The ingenuity of bureaucracy ...
When I first started work 12 years ago, I had to park my truck some distance away far enough where the city didn't keep track of time limits.
A few years later, the company gave me a spot on an abandoned gravel lot. I had to pay a small fee for it, but it was much less than what I paid in parking fines.
Then, I got a spot on the building grounds. Then, a year or so later, a closer spot.
When I started, the newspaper was hiring. By the time I was moved onto company property, the hiring had begun to dry up. When they moved me the second time, it was when they were laying people off.
The place everyone wants to be, ultimately, is in the garage under the building. You don't have to worry as much if you forget to lock your door - and your gym clothes don't get wet if you accidentally leave them in the truck bed.
This is no merit-based system.
It is based solely on the number of years you've worked at the company.
For years, I'd see these folks swipe their badges and pull into that garage.
Older folks. Maybe middle-aged. Usually grey hair.
Good for them, I thought. Commitment to a place. Fruits of a career.
Soon, however, the layoffs swept through in waves. And every time, it seemed, somebody I knew was getting an email about an upgrade to their parking spot.
Mine didn't change. It was about as close as you get - but not in the garage.
The latest move was to offer early-retirement packages to older employees, in an effort to trim large salaries and expensive benefits carried over before the newspaper was bought from another company.
The majority of the people who accepted the offer weren't ready to call it quits - but they played the odds. It was a better deal than if they were to later get laid off. They're holding on - posting on Twitter the news of things they were once paid to write about.
The Friday of their retirements, the company sent an email to me to ask if I wanted a spot under the garage.
The retirees hadn't even left yet.
I went to look at the spot. There was a small, white Tacoma parked there. A bumper sticker extolling the virtues of giving to the United Way.
An unassuming vehicle.
I had a guess at who it was, and I was right.
I spoke to the man. He was in his late 50s. The truck had 300,000-plus miles on it. It was a former newspaper delivery truck, the ones the company puts on auction.
He tells me the truck's been good to him. I tell him I've got a Tacoma, too. And I hope it lasts as long.
I told him to be assured that I would take great care of his space.
He wasn't ready to leave. He told me that he had a 14-year-old daughter and that he wasn't sure if he was making the right choice for her. What if he couldn't find anything? What if things turned around and they never laid off another soul?
I told him I understood how difficult it must be to know if you've made the right decision.
He told me that, in the old days, an employee would have to work 20 years to get a parking space under the garage.
What I've done isn't an accomplishment. At age 38, I'm just young enough to be considered an asset not too expensive to keep and just old enough to be somebody who knows what I'm doing.
All I've done is wake up, come to work, write some stories with people whose names I don't remember, go home, paper comes out and in two days is forgotten and used to potty train a puppy, have a weekend, come to work, take a vacation in the summer, take a week off around Christmas.
Just live.
It's an odd feeling: At my age, I've just met an end of the line.
There will be no new parking space for me. I've made it as far as I'm going to on that little journey.
I will be here - in the dark recesses in Private #40 - until I'm here no more.
Will that be on my terms? If so, will it have been the right decision? If not, will it have been the right decision?
And how many miles will be left?
As we rode this Sunday afternoon to the last basketball practice we would have this winter, my sons asked me: "What is your favorite time of day?"
***
We weren't supposed to be going to "practice." We lost on Saturday, upset in the playoffs as a #1 seed. The expectations of how these things work said we should have another game this week, then perhaps a rematch between the two best teams this weekend. A trophy to put in the case.
Christ Church won the regular season in our 6th grade division, the youngest of four divisions in the middle school boys league.
We were a small bunch - younger than most, too. We were truly the most entertaining team in our division, and that's really about all I ever set as a goal for them: "Put on a show and let everyone know we're not afraid of anybody."
We were fast, relentlessly conditioned, full-court pressure from the tip until it was over - and sometimes that was at halftime.
No one child was greater than the whole.
And no child ever dreamed that they could disappoint me.
We ended the regular season defeating an undefeated team of giants. We finished with the same 7-1 record, but won the regular season in a tie-break.
They moved us up in age division for the post-season. The boys were simply too big that day, though that was decided only after overtime.
Such a disappointing end.
The idol worship started to consume me. No trophy for the case.
I began to feel the emptiness that comes along with believing in things that don't matter.
***
This didn't start four months ago as ours to lose.
It was ours to take. And we did.
Each game, we made no assumptions. And each game we surprised ourselves at what we were able to accomplish as each giant fell harder and cried in the post-game handshake.
It was liberating to feel as if winning was little more than a convenient accompaniment to believing in your children regardless of the outcome.
I learned that disposition by necessity in six years of coaching my son. We had never been any good.
This winter, we put on a show.
We didn't get together on this Sunday afternoon, at our regular practice time, to dwell on failure or exorcise our frustration. We weren't desperately holding on.
We did it because we didn't want what we had said all year didn't define us - losing - to keep us from what we were supposed to be doing.
The coach put his North Face jacket in the closet and brought his basketball gear instead (I don't go on adventures anyway).
The assistant who suited up all year to prove to the kids that he - by God - can play basketball even though he can't, did the same.
A parent, who normally sits on the sideline stroking his fingers across a tablet, showed up in full body gear.
And, on this unseasonably warm winter day, we joined our kids and we all put on another show.
There was nothing to win except what we came to reclaim: Our purpose.
And then it was over.
***
There's something to be said for feeling blue.
Depression is something else. Hopelessness.
Melancholy over loss of something helps you define how good it was.
This is a "real" feeling, unmistakably not going to simply just pass through you. It demands acknowledgement.
It's a gift. Introspection. Take what you lose and somehow keep it with you.
***
My oldest son plays AAU baseball.
Pay to play.
Parents don't just parent - they coach. And they expect.
They say it's for fun, but it feels like trying to fill some empty hole.
"Play ball." It's been a slogan of vacant emotion.
Last December, at the close of the baseball season and the beginning of our basketball season, I had to take my son to his first funeral.
His coach had shot himself in the head.
He was dressed in his coaching gear in an open casket.
Along the line for people to pay their respects was a collection of trophies and plaques.
The boys were expected to wear their jerseys and do their pre-game cheer as they prepared the coach for burial.
A couple weeks before, I had told the coach that I didn't care about the plaques - the Oakley Sunglasses Invitational or Fall Brawl Open trophies - and that in fact I thought it was a joke, a transparent manipulation by people who run tournaments to make money on things that don't matter.
He disagreed. He lived in a small town where he put the high school mascot's name across his AAU baseball team's jersey. There was no purpose if it wasn't to bring home tangible sign of victory.
The phone went silent. He said he lost his battery. I felt like I had challenged all he believed in.
Southern Gothic.
We left the team.
The other day, I found one of the plaques inside my truck as I carried the trash to the landfill.
I looked at it. "Halloween Havoc 2.0. Runner Ups."
I thought about that guy. How important that was to him.
I threw it in the garbage.
It disgusted me.
Two of the boys on my basketball team played on that baseball team.
They missed this special Sunday of culminating and bringing full circle four months spent of their lives together.
They had baseball practice. In the first week of February.
Neither wanted to go. They wanted to be with me - and I wish they had been.
As my sons and I turn from the respite of warm gyms in the winter to the soon-emerging spring grass of the baseball fields - and find ourselves with a new team - I take something with me from this.
I know that my sons will only take with them what I didn't stand in the way of them having.
If anybody ever tells me or my sons to be ashamed of being a loser, I'll tell them I've done both.
And I didn't do anything different either time.
***
I heard one of my favorite musicians recently telling a crowd that he wrote a song based on imagining what would flash before his eyes as he lay dying.
And he realized that every warm vision had some person it.
"What is your favorite time of day, Daddy?" I like afternoon. I like night. I like morning."
I tell them, "If there were only three hours that I could see you in a day, that time of day would be my favorite time of day."
"In the morning, I take you to school, and we talk about our defensive strategy."
"At night, I lay you down, say your prayers, give you a kiss on the forehead and we talk about the shot you made.
"And in the afternoon ... we all go to practice when we've got nothing to practice for."
I look at the stars along the water from that place that's "nowhere,” where you can see the unveiled faintest fibers of the night tapestry of the sky.
They move because you move.
At 17, your universe expands - and the memories you have are set apart among only a few.
They can breathe and radiate.
The present happens, then is enshrined. They become holier and more mythical as time passes.
You are aware you are growing.
Move forward ...
"Future is as future does."
They multiply.
"This reminds of me of this. But, no, it's still new."
"This memory is unlike ...no, it is like everything I have seen."
Your purest memories – the ones you feel more than remember - are borne only from places unexplored.
You remember them only so far as you can feel them in their present.
The intricately patterned poisonous snake. The billowing steam of locker room shower. Lost in the parking lot. The day you remember surrendering your most-precious thing to the world.
A million musical notes coalescing.
Tonight the relics are overwhelming me.
And the time and space for them is compressing.
Unfortunately, being a human being, I am unable to be anything but human.
I can understand only as this curious collection of particles
Finiteness.
I’ve lost traction.
Everything is onward flowing forward.
There's just now less to drift toward - and only so much newness left - a priceless blessing.
I've thought the measure of a man
is to be fair, honest and ... just.
Justice is righteous.
In justice, you know what the weight of evidence would say.
Fair and honest to all.
That's the thing it says.
But kind?
Fairness and honesty are not kindness.
Kindness shines a light into the abyss,
Fairness, honesty ...
They are the illusion of being a good man.
