I also have the handy man skills of a six month old.

So now I’m sitting here, staring at the massive hole in my ceiling, and all I can think of is Michael Caine. Specifically, this clip:

I love that clip for a thousand different reasons, not the least of which is Michael Caine’s accent. The man just sounds cool. But I also love it for the truth it contains: we fall down so we can learn to rise. Life has its way of asking us to go backward in order to go forward; we’re not fond of that fact, but it’s true all the same.

I had coffee with a friend tonight (well, now that I think about it, I had coffee; he never drank a thing) and we talked about life and the changes that it holds. For me, the changes with my job and career track; for him, the adjustments to fatherhood and how his writing/creative life has been put on hold for the moment. As we often do, we reminisced about life in high school and college, and we each were able to identify a specific point, or a specific thing, that – if we could do it all again – was the one thing we’d do differently. We talked about that for a second, and then my friend said something like this:

“But you know, by not taking that path, we’ve become the men we are today. So in some ways, not making those choices taught us to make them when they counted.”

We fall down, so we can learn to pick ourselves back up.

I know plenty of people who’ve fallen down lately (and for some, it’s more accurate to say they’ve been shoved down cruelly or kicked to the ground). There are people who are simply looking for enough hope to make it through the end of the week, or the day, or their particular shift at work. They wonder if things will ever be in their favor; if they’ll ever reach that point where life feels like it’s moving forward more often than it feels like it’s going back. The dream is still out there, but they’re tired of it being beyond reach.

All I can say is that falling down isn’t the worst thing in the world. Going backward isn’t always bad. It’s staying there that’s the issue.

If we fall down, we must get up.

That’s the path of reward – that’s the life worth living. Even gaping ceiling holes can be patched and made good as new. But sometimes, we have to live through those moments to believe that.

When Anything Was Possible

This morning, because he was climbing the walls, I put my son in my car and took him for a drive. We ran an errand for work first, then headed down Highway 78, eastbound. We passed through Loganville, Between, Monroe…and as the mile markers swept by, Jon asked me where we were going.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m going to take you to where I went to college.”

“You’re gonna take me to your college?” he repeated.

“Yeah. The University of Georgia.”

“The Yoo-be-nursery of…how do you say it?”

I smiled. “The University of Georgia.”

“Oh. You’re gonna take me there?” he asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Can we get ice cream?”

The great thing about my alma mater is that it’s less than an hour’s drive, yet feels like going to another planet. As we turned onto Milledge Avenue, Jon immediately started asking questions. “Why are there so many houses? Why do people have couches in the yard? Why do they have bulldogs on everything?” It was non-stop.

I turned into the Butts-Mehre Building parking lot, thinking that I’d take him to the sports museum inside and show him the glory, glory of old Georgia. We walked in and in quick order took pictures with the 1980 National Championship trophy, Herschel Walker’s Heisman Trophy, and a very nice lady who knew where the restrooms were (that was Jon’s idea). But all of that lasted less than a minute; suddenly, Jon wanted to know where the scientists were.

“I want to see the scientists, like me.” (Special thanks to my brother- and sister-in-law Terrell and Julie White for sending Jon a Big Bag of Science Experiments for his birthday. My kitchen floors will never be the same.)

So we left the Butts-Mehre, went down by Foley Field (Jon had zero interest in the baseball diamond), turned by Stegeman Coliseum (he wasn’t interested in that either) and zipped over towards the Biology, Chemistry and Food Sciences buildings. He begged me to find a place to park so he could “see the scientists make stuff up”, but I couldn’t find a spot, and wasn’t sure we could get into some of the labs anyway.

“That’s sad,” said Jon. “Don’t people want to see scientists?”

I’ve yet to tell him what Bear Bryant said on that issue: “80,000 people never showed up to watch a chemistry test.”

We turned left on East Campus Avenue and drove behind Sanford Stadium. I turned left again on Baldwin Street and showed him Park Hall. “That’s where daddy spent most of his last two years of college.”

“That looks boring,” he replied.

We turned right onto Milledge once more, and then made a right onto Broad Street. I parked downtown near the Arches and we took a stroll across North Campus. We looked at squirrels, trees, the Chapel Bell, the Law Library Atrium, and the inside of the main library. I walked him back down to Sanford Stadium and made the mistake of telling him that’s where all the dead Ugas are buried. After that, he wanted to talk about nothing else.

It was a nice trip, despite the fact that the campus looks almost nothing like I remember it. Fifteen years after I left, the university has become what former president Charles Knapp had dreamed: a top-flight center of education. I marveled at how young the students are compared to when I was in school; how many of them still think they’re invincible enough to smoke; how many of them seem far more determined than I was when I roamed the same grounds.

As we walked back to the car, I took Jon to Park Hall, where the English and Classics departments are headquartered. I snapped a picture in front of my old haunt, and recalled when a professor stopped me on the front steps and told me that, with a bit of revision, some of my pieces would be press-ready. And then the professor offered to send them to his friend at The New Yorker – and could almost guarantee they’d see print.

I stood there and watched that memory play out one more time: I shook his hand and told him thank you, but no. I wasn’t prepared to face rejection. He asked me to reconsider; told me that of all the students in my “Writing for Publication” class, I was the only one to demonstrate real potential.

I told him no a second time. Then I walked away.

It’s been fifteen years, and I still remember that. In college, so the saying goes, anything is possible. You’re not who you were, not yet who you’ll be. You’re a bundle of potential and passion and purposeless energy. You’re waiting to be aimed somewhere and to see how far you’ll go.

At least, that’s the way some people were. I wasn’t. I’m 37 now, and am just finally reaching my “anything is possible” phase. It took me this long to realize the things about myself that are good and worthy and deserving of people’s attention. Today, I wouldn’t hesitate to take that professor’s hand and say, “Let’s sit down and make those revisions now. Why wait?” I would whole-heartedly accept his offer and be so excited about even the possibility that I might get read, much less published.

But I am that person today because I wasn’t that person then. I am a husband and father and writer today because I couldn’t see myself as any of that then.

Sometimes, we take the path we think we’re supposed to take because we have a hard time imagining ourselves take any other path. We choose what we know because we’re afraid of what we don’t. And sometimes, we discover that we end up where we started; we come back to the path we turned away, prepared to take it and see what happens.

That’s what I felt today, standing on a campus that isn’t the same as it was fifteen years ago. But then again, neither was the man standing there. Today, with my son in tow, I went back in time and realized I hadn’t missed my moment; I’d just been preparing for it.

Carpe diem, right?

Anything is possible. Even today.

Everything Old Is New Again

My Ella, the Dancing Queen.

Last Friday, I took my daughter to our first Daddy-Daughter Dance. I was nervous. She was hyper. We had to go buy toothpaste before we went.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I was nervous because I wanted to make the evening memorable. I wanted to make sure that I set high standards for her, to ensure that future suitors would have a tough act to follow. To that end, I shaved. I wore a tie. I opened the doors for her. I bought her a corsage. We got our picture taken together thanks to Andrew Watson photography. And then we entered into the actual dance.

(Quick aside: while waiting to get our picture taken, I told Ella that Andrew Watson was the photographer that Rachel and I used for our wedding. Ella made a funny face and said, “He’s not dead yet?” I now know how old my daughter perceives me to be.)

But I was also nervous because my past history with dances is not good. I think I mentioned that at two of my high school homecoming dances I got ditched by my dates, and I never even made it to either prom. So there was a strange sense of deja vu escorting my daughter to a school-sanctioned dance. The only real ace that I had in my pocket was that no matter what happened, Ella had to come back to me at the end of the night. But even that was cold comfort.

I was really hoping that Ella would want to hold my hand, dance goofily with me, and just in general spend the whole evening at my side. I dreaded the idea that she might ditch me.

That’s exactly what she did.

We weren’t even five minutes in the door before the pulsing music called to her and she ran off to find some of her friends. My heart broke. Actually, my heart disintegrated in my chest and the ashes fell to my feet. My worst fear was realized as I watched a silky pink bundle bounce off to “Party Rock Anthem“. With nothing left to do, I naturally started looking around the room to see if everyone else was laughing at my shame. I shouldn’t have worried.

If you’ve never been to a Daddy-Daughter Dance then you won’t understand what I’m about to describe. If you have been, then you know it all too well: slumped dad syndrome. The walls of the gym were lined with chairs, and almost 90% of them were occupied by fathers who had been likewise ditched, their heads hanging low, their faces lit by the screen of their smart phones, their shoulders slumped as they lean awkwardly against the wall in chairs too small for their butts. There is no more solemn glow than the backlight of an iPhone; it highlights the true despondency of modern fatherhood in all of its ugly glory. The men sat there like victims of Medussa–silent, stoned faces hiding the internal scream at a clock that will not move fast enough.

And seeing all of this, taking in the fact that I wasn’t alone in my apparent ineptitude as a father, I felt better. In fact, I gained enough confidence to move farther out onto the dance floor in search of Ella.

The general rule is that good daddies are goofy, the kind of person who lets you dance like mad while joining in the insanity himself. And truly great daddies are goofy even in public. I think that goofiness is fueled by a love that we can barely comprehend, let alone harness; when it comes to our daughters and their happiness, there’s just not much we goofy daddies won’t do. So it was that I pressed into the mad throng of pre-teen girls, bobbing my head like one of the Butabi brothers and embracing my inner goofy. I was joined by other dads who had similarly decided to brave the Floor of Death (i.e., the dance floor) in an attempt to find their little girl and vie for her attention. Collectively we looked like drunk chickens pecking for food, but when an action is performed en masse, it takes some of the sting out of the humiliation.

When I finally found Ella, she was parked directly in front of the DJ, hands raised firmly in the air, eyes shut, her little body rocking with the rhythm of the music (C&C Music Factory, I believe). She was surrounded by her Kindergarten friends, and for a moment the scene reminded me of some of Rachel’s old sorority photos. When the music changed, the girls gathered together in a group just as a photographer happened by, and they instinctively linked arms, cocked their heads to one side, and smiled for the camera. At first I thought it was just a fluke in the moment, but every time a photographer walked by the girls would stop dancing and strike the exact same pose. And again, all I could think of were the countless pictures I’d seen from Rachel’s days as an Alpha Chi Omega and my own memories of sorority parties at UGA. Here, fourteen years before it could happen, I saw my daughter’s future written out.

I texted Rachel: “Ella is going to end up in a sorority.”

Though it took me a while, I finally convinced Ella to let me take her to the snack table for a piece of cake and some lemonade. It took her thirteen whole seconds to dump her cake on my shoes, and another fifteen seconds to eat the replacement piece I brought her. She gunned back some of her lemonade and then said something that really took me back to my past:

“Here, would you mind holding my drink while I dance?”

Ditched again. Only this time, instead of feeling sorry for myself, I felt a strange nostalgia come over me, as if somehow I were Marty McFly caught in the wrong time. Watching Ella navigate the dance floor, bouncing and laughing from friend to friend, finding her own space within the crowd and spinning herself silly to the music, I realized I was getting a preview of her young adult life. I was getting to see how she might be as a woman. And as a father, it brought tears to my eyes. It was beautiful. She was confident; she was friendly; she was at home in a group or by herself. But what I was most proud of was the fact that she possessed not one hint of mean girl; she danced with friends who were popular, friends who were hiding behind their daddy’s legs, friends who had tried to blend into a group only to be shut out by the dominant female.

Or as I texted Rachel: “You can definitely tell which of the girls have the Queen of Mean gene. It just flows out naturally.”

Ella seemed immune to that, seemed to only care that she and whichever friend might be in front of her at the time were having a blast. And to see that–to witness first hand just how special my daughter really is–well, it made every other observation pale in comparison. I stood there, alone, holding my daughter’s lemonade like a good little dork, my heart bursting with pride. And if the evening had ended right there, it would have been entirely worth it.

But it didn’t end there. The DJ announced two back-to-back horrible songs that were meant to be for “daddy-daughter dance time” (horrible in the sense that the slow songs he played weren’t exactly intended for daddy-daughter dancing) and Ella came and found me. She grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the floor. I broke from her momentarily (to put down the lemonade), and then joined her.

And there, in the middle of 200 other daddy-daughter couples who were in their own little worlds, Ella and I danced. The fact that she didn’t want to dance to the beat of the music, but instead wanted to do West Coast Swing spins, and dips and under-leg sweeps just made it all the more memorable. And when she finally paused long enough to give my poor arms a rest, she nestled her little head next to my hip and wrapped her arms around my waist.

“I love you, daddy. You’re fun.”

My evening was complete. Ella’s was not; I had to drag her away from in front of the speakers, even after the DJ had announced it was time for everyone to go home. My daughter, it seems, loves the night life. She loves to boogie.

She got into the car a little pouty, but we managed to get home without me having to get ugly and ruining the mood. When we walked through the door she went straight to Rachel to give her all of the details and to show her the corsage and to just float around and enjoy the night that much longer. And when I put her to bed, she kissed me on the cheek and said she couldn’t wait to go dancing with me again. And I told her I that, despite my history, despite how nervous I was for the evening, I couldn’t wait to go with her again too.

That’s the magic of your kids: they can take everything old and make it new again. They can take those parts of your past that might still be a bit scarred and somehow smooth them over. They can take your heart and heal it.

If you’ll let them.

Someone Like You: Adele, Melancholy, and Getting Free From the Past

Sometimes, the past holds you prisoner.

Ever get in one of those nostalgic moods? It’s hard to describe, but you suddenly spend time thinking about the way things used to be in your life – the people you know, the places you went, the things you did, the hopes you held. Sometimes these little moods can become sad, as if the mere recollection of your past obscures your present and overshadows your future. You just start thinking of the way it was and you begin to consider the road not taken.

But those trips down memory lane don’t always have to be sad.

I’m learning the truth of that statement these last couple of days. For some reason, my mind has been stuck in reverse, wanting to go back through some of the memories of my late teens and early twenties. I don’t know exactly where it’s coming from – though my post from yesterday might have nailed the starting point – but it’s not a sad thing. I’ve not found myself looking back across my life wishing that things had turned out differently.

Case in point: I was driving to the gym last night and I heard Adele’s “Someone Like You”, and I realized that I don’t have a single “lost love” to regret. Not one. I realize this makes two days in a row that I’ve posted about a song influencing my thinking, but good music will do that to you. And as I listened to this lovely voice sing about the heartbreak of having to move on from a past that didn’t work out like it was supposed to, I realized something with such clarity, such force, that I had to sit in my car for a few minutes once I got to the gym and just meditate on the magnitude of this thought:

I was blessed and miraculously gifted with the chance to marry the only woman I’ve ever loved: Rachel.

Thinking back across my life to all of the people I ever dated or thought I was in love with (and admittedly, it’s not that large of a sample size, but still), the truth just crystallized in my mind. There’s no one else but Rachel. She’s the only one. Nowhere in my brain or memory is there another woman that would even be close to haunting me the way Adele’s mystery man haunts her.

Now, less this sound egotistical, I’m pretty sure that all of the women I dated feel the exact same way about me, and probably felt that way within milliseconds of breaking up with me. I don’t for minute think that there’s a woman out there looking back on her life and recalling me as “the one that got away.” If anything, they probably think of me as “the one I couldn’t get away from fast enough”.

So why does this matter?

Because it means I’ve found freedom from my past. I’m one of those people that used to spend a lot of time beating myself up over the past. Worrying if any of my old decisions would come back to haunt me. I guess the Adele song was so stunning to me because, for the first time in my life, I didn’t identify with the sadness, didn’t let the melancholia of the music get into my own soul. Instead, I found myself thinking, “Gosh, that’s gotta suck – to be that stuck on what’s behind you.”

For me, it was like…well, pick your own tortured metaphor: diving into a clear mountain lake, seeing a gorgeous ocean sunrise, yada-yada-yada. Whichever way you go, the result is the same: a past that was suddenly in proper perspective, without an overpowering emotionalism to consume me.

It’s been a refreshing thing, this looking back at my life and seeing clearly, without sadness. Sometimes, I think, we paint the past in one of two colors: rose or blue; to see it without tint, without taint, is a wonderful thing.

As I wrote yesterday, there are plenty of things that I regret doing – or not doing – from these years that have been on my mind. There are things that I would do differently if I could go back, but they are at the micro-level; things that, had they been different, would’ve only produced a better me. Indeed, if I could go back in time and impart wisdom to my younger self (or, given how stupid I was back then, go back in time and brain swap with my younger self) I would tell myself to spend more time studying, more time writing, more time developing my own interests and talents. I would extol the virtues of being the “nice guy” and preach the problems of falling into the pit of self-pity and self-loathing, both pits in which I spent a considerable amount of time.  I would preach the virtue of saving money by simply not spending it on the two major vices of my college days. I would overall just tell me that eventually, I would one day find myself an adult, with the world wide open before me, free to choose my outcome, no longer under the counterfeit weight of adolescent expectations.

Of course, the irony is that the wisdom which I would impart to my former self is the wisdom I gained by being my former self. Hmmm.

Maybe what I’m really trying to say is that the past two days have found me more at peace with myself than ever before. Instead of wrestling with myself in all three phases of the time continuum (past, present, future), I’ve been able to forge a truce with at least two of the three (past and present; future me still wants to pull my pants down in front of the Senior Ladies Auxillary and laugh, so we’ve got some work to do there)

You’re probably sitting there saying, “Duh. It’s called growing up, dude. Glad you finally got here.” And I’ll admit that my personality (melancholic as it is) sort of fed into that type of thinking. But I also do a fair amount of people watching, and I’m not the only one like this. I see a lot of people who carry the past on their shoulders. Some, it’s fairly obvious to see; with others, it only comes to light once you’ve known them for a while. Regardless, there are a lot of people (in my estimation) who would dearly love to experience the same kind of breakthrough I had last night: the chance to see yourself without tint or taint. The chance to simply be at peace.

All I’ll say is that the journey was not easy, though it could have been. I’m just glad to have been set free.

Ghosts I Never Knew

The house is quiet. Jonathan’s asleep, Rachel’s out running an errand, Ella’s not yet home from school. I’m all alone in my room.

It’s the perfect time to let the ghosts have free reign.

Here’s one from 1948. My grandmother, standing outside the rock building at Grayson Elementary school. She’s holding a basketball, in full Grayson High School uniform. Her smile is pleasant, if a bit forced. This is not the woman I know as MawMaw, though the picture is of her (the eyes give her away). No, the young woman in the picture is someone else, someone who lived long before I was born and whose life, to me, remains somewhat of a mystery.

MawMaw, looking ready to dunk on a fool.

Here’s another, from 1949 I believe. My grandparents, standing in front of some sort of mural at Lakewood Park in Atlanta, Georgia. Pop, his collar open, his right hand thrust casually into his pocket, looks every bit the charmer. His eyes and smile are confident and mischievous, and looking at him as a young man, I’m wonder if my grandmother liked him because he was somewhat bad. When you see him next to her – she’s clad in an ankle-length wool skirt that reaches high on her waist, her blouse a plain, inelegant white with a blunt neckline – he seems positively dangerous; his hand snakes behind her back and cups her hip, pulling their bodies together. It’s the kind of thing that, as a father of a daughter, sets off warning bells in a parent’s head.

My grandparents, getting cozy.

The next ghost comes all the way from Europe, circa 1944-45. My grandfather, perched atop an Army Jeep, looking very much insubordinate. Every other soldier visible in the picture has on a helmet; Pop’s jet-black hair is cut close to his head and looks relatively styled for a GI on the front. He looks heroic, if reckless, and reminds me of Ed Burns’ character from Saving Private Ryan. Easy company, indeed.

I'm pretty sure what Pop is doing here is NOT regulation...

My grandparents sharing a kiss in a muddy field. Who ever looks at their forebears and thinks of them as passionate young people, in love, wanting to spend time in each others arms? It’s so much easier to just file them away as we come to know them – older, more restrained, the settled products of a long life. Thinking of them as like us – young, ambitious, full of dreams and imagination and hormones – takes us into places where only our therapists dare tread. But to not think of them in this way deprives us of knowing them fully; it’s what leaves us looking at pictures in stunned silence, realizing that there were stories that never got told because we were too timid to want to hear them.

True loves kiss.

Another good one: Pop, in what looks like a photobooth snapshot. You can’t miss those ears, or that bulbous nose that most of his siblings shared. The hairline is starting to rise a bit, but the inky silhouette of his hair jumps out against the pallor of his face and shirt. Here’s where you can really see the mischief; you can look at those eyes and that half-crooked smile and just tell that this young man is capable of getting into trouble of all degrees. There’s an arrogance to him – not nasty or mean, but the type that daredevils and other thrill-seekers share, the type that says I will not be afraid of life. Of all the photos I’ve come across, this one is my favorite because I can see both the man I know and a complete stranger, one whose life might make an excellent novel about life in the Depression-Era South.

The very image of a rascal.

And here’s where the exercise comes to an end, not just because Ella and Rachel have returned; my heart hurts. The ghosts I’ve spent the past hour with retreat back into their photographic homes, their eyes pleading with me to release them again sometime soon. Their faces are different to me now; I see them not as curiosities or heirlooms, but as ghosts I’ll never really know. I look at this black and white legacy and lament that when my grandfather passes, so will the young man in that photobooth snapshot. I’ll never be able to talk to that man, or any of his iterations, again.

It is a bittersweet truth.

At least I’ll have the pictures, and between my own innate curiosity and my family’s love of stories, I’m sure that I’ll be able to cobble together some sort of loose history that will in some way satisfy me. But the taunting thought that I let so much go by me will not sit well; and I will not make the same mistake going forward.