Coach said simply, “These guys are uncommon.”  Multi-colored confetti was still floating as a sea of cameras clicked on the boys standing just behind the logo in the center of the floor. The sweaty, happy hoopers looked like a band of brothers who had just run the court on the asphalt at the corner of 13th and Shartel. That they were and that they weren’t. Therein lies the beautifully juxtaposed magic of the Oklahoma City Thunder, the NBA’s newly crowned Western Conference Champs.

Beginnings and endings are rolling around like the hands of a clock these days, each intermittently bopping me on the top of the head as it clunks. Friends to my right and left are exiting lifetime careers, leaving the lane that’s almost conformed to them to the care of others. I clap for them at farewell parties, then run home to write a letter of recommendation for another, freshly credentialed, who is vigorously venturing out. As graduates stand awash in pomp, their audience exuberantly twists and shouts while young parents deal with the circumstance of filling out pre-school pre-enrollment cards in the prickly privacy of their kitchens with a lump the size of Texas in their throats. 

There’s taking off and landing. A baby comes, a parent goes. I have funeral outfits and wedding get-ups with interchangeable parts.

Occasions of commemoration dot the days of the weeks of my months, and I wonder, “What gives the ones that take up the most space in me their girth?”

It all started at a 7-Eleven in west Texas.  This is the way goodness often goes. No elaborate intention is set. No detailed business plan is hatched. An instinct just makes it past the gate of the soul and BOOM! All kinds of lives get changed.

When athletic phenom, Serena Williams, decided to walk away from professional tennis at the age of 40, she couldn’t say the word “retire.”  “Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution,” she told the press.

I like it. She had somewhere (that may or may not have been clearly defined at the time) to go.

Retirement is a sleepy word with implications of a hard stop. We “retire” at the end of a long day. We “retire” shoes that have a broken heel, clothes that no longer fit, hats that have gone out of style. A baseball team, once they acquire three outs, is said to “retire the side.” Inferring, of course, that the batters no longer get to bat. The word “retire,” per definition, means to leave, to cease or to withdraw. 

It seems odd to me, sometimes, that a single day is set aside to honor mothers. Or fathers, for that matter. Or Jesus (for Heaven’s sake!) though, technically, I guess he gets two. 

Mothers are given a deep-breath recognition on one day out of THREE-HUNDRED-SIXTY-FIVE. It hardly feels sufficient. 

And, yet, I have a plastic shoe box filled with homemade cards and trinkets that begs to differ.

I can say from experience, however, that the real prizes come randomly. Rarely wrapped. Sometimes not distinguishable until time has its way with them. But the crate full of “I Love You”s and “You’re the GREATESTEST”s  with intermittent backward letters mark time. Sentiments piled upon paper butterflies rolling around in a container full of flowers fashioned out of clay serve as a conduit to the days that birthed them. 

I’m grateful someone somewhere once decided we should pause to raise a glass.

In honor of Mother’s Day week, the following is an excerpt from “The Compost File: Stories for the Striver in Us All”—along with a photo and a song that wouldn’t fit in the book.😉

The final challenge of the high ropes course was to pair up and scale a 60-foot telephone pole, stand together on the tiny wooden platform on top, then jump. “Face your fears!” “Do what’s hard!” “Trust your buddy!” “Trust your body!”  “Find a way!” My team’s 6’6” center and I stared up at the pole’s metal stakes designed for use as handles and steps, doing our best to breathe, naturally, not as if the intake could well be our last one.

Like most Americans, I remember exactly where I was on the morning of April 19, 1995. I couldn’t, if I wanted to, forget. This past weekend Oklahoma honored, as it has done annually since the horror in the heartland, the lives lost and the lives changed forever on that tragic day. On Saturday from the memorial grounds, a 91-year old man who had lost his wife in the blast and had returned for the ceremony of commemoration said, “It was 30 years ago, but when I return to this spot, it feels as if it was 30 seconds ago.” 

 Time. We cannot pin it down.

The following essay is an excerpt from my latest book The Compost File: Stories for the Striver in Us All.

Scottie Scheffler leads the world in birdies after bogeys. For those who might not be familiar with golf’s scoring ways and words, that means that, most times, when he finishes one hole one stroke over par, he finishes the next hole one stroke under par.  One step back, followed by an immediate step back forward. Trip, stand-up and walk. Trip, stand-up and walk. Trip, stand-up and walk. This is how you keep from ever falling far behind. It’s also how you end up way ahead.  

The best of the best don’t land with a splat on a bed of concrete when they fall, they bounce.