Historical September–October 2022 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Today, class, I want to talk a bit about life’s transitions. Oh, I don’t mean the big ones, those we note on Facebook, in scrapbooks, at the attorney’s office, or by the gravesite. Those public transitions are anticipated and celebrated – well, the first two kinds, anyway. I’m thinking of the smaller transitions, the conscious or semi-conscious decisions that we each make in response to the fact that we continue to get older. Until we don’t.
As Socrates said, “Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.” Many of my transitions centered around sports.
As wannabe athlete, someone whose aspirations far exceeded his skills, FAR, throughout my youth and after-youth, I spent way more time in sports than was rational. Despite my consistent athletic failures, I exhibited grit before I knew it was anything other than a southern food.
In college, for example, our intramural basketball games were played at noon, and I routinely skipped my 11:00 class to warm-up and my 1:00 class to cool down. Sadly, this is not an exaggeration.
If you go to quotes.com and type in “Youth is wasted on the young,” you’ll see my photo. (OK, you won’t, but you should.) You might think that this misaimed dedication resulted in my becoming somewhat adept in sports, but that was not the case.
The only possible way these choices had any merit comes from Winston Churchill’s quote that “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without a loss of enthusiasm.” In fact, I was learning the virtue of enthusiasm. One of my first conscious transitions – and the key word here is “conscious” because as you just read, up until then I navigated life in a state of semi-consciousness – occurred decades ago when I enrolled in graduate school to work on a master’s degree. At the time, I played on two slow-pitch softball teams. More accurately, I played on two slow-pitch softball teams and I drank with these slowpitch softball teams at the bars we visited after each game, win, lose, or rain-out. Unfortunately and not surprisingly, I was much better at the bar than I was at third base. Alas, misplaced enthusiasm is not a virtue.
But grad school would be a big step up for me.
I figured correctly that I needed to focus and apply effort if I was going to succeed in a non-Churchill way. So after much wrenching thought, I stopped playing on my Friday night softball team. And I stopped going to the bar afterwards. And I started studying.
I still miss those rain-out games.
My next transition didn’t involve sports.
It centered on my 1992 Miata.
The small white convertible was a terrific car: small, snazzy, speedy, and small. No, my repeated use of “small” is not a typo.
It was really small!
I felt like I needed a shoehorn to get in the seat, and the trunk was only large enough to hold my laptop and gym bag.
Then one day I was stopped at a red light and a long-haul truck pulled up next to me.
I realized that the top of my head – did I mention that the Miata was small? – was midway up the tire on the truck.
The tire! One wrong turn, I thought, and I would be dust.
A week later I sold the Miata and didn’t even mourn the decision.
My most recent transition occurred yesterday. Rather, I made the decision yesterday.
After more than 50 years of doubledribbles and missed layups, I’ve decided that I should no longer play basketball. Right now it’s an abstract decision because I couldn’t play even if I wanted to do so. You see (and of course, you cannot see it, so please imagine), right now I can neither stand nor walk because I tore my left hamstring last Thursday while, you guessed it, playing basketball. Beyond the difficulties arising from my total lack of mobility, the hamstring tear is the most painful injury I have ever experienced.
The pain was worse than during my open-heart surgery (although the anesthesia may have helped a bit then). You, logical reader that you are, may be thinking, “What in the world was a 76 year-old guy doing playing basketball?” Good question, and one also asked by my wife.
As my torn hamstring now shouts, I am not as young as I used to be.
From the grave, Socrates thinks, “I told you so.” So, another way to look at transitions is that they are simply small steps in the journey to maturity.
They are the times when take the longer and wiser view and give up that immediate pleasure because we’ve done the calculation and considered the trade-offs.
We can still enjoy, but it is getting later. So for me, no more dissecting the rain-out game that we didn’t play at a bar, no more Miata, and no more playing basketball. EPILOGUE: This column was written a couple of months before publication. Thankfully, since then progress has occurred.
I am walking, still going to twice-weekly Physical Training sessions, and writing foolish things.
But no more basketball ever. At least not yet. How about you, dear reader? Can you quickly identify your life’s transitions?
A compilation of these might make a fun column, so please feel free to share one with me, your anonymity is guaranteed, at trhoerr@aol.com.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, September–October 2022.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2022_09.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
