Sadie bounced through the back door, ecstatic. She had a new math teacher, Mrs. Washington, a twenty-year vet (not of the armed forces but of the profession, though the line between the two seems sort of dotted if you turn your head just right.)  Mrs. Washington had recently relocated and was new to Sadie’s school. 

“She’s sooooo cool,” Sadie said, kind of bobbing her head, while grinning like she had a Super-Secret, as she no doubt held an image of her teacher in her mind. “Her room is bright and colorful, and we sit in stations to do our work . . .” Then, while dumping out the contents of her backpack on the kitchen island, “She puts a thought for the day up on the board and we read it out loud together at the start of class.”

“Oh! I love her already,” Sadie’s mom, Brenda, gushed. 

Michael W. Smith composed the iconic song, “Friends,” in roughly thirty minutes. The year was 1983 and Bill Jackson, Michael’s close friend from his Bible study group, was moving away.  Michael’s wife, Debbie, decided he should write their spiritual brother a tribute and perform it at his farewell dinner that evening, but Michael wasn’t too keen on the thought. They had less than an afternoon. 

Debbie insisted. 

Jon’s precognitive mind didn’t know he had eggs. He ate eggs, preferring them sunny-side up to scrambled and scrambled always over poached or boiled.  He colored eggs, dipping them carefully into bowls of dye at Easter for his younger brother and sister to hide and find. But he didn’t know he had any. 

Until people started telling him what to do with his, that is.

Since being old enough to understand and to remember, coaches and teachers, parents and grandparents, podcasters and TED talkers –voices of authority, people “in the know”-- have inundated him with unsolicited assistance. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” they say.

Jon takes umbrage with the notion.

My dad would have turned 89 yesterday had dementia not rooted in and crowded out his days. On his birthday, I ache for all the life that’s happened here without him.

Consistently, but with haphazard timing, his essence blankets me. 

This story—my way, I suppose, of folding up and tucking away the raw edges of jagged grief—was the first blog I posted when I began “A Weigh of Life” almost five years ago. I’m re-posting it today with a little spit-shine, including a fresh title. Dad was big on buffing. I think he’d be glad to see I’ve moved forward from the arm of his chair.

We pushed the lead to seventeen midway through the second half. But the savvy and experienced Australians refused to go away. On defense, they bluffed us into taking shots we didn’t love and usually didn’t take. On offense, they probed until they could isolate the match-up that they liked, then they put us one by one on skates. They scored. We fouled. We missed. They rebounded. With seasoned play that fueled conviction, they built inside our red, white and blue jerseys a tower of existential dread.

When USA is emblazoned across your chest, the expectation is “we win.” It doesn’t matter if your roster was just decided ten days before you flew across the world while most of your competition has been playing together for years. No one cares if the average age of your team is nineteen while most opponents are twenty-five. It’s immaterial. So what if you’re jet lagged and it’s only dark at night from twelve to four and the beds are hard and the rooms are hot? Nobody wants to hear it. Your job when you wear the gear is to win.

Our crystal-clear objective was teetering on the brink.

PaPa hung the hoop on the streetside face of the carport above the concrete that sloped at an angle toward the asphalt street. The “driveway” pad was mostly smooth. Its only demarcation, a seam where the cement met the pebbly tar, naturally, at right about fifteen feet. 

In most respects the outdoor half-court was perfect. A boundary line of gravel flanked it to the left.  To the right, it was walled off by yard-- grass sometimes mingled with stickers, sometimes mud. The court didn’t sit atop a hill where the Oklahoma wind was known to sweep. The airspace above it wasn’t threatened by stretching branches of nearby trees. The street it met at its inborn free-throw line was almost always quiet. The slant of the surface, however, was the cause of much chagrin.

Following a lengthy debate, “Let’s just do it right,” PaPa finally announced with end-of-story resolution, “with as little wrong as it will be.” 

We sang the song, it seemed like, almost weekly. “Trust and Obey/ for there’s no other way/ to be happy in Jesus/ but to Trust and Obey . . . .” A go-to for small-town worshipers on Wednesday nights at the Church of Christ.   A song regulars could sing without the assistance of a hymnal, though there was always a reminder. “Turn next to #915.” We sang it so often we forgot to hear the words. 

Trust and Obey. The directives come hitched like a trailer to a truck, though it’s hard to say which is doing the pulling and which is being pulled. They’re not the same and yet one rarely makes a showing without the other in tow. 

Back in the day, when the rule book was fat and the list of “shall nots” for college programs was long, we were allowed to give our scout team fellas nothing. Cool University of Oklahoma swag? No way. Gear for daily practice, perhaps shorts with an interlocking OU and a pair of Nike shoes? Nope. “Extra benefit,” the University’s compliance officer would chide with an I-mean-business face.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” we would argue. “What’s the original benefit the extra would be on top of?” 

“She just kept not dying.” That’s what the doctors said to Katherine Wolf’s family after a sixteen-hour surgery in which they replaced her full blood volume five times. She was a twenty-six--year-old brand new mom living her best life when a birth defect she didn’t know she had caused a rupture in the base of her brain.  It doesn’t make sense that she lived through it. “Nothing on paper does,” make sense that is, she says. Yet, when you hear her tell her story a lot of wavy things start to straighten out.

We were talking, a small circle of us, at a New Year’s Eve brunch. The kind of get-together where you get together wearing lululemon tights and ball caps and the front door with the “Welcome” wreath never closes but instead stands open like a handwritten permission slip. Our conversation turned to loss.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” someone said, “How every Christmas seems to bring a tragedy...” 

As the blank slate of January 1 approaches, our minds as if on auto-pilot shift to lists… An excerpt from “The Compost File:”

I’m not much of a New Year’s resolutions girl, but I do love lists. They erect borders around slippery things I’m afraid might slide away if I don’t step in and do my part to contain them. The ones in the notes on my phone, while a decent substitute when I’m on the go, don’t hold a candle to the real ones I make on the backs of envelopes—the ones that sometimes get re-written just so they can get checked off. Those carry gravitas in their etching.

That’s how stuff gets done.

Austyn sat up in bed organizing her lovies who were joining us for the night. Turtle-Turtle, Rocky Bear, Dumbo, Puff-Puff and her newest acquisitions from an extended-family gift exchange—Katty and Dog. They were neatly lined up on and around the pillows forming a retaining wall on the far side of the bed. “You hafta be good,” she whispered to them. “Santa is seeing who’s nice and naughty and he’s coming in his sleighhhhhhh!” the last word taking off like a team of reindeer from the roof, its one syllable stretched to capacity inside of her whisper-shriek. I was laying with my back to her, feigning sleep while cataloging every single word as the Times Square Ticker in my head ran ‘round and ‘round exclaiming, “This is as good as it gets!”

My four-year-old granddaughter thinks Santa and Jesus are next of kin. 

I can so see how she got there. 

Both Old St. Nick and the Prince of Peace watch over everything everywhere all at once. Each disapproves of bad behavior. We petition both with lists of wants and needs. Legions of helpers—elves and angels, respectively—rally to help them make miracles occur...

Austyn, who has grown into a pre-school-going girl, is a believer. Even if some of her wires are crossed. The fibers that cement Jesus of Nazareth and Santa of the North Pole together in her mind will, in time, loosen and begin to separate. But I am not inclined to push the process. 

Her conviction—however it’s bundled—fortifies me.

“Clear the court and let’s play points!” instructs my hitting coach. We always start with FBI. Not the bureau, but the “first ball in” -- a way to get free reps of the serve before scorekeeping begins.

I stuff one used yellow ball under the leg of my Lycra shorts and bounce another with my left hand.

As a girl who loves the grind of a drill, I do not dread the first half of our practice.  “Three deep cross-court forehands then one winner down the line” is the manifestation of Churchill’s “man who grins when he fights” for me. The over and over and over again seduces and sedates. I’m happiest when straining to build necessary ruts. 

But the last half of practice, playing points, is my favorite part.

She was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a daughter, a friend. 

A teacher for decades.

A lifelong warrior for the not-quite-yets, Freeda Richardson’s classroom was a haven. Students found their way there for the jar of peanut butter and the box of saltine crackers she put on the table every day at lunch (a practice that gave those with no set place to go a place to be.) But they came for a hundred other reasons, too. Like mostly how she made them feel. Teenagers wandered in and hung out. Word got around: Mrs. Richardson was kind. 

During the most chaotic spans of my life, I’ve kept a gratitude journal.  When my kids were little and I was building a college basketball program, I kept one religiously. It was my calibrator. Daily, it seemed, an avalanche of things that either came out of left field or simply did not go as planned would pile into the sanctuary of my mind. When I closed my eyes at night, my brain would re-count them as if at confession. While tons of good stuff obviously happened, too, it didn’t naturally land in pews of prominence.  So I had to put it there. 

Sara Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance Gratitude Journal was my prompt. 

Hiking presents a conundrum for me. I can never decide what to do with my eyes. If I look up and around at the grandeur—which is, in fact, why I love to tromp around in nature in the first place—I am bound to trip or roll an ankle or end up three-feet deep in mud.  But if I look down to ensure I’m putting my foot where I need to put it, I miss what I came to see. So I look up and out, then down. Up and out, then down. Up and out, then down. Constantly wondering if I should be doing the other while I’m doing the one.

I never get it right. 

The white clapboard house with two front doors had an OPEN sign taped in the window.  Our phone’s GPS had directed us via the walker’s route to the vintage Vermont structure masquerading as a UPS shipping center about 2.9 miles west on Main Street, just past the Dandy Doggie Groomer and across the street from the furniture mart.  Walking parallel to the river alongside the busy road, we made the picturesque trek, motoring briskly--both to get there on a Saturday before it closed at 2:00 pm and to keep step with the anxiety that had ballooned around the misplaced package of medical supplies my friend and travel buddy had to have.

Crossing the natural spillway where the lower lake pauses before reaching the brink of its fall (a decision I made to avoid an additional forty-five minutes of hiking in the freezing mist that had moved in), I carefully plotted my route, rock by rock in real time. The first few steps felt daring, like an adventurous Twister game without the plastic mat of brightly colored dots. I was a kid again, riding my bike along the top of a three-foot tall by one-foot-wide concrete barrier wall that surrounded my elementary school. Fear of falling wasn’t a factor. I was footloose and fancy free. 

Testing half-submerged rocks for stability, I moved steadily though not quickly across the top of the icy water. 

I chose landing pads, locked in on targets, solved problems before they became them. I tightened my core and deepened my breath. I was a ninja defying frigid peril, measured step by measured step by measured step.

Then I looked up to check my progress and panic swallowed me like the whale that devoured Jonah.

Suddenly, I knew not what to do.

In the HBO limited series, “Task,” an intense tale of cops (in the form of a small special ops FBI team) and robbers (in the form of a drug trafficking motorcycle gang), Mark Ruffalo plays Tom Brandis, a last-leg federal agent who is running in place inside of himself. When we meet him, Brandis is working a recruiting desk for the FBI at a career fair while waiting for the sentencing of his adopted mentally ill son who is in prison for killing his mother, Brandis’ wife. 

The weight of love that looks and feels like anything and everything but is pulling him under.