Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1 Newspaper. While I am certainly not above whining if my morning newspapers arrive in time for dinner, or Heaven forbid are totally AWOL, I do wish to give a virtual (and most assuredly unheard) huzzah to both of the folks who brought my Sunday tomes this AM. Pouring rain. Each paper double wrapped in plastic.

That there’s just nice peopling.

2 Mugwump. Fence-sitter or fence-sitting. British word. I know we Americans speak English, just like the Brits.

Sometimes they just do it with a bit more style, ya know?

3 Anniversary. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve had a chance to sit down on a Sunday and empty out my internal hard drive by musing. Missed writing about my 39th Wedding Anniversary! Beth and I were on the road for my nieces wedding in Bar Harbor Maine. Lovely place, that. Bar Harbor. Despite the fact that we have a number of places that we each wish to see for the first time, I think Beth and I agree that the coast of Maine was unexpectedly spectacular in all respects.

We plan to find a reason to return, for sure.

39 years married. 42 together. What a ride! I know I have written about this in the past, but we get asked all the time if there is a secret to our marriage. To our love. We have two, neither of which is all that complex, and at least for us, neither of which feels or felt all that difficult over the years. Marriage is not a 50/50 proposition, it’s 100/100; both partners make a primary commitment to the marriage. Never stop courting. Beginning when our firstborn was still a baby we have been on at least one date every week. One night at least, when we are simply two people in love, together, doing the stuff that people do when they are in love. Remember, the honeymoon isn’t over until you say it is!

I do so love you, Dollie.

4 Obituary. James R. Hagerty is the obituary writer/editor for the Wall Street Journal. Once upon a time he wrote a moving opinion piece about the value of writing your own obit. I think he may have included his most recent personal effort writing his own, but my memory may be foggy. No matter. Somewhere I wrote up a draft of my own which is long lost by now, although I did choose the picture I’d like included if I should depart in the nearish future.

Hagerty didn’t give any specific instructions on the picture thing, but the one I’m thinking about really reminds me of what I think I look like at this stage in life.

Writing in this week’s Sunday Times Opinion section Kelly McMasters sorta one-ups Hagerty in her piece: “Why I Write My Obituary Every Year”. It’s a gem of a piece, written around a tight prompt and literally brimming with delicious word nuggets that describe her rationale and her process. “Reflecting on your life isn’t as maudlin as it may seem.” Some of her autobiobituaries were little more than an accounting of the life lived, the most recent iteration simply an update of the previous year’s effort. After particularly unimpressive years she admitted to a bit of embellishment, inventing “facts” that would surely occur if only she lived long enough for them to make it into her last final word. It’s a funny little quirk, that: an aspirational obituary. A forward looking, backward glance.

Ms. McMasters quotes the Times reporter Margalit Fox from the documentary “Obit”: Obituaries have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life. McMasters: “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves. Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.”

I really like this. As easy as it is for me to do most of the writing in which I indulge, I found it terrifically difficult to write the obituaries for my Dad and then my Mom, even though I knew exactly what I wanted them to say. The process was equal parts heartbreaking and gut-wrenching, so heavy was the weight carried while writing those final chapters. Perhaps writing my own might ease the pain that a loved one may feel if they were so chosen, even if my effort is just an outline for how my people wish to remember me rather than the last version of how I remembered myself.

Living is so much more than simply being alive. More than just not dying today. I was totally taken by surprise by Ms. McMasters’ piece today, and I’m not nearly well enough prepared to update my obituary in time for “Sunday musings…”, at least not this week. I don’t know exactly when I will do so, or if I will try to do it every year, but reading this piece was one of those times when I totally and completely got the author’s perspective, and felt like she knew I was here and was gently encouraging me to listen, to think about more than staying alive.

“[The] obituary exercise taught me the practice and value of holding death close, so I could remember to live.”

I’ll see you next week…

In my travels, and those of my oldest friends and acquaintances, I have come across scores of people who are truly happy. Capable of feeling and giving in to joy. It’s such a special thing to see, and even better to in some way feel a part of that joy, wherever it may be from and whatever may have brought it to life. It’s out there, you know. Sometimes it’s subtle, as gentle and quiet as the proverbial footstep of a butterfly landing on a leaf. Other times it is raucous and riotous and simply blasts through your space like a runaway train.

That’s kinda cool.

Sadly, there are others out there who resent the joy in others. Whether they are themselves happy or not so much, the happiness of another feels to them like losing. It’s more than envy in the unhappy. For these folks it’s as if there is a finite about of happiness and joy in the world; no matter how much of either they may have at any one time they cannot see another’s joy without feeling as if it is somehow draining the reservoir from which they may drink some time in the future. Weird, huh? They sometimes seem more fixated on the blessings of others than on their own, so much so that their own joy slowly seeps away.

Happiness and joy are not limited resources. Quite the contrary. My happiness, my joy is not predicated on your unhappiness or your sorrow, and vice versa. Heavens, if one person’s happiness could come only from another’s despair we’d have long ago slipped into a rather dismal anarchy. No, joy is the ultimate non-zero sum measure. More than that, joy is an exponential multiplier. When you find or see joy in someone else and that vision makes you happy, the amount of happy you get is a full order of magnitude greater than it should be. If that joy and happiness should come to someone who has lately had little of either, well, that’s just so much the better.

Life is pretty good around Casa Blanco right now, and as much as I’d like to think that means it will always be thus that’s not how life works. Regardless, if I should stumble upon you in the midst of something joyous you can be sure that no matter what happens to be going on in my little world I’m surely not going to resent you or your joy. Quite the opposite. I’m going to revel into your happiness and dive into the wake of your joy.

Whether the skies be cloudy or eggshell blue, a glimpse of the sun always warms everyone it touches.

Sunday musings…

It was a Tuesday. For sure. Tuesday is an OR day for me, and I was with my work people on what looked to be a pretty vanilla Tuesday morning. That’s how you like it in the OR: vanilla. A good day is no memory of the operations whatsoever. A great day is one where you remember some interaction with your teammates, something good or funny or nice.

9/11 was definitely a Tuesday. What I remember is being with one group of my people.

Everything about the day was going just like every other Tuesday. Fast cases with great results. Stories flying back and forth between doc, nurses and patients. Just a joy to be doing my job. Until, that is, one of the nurses came into my room and said a plane had hit a tower. To a person our collective response was something like “huh…that’s weird. How tragic,” and then back to work. Back to normal until that very same nurse came back and said a second plane had hit the second tower. We all stopped after that case and headed to the family lounge, a TV and CNN.

I remember being in a similar place when the Challenger blew up, surrounded by colleagues, patients and families. That’s where I was when the first tower collapsed. After that nothing was normal about the day at all. There is literally nothin in my memory banks about the rest of the morning. I know we finished the cases, but then everything came to a full and complete stop. Clinic hours were cancelled, schools let out, and the wheels of American life ground to a halt. The rest of the day was spent in tracking down my brother (traveling now by car from Chicago to Connecticut), and best friend (stranded in Brazil). The skies were empty for days.

Our new normal had just kicked in.

My parents worried about an attack on our soil from Germany to the east (U-Boats off the coast of New England) or Japan from the west (a friend posted the story of a Japanese pilot who actually fire-bomb Oregon!). As a child our politics and our lives were spent worrying about the specter of a communist attack. As an adult, a father and a grandfather, it is now the fear of Jihad unleashed. The post-Reagan/post-Berlin Wall years of relative peace and security seem so very long ago now, don’t they?

The reality, of course, is that we are far safer than we think we are. Yet our own personal realities are driven by the same psychology that led our parents to fear a coastal invasion, for us to fear Russian bombers. We march on each day, as we must. We march on so that each day’s completion becomes one more tiny victory in yet another long war fought for us mostly between the ears, so much like the Cold War before it. We seek victory once again in the daily act of living our normal lives.

We remember, though. Like I remember that it was a Tuesday. We never forget, nor should we try to forget. It is in the remembering and carrying on despite the remembering that we do our tiny part to honor those who were lost. Today is a day to take a moment away from normal to remember.

I remember.

Here is what I wrote on “Sunday musings…” 10 years after 9/11. I am re-posting it today. Really, this should have been an annual thing. 9/11 was, and should continue to be, a very big deal.

1) GPS. Where were YOU? 9/11/01 is the equivalent of “Where were you when JFK was shot”, or “Where were you when Pearl Harbor was bombed?” We chatted about this at dinner chez bingo the other night. I was in the OR with a full schedule when the first plane hit. I came out in time to watch the second one hit, and then was between cases when the second building went down.

Never forget.

2) Plain talk. 9/11 is almost routinely called a tragedy, especially now, 10 years on. This is pretty much the only way I’ve seen it described in all types of media, mainstream and otherwise. Well, it is, and it isn’t.

The killings of nearly 4000 people on U.S. soil was tragic for each one of them, and truly tragic for their friends and families. But a tragedy? I say no. A tragedy implies some element of fate, something about which no single person could have stood up and prevented. Think the Tsunami in Japan. Mudslides in South America. An avalanche or wildfire out of control. THOSE are tragedies resulting in death.

No, 9/11 was filled with a tragic loss of life, but the only fate involved was so banal that if beggars the definition of fate: did you go to work that Tuesday morning? The deaths of 9/11 are the direct result of pure, unadulterated EVIL. They represent nearly 4000 killings. Purposeful killings. Mass murder perpetrated on civilians so far removed from any war zone that to even call them “non-combatants” is a meaningless over-reach. Calling 9/11 a “tragedy” cheapens the word, cheapens the loss, puts the soft glow of unavoidable fate on what was nothing of the sort.

9/11 was EVIL. Call it what is was.

3) Press “up”. Funny, after 10 years you’d think we’d have heard all of the “hero” stories by now, huh? Apparently not. Seems there were some folks who did some pretty heroic things who just never got around to telling anyone. Like those 2 Air National Guard pilots who scrambled after the plane that eventually went down in PA with UNARMED JETS. Yup. No missiles or bullets on board. They took off with complete knowledge that they would not only have to face the specter of shooting down fellow citizens, but “shooting down” actually meant using their aircraft as missiles.

It’s crazy, even after 10 years, to think of how many heroes stood before life’s elevator or stairwell and pushed “up”. Safety was “down”, out, anywhere but “up”, and yet up they went. Cops, firefighters, and two unarmed fighter pilots who just happened to be a little higher when they chose to go “up”. These men and women, on the ground floor at several Ground Zeros, have been followed honorably by thousands of other American heroes toiling anonymously, and SUCCESSFULLY, to prevent other evil doers from killing other Americans.

I’m still awestruck, 10 years on.

4) Epilogue. So, what did you take away from 9/11? Did anything change? Anything stay with you? Couple things for me. The first thing, regrettably and to my great embarrassment, is that it took a tragic event like 9/11 for me to really look at a huge swath of Americans I’d never really paid much attention to before. This would be Police Officers, Firefighters, and any variety of men and women in the Armed Forces. This was still 4+ years before I discovered CrossFit mind you, but our collective respect for, and willingness to acknowledge, these men and women is a small positive outcome that I believe persists 10 years on.

I had an epiphany of sorts 10 days after 9/11. The particular trigger (I really disliked a certain golf course) was trivial, but I was primed by 9/11 to be open to the “Aha!” moment. I discovered that the things that make me unhappy make me more unhappy than the things that make me happy, make me happy. Seems kinda simple I guess, but it was like a bolt from the blue. I realized that, once identified as such, things that made me unhappy could be avoided downstream. You don’t always get to choose only the stuff that makes you happy (Polyanna doesn’t live here anymore), and you don’t even necessarily get to always choose to avoid stuff that makes you unhappy, but it’s amazing how often you CAN if you try just a little. A life changer that I was able to notice because, well, I was thinking a whole lot about life after watching so many lose theirs.

I’m not saying that anyone else should have had this particular epiphany on or about 9/11, or ANY epiphany for that matter, but I do wonder, is there something that changed, something you’ve carried with you since that day. Since 9/11/01? 10 years on?

1 Curse. “May you live in interesting times.” Ancient Chinese curse.

It seems to me that we have always ever had only interesting times.

2 Dylan. Bob Dylan’s music comes up pretty regularly in my college group. Usually in the form of another artist’s cover. I’m continually amazed by the quality of the music as written; so many artists with manifestly greater performative talents produce vastly superior versions of Dylan’s compositions. Hendrix: All Along the Watchtower. Clapton: Don’t Think Twice. Joni Mitchell: Blowin’ in the wind. Seriously, one could go on and on. And yet their performances are but veneer laid upon a brilliant foundation.

What strikes me lately is how timeless his lyrics are. Spend a moment or two with “The Times They Are A’changin'”. Written in the mid-60’s if memory serves, and yet each stanza could easily fit on stage this weekend. Generational strife. War simmering in foreign lands. Talking heads trying to talk over our heads.

Dylan the poet is the seer of change.

3 Change. “It’s never the changes we want that change everything…”: Graffiti on the walls of a decaying office within an abandoned foundry in Cleveland, OH. (HT @ExploresMr).

Goodness, there’s an awful lot of meat on that bone.

Those of you who are longish in tooth will recall that “Sunday musings…” was born on the “pages” of the old CrossFit.com. At least once each year calls for change in some aspect of CrossFit, or perhaps the bleating of those bemoaning some change that emanated from the halls of CrossFit HQ, would finally become sufficiently loud to trigger a “musings…” about change. These protestations almost always had a particular quality to them: the viewpoint through which the conversationists wished to propose or protest change was myopic to the point of seeking/seething over change that had nanoscopic scope. There was often an almost willful naiveté. “Thus and such needs to change/should never have changed because I feel…”. You could set your watch by the timing of these conversational threads whenever change might be blowin’ in the wind.

Re-reading the scribblings of our mystery savant I can’t decide if they speak more about miss-met expectations or unintended consequences. Covers both pretty well, actually. Change always happens; change is the only constant. I’m pretty confident that our philosopher in the foundry is not lamenting some sort of stasis, some lack of change. Pretty sure they are turning a keen eye on those who are active seekers of change. Again, to CrossFit and the crescendo of demands for change that followed the founder’s ill-advised public pondering of things not necessarily CrossFit. The change that people wanted was for the culture to become more like the aspirational culture seen on the nation’s op-ed pages. It was occurring, after all, at a time of peak identity politics.

What they got, what changed everything was the culture you see on the pages of a spreadsheet during peak financial engineering.

In my day job as a practicing surgical specialist I am constantly aware of both the mis-met expectations and the unintended consequences of the creeping consolidation of services and those who provide them in our American healthcare universe. The change everyone professes to want is “universal coverage”, the universal access of every citizen to a vehicle that will pay for the healthcare they use. The changes many wish for would lead to a single source of both funding and foundational structure, the federal government. Where once more than 75% of physicians were in privately owned practices in which the employees worked for the doctor and the doctor worked for the patients, the Affordable Care Act has driven consolidation to the point where nearly 70% of physicians are employed by massive corporations, both for- and “not for-” profit. Believe it or not, this has increased the % of people who are “covered”, who have health insurance that pays for all, most, or some of their healthcare.

What changes everything turns out not to be coverage, but what this coverage-driven consolidation has done to care. Dollar-driven care changes your relationship with the people who take care of you. No longer do you actually have a relationship with the people who take care of you any more than you have a relationship with the person who checks you out at Walmart. “Coverage” that drives doctors into ever larger organizations, be they faux “non-profits” like the Mayo Clinic and its peers or ever-larger practices owned by the numbers people who run private equity investments (like CrossFit), means that your care is now provided by people who work for someone other than you. The people who support the clinics where you receive your care report to business people, not medical people. Coverage isn’t caring. Coverage is a transaction.

What changed everything was that coverage isn’t healthcare; coverage is nothing more than a transaction.

On and on it goes. Change, that is. We have actually never lived as a species in a time where there WASN’T change, although it surely seems as if there have been times when similar changes occur over and over again. Maybe the fault lies in something altogether human, our inability to distinguish the differences between that which we want and that which we need. Perhaps that’s why so many of Dylan’s lyrics seem so current despite the fact that they were written 50+ years ago.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’ (Bob Dylan)

“It’s never the changes we want that change everything.”

I’ll see you next week…

1 Phone. On holiday, pretending to live in a time when there were no phones. WSJ Katie Roiphe

I’d like to give this a try, although I’m not sure that I can devote a month to the effort as is suggested by Ms. Roiphe. At least not at the moment. Still…

2 Still. “There’s a difference between being still and doing nothing.” The Karate Kid

Would it be easier to be still without access to your phone? Or looking at the other side of the coin, can one escape the notion that randomly scrolling is in some way doing something?

This quote found its way into “musings…” several years ago. I’m still working on being good at being still.

3 Rain. It is raining in the precise little sliver of geography I presently occupy. According to the weather reports (acquired from my laptop, not my phone, thank you very much) it is going to continue to rain for another hour or so. At least on my immediate surroundings.

It looks as though it’s fairly dry above the lake some 10 or so miles north.

No real reason to bring this up. Contrary to the song, rainy days and Sundays don’t really get me down as long as I’m not alone on either for too very long. Alone in the rain on a Sunday? Sounds like a song waiting to be written.

4 Viewpoint. In the mid-’90’s one of my colleagues taught T’ai chi in a series of classes offered to folks who had some connection to one of the local hospitals where we were both on staff. Viewpoint #1: turns out we were both former “hard-style” martial artists who’d left the fighting stuff behind for various reasons and thought that T’ai Chi would fill the void. Michael is 10-ish years older than I am and had reached the point of action 10-ish years sooner. All the better and fortunate for me because I could learn from him in comfort.

Over the ensuing 30 or so years our friendship has waxed and waned as our slightly different life stages and medical lives flowed toward and away from each other. Likewise, we spent more and then less time together in our T’ai Chi practices. As my dive into CrossFit went ever deeper I drifted away from T’ai Chi. Michael stepped in with a couple of refresher sessions. My CrossFit practice was enhanced by my reintroduction of T’ai Chi.

Came a time around 2018 when my left hip rebelled to the point where everything hurt, including the gentle movements of T’ai Chi. Sadly, the ensuing 6 years of so were so engulfed with the ebb and flow of pre-hab/surgery/re-hab, my physical viewpoint so tightly focused on the necessary aspects of recovering whatever was possible after two surgeries and the overwhelming need to re-build large-muscle strength, that I find that I can no longer remember the T’ai Chi form. So long in the building of the memory, muscle and otherwise, at 64 it is naught but shadows in mind and muscle.

I miss it.

In T’ai Chi, specifically classic Yang style T’ai Chi, it looks as if I have found a building block as I seek to construct the next phase of life. Interestingly, I discovered that a very specific issue of viewpoint has created a challenge that will need to be overcome before I can even begin to address the twin peaks of muscle and memory I will need to summit to re-gain the sequences of the practice: I learned by standing behind my teacher, and by placing myself in the middle of the group when privileged to have company. All of the videos and all of the diagrams in print are shown from the front view, looking at an instructor facing the camera.

In order to regain something old that I’ve lost I will need to learn how to look for it in a totally new way.

5 Sixth Sense. “It’s about perhaps the most frightening thing of all–not being able to communicate to people that you care about.” Haley Joel Osmet, on what he felt was the ultimate theme of the movie The Sixth Sense. Gentle warning: I don’t really know where this is going, so if you haven’t seen the movie there may be a spoiler ahead.

Those of you whose parents have died know exactly what Mr. Osmet is talking about. While I didn’t necessarily think of talking with my Dad each day after he passed away in 2015, now that my Mom is gone I think about what I would like to talk about with each of them every day. Funny, huh? For decades after med school I would chat with one or both of them at least a couple times each week. Lest you feel this declaration is a push for some type of beatification, each of my siblings called my folks 5 or more times each week. We all agree that not being able to talk with them at all is the harder part of no longer having them here. Each morning when I park my car at the office I look at the path I wore through the grove of pine trees between my office and my Mom’s final home.

A path I no longer have need to travel.

Death, while certainly the most certain of causes, is hardly the only reason why we might be unable to communicate with someone we care about. You might, for instance, have a family member who is in the military and is deployed someplace where they can neither reach nor be reached. Friendships, as I’ve written, fall prey to distance and time; more of either can change the calculus, even if one friend still has the will to make the math work. Of course, if one has had an abusive childhood of any kind, especially if the abuse has extended into your adult life, ceasing to communicate with the abusing agent might be the difference between happiness and ongoing despair.

If memory serves, the essential thread that runs through The Sixth Sense is the effort being made by Bruce Willis’ character to talk with his wife. Throughout the film we wonder why. Absent time or distance or abuse, or death, of course, one not only fears the inability to communicate with someone they care about, but like Willis in the movie, one’s fear is amplified by a parallel quest to understand the barrier to communication. One thinks of something like shunning among the Amish and similar communities or situations. Willfully severing the ties of family and community in response to some transgression for the purpose of punishment.

It’s as if you’ve been sentenced to a kind solitary confinement while you are surrounded by the rest of humanity.

Owing to the geography of Beth’s upbringing in Pennsylvania I have some knowledge of the cultures and the mores of “Plain Folk”. I’ve always found shunning, the willful imposition of estrangement from family and friends, to be an unsolvable puzzle. Even the more general term estrangement contains conceptualization that suggests both a puzzle (the word “strange” is contained therein) and something truly awful (it literally means to turn someone into a stranger). A fatwa not on a life itself, but on acknowledging the person living. Is a shunning a life sentence? Is there some sort of restitution, some penance of a kind that would end the institutionalized estrangement? I never learned enough to know.

In the end it’s really quite a profound insight that such a moving film is ultimately about the fear of no longer being able to communicate with a loved one. Especially given that the insight comes from a 30-something’s recollection of how he felt as a 10 year old. Did his character fear the same loss? What did young Haley Joel call upon in his life to so convincingly portray that fear? And what of Bruce Willis? What did his character feel when his ultimate fear became reality? What did Willis call upon in his portrayal?

When through discretion, distance, or death he learned that he could no longer communicate his love?

I’ll see you next week…

“Memories light the corners of my mind. Misty water-colored memories of the way we were.” (The Way We Were: Bergman, Bergman, and Hamlisch).

“I used to remember everything, but now I only remember the things that never happened.” –Mark Twain.

Twain never disappoints, does he? There’s all kinds of meat on that bone. Is he saying that he no longer remembers things that really happened, only those things he imagined at the time, or imagines now? Or is he rather saying that looking back on his life he only remembers those things that SHOULD have happened, but didn’t?

Knowing Twain, my bet is that his answer would be:”yes.”

Memory is a funny thing. Partly accurate reportage, one’s memory is leavened by equal parts wishful thinking and regret. At least according to Twain. Think of your own narrative, the telling of your story. How much is fact, how much is embellishment (never let the facts interfere with a good story!), and how much is what you wish had happened? We were telling stories at dinner the other night, stories we all knew, ones we’d all taken part in creating and ones we’ve told countless times. Each time they are told they get a little better. Does this happen with you? Some of the stuff in our stories probably never really happened, but we remember it just the same.

“Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind. Smiles we gave to one another for the way we were.”

After my love letter to Cape Week a couple of weeks ago two of my siblings have gently accused me of looking at Cape Week, and by extension I believe at least just a little bit all of our past, through rose-colored glasses. Is this true? Meh, of course it is. Without the aid of the modern technologies that allow us to document chapter and verse of nearly every event in our today lives through the use of our ever-present mondo-pixeled pocket cameras and the vast repositories that live in literally and figuratively in the clouds, we would be left not so much with the “what” of our stories but rather by the memories of how we felt while those stories were being created. Countless neuro-psych studies have shown that humans remember the emotions felt during an event much more accurately than they do the factual details.

There have been times in my life that literally rocked the foundations of who I thought I was. Occurrences that literally had me sprinting down Prometheus’ hill just barely in front of my boulder as it threatened to flatten everything I thought was right in life. Everything that anchored me, formed the foundation upon which I was building whatever “me” meant. At dinner last night our friends talked about “experimentation” during our school years. They were astonished by how little I’d actually done, and when they asked me why I recounted a story about a 5 on 1 fight I lost in rather spectacular fashion that was triggered by my refusal to join a group of my oldest friends as they “inhaled”. The details were as dry and the recounting as rote as memorializing an EKG during a doctor’s visit, but in the telling I was transported back to the 14 year old boy who’d just lost 5 of his oldest friends. I was just as crushed, felt the loneliness and loss at dinner, at age 64, as I’d been on that Friday night so long ago.

“If we had the chance to do it all again tell would we? Could we?’

Twain also touches on regret in this quote, don’t you think? Things that could have been, or should have been, but for one reason or another, never were. Dangerous ground, that. Regret can turn the urn of happiness into a sieve. To regret, to say that you deeply and truly wish that something had not happened, that you could have a mulligan and do whatever it was differently, means that you are saying that everything that happened after that moment has been insufficiently wonderful and that you would trade it all to not have had the moment in question. It simply can’t be any other way. It’s why regret is such a dangerous indulgence in my mind. In his later years Twain was said to be increasingly bitter. One wonders if his regret fertilized the weeds in the garden of his memory.

“Memories may be beautiful and yet what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget.”

All stories, it seems, have parts that are wonderful and beautiful, and parts that are not. Was Cape Week all sunshine and skittles, the air in our beach house perfumed with nothing more noxious that unicorn farts? Nope. Not even a little bit. Come on, we had 4 families with kids in two houses next door to one another, all together and under the iron fist of a matriarch who demanded full attendance every moment of the week. There was all kinds of stuff I have chosen to forget.

People sometimes choose to remember an event, sometimes even an event that others present disagree ever happened, and build a narrative around it that influences how they interact with the other people who were there at the time. In their defense, it’s no different: they remember the negative emotions they felt and do the opposite of what I’ve done, keeping those memories front and center in their minds and making decisions in the present based on bad feelings born in the past. Rather than choosing to forget, or even to put beneath the comfort of happy memories, each new story must first climb through the briar patch before it reaches the meadow.

“So it’s the laughter we will remember, whenever we remember the way we were.”

My siblings “rose-colored glasses” quip is really just a good-natured jibe, a tiny, gentle tease about my worldview in general and the Cape in particular. Judging by the simply lovely friendships that we four and our spouses enjoy we have all decided in our own ways to remember first, and most often, the laughter. The memories of of the parts of our stories that made us happy. That made us feel seen, or appreciated, or loved. Some of us are better at the remembering part, and to be honest when I try I can remember pretty much every minute of most stories whether good or bad. At the same time some of us are better at the part about what we choose to remember, and again, if I’m being honest with my siblings and the rest of my family, I really do try to find those rose-colored glasses as much as I can, and I really do try very hard to make them fit.

There’s so very little time left. So many memories already made and so little time to make more. There’ll be more laughter, but soon the only thing left will be the memories of that laughter. We choose not only what we remember now but how we choose to live with the memories today. Soon enough memories will be all that is left. And the rosier my memories the more laughter there seems to be as we make the newest of our memories, and that makes me smile.

I’d like to think that people will put on their own rose-colored glasses and smile as they look back on the way we were.

I’ll see you next week…

1 Wroth. Angry. Wrathful. Usually used as a predictive: the anger will result in wrathful events. Also stormy, violent, stormy.

Did I mention that a tornado hung out over my house this week?

2 Barbecue. “Barbecue is the only food apart from lobster where a grown man is permitted to wear a bib without criticism. It is intended to be messy, sweet and bad for you.” Doublewide in “Titanium Noir” by Nick Hardaway.

Those are two perfect sentences. I really have nothing to add other than to suggest that “Titanium Noir” is one of the wittiest, most clever Sci-fi novels I’ve read in some time. You would do well to pick you up a copy.

3 Consilience. A jumping together of destinies. I like everything about this word and what this word means. Oh yes, I like it very much.

Do you believe in destiny? Honestly, I’m not really all that sure that I do. Still, the part about destinies coming together, right? Even more than that, destinies JUMPING together! Not slowly merging or casually sliding together. No. JUMPING! As if somehow the fates are impelled to compel the union of the fates.

I honestly have no idea what this might mean if it’s a thing. If it’s real. But still, what if consilience is real? What if we have people with whose destinies are literally going to jump together with ours?

I dunno. That just sounds cool.

4 Games. Turns out the Crossfit Games have been going on this week, overlapping with the Paris Olympics. CrossFit was once upon a time a very central aspect of what I did. Maybe even who I was. In the earliest days of dial-up internet I spent so much time on CrossFit.com my daughter called it “CrackFit”. In earlier days when CrossFit’s founder still held the reins I would have assumed that he planned it this way. Planned to show that his particular spectacle and his particular idea of what constituted elite athletes was more on point and more accurate than even the Summer Olympics. That CrossFit athletes were superior to even the Olympic triathletes.

Betting he still feels that way.

In what has to be one of the most amazing and unlikely things CrossFit and CrossFit Games, the first fatality in an officially sanctioned CrossFit competition occurred on Thursday during the first individual event of this year’s competition. During a Run/Swim/Run event one of the male competitors disappeared under the water and drowned. Maddeningly he was literally yards from two volunteer safety workers on paddle boards (it should be noted that all non-CF HQ personnel at the CF Games are, and pretty much always have been, volunteers). This has unleashed a predictable firestorm of criticism of all things CrossFit, but especially the CrossFit Games. I feel that a bit of perspective is in order.

Let me first say that I have had no contact nor any engagement with CrossFit, Inc., the CrossFit Games, or CrossFit.com since some time in 2019. Prior to then I was deeply embedded in all things CrossFit. My sons owned a gym for 7 or 8 years. I was an invited guest at every running of the Games, and while there, volunteered on the media team in the earliest years and on the medical team for 10 or 11 years. Behind the scenes I was one of a small group of physicians and scientists who worked along with CrossFit founder Greg “Coach” Glassman on projects as varied as defining health and preventing rhabdomyolysis from the workouts. While doing this I was a very active on CrossFit.com, writing a Sunday “column” and supporting newcomers to the movement. At no time did I speak on behalf of, or represent the position of CrossFit or Coach Glassman or anyone on the CrossFit staff; my statements reflected my own opinions only.

Today is no different.

In my opinion it is borderline miraculous that it is in year 18 or so that we have a first Games fatality. It is important to note that every year there are tragic fatalities in marathons, triathalons, ultra-endurance, and adventure races. This is not in any way to minimize the fatality at the Games, only to point out that it’s simply amazing that the first one occurred so long after the first competition. Are you a CrossFitter? Do you remember the cluster of a full, as Rx’d “Murph” complete with weight vests in the midday heat of Los Angeles in the summer? I continue to be astonished at the good fortune that no one died.

Which brings me to today and the aftermath. Things are so very different from even 2019. The reach of social media, with new players like Instagram and TikTok exponentially increasing the effects of FaceBook and Twitter/X. The firestorm is driven by both the hot winds of a wildfire and the kerosene of the fanatic. Could Lazar’s death have been prevented? Sure. Of course. It’s always the cluster of the wrong things happening at the wrong time that concludes in tragedy. One head is turned just a couple of clock hours further 10 or 15 seconds sooner and the story is one of tragedy averted.

I do not seek to absolve CrossFit, Inc. of responsibility. I do, however, believe that those who have been critical of anyone involved in the incident should remember that there are real people here who are horrified that this death occurred on their watch. I have no idea what qualities the folks on the paddle boards possessed. Given my experience on the medical team where my fellow volunteers were ER doctors, ER nurses, and EMT’s (there were a few specialty volunteers such as yours truly who only engaged in our specialties), my assumption would be some similar level of competence for the folks right there until or unless it is discovered that this was not the case.

Should the Games have been cancelled? Again, historically events in other disciplines (marathons, etc.) typically run their course in the face of these tragedies. Under the circumstances the weight of the moment then falls most heavily on the organizers of an event, in this case the owners and executives of CrossFit, Inc. How are they addressing the tragedy? How are they addressing the decision to carry on, again, the default decision for most similar events? I believe commentary on how they are performing is appropriate.

Since his ignominious exit from CrossFit, Inc. Greg Glassman’s company had been run by a series of bean-counters. Despite the presence of CrossFit HQ OG’s such as Dave Castro and Nicole Carrol, you just can’t escape the sense that every decision emanating from CF HQ, including this one, is the outcome of a bloodless financial calculation. Do they deserve that this weekend? I believe that they do. For several years they have serially upended many core aspects of what made CrossFitters, especially Box owners, support the company. They have conditioned the community to believe that they lead from the accounting office. It is up to them to convince the community otherwise.

Greg Glassman did not like the CrossFit Games, at least what they became after they decamped from the Castro farm in Aromas. It was one of the few things that had enough momentum to defy his desires; he, and CrossFit, were simply swept along by the current generated by the Sport of Fitness (TM). A first death could have come at any of those earlier Games. Castro, co-Games director Tony Budding and Glassman have been widely quoted as openly worrying about athletes surviving multiple workouts in a single day. Would Coach Glassman be handling this differently? Meh, who knows. Remember, he’s a guy who was quoted in an interview with the NYT as saying “this stuff (CF) can kill ya.” Would he have handled a death in an earlier version of the Games differently? Again, who knows. I’d like to think that the earlier versions of Greg Glassman might have. Who knows…

All of this is really just a (typically) long-winded lead up to a very small point and plea: please remember that everyone who is involved in the aftermath, whether they were near the tragic death or forced to address any aspect of it afterwards, everyone is a living, breathing, and especially feeling person. Not an avatar. Not an address or an @something, a person who is struggling with the fact that someone died during what was supposed to be celebration of something they in one way or another hold dear. Whether well inside the current world of all things CrossFit as I was once upon a time, or far outside as I and so many others find ourselves, we can seek answers to questions fairly asked without adding to the collective trauma.

It was said that the formation of a community around a fitness program was a complete surprise to the founder of CrossFit. It’s been said that the community was born, grew, and prospered because of the shared suffering of the participants. Members of that community have no say in how the owners of CrossFit, Inc run the company. The community members share the burden of a loss in that community. The private equity owners have no say in how the community will respond.

In that response I simply ask that members of the community remember that what makes them so extraordinary is how they have always lifted each other in the suffering.

I’ll see you next week…

It’s late afternoon and as usual, there’s a quickening breeze off the water. Umbrellas are flapping. Towels whip around as if possessed. It feels so familiar. The first weekend in August, sitting near the water, watching kids playing with only the faintest awareness that an adult or two has them in view. Yes, the first Sunday in August. The first full day on the water. The first full day of Cape Week.

Year two dreaming of the 32 Cape Weeks that were.

You see, for the second summer I am sitting under an umbrella at home, gazing out over the inland ocean that is Lake Erie and watching someone else’s family and their kids in the water. Social media, for all of its wonders and all of its ability to connect us with our past is at best a mixed blessing this weekend, with all of the memories and accompanying photos of Cape Weeks past. Have you been coming around here long enough to know the stories? I know I’ve told them. The good ones, or at least the better ones. Would you indulge an old man his memories? Perhaps they will trigger good ones of your own. Maybe even kindle a desire to make some. Memories, that is.

Families are funny, aren’t they? Beth and I are both first-borns. More than that, we also ended up being the first in our families to do pretty much all of the standard issue milestone stuff. You know, graduate from high school and college, get married, have kids. Yup, front of the line for all of that. It all seemed pretty regular, and it all seemed to go pretty smoothly until it became clear that we had also become the first of the respective families to acquire in-laws. Now, depending on your particular family in-laws may or may not get a vote on stuff like who goes where on what holiday, but I’ve yet to come across a single family that didn’t include in-laws that had an opinion.

In our case it was equal parts flattering and infuriating: both families really wanted us, well, us and our kids, to be with them for every single major American holiday. Because our families did not live in the same region, let alone state or town, this just wasn’t gonna happen. Our solution was Christmas in our own house, and alternating family homes on Thanksgiving. To try to fill the gap Beth and I proposed a week on the beach to my siblings, and happily they said “yes”. Cape Cod won out over the Jersey Shore beaches of our youth, and Cape Week was born.

One house. Five bedrooms, one for each family. If I close my eyes I can see us through the windows.* My folks look so young. My Dad took up residence at the head of the table, so far from Mom at the other end. A twinkle in his eye as he drank a “forbidden” third glass of wine. There I am holding Randy, my 6 week old son who would become “Randy Pat” that week to avoid confusion with my younger brother, also Randy. Randy Pat is so tiny. There he is next to that 15 pound lobster we got at the Swan River Fish Market. Little Randy is dwarfed by the crustacean! We must have already been to the pediatrician for his ear infection; he’s smiling up a storm at Darric and Timothy with whom he would form the Three Musketeers. No one had more fun than those three boys at any White family gathering, Cape Cod or otherwise. We ate and drank and laughed, 10 adults and 5 children, and had a good enough time to give it another go the following year.

Cape week would live on.

Was it year four or year five? I have my nosed pressed up against the window overlooking the table at breakfast. Uncle Randy, the “Muffin Man” has delivered once again. I see my brother and his family, both of my sisters and theirs and…where are we? Ah, here we come, strolling over from the cottage right next door where we’d rented overflow sleeping space now that there were 7 or 8 grandchildren if my memory is correct. The bedroom that our little family occupied, the largest one in the house, had nonetheless become too small for the five of us to be comfortable so we slept across the driveway in the cottage. My Mom was apoplectic leading up to Cape Week, but by day 5 or 6 she came around, agreeing that we’d outgrown a single house.

Cape Week would live on.

Oh look, there’s the kids’ table in the kitchen. All 10 grandchildren now. All four Moms working the table, some on food prep, a couple waiting table, at least one looks like they’re the bouncer. Mostly keeping Gram at bay from the looks of it. Wait, what’s happening now? All 10 kids are running for the door with Gramp in tow. Ah, you can hear why: the familiar jingle of the ice cream truck can be heard well before it makes its way around the last corner of our little dirt road. If you stand just this side of the hedge you can see them all, sitting on the front porch, smiles outlined by melted Good Humor treats as Gramp gets his annual photo. As time went by the ice cream truck would become a family caravan to Sundae School, which would later become our little version of Uber Eats as the big kids would drive the young ones to pick up sundaes for their parents.

Cape week would live on.

It’s a long story, no? 32 years in all. Another generation of in-laws arrived in the form of spouses for my kids. One summer we even had 3 from the fourth generation. The view through the windows changes as we speed through the years until 2016 and an empty chair. Gramp, the patriarch was gone. Still, the initial reason for Cape Week lived on. We shuffled the seats, gave up the overflow cottage, extended grace to family members from all of the generations who couldn’t make it, and extended our sincere hopes that we would see them soon. It was all so much the same, and it was all so much different. We still had barbecued chicken on the first Saturday night but pizza lost out to chilled lobster and corn on the cob for Friday. Until at last Gram just couldn’t make it over the dunes. August of 2022 would be our last visit to our beloved little beach on Cape Cod.

But you know what? The spirit of Cape Week would live on.

You don’t think I’d take you on an old man’s trip down memory lane, sharing the view through windows blurred by decades of beach spray and the dried tears of both joy and sorrow without a lesson, do you? Of course not. I, we, may never again set foot upon that little beach on Uncle Steven’s Way, but in some way or another we have all been changed by Beach Week. It was a week about family. About choosing family. About making the choice to invest 1/52 or each year into a family. As I look through those windows back in time I ache to see my parents again. But my siblings and their spouses are 6 of Beth’s and my best friends. Our 10 children, none of whom grew up in the same town, know each other so much better than 10 kids from 4 towns have a right to know each other, at least in part because they spend a week together growing up with nothing to do but be together.

Cape Week lives on through all of these friendships.

My folks and Beth’s (who encouraged other gatherings) did their job. They passed along to us a deep knowledge of who our siblings are, and who the in-laws they would acquire would be and become. Those who would become in-laws joined us in full. We who were the middle generation, Randy and Joanne, Tracey and Steve, Kerstin and Jimmy, Beth and I, we did our job. We made the larger family a cornerstone of our lives and demonstrated that in part through our commitment to Cape Week. We came for as long as Gram and Gramp could come. To this day we continue to seek each other out, to look for ways to be together in both happy times and sad.

Cape week lives on for us.

And what of our children? Those 5 there for the first chicken off the Saturday grill and the 5 cousins who joined them? They have now acquired, are acquiring, or are soon enough to acquire another family, in-laws of their own. What do they see when they gaze through the windows at the ghosts of Cape Week? Their parents fought hard and loved harder. What do they see when they look through those windows at the ghosts of us around that dinner table? What do they remember of the countless hours spent in the ocean and on the beach? Do they remember the outbursts of childhood battles revisited or the outpouring of love that thrived despite them? Will they ask the in-laws who have joined the family to adopt the spirit of Cape Week? Will they fight for Cape Week and what it represents?

Will Cape Week and the family that gave it to them live on for them?

The first Sunday in August. It’s Cape Week. I’ve apparently been here for quite a while. The wind has died down as it does each evening. A quiet ocean fills my horizon. Someone took the towels in to be washed. It’s time to take down the umbrellas and bring in the chairs. It’s been two years since we have spent a week together on Cape Cod.

And yet, our generation’s eight spent a week together on vacation last summer and we will gather in September to celebrate the addition of an in-law. Cape Week lives for each of us. I wish for you who are reading this all that was good about Cape Week. All that is good about what Cape Week represents. My wish is that Cape Week may live for you and yours. And mine.

Long live Cape Week.

I’ll see you next week…

*I am grateful to the late, great columnist Dick Feagler of the Cleveland Plain Dealer for the inspiration of a house filled with the ghosts of family, past. RIP.

1 Path. When I park at my office the path I wore through the woods to my Mom’s facility is the first thing I see. Each day my first impulse is to determine if I’ll have time to walk that path for a quick visit. We would have had so much fun watching another Olympic Games together.

I am left to wonder when, if ever, I will look at that path and not see where it leads.

2 100. It has been 100 years since the Summer Olympics were last held in Paris. In an altogether typical French response, the Parisians left town and went on vacation.

3 Celine. Gotta give them credit though, the French know to throw a party. I mean, come on, 360,000 people stood in the rain, happily, because that OPening Ceremony show was simply fantastic. The hits just kept coming. Not gonna lie, the “specter” that ran through the whole shebang was more than a little bit creepy, but the final entry on horseback?! So. Good.

And then they go and top it off with Celine Dion just crushing a classic French anthem.

Thousands of athletes, some of them the wealthiest, most coddled jocks in history, stayed up and stayed out, many of them without so much as a Walmart disposable poncho, lest they miss a minute of the Ceremony. We were glued to the set.

Alons y!

4 2028. Los Angeles, CA, USA has been awarded the Summer Olympics in 2028, and Salt Lake City, UT, USA has been awarded the Winter Olympics in 2034. Admit it, you forgot that the next Summer Games were in the U.S. until the Salt Lake announcement was made. I sure did. Honestly, my first response was to start plotting and planning to return to Park City. We are such Olympics junkies in my family that we actually bought a home in Park City 6 or 7 years before the Games to ensure that we would have a place to stay (we later sold it when our kids were in school and we couldn’t gather to ski together).

I came by my fascination with the Olympics honestly. My Mom and Dad went to the ’84 Games in LA. In the days prior to digital cameras and cell phones my Dad took something like 10,000 photos, creating slide shows for the ages. Mom and Dad were swimming and gymnastics fans, but they went to the LA Games with the intent to see at least one competition in as many disciplines as they could. Heck, there were a couple hundred slides of their one and only equestrian competition where Dad scored front row seats.

Now that’s big time commitment!

My folks were in their late 60’s, I believe, when we took them to Utah. We tried to see as many events as we could. We were there to see Johnny Mosley’s famous “Dinner Roll”, live and in person! My folks found a way to enjoy the snowboard half-pipe, and we all fell in love with short-track speed skating. Especially the relay races! Crazy good.

I’d sure love to see another Olympics on home soil. I will be mid-70’s for the next Salt Lake City Games, but I am going to do everything possible to get myself and Beth to LA in ’28.

5 Hoopla. Men’s Olympic Basketball is the second biggest lock in team sports, right behind Great Britain in Eventing. Just kidding! The biggest lock in team sports at the Paris Olympic Games is the U.S. Women’s Basketball team. There are 12 women on the team and it seems like 10 of them will be first-ballot Hall-of-Famers. Bet the house, the ranch, the farm. They are a Dream Team, winners of the last, what, every Gold medal? Diana Taurasi is gunning for her sixth for goodness sake. SIX!

And yet, so many folks still obsess about the player who isn’t there.

There really is no one to whom one might compare Caitlyn Clark when it comes to the peculiarity of the Olympics roster. She is, indeed, wildly popular at the moment, but as a basketball player on the biggest professional stage–there are no amateurs in the modern Olympics Games–she really shouldn’t be in the conversation. Folks are invoking icons like Magic and Larry, but at this stage in her athletic career Ms. Clark arguably has more in common with Christian Laettner when it comes to the Olympic team (hoops cognoscenti will recall that a rather famous half-court game-winner made Laettner 12th man on the Dream Team). She is a wonderful player, blessed with not only incredible eye-hand coordination but a preternatural court sense that allows her to find teammates for open looks when none appear to be open. But like Laettner, she is unlikely to be the 12th best woman playing basketball in the United States at the moment.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Caitlyn Clark and I like her game. She’s fun to watch, both from the standpoint of a washed up suburban point guard and as a fan of good basketball. She reminds you a bit of a young Pete Maravich, no? Great handle, crazy passes out of nowhere, and just money as soon as she steps across half court. A part of the whole Olympics kerfuffle is that so many otherwise good-on-details pundits have been mixing up the powers that be in determining the Olympics roster, albeit with hilarious takes from some of them. Jason Whitlock took umbrage at the question of whose spot Clark could/should have taken: “The ‘who do you remove from the team?’ debate is comical. Like it matters. For the first time in American history, women have the biggest star in sports and they don’t know how to utilize her. This is high comedy. They’re all Tito. She’s Michael. Beat it.”

That’s good stuff right there, but it’s directed at the wrong folks. You see, it’s USA Basketball, not the WNBA, that’s responsible for selecting the team, and while they are certainly mindful of the need to promote women’s sports in general and basketball in particular, what they are charged with is winning a Gold Medal. Forgive me for picking on poor Mr. Laettner, but his impact on both game outcomes and the promotion of sport was infinitesimal. USA basketball made a call based on the history of the women who were long-time pros before Clark left college with the single-minded goal of Gold.

Jason L. Riley has a weekly opinion piece called “Upward Mobility” in the WSJ. He also conflates USA Basketball with the WNBA with regard to the Olympics roster, but to his credit he directs his comments about Ms. Clark’s importance to women’s basketball toward the WNBA. He does not address her impact in simple basketball terms, as one might have done with someone like Michael Jordan, but more like Larry and Magic, men who were never in the GOAT conversation but nonetheless were responsible for a huge increase in both the popularity of their game and the money the players made playing it. Caitlyn Clark will never be in the GOAT conversation, whether she ends her career more Larry or more Pistol Pete.

Her early influence on the popularity of both college and professional Women’s basketball leads Mr. Riley to the influence that Tiger Woods had on the PGA. During Woods’ reign PGA purses climbed from $68MM to $363MM per year, and golfers in the top 100 made much more money via endorsements. Can Clark do the same thing for the WNBA and the women who play in the league? Tiger overcame literally centuries of discriminatory history in the world of golf through what can only be described as sheer force of will. It can’t have been easy.

But what if it was? If he’d triumphed as completely as he did without any discrimination, elevated the game and the fortunes of all who played during his tenure as completely as he did and he was, I dunno, Doug Sanders, would it have been less meaningful to the sport? Again, don’t get me wrong, Tiger Woods triumph was built on the foundation built by pioneers like Ali and Robinson. In my opinion his broader achievements ARE greater than they would have been if he’d been Doug Sanders precisley because he wasn’t and he isn’t: Tiger Woods, as we all know, is Black.

Riley, also Black, pulls back the curtain on the underlying tension behind the rapid uptick in America’s interest in women’s basketball: Caitlyn Clark is White. Not only that, but unlike Woods she plays in a league where players are predominantly Black, and unlike the PGA a league where many of the brightest stars are gay. Clark, like Woods, is straight. Riley says all of the quiet parts out loud when he questions whether WNBA officials are up to the admittedly delicate task of balancing the already obvious quantitative benefits being reaped by Clark’s arrival (TV viewership up 3x; merchandise sales up 230%; games moved to bigger venues and sold out) with the reality of who she is and what she is not.

Jason L. Riley is to be commended for saying every bit of this.

For me I think there are three take homes from this, all of which can be, and are, true. First, pundits like Jason Whitlock and even Jason L. Riley should be a bit more on point with the WNBA/USA Basketball nuance. Rather than take the however easy but inaccurate shot at the WNBA just say what is: USA Basketball made a proper hoops call that Caitlyn Clark is not one of the 12 best U.S. women basketball players. Riley’s 11yo daughter leads us to conclusion number 2. A budding basketball player, she only started watching WOMEN’S basketball because of Caitlyn Clark. Who cares what Clark is and/or what she’s not. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a PGA golfer of the Tiger Woods era who bemoans the fact that Tiger is Black. Clark is bringing new fans, and new fans will bring new money for everyone.

The third truth? I have no idea who will be the next Tiger Woods. It took an awfully long time for Tiger to become the next Jack Nicklaus, and you could argue that we are still awaiting the next Arnold Palmer. But without Magic and Larry would Michael have had the same impact financially? The same impact growing the game? Would Michael have been, well, Michael?

There’s a certain rising sophomore basketball player on the USC women’s team who makes me think about Magic and Larry and Michael. Will she be who she might be without someone who builds the game so that it is big enough for who she might become when she arrives? I think Mr. Riley understands.

I’ll see you next week…