Remember where you're from

 

“Remember where you’re from.” That was the closing line for a play that my wife and I saw recently.

It was from a Barter Theater production called “Go Tell It on The Mountain.” BTW, if you haven’t been to the Barter, you should make the trip. It isn’t really expensive and you can get there in less than two and a half hours. It’s worth the trip.

The play is about life in Appalachia, provided in a series of sketches. The good and the bad.

I’m well acquainted with life in Appalachia.  I’m from a small town in rural east Tennessee. It was a great place to grow up, but there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on higher education.  At times, it seems ambition was discouraged

Yet, summers were idyllic. I lived out “in the country,” about a mile from town and my nearest friends. A bicycle allowed me to join my buddies on a wide variety of ventures.

Pick-up basketball games wherever we could find a court and a ball. Swimming in the creeks or the Tennessee River. Tennis at one of the two privately owned courts (there were no public courts). Summer Rec, run by Coach Ratledge, where we might divide up and play full baseball games.

There was no little league, no swimming pool, no outlets for all that youthful energy. We were mostly on our own. There was youth football but it was mostly just a league for anyone not yet in high school. As a 3^rd grader, I was on a team with 8^th graders. We did play a lot of backyard football games.

I’ll not belabor the point, but I was not encouraged to attend college.

But I did. And I discovered a world out there that I never even knew existed. A world of music and arts and education that I somehow figured out a way to take advantage of.

And here’s the confession—I believe I’ve been running from where I grew up ever since. I’m proud of my little hometown, but I never wanted to go back there. I wanted more for my family. I found that here.

Yet, I can’t deny that the person that I am today is due to those growing up years…due to that hometown.

I wrote recently about leadership learned in Boy Scouts. My faith is based on a foundation earned at that little Baptist church I grew up in.

High school football and Coach Ratledge changed my life forever, giving me the courage to step out of my comfort zone, teaching me the value of hard work. He taught me more about life than about football.

My first best friend Ricky Alexander and I shared many adventures. He’s still the most extraordinary outdoorsman that I’ve even known. My life-long best friend Ronnie McNabb and I were as close as brothers and are still that close.

I loved hanging out with Jimmy Greenway and Daniel Johnson on the Simpson Farm. I hauled hay, hung tobacco, hunted, fished, and did some crazy stuff.

Because of that life, that place, I grew up to be well rounded, accepting of people from all walks of life, appreciative of the outdoors, able to take care of myself. I became resourceful, creative, and curious.

“Remember where you’re from.” I think I sort of forgot that. I forgot about a world where if I did something wrong, somebody was going to call my momma.  I forgot about a world that allowed me to leave the house in the morning and go anywhere I wanted, do anything I wanted to do, as long as I was home for supper.

I forgot that this level of freedom also led to a strong sense of accountability and responsibility. I’ve since realized that the work ethic gained from working on farms, delivering newspapers, playing football, and mowing yards has served me well as an adult.

It was a great way to grow up. It was a great place to grow up.

The Little Things

 

As we get older, our world gets smaller. I stole that basic premise from another columnist but these thoughts are my own.  It’s true. Our priorities change, our aspirations shrink; we just want to live in peace. With a few good friends. And a safe place to live.

Don’t get me wrong—I still want to change the world. But maybe the part of the world that I want to change isn’t as vast as it once was. Addressing a huge audience is somehow less important than addressing the person sitting in front of me now. Maybe it’s the realization that I can impact that one person more effectively than a room full of people.

Since my college days, my personal mantra has been drawn from Robert Browning’s The Grammarian’s Funeral. One line says (sort of) “the low man aims for a hundred, his mark is soon hit. This high man aims for a million, and misses by a unit.”

Aim high and miss by just a bit and you’ve still accomplished a lot. Aim low and hit it and suddenly you’re satisfied. Even when you were capable of so much more. I’ve aimed high and it’s taken me to amazing places. Yet, my world shrinks.

As they say in sports and in love, I’ve “out-punted my coverage” in several arenas. I was never supposed to go to college but here I sit with multiple college degrees. My mother-in-law didn’t think my marriage would last but here we sit, 48+ years later.

No English teacher I ever had (except for Dr. Barrett at UT) thought I had even a hint of talent but this column puts me in the neighborhood of 2 million words published. My artistic side was limited to sketches of classroom monitors done  out of boredom but in recent years, I’ve produced several hundred paintings that some people seem to like (betcha didn’t know about that one!).

I still want to travel more, but my bucket list trip is now down to just Machu Picchu. Maybe Cinque Terre. Now that I’m in my 8^th decade, little things have become more important to me.

Like my routines. Every weekday, my routine is the same. I eat the same things for breakfast. I eat the same things for lunch (Olivia’s Old South from Chicken Salad Chick).  Same workout routine. For 25+ years, Steve Bright and I led an intrepid group of bicycle riders around Blount County every Saturday morning. The roads have gotten too crazy for that now.

Date night is the same. Chesepeake’s or Big Ed’s. Movies are mostly at home now. Even my mowing is the same. Front yard, side yard, big field, upper pasture. In that order. Squares one time, diagonals the next.

A simple ride in my truck with a grandson to play tennis is treasured. Same thing for that time with my 11 year old—he asks the most profound questions when it’s just the two of us.

One-on-one with my college girl is really special. She sat down beside me at her brother’s soccer game recently and we just talked about things. College. Life. What made her happy. It wasn’t much—just a few minutes, really, but it was more precious than gold.

I love the sameness of putting up our Christmas tree by myself, listening to the same Christmas music while doing so (Pentatonix). I love putting the colored lights on the Blue Spruce outside my bedroom door. I’ve been doing that for years.

Embrace the little things. Love the tiny episodes. Sure, we remember the big events—major accomplishments and huge milestones. We can remember when and where on those. But life is made up of precious, often brief bits of time when we can truly live in the moment. It’s taken me a lifetime to figure that one out.

Coach/Leader

 

I’ve told you several times that ideas for this space come from a lot of different places.

Matt Storm is an assistant baseball coach at MHS.  Prior to that, he had been at King’s Academy in Seymour as their Head Baseball Coach.  He’s coached at many levels and has sent a lot of baseball players on to bigger and better things.

He’s also spent a lot of time coaching youth league baseball, which led to a recent conversation he and I had.  We were both telling stories of youth coaches gone bad.  He related a couple of really horrific stories.

I’m not going to pick on baseball here. All youth sports have their stories. And I’m not going to pick on parents that coach their kid’s team.  It’s mostly dads, but both parents coach. And without them, very few sports teams could exist.

It takes a special person to coach other people’s kids. Fortunately, we’ve had quite a few of those around here. Don Sentell. Joey Winders. Rick Young. Ricky Maples.

Those were all youth football coaches. It seems like football has a bad reputation in youth sports ranks, but the vast majority of coaches that I know are genuinely interested in their players as individuals. They understand how important the role of Coach can be. They wouldn’t do it if they weren’t.

But this year, I watched a youth football coach (from another city) yell at his players, yell at the opposing players, yell at his assistant coaches, and, most of all, yell at the referees.  His tirade lasted from whistle to whistle.

Sometime in the second half, he incited several parents who then spent the rest of the game standing on the fence screaming and yelling for blood. Literally. It was awful. My son and I, along with a couple of others, escorted the referees to their vehicle, fearing for the safety. It was that bad.

But that wasn’t the worst episode I’ve ever witnessed. The worst youth sports coach I ever saw was a flag football coach.

This dad was a win-at-all-costs kind of coach.  He was all about building 9 and 10 year old “winners.” He sought to accomplish that by winning every game, preferably by a large margin.

When one of his players asked him if he could carry the ball just one time, in this, their final game (something his coach the year before had always done) this coach laughed in his face.

Laughed. Really. That youngster never considered playing football again.  I can only hope that the coach never coached again. Ever.

Sports are important. You’ll never hear me say anything else.  But when we reduce our definition of success in sports to wins and losses, we miss the point altogether.

Sports are intended to prepare young folks for adulthood.  The lessons we learn on the playing field should always lead to healthier, happier, better adjusted adults.

Don’t get me wrong—winning is good, but there is also value in adversity. For every team that wins that championship, there might be 50 that didn’t. If we ignore the true value of sport, then that championship becomes hollow.

The value of sport lies in the lessons learned. Teamwork. Discipline. Perseverance. Mental toughness. Diligence. How to lose and win with grace. The rewards of effort. Self-confidence. How to be coachable.

If your coach is not teaching the fundamentals of the game, whatever the game, you might want to look elsewhere.

Coaches, never forget the profound influence you have on your young charges. They often spend more time with you than they do their parents.  And often they will listen to you better than they will listen to their parents.

Giving Thanks

 

In case you hadn’t noticed, Thanksgiving arrives on Thursday. 2024 has flown by.

When I was growing up, Thanksgiving wasn’t that big a deal. I can remember going to one of my uncle’s houses a couple of times but mostly it was quiet. My dad’s food allergies kept us from having a turkey and I never knew what dressing was.

My wife’s family was quite different. I can remember when I first starting coming around, we would start the day with breakfast at her grandmother’s house, maybe go rabbit hunting, come back to my mother-in-law’s house for lunch, then as soon as we could stuff anything else in, return to her grandmother’s house for a second lunch.

As my mother-in-law’s health began to deteriorate, we moved the Thanksgiving celebration to my house, where it has remained ever since.

Food prep has already begun and gets quite intense over the next couple of days. I’m actually taking off work on Tuesday, mostly to help with that.

For a good part of the past 27 years, I haven’t been much help.  There is this really cool tradition with Maryville High School football--when the team qualifies for the semi-finals of the state championship, they have a special practice on Thanksgiving morning.

It starts that morning with breakfast, prepared by the senior dads. After a time of fellowship and sharing, the team heads to the field for a final practice before the game the next day.

It’s usually crisp and cold—perfect football weather. It was my second favorite football practice of the year. And we were there every year but two between 1997 and 2020.

What was my favorite football practice of the year?  Any practice the following week.  Because that means we won and were headed for the state championship game.

I have to say that my wife did not really welcome my absence. Her house was about to be filled with 20+ people and her main/best helper was not around. But since I gave up MHS football after the 2020 season, she has had her right hand man, her “beck and call” boy, there for the whole process.

All that leads up to why Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Everybody is there. It’s the best of times.  My wife prepares everybody’s favorite dishes. We get to simply enjoy each other. And we never forget to be thankful for our bountiful lives.

I’m thankful for a wife that tolerates my absences, my work, my hobbies and my quirks. 48 years is a long time.

I’m thankful for adult kids that still allow us to be a part of their lives. That’s more rare than you might think. And for you parents that are facing an empty nest—don’t fret too much. There is nothing better than adult kids.

Unless it’s grandkids. I have seven of them, and they’re all wonderful in their own way. From the college girl to the least one that screams my name and jumps into my arms every time she sees me. I seem to spend more time with a couple of the boys in the middle, my tennis player and my football player, but that’s ok. I hope they remember this time as fondly as I know I will.

I’m thankful for good health, meaningful work, great friends, good food, and the opportunity to live here.

I hope you have a good day and have plenty to be thankful for.

 

Servant Leader

 

I’ve told bits and pieces of this story before. Let me step back a minute—a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about leadership. In it, I talked about different types of leaders. What I failed to state clearly is that all effective leadership is servant leadership.

Let me repeat that:  All effective leadership is servant leadership. There are a ton of cliches about that. Simon Sinek is one of my favorite public figures. I guess you would call him a motivational speaker, but I think he’s more than that.  I think of him as a change leader.

My favorite Simon Sinek quote is this: “Leadership is not about being in charge. Leadership is about taking care of those in our charge.”

Enabling others to be their best. Paying the price by putting yourself last.

I love the much-told story about the Army general who made sure that his troops ate first. He was always last in the chow line. He could easily have been at the front of the line.

Servant Leader. Serving others. You don’t have to be an Army general or CEO of a large company. Your leadership may manifest itself as leading your team, your family...really anyone that you’re responsible for.

My own leadership path was probably different from most yet, in many ways, the same as many.

I was 12 years old in Boy Scouts, Troop 215. Up to that point, I had done nothing to distinguish myself. Average student. Average athlete. Average Boy Scout.

But one of those Boy Scout leaders saw something in me, something that I didn’t see in myself. The Troop had grown and they wanted to expand by forming a new Patrol. That was the organizational structure—the Troop was the whole group, broken down into several Patrols.

They asked me to be the Patrol Leader for the new patrol. This new patrol was to be made up of kids new to Scouting. A couple of them were quite the misfits. And I was their new leader.

We quickly organized as the Owl Patrol. I carved an owl head to top of our flagstaff. Our first event as a Patrol was an event called the Jamboree. Several Troops came together for a big camping excursion.

Our Patrol cooked together, ate together, and competed in several events. One of those was building a fire without matches. The first to burn through a piece of cord maybe two feet or so off the ground was the winner.

The Owl Patrol came together, won the fire building contest and then accumulated enough points to win the overall competition, beating much more established Patrols along the way.

How did we do it? I have no idea. I just know that we came together as a team, trusting each other, lifting each other up. But I learned that the strength of the team is in the team.

That was the beginning of my journey. Over the next several years, who I would become as a leader slowly emerged. Since then, I’ve worn a lot of hats but that concept of the Servant Leader has stayed at the forefront in my leadership approach throughout.

When you are a leader, it matters not what you achieve—it matters only what your team achieves. It doesn’t matter what your stats are, what accolades you might receive. The only thing that matters is was your team successful.

Living Life on His Own Terms

 

Most people in the gym didn’t know his full name. We just knew him as Randall. He had been coming to our gym for years. As regular as rain, he might say. He rarely missed.

His wife was alive when he first started coming. She’s gone now. Has been for years. She was from Germany but I have no idea how they met. He had become an amputee at age 4 when he was run over by a car, but he just never let it bother him. 

Later years found him in an electric wheelchair, after his stump really couldn’t hold a prosthesis.  He would wheel that chair around the gym to position himself in front of one piece of exercise equipment or another. Sometimes he would transfer off of it onto a piece of equipment, like a bench for doing a bench press. 

Powerfully built, it hasn’t been that long since he was tossing around 80 pound dumbbells.  He also freely tossed around his ideas about what was right or wrong with the world. Our politics collided and I would tell him so, but he embraced dialogue on issues.

He left the gym early one day, barely a week ago, asking me to tell his buddy Phil that he wasn’t feeling great and that he would see him the next day. He didn’t make it. At age 92, he died of an apparent heart attack.

If I were to sum up what I knew of Randall, I would say simply that he was a man that lived life on his own terms. His only complaint was that it was hard to get old, but then he defied those odds by pushing a lot of weight around the gym. And then he didn’t.

This isn’t supposed to be macabre, just a bookmark in a long life. For me, it is a call to enjoy life and not waste time doing things I don’t want to do. To surround myself with people that enhance my life and none that detract from it.

I’m 71. Thirty years ago, I was 41, with all original parts and a family growing up. I had my health, more than my share of happiness, and was doing work that I felt was important.

In thirty more years, I will be 101.  Statistics tell me that I won’t make that. Maybe. I’m not planning on going anywhere but we are not promised tomorrow.

My mom died at 93 with bad health for a decade before succumbing to an accumulation of things including advanced dementia. My dad died at 84 after having had his first heart attack at 45.  He lived for almost 40 years on the medicine that would ultimately kill him.

I find myself making decisions about what to do today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year based on what would I do if I didn’t make it to tomorrow. Eat that pie? Sure. Skip that workout to ride bikes with a grandson? No brainer.

Some buddies have invited me to go mountain biking in the area around Brevard, North Carolina in December. The trails are open and I really like these guys, but is it really convenient for me to go? I might miss something here! It’s not at all out of my comfort zone but I get so tied up in the same daily routine that any deviation is met with some degree of reluctance.

But I’m going.  And we’re probably going to a friend’s beach house sometime this winter. It’s free and he offered. And I’m going to pick up the phone and call an old friend and catch up and talk about days gone by. And then do it again.

I’m going to tell those that I love that I love them. If somebody has wronged me, I’m going to purposefully forget all about it.  I’m going to eat that Benton’s bacon and take that hike and head to Oak Ridge for Big Ed’s pizza anytime my wife even mentions it.  I’m going to take that little namesake to the Blue House that she loves and play tennis with my tennis player anytime he wants to.

I’m going to drive to Blacksburg and take the oldest grandchild out to dinner. I’m going to watch soccer games and track meets and sunsets. I’m going to sleep late (sometimes) and go about the business of lifting up those around me.

Because I can. RIP Randall.

Who will you be?

 

There are a lot of young folks that are in their first year of college right now. And more that are in the workforce. Maybe in the military. A lot of those were high school athletes that, for whatever reason, are no longer playing their sport.

Maybe it was a choice. Maybe they wanted to focus on their future without the time demands of athletics. High school is all about the experience and developing a foundation upon which to move forward in a career.

A lot about high school is learning how to learn. To this day, I have no idea what the value was for diagramming sentences, and I’m pretty sure the Latin I had to take was of no practical value. But by having to learn something that didn’t interest me (in full disclosure, nothing interested me in high school but girls and football), I learned how to learn.

Then when I get to English Literature class in college, I could still manage an A, even though I didn’t think it was worth anything to me. I had learned how to learn from having to learn something that held no interest for me. That lesson has followed me to this day.

Jump ahead a bunch of decades and here I am writing a weekly newspaper column for the 40^th year and quoting Browning’s “Grammarian’s Funeral” in front of college students. I’ve come a long way.

I had hoped to continue playing football in college but lack of talent and opportunity made that difficult. Oh, I had a brief stint with Mars Hill in North Carolina but that didn’t work out.

For me, and for so many others, giving up a sport that I loved was hard. Being a football player was a whole lot of who I was. The first year of college didn’t really change that. Intramural sports were OK but it wasn’t the same.

I had ended up at UT-Knoxville, majoring in wildlife biology. Then I injured my knee, had surgery, met my first physical therapist, and…well…that’s a story for another day. I ended up switching majors to prepare for physical therapy school.

And here’s where the story really starts. I finally had a real purpose in life, a career to pursue. My academic performance soared. The friends from my hometown fell away and I made new friends, different friends, many of which I am still friends with.

Being finally and fully immersed in the college experience, I discovered that there was a wide world out there. And I discovered a lot about who I really was. 

I discovered art and literature and music. I met people very different from me. I discovered cultures very different from my own and realized that they had value too. I learned that a lot of what we thought we knew was just our opinion, and that others might have a different opinion. And that was OK. I figured out that I did have a brain and how to use it.

I asked a college freshman just last weekend what she found so great about college. She has really enjoyed her first few months. Her answer? “Anonymity.” I like that.

Some have said that college can be an opportunity to re-invent yourself.  I don’t think it’s so much that as it is that you can become the person that you were intended to be.

No longer bound by expectations, no longer living the life presumed for you by others, no longer limited by the perceptions of others, you are free to be you. It definitely happened to me.

And as you enter this incredibly important transition from teenager to adult, whether it is going to college or entering the workforce, you control your destiny.

So, what do you want to do with your life? Or, more importantly, WHO do you want to be?