Being here

May 12, 2011

Dear Patty,

In junior high school the Central football and basketball games provided my primary entertainment. The athletes on those teams were heroes to me, maybe especially because I was a scrawny kid. They were better than comic book heroes. They were real. So were the cheerleaders.

The scoreboard in the high school gym listed the names and jersey numbers of every player on the team. Red lights next to each name indicated how many fouls each one had. One season the list included R.C. Grossheider, Lonnie Blackwood, Greg Brune, Mike Price and others.

Further back my memory gets hazier. It helps if the players had nicknames like Kermit "Moose" Meystedt and Paul "Nugget" Banks. Gary Schemel was a stalwart on the football, basketball and track teams. A year after high school graduation Marine Gary Schemel drowned crossing a river in Vietnam. That was real, too.

Few if any of these names are in the school football and basketball record books anymore. Teams score more and athletes have gotten better. But in my memory those players from the mid-'60s are like faces on an athletic Mount Rushmore.

Years after their graduation, I played sandlot ball with one of the stars. Lee Roll still was sure he never stepped out of bounds on the touchdown run that was called back and would have beaten Poplar Bluff, the only game the Tigers lost that year as I recall. But I may recall wrong.

Memories are rarely accurate. Most fit neatly into the stories we've constructed about our lives. But they're only stories about our own drama.

As long as you want things to be a certain way you can't see how things really are, Ram Dass said.

In California I went to a talk by the Harvard psychologist who went to India in the 1960s and became a spiritual teacher. In India he found people living as if they are their souls rather than living, as most of us do, as if we are our egos. The difference is between who we are and who we see in the mirror.

Paul Banks moved back home after many years in California and sometimes plays golf with the group I play with. His knees are bad, maybe from charging into the line from his fullback position, but he's still athletic. At first I was junior-high awed to be playing with one of those heroes, but Paul is not still living in those glory days. He told me going down memory lane doesn't interest him.

Paul is interested in what's next. It's in his golf game. His focus is on this shot. This putt. He encourages each one. And if he mishits, he mourns and complains for only a moment. And moves on.

Ram Dass, who enjoyed golf, told us: Be here now.

That's how the game is played.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.