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After Mister Rogers

We went to see the Mister Rogers documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Everything we read and heard warned us to be ready to cry. One friend told me she had taken a box of tissues to the theater, then passed it through the crowd when everybody started sobbing. The movie is amazing – thoughtful, powerful, spiritual – but for me the heart punch didn’t happen until right at the end, when the filmmakers create a brilliant little moment that I won’t spoil here. The tears came then, and they came hard.

But I don’t want to say much more about the movie. I want to talk about after the movie.

There was a pretty good crowd – maybe 50 people on a Thursday night – and most of them left when the lights came up. But a dozen of us stayed. There were four people a couple rows behind us, and three people a row in front of us, and five of us – Alix and I, a friend we used to work with, and her parents.

And all three of our little groups just sat there and talked about the movie.

The people behind us talked about watching Mister Rogers when they were kids. A young woman in front of us got out her phone and found a YouTube clip of a moment shown during the credits. Our group got out the box of cupcakes our friends had brought – Alix and I just had our 20th anniversary, and each cupcake had icing that looked like a baseball with “20” between the seams. (Our first night out together was at a Hickory Crawdads game.)

Ushers usually come in right after every movie ends to sweep up and make sure everybody leaves. But nobody came. So the folks behind us lingered, and the ones in front of us lingered, and our group ate cupcakes in what I am sure was a flagrant violation of Regal Cinemas policy. I wish now that we would have talked to somebody in one of the other groups, but in the moment we were all deep in our own conversations.

Our group talked about what Fred Rogers would think of the way our world is now — if he would think that he had not done enough. We wondered what happened to some of the children in the movie. We agreed that the things Mister Rogers stood for – kindness, tolerance, love – are not naive or shallow but are the most profound and deepest things of all.

We all stayed for a good 20 minutes. I’ve been to hundreds of movies, but I’ve never seen that happen before.

It felt like we were sitting out on our porches on a long summer night.

It felt like we were in the place we belonged.

You know what it felt like?

A neighborhood.

– TT

 

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54 and Hitchcock

Today is my 54th birthday. Fifty-four is not that exciting a number. It doesn’t signify anything in particular. It’s not even prime. But it’s substantial. You make it to 54, you’ve lived through some things. I’ve got a few scars and I’ve earned most of them.

Like most people on the back side of 40, I can’t help but wonder sometimes if the best part of life is behind me. My right knee creaks like the cellar door in a horror movie. I wake up in the middle of the night, sometimes to pee, sometimes for no reason except my body thinks 3:30 in the morning is a fine time to get up. Every so often I find myself in a light fog, the kind I used to drift into after one too many drinks, but now it happens sober, and at random. My favorite piece of clothing is a pair of fur-lined slippers.

But one of the terrible things about life is also one of the great things about life: You never know how many days you’ve got left. Might as well shoot your shot.

Over the holidays I was re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “What the Dog Saw,” a collection of his New Yorker pieces. One of them was about how we think of most creative genius as emerging fully formed — Mozart and Picasso were brilliant by their teens or 20s. But other artists, like Cezanne, were late bloomers. Their best work came late in life. Down near the end of the piece, Gladwell mentions another late bloomer:

This gives me great hope, and also puts on some pressure. It’s my fifty-fourth birthday. Damn, I better get cracking.

 

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Glory, glory

I jumped straight out of my chair — my highest vertical leap since I was a teenager, a good solid three or four inches. My old roommate Zane looked at my friend Greg — they had known each other about four hours — and said, “Has our relationship been long enough for a hug?” Old friends texted in from Indianapolis and Phoenix and Fernandina Beach. On the TV they kept cutting to shots of the celebrating team. The winning team. OUR team.

It’s hard to write happy. Sadness makes better country songs and Russian novels. When you try to write about joy it’s easy to put too much sugar in it, and you end up with a plateful of syrup. But as that great philosopher Lyle Lovett once said, what would you be if you didn’t even try? You have to try. So let me try.

The Georgia Bulldogs — the football team I have rooted for since I was old enough to root — won the most thrilling football game I have ever seen, and will play next week for the national championship. It’s 6:30 in the morning on the day after, and my blood is still coursing with a mix of Irish whiskey and adrenalin. I feel thoroughly and completely alive. The birds outside are chirping just for me.

This, I know, is crazy.

I don’t know a single player on the Georgia team personally. Our only ties are geography and laundry. They play in the town where I went to college 30 years ago, and wear the jerseys that still give me a little buzz of delight when I see them out in the world. Years ago, walking through the Harvard campus, I spotted a guy 20 yards away in a UGA shirt. “HOW BOUT THEM DAWGS!!” I hollered across Harvard Yard — maybe the first time those particular words had been hollered across Harvard Yard. In that little moment, with a complete stranger, I felt safer in a new place. At least there was somebody else there like me.

 

*****

 

In a lot of the ways that matter, 2017 was the worst year of my life. My mom was sick most of the year — back in the spring we thought we might lose her. Now she’s in a nursing home, feeling better, but aching for the life she had. In August, as I was driving through Athens of all places, I got a call that my best friend, Virgil Ryals, had died of a sudden heart attack. A month later, we got a call on a Saturday night that my father-in-law, Dick Felsing, was in the emergency room. We drove to Knoxville in the middle of the night and got one good hour with him before he lost consciousness. He died three days later.

I haven’t been able to write about all that. I’ve had a hard time just thinking about it. At Virgil’s funeral they ran out of programs. His longtime girlfriend, Danita, mailed me a copy. I didn’t open the envelope for months. It was like I could keep him alive as long as I didn’t break the seal.

Sports has always been my great escape — a way to stave off real life for a few hours. When my mom was so sick and I was at my brother’s house in Georgia, we watched Atlanta Braves baseball night after night. On the day of my father-in-law’s memorial service, we drove past Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, where Georgia was playing Tennessee. When we got back home, I went off in a corner and checked the score. Georgia won 41-0. It meant so little next to the death of a good man. But it was a bit of warmth on a cold day, a tiny bloom growing out of the rocks.

I’m not a rabid fan. I don’t dig through the Georgia message boards, or paint my face red and black, or tear up the house when they lose. I like to think I’ve got some perspective. But really the best thing about sports is when you lose perspective, when you get swept up in the moment and shove the real world off into a corner and care about nothing else but right now, bottom of the ninth, three-pointer in the air, a putt to win the Masters, overtime.

The Georgia game went to overtime.

At the beginning it looked like it would be a blowout. Oklahoma went up 31-14 with seconds left in the first half. But then our kicker, who wears black hipster glasses and has the wondrous name of Rodrigo Blankenship, made the longest field goal of his career as the first-half clock ran out. We had a little hope. And in fact we came all the way back and led 38-31, only to have Oklahoma take the lead back 45-38, and then we scored with less than a minute left to tie it.

I softpedaled the sports part of it there, for those of you who don’t care about sports, but let me just say that the events of the previous paragraph felt like climbing up and down Everest three or four times without an oxygen tank.

We traded field goals in the first overtime. We blocked their field goal attempt in the second overtime. And then one of our running backs, Sony Michel, took a direct snap from the 27-yard line. He swept around the left end and broke into open space.

It took about two and a half seconds from when he broke free until he crossed the goal line. Those two and a half seconds were a gift that maybe only sports can give: that sudden delicious understanding that you haven’t won yet but you’re about to. There wasn’t much in my 2017 that felt as pure and good as those two and a half seconds on the first day of 2018.

 

*****

 

I say all that knowing that Georgia fans have it easy. We’re good at football. We win 9 or 10 games most years, contend in the SEC, play on TV every week. But that’s different than playing for the title.

In 1982, my freshman year at Georgia, we went 11-0 and were ranked no. 1 at the end of the regular season. We lost the Sugar Bowl and the championship to Penn State. It hurt, but it didn’t feel like a deep cut. We had won the title just two years before. I figured we’d be back again soon. I was 18 and had no sense of history.

That was 35 years ago and we haven’t played for the championship since. Now, next Monday against Alabama, we get another chance.

Sports happy is not the same as real life happy. A good day with my wife is better than the best day I’ve had watching a ball game. But sports happy counts for something — the same way that movie happy counts, or comic-book happy counts, or reality-TV happy counts. Life is too hard not to take joy where you can get it.

Zane and I sat next to each other for that second half and overtime. We have sat next to each other, watching Georgia games, since we were teenagers. Now we’re in our 50s. We have married good women, lost people we loved, tried to find our way in the world. At some point, after the winning touchdown, after I beat my personal best in the vertical leap, we grabbed each other and held tight. It wasn’t just a game. It’s never just a game.

 

— TT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My year in books, 2017

I read 24 books this year. To be more exact, I guess, I finished 24 books this year — I’ve got a few more scattered around the house, but I’m not going to finish those before 2018.

If I finished a book, that means I liked it. I used to be one of those people who would slog through a book to the end, even if I hated every page. The great Nick Hornby cured me of that. I read a quote from him somewhere where he said that if you don’t like a book, it’s OK to toss it across the room. You shouldn’t feel like you have to finish out of duty. Thanks to Nick Hornby for saving me from many books that just weren’t for me.

So you can take this list as a list of recommendations — the books I wouldn’t recommend are the ones I didn’t finish. Some of the books below were work-related and others were just for pleasure. But I got something meaningful out of all them. These aren’t ranked; I’m listing them in the order I finished them during the year.

Bruce Springsteen, “Born To Run”

Patti Smith, “M Train”

The Rev. William Barber, “The Third Reconstruction”

“Best American Sports Writing 2015”

Tig Notaro, “I’m Just a Person”

Elmore Leonard, “The Big Bounce”

Vince Dooley, “Vince Dooley’s Garden”

Terry McDonell, “An Accidental Life”

George Saunders, “Lincoln In the Bardo”

Atul Gawande, “Being Mortal”

Roxane Gay, “Hunger”

Jennifer Weiner, “Hungry Heart”

Dan Harris, “10% Happier”

James McBride, “Kill ‘Em and Leave”

Dick Francis, “Whip Hand”

Dick Francis, “Risk”

Dick Francis, “Come To Grief”

Joe Ide, “Righteous”

Warren Zanes, “Petty: The Biography”

Kelly Williams Brown, “Adulting”

Gavin Edwards, “The Tao of Bill Murray”

Jesmyn Ward, “Sing, Unburied, Sing”

Paul Zollo, “More Songwriters On Songwriting”

Cary Elwes and Joe Layden, “As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From the Making of ‘The Princess Bride'”

Here’s to more good books in 2018.

 

— TT

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The reverse calendar (and the reverse horoscope)

This year, for the first time in a long time, I bought a day planner. I toted it everywhere and put stickers on it and felt nice and solid and analog. I still kept my electronic calendar on my laptop and phone, but paper felt better for seeing the bigger picture.

The day planner I bought has lots of spaces for to-do lists, pages in the back for sketching out long-term plans, a yearly calendar inside the cover where I keep track of the books I read and movies we see. It turns out  that for me, the day planner works great for everything except planning days. Because I realized at some point that I need a record not just of what I’m supposed to be doing, but what I actually do.

If you just looked at my calendar, with all those work sessions dutifully blocked out, it would look like I’m fully on task every moment. But lots of times, when I’m supposed to be writing, I’m plunging down some rabbit hole of music on Spotify. When I’m supposed to be doing research, I’m scrolling through Twitter. When I’m supposed to be exercising, I’m taking a nap.

So in 2018 I’ve decided to use my day planner as a reverse calendar. At the end of every day, I’m going to block out how I really spent my time.

I’ve been using a Fitbit for a couple of years now as a tool to lose weight and get in shape. The most useful part of the Fitbit for me is the daily log, where you have to write down what you eat every day. It calculates the calories you take in and compares them to what you’ve burned. Just knowing that I would have to write down a cheeseburger and fries keeps me away (most days) from a cheeseburger and fries. What I’m hoping is that, if I know I might have to write down three hours of “randomly paged through social media,” it’ll keep me from doing it in the first place.

This also got me thinking of the idea of a reverse horoscope. I still look up my horoscope every day in the newspaper, out of habit, the same way I read the comics even though I haven’t laughed at Hagar the Horrible since I was 9. The horoscopes in the Observer give you a sentence or two and a star rating. Here’s mine for this morning:

CAPRICORN: Get out and have some fun. A makeover will be rejuvenating. Someone from your past will offer insight. 5 stars.

(I’m going to lay pretty steep odds against that makeover.)

But what if you had to write up your horoscope at the END of the day, based on what you actually did? Some days it might be embarrassing: You didn’t shower until after lunch, which was peanut butter and crackers. You spent an hour looking at dog toys on eBay. You do not currently own a dog. 1 star.

So these are a couple of my goals for the new year: Fill out the reverse calendar and see how I really use my time. Write a reverse horoscope and be honest about how I really spend my days.

Maybe that’s what they mean by a makeover. THE STARS ARE RIGHT AFTER ALL.

 

— TT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Two moths

One night last week we were at my mother-in-law’s house, and I was washing dishes after supper. She lives on a mountain ridge in east Tennessee, and up there it gets country dark. There’s a light over the sink, and as I was cleaning up, two big moths kept slamming themselves against the window, trying to get in.

And I thought: That’s all most of us are. We’re just moths, straining for the light.

The story of our lives is the struggle to get out of the dark so we can see.

 

— TT