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Wednesday, December 18, 2013
THE BLUE STREAK
A couple of months ago, some friends posted a story
on their social media accounts about a bicycle repair shop basically refusing
to do what the sign on the front door advertised: repair a bike. The bicycle in
question belonged to a young boy, and his ride was an off-brand two-wheeler
that can commonly be bought in big-box department stores. Well, according to
the owners of the repair shop, it didn’t actually qualify as a bicycle in their
eyes. It was more of a toy, and one not worth their time to fix. This was
incredibly hurtful to the young boy in question, as you might imagine, and his
mother was quite upset, as she should have been. But I also managed to feel a
great swell of pity for the people who refused to help the boy with his bike,
and when I explained that to a friend, she gave me a blank look that suggested
I had taken leave of my senses. But after I explained, she understood me
perfectly.
June of 1982, I turned twelve years old. Growing up
in a tiny Midwestern town, I had always had a bicycle – the years prior to this
it was a nifty purple and black dirt bike – but the present I received that
year was like a shining gift from the gods. It was a brand-new, sparkling blue,
Free Spirit ten-speed! To that moment in time, it was the most amazing,
fantastic, awesome thing I had ever been given. This was a step up; heck, it
was two or three steps up. The dirt bike was great for riding around town in a
small radius. But this?
This was freedom on two wheels.
The Free Spirit – which I did not know at the time
was a big-box department store (Sears) knock-off brand of bicycle – opened up
my world. The nearest town was three miles away, and during the summer I would
make a quick ride down to pick up new comic books at Kaki’s Five and Dime. Mrs. Kakisoulas quickly learned to anticipate
my weekly arrival, and I always had first pick. She and her staff always
chuckled at me for loyally showing up every week, but to me, it was one of the
greatest things ever. I had this
bike, which I had named The Blue Streak, and it gave me license to go go go
wherever my legs would take me.
It would get better.
Soon, I was riding two towns over to my best pal’s
house, about seven miles away. We’d goof off, play outside, shoot bb guns, you
name it… summer days that seemed to go on forever. As I made those rides, I
started creating stories, putting together plots and ideas that I would
eventually put to paper, something I had never done with such volume before. Or
I would slip into the world of make-believe as I rode, using the reflectors as
my phaser cannons as I played Star Trek
against imaginary Klingons and Romulans. I plotted a full novel about a boy who
owned a bicycle that could pierce dimensional walls and go from parallel Earth
to parallel Earth.
Giving me the freedom to move distances physically
also encouraged my mind to do the same, you see.
Eventually, I got a moped, then a car, and I used
The Blue Streak less and less. That didn’t mean I stopped loving her, though. I
didn’t get rid of her, either. I kept her around. And when I moved to Arizona at the age of
eighteen, she soon followed, and we were reunited like I was twelve again.
First, she became my transportation around campus.
Then I moved five miles away from campus, and the old girl became my lifeline.
Every day, through brutal summer heat, I rode that bike to my job. And about
once every two weeks, I would hit a patch of glass and wind up with a flat
tire.
There was a small bicycle repair place about a
half-mile from campus that was owned and operated by a kindly older gentleman.
He had thinning greay hair, an odd assortment of summer sweaters, and glasses
that he propped at the tip of his nose. The first time I brought the bike in to
be fixed, he looked at it, looked at me, and said “Son, are you sure?”
I nodded and told him simply “This has been my bike
for a long time.”
He fixed the bike.
He fixed the bike repeatedly. Broken glass is all
too common where I was living, and time after time, I would drag my poor Blue
Streak inside his shop and he would shake his head in bewilderment and tell me
to come back at 4pm. Occasionally, I would show up early, and I would tell him
stories about the bike, and he would tell me how he had never seen a Free
Spirit that had lasted like mine with so many miles on it. I was lucky, he
would tell me, that it somehow continued to stay on the road. But after a
little while, I also knew that he grew to respect my commitment to the old
girl. He understood that it was so much more to me than just a way to get back
and forth to work. So he did his job, took my money, and sent me on my way. I
must have spent $300 or more fixing my bike in that shop, when I couldn’t have
sold it for $20. But that’s why I went there.
And that’s why I felt a swell of pity for the guys
who refused to fix that boy’s bicycle. That young boy, he doesn’t know or
understand that his parents didn’t have the money to buy him a bike worth
hundreds of dollars. All he knows is that the greatest instrument of freedom he
has ever known has been granted to him. The guys working in that shop have
forgotten that – they have forgotten that a bicycle is not just a way of moving
from place to place. It is an instrument of imagination. It is a doorway that
opens up new worlds for a kid to explore. It makes everything bigger. I pity them that they have lost
that sense of wonder, the sense of wonder with which that the young boy is
about to blossom.
I rode The Blue Streak until she literally fell
apart beneath me, over eleven years after I received that amazing gift. The body
of the bike broke away from the wheel base, and there was nothing in the world
that could fix the old girl at that point. I walked the pieces over to a nearby
bicycle rack and gently parked what was left between two shiny mountain bikes.
I didn’t have the heart to put her in a dumpster or some other cruel fate, so I
straightened the pieces until they looked like they basically should, and I
took one last mental picture of my wonderful friend and companion. Saddened and
eternally grateful, I finished the rest of that journey on foot.
4:10 PM
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Friday, August 09, 2013
THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
I’ve given a lot of serious thought to giving up my satellite dish subscription lately. I find myself watching less and less television, even during the main part of the year, and I have so many things going on at once that I can’t help but wonder if I just wouldn’t be better off without it. But then I remind myself what I really use the dish for, and it remains on my roof.
You see, my Dish gives me access to Sirius/XM satellite radio, and running that magnificent bit of programming through my home Dolby Digital 5.1 soundsystem gives me nearly unlimited joy. It also, at one point in my life, actually kept me going when I was at my lowest. That is the gift of music; it can hoist you upon its broad expanse and carry you through life’s roughest waters.
When you’re a kid, music grants you an almost unlimited license to be emo. (God help us all.) I can remember all too clearly the hours I spent alternating between rage and depression as I sat in the dark listening to Pink Floyd and Nine Inch Nails. Glorious days of misspent youth and all that. But getting older, I think it becomes harder to find music that truly gets under your skin and becomes meaningful. Aging allows us to find that meaning in many other places, and general maturation sees our inner emo turn to dust and float away in the wind. It takes something truly special to burrow into your soul.
That happened to me last in 2006.
Rebecca and I had been split for a bit over a year at that point, and to say that I was not doing well would be underselling it. I was living alone for the first time in my entire life, which was an ongoing struggle, and my efforts at getting back into the dating pool (“Hi. This is my first date this millennium.”) were not exactly brilliant. I found myself frequently overwhelmed by even mundane tasks, and I had serious questions about my ability to cope over the long term.
Then, one night, I was listening to the radio and a song came on that made me sit up and take notice. It was immediately different than anything I had heard in a long, long time, and it was called “The Adventure.” The chorus spoke of a deep and abiding love (“I cannot live, I can’t breathe, unless you do this with me.”) but it also carried a larger message, one that I grasped immediately: tomorrow has the potential to be the best day of your life.
It sounds trite, I suppose, but that was the message I needed to hear at that time.
What made it more unusual, I believe, is that it was played on an alternative rock station. I’m a huge alt-rock fan, but let’s be honest: songs with an uplifting, positive tone aren’t exactly what the genre does best. I fell in love with it immediately, and I wanted to know more about this band. What was their name? Ahh… “Angels & Airwaves.” Cool name.
Now, I had never been a huge fan of Blink-182. I liked some of their stuff well enough, but not enough to be a fanboy. So I was stunned to find out that the guy behind A&A was one of the members of Blink. It seemed incongruous to Blink’s music that this dude produced something so completely opposite of their music, but it was true. There was obviously a hell of a lot more to Tom DeLonge than met the eye.
The next single, “The War,” had some of the most powerful lyrical imagery I’d heard since I was a kid. Ostensibly a cry for the end of the war in Iraq, it also worked as an ode to the hope that pain and strife in one’s life would come to an end: “Why won’t you tell me that it’s almost over? Why must this tear my head inside out?”
It felt like the music was written directly to me. Cheesy, I suppose, but that’s how it felt.
I bought the album, of course, and it was easy to see how it told a story from beginning to end. Each successive album has done the same, and if you play the band’s four albums consecutively, you can see a grander picture unfold before your eyes. It is absolutely amazing.
Seven years later, I still remember how it felt to hear those first couple of singles, then that first album. How it felt like I had found the music that would weave into the tapestry of my universe for the rest of my life. Makes my hair stand on end just thinking about it.
That is the gift of music, you see, just as it is the gift of great literature: it transports you and elevates you, and it leaves part of itself behind in your soul. I am forever grateful for that.
3:37 PM
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Saturday, January 12, 2013
SCOTT GRIFFEY
I awoke to a phone call from my mother today, and she was
crying so hard that I could barely understand what she was saying. But I soon
pieced it together quickly: Scott Griffey had died. I was mute in disbelief.
Griff had been ill for a long time, and the true depth of
how sick he was wasn’t something widely known. During the holidays, Mom was
getting updates from him as he learned about his condition and charted a course
for surgery and healing. It wasn’t easy for her; Griff had always been a great
friend and mentor to me, but to her, he was one of her two best friends. As he
had been getting sicker, she had stepped in to help Abdul (Mrs. Griff) with
taking him to doctors’ appointments and the like. He had also been keeping an
eye on her through Mom’s own health issues. That’s what good friends do. It
gave me comfort to know that she had Griff for a friend, because he was top of
the line as far as humans go.
The man first came into my life as a teacher, but he quickly
moved beyond that. He was a mentor. A friend. A coach. Spending time with him,
even as a kid, was something that I knew was special. He was also honest, and
he never fed me bullshit. When I was wrong, or being a jerk, Griff never
hesitated to tell me so. When you’re a teenager, that isn’t always easy, but
later I realized what a precious gift that is. Most of the world is ready to
blow smoke up your ass; Griff blew his smoke out the window and then let you
know what you really needed to hear.
When Griff was assigned to teach the Gifted & Talented
Students program, I think a lot of people may have been taken aback. Griff had
a reputation as an eccentric guy, and maybe not the most rigorous teacher;
hell, even I was a little baffled by it at the time. I couldn’t even understand
why he would want the task. It wasn’t like we were any less of a pain in the
ass than anyone else. In many ways, we were probably worse. But later I would
understand all of it quite clearly.
You see, Scott Griffey was a chameleon. He was an incredibly
intelligent man, but he didn’t necessarily like it when people realized that.
Like Muhammad Ali, Griff used the rope-a-dope. If you underestimated him, he
had you right where he wanted to. By using that perception of him as an
eccentric, he could quietly maneuver people into doing what they should be
doing and acting how they should be acting.
For instance, in the G/T class, he made us read Ayn Rand’s
THE FOUNTAINHEAD. This drove my pal Bill Beechler absolutely crazy. Billy hated
that book. Hated it. Some others liked it. I was intrigued by it enough to read
it twice. But I never quite understood why, of all books, Griff made us read
it. Later, I would.
In the book, Howard Roark uses his uncompromising vision to
power through the world and attain the greatness that he knows he can achieve.
I think that Griff saw that potential in us and wanted very much for us to tap
it and reach greatness ourselves. But Roark was also a colossal asshole in
reaching for his goals, scorching the Earth in his quest for personal glory.
Griff saw that potential in us as well.
I realized that Griff wanted us to see both sides of the
coin, that he wanted to make sure that any quest for creating something
wonderful must also be tempered with caring and respect for the lives of
others. That if we do that, we can truly become better than we hoped to be in
our wildest dreams.
Clever man, that Griff.
He also used the rope-a-dope to inspire others. When he was
the girls basketball coach, I remember one thing that never fails to make me laugh
to this day. We had Noblesville on the schedule, and they were ranked number
one in the state. Mind you, the HHHS team was really, really good. Just not
Noblesville good. Anyway, someone asked Griff if he had a plan to for how to
start the game strong and keep us in it, and this was (approximately) his
response: “Well, Noblesville will win the tip, and then run down for a layup.
Then we’ll bring the ball upcourt, they’ll steal it, and then they’ll run it
down for a layup. Then I’ll call timeout and hope for the best the rest of the
way.”
We didn’t beat Noblesville. But where that team was beating
everyone else by 40 or 50 points, we were always within 20. Because Griff
coached our girls hard on how to effectively play against that team so they
couldn’t do what he had joked about.
Griff could show you the surface all day, but you really had
to get close in order for him to let you see the real, brilliant man below.
But if I had to pick the most important thing about Scott
Griffey, at least as he pertained to my life, I would tell you with all honesty
that I would not be the man I am today without him, and my life path would be
wildly different. Here’s why:
Early in my high school years, the sports editor of the
Noblesville Daily Ledger, a man named Chuck Godby, struck out on his own and
started a sports tabloid. It was called Hamilton County Sports Weekly. Sometime
after the paper got going, and I don’t remember the specific details of how it
happened, Griff got an offer from Chuck to write a column for that charming
little publication. And while I don’t remember the details out of how it played
out, Griff brought me into the mix. Thus, “The Ramblin’ Guys” column was born.
At the age of fifteen, I was co-writing a column for a legit newspaper.
Awesome.
As time passed, though, Griff quietly handed off more and
more of the writing to me, until finally, I was almost a solo show. Eventually,
the tabloid folded, and Chuck went back to the Ledger. Not long after Chuck
went back to the Ledger, he gave me a call and offered me a job as a full-on
sports reporter. For a daily newspaper! I was still just seventeen years old.
I took that job. I learned more at that job that I can even
begin to explain. I would go on from that job to write for a weekly magazine at
ASU, do a stint at U Magazine, review films… When digital rolled around, I
would continue to do those types of jobs online. I still do. But it all started
with HCSW and “The Ramblin’ Guys.”
Again, Griff knew what he was doing. He saw the potential in
me, and he saw a path for me, and he helped set me on it. No way that Chuck
called and offered me a job without Griff in his ear telling him about how much
of the column he had turned over to me. No way Chuck offers me that job without
Griff telling him that I can do it, and do it well, and that I can be counted
on. Still, that took balls of steel; he put himself on the line for me, betting
on me coming through and succeeding. He never told me as much, and he never
held that over my head. He just believed in me.
There were other things as well, and I could belabor them
for a long time, but I think what you need to know about the man is abundantly
clear: he was one of the best. You couldn’t ask for a better person in your
corner. Friend. Mentor.
Family. Scott Griffey was all of those things to me, and more. I am who I am
today in no small part to the influence he had on my life. I am lucky to have
known him and to have been a small part of the enormous sphere of influence he
achieved in his amazing, wondrous life. For that, I will forever be grateful.
2:54 PM
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