Gratitude is a Wonderful and Sometimes Weird Thing
As I sit here in an absolute quiet and try to give some thought to where I am ‘in the season’, I know I am grateful for so much. I am so fortunate to have great family and friends, a mind and body that still work pretty well, projects and activities that engage me, interests and books, especially books! that entertain me and educate me, more than enough creature comforts and too, the ability to regularly help others. I have a professional career as a trial lawyer that has been ridiculously and happily successful. It’s winding down now; I think forty-five years of either heading to the courtroom or being in the courtroom is a gracious plenty and I want to walk out soon with my skill set and enthusiasm intact. I have a new profession, writing and thinking about writing, that is raw and needs much polishing but I am confident I am on the right track. Yes, it has been the year of damned, awful COVID-19, the ‘annualus horribillus’ and so many have been sadly affected but so far, the great majority of us are hanging in and stumbling through so may that good and better news continue.
Now, let me tell you a true ‘young boy’ story that happened a very long time ago and it still resonates and will as long as I continue to reside on this mortal coil. This hits me in the center of my ‘happy place’.
We all can remember where we were when hugely important, often terrifying and sad, events took place. The Kennedy Assassination, President Reagan being shot, The Challenger explosion and of course 9/11 come rapidly to mind.
Now, what I am about the recount is, compared to those difficult events, is insignificant and even banal but between my ears and in my heart, it counts.
It was snowing hard in Winston-Salem that day, big fat wet snow flakes cascading down, inches and inches of them piling up and drifting in the wind. It was a Saturday afternoon. My little brother Paul and I were sequestered in our cinder block basement (none would dare then to call it a playroom!). We both had chicken pox and we itched terribly and had not insignificant temperatures and we were in our pajamas and robes, slathered in stinky, stiffening Calamine lotion.We were idly watching an old black and white television set, box sized as big as the trunk of a sedan with a screen the size of a port hole. We were uncomfortable, bored and distracted.
And North Carolina was playing Notre Dame in basketball up in South Bend and the Tar Heels were getting, as we are prone to say in these parts, whupped and whupped badly.The picture was fuzzy and often both the horizontal hold and the vertical hold would flare into wacky and we would try to twist and wiggle to dials to restore order, usually in a minimal fashion. The antennae on the roof was controlled by some sort of clicking directional dial box and the snow and the wind necessitated our fiddling with that too.The visitors from the Old North State were coached by a then perfectly unknown fellow named Dean Smith who seemed so calm and unperturbed as his charges were getting mashed. It was as though we were passing a minor car wreck-move along here, nothing to see here. During time outs, he never raged and gesticulated. The calm on his face and in his manner was almost beatific. He was clearly in over his head.
But we nothing else to do, we kept watching. I remember that a local sportscaster from WFMY in Greensboro, the legendary Charlie Harville was on the call, his being seconded by another then relatively unknown, a fellow named Jim Thacker. The teams were playing in an old wooden, bandbox gym at Notre Dame and when the Irish would score, there was great cheering and shouting and when the Tar Heels would score, one lone voice just below the broadcasters would clap and holler in lonely support (we later learned he was a Chapel Hill guy pursuing further graduate studies at Notre Dame), the vocal equivalent of King Canute urging the great tides back.
That Heel team had some pretty good players and a young superstar sophomore named Billy ‘The Kangaroo Kid’ Cunningham. He could, it appeared to us, leap tall buildings in a single bound. We became spellbound and the Boys in Blue started clawing their way back into it. We sat up straighter, more intently, in our seats. The ‘Kid’ was leading the charge. It was becoming a close run thing now but time was running out. The Irish scored to lead by one and with but seven seconds left, Coach Smith called a time out, gathered his boys and gently gestured a cobbled play together and sent them back out to execute his teachings.
We were breathless and spellbound.
UNC had to go the length of the court to score. A big, strong fellow named Charlie Shaffer threw the ball inbounds. Cunningham leapt, grabbed it over the flailing hands of a Notre Dame defender, wheeled and heaved up a half court prayer. This surely was not the play Coach Smith had drawn up, was it? And damned if it didn’t go in! The crowd in the gym went deathly still save for the one UNC grad school orphan who went berserk. The announcers were flummoxed but were trying to be calmly professional, a failing effort at that.
And my brother and I exploded out of our chairs, summer lawn furniture and cushions pulled in for the winter going tumbling, and we truly ran around that chilly room like delirious chicken with our heads cut off. Screaming and yelling and jumping up and down and hooting and hollering until we were collapsed on the smooth concrete floor, exhausted, spent and breathless.
Our parents rushed down the basement stairs, not quite comprehending what’d just taken place but quickly realizing we were sick with fevers. They felt our sweating foreheads. We were sternly admonished that we were not to exert ourselves in such a manner, that it could harm our hearts.
We could have cared less. We had just been transported to an ephemeral Twilight Zone of Joy. And we never got over it.
And so, on January 5, 1963, five days shy of my 13th birthday, at about 3 p.m. on a dreary weekend afternoon, I became a Tar Heel to the very core of my being and depth of my soul. Almost 58 years ago, I might as well have been baptized in a river of Carolina Blue and thus, marked for life.
When did ever such a thing happen to you, dear reader?
So, Merry Christmas to all and I will see you all on the flip side! In the meantime, stay safe!
(And yes, I am going to the Orange Bowl to see the Heels battle against the mighty Texas A&M Aggies. I am a lucky boy indeed!)