Andrew and Me

Andrew and I spent last weekend together without his mom, who was off to a high school reunion in Wisconsin.

It turned out to be a somewhat traumatic and intellectually challenging experience for both of us.

He’s three, and pretty smart for his age.  He knows and understands words.  He has good instincts.  He seems to sense what is happening around him. He knows when it’s time to go to the bathroom, and almost always knows how to tell me. He announces in his own way when he is hungry or thirsty. And when I put his food in front of him he won’t touch it until I put grated cheese on top.

I sense that he really likes me. He follows me wherever I go, even into the privacy of my bathroom. He sits under my chair when I eat. He even comes with me to den to watch the Indians game…and unlike me he seems rather relaxed about it.

Is he suffering like I’m suffering? I asked myself, after my once beloved team began to fall apart.  My jaws were tight, my mouth dry I was sweating, wondering what this embarrassing performance  means to the reputation of my beleaguered town…I’m beginning to hate the coach, the owner and everything about the team. I even hate the announcers. 

The New Normal Run Amok

   I winced the other day when the main story on page one of the New York Times declared pretty much without equivocation that births out of wedlock are the “New Normal” in America.
   My initial reaction was one of sadness for the nation and for the mothers who either by choice or by pain of abandonment go it alone.  But mostly a personal pain for the children, primarily for the boys, who must grow up without a father.  You might call it, as does the Cleveland Plain 
Dealer, "Fatherless in America. A national tragedy.”  I was startled to learn the 76 % of children  born in Cleveland out of wedlock.  fatherless boys we are told are much more likely to end up in jail, to fail in school, to become jobless.
   A national tragedy you bet.  If we wnt to fix  America, here's a very good place to start.
   I drew partly on my own experience as I wrote this story about “LeBron and Me” a while ago touching on this subject.. This is a slightly expanded and updated version that tells it as it is, or, at least, as it is for me.…

LeBron and Me

I felt an eerie, uneasy kinship with LeBron the other night as I watched him slowly, painfully walk off the court in Miami, in defeat in game six with Dallas in the NBA playoffs.

I wondered how he really felt inside.  This huge boy in a man’s body, lifted by passion and athleticism to heights few mortals ever reach,

What are his inner resources? To whom can he turn as he feels the pain of loss? Not to the man who made his mother pregnant at age 16 and never returned.

I think I know something about that sense of loss. And the inability to deal with it likes a “man”, so to speak.

Like LeBron, I grew up without a father.  It was not good experience.  This devastating loss of the man in your life leaves a hole in you gut a mile wide. And it never really goes away.  No matter how hard you try, on the basketball court or on the courtyard of life.

Particularly when the man you came to depend on disappears, or in LeBron’s case, was never there at all.
I was enchanted when he told the journalists at a news conference after the playoff loss that it was truly up to “the Man upstairs” to determine when he would ultimately win that coveted championship ring. Something, he had indicated he wanted more than anything in this world.