Every weekend my Star Pupil and I try something new and this week it was use of an ax. It was a skill that really wasn’t on the schedule but a box of tools I recently gave him unfortunately included a sort of multi-tool-on-steroids that inexplicably included an ax blade…and as anyone with kids will tell you glaciers can be moved by hand before you’ll get a five-year-old boy to change his mind about something like this.
After a safety briefing we spent about forty-five minutes in the shop chopping away and eventually produced the sundered one-by-two you see in this photo. The process could have been faster but one too many roadrunner cartoons convinced him logs literally jump into with one direct chop with an axe held straight on. I’d demonstrate alternate chopping at an angle but then he’d politely correct me and attempt to bludgeon the board in half.
We finally succeeded in parting the one-by-two and now he’s out with his mom visiting friends while I am busy hiding every other cutting implement before he gets back.
Teaching at Lincoln Memorial University was a good news/bad news type of situation. On one hand the school’s expectations weren’t too high, I had a tremendous amount of freedom in the way I handled my class and there were a few fairly competent students. On the other hand the pay was terrible, the administration gave scant support and most of the art majors avoided my class because I actually expected them to work.
I just told myself I was fortunate to be teaching somewhere.
Capping it all was the miserable commute: while the school was located only 50 miles to the northeast there were several ridges and valleys to transit, and I spent as much time going up and down as I did moving forward. My schedule also had me returning to town in the middle of the evening rush hour which made the last 5 miles as tedious as the preceding 45.
It was a wet, sloppy evening in early November, I was tired and cold, and it was a strain to see through the rain and slow-moving traffic. Struggling to stay awake and alert, I turned on the radio and tuned into the local classic rock station – which like every classic rock station ever had a playlist shorter than a five-year old’s attention span.
I was surprised – instead of hearing the inevitable “Freebird” or “Stairway to Heaven” a young man was talking about Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, a topic which caught my attention in the same way dog whistle rattled a collie. I’d discovered Jung in graduate school, became intrigued with this work, and worked at integrating some of his concepts into my thesis project but just as I was piecing together what was being said, the speaker stopped, and the song he had been so long in introducing started to play.
Electric guitars shot out a very basic but compelling tune which repeated like a car alarm, accentuating the tension and stress of the surrounding traffic. Negotiating this nerve-wracking commute had my pulse pounding so hard I could hear it in my inner ear and when a vocalist suddenly started to sing it took me a moment to hear past the thub-thub-thub.
Like a million little doorways
All the choices we made
All the stages we passed through
All the roles we played
There was no mistaking that voice: Geddy Lee, which meant I was listening to the Canadian rock trio Rush, most appropriate for my situation as I didn’t have the soundtrack for Mad Max in my CD player. Lee continued to sing, his voice getting more forceful and strident:
Somehow we find each other
Through all that masquerade
Somehow we found each other
Somehow we have stayed
Voice and instrument continued to build to a point of frenzy, then suddenly it was like cresting a mountain or going into free-fall:
In a state of grace
Languid guitar chords lead into a restful interlude devoid of the song’s previous intensity::
I don’t believe in destiny
Or the guiding hand of fate
I don’t believe in forever
Or love as a mystical state
The cardiac pounding in my ear eased off as I relaxed a bit
But I believe there’s a ghost of a chance
We can find someone to love
And make it last
And make it last
Guitar chords echoed and a feeling of calm continued to envelope me, but then the chaos abruptly renewed with strident vocals and crashing guitar chords once more
Like a million little crossroads
Through the back streets of youth
Each time we turn a new corner
A tiny moment of truth
The quiet, calm returned:
In a state of grace
I believe there’s a ghost of a chance
We can find someone to love
And make it last
This time when the pattern broke the lead guitar began an improvisational guitar solo that caused my heart to sing as well. It also helped me tune out the lurching/honking/swerving and I was startled to find myself on the last leg from the freeway to my home, free of the tension and chaos of rush hour as the song returned from the solo to the calm of the dreamy interludes:
I believe there’s a ghost of a chance
I believe there’s a ghost of a chance
We can find someone to love
And make it last
…which transitioned into a measure or two of a slightly mournful, slightly wistful echoing guitars. I pulled into the driveway, turned off the engine and sat listening to the tick-tick-tick of the cooling engine. Rush was not a particular favorite group of mine; while I had respect for their talent and dedication, their music and their message usually did not resonate with me … but I had no doubt that at this point Ghost of A Chance was stealth scripture – truth given in an unexpected manner that would have otherwise been ignored, and at this very low point in my life it contained a very important message for me.
Tomorrow morning I would get up bright and early and face another week head on:
submitting job applications to colleges sure to ignore me
canvassing art directors who routinely told me I was too old
worshipping in a congregation that cornered the market on cliques
teaching students who regarded study as a process akin to hustling free t-shirts at a concert
….but right now as I walked in the door…
You know I read somewhere that the onion is a distant relative to the opium poppy. Maybe that’s why I felt calm and happy as I walked into the house, maybe I was getting a contact high as Lori was browning onions in preparation for making soup, but I knew there was more to the warmth I felt. I drew it all in as I shelved my teaching binder and hung up my coat: music was softly playing on the stereo and my sons had their yearbook open, scoping out the young ladies while conducting a post-game wrap-up of the Oldest Game Ever. Wrapped in the warmth of my family I felt the very essence of joy.
It may be that life was getting the best of me, that the academic and creative arenas in which I fought daily were more than a forty-year man could handle, but as long as I had this wonderful home and family as a place of refuge I had a chance, albeit a ghost of a chance.
It’s been a good news/bad news type of situation the last couple of days. Good in that I’ve gone almost five months without an upper respiratory infection, bad in that I’ve finally come down with some kind of bug but good (?) in that it is some sort of stomach virus and I’m still able to breathe. I’m not getting as much done as I’d like but I’m grateful to be able to work.
My Star Pupil and his father helped me with installing a shelf in my Beautiful Saxon Princess’ part of the closet. In these types of situations BSP just laughs at me “at the five minute mark I hear you voice slip into that measured cadence and I know at that point you’re in teacher mode again. “
I don’t know how many of my readers live in Seattle, but if you do live in the Emerald City, work in a creative field and are interested in professional development I would recommend enrolling in The Rekindle School (https://www.classesandworkshops.com/). Rekindle is an independent education program loosely affiliated with the Seattle Experimental College and features classes in traditional art, cartooning, writing and film-making.
Nils Osmar is the writer, director, producer, principal and chief cook/bottlewasher of this program and every semester he puts together an entire academic program from scratch. Even if his former students didn’t sing his praises as a teacher and creative professional I would still recommend him highly, if nothing else but for the firm shove he gave me towards professionalism when I was taking baby steps towards a creative career 40 years ago.
Nils is one of those rarest of animals – an established creative professional who is also a decent teacher. Not only can he walk the walk, he can talk the talk….and you’ll understand him when he does.
My Star Pupil spent a couple of hours in the studio with my Beautiful Saxon Princess and I. He had made a snake and lady-bugs out of Paperclay a few days earlier and yesterday they had dried enough to paint.
When I wrote about shuffling studio space the other day I failed to mention one important point – why I made the change. Yes, I wrote earlier that the move was meant to get me moving, but what I didn’t mention is that it wasn’t just exercise-type moving that needed to happen.
I needed to move out of a window.
A couple of weeks ago I was informed that my contract was not being renewed at the junior college I have been teaching at since the doors opened in the fall of 2012. I’ll skip editorial comment other than to say that the dismissal was handled in a most callous manner because the first reaction I had when I found out was a feeling of serenity.
Never mind the abrupt last-minute email message.
Never mind the loss of income.
Never mind the fact that at 65 it’s doubtful that I will ever be hired to teach again.
When I read of my dismissal I sat back and the thought came me: “When a door opens God will open a window.
OK – I admit it. In the past I’ve dismissed that phrase as trite and over-used, but it’s the first thought that came to mind and it has prompted me to jump-start other parts of my life and career – and I am convinced the new studio is an important part of that new beginning.
What’s more: when we finished the move and surveyed both the new studio and the sitting room in the space the old studio used to take up both my Beautiful Saxon Princess and I felt an overwhelming sense of “right” in the new arrangement.
Even at 65 I am drawing all the time. I have two sketchbooks, one of them a little 3″X5″ field journal and the other a section in the back of my planner. As a good part of my early training was in industrial design I usually work with designer’s markers over black line work, but sometimes I forego the color. This young lady ended up looking too melancholy for color.
I rotate subject matter between drawing from life, drawing from photos, drawing after another artist’s work and drawing ideas from my imagination. I am a firm believer that emulating another artist’s work is a good idea as long as doing so is a tool instead of a crutch. I feel the same way about tracing (tool vs. crutch) but it took comics legend Neal Adams to convince me that there was no better way to learn anatomical details that were particularly vexing.
That little circle-y symbol to near the young lady’s right elbow is my logo/sigil/symbol – I use it to “sign” sketchbook works and three-dimensional work.
Also – Facebook has changed the parameters for the way outside material can get automatically posted and I think I’ve lost some readers in the confusion. I am in the process of figuring out a way around the problem but in the meantime please encourage people to “follow” via WordPress or other means.
The call came the spring of 1999, shortly before the second of our three trips from Knoxville back to the Kenai Peninsula. The ravages of Parkinson’s disease made difficult for Dad to make himself understood on the phone, but there was no mistaking the message of his call:
“Son, I miss you and I don’t have much time left. What would it take to move you home?”
I was stunned speechless. My father was thrifty to a fault and had turned me down once before when I had asked for help getting home right after I finished grad school, but that wasn’t the sole reason for my discomfort. I wasn’t sure if we could make the move back – and It was the first time that Alaska hadn’t immediately trumped every other card in my hand. The truth was we’d invested a lot time and energy to “bloom where we were planted” in East Tennessee.1 Plans were in place to get the boys through their missions, we were finally winding up Meghan’s adoption process and my part-time teaching gig showed signs of becoming a fulltime job. A 4000-mile move was not the simple decision it was when our family was much younger. It would need substantial planning, but fortunately the vacation back home that we’d already planned for the summer would allow us to gather information we’d need for such a move.
We came back from the trip feeling positive about moving but during our first church meeting back I was abruptly pulled aside by a friend whose family was undergoing some rough times. She hissed: “You’re leaving, aren’t you? You’re going home? YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME! You can’t leave now. I need you! My whole family needs you! Our whole world is falling apart and you’re the only people I can depend on!”
…which put the needle on my awkward-o-meter well into the red caution zone. I knew from personal knowledge that she wasn’t exaggerating – if anything she was down-playing her domestic situation and unfortunately, I was still at a point in life where I thought I was Batman and could save anyone. She was so distraught that I mumbled something vague about postponing the move and for the time being we went back to the exquisite hell that is life for a Yankee in the Southern Appalachians.
…but then the real problem was that we weren’t Yankees – or Southerners. Living on the northern arc of the Pacific Rim took us neatly out of north vs. south // urban vs. rural // mountain vs. flatland // red state vs. blue state rivalries. However, to be brutally honest I couldn’t care (bleeping) less whether I was in a red, a blue or a purple state. The only state color I ever cared about was the white state – Alaska.
Alaskans are different – and when I refer to Alaskans I’m not talking about snowbirds who try the Great North on as an experiment then run back to Oregon or Ohio when they find out life is hard on a frontier. I am referring to a person whose feelings for the last Frontier cannot be indexed against the size of this year’s PFD pay-out. Someone whose emotional bond with the state is more a matter of citizenship rather than residency.2
It’s said that you can take the boy out of Alaska, but you can’t take Alaska out of the boy. If you talk to anyone that knows me well you’ll find that I have never completely left – and for the first twenty years of our marriage that was literally the case as education, military and ecclesiastical service prompted moves back and forth between the Last Frontier and the Lower 48. Every plan and/or decision in my life included the end goal of returning to Alaska – we’d never have left Alaska in 1989 if my job situation with Kenai Peninsula College hadn’t been changed by university politics.
By the same token an extended stay in Knoxville after graduate school was never part of my plan – it would be more accurate to say that we were marooned in East Tennessee by a combination of unforeseen setbacks. In the last forty-five years I’ve moved 22 times and lived in 16 different states but at heart I am still an Alaskan boy with an Alaskan license plate on the front of my car.
The funny thing is that I didn’t really think of myself as an Alaskan until I left for college in 1971. Since moving north in 1962 I’d thought of myself as a transplanted Californian – I kept up regular correspondence with my cousins and seemed to make friends easier with other transplanted kids who had been hauled north by parents either serving out at Wildwood Air Force Station or working as petrochemical managers and engineers getting the new North Road refineries running smoothly.
Sometime during the winter of 1970-71 that mind-set began to change – and like most major changes in my life it was brought about by a very minor incident, in this case a story I heard while serving as a teacher’s aide in gym class. While sorting and folding towels Marie (my counterpart from the girl’s class) told me a story she’d heard in her Alaskan history class about a native witch that lived in the area many years ago. This witch never seemed to age until the day she accidentally left her tribal lands – her hair immediately began to streak with grey, wrinkles creased the skin of her face and the joints in her arms and legs became stiff and painful. It was all very terrifying until she stumbled back over onto home turf and the effects reversed just as quickly. The story became a predictable series of mishaps involving the witch (or her victims) inadvertently crossing the line.
Of course, I had to turn it into another of my very predictable running jokes, so from then on, I would always call for a shoe check whenever Marie would come into the room, the idea being that she was somehow a descendant of the witch and was able to retain her youth by hiding a small bit of dirt in her shoe that would allow her to still be technically “walking on tribal land”. At the same time though the witch story did more than just supply material for my sense of humor – it also generated in me an awareness that there could be something intangible linking me with the Great Land that surpassed all other relationships.
Maybe that’s why I was so careful unpacking my carryon bag when we got back to Knoxville after that trip in the summer of 1999. I didn’t bring back dirt for my shoes, but I did have a couple of small, smooth pebbles from the north pasture on the homestead where I had always wanted to build a home after moving back. As time goes by the chances of getting home keep getting slimmer and slimmer but I refuse to give up hope and until then those two pebbles will serve as a link.
I’d like to say karma rewarded our sacrifice for staying put to help our friends but unfortunately that was not the case:
Martin Landau never made it to the moon by September 13th and in the process tipped the entire Space:1999 continuity over into the ashbin of cancelled TV series.
The move back home kept getting postponed and the next time I saw my Dad he was in his casket at his funeral four years later.
Shortly after this story the friend that so desperately needed us to stay in Knoxville informed us that since her “family was doing fine she didn’t need us as friends anymore.”
It was tough dealing with that statement /snub because I had yet to learn to stop crossing oceans to help those couldn’t be bothered to step over a puddle in return. Fortunately, there was something else that helped me move on, an aspect of my life and identity remains the same: Even though our subsequent move to Clarksville kept us in the Volunteer state I cannot refer to myself as a Tennessean, I cannot sing the entire Alaskan Flag song without breaking into tears and the sun always appears too bright and too high in the sky
Regardless of my physical location I am and will always be an Alaskan boy.3
In his epic poem “Cremation of Sam McGee”, Robert Service states that Sam’s home town was Plum Tree, Tennessee. When planting trees in our yard in Knoxville I made sure the first one put in was a plum tree.
I’ve spent my life performing residency calculus – totaling up years, months, days – even hours and minutes that I’ve spent physically existing within the state’s borders. For years I was obsessed with keeping my “Alaskan citizenship”: From 1971 to 1989 I bounced back and forth like a tennis ball between the Last Frontier and various locations in the Lower 48, and for most of that time I was able to keep my Alaskan driver’s license with its wonderfully low number.
I had started to doze off while rereading Larry Niven’s Protector when the phone rang.
The caller started speaking rapidly: ““Hey Mr. Deitrick – this is Denny” Before I could respond he continued: “Yeah, since it was Christmas and all that I thought I’d give you a call and see how you were doing. You were always my favorite teacher and PLEASE HELP ME FIND A JOB! IF I DON’T START BRINGING SOME MONEY INTO THE HOUSE MY MOM IS GOING TO KICK ME OUT!
It was at that point that I remembered my caller as a former student from Lincoln Memorial University.
Fall 1993
I doubt I’d have gone to graduate school if I hadn’t been pushed into it. When the state of Alaska placed all the community colleges under the university system in 1989 it meant that in order to continue teaching I needed a terminal degree , which in my case would be an MFA. However, returning to teach at KPC wasn’t the sole factor inducing me to borrow obscene amounts of money; according to the media, colleges all over the nation were anticipating a record level of retirement in their liberal arts faculties. If KPC didn’t work out I should have the pick of any number of schools where I could dispense my aesthetic wisdom.
It wasn’t the first time in my life that a beautiful theory was shot down by a cold hard fact. The recession of 1992 hit universities as hard as anyone else which meant A) there were fewer retirements than anticipated and B) many schools elected not to refill vacancies created by those who did retire. Each advertised position would now attract more than 100 applications and I managed to strike out with every application I made.
I lost no time in launching an ambitious program of promotions and portfolio showings to build the freelance work that had dwindled during graduate school, but I found that the market had changed, and my highly identifiable style was not as popular as it had been just a few years earlier. I had also unfortunately taken an extended leave of absence from my reserve unit so even that modest income was no longer coming in…all of which meant my family and I were stuck 4000 miles away from home with a mortgage, a sizeable school debt and very few prospects.
As I was contemplating this dire set of circumstances one day, I received an unexpected phone call concerning an instructor’s position at Lincoln Memorial University located near historic Cumberland Gap northeast of Knoxville. Their nascent design program was foundering, and they needed a good teacher to keep them going – and I was thought to be the ideal candidate.
I gave the matter deep consideration – and after fifteen seconds I agreed to take the job and made plans to visit the school two days later. I would need those two days just to find the school – the location of the school and background information were not easy to find in those pre-Internet days but I was able to dig up just enough to get me to the school and talk in a fairly informed manner about the situation.
The trip to the school took longer than planned as I adjusted to the up-and-down nature of the route – terrain in East Tennessee strongly resembles corduroy fabric and I had to cross ridge after ridge on my way to the school. I was met on arrival by the head of the art department, which was very impressive until I found out that the entire department consisted of just two teachers. It was then that I learned I would basically be the entire graphic design program which had been languishing since the original founder/teacher left the previous summer.
Hard work had never bothered me but within a few weeks it became clear that the program needed more than just industry. The department lacked proper computer support, and it soon became clear that the school was hoping that I would somehow be able to obtain (without cost to them) the necessary software – the kind of situation that brought to mind the character of Wimpy in the old Popeye cartoons when he’d tell Olive Oyl: “Come on over for a duck dinner. Please bring the duck”.
Once I made it clear that I wasn’t buying any programs, I found that the situation was a good introduction to teaching college and that I was learning as much as the students. Old habits die hard; as a former intelligence officer I was prone to look for patterns in groups of people and I soon discovered trends in the way classes would organize themselves, trends that would repeat themselves in every class I would teach over the next twenty-five years.
Every semester the same type of student sat in same place in each classroom – for example the smartest student (but not always with the highest GPA) always sat two seats from the rear of the row along the left wall while the student with the highest GPA always sat two seats from the front row of seats along the right wall.
Students used the same excuses no matter the subject, composition or geographic location of the class.
Class composition in terms of talent was consistently the same as well – 10% of the classes were extremely talented go-getters, 10% were totally hopeless and completely devoid of talent while the remaining students seemed to be just milling about marking time.
Each class had one poseur who been very successful in high school and was now coasting on a few selected techniques and types of subject matter, never progressing beyond those sure hits.
Denny was the poseur in this class; he had a half-dozen programmed images and no matter what assignment I gave he would turn in a hillbilly portrait, a totally bitching burning skull or one of his other canned compositions. Critiques had little effect as every comment I made was met with “I meant to do that”. At any other time or place I would have flunked him but third world tuberculosis babies were healthier than the LMU design program and I had already been informed that students were avoiding my classes because I had the audacity to expect good work for good grades. The best I could do was try to keep all the students moving in the same general direction…
…so it was no surprise that I jumped ship two years later when a position opened up at another college where I was free to terrorize my students into doing their best. Four years later I’d assumed I’d made a clean break with my Cumberland Gap students but now I had a very panicked Denny on the phone and as much as I wanted to just say “TOLD YA SO!” and hang up, the teacher side of me kicked in and I started brainstorming with him for solutions.
It turned out that he had taken the same “pose” in all his classes and managed to graduate without the skills necessary to enter either the work force or graduate school. Fortunately he was able to enroll in remedial design classes at another university and learn enough to start doing basic layout for a local shopper’s guide. At that point I withdrew, feeling very smug about the way I had wisely handled a common problem in design classes and education in general – the student who is sure they already know it all.
Then three nights later I woke from a sound sleep, sat straight up out of bed and realized that I really wasn’t so different from my former student. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the business – it’s stressful showing your portfolio to prospective clients. Most of the time you get nods and very general but nice comments but now and then you’ll get someone who digs in and critiques – like the New York City editor that had recently looked at my work and suggested I take some additional figure drawing classes. I smiled, said “Thank You” and walked out muttering under my breath about “15 years freelancing, five years teaching and a Master of Fine Arts degree!”
I’d been just as bad as Denny had been.
It took me a while to set things up, but eventually I went into what Lori called my “self-administered MFA in figure drawing”. I started drawing figures from life, reference photos and occasionally from another artists’ work. No matter how hard I was working or how busy I was I would always draw five figures a week.
Then one day after several years of all this extra work I looked down at my drawing board and realized that I had become a much better draftsman when it came to anatomy – but at the same time I realized that all that extra work wasn’t just about improving the figures I drew. It made me a better teacher as well and gave me a better grasp of what’s going on in the mind of each new Denny that I encounter.
…and I can also tell them with conviction that the extra effort will definitely pay off in the end.
Boy/girl romantic mushy stuff kind of ambushed me; it seemed like overnight everyone went from playing army to “playing the field”, which was tough when there were eight boys to two girls in my eighth-grade class. Without an older brother to pattern on I was clueless when it came to managing the romantic side of life – but while there were several situations dealing with love & hate during eighth grade, none of which (unfortunately) involved girls. Living in Sterling was a love/hate relationship; while I hated moving to the Peninsula from Anchorage I was finally making some good friends. Participating in sports was a love/hate relationship; I loved doing things with my friends, but I hated the fact that I had absolutely no skill in sports at the time. Having Head Teacher in both a classroom setting and as a coach was not so much a love/hate relationship as an endure/hate situation.
On one hand Head Teacher was impressive – he fought across Europe with the glider infantry in World War 2, he was personally very intelligent, and he worked hard to improve Sterling School, establishing both a sports program and a controlled reading program that raised reading speed and comprehension in every student that participated. Most importantly he elbowed the school district into completing a badly needed but often delayed multipurpose room that served as combination cafeteria/gymnasium and counterbalance to student cabin fever.
On the other hand, he could be meaner than hell, especially if you embarrassed him. I made the mistake of making the ethnic distinction that “Scotch is what a Scotsman drinks” and paid for it for the rest of my life. Head Teacher was one of those people unable to handle conflict with a kid without descending to a kid-level of thought and action himself; he took offense easily and never tired of carrying a grudge, an unfortunate tendency aggravated by the lunch he often took in liquid form. I do have to say that he gave credit where credit was due; during class discussions he’d ask for my input when searching for a title, definition or some other bit of information from any of my areas of interest, and when I placed first in the school district science fair he showed just as much support for me as he did for his designated favorites.
Unfortunately, his model of character assessments placed a bit too much emphasis on athletics for an elementary school environment and as I consistently lagged two or three years behind my peers in developing strength speed and athletic skills it was a sure bet that I would miss getting on board with the Head Teacher sports machine.
The first sport of the year was softball, which for me was a qualified success: I got to suit up, but I sat on the bench for the entire season. As the year progressed and we changed sports I decided on a more attainable goal and applied to be the manager of the basketball team. Head Teacher somehow convinced me to try out for the team instead of that manager’s position and while I didn’t miss a single practice I never was tapped to suit up for even a single game. Given my relative lack of athletic talent at the time I wasn’t too troubled by the perpetual benching, but it soon became obvious that talent was not the deciding factor. No matter how well I did in practice I’d be passed over at game time, and it became quite a bitter pill to swallow when he started to fill the second team with fifth graders who routinely failed to get a ball even close to the net, much less through it.
It didn’t matter. I still showed up every Wednesday night and Saturday morning to participate in the all the exercises and drills to include the dreaded final four-lap run around the gym at the end of practice. It was a definite challenge to stick with the program especially since I was so bad at the sport that the only feedback I was given consisted of variations of the same message: “You’re a loser”.
I still showed for every practice – and I also went to every game without fail where I’d sit in the stands and cheer for my friends with the same dogged determination as when I’d try (and fail) to make a lay-up shot. Despite the vindictive and petty needling, it never occurred to me to quit.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my Mom worried about me the whole season – that I would somehow end up emotionally damaged because of the experience. Unfortunately, some of her fears were well-founded; any effort at bettering myself seemed pointless after being so thoroughly schooled in my own total lack of value that I ended up just drifting through high school until college and a change of venue altered my outlook.
…. but it actually wasn’t a juncture almost forty years later that Head Teacher’s tutelage showed its true value. In a deep discussion about permanent solutions to temporary problems Mom paused and said, “You know, Fritz can take the credit for this” – a comment which totally bewildered me at first. When I mumbled something about his actions causing the current situation she stopped me cold:
“No – he made it possible for you to survive! I saw what Fritz was doing, and it broke my heart to see how he constantly (expletive deleted) with your head…but as hard as it was – never missing a practice but never playing – dealing with the constant belittlement in class– you never quit…
“It made you stronger.”
She was right, and that’s why when I heard of his passing I smiled instead of making my usual snarky comment. I haven’t won every battle in life, but I’ve always stood up one time more than I’ve been knocked down. It had never occurred to me that each time I got knocked down Head Teacher’s antics would come to mind – and would jolt me into getting up again, and for that I must give him credit where credit is due.
The experience also gives a clue to the question in this post’s title.
I have no affinity for basketball in any form or level of competition. My sort-of twin sister Heather loves the game and maintains that Head Teacher is responsible for that attitude, but to be totally honest it is a chicken vs. egg type of situation. I wasn’t a fan before I tried out for the Sterling team in the winter of 1967 and afterwards…well the only time I even thought about the game was when I had to deal with the irritating and pointless distraction it presented to every pack, troop, team and post that I worked with in my 30+ years as an adult leader in the Boy Scouts.
David R. Deitrick, Designer 