Little boy lost

I lost my little boy last night. In truth, he’s been missing for several years, hidden beneath the gruff exterior of the teenager who has been living in his room and wearing his clothes, the phantom who slips in the back door each day and heads for the middle bedroom, firmly closing the door behind him.

I’ve lived in hope I’d see the little guy again. And every once in a while, I think I catch a glimpse of him, a brief peep from behind the eyes of the stranger as he puts his arms around me at bedtime and says, “Love you, Dad.” Or I think I see the child of my heart in the mischievous grin the stranger flashes me when we share a joke at his mother’s expense. Then the kid disappears again, and I’m left staring at the cypher before me, wondering if I saw him at all.

But now the little boy is really gone. He grew up and graduated from high school last night, and I’m left wondering whether he feels as strange and disjointed at the whole affair as his mother and I do.

It’s not that we didn’t have time to prepare for this particular moment. It’s been approaching us like a runaway freight train for months. And now the train has roared through the station, and we’re left breathless and disoriented.

I still remember, as if it were yesterday, crisp and clear, the startled yelp of pain my 8-day-old son gave at the decisive moment of his bris and my instinctive move to protect him before I remembered where I was.

I think about the 5-year-old who posed for a photo on his first day of kindergarten, jelly smeared on his chin and a goofy grin spread across his face.

I see the youngster coming off the football practice field cradling his right arm, a strained expression of pain etched on his ashen face, telling me, “It hurt really bad, Dad, but I didn’t cry.”

I recall the days and nights he spent shooting and editing the high school soccer team’s season video and the quiet pride in his voice when he asked, “Do you want to take a look at it?”

And I remember the day he told me he didn’t want to play football anymore, that he was afraid of getting hurt again, the memory of his 8^th-grade concussion on the first game of the season still fresh. My stomach knotted and a feeling of loss swept over me – not because I was reliving my own childhood through his, but because I so loved every second I watched him play. “Dad,” he said, understanding the dismay I couldn’t hide, “you always told me I was playing for myself, not for you, and that it would be my decision, not yours. Well, I’ve made it.” How do you answer that with anything other than a fierce hug and a splatter of tears?

I want the little boy back, but I will have to settle, like all parents must, for the young man he has become. That is more than enough, and on this point you will have to trust me, discounting for a moment the blurring power of a father’s love.

He is not without fault, of course. I can see that, even if his mother cannot. But most of my son's failings can be excused on the exuberance of youth, the nearsightedness of inexperience. Asked to provide a message to my graduate for display on the stadium scoreboard screen during last evening’s ceremonies, I offered this: “Be bold and brave. Be kind and loving. Be inspiring and creative. Be the man we know you are.”

He is all those things. And I think of that when the melancholy about the little boy gone almost chokes me and I fear my heart will break.

 

D-Day + 70 years

Seventy years ago today, Allied troops waded ashore at five beaches in the Normandy region of France to begin the brutal work of wresting Western Europe from German tyranny. For American soldiers at Omaha Beach, the operation was a bloody shambles, salvaged only by courage, tenacity – and luck.

When I was in college in the early '70s, I came across a book of World War II artwork – propaganda posters, battlefield drawings made by combat artists from both sides, and the like. It included a long essay by James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, one of the best novels to come out of the war. Jones was in the U.S. Army, stationed in Hawaii, when America entered the war. He heard the explosions from Battleship Row and ran for cover as Japanese planes bombed and strafed Schofield Barracks.

In his essay, he described a visit he made to Omaha Beach decades after the D-Day landings. In the tall coastal grass that covered the bluffs overlooking the beach, he sat where German machine-gun installations had been carefully located to saturate the landing area with machine-gun fire and death.

“It was easy to see what a murderous converging fire could be brought to bear on the beaches from the curving bluff. Especially to an old infantryman. And it was easy to half-close your eyes and imagine what it must have been like. The terror and total confusion, men screaming or sinking silently under the water, tanks sinking as their crews drowned inside, landing craft going up as a direct hit took them, or grating ashore to discharge their live cargo into the already scrambled mess … I sat there … and I fervently thanked God or Whomever that I had not been there.”

Memorial Day: The damage done

On this Memorial Day, my thoughts turn to my late father, a veteran of World War II and a member in good standing of the Greatest Generation, now dead these 25 years.

This day, created as a way for us to honor the men who marched off to fight in this nation’s wars and never returned, is not designed exactly for him. He survived his trials by combat and came home – undamaged on the onside, but changed forever on the inside.

Nonetheless, I think of him today. And of his life after he came home in the closing months of 1945. There would be no quick return for him – no tickertape parades or crowds at the train station welcoming the boys back from overseas. When the Japanese surrendered, Dad found to his bitter dismay that he didn’t have sufficient “points” to be mustered out immediately.

How such a thing could  be bewildered the battle-tested U.S. Army sergeant. After all, he was drafted only months after Pearl Harbor, had walked ashore during the first invasion of Japanese-held islands in the Aleutians and miraculously emerged unscathed from the bloody horrors of Okinawa, the last ground campaign of the war. Since points were rewarded based on length of service, time spent overseas and duration of combat, how could he possibly be short?

A paper-pusher’s mistake no doubt, a typo in the blizzard of paper forms that governed men’s lives, then and now. But Dad never questioned the unfairness of it all. He shouldered his disappointment and headed to Korea for several months of occupation duty.

And then he came home to Texas, a farm boy back from the first and only big adventure of his life, a survivor of one of the greatest tragedies of mankind and one of the men and women who risked all to protect their country and the ones they loved, and in the course of things saved the world from an unimaginable evil.

The first thing he did was to tackle some unfinished business, the courtship of my mother that the war had interrupted. He climbed into his Ford sedan and drove to my mother’s farm. Perhaps he brought along the photo of her he had carried across the Pacific in a sweat-stained and battered pocket album. He proposed and she accepted.

And that brings me to the photograph.

It was taken on their wedding day, a mere weeks after my father’s return. The young couple – he was 28 and she a mere 20 – look directly into the camera. A nervous and somewhat uncertain smile hesitates on her pale, thin face. The years directly before and during the war have been hard on her. Before meeting my father, she was married and quickly divorced from an Army officer who swept her off her feet and then broke her heart when he deserted her and the Army. She has waited for my father to return for more than three years, wondering no doubt if the relationship would withstand the separation.

As for my father, his steady expression is unfathomable. In some ways, he looks older than his 28 years. He has seen and experienced terrible things, things he will never share with his family. Does a slightly haunted look linger in his eyes or is it just my imagination?

He bears no scars of his ordeal. At least no scars that anyone can see. He came home with a bad case of trench foot that lasted for months, but otherwise he’s in excellent health. Like many wives of returning servicemen, my mother is reluctant to ask too many questions about the war of her new husband. And he is reluctant to offer much in return, other than amusing tales of life in Schofield Barracks in Hawaii before his unit shipped out for the Aleutians.

There is one thing she notices. For months after he returns, he stubbornly refuses to go into a store alone. She must accompany him or he sits sullenly in the car. She has no explanation for such a weird quirk, and he offers none. But she wonders, is this a psychological twitch caused by something that happened to him during the war? An unconscious reaction to a trauma he keeps locked deep inside? Eventually, the reluctance fades and then disappears. She is thankful but wonders all her life, what did it all mean?

On this Memorial Day, I think of my father’s service and how those three eventful years colored the rest of his life. I know he thought about those experiences. And I suspect a compulsion near the end of his life to talk about them with people who would understand was the reason he joined the VFW, after a lifetime of distaining servicemen’s organizations.

I’ve been an avid student of World War II all my life, a passion fueled, no doubt, by father’s own history. As I think about it now, I’m certain it was an effort to understand the stoic, deeply reserved man he was, to learn the stories he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – tell, to come to grips with the sacrifices made and the costs paid.

Like my mother, I struggle with the question: What did it all mean?

2014 Southlake Carroll Dragons: A work in progress

The 2014 season of Southlake Carroll Dragon Football officially opened Wednesday with the annual Green & White Game, the culmination of spring football.

It was an opportunity for the Dragon faithful to get their first glimpse of what’s in store in the fall, when Southlake’s gridiron warriors dip their toes into one of the toughest districts in the state. But more on that later.

For most of us, it was a somewhat confusing affair, as these glorified practices always are. Unless you’re a coach on the field or a heavily involved parent in the stands, it’s hard to tell what the hell is going on.

The knowledgeable fans with whom I was sitting provided somber assessments of the action on the field. There is, they agreed, much work to be done.

Most viewed the Dragon defense with deep suspicion, not an entirely unexpected assessment at this early stage. There was general agreement that the Dragon offense, helmed by returning quarterback Ryan Agnew, is a potentially lethal weapon, if and only if a presently questionable O-line can keep the senior superstar “vertical.”

“The Big Guys can get better,” one football analyst opined. “The question is how much better? This season isn’t going to be another March through Georgia, now is it?”

The reference is to the easy time Southlake Carroll has had the last two years in a creampuff district that included the sad sacks of Keller ISD and the only marginally better schools of Birdville ISD. Many observers – including yours truly – referred to the district race in 4-5A as the “Cupcake Parade,” a label no one bothered to challenge, even the cupcakes.

But the 2014 season will be different. Oh, brother, will it be different. District 7-6A includes football powerhouses Euless Trinity and Coppell, along with the up and coming L.D. Bell. The foregone conclusion of the recent past that the Dragons will glide to a district championship disappeared when the UIL unexpectedly placed Southlake in a district with two of its biggest rivals.

The smart money is on a dogfight for district between the Dragons, the Trinity Trojans and the Coppell Cowboys. Regardless of the outcome of that brawl, Southlake probably still makes the playoffs. But make no mistake, a failure to win district will be a big disappointment to Dragon fans, who have become spoiled to the point they consider the district trophy as part of their birthright.

Meanwhile, Southlake Carroll has its work cut out for it in pre-district matchups, too. It faces Oklahoma juggernaut Tulsa Union in Cowboys Stadium on Sept. 5 and meets the always dangerous Abilene High Eagles at home on Sept. 26.

Which brings us to the season opener in Dragon Stadium on Aug. 29. That’s when the Austin Westlake Chaparrals arrive in Dragon Stadium with their brand-new head coach, Todd Dodge.

That’s  right. The same Todd Dodge who led the Dragons to state 5A championships in 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2006. The same Todd Dodge who coached Southlake to a 79-1 record before departing for UNT, where he met defeat and disaster.

Dodge is back in the high school ranks, where he has demonstrated an ability to motivate kids, nurture quarterbacks and devise crushing offenses. After leaving college coaching, he spent a couple of undistinguished years at Marble Falls, where the talent pool was lacking. At Westlake, he inherits a powerful and storied program, with a winning tradition and a fan base much like Southlake, which is to say privileged and demanding, with a low tolerance for failure.

The pressure will be on Dodge to prove his detractors wrong. Many point out that Dodge has an unexceptional record as a coach, except for his phenomenal tenure at Southlake. Here, his string of championships – which include a last-minute defeat in the 2003 state title game against Katy – still is referred to reverently as “The Run.” Without exaggeration, I can attest that it was a magnificent, magical time that those of us who lived through it will never, ever forget.

And that’s why Dodge and his Westlake boys no doubt will receive a prolonged standing ovation when they appear at Dragon Stadium, and why some of us – in the deep recesses of our hearts and souls – will not be extravagantly disappointed if they emerge from the game victorious.

That’s not likely to happen since Westlake is immersed in a down cycle – the reason Dodge was hired, of course – but as you’ve heard me say before, this is Texas football and anything can happen.

Scenes from a life

My daughter graduated from the University of North Texas on Saturday. As I sat in the cramped seats of the Coliseum, the affectionately nicknamed “Super Pit,” I passed the time waiting for her to walk across the stage by viewing a slideshow in my head of scenes from my daughter and my life together.

Here are a few of the slides:

• Moments after she is thrust into my arms by nurses in the delivery room at Baylor Grapevine hospital, I look down at my daughter. To my shock, I see in that tiny scrunched-up face vestiges of my father, who died three years earlier. It is a joyous reminder of the continuity of life, the majesty of family and, perhaps, the power of imagination.

• After a dispute with her mother, my daughter, then 3, finds me and crawls into my lap, resting her head on my chest. Looking up, she says, “Oh, Dad!” It is a routine repeated many times over the years with only slight alterations and with the same result: She gets what she wants.

• In a routine that spans all her preschool years, I deliver my daughter to her various daycare centers. She lets me hold her hand as I walk her to her classroom and deliver her to her teachers. And each time, I wait, hoping as she walks away that she will give me a backward glance, an ever-so-brief acknowledgment of my role in her life. Most times, she does, and each time, it almost takes my breath away.

• Our nightly routine since she was very young is a story from Dad at bedtime. Desperate for a respite from the vapid plots of the Sweet Valley Twins series, I suggest to my second grader that perhaps we could try the current bestselling phenomenon known as Harry Potter. My daughter looks at me with an expression I’ll come to know well over the years and which implies that I am perhaps the dumbest person alive. “Dad,” she says firmly, “that’s a BOY’S book.”  I persist, and convince her to listen to the first chapter. If she doesn’t like it, we’ll find something else. The next night, I read the first chapter of “The Sorcerer’s Stone.” I close the book and look at the skeptical critic. “Well?” I say. She replies, “You know, I could listen to some more.” I will read the rest of the series to her, all except the last book, by which time she is convinced she is too old for bedtime stories and which she reads herself. I am secretly heartbroken.

• By age 12, it is clear that my daughter has my high-strung personality and shy, reticent nature. She is eager to please, fearful of rejection and loves to create. She is an inventive writer with a fertile imagination and a command of language. She is beautiful and, thankfully, does not look like me. But she is my daughter. More than once, my wife has walked in on a conversation between the two of us. She will listen for a while and then interject, with more than a hint of irritation, “You two are a strange couple of ducks, you know that?” My daughter’s typical, unruffled response: “Don’t worry Mom, Dad and I understand each other.”

• After some deliberation, my daughter joins the Southlake Carroll High marching band as a freshman. She’s not sure she will like it, but I am delighted at her decision. In a clique-obsessed high school like Carroll, marching band will give her a place in the school hierarchy and a group with which to identify. She will be surrounded by good kids and creatively inspired classmates. And lots of hard work to keep her busy and, perhaps, out of trouble. In her freshman year, she marches all the way to the State Football Championship in San Antonio. Over the years, she will learn to endure her father checking up on her, via binoculars, in the stands during football games and during the band’s intricate routines on the field.

• During her junior year in college, my daughter, now an English major, is home for the weekend. She wants to know if I have read a certain book she is currently studying. It turns out I have, and we have a long conversation about the book, its theme, our favorite characters and the like. That turns into a general conversation about literature, and I find, satisfyingly, that she is well-read, thoughtful and insightful. As she describes parts in her favorite books, her face lights up and her gestures become expansive. It occurs to me, for the first time, that she will be a great teacher.

"Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph..."

There is a photograph, taken in the fall of 1972 for North Texas State University’s yearbook, The Yucca. It is of the staff of the North Texas Daily, the student newspaper at NTSU.

I was the leader of that group of journalism stalwarts, and there I am in the center of the photo, my mustache neatly trimmed, my hair flowing in waves to my shoulders. I’m dressed in a black turtleneck and a belted corduroy coat, the very epitome of early-’70s cool. Or so I thought.

Most of the young people pictured are unsmiling. They have serious expressions, some have frowns. It is a heavy burden they carry, these lords of all they survey, these gods striding confidently among mere mortals on missions of grave importance. Or so they thought.

They are editors of the best student newspaper in Texas, perhaps the country. Their futures, though unclear, nonetheless are secure, their eventual success unquestionable.  Or so they thought.

We had a lot to learn. And the lessons would sometimes be cruel.

Tomorrow, I travel north to Denton to attend a reunion of staffs of the NT Daily and its quirkily named predecessor, the Campus Chat. By all rights, they should serve us cold pizza and beer, since that’s what we largely subsisted on in college. But since the event is on campus, I suspect it’ll be punch and finger food.

That’s just as well, I think. In our day, my Daily colleagues and I could hang with the best of them. And did. Today, four decades later, I’m not so sure.

A few years ago, my daughter, then a freshman at what is now known as the University of North Texas, accepted an invitation to help with production of the NT Daily. 

Such an idea would have been unthinkable in 1972. The NT Daily office then was a holy place, where access was jealously guarded and only the Anointed Ones – otherwise known as J-students – were allowed to worship there and to be instructed in the mystic ways of protecting the Public’s Right to Know.

The thought of allowing a non-journalism major – and a freshman to boot – to actually touch stories being prepared for publication would have sent all True Believers in the Five Ws and an H (Who, What, When, Where, Why and How, amen)  into a frenzy of self-flagellation and alcohol consumption.

But times have changed – alas and alack – and so it was that my daughter, bored and a little lost during her first semester at UNT, showed up in the NT Daily office on a Wednesday evening to edit some copy and perform what other chores the staff could devise for its volunteer slaves.

Three hours later, Rachel was walking back across campus on her way to her dorm, the venerable Maple Hall. Still a little nervous of the darkened campus at night, she called Dad for some company.

“How did you like the Daily?” I asked nervously, fearful she had been bitten by the same bug that had infected me with a love of journalism and sentenced me to a career in newspapers.

“OK, I guess, but I don’t think I’ll do it again.”

“What happened?” I said, a wave of relief washing over me.

“God, Dad, it was the most boring night of my life,” she said in a rush. “The stories were boring, the people were boring. And the Daily editors?  Geez, what a bunch of arrogant jerks they were. Walking around all self-important, ordering people to do this and do that, and just lording it over everyone.”

Then she paused for a moment as if just realizing something. “I’ll bet you were just like them when you were at North Texas, weren’t you, Dad?”

Yes, sweetie, I’m afraid I was. Guilty as charged.

I doubt many of my crowd will make it to tomorrow’s reunion. We have scattered since our days in the sun. I will attend in their honor and sip a cup of too-sweet punch in memory of the days we ruled the NT Daily – utterly convinced of the righteousness of our cause, fearless of the future or anything else, and completely assured we would change the world.

The world hasn’t changed much. We have.

“The children were nestled all snug in their beds”

A happy holiday chaos has descended on Gunnels Manor.

 

How else to put this? My wife and kids are slobs, God love ’em. Carelessly abandoned shoes litter every room in the house. Discarded winter coats hang from every chair and railing. Half-empty drink glasses sit forlornly on coffee table, side table and console.

 

And my kids’ rooms? Dear Lord, preserve us! My son sits in unspeakable squalor playing video games and watching Netflix. My daughter, home from college, has clothes, toiletries and God-only-knows strewn everywhere. The aftermath of a tsunami would look more orderly.

 

But I don’t care. Because I know, with a heaviness of heart that surprises me, that soon enough, the kids will be gone, along with the clutter. We’re coming to an end of things in the Gunnels household.

 

My daughter graduates from college next May. Then she will hit the job market and look for a teaching position. I hope it will be close enough for regular visits, but who knows about such things.

 

Next fall, my son will leave for college, and I’ll be surprised if we see much of him thereafter. Short visits to drop off laundry and mooch a home-cooked meal, perhaps. But he yearns to be free of his parents’ cloying grasp. So did I at his age, so who am I to complain now?

 

Transition time is upon us. It’s nothing new and nothing that countless parents haven’t faced – and survived – before. There’s nothing special about our situation, certainly, but that doesn’t help much. I still get a knot in my stomach thinking about it. And certain random things trigger an onset of almost-panic.

 

It happened last night when I got up to get a drink of water, and decided to take a peek at my sleeping children, something I've done all their lives. It started when my daughter was a baby and I lived in fear that she would die in her sleep, an irrational worry sparked no doubt by reading too many articles about SIDS. Sometimes, when she appeared to be too still, I would pinch her awake just to reassure myself.

 

Over the years, particularly when they were old enough to stay out late, I would look in on them after they fell asleep, grateful for the peace it gave me to see them safe and sound in their own beds.

 

So last night, I quietly checked first on Rachel, who lay on her side, her long hair a tangled mess on the pillow and her angelic face hidden by bedcovers. Our West Highland terrier, Kiera, raised her head from her spot on Rachel’s bed, saw me in the doorway and lay down again with a contented sigh. No intruders to chase on this night.

 

I turned and tiptoed to Ethan’s room. He had gone to a late movie with friends and didn’t get in before I went to bed. Standing in the entrance to his slovenly den, I looked at him wrapped in a blanket, one bare leg hanging over the side of the bed, the very image of youthful sloth.

 

Then I returned to bed and lay there, eyes open, filled with the nagging apprehension of a time when it will not be so easy to determine their welfare and to shield them from harm.

When my children are gone – from here into the wild, uncontrolled fury of the world – how will I cope? Like all empty nesters, I suppose. But I will yearn for the days when a quick survey of my children in their beds could bring blissful, untroubled sleep.

And I dread the day when I will walk past their clean, uncluttered rooms – neat as a pin and just as featureless – and remember when chaos reigned, when my only true gifts to the world lived carefree and unruly under my roof.