Unshakable Knowledge

It's Also a Boy Meets Girl Story

The other day I started thinking about my “formative” years. It was after watching John Krasinski’s latest Some Good News episode where a graduating high school student got the opportunity to ask Oprah Winfrey what negative experience she had that blossomed into a net positive experience.

For some reason, I realized I usually think of my formative years as being from birth to graduating high school. And, technically, they are. For eighteen years you are under the auspices and protection of your parents and then you are released into the world to be the best that you can be without constant supervision.

When I look back upon those - nearly - two decades, for me, there was a Phase 1 and a Phase 2. Before I get started - this is a classic boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again, then boy truly fucks it up and somewhere along the way he learns a very strong lesson about the value of unconditional love.

The delineating factor between phases was my first kiss.

Before my first kiss, I was still in phase 1, as an acts-like-they-know-it-all, mischievous sixth grader. Your first romantic kiss doesn’t make you an adult. But it is a ‘game-changer’. Suddenly you are catapulted into the nether region between child and adult. Or you’ve had a glimpse of adulthood. Or a peak behind the curtain. At least, you think you have. Maybe it’s that gush of hormones.

My first kiss was electric but short lived. Just a peck on the lips really.

It happened during a game of spin the bottle in Sandy Fogels’ bedroom. I was 12 years old. I spun the bottle and it miraculously, or maybe not so miraculously (for all I know it could have been a set up), landed on just the person I wanted it to land on - Jill Jeanes.

She was an athlete with a beguiling smile of perfectly, straight white teeth and, according to my mother, “She was cuter than a bug’s ear.”

Our first kiss led to long sessions of passionate kissing under bridges, in movie theaters and behind bushes in parks. In hindsight, it’s difficult to imagine the amount of time we devoted to kissing one another. We were hormonal 6th graders but I can also attest, that for us, kissing did not become the ‘gateway’ activity for anything more noteworthy.

In other words, we were both quite content resting on first base with our ‘Texas leaguer’.

Our kissing bliss ended, however, after we graduated from Arapaho Elementary and entered West Junior High School. I don’t remember explicitly when, or how, we broke up because my start to junior high was rocky due to my steadfast refusal to cut my hair.

Crazy, huh? Those were the days.

The hill I chose to die on going in to seventh grade was to not get a haircut and, by not doing so, I was banned from trying out for football. But that was not the worst of it. I was a reasonably popular kid in elementary but my decision to defy junior high football coaches’ rules in regards to hair length quickly labeled me a ‘social pariah’. And, because Jill was an aspiring cheerleader, I became persona non grata with her as well.

I guess. We never talked about it.

This is where my dad enters the picture because he could not have been happy with my decision in regards to my digging in heels about my hair length. He was a competitive man by nature and he enrolled me in contact football - pads, helmets and cleats - at the age of 8. In fact, he gave the thumb’s up for me to compete against 12 year olds because I weighed too much to play against my age bracket.

He came to all of my games from first grade through sixth grade and exhorted me from the sidelines with all of the fervor and intensity that he would also use in the pulpit as a minister. Fortunately, he was not a combative, partially tipsy, sideline dad, he was merely a ‘seriously invested in my success’ dad. To his credit, upon learning of my decision, he refrained from being visibly upset. So, instead of playing for the West Junior High Broncos, I played for a citywide recreational “all-star” team consisting of misfits, miscreants and marginal athletes.

Starting eighth grade, I conformed by cutting my hair, tried out and made the team and got named one of the captains for the junior high team. My popularity soared along with my football successes. I was back.

But Jill had moved on.

I entered high school as a “football player to watch”. The senior high coaches expected great things out of me. But somewhere along the way I had an epiphany about the violence of football.

It might have been related to the meaninglessness of the Vietnam War.

It might have been related to the publication of Meat On the Hoof: The Hidden World of Texas Football.

It might have been a traumatic incident during one of my final games in junior high when a solo tackle I made broke a guy’s leg and, as I stared in disbelief at his protruding shinbone, my teammates pounded me on the back and roared like amped up berserkers.

In any event, as a fresh-faced junior, I found myself in the high school head coaches’ office announcing that I was quitting football. Again.

He was not, in the least bit, understanding. As a matter of fact, his immediate argument for why I should not quit was that I would be destined to lose all of my friends.

That’s a powerful, mean and nasty statement to make to a teenager. I’d been there before. It had been awful. But I “stuck to my guns” and walked out the door. No longer a member of the Richardson Eagles.

Telling the head coach I was quitting was demeaning and hard. But telling my dad was ten times harder.

For whatever reason, I went home expecting this news to be so devastating to him that he would finally erupt at the temerity of this hare-brained decision. Seventh grade football was one thing. Varsity high school football and the accolades it brings in Texas was a whole ‘nother enchilada.

I expected, at minimum, a lecture about ‘following through’ and how disappointed he was in me having invested so much energy into my short career. Once home, I went into my room and sat like a whipped dog on the edge of my bed awaiting my father’s judgement.

To my everlasting astonishment, his reaction upon hearing my news was the polar opposite of what I anticipated. If I wasn’t in tears when I told him I had quit, I was certainly in tears when he told me he loved me regardless. That he supported my decision. That it was, and had always been, my decision to make.

The other day one of my dedicated readers had messaged me and, at some point in our conversation she replied, “Glibness aside, the kids are steadfast in the unshakable knowledge that I love them. So we are solid. They are nine now, third grade.”

Her comment immediately cast me back into my high school bedroom having that conversation with my dad about quitting football and I responded with, “That knowledge may be the single most useful 'thing' a parent can give....”

Then, “You’ve given me a future topic.”

That unshakable knowledge that both my parents loved me unconditionally was an incredible gift. Foundational, I believe. It has carried me all the way to this very day.

It also bolstered me the next day when I returned to the halls of Richardson High School. Because I lost no friends. And, by the start of my senior year in high school, the washout one-time football stud was dating the head cheerleader, soon-to-be-named homecoming queen and one of the coolest girls in school, my spin-the-bottle partner from Sandy Fogel’s bedroom.

I won’t make you suffer through the “boy fucks it up” part.

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There’s a movie going around that debuted on Earth Day and was executively produced by Michael Moore. Talk about dispiriting. I’m not going to mention it by name. I don’t think it deserves any amplification. But, if you saw it and were as dispirited as I was at it’s revelations, I’d encourage you to listen to this episode of the podcast, Drilled. And/or read this rebuttal from Ketan Joshi.

They will make you feel better. Promise.

Also, I know it is all over the internet but - just in case you blinked - it is not enough we need worry about the economy, our health, our third world, banana republic of a federal government (I encourage you to watch Britain’s daily coronavirus briefings or Governor Cuomo’s) but now there are MURDER hornets. Aka Asian Giant Hornets.

And they’re in my back yard!