Playing Amigos

Those of us, who moved from one town to another, know the pain of waving goodbye, and the pain again, of saying hello to strangers.

But I have a feeling that may be an Eternal Life’s Pattern. Are there dozens of so-called “airports” in our endless journey? My Dad always felt moving was progress, which didn’t always mean making more money. It usually meant making the same amount of money doing something different.

When he walked away from Petrolane Corporation’s offer to stay and run Mountain Gas in Bishop, they offered him more monthly salary than he would ever make again, playing corporate businessman, opening their own store in the morning, publishing business cards but with his name.

But Dad insisted on being his own man.  His dreaming of "black swans," made me think of Willie Loman, that painful version of the American Dream. However, Pop was sometimes bigger than life for me and loved by everyone. They affectionately called him The Little Giant. He dreamed like Willie but he knew enough about life to ignore alcohol—except in small packages, say, a can of Bud Light, sitting in the storeroom with Sam Powers, his gentle giant friend, who painted Camp Pendleton army green buildings 8 hours a day and then wandered out to the store to be with Dad.  He would fill a car once in a while with 18 cent Rio Grande Regular and once, he even condescended to play upstart Gene, my brother, a game of checkers.

Not this time. This was not the Battle of Little Big Horn with Uncle Gene as Custer. In less time than it took me to snatch yet another Snickers and gobble it down, the board was clean and The Terror of the Junior Marines was “on the canvas,” as Sam whispered, "It's ovah," his Maine accent still stuck on some words.

It was clear, though, that when I stood up; or, leaned forward, to be honest, and told Dad that I was “not going into business,” I really meant it.

I wanted a salary, security, and safety. I would take Dad’s sage advice and redefine the American Dream. Unlike Nick, in The Great Gatsby, I would not even look across the harbor for the Green light—because there would be only the White Light of God—but no Green Light and no Daisy.

Strange.  I always wanted to be someone else’s man.  By the time my mission in Germany had ground to a 30-month halt, I was looking for a way to be a perpetual student. I liked the “student” rhythm. And at Ricks College that’s what I found. I wanted a salary, a desk, some books and friends to spend my life with. It all happened—well, nearly. I am writing this at 2 in the morning from Austin, Texas, anxiously awaiting the sound of rain. Nothing.

Think of it, though, children. You knew of a man, your grandpa, who slept lightly on Sunday night, not because he had the Monday “blues,” but because he couldn’t wait to be in the classroom, teaching, loving the ideas, and loving the often bewildered but laughing students.

Paradise Regained.

Good people surrounded me, driven by the same sweet compulsions. Ricks was, the cynics say, "The Lord’s College." Well, if you describe a place where there was no political infighting, struggle for rank, or special recognition, a place where everywhere you walked, you just might walk into a colleague who would see you in the temple within the next week. "Then," as Jerry Seinfeld would say, defining yet another human phenomenon: "I think we’re talking about a preeeettty special place."

We shared the hall with the nursing college, so Barbara Quirl was always ready to bandage a thumb or offer the latest on bi-polar disorder, an especially Mother Nature designed torture rack for our home. She drew and then surgically quartered Carolyn’s brain on a regular basis.

Down the hall lived Don Decker, who sneaked into the Marines at 16, traveling to Hell and back by way of Iwo Jima. That meant our daily ritual of handball was Iwo all over again. Craggy faced, he had the heart of a lion—a Good Lion—and the students and those of us who knew him, loved him. I think he read Homer’s Odyssey 50 times and certainly knew dozens of pages by heart—not by head—by heart.

Next door to him was Don Hunter, part time dairyman, poet, teacher, temple sealer, father of 8 children [I think] and a gem of a wife, who really made all of the above possible. He is not only the only guy in Idaho [the whole US?] to have read all of Henry James, but to have both finished The Ambassadors and then walked around the Rexburg winter to think it through.

Don Hammar, our large, deep-voiced Norwegian Viking had the most strength; a stellar member of the handball quintet, he had a vicious serve, the only one of us, really, who could make the ball dance. If you managed to get it back, you had a chance. He was weak in the ankles, so our only hope on his good days was for an ankle to bend like a rubber band and send the gentle giant to the floor. He also had the lowest threshold of pain, so that caused problems and created rare opportunities for the “Dons” to win the Most Critical Point in The Universe! Yelping like Aztecs, Hunter and Decker jumped over The Fallen Viking’s anguished body, supine on the hardwood.  I apologize for Decker and Hunter, Old War-Scarred Warrior. Remember your Aztec history: Death to the losers!

Let me further intercede on behalf of their failings because they were young. In spite of Hammar’s groans, Decker thought only of entrenched Japanese, Hunter of a possible easy point.  It would make milking the cow easier that night.

Bill Conway and I usually tried to stay out of the way of the two Peterbilt trucks and drag the raging Hammar to shore.

Conway was the clinician, expert in self-analysis of posture, swing, follow-through, and body position. I think he knew all of the rules. But his game, for all the soul-searching, didn’t seem to change all that much. He won and lost about as much in the end as he had in the beginning.  One Eternal Round.

I simply aimed for the front wall and was notorious for the infamous “dinker,” a return that slowed to 2 mph and died a slow death in one of the two corners.

Decker would quietly—no very loudly--respond that “most of your shots are so lame they’re not worth going after.” I think he wanted the hard black little ball to bounce with vigor off the ceiling and the four walls. The court was, after all, a box.

If he and Hammar had bazookas, I was carrying a .22, an apparent weapon of choice in our family. Ask my Uncle Roy.

Conway and Hunter were better at playing position and won a lot of games with cunning. I was usually too bogged down in protective gear: goggles, sweatsuit [which hid my imposing calves], headband and wristbands. I looked like a mummy and moved like one. Mummy speed.

Looking back, I was the Court Jester. When Conway or Decker, especially, raced to the back or head-on for the dying duck dinker, I would yell a distracting “troubles!” Troubles? I was working on something beyond the handball court. Fishing for larger, cosmic questions was my business. Trouble at home?  In Denmark? At the office, which a student had set afire?

It rarely worked, but the pause and the stutter it occasionally created made my day. Conway and Hunter kept a four-year score sheet, each claiming “total victory,” something Nixon would bark, or some other politician or general.

Surprisingly, neither Hammar nor Decker seemed to care once the game ended. The dead lions were removed and Nero went home. Actually, I secretly kept score and have the numbers to prove that I WON MORE GAMES. SSSSHHHHHH.

Bill Conway, an accomplished machinist and wood-worker, rebuilds airplanes and mills blocks of metal into diminutive steam engines. A Man for All Seasons. Here is a man who taught a superb Shakespeare class, complete with a much-borrowed test bank and then spent Saturdays rebuilding century-old lathes in order to mill custom-designed engine parts. And now he paints landscapes.

Don Hunter still writes a little poetry, woodworks in his shop, identifies birds of all feathers, and paints. He even went back to school to take painting classes after three LDS missions, after one in Mexico where he labored as a 19 year old. With Spanish-speaking Nita, they served as presidents in Mexico, in humanitarian service in Panama, and as temple president and matron in Santiago. As Brigham said of Jeddy Grant’s funeral: “He served more than a 100 years in the Lord’s church--in less than 35 years.” [Hunter is now 82.]

Don Decker exited this world in grand, Greek epic style:  Failing to belt up to demonstrate a “simple maneuver” on a dangerous cliff in the Grand Tetons, he slipped, falling to his death in the 80s. ”He awakens,” says Hunter, in a eulogy-poem, “to a view of the Tetons/And he will know where he is.” Fearless in the face of death, like my Dad. “Tough minded,” William James calls them.

Yes you will arise, Donald Decker. We still miss you and your warrior spirit, a leader in God’s Army in Another Place.

Don Hammar, another Renaissance man, pours cement, can do finish carpentry and feels at home as a cuisine-artiste of some renown. In fact a friend, with some aplomb, some, I say, asked if Don would be cooking my funeral dinner. Don has cooked for those who mourn. At my wife’s funeral, he couldn’t fix my broken heart, but he and Joan sure “fixed” a lot of grateful people’s stomachs.

But before the funeral there were other cuisine encounters. One day he stopped by with a fresh huckleberry pie. I was trying to paint my daughter’s room. “You have more paint on you than on the walls,” he laughed his hardy laugh.  He came into the house, grabbed a little paint rag and began to paint without protective gear: no face mask, no coveralls, no paint rag the size of a the sail of the Pinta [or Santa Maria]. Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet—the theme song for Out of Africa—played quietly while the winter snow flew and fell. He moved across the ceiling with the roller, covered the walls, and never even had to dob a stain on his clothes from the wet paint.

“Don,” my daughter, Alison asked, “can you show me how to make your cinnamon rolls?”

"Sure; turn on the oven to 400 and we’ll wait."  Back to painting and humming. IT WAS A MOMENT. Mozart and the smell of baking rolls filled the house while snow flittered out of the dark Rexburg winter skies.  In an hour or so we were on the verge of baking greatness, and DaVinci had come and gone.  Now that’s a keeper.

Hammar, in spite of chronic injuries, apparently lived through the handball phase and is doing better these days. No handball, a sport only for the young, but still teaching, wondering if I’ll return this month so we can drive to Kilgore about 3 in the afternoon, ski out 5 miles and make it back before midnight. Afterwards we could eat an entire huckleberry pie.

He was brilliant enough to get into medical school at the University of Washington, but I could never convince him that it would likely take as long to ski back as it took to ski out.

You ask, where is your brother, Gene, your walking companion for 20 years? Well, it was “quick and dirty,” as they say in Idaho. My brother slid into my cross-country skis, fell on his face in a couple of feet of snow, brushed himself off and never looked back. When President Hafen asked what the difference might be between us, Gene said, “Larry’s the compulsive; I’m the obsessive.”

And here we are at 2:30 in the morning; Gene sits in his office, his computer clicking, obeying his regular-army, quick-moving index finger, preparing for a class he’s taught 508 times. I’m up at this wretched hour, unable to sleep, writing about eternal friends who came marching into my dreams. They and all my dear friends, God’s kind gift to me, live within my mind and heart.

Scott Samuelson, the Rookie, arrived too late for the handball epoch. After 5 years, shoulders, knees, and elbows froze up. The smell of Icy Hot filled our homes at night. Other sounds replaced the thunk of the black spheroid.

Samuelson, like these other talented guys, chose racquetball, along with poetry, painting, woodworking, etc. The dreaded racquetball? Too much a lethal weapon. To bump shoulders with one of the first to hit the sand at Iwo was one thing; to be on the wrong end of a pesky club was something else. 

But with Scotty, had I tried the sport, I would have been in good hands. He would have beaten me, but gently, sweetly.  It would even have felt good.

So we “few, we happy” five, left the “Playing Fields of Eton.” Exercise died and Walking-While-Talking was born. Ok, I admit my earlier mistake. For 5 magic years, I Was Homo Ludens. As with the Randy Miller, Ron Messer, and Ralph Thompson Reading Groups, something sweet and eternal lingers long after the lights are, so to speak, turned off and the warriors are heading home. The sweet memories of friendship endure.  No one really kept score [except Hunter], but all of us remember being together.

And in spite of “troubles,” we move on, without Decker, remembering the time we were the Playing Amigos.

Perhaps the tone has gotten out of hand, here. The night wears on and now I’m completely awake and emotional. It was about games, though, wasn’t it? I mean playing, as Huizinga instructs us, allows us to play out the earth’s curse, that hunger every man has to either go to war or play football.

And so we end with the Rookie, Scotty. I did tell you he would hug afterwards, but don’t forget your Bandaids.

Scotty worked from the top of the ability ladder down. Why not begin with the president of the college? A man, competitive to make sure, he finished dessert before you did because he had to. Life was a CONTEST! EVERYTHING. Even the sweet ritual every morning any caring husband knows: making the bed, his half, at least. But you would think him the only man on the globe to help his wife make the bed in the morning—and in less than a minute.

I see him now: jaw squared, muscles tight as violin strings, racquet ready for mayhem. But he always lost. And he didn’t like to lose, which made “our man,” Scotty’s constant victories, even sweeter. No malice, mind you. It’s only a game.

I remind you and me that rigor and gut-straining courage built this Kingdom. And with profound respect, I bow to our former president. I’ve just reread The Giant Joshua. Whipple charts the struggle, that pioneer sinew that built, prophetically, southern Utah into what it is today—good and bad.

Allow Maurine’s irony its play. Faith is the accommodation of ambiguity. And our college and the church became stronger because of that president, who, to be honest, did lead a herd of thoroughbreds to water, and they did drink.

But  he could never handle Scotty’s backhand.

And here in Austin, now early in the morning, all is silent. My Carolyn-designed house, her signature everywhere, covers another family, now a rented house.  Here, the Tabernacle Choir guides me through Handel.

And all is very quiet.