COMING HOME!

COMING HOME

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 24, 2014

 

On August 27, 1990, I had just completed a book that had been germinating in me for many years.  I called it “Work Without Managers,” and it was published later that fall. 

But on this date, my mind was not one of satisfaction or relief.  It was a call from my sister, Pat Waddell that my boyhood friend, Bobby Witt, had died.  He was in his fifties, a Hall of Fame high school basketball coach, and a high school all-stater in the same sport, playing with me.  We played high school football, baseball, and ran track together.  We also lived three houses apart in the shadow of the Clinton County Courthouse.

I, also in my fifties, had retired for the second time, the first time in my mid-thirties.  Life had always been a chore for me, which had nothing to do with success after success.  Perhaps that was because success also meant stress after stress, which for me led to distress. 

I’ve always been a bit of a grind.  I suppose because I’m not too confident, always felt that I was one great big phony, putting on a front to being what I wasn’t and pretending to feel what I didn’t.  My happiest times have always been alone, not with people, yet my many careers have always put me in the center of a lot of people doing what people in such centers do, which is pretend.

It got to me so badly when I was in my mid-thirties that I turned my back on what was considered a “brilliant career” and financial security to sit around and read books, write poetry, play tennis, watch the ships come into port and leave, watch the people frantically rushing about, thankful that I was no longer on that freight train.

Late in life, in my early fifties, I discovered something that I thought only existed in books, love.  I met a creature that was so real she was surreal, and I have spent these many years since with her.  I was married to her when my friend died, she a generation younger than I am, had little sense of why I was so blue.  At least, that is what I thought.  She said simply, “Jim, your mind is just going home.”

That was a most kind way of saying I was thinking of my mortality.  No doubt I was thinking of my beginnings because I was moving towards my end.  The death of my friend was a stark reminder of that fact.  My beautiful Betty didn’t say that because she is far too kind, but that was the essence of her comment.

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer points out that when we reach an advanced age, and that age can be in our 40s, 50s or beyond, the mind is given to looking back over one’s lifetime, as I was doing and didn’t know it. 

I was with Bobby Witt again, he was pitching and I was catching, I was handing the baton off to him in a relay race in track, he was going around end with the football in a key game with Davenport, that we won, and I was his lead blocker, we were sneaking into the professional baseball game, going over the fence, we were hanging out at Rastrelli’s  having a chocolate marshmallow peanut sundae with a cherry on top.   We were at the movies seeing our fighting G.I.’s in Iwo Jima or Bataan during the war, watching Dean Burridge, our coach at St. Patrick’s, star in football and basketball at Clinton High, serving Mass together for Father Harvey Finefield, or listening to Sister Cecile read “Brass Knuckles” to the class, or letting us listen to a couple innings of the World Series with broadcaster Red Barber. 

Bobby would never go to the YMCA because “Father Finefield said that was not a place for Catholic boys,” but I went there all the time.  Bobby was equally poor as I was but he never worked, and I always did, with a newspaper route, or stacking shelves at the A&P Supermarket.  Bobby was also brighter than I was, but he never read books, and I was always reading.  He found it funny with my head always in a book, and told me so.  But he always had his head in some sporting magazine.  He wanted to be a Major League Baseball Player, but he had two things working against him, living in Iowa where we had eight months of winter, and seemingly two weeks of summer, and what baseball scout would ever think of coming to Clinton, Iowa? 

Bobby went to college on a basketball scholarship that paid everything.  I went to college working five summers in a chemical plant, and on a merit academic scholarship that only paid tuition.  He became a coach and didn’t leave the Midwest, not even when he was in the army.  I became a chemist, which was not a good fit, went into the navy and spent two years on active duty in the Mediterranean, and that changed everything for me.  While most guys hit the beach and got drunk and laid, I went on tours, finding myself something of a culture vulture.  I wanted to know everything about everything that ever happened to my native continent, the home of my ancestors in Ireland and Norway. 

In the process, I wrote copious letters finding that my da was right – I didn’t write a very good letter – but passion doesn’t always burn with good sense.  I wanted to be a writer!  But of course, without any talent, only this strange passion. 

Since I couldn’t write well, and had to work, I had to substitute reading successful authors and their biographies as surrogate for my writing aspirations, finding that many writers, perhaps most, were as confused about their talent or lack of talent as I was about mine.  I found most writers wanted desperately to connect with other people so that they could in turn connect with themselves.  I never read a serious writer who was not plagued with that malady.

All of this strange thinking was tripping through my head as I thought about my boyhood friend who was no longer with us. 

Schopenhauer claimed everything that happens in our lifetime -- everything! – has a consistent order even when it seems it doesn’t, and that in that order there is a plan, and that plan is as if it were composed by a novelist. 

Things that seem accidental, hurtful, shameful, discouraging, regrettable, surprising, he said, things that seem to have little moment are indispensable factors in the composition of our own unique plot. 

Aspects of ourselves of which we are conscious, that become conscious to us when we think of our dreams, are part of a grand design that is recorded in our unconscious and composed by the will within us.

A shock to our system finds us going home, as my wife Betty suggested, which was obvious to her when I was mooning over the loss of my friend.  It was my mortality coming to the fore.  It was also the process of coming home surfacing to take charge of my attention. 

Life constantly blows us off course and into troubled waters that are of little consequences in the scheme of things, but alas, we make them momentous when they are only moments. 

Coming home reorients us back to ourselves recapturing the essence that has made us unique from everyone else, a uniqueness that cannot be dissuaded by someone saying “you have no talent,” or “you don’t even write a good letter,” or “you’ll never amount to anything,” or any number of other discouraging things, things, unfortunately, that our minds are so ready to accept as fact when they couldn’t be more fictive.

Three years ago last February I lost a daughter to a hit-and-run driver as she was crossing a street in Pinellas County, Florida.  That was different than my reaction to my boyhood friend's death.  He was a friend.  My daughter was part of the chemistry of my soul. 

Some writers would turn that pain into a book, but I instead savored it then as I do now, as it is a connection that has no interruption.  Bobby was my past, and my mind drifted to those halcyon days of that quiet time.  Jeannie was my life with another face.  She was never quiet, not in her mother, and never during life, and she is not quiet in my soul now. 

There was no pretend in that girl.  As my granddaughter, Rachel, might say, “Jeannie had no filter.”  She said what was on her mind without editing.  There wasn’t an expletive that she didn’t know, and couldn’t bring to the fore creatively at a moment’s notice.  She could make a sailor blush. 

Strangely, I had an unease with who I am and who I purport to be with Bobby, but not with Jeannie.

Any parent who has lost a child knows exactly what I am talking about.  Only the real is remembered, and it is in more than three dimensions. 

There are no words to describe the hurt or the joy or the love that reverberates in your soul.  There is no language to remind you of coming home again to nestle that child in your arms. 

With Bobby Witt there are coherent moments but with Jeannie there is only loss.  Memory of Bobby moved me to eventually write IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) about our days as children.  Jeannie death recaptured something that was missing in my memory of that childhood, that is, my life with her moment to moment in joy and sorrow, frustration and disappointment, but always, love.  Bobby gave me eyes to see my childhood self.  Jeannie circled deeper into my soul to reveal the child in the man, and the adult in the child with eyes that looked down from above on us both.