Remembering the Braves: one in Atlanta, one in my hometown; both in my heart

I stopped at Cold Stone Creamery tonight, treated myself to 12 million calories packed into 12 ounces of pure pleasure. I've been trying to avoid such indulgences, lately; I've always been thin, and determined to stay that way. But tonight was an ice cream kind of night, the archetypal summer evening that cries for reliance on simple pleasures not as a defense mechanism but aid to the enhancement of experience. Swaddled in a cushion of warm, motionless air, the sun was stained in magenta as it sank into a gauzy haze. It was the kind of evening we tell ourselves all evenings looked like in days gone by and are certain (or at least hopeful) will look like when we are released from this mortal coil.

Apparently, I was not the only one who thought this way. The line at Cold Stone was long and slow-moving, but unlike most lines I get stuck in, not impatient. No huffs of indignation or lizard-like sighs from any of its participants, no muttered obscenities under anyone's breath (including mine...). Though there were times when the teenagers behind the counter seemed more intent on gabbing with customers and each other than serving ice cream (or taking time out from prep to sing whenever they received a tip; always a cringe-worthy gimmick), nobody seemed to care how fast or slow the line moved. Everyone was just happy to be there, in the moment, alive on this particular night, with ice cream in their immediate future.

That is, with the exception of the harried woman directly in front of me. She had two children with her, ages 9 or 10. Both were donned in red baseball caps and jerseys sporting the word 'Braves'; both had mud smears on the knees of their piped nylon pants; one had black and white plastic cleats tied together by the laces and slung over his shoulder; the other was still wearing his, and wherever he stepped on Cold Stone's lobby linoleum, he left behind a little scuffy offering of dirt and grass. It was obvious they had just come from a Little League game, and were being treated by their mother for winning...or perhaps consoled for losing.

At least, I'm reasonably sure she was 'mother' to both of them. At first I naturally assumed they were mere teammates. They seemed too close in age to be brothers, and on the surface did not really look alike. One had fair skin, red hair and freckles, very much like the woman who had brought them there, the other was darker all around - slightly darker skin, hair closer to brown than red, freckles evident but less pronounced. But the longer I watched, the more obvious it became that they were brothers. Embedded deep in their little countenances were physical traits demarcated by their parents' individual genetic contributions but sharing an unmistakable common make-up. They were built the same and even moved the same, walked and pantomimed alike, unconsciously replicating each other, and their mother.

I could be wrong about this, but I like thinking it was the case. I like thinking our heredity reveals truths about our identity without the need for words.

In any case, they were ecstatic to be there, and quite a handful, jumping, dancing, pushing, laughing and shouting as they waited in line, driving the woman crazy. Locked in a shoulder to shoulder jostle, they pressed their faces up against the glass case, announcing loudly the myriad ingredients they planned to have mixed into their ice cream. Sadly, reality fell short of their bluster, when the woman - as much to rein in their unwittingly obnoxious enthusiasm as to establish limits for their own good - informed them they could only choose one. The red-headed boy looked positively bereft to learn he would have to choose between gummy bears and peanut butter cups. I felt his pain in no small measure. Sucks being a kid, having limitations in a place like Cold Stone Creamery.

Peanut butter cups, I urged silently. Choose peanut butter cups!

Gummy bears - gummy anything - have no business being allowed to play with ice cream. When I saw he was flirting with this option (staring at them through the glass, crinkling his nose in heavy deliberation) I was moved to intervene, but too late. He chose the gummies - not even gummy bears, but gummy worms! Unchewable, undigestible, tasteless... - and had them mixed into cake batter flavored ice cream...!

A flavor profile from hell is every child's inalienable right, I guess.

Maybe limitations are a good thing after all.

While the first kid watched his monstrosity get blended before his eyes, his brother (who, much to his credit, was eyeing Oreo cookies and peanut butter ice cream...now that kid's gonna be the frigging President someday!) kept staring at me, taking off his baseball cap and putting it back on, and looking away whenever our eyes met.

"You win tonight?" I asked him, unnerved a little by the persistence of his stare and its rabbit-like retreat.

My question surprised him. His eyes widened, and he responded with a tentative nod of his head.

"That's cool," I nodded back. "I played for the Braves, too." I motioned to the team logo across his diminutive chest.

"My Braves?" he asked quietly.

"No, another Braves. A long time ago."

His response to this was silence, followed a moment later by total disinterest as the woman hurriedly instructed him to tell the girl behind the counter what he wanted.

"Come on, Colin, you're holding the line up!," she barked, louder and more brusquely than I think she intended to. "Colin! You're holding the line up!"

Now I felt her pain in no small measure. I do not miss the never-ending fight to keep the line - any line - moving, which makes up much of parenthood.

Colin and I said nothing else to each other, but he left me thinking, unexpectedly, about the Braves. Not only the Little League team for which I played in the summers of 1983, '84 and '85, but the major league franchise in Atlanta. Both entities were once inextricably linked to my existence. Colin and his brother were not even a thought yet, and though they'll probably never be able to understand this, their mother, maybe a year or two older than I, was likely unable to imagine them as part of her life one day, or that their father would be anyone other than Simon LeBon, perhaps. Or Ralph Macchio.

When combing through my vast store of childhood memories, my Little League years don't readily spring forth. Probably because when they were over, I let it all go. I became too cool for team sports, walking away from a promising career in Senior League over the harassment I took from the older kids my rookie year. One night in June 1986, after enduring ridicule for a) flubbing an otherwise a routine pop fly to right field and b) responding to a little chin music from an older pitcher on an opposing team with a spasticness that everyone seemed to think was hilarious, I crept up the coach's walkway and stuffed my uniform into his mail box, tendering my resignation in an act of unspoken defiance. Hell with baseball, I'd decided; it was time to grow my hair long and start thinking everything sucked.

In spite of my spate of self-styled insolence (which would consume the next four or five years of my life), my three years in Little League spawned an interest in the sport that has endured. My assignation to the 'Braves' (amongst eight other Little League teams, with names like Pirates, Yankees, Red Sox, et cetera) at age 11 was completely arbitrary, but fortuitous. As it happened, the cable service in my town carried WTBS, Ted Turner's 'super station' from Atlanta, which back then broadcasted every Atlanta Braves game throughout the season. Because of this, the Atlanta Braves became my team, and remain so to this day.

I must here confess having felt a certain ecstasy throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, when the Braves simply couldn't have a losing season. In that time: 14 straight division titles (not including 1994, a strike year in which they'd otherwise been headed for dominance), five World Series appearances resulting in one World Championship, and a memorable finish to Game 7 of the 1992 National League championship game against Pittsburgh (seriously, YouTube it....truly one for the record books). Their success was spear-headed by a nuclear arsenal-caliber pitching line-up (Smoltz, Maddux, Avery, Glavine...) and the strong swings of Fred McGriff, David Justice and Terry Pendleton, who was solid for RBIs and making it to scoring position. All of this was coordinated by Bobby Cox, retiring this year as one of the most successful managers ever and richly deserving the post-career accolades he almost certainly will receive.

But the real love affair between me and the Atlanta Braves was back in the early 1980s. Atlanta was in the NL West then and - at the height of my interest - under the management of Joe Torre (who has since pieced together his own storied legacy with the Yankees). Back in the days of Dale Murphy, Bob Horner, Glenn Hubbard, Phil Niekro and Chris Chambliss, with Skip Caray announcing (wasn't until many years later that I realized Skip was Harry's son), there was no better way to spend a summer afternoon than splayed on the living room sofa with an ice cream sandwich and a bottle of Faygo Rock-n-Rye in front of a loudly whirring fan watching the Braves play in Atlanta-Fulton County stadium. I still remember the action-packed bumper music for 'America's Team' then - da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da, da-da, dahhh...! (Er, something like that...)

What I don't remember is them winning a lot of games; certainly there was little sign of the glory decade to come. Their gutter season was '88, when they lost 106 contests; by then my hair was hanging down to my butt and covering my eyes, and I really couldn't have given less of a shit. But even earlier, when I almost never missed a game on WTBS, it always seemed the crowds at Atlanta-Fulton on any given week day in July were painfully thin, rows and rows of center and right field stands empty, balls hit there caught by no one. There were long stretches of losses, and an ever-present morbid tone in Skip Caray's voice. Yet, contrary to this memory, statistics show Atlanta won the NL West pennant in 1982, and placed 2nd in '83 and '84. How is this possible? Perhaps my recollections are muddled. Childhood memories often are.

Or maybe it's the fact that my Braves were, at that time, the losingest team in our town's Little League history...

At least that's what my older brother claimed. He had no stats or figures to back it up, he was just trying to get under my skin (and was good at it); but it was a reliable assertion. In my three years with my Braves, we were never champions, but in the summer of '84 we went 0 for 14 for the season. Didn't win a single damn game, and our 'perfect' record helped foster a reputation as the league's resident losers, which amongst any group of 10 to 13-year-old boys can be a heavy cross to bear. Every morning after a game, I'd pick up the daily newspaper to find a box score at the bottom of the sports page heralding our loss. Occasionally, as space allowed, there was even a little write-up about the game, with certain keywords for my Braves sure to abound: error, strike-out, missed opportunity, fly out, ground out, rally falls short...

Sometimes, just sometimes, with my last name attached to them...




SUMMER OF '84 - As per rules/etiquette, members of the Ashland, Wisconsin Little League Giants and Braves congratulate each other on a 'good game'. I'm the moppy-haired, fish bellied #4 walking dejectedly. There were no good games for the Braves that season. We went 0-14, the losingest team in league history, or so my older brother enjoyed telling me at the time.

The worst part of that losing season might just have been our unsatiated post-game thirst. The winning team was allowed to go over to the clubhouse where they stored the equipment and score a free can of soda. The losers, if they had money, had to take the walk of shame down to the corner store and buy something to drown their sorrows in. I did not generally have any money, so my thirst usually led me home, to the hose in my back yard.

Why we were a losing team, the mechanics of our failures, escape me. We had some good players in our dugout, a few who had carved out solid reputations for hitting and fielding in spite of the team they played for. A lot of it had to do with the coach, whom none of us respected and blamed wholly for our inability to win games. The umpires were also frequently in our crosshairs, their bad calls and inattentiveness sealing our fate in more than one game. But who knows? Maybe, collectively, we just sucked. Maybe that's all that needs to be said.

I was one of those who fared better individually. I maintained a pretty respectable .290 batting average two summers in a row, finished with 6 career homers (just 749 behind Hank Aaron, I enjoyed telling myself at the time), even managed to make the All-Star team my final season. I executed a one man double play once, and a 3-2 double play that was poetry in motion between me and the catcher, a kid named Scott: After making the out at first, I fired a perfectly aimed throw toward home to catch a third base runner who got cocky. I must declare, it was a low and to-the-point missile, flawlessly snagged at shin level by Scott, who twisted around and applied a perfectly timed tag to the sliding runner. And it saved the game, to boot. The assemblage of parents, grandparents, older brothers and kid sisters on the aluminum bleachers behind home plate all swept onto their feet at once when that play was called.

Andy Warhol was making a comment about society's rising celebrity culture, but I've always interpreted his 15 minutes of fame comment in a more grassroots way. I believe most people get their 15 minutes of fame in little venues, amidst circumstances that hold little sway in the world, but huge impact on the individual's life. I like to think, even, that people get more than one 15 minutes of fame throughout their life. And I believe that dusky evening in the ball park that to this day I still walk past when I go home for a visit (and true to mythology, really DOES seem much smaller than it did at the time) was one of mine.

Little Colin got me looking back on Little League fondly, but he also unknowingly filled me with regret. Tonight, so many years later, I regret stuffing my uniform in my coach's mailbox. I should have stuck it out, gotten through my rookie year of Senior League, seen where it led me.

I could have; that's more the point. I could have hacked it.

If I had, would I have played three years in Senior League, gone onto high school play, then college, and at this point in my life be ready to retire from the Majors?

No, probably not. But that is decidedly not the point.

I really, really wish I had stuck it out. It is an invaluable lesson sports teaches us, elegantly simple and timeless: You can't quit. You can lose. It's okay to lose. But you can't quit.

Hopefully Colin and his brother learn this, in sports or somewhere else. It is not only an invaluable lesson, it is the one most relevant to a successful life, no matter where that life leads.

Ah, the good ol' Cold War; when fear itself grew larger than what we were afraid of

When I was twelve years old, I had a frightening dream. I dreamt about a music concert taking place in my school's gymnasium, an orchestra of my fellow 6th and 7th graders sawing away an almost on-tune rendition of Mozart, the teacher swaying her arms as tolerantly as she was rhythmically. In the waking world, this scenario would have included me playing with them, dutifully shoring up last chair cello as I did for seven years. But in this dream, I was merely a bystander, an unseen but omniscient witness to an awful chain of events that, for better or worse, could very easily have happened. And, in fact, had already.

It was the tail end of the school year, a warm, late spring evening. The setting sun was shining through the west-facing windows of the gymnasium, casting the entire space in a dense orange glow. Parents filled the bleachers on both sides, listening to the performance as attentively as possible but mostly just fidgeting: struggling with babies, programs, and purses, telling toddlers to settle down, clearing their throats while shifting to get comfortable on the stiff wooden seats...all of this creating a din that underscored the dowdy melody rising from the center of the gym floor. Our principal stood in the wings near the front entrance, arms crossed, watching and waiting to be of assistance if necessary - his job at all the school events. It was hot; the air was saturated with a potent mixture of lilac, sweat and sneaker, mirroring - it would occur to me much later - the conditions present in the bedroom where I slept on the night this dream took place.

Midway through the concert, at no particularly significant moment, an ear-splitting roar came from outside, rising sharply in volume and quickly drowning out the young musicians' best efforts. It was similar to a jet engine - seemingly in motion, as if something were shooting from one end of the sky to the other - but it had a shrieking quality embedded in its deeply-throated howl, like a bottle rocket.

Everyone looked up at once, then at each other with growing unease. The unnatural noise lasted several seconds, then was punctuated by a seemingly bottomless explosion that sent everyone into a spastic auto-response, a motion suggesting both jumping to their feet and crouching with their hands over their heads, in equal parts. They grabbed hold of their children, began making their way toward the steps leading off the bleachers, surrendering immediately to the impulse to bolt. Each had at least one child down on the floor, a child playing or waiting to play; a child they had to get to before they could get the hell out of Dodge. In a strangely inadvertent delay that sticks out in my mind, the music carried on a second or two after the explosion, almost deteminedly, as if Mozart would, or might, continue to matter; but when it stopped, it stopped dead in its tracks, the young musicians - my classmates and friends - dropping their instruments at their feet in a cacophony of wooden twang and clatter and rising up to signal their parents where to find them.

There was a new light filtering into the gym now, but not from the west. This time it barreled its way through the east windows; a bright, shade-your-eyes glare that caused the rich western light a moment ago to disappear, swallowed into the sooty periphery of this blinding white dazzle. This hastened everyone's panic.

The principal tried to take charge, shouting for people to remain calm, remain seated, but that ship had sailed; 'people' had become animals in stampede, pushing their way down the steps to the gym floor. They shouted at each other - to move faster, to get out of the way - and in the same breath called out sharply to their kids on the floor - first verbally, then through a series of frantic hand gestures when the collective noise began drowning out individual voice - to meet them by the doors. Some forsook the stairs completely and jumped over the railing, willing to absorb the shock of the six-foot drop if doing so would expedite their escape.

In a last ditch move to feign control of the situation, the principal backed his way toward the entrance of the gym as calmly as possible, though he too was sweating, trembling, a grim look on his face. He opened one of the doors and peeked out to see what had happened, what had caused the explosion (still, in the last seconds of his life, believing it was something manageable; very bad to be sure, but manageable. If everyone stayed calm, they'd be okay...). In the instant he looked up his head was thrown back, then his entire body. An unstoppable sweeping force pushed him feet over head back inside, and a moment later, the entire gym - building and occupants alike, along with memory of every ass that had ever been towel snapped, every spitball shot across the locker room, every dream of sports glory ever concocted, or realized during Tuesday night intramurals - was stripped off its foundation like a scab, and all that bright light switched to pitch black, and that big crescendo of sound - all the scrambling, screaming, calling and crying - ceased as abruptly as Mozart had, replaced by a thickly insulated silence.

The dream wasn't over, however, it just switched arenas. Suddenly I was part of it, all of it in fact, a lone survivor standing on high ground to the west. In the distance I could see the lake bay I'd grown up in. Splayed alongside the familiar embrace of lake and shoreline curving its way toward Michigan was my hometown, and from the center of all I knew at age twelve, a colossal mushroom cloud erupting to dizzying heights - 5000, 15,000, 30,000 feet, and climbing. It was the most vivid part of the dream: the terrifically animated cloud, the very symbol of utter destruction in my youth, snaking its way skyward. A slowly but powerfully moving plume of white so large it seemed to be sucking everything into the sky with it.

I turned and started running across a great field, feeling to the core both the frustration of trying to cover lots of ground in a vast open space and the electric terror of being pursued. I knew the destructive wave that emanated from ground zero was on its way fast, raking the ground it crossed, vaporizing everything as cleanly as it done away with my school. I ran for hours. So fast the sun never set on me. So hard that when I finally woke up I was out of breath, marinated in an ice cold sweat, trembling beneath the covers as the disorientation dissipated; thankful beyond description to hear the television droning benignly from downstairs.

My dad, I sputtered in my head, still awake. Watching David Letterman.

The creak of my brother's footsteps walking in his bedroom across the hall confirmed the blessed safety of the moment.

This, followed by crickets outside my window as my senses unfolded. A warm but dark and peaceful night in northern Wisconsin. No loud noise. No bright flash. No running. No dying.

All was still. I was still twelve. Mozart still mattered.

A few years ago, I had almost the same dream, only this time informed by an adult's capacity to imagine best and worst-case scenarios in detail. Once again I woke up with a start, catapulted into the tranquilizing safety of my bedroom, out of breath but none the worse for wear. It was early that second time around; the dawn was beginning to swell. I was never more thankful to see it, or hear the first twitter of birds, or the clang of a garbage truck outside that normally aggravates me with its metallic, crashing bluster, but now sounded like a lullaby.

Why the dream came back to me in almost exactly the same way more than twenty years later I can't say. Frankly, there are facets of it that a pyschologist could have a field day with: my detached, omniscient role in a world I was otherwise immersed in; viewing the destruction of my hometown from a initially safe vantage point that eventually becomes invaded; being chased; getting nowhere. But it was never a mystery to me that I should have the dream. It was not only a dreadful hallucination, but uniquely Cold War-era, and I am nothing if not a card-carrying member of Generation X, the second of two generations to shudder beneath the disquieting thought of nuclear annhiliation, the completeness of the end brought about by either 'us' or 'them' doing something so maddeningly simple as pushing 'the button.'

The Cold War was everywhere when I was growing up. I have vivid memories of nuclear fallout shelter signs posted throughout my elementary school, memories of being educated by school staff as to what they meant (both literally, and metaphorically). I remember being taught how to 'duck and cover' in gym class, where to go if a siren began blaring. The answer: undergound, which is where my classmates and I were sent for periodic drills (the old cobwebby basement of our turn-of-the-century schoolhouse, where we'd crouch along a wall in unison and wait; school staff apparently thinking under our desks was simply not 'underground' enough). I knew what would happen if a bomb were dropped, and exactly where that bomb would come from: the Soviet Union.

Ahhh, the Russkies! Remember the good old days, when we knew exactly who and where the enemy was? They were The Red Army during World War II, our reluctantly acknowledged allies. But not six months after Fat Man and Little Boy landed on Japan to end the war, the American media was already referring to them as the Red Menace. By the time they were known simply as the Reds, the Cold War was in full swing. 'Reds' could be anywhere, and were likely everywhere, for a while, even the highest levels of government.

All of that was before my time. When I was old enough to be instilled with such fear, the 1960s and most of the 1970s had come and gone, and the outright paranoia had been mitigated significantly, thankfully. The Reds were now known largely as the Soviets.

But they were still a menace in my young eyes; or more accurately, what they could do, what they were capable of, remained a menace, remained a big presence in my thoughts.

Strangely, other people my age whom I've talked to have no recollection of this. They might remember the Cold War, but they don't remember duck and cover or nuclear fallout shelters in their schools. Perhaps my small town was behind the times, anachronistically beating the old drum of a by-gone era. The more I think about it, that was almost certainly the case.

And yet, while it's true that when people think of the Cold War they immediately picture its golden age - that grim, repressed, 'black and white' world of McCarthyism, Sputnik and the man in the gray flannel suit - fact is, it was still going strong in the late 1970s and early 80s. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan did nothing to ease tensions. Germany was still two countries. The A-bomb had become the H-bomb - or hydrogen bomb - and its destructive power, were it to be unleashed in the States or anywhere on Earth, really, would make the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like Sunday picnics. To top it all off, America was reeling with a sense of fractured vulnerabilty in the post-Vietnam era. We boycotted their Olypmics in '80. They boycotted ours in '84. And these little symbolic pissing contests seemed to have as significant an affect on international relations as nuclear arsenal build-up and geo-political machinations.

All of it spilled over into my school system. It was not a priority, I'll concede, and it was always mitigated a little by some of the more enlightened peace and love rhetoric of the time; but it was there, and we were made aware of it, with no idea whatsoever that it would be over before the decade was out.

In fact, one elementary school teacher said something she shouldn't have, sometime around Christmas 1979. Not sure how the subject came up, but during a discussion in which, to her credit, she had taken to answering as honestly as she could our questions about the possibility of nuclear warfare happening, a kid in our class asked a simple but loaded question:

"What would happen, exactly...?"

The inquiry spanned the entire universe of his young thoughts, I imagine, because it sure as hell did mine. It spoke to the fallout shelter signs we saw every day on the way to and from the cafeteria. It spoke to the snippets many of us heard on the evening news, or the things we caught our parents saying from the periphery of their world. It spoke to our imaginations churning out worst-case scenarios, and the fact that not really understanding any of it made it worse. Indeed, what would happen? What was this all about?


I will never forget her answer. She replied, "Well, there probably wouldn't be much left of anything or anyone."

This planted itself on us, and stayed there.


The only comfort I received contemplating nuclear annihilation as a child was gossamer at best: adults assuring me that my town wouldn't be a target. Thin consolation, having been made aware of the level of destruction that was possible, knowing it would be planet-wide, that everyone would be affected. I labored under a slow, drawn-out terror for years, became a news junkie at eight so I could keep tabs on US-Soviet relations (as if knowing what was going on might somehow keep me safe, or more absurdly, keep it from happening), and freaked out not a little whenever I heard those relations were going sour, even temporarily.

As a result, I still bristle a bit at the sound of a civil air defense siren, even though they go off for relatively innocuous reasons these days (severe weather, or in some communities just to signify it's time for lunch). To me, that multi-tonal wall of noise signifies a great jarring polarity - both the dizzying heights achieved by the mushroom cloud, and the only purported route of safety from that cloud, which is underground. The cloud goes up, and you go down.

I watched a History Channel program recently about the fateful August day in 1945, when the city of Hiroshima, Japan helped usher in the nuclear age. The program recounted in dramatic detail an otherwise serene summer morning in the city, citizens waking up and going about their everyday lives as they always had and assumed they always would, whether Japan won or lost the war.

The scenario depicted in the show so movingly mirrored my dream I was unable to watch the entire thing.

It wasn't even the thought of dying so much as it was the thought of hearing the siren going off, being awoken by it perhaps, looking out my window and seeing that cloud on the horizon, the sky a strange hue. I was more afraid of those final twenty seconds of my life, or final hours, or worse, the long hours and days of nuclear winter following the event, than anything that did or did not await me in the afterlife.

And this perhaps is the defining characteristic of the Cold War: the sense of fear, the practice of being afraid - of cringing, bristling and being ready to cower - growing larger than that which is being feared. This was the pall under which the world labored to breathe for almost fifty years! The air raid siren and mushroom cloud were not alone; there were other images to fill out the picture: the hammer and sickle, the trefoil nuclear symbol, the fallout shelter sign, armies goosestepping, tanks rolling, even the color red (at least in some capacity), both in terms of the Soviet flag, and Red Square, and, of course, blood itself. All of it swirled around in my mind at eight, signified a great threat to not just my world, but all the world, and still pinches me a little bit - just a little - when I think of it today.

And frankly, I was one of the calm ones. There was a kid in my neighborhood growing up who was worse off, kept a truly uneasy vigil for the tenuous relatonship between what could happen and what suddenly looked like it might soon on any given day. It wasn't so much that he was terrified (which he was, bursting into tears more than once), but strangely assured that it was going to happen, resigned to the fact; ready for the end.

The end did come, of course. But it was the end of the Cold War. The United States won the Cold War, and though personally I wouldn't get too comfy with the idea that nuclear warfare could never happen, that mind-pounding oppression in our imaginations, where there is a sky larger than the real one for a mushroom cloud of unearthly size to unfold up and spread across in white, sun-blazed billows of the end of days, is simply no longer present, even in today's wholly troubled world.

In other words, kids today don't fear terrorists the way I feared the Soviets. Do they?

I could be wrong about this, but I just don't see it. And the fear amongst adults isn't the same either, does not seem to be as pervasive, or oppressive. The propaganda is not so artful now as it was allowed to become in the days when it was focused on single enemy, nor as free from scrutiny now as it was then. And that last, on balance, can only be a good thing.

Aside from a certain preparedness that might arise from fear (and this, naturally, always teeters on paranoia), I guess kids today are lucky. They are masters of their own fate. If something, God forbid, happens, it happens. But they don't, and shouldn't, lose sleep over it.

Or dream about it.

They live their lives, as they always have and always will. And that's as it should be.

Remembering Robert B. Parker; remembering how to be alone

The news of author Robert Parker’s death Tuesday was not likely to send shock waves rippling through the media. His passing did not compete for our attention or incite intrigue or outrage like the stuff that, for better or worse, shapes our sense and sensibility in these times. It did not linger amidst headlines for days on end, thirsty for updates, like the sudden deaths of ‘greater’ luminaries in our midst, from Anna Nicole Smith to Heath Ledger to Michael Jackson; it posed no threat of perversely wresting cable news network airtime from the clutches of important issues like the election in Massachusetts, health care reform or the tragic situation in Haiti. In fact, by the time I posted this, the whole of the story’s energy - which so far as I saw was mentioned only on The Huffington Post - had flared up and flashed out of a world where even the most commercially successful writers enjoy a measured fame at best, usually dependent on some other medium to pick up the slack. But for fans of contemporary crime fiction, the unexpected death of Parker - author of the Spenser detective novels, amongst others - at the age of 77, surely packed a wallop as jarring as any right cross his famed P.I. protagonist could unleash.

And for me, it felt like a deeply personal loss.

The first Spenser novel, ‘The Godwulf Manuscript’ – was published in the early 1970s, around the time I was born. This began a literary franchise that would span more than three decades and three dozen books, right up until – it is said – the day…the moment, in fact…Parker died, sitting at his desk. He was nothing if not prolific, and though he wrote other novels, tried other heroes on for size, he never abandoned Spenser completely.

The series’ popularity reached its zenith in the 1980s, with the creation of a television show, ‘Spenser: For Hire’, starring Robert Urich, and it was during this period that I was introduced to Robert Parker’s world. I’ll never forget my father – hoping to assuage the anxieties of his fish-bellied 7th grade son, who had just begun to think, as most people do at that age, ‘what the fuck is wrong with me…??’ - handing me a copy of ‘Early Autumn’.

“I think you’ll like it,” he said, “I think you’ll relate to it. When you’re finished, we’ll discuss it.”

I possessed neither the presence of mind nor the self-awareness to understand what he meant at the time, and resisted the book at first, on principle. Nothing my dad had to offer was anything I needed then. Neither his stated belief that I’d ‘like it’ nor his desire to ‘discuss’ it afterwards (yikes…) struck me as a good sign, and his suggestion that I’d ‘relate’ to it…well, what the hell did that mean?! The book would prove to be embarrassingly irrelevant to anything even remotely connected to my world, I was certain, and I’d have to somehow smile and conceal this fact when he eventually came looking for my book report. Thus for several months, in an act of not only defiance but utter denial, ‘Early Autumn’ floated beneath my bed in a roiling sea of video game cartridges, Beatles records, Garfield collections, dirty magazines, dirty towels and dirty socks.

Eventually though, I picked it up. I don’t know why; perhaps I was worried about hurting his feelings, or spurred into action by his repeatedly asking about it. I only know that I read it straight through, in just about one sitting; and when I did, nothing was ever the same again.

That which made the character of Spenser popular with readers is not hard to understand, really. Parker was a superb story-teller…just a damn good writer. He had a way of blending his compelling attention to detail with characters and storylines that were of tremendous emotional import, and seasoning the concoction with satisfying amounts of requisite humor and action. Though it is no secret he borrowed heavily from crime fiction predecessors, notably Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Parker did it differently; at least, I’ve always thought so. There are some who say he didn’t do it differently enough; that, in fact, he borrowed too heavily. But if that be the case, I contend that if nothing else, he carried on a first-rate tradition in first-rate style.

Spenser was a sophisticated thug, a walking GQ article in many ways; he was a gourmet cook, an avid reader, a quoter of poetry, a connoisseur of everything from good clothes to good food to good beer. These enhanced sensibilities gave him a sharp wit that he wielded as readily as he did his fists or gun, with the intent of both perplexing his adversaries and pissing them off.

But Spenser also worked out. He was an ex-boxer, an ex-cop. He knew things, but he’d lay the smack down in a heartbeat, and do it well. Perhaps no other character in literature was so deceptively deserving of the phrase ‘open up a can of whup ass’ as Spenser.

At the same time, he was a hopeless romantic. The sole recipient of this abiding love, the singularity in his life, was Susan Silverman. Beyond Susan, he had a small coterie of people he could rely on as he plied his trade, from fellow cops to ex-lovers to Hawk, his sometimes mysterious side gun who, like Spenser, was not always what he seemed, although far less complex a character - in terms of what he would and would not do – than Spenser himself.

This world, conveyed through Parker’s carefully detailed prose, was fairly dazzling to the likes of me at twelve. So it was with countless readers, but there was something else about the Spenser mystique that resonated with me. In fact, it very much shaped the person I would grow up to be.

Spenser knew how to be alone.

For most of my young life, I had felt ill-at-ease with myself and not sure why. Overstating it cannot help but come across histrionic, so I will dispense with details and summate that I knew from an early age that I was different. I didn’t know in what way, or to what extent, only that I was alone a lot, and that at twelve, taking my first steps into adolescence (when everything is histrionic) I hated it. By 7th grade, loneliness was quickly becoming an untamed live wire that brought anger and anxiety to me in equal portions, and all the psychological clichés became present as a result: resentment of people around me I deemed as more fortunate, a burgeoning self loathing, a persistent restlessness and dissatisfaction with things, despair at the new social pressures that had befallen everyone my age, seemingly overnight. One day we were all playing together on the playground, or forced to anyway, the next a well-defined social strata had formed with no intervention from parents or teachers. To make matters worse, I was stuck in a netherworld, suffered a form of middle child syndrome amidst all the new cliques. I was not the LAST kid to get picked for dodge ball in gym class, but I was not the first either. I was not cool enough to sit with the well-dressed and well-coiffed kids at lunch (deftly weaving new concepts like dating, dances and attendant drama into their lives), but was simultaneously stricken with a deep disdain for the true nerds and geeks in the cafeteria (huddled at their table in the corner, picking their noses, sweating and being boring, weak and lame).

‘What the fuck is wrong with me…??’ indeed.

Robert Parker’s novels put all of that into perspective, because Spenser was different too. He had the same kind of duality in his personality, which is why he could kick someone’s ass and do it quoting lines from literature that would otherwise lie in darkness were it not for English grad students, and why he was alone a lot of the time. For everything else he was that contributed to a suitably dynamic leading man, Spenser was nothing if not comfortable spending time with himself - not so much because he had to as he wanted to...or preferred it, or saw no other way and was thus okay with it. It was Parker’s version of the ‘loner’ mystique that Chandler had lent Marlowe in the 40s and 50s. I was not familiar with Raymond Chandler or Philip Marlowe when I was twelve, knew nothing of the parallels. I only knew, by the time I had finished ‘Early Autumn’, that I wanted to read more. My dad never got his book report; we never ‘discussed’ anything. But he did get my enthusiastic request for more Spenser novels. I was happy to learn that there were a lot of them, and I began to devour them with a sense of both hunger and greed. I wanted to be Spenser, not only for his more dashing attributes, but for what I felt was a kindred spirit.

When Spenser was alone, when the storyline took him away from Susan, or Susan away from him, he would sit and consider the street light at the end of the block, the way it illuminated certain objects or twinkled through the high wind-tossed branches of trees. He would watch a young couple making their way down the sidewalk in the gathering dusk and contemplate their lives, as they related to his own. He watched shadows bend and stretch in the sunlight, watched traffic cruise past, listened to sounds, absorbed the world bustling past him with a prescribed focus. Parker repeatedly made a point of the fact that Spenser thought; he considered, he pondered.
That’s it! Spenser pondered everything. And if pondering produced no answers, then he made up his own answers, he philosophized…or at the very least, joked. And these thoughts, however they played out and wherever they led, were reliable distractions, time and time again, from loneliness. And that’s what I could do, I realized; that’s what I was good at. When you’re alone, whether by choice or circumstances beyond your control, you have two options: you can fear, or you can ponder. Spenser pondered, and I loved, absolutely loved, that about him.

In one novel, I cannot now remember which, someone asks Spenser why he learned to cook. He answers (and I’m paraphrasing), ‘At some point I realized I’d spend a lot of my life by myself, and to me there’s nothing more depressing than the thought of some guy sitting alone in his apartment eating Chinese out of a carton. I learned to cook for myself.’

What a fantastic concept, I thought! To ready oneself to be alone! To treat oneself as company – company worthy of cooking a great meal for, or engaging in discussion. This philosophy became the yardstick by which I measured myself as I navigated the white water of high school and early adulthood. Self reliance and autonomy, which is the theme of the novel ‘Early Autumn’, became watchwords. It was a lifestyle unto itself, a method by which I could achieve the Catskill eagle in my soul that Melville writes of in ‘Moby Dick’, which soars high and then swoops down, but does so in the mountains, so it never flies too low. Not surprisingly, this is the title of another Spenser novel - ‘A Catskill Eagle’ - one of Parker’s best.

I don’t consider myself the loner I used to; at least, I don’t brandish the mystique as my calling card. I don’t like the thought of being an island; I like people, for the most part, cherish the friends and family I have. But the duality of my personality has only strengthened over time, taken on adult versions of cliques people still scramble to gain access to and identify themselves by. What were once the cool kids at one table and the geeks at another in the cafeteria, have become the liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state, the Louis Vuitton and Wal-Mart, the listeners of NPR and watchers of football, the arts and croissant crowd and the monster truck rally folk, the fierce patriot and the expatriate. I love and hate them both; I want to be each, and am thankful I’m not the other on a day-to-day basis.

For a variety of reasons, all of which are subtle and psychological, this is a recipe for solitude. And solitude all-too-often precipitates loneliness. And when it comes, I still practice the Spenser method. It still brings me great comfort to ponder. It keeps me grounded, upbeat, virtually invulnerable to loneliness, or at least able to open up a can of whup ass on it (nearly) every time it comes skulking around. Pondering still makes silence a time for contemplation, rather than fear. Through my life, it has helped make loss - of friends, of women, of jobs, of time, of whatever - bearable to be able to sit and stare and absorb the world. Maybe everyone feels this; but I learned it from Spenser. Though I have not read a Parker novel for a while, and have, to a certain extent, outgrown them as a reader, they have left as indelible a mark on my psyche as anything I've read, or any other form of entertainment I’ve come across.

That this resonant voice has fallen silent, pains me greatly.

Calling my dad to inform him of Parker’s sudden death was strangely emotional. They are almost exactly the same age, and the significance of this fact – if only superstitious until the moment something happens – was lost on neither of us.

“Those books were a big part of my life growing up,” I reminisced, “they shaped me.”

He shocked (and relieved) me by replying, “And made you a better person, no doubt.”

That was all we said about it, but I was satisfied, and I like to think he was too. It took a quarter century, but we’d finally had our discussion.