March Madness

I can remember standing outside the old gym, in the cold, with snowflakes falling from the sky. There was a long line of people waiting to get in. Fortunately, my family had season tickets, because there weren’t any tickets available to this game. The old gym only seated about 2000 people, a few hundred more if the fire marshal wasn’t looking.

This wasn’t big-time college basketball, and it was nothing like you’d see today when you’re watching March Madness. This was the early 70s at a small college in a small conference, which had always had a dreadful basketball team.

Until now. Now the basketball team was winning, and everybody in town wanted into Memorial Gymnasium to watch them. There were no plush seats in this gym; everybody sat on wooden bleachers that came almost right up to the court. Our seats were in the end, just to the right of the basket, in the second row. To this day, I like watching a basketball game from the end. I love watching the flow of the game as it’s coming towards me.

Why was this team suddenly winning? A couple of streetball players from New York City had been recruited to this sleepy little Southern town, and they were changing the way the game was played here. Their supporting cast were mostly local kids, who had never seen basketball played like this, for both good and bad. Think about what you’d get if you put a couple of street kids on the team from Hoosiers, and that’s sort of what it was like. It wasn’t exactly great fundamental basketball; it was wild and unpredictable. At the center of it all was Fly Williams, the wildest and most unpredictable of all.

If you’ve read Heaven is a Playground, by Rick Telander, you know a lot about Fly Williams. If you haven’t, you should; it’s a great basketball book. I didn’t read it myself until much later. Back then, I was a kid, mesmerized by what the Austin Peay Governors were doing.

I remember more than just Fly. I remember Danny Odom, another New York kid, much quieter than Fly. I remember Richard Jimmerson and Mickey Fisher, local kids that I had watched in high school. I remember Percy Howard, who would later go on to play football briefly for the Dallas Cowboys, briefly, but long enough to catch a touchdown pass in a Super Bowl. I remember Howard Jackson, whose college career was cut short when he shattered both ankles in a fall while working a summer job in construction. Lake Kelly, the head coach, took Jackson into his home to live while he recovered.

Leonard Hamilton was the assistant coach who brought Fly and Danny Odom to Peay (and yes, the cheer really was “Let’s Go, Peay”, and yes, Peay is pronounced like pee.) I remember his younger brother, Willie, who played one season for the local high school, but then it was determined that he was ineligible, that his transfer was not allowed.

I remember all those stories. That’s what college basketball is to me, stories. I learned to follow a team back then, going to games with my dad. I watched the players come, grow and develop, and leave. I read the sports section every day, following their exploits. I listened to away games on the radio; listening to a close basketball game on the radio is a heart-stopping experience. Basketball is still the easiest way for me to connect with my dad; we’re both passionate about it.

Over 30 years later, I still love to follow college basketball. Today I follow women’s college basketball more closely than men’s. I guess the smaller scale reminds me of those long ago days, when that old gym was rocking, and I was shouting myself hoarse, chanting “Let’s Go Peay!”

Today, my favorite team bears little resemblance to those long ago Governors, and not just because of gender. They play a tight, disciplined game; not much streetball in their game. But then, these kids aren’t on this team because their options are limited; these kids are at the other end of the spectrum from Fly. Their options are limitless. They’re playing basketball for an elite private college, being coached by a former Olympic coach. And their stories are still fascinating to me.

Go Cardinal! (and Let’s Go Peay, for old-time’s sake!)

Old Boyfriend

Hey, you remember Old Boyfriend?

You mean The Guy Who Always Wore Shorts, Even in Freezing Weather?

No, not him, the Young Republican.

Oh, the one who managed to find about three ways to insult me within the first 10 minutes of meeting me.

Yeah, that’s the one. He still sends me email.

It’s been what, 20-something years since you broke up with him? It was our sophomore year of college, right?

Yeah, that’s right. But I’m on his email list, along with, like, 40 other people. He periodically sends out emails to his list, with his thoughts and opinions on politics and movie reviews. I suppose if I asked him to stop, he’d remove me, but I don’t think any of us asked to be on this list.

And occasionally, I respond to one of his emails. I did a few days ago, and we engaged in an extended political discussion. The whole time, there’s something niggling at the back of my head, that there’s something not quite right about our discussion, not quite healthy.

What do you mean?

Well, I was having a hard time figuring out what I mean by that, until I was writing about it this morning, and it hit me. Old Boyfriend fits the classic profile of an abuser in many ways. He was never physical with me; he’s not really a physical kind of guy. But he was emotionally abusive; I just couldn’t see it back then because it felt too normal to me.

Why do you think he fits the profile?

He was always very controlling and possessive. Remember the time he tried to call me at college one weekend and he couldn’t get in touch with me? He started tracking down the phone numbers of all my friends he could remember and calling them to find me. He was angry at me for not being available when he wanted to call me, and suspicious that I was seeing someone else.

He also made it clear that when we married, he expected that I would become a Republican and a Methodist. To this day, he still tells me that I’m not really a liberal, that I’m really a conservative, just confused.

If I had friends that weren’t also his friends, he’d make disparaging comments about them. One time I went out horseback riding with another girl from my church, and when OB found out about it, he made it clear that he didn’t think she was an appropriate friend.

And of course, he was rude to you when I introduced you to him.

That he was. I remember thinking, what does she see in this loser?

He could also be very charismatic. He’s intelligent, well-read, and can be really funny. The only problem with his humor is, there’s a real mean streak in it. It’s funny if it’s not directed at you.

He was exciting to be around, when he wasn’t being a jerk.

That’s like saying a lion is a cute kitty, when it’s not eating you.

Well, yeah. I did break up with him, remember?

Yeah, I remember. I remember his friend showing up at Our College at midnight after you broke up with OB, driving from over an hour away after OB called him and told him that you had broken up with him. He tracked you down to find out why.

That’s right; I remember that, now. But he was a good guy; OB may have wanted him to track me down and talk me out of breaking up, but that’s not what he did. We just talked, and I told him why I was breaking up with OB. I told him the story about calling all my friends trying to find me, and I told him about the notepad.

The notepad?

Yeah, OB sent me one of those cube-shaped notepad thingies, with several hundred pages, and on each page, he had written a little note to me at the top. My roommate thought it was romantic; I thought it was kind of creepy. So even then, I had some kind of idea that maybe this relationship wasn’t the best idea for me.

Another time when he couldn’t reach me by phone, he sent me a telegram, which I also thought was kind of weird. Of course, this was in the “olden days”, before email.

I always thought he liked getting in your head. Remember when his first marriage was breaking up? Didn’t he tell you something like he wished he had married you?

Yeah, that did mess with my head. What he said was, that one time he and his wife were out with me and my hubby, and Hubby and I were holding hands and generally acting in love, and he was jealous. I thought he was going to say that he was jealous because he and First Wife were not lovey-dovey, though they’d been married only slightly longer than us, but what he actually said was that he was jealous that I wasn’t holding hands with him. I was too shocked to react; it had been 10 years then since we had broken up.

That reminds me of another instance that happened not too long after I broke up with him. I was back in our hometown, and had gone out to a movie or dinner or something with a male friend, not as a date or anything, just because we had a good time doing stuff. I had driven over to my friend’s house and left my car there while we went out, and when I got back, there was a note on the windshield from OB, saying he hoped I enjoyed my date. That pissed me off. It probably should have frightened me, but I didn’t know enough to be frightened. This was before being killed by estranged boyfriends became the crime of the week.

No kidding. So, he was controlling, wanted to isolate from friends he didn’t pick, and stalked you afterwards. Anything more?

He never laid a hand on me, if that’s what you’re asking.

Do you think he ever hit his first wife?

I doubt it. He’s not really the physical type. I mean, he’s big, but he’s not particularly strong or athletic. He doesn’t try to dominate people physically; he intimidates verbally.

Why did his first marriage break up?

I don’t really know. I know what OB told me – that First Wife was cold and distant, and was very insecure – but I’ve never talked to First Wife about it. I’m unlikely to ever encounter her, and I’m not sure she’d want to talk to me, anyway. After what OB said about being jealous he wasn’t my husband, I have this worry that she might blame me for the break up. It’s a shame; Hubby and I liked her better than OB.

So why do you think you’re noticing all this now?

I’ve always had this thing about our interactions. I’ve never understood why they bugged me so much, when I don’t really care that much about OB. Not that I wish him ill, but if he stopped sending me emails, I wouldn’t do anything to maintain the relationship, I’d let it go without much thought. But when I get in email discussions with him, I invariably end up feeling uncomfortable. It wasn’t because I was attracted to him or anything, because I’m not. But there was something there.

I think it became clearer now because I’ve started to deal with the other abuse issues in my past. I couldn’t see what he did as abusive before, because it was too similar to the type of abuse I went through growing up. Like being told what I really thought or felt, being expected to fit in some mold that I didn’t fit in. OB still tells me I don’t really think or feel what I say I do, but now I’m becoming able to say sorry, but no, I really do think that, or feel that. I still let him intimidate me sometimes, though.

The other thing I’ve noticed about our email discussions is that occasionally he’ll just suddenly blow up. We were having a political discussion a few months ago, and I must have hit a nerve, because I got a pretty angry email from him. The next exchange was back to being perfectly civil, just like the angry email had never happened. I showed the exchange to Hubby, just to make sure I wasn’t crazy or over-reacting, and he was surprised by the tone of the one email in the exchange. Because of my history, I’m pretty sensitive to unexpected and unpredictable blowups; just another reason why this whole thing has been niggling at the back of my mind.

Looking back at all of it, and in light of what we know about abusers now, I guess I was lucky that he wasn’t physical, and that he doesn’t drink. Who knows what would have happened if we had married, with my anger and drinking and his controlling? Could have been a pretty volatile situation.

Guess his mom did you a favor when she told OB you weren’t good enough for him, huh?

Yeah; think I should send her a thank-you note?

Being Weird

My 25^th high school reunion will be coming up this summer. I went back for my 20^th, but I doubt I’ll bother making a special effort to go to my 25^th. If it happens to fall when I’m taking my daughter back to spend time with her grandparents, maybe I’ll drop in.

It’s not because I harbor a lot of resentment about my high school years; I don’t. High school wasn’t bad; it was the first time I was able to assemble anything like a social group of people similar to me. Most of those people weren’t in my particular class, though; in fact, most of the people I hung out with were in the class ahead of mine. Senior year was a little lonely after they had all departed for college, but I was planning my escape to college then, anyway.

The reason I probably won’t bother is that I just don’t care that much. It was interesting to go to my 20 year reunion and see people, almost all of whom I hadn’t seen in 20 years, but it’s not as if I suddenly rekindled relationships with them. It was nice to see them, but we really don’t have that much in common. Just about all of the people who came to the reunion either still live in the town we grew up in, or live within a few hours drive. I live on the other side of the country.

There are reasons I live on the other side of the country, and not all of them are about keeping distance between me and my family. Despite the fact that my roots run deep in that part of the country, I never felt like a native plant. It’s a very strange feeling to go back there, to feel the longing for my roots, but to know that I don’t blossom there. I’m an exotic plant there, and I need other exotic plants around me to thrive.

I don’t know what made me different. My family has been in that little corner of Tennessee for over 200 years. I don’t think it was wanderlust or a need for adventure that pushed me away to college, and then out of the South for grad school. I think it was just a sense that I didn’t think and feel like the people around me, even though I loved them and they loved me. I just didn’t belong.

I’m glad I left, and I have no desire to move back. I still have lots of family there, and I love them, but I can’t live near them. I have friends who are still there, even other “exotic plant” friends. The pull to stay in the South is strong; the family ties there are hard to resist. One of my exotic plant friends from college tried to move to California a few years back. I recently talked with her, and she was moving back after five years, because California had never felt like home to her.

The South was always and never home for me. When I go back and walk the land where my parents live, where my grandparents lived, where their parents lived, I miss it. Part of me wishes I could go back there. After a few days there, though, I remember why I don’t live there anymore. After a few days, I can feel myself start to shut down, to hide, to close off. All my instincts start screaming, don’t let them see you! And my exotic bloom closes.

How did I manage to achieve escape velocity? How did I avoid the tractor beam pulling me back there? I had always felt weird and alone growing up, so going to a strange place where I didn’t know anybody and the culture was very different, as I did when I left the South, wasn’t that much different for me. I could handle being weird long enough to discover that in grad school, I was a little less weird than I had been in college, where I was a little less weird than I had been in high school. There were more people like me, and maybe just as important, more people even weirder than me! Compared to a lot of the people there, I was pretty damn normal.

There are people like me in the world, and there are places where there are even enough of us for me to form a social group and feel less alone. I had that in grad school, and I had that in California. I can’t tell yet where the partial pressure of people like me is high enough here or not. But I know how to tolerate being weird and alone for a while.

And I can even do it sober, now.

Terri Schiavo

I'll confess, I haven't been following the Terri Schiavo case very closely. But then this morning, I'm listening to the news and finding out that Congress wants to get involved. Regardless of the merits of the arguments on either side, Congressional involvement seems like a very bad idea. That's a big, blunt instrument to use, which is certain to result in collateral damage.

So, I've spent some time researching this morning. I found a very good summary of the case at Abstract Appeal. I can't say I really understand why this case has become such a cause celebre; it's a very tragic situation, true, and it's unfortunate that Terri's parents and husband no longer agree on how to handle her situation, but it's not like there has been a rush to judgment here. It's been 15 years since Terri suffered her heart attack. Eight years passed before her husband petitioned to remove the feeding tube. There have been two trials on the matter since then. Both resulted in the judgment that there was no hope of recovery for Terri, that much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone.

Michael Schiavo, her husband, has been demonized in all this. He's been accused (on little credible evidence) of having beaten Terri and caused her heart attack. He's been accused of wanting to kill Terri so he could inherit the remainder of the money won in the medical malpractice suit, which claimed that doctors were negligent for not diagnosing bulimia, and that Terri's bulimia led to her heart attack. He's been accused of wanting Terri to die so he can get on with his life; he's supposedly started a new family with another woman. A lot of this strikes me as pretty unfair.

The Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation claims that only $50,000 remains of the million dollar settlement; sure seems like a lot of work and pain to go through to inherit only $50K. The beating accusations stem from a bone scan which purportedly show evidence of old trauma, but there was no contemporary evidence from paramedics or doctors who examined and treated Terri when she had her heart attack that indicted a beating had occurred. And it's not surprising that after 15 difficult years, a person might want to get on with his life.

I don't know what Terri Schiavo would have wanted. I don't think anyone does. I know that personally, I wouldn't want to be kept alive in her state. That's why I have an advance medical directive (aka "Living Will"). But I didn't when I was the age Terri Schiavo was at her heart attack. I doubt that many twentysomethings without kids have one.

Do you? It's not a guarantee that you won't be turned into the next Karen Ann Quinlan or Terri Schiavo, but it's an important document to make your desires known.

Busted

Mom wasn't feeling well that Sunday, so she stayed home from church. But even when she was sick, she wasn't good at just doing nothing, so while the rest of us were gone, she decided to empty the trash cans.

When she came to my room, there were torn pieces of paper in my trash can, and she saw “Mom” written on one of them. I guess she just couldn't resist. We had a difficult relationship, and I had done all I could to shut her out of my life my whole adolescence. I’m sure she wondered what was really going on with me, beyond the surface that I let her see.

So she pieced together the puzzle that was my torn-up letter. Today, the advice is, “never send anything in email that you wouldn't want to read on the front page of the paper.” The advice I needed then, in those pre-email days, was “if you write a letter to your friend in college, don't tear it up and leave in your trash can for your mom to find.”

There were probably three or four things in that letter that I really didn't want her to know about. But the thing guaranteed to send my mother off the deep end was that I mentioned getting drunk. The legal drinking age back then had recently been raised to 19, but even had it been legal for me to be in possession of alcohol, drinking was a big no-no in our household. My parents didn't drink, and if anybody else in the extended family drank, they hid it well. Drinking was wrong, period.

There was a big scene, of course, or at least what passed for a big scene in our house. First, my mom called my dad back into their bedroom to discuss what she'd found, then I was summoned and confronted with the evidence. This was not a calm, reasoned discussion of why they thought drinking was wrong, nor was the legality of my action much of an issue. Drinking was wrong, period, and I was drinking, so what else was I doing? What drugs was I taking? Who was I sleeping with? How could I do this to them, and with Dad a deacon? How could I do this and then go sit in church on Sunday? Maybe I didn’t deserve to go to college. Maybe all I was good for was waiting tables.

I reacted the way I always did. I lied about what I thought I could get by with, and shut up about everything else. “The Silent Treatment”, my parents called it. There wasn't much point in doing anything else. Trying to defend myself would only make my mom angrier; “don't talk back to me!” I just went into survival mode; eventually, if I didn't give her anything new to feed on, she’d wind down. I admitted to no more drinking than had been revealed in that letter, though I had been drinking for close to two years by then. My goal was to get out of there with my ability to go away to college that fall intact; I had a couple of scholarships, which helped a lot, but didn't cover all my expenses.

And they were threatening not to help with college, were threatening to not let me go a hundred miles away to the college where I had the scholarships. I was only 5 months away from starting college, and getting some room to breathe, so I was going to do whatever it took to not lose that. So I quit drinking; I didn't drink for the next 5 months. Even though I had been able to hide it for two years, been able to walk in the house drunk and maintain enough control to not get caught, I couldn't risk it under their roof now.

It took me two years, but after two years of college and working in the summer and saving my money, I no longer needed their support for college. Never again would they be able to use money to threaten me.

They taught me to manage my money wisely. I graduated from college without any debt. I always paid my credit cards in full each month. I didn’t spend money that I didn’t have. Even today, the only money I owe to anyone is mortgage debt.

I didn’t ask them for help with the down payment, either.

Period

She looked up from her desk to see her mother at the door of her classroom. A quick consultation with her teacher, and they were both motioning her over to the door.

“Let's go to the bathroom,” her mother whispered, holding a brown paper bag.

Once safely in the girls bathroom, her mother explained that while doing the laundry that morning, she had seen the blood on her daughter's panties. So, here she was, supplies in hand, to help her deal with her first period.

Her heart was in the right place, and unquestionably, showing up at school to take care of things before the blood was obvious to all was the right thing to do. But the daughter was mortified, of course. She was only 10; nobody else she knew had gotten her period yet. Now everybody was going to ask her why her mother had come to school and whisked her off to the bathroom.

Into the stall they went. Her mother handed her the belt, and showed her how to attach the bulky pad to the belt and put it on. It felt thick and huge and uncomfortable between her legs. How could everybody not notice she had this big thing on? But her mother thought a girl of ten was far too young to use a tampon, and science hadn’t yet produced the ultra-absorbent yet thin pads with adhesive to stick to your panties.

So, on went the belt, looking like a weird sort of garter belt. The pad rubbed against her skin when she walked. Her mother gave her a couple of extra pads, with instructions on how to replace the pad and what to do with the used pads. Ewww.

Her mother had had “the talk” with her a year earlier, when her breasts had started to bud, so this wasn't a total shock, but she still didn't quite know what to make of it. She was torn between wanting to go home with her mother and go to bed and hide in a book, and wanting to ignore the whole event and pretend nothing had happened. But going home from school wasn't an option unless she was really sick; school was regarded as too important to miss.

Back in the classroom, there were whispered questions. “Why was your mom here?” “What happened?” “Where'd you go?” She deflected the questions from the boys; she certainly wasn’t comfortable telling a boy she had gotten her period, plus she didn’t know if they would even know what it was! She did tell a couple of the girls, who were jealous yet grossed out at the same time. She was right; nobody else in her class had gotten her period, yet. She was the first.

Once again, she was different.

The Misfit

Every morning, she looked at her face in the mirror. “Yes, those are definitely my mother’s eyes, and that is without question my father’s nose. I guess I’m really not adopted.” So why, then, did she feel adopted?

She didn’t think like her parents and her brother; she knew there was more to life than could be found in their small, rural corner of the South. Her parents had always lived there, as had her grandparents, and her great-grandparents, stretching back 200 years. But she didn’t belong there; it wasn’t really a home for her soul.

Her parents were puzzled by her, she could tell. “You’re just too sensitive.” “Why are you worried about that, that has nothing to do with you?” “You don’t really think that.”

School wasn’t any better. She didn’t fit in there, either. She was a tomboy and a bookworm, neither of which was likely to win her lots of friends. When she was younger, she mostly played with the boys, because their games were more interesting. But she matured early, and her mother discouraged her from playing with the boys so much once her breasts started showing.

Her soul found no refuge at church, either. The hellfire and damnation God of the South just convinced her further that she was somehow wrong, because she didn’t get it. There were too many things that didn’t make sense to her mind. When the preacher told her that we knew the Bible was true because the Bible told us it was true, she assumed that it was something in her that was flawed, because she couldn’t understand that reasoning. She learned to keep her mouth shut as much as possible, to parrot the answers her Sunday School teachers expected, and above all, not to ask questions.

She tried to go along, to fly under the radar, to hide her real thoughts and feelings. Every now and then, she couldn’t keep it all under wraps, and a stray dream would slip out from her tight control. Those moments were often devastating. Fragile, little dream balloons were shot down out of the sky by the flamethrower of her mother’s fear, raining down fiery debris on her. She emerged from those experiences determined to never let it happen again, and to go far away as soon as she could.

Fortunately, she was smart, and she could see a path out: education. Her parents valued education greatly, and she could see that getting a college degree was her ticket out. She didn’t have to marry somebody to leave home, she didn’t have to run away from home with no money and try to find a way to survive, she could get a college scholarship! Her parents would prefer for her to stay home and go to the local college “at least for the first couple of years, then transfer”, but if she could earn a scholarship from a college away from home, she could leave home sooner.

So she held it together, wishing there were someone she could talk with, someone around who really resonated with her soul. She survived with books and booze, numbing the pain that comes with being so out of sync with the world she found herself in. She dodged the land mines of her mother’s anger, and made it to safety: college.

She still didn’t trust, but now she had hope. She at last felt like her journey could begin; maybe somewhere there were other people like her.