Michael Grant

October, 2006 - I wasn’t sure I would go to my 40th college reunion. But I did, with my bride-to-be, and this morning I pulled on my new red Stanford sweats and went outside to drink coffee on the glider and think about the weekend.

Stanford University, Class of 1965. We had a good turnout, at least 300 (felt more like 500) alumni and spouses and in some cases kids, at the main party Friday night at the Sheraton across El Camino Real from the campus.

They call Stanford “The Farm,” because it was built on a farm – a very large farm – owned by Leland and Jane Stanford. The university was founded in 1891. It was beginning its 70th year when I and my ’65 classmates matriculated in 1961. Today, the university has passed more than a third of its existence since we left. Over the weekend, we meandered in the Quad among familiar stone buildings that had acquired not just the wear of middle age, but the splotchy patina of history, that you would expect to see on the porticos of Florence and Madrid. It placed in me a sense of awe, and respect, that had not been there before.

We munched and moseyed at the party with our own splotchy patinas, looking for a few old friends in a throng of old strangers, 99 percent of us connected in life by only one bond, names on a class list, not enough to allow us to remember each other.

But I didn’t go to see them. I went to see and be with classmates I did remember, brothers in the Class of ’65 who lived together in the old Delta Upsilon House on Salvatierra Street. There were 13 of us there. Dick, Joe, Paul, Steve, Mike, Tom, Rich, Ted, Terry, Bill, Dirk, Brooke and me. We came from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Texas, Washington, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Piedmont, and San Diego. During the weekend, we candidly reviewed our collective academic performance. Only one of us, Joe, graduated with any honors, something called “distinction,” he said, and he only did that because, he said frankly, “I gamed the system.”

My Stanford performance was the essence of marginal. The university has always striven to maintain a diverse population, and I have long suspected that was why I was admitted. To balance the brilliance, they needed a white male freshman from a lower middle-class family who attended Texas public schools. When I go back to Stanford, I have to hide my eyes from the things I missed as a student there. I go only to celebrate the experience of simply being there, which was still a true difference in my life.

We are now all professionals, a lot of lawyers, two doctors. Rich is a neurosurgeon at the University of Connecticut medical complex. I had not seen him in 40 years and probably didn’t talk to him more than 20 minutes total – he could only be at the Friday night function – but it was worth the trip.

There were a lot of old stories waiting to be told again, which is why I almost decided not to go. I didn’t want to hear the old stories of the hell raised in those days and nights of the early 1960s. They belonged to a place in my head that I have worked hard to get away from in the last 15 years, and I like 2005 so much, it didn’t make sense to go back to act out the drunken frat-boy indifference of 40 years ago.

Eventually it was curiosity – and something else – that made me decide to go. In the pre-reunion email chatter there was a lot of talk about the old stories and roaring thirsts and a special Saturday afternoon retreat at Zott’s, still there with the same plank tables and pitchers of beer from 40 years ago. But I wondered if the others might also, at this 40th reunion, have felt a shift forward, a preference for our seasoned 62-year-old selves in 2005, over the gifted under-achievers of 1963.

Then Saturday morning I was showing Karen the Quad, and we walked across it toward Memorial Church, and as we reached the arcade and the steps up to the doors, Sandy and his wife Anne walked out. On Sandy’s face was a look that could be interpreted as awe, gratitude, surprise. It was a look that belonged not to the old stories, but to a new story about interacting with an old place and, in Eliot’s lines about the end of our exploring, “to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”

There were others of us, exploring. Across a distance we would spot them, the brothers, strolling the Quad as we were, looking this way and that, most of us eventually winding up at the Bookstore and joining long lines (the old grads got 10 percent off) to pay for sweats and t-shirts, many of them in small sizes for grandchildren.

Some of the brothers did make it to Zott’s Saturday afternoon. But I was both exploring an old place and celebrating a new one. I loved introducing Karen to the brothers and their wives, and they were happy to hear about our marriage coming in December. We thought about going to Zott’s, but we needed more to make our first trip to San Francisco together, in the new lives that we have. We drove up for lunch, and it was perfect. Driving back down, it was after 4 and we didn’t try for Zott’s. But that night, at our own special reunion party, I was talking to Brooke, who is the new president of the Washington state bar association, and he told me simply that it was “Perfect.”

There is a mood about “Perfect” that implies summation, something not to be improved on, and I was happy it was the word that a man like Brooke would use about the afternoon at Zott’s. I think the word might also be the best one to summarize the weekend. A college homecoming is not like a high school homecoming. In high school, it was the community that united you. In college, you must create your own family. I believe the people in families are like threads bundled together at the starting place, then each thread following its own direction, the threads spreading far apart, in all manner of directions, each picking up its own colors, then at the times they return to the bundle, sharing their colors with the others. When we were bundled again this weekend, as different as we were, I saw that each of the brothers had given me some of their colors. And I have given them some of mine. The ”something else” that made me go was wondering if I belonged. I found that I do.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments

August, 2005: I had not been to the San Diego Padres’ new ballpark, which opened last year. Then last week, friends, and they are dear friends, gave us tickets and we went. The game – Padres vs. St. Louis – was a totally new experience for me.

Well, not totally new. I took a bite out of a bratwurst and momentarily considered placing it back in its plastic container and taking it to the city attorney to see if there were any laws against calling a very pale, cool to the touch length of dense protein colloid a bratwurst and selling it for $7.95 in a public place.

But I went ahead and ate it. No sense having the city attorney stalking the concourse, waving handfuls of dense protein colloid under the noses of employees, when I’ve eaten equally remarkable fare at any number of sports events in San Diego. No one who has spent several hundred dollars over the years on what stadium concessionaires call “Nachos” can speak too severely against the PetCo bratwurst.

What was new was the tenuous hold that the game of baseball had on the event. Since I last attended a major league baseball game – four years, at least – the half-innings of actual play seem to have become miniaturized intervals between promotions. Looking around the place, I thought about pinball machines I played as a kid, including one that was a baseball pinball game. Lots of lights flashing, and lots of noise effects, and, oh yes, the game itself.

That’s how this event felt. Many other new ballparks have opened recently in other big-league cities. If PetCo is the typical ballyard of the 2000s, baseball’s executives have engineered for real baseball the look and sound and feel of having a seat behind first base inside a pinball game.

But it was more comprehensive than that. The ultimate business model of entertainment media technology is to turn the outdoors into the indoors, the ominous “virtual reality.” You get a feel of that sitting outside at PetCo.

In the old days, 10 years ago, it was the difference between going to a live event and watching it at home on television. At the live event, the viewer enjoyed the freedom of subjective choice. At any moment, your eyes could go where they would, in the setting before you, to a player, to the dugout, to the sideline, to the stands, to the moon. Watching it on television, you lost that subjective freedom. The cameras and the screen objectified the view: you could only see what the camera was showing you.

At PetCo, there were constant video demands for your attention. It never stopped: screens and bright quick-cut montage visuals demanding attention from your eyes, enforced by booming digital-fidelity surround-sound commands from extremely high-energy speakers. Before last week, the loudest sustained noise I ever heard at a sports event was the crowd at Jack Murphy Stadium in 1984 when Steve Garvey hit the home run off Lee Smith to beat the Cubbies in Game Four of the NLCS.

That was a natural sound, the analog output of 45,000 throats, and lovely to plunge into and get squeezed and scoured by until you couldn’t breathe or feel, and eventually surface into the night air and survival, carrying with you out of the ballpark a sound you would tell about for the rest of your life, because there was a reason for it.

At PetCo, the sound was ear-ringing but couldn’t compete on the Garvey scale for loudness. As sustained sound, however, it was surpassing, and tireless, barrages of sub-woofing, subjectivity-gobbling sound scouring you not in a passage of glory, but with promotions, commercials, goofy quizzes, heavy metal riffs and aggressively mediocre humor shots. Just like TV. Visuals and sounds, objectifying space. On the field, interludes of miniature baseball. Beyond the outfield, a city skyline. Both were hard to see, through the digital blizzard.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments

April, 2006: Johnny Gerhart’s name came up again this week, in an incidental way. Oran Logan, a ninth-grade classmate of John’s at South Junior High School (Abilene, Texas, 1957-58) came into possession of scrapbook material that Oran’s mother had kept all these years. Among these was a page from the school newspaper, the “Coyote Howl” (coyote pronounced “ky-yoat,” in the West Texan dialect).

The page announced the results of student polling for ninth-grade class favorites. There were Friendliest Girl and Boy, Beautiful Girl, Handsome Boy, Most Talented Girl and Boy, Best All-Around Girl and Boy, Girl and Boy Most Likely to Succeed, Most Athletic Girl and Boy.

This page was circulated among an email classmates list. It was fun seeing again who won, and wry comments were passed around (“Bob Cluck was runner-up Handsome Boy?”).

Most of the comments, though, were about Johnny Gerhart, who was selected Boy Most Likely to Succeed.

It shows the power of even the unsophisticated to detect greatness. Not a single one of us in the hallways of South Junior in 1957-58 would have seen Gerhart coming down the hall and thought: “Harvard grad, double degree in English and French history and literature; at Harvard, he wrote for the Crimson (school newspaper); took a year off in 1963 to teach high school in Tanzania; a Masters and a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton; international educator and philanthropist; from 1969-98, a Ford Foundation representative all over Africa; president of The American University in Cairo, 1998-2002; named by Princeton’s graduate faculties as one of their 100 most notable alumni of the 20th century.”

Nope, we just saw Johnny, coming down the hall, on the short side, plaid shirt, Levi’s rolled up two laps, grinning and waving hello (I’ll bet he won Friendliest, too, but they couldn’t give two awards), just one of us. But we knew something. We looked at Johnny Gerhart and voted him Boy Most Likely to Succeed, hands down. How did we know he would be South’s most notable 1958 alumnus of the 20th century, 43 years before the Princeton vote?

That’s what the talk was about this week. It felt so good to us to find his name there. Johnny Gerhart died of cancer in July, 2003. We had hardly seen him in all those decades; he left Abilene, went to private school in Austin, then to Harvard and off on his international path of brilliance. But we didn’t forget him. We were among the first to see, somehow, the unforgettability that stayed with him wherever he went, among whomever he walked, from unschooled ninth graders to foreign kings. We felt included in a natural community with John at its center, the creator of the community, which is how, after his death, he was remembered by so many.

The eulogies and remembrances and stories were collected and now are maintained at the Website of “Alliance” magazine, “the leading magazine on philanthropy and social investment across the world." The first three tributes are from the president, the first lady, and the prime minister of Egypt. The rest, “Messages from friends and colleagues,” from all over the globe, scrolling down and down, are more informal and informative, filling in many blanks that our South Junior instincts knew were there.

Not a one of the 40 messages is from one of John’s South Junior classmates, a gap which I undertake to correct. Much of the affection is nothing new. “Always when we met again it was as if we were resuming a conversation that we had left off in mid-sentence.” Yep. That’s the way Johnny put us all first. “I have been lucky to know all kinds of wonderful, smart and original people,” says another. “But John was one of the very, very, very special ones.” No lie, as we used to say at South.

But he was also a collector of African art, and an expert bird watcher. I never knew that. He was also an expert storyteller, and I don’t remember that, but it makes sense. Many of his friends remembered John’s father, the Rev. Willis P. Gerhart, as anyone does in 1957-58 Abilene who met John’s father. There was no mistaking Rev. Gerhart’s intellect, or vivre, or fondness for good stories, or willingness to tell them. Being his son made Johnny mysterious. So austere a robed presence, commanding a towering white Episcopal church on South Sixth. Directly across from the church was a neighborhood grocery store, with wood floors and screen doors, owned by Eddie Baldwin’s father. Eddie was named “Friendliest Boy” in our poll. And just around the corner from these two lived Pam Oswalt, who was just gorgeous but, darn it, went to Lincoln Junior. That block on South Sixth must have been the closest thing to a vortex that Abilene had.

Now there are a couple of things about Johnny that the other messengers may not know. Wherever in the world he was, or whomever he was with, if Johnny saw a coyote, and called it a ky-yoat, he was only being true to his roots. Once a South Junior Ky-yoat, always a South Junior Ky-yoat. Secondly, a Ford Foundation colleague wrote about John and women: “His reputation for hiring smart, dynamic women was known throughout the Ford Foundation.”

When you went to junior high with Gena Jay (“Friendliest Girl”), Pat Wright (“Best All-Around Girl”), Crystal Ragsdale (“Most Beautiful Girl”) and Nancy Shoemaker (“Girl Most Likely to Succeed”) AND lived across the street from Pam Oswalt, you couldn’t help but take that appreciation forward. We haven’t forgotten Johnny Gerhart. And Johnny didn’t forget us.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments

September, 2005: Karen, my bride to be, has 25 years experience in organizational systems analysis. I am in media. We sit side-by-side these days and have interesting conversations.

She talks about what happens in organizations that need to change, and know it, but resist. It drove her crazy to be assigned a systems analysis within an organization or institution, discover the problem and report it, then watch while nothing happened.

"People and organizations really need to be afraid, or in pain, before change can occur," she said. It makes no difference, she says, how vitally the change is needed, to avoid institutional ruin, or disasters like Sept. 11, Iraq, New Orleans and pension funds. Not until after the fact will the people in charge go back to the pre-disaster analysis, recognize the truth in it, and then do something about it.

I tell Karen how people in my business, the media, constantly call for change in our newspaper and magazine pages. Long reports have been published in the last five years about what a major hurricane would do to New Orleans, with scenarios almost identical to what actually happened with Katrina.

"You know," I said, "the media could have published an in-depth report on teenagers, culture, violence and guns, with a scenario of multiple deaths in an armed teenaged assault on a high school, and no one would have read it."

We looked at each other, realizing we were in the same business. It is our job to bring useful, even critical, projections to people who don't pay us the slightest bit of attention, until something actually happens.

Not one, but two long reports, first in Scientific American (2001), and National Geographic (last October!) described what would happen to New Orleans when the big hurricane hit. The Geographic story was almost word-for-word with the actual Katrina stories in the national media last week. The Times-Picayune in New Orleans has published countless stories about the danger of under-maintained levees and the difficulty of getting federal money to fix them.

The media could have published a story about how easily a major wildfire could get started in San Diego, and how planning, equipment and policies would be no match for it, and no one would have done anything about it until after the Cedar Fire.

That fire, in October 2003, burned 2,700 homes, killed 15 people and roared through more than 273,000 acres, from Julian down to Scripps Ranch, and since then, there have been plenty of changes in planning, equipment and policies.

Before 1978, the media could have published analyses of air traffic control patterns in the San Diego area, with no change occurring until after Sept. 25, 1978, when a mid-air collision over North Park killed 135 people on Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182, two men in a Cessna, and seven people on the ground. Shortly after that, control patterns were changed that now send incoming airliners from the north all the way out to La Mesa before they turn around.
Presently there exists a scenario, developed and published by the state Office of Emergency Services in 1988, on the effect of a 6.3 earthquake in San Diego. I have written two stories about the scenario myself, one in this publication three months ago. So I ask readers: on what fault line is the scenario based? Where is the fault line located?

The disconnect is simple. The media sees stories in events that haven't happened yet. In the Toolbox, it’s called the Threat to the Status Quo. Readers and viewers don't see stories until they happen. Or, in Karen's case, they are scared to death. How do we change that? Somebody should write a story.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments

SEPTEMBER, 2006 - Fascinating, this week, to read the story by New York Times travel writer Joe Sharkey, of his experience on an airplane he believed might crash. He was aboard the executive jet, flying above the Amazon forest, that was clipped by a jetliner with 155 people aboard. The jetliner crashed, killing all on board, but Sharkey’s story tells how his damaged aircraft was able to stay airborne until they could find a landing field.

It was the first such experience I had ever read, since the same thing happened to me, almost 50 years ago. On the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 28, 1958, I was on an airplane that I believed was going to crash. For a moment, in fact, I believed it had crashed, and that I must be dead.

I was a sophomore on our district champion high school football team, the Abilene Eagles, and we were flying from Abilene, in West Texas, for a first-round playoff game against Ysleta, an El Paso suburb. We were on two chartered DC-3s, the first team and head coach on the first plane, the scrubs on the second. I was on the second, in the last seat on the right-hand side.

I loved airplanes, knew all the makes and types, liked to go to the Abilene airport and watch the Pioneer Airlines DC-3s come and go. So I knew, that at Big Spring, 100 miles west of Abilene, there was Webb Air Force Base. The base was south of us, to our left, so I got out of my seat and asked the two guys across the aisle if I could lean across and look out their window at the base. There it was, the runway perpendicular to us, maybe five miles away.

In the next instant, without any sense of anything happening, or time passing, I was stuck, spread-eagled, to the ceiling of the airplane. I couldn’t move a finger, couldn’t close my eyes. Directly below my eyes was the window I had been looking out of. Below that was the ground, brown West Texas ranch land, coming up to get me.

In another instant, again without any sense of happening or time, I was on the floor, underneath one of the guys – Graham Holland – I had been leaning over, and on top of us was a lot of stuff, including a long, large, glossy stick, red and white with black marks and numbers on it. Loving airplanes, I knew this was the stick that, at the airport, they used to measure the fuel in the wing tanks. I looked at the stick and thought: this stick is supposed to be outside the airplane. It must mean that I am outside the airplane, too, which means I must be dead. Never having been dead, it made sense that this is what it would look like to a departing spirit: just like life.

But then we started to stir, pick ourselves up. We were flying again, straight and level. It was very quiet on the airplane. The pilot, Charles L. Kageler, came on the intercom. He said we were almost hit by a T-33 jet trainer, taking off from Webb. He said he cut power to his engines, stood the DC-3 (a fabulous airplane) on its left wingtip, and dropped about 1,000 feet. That’s what stuck me to the ceiling. Kageler said the trainer missed us by about 25 feet.

We flew on to El Paso, played the next day, won, 45-0, and flew home without incident. But the people on the airplane that Friday afternoon had become members of a club who know what it is like on an airplane that is about to crash. We knew three things: your life really does pass before your eyes; the ground really does come up to get you; there is no panic, or terror. No one on the airplane yelled, or screamed; it was eerily quiet, during and after.

For 48 years, I believed the absence of terror was because of time. It happened so quickly, the brain couldn’t figure it out. The brain, being a logical instrument, strives to put patterns on everything, but things were happening too fast. I came to believe it was a form of compensation: people who were about to die at least would not die in the indignity of terror.

Now, this week, I read about Joe Sharkey’s experience, a “terrific jolt,” the sight of a wingtip sheared off and the skin of the wing peeling back, losing speed and altitude, and no visible place in the thick rain forest to land. They were in the air for 30 minutes, “the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life,” Sharkey writes. Plenty of time to figure things out. Yet, Sharkey writes: “Amazingly, no one panicked.”

So there must be something else about human beings. We – not our intellect, but our visceral selves – must understand the singularity of life, of being alive, and we are born with an instinct that says such a possession cannot, will not, be taken away. A wingtip is sheared off, the plane is going down, but that’s okay. Plenty of time left. Plenty of fight. I have witnessed some evidence of this. A person is dying, wasted by disease, yet in the last minutes, the final minute, the last seconds, the body is fighting visibly, ferociously, to stay alive, to possess its singularity, until finally it relaxes, takes a deep breath or two, and then surrenders. This thing about life in us makes us all noble. The World Trade Center victims didn’t jump to die. They jumped because it was their last fighting chance to live.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments

August, 2006: On the shelf behind the toilet in our bathroom sits a roll of toilet paper autographed by Herb Kelleher, founder, former CEO and now executive president, of Southwest Airlines.

Actually, this is “Son of Roll.” There was an earlier Herb Kelleher roll that came to me in events initiated in the 1990s by Jim Price, a native of Childress, Texas, living in San Diego. Jim was in labor relations and traveled a lot, up and down California, mostly on Southwest flights. I knew Jim Price from the media ramble in San Diego, and Jim knew Herb Kelleher, knew him well enough to send him a personal letter of complaint about his airline.

Jim told Herb he had flown Southwest faithfully, “but no more,” Jim said, until Southwest corrected the toilet paper feed on its fleet. At present, Jim said, the paper in the airplane lavatories fed over the top. Everyone with any sense knows it should feed off the bottom. I received a copy of the letter, as one who, Jim sensed from knowing me, would have a definite opinion about toilet paper feeds. Immediately I wrote a column for my paper, The San Diego Union, saying what a great guy Jim Price was, but he was dead wrong about the toilet paper, which should always feed over the top, never off the bottom.

The column found its way to Dallas, because several days later I received a congratulatory letter from Herb Kelleher, along with a roll of Scott tissue, autographed on the wrapper by Mr. Kelleher himself. This I displayed in the bathroom for the longest time, until a new cleaning lady took the roll from the shelf behind the toilet, pulled off the wrapper and threw it away, and installed the roll on the dispenser.

I was mortified, but of course it was my own fault, that the cleaning lady didn’t know the roll for what it was.

Now into the picture comes Dr. Ted Martinez, who until last December was president of Grossmont College, where I teach journalism. At that time, the college district board decided not to renew his contract. It was unpleasant for us. Dr. Martinez was much respected by faculty and staff, as an involved, effective, innovative, president. The board was, well, the board. Faculty and staff were surprised and tickled to death when, in January, Dr. Martinez accepted a high-level job – much higher and infinitely more visible than the Grossmont presidency – in the administration of the new San Diego mayor, Jerry Sanders. I wrote a column about that for San Diego’s online newspaper, voiceofsandiego.org.

Several weeks ago, I wrote a voiceofsandiego column about the ongoing debate (60 years now) concerning a new San Diego airport to replace Lindbergh Field. In that column I expressed great affection for Southwest Airlines, and included a mention of the long-lost Herb Kelleher toilet paper.

This week, we got a call from Dr. Martinez. I wasn’t home, so he told Karen who he was and that he and his wife, Lidia, had read the two voiceofsandiego columns, and they had a surprise for me. As they chatted, Dr. Martinez told Karen that Lidia was the California marketing director for Southwest Airlines. I may have known that, but I had forgotten.

Last night they came over, and Lidia, just back from company meetings in Dallas, presented me a roll of Scott tissue, inscribed on the wrapper: “For Emergency Use Only!” And signed by Herb Kelleher. In a brief installation ceremony, we placed it on the ledge behind the toilet. My next stop is Bed, Bath and Beyond, to get a glass or acrylic case for it. Herb sent a letter, too, and I thought about framing it and hanging it above the toilet paper, but that would probably be a bit much.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments

First published in June, 1986.

The smartest I ever was, was on a Sunday morning in Texas, 25 years ago this month, walking across a warm and grassy courtyard toward the Abilene High School auditorium. I was about to be graduated from high school.

There were 560 of us in the auditorium that Sunday (minus the usual number of hoodlums skipping the ceremonies), quite a critical concentration of superiority, as graduating classes go.

I have a snapshot from the event, of me and my pals in the grassy courtyard, graduation robes slung over our forearms, grinning the grins of kids who have absolutely nothing further to learn.

And we didn't, for maybe three months, the most carefree of summers. Then there began an educational process, continuing to this day, concerning all the things we really didn't know, possibly still do not know, and may never, ever, know.

This was not unnatural. The unnatural thing would have been to sit in the auditorium that morning offhandedly aware that you did not know it all yet. There could have been two or three of those, who today are on their way to being such unnatural things as Supreme Court justices.

The rest of us may have switched horses since that verdant Sunday May morning. I was going to be a doctor; advertised it openly in fact. No one, peers or parents, said to me directly that I was crazy. If they had said to me, "You are going to flunk college chemistry as it has never been flunked before, and then you will become a newspaper columnist," I would have laughed my utterly confident laugh in their face and said, "See you in surgery, beetlehead."

The Sunday auditorium event was the baccalaureate. They may not do this anymore, but baccalaureate and commencement were separate events in those days, one in the auditorium on Sunday, the other in the stadium on Monday night.

At baccalaureate, the traditional sermon was delivered, of which I remember not a syllable. We bounced our gold tassels and spooled the programs, and watched the ushers, junior girls, the best and the brightest from that class, gliding along the aisles in white dresses.

My name in the program was appointed with all kinds of asterisks and daggers and stars, connoting me as one among the wonderfully smart. One had to be humble about this, though privately I counted the typographical salad as proof of my ascension to perfect knowledge.

But the writing was already on the wall. Some months earlier, the Scholastic Aptitude Test had asked me to define "thesaurus," and I blacked in the circle by "extinct reptile." Later, learning the truth, I responded from the summit, "Ah, what dummy would ever need a thesaurus anyway?"

I still tell people that I was smart in high school. For a long time I wondered how a kid so smart in high school could sink like an anchor as a freshman. It was years before I realized that high school asterisks and daggers connote nothing more than the difference between memory and intellect. If I had a word of counsel for smart seniors, that would be it.

The AHS auditorium is still there, filling higher and higher each June with new batches of great expectations, most of which are left behind. That is where most of mine still are. As far as I know, no one who was in the auditorium that morning in 1961 holds it against me.

It generally works out somehow. A quarter-century is plenty of time for this, if it is going to happen. I am not a doctor and the beetleheads were not crazy, and I have no complaints.

And it felt pretty good, those summer months of '61, knowing it all for a little while. Such confidence will not come this way again. But I still think the thesaurus is overrated.

Present-day postscript: Boy, have I learned a lot since 1986. But I still think the thesaurus is overrated.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments

August arrives, and soon the dreaded two-a-day football workouts will begin at high schools across the nation. This week's archive is from my 2004 book, "Warbirds – How They Played the Game," about the 1954-57 Abilene High School Eagles, voted "Team of the Century" in Texas high school football.

“When the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks - not that you won or lost - but how you played the game.” – Grantland Rice

On autumn Friday nights in Texas, the One Great Scorer is a busy deity. In brilliant metropolitan concrete bowls and in rural settings where the lights are barely strong enough to cast a player’s shadow, thousands of Texas high school boys (and an occasional girl) go at each other on the football field for personal fulfillment and the glory of their schools and towns.

Unless it’s a tie, one school wins and the other loses but the Scorer pays no mind to that. His only care is how you played the game. Still, most of the time there was a predictable correlation between the Scorer’s judgment and the final score. It was possible to receive the Scorer’s highest marks and still lose, but it didn’t happen often.

Thus there were two compelling reasons to begin each season with how you played the game. In Texas high schools, football was not and is not an extracurricular activity. Football is a class in physical education, whose curriculum credits are as necessary for graduation as credits in English and math. In fact football was a very long class. It always began by mid-August, and in some places players started receiving mimeographed instruction from their coaches, their “teachers,” as early as July 1.

Of course there were lots of X’s and O’s, that are central to how you play the game. But it hardly ever began with X’s and O’s. A few coaches might settle for that, but most understood that their first job was to extract from a 16- or 17-year-old boy a commitment to achieve a goal. That was a far more difficult teaching assignment than the belly series or 5-2 defense, and coaches took inspiration where they found it, in convincing a boy that an afternoon at the lake was not as good in the 100-degree heat than putting on 15 pounds of football gear and slamming into each other for three hours.

If the boy accepted that commitment, there was a good chance he would learn what it felt like to win, and winning, he was promised, was a feeling that would serve him well in building a successful life. Not one, but thousands, of coaches have told their teams in August: “Men, football is like the game of life.” Of course it became a cliché and fuel for mockery, but it was a true cliché nonetheless.

Winning was a powerful attraction. Not many 16-year-olds would submit to twice-a-day football practices in order to prepare themselves to lose. Coaches talked about winning, and what it took to win, constantly.

But the coaches knew that every weekend there would be as many losing teams as winning ones. The best they could do was prepare their teams to give them the best chance to be the team that won. If their boys won, the coaches knew they would like the lesson. It was equally important that the boys who lost would feel like they learned something, too. It was the only way they could improve.

Some coaches developed great skill in articulating that truth to their players. Others could rely on the literary sports writer, Grantland Rice, for inspiration, even if they couldn’t recall the Scorer quote verbatim. “Boys,” they would say proudly in both locker rooms, “you did your best.”

Doing your best. What does it take to do your best? First of all, you have to do good. Good, better, best, we all learned in English class. Best is the superlative of good, but good is where it starts.

There are two main ways to do good. You do things good, and you do good things. That is where not just football, but all athletics, start. Before they ever pick up a ball or get into a stance, athletes are taught to do things good and do good things. Many of these they are given to do; others they are encouraged to do. Get in good shape. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Have good eating habits. Have good study habits. Make good grades. Be a good citizen.

If you do things good, you will get better. If you keep getting better, you have a chance to be the best. All over Texas, in rich huge districts and poor tiny ones, those were the first lessons of the season, and they did comprise a good textbook for preparing for the life beyond athletics. Then finally, when you go on the field, make the best use you can of all these good things. As long as the deity is the One Great Scorer, and not God, you could almost call football Sunday School taught on grass and not get in too much trouble with the U.S. Constitution.

Year after year, thousands of times over, the lessons are taught and learned and a team goes into a game with its best chance to win. But every Friday night, someone wins, and someone loses. Then in one Texas town, a team started to learn from a new coach how to do things good and do good things. He was a man who understood that principles were principal to any success on or off an athletic field and he was exact and unrelenting in teaching the value of values. Studying him now evokes a nostalgia for that time when principle and values were unabashedly traditional in the American dialogue. With these lessons and his meticulous knowledge of the game, he provided his players their best chance to win, and on Friday night they won. And won. And won. And won, won so much they made history and set lasting examples for coaches everywhere to give their players about how to be good, and maybe better, and maybe the best. This book is about that coach and that team, and the reason for the book is their winning streak. But its content is about how they played the game.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments

August, 2006: You take your mentors where you find them. It was a turkey buzzard, minding his own business, who made me see that anything is possible.

I thought he was a condor. Huge, black bird, circling and soaring in a hot midday sky around and above my house, several years ago. I was impressed that I might be looking at a condor, a rare bird to which much symbolism is attached. When I spotted him, I thought that some mechanics of symbolism might be in place, guiding him to this house, where I might see him.

Such is vanity. I felt so special that I went inside to telephone the zoo, to report a sighting of this endangered creature far from his natural mountain habitat.

“Probably just a turkey buzzard,” said the voice from the zoo. “We get calls like this all the time. Does he have an ugly head?”

I couldn’t answer that question. I found the binoculars, took them outside, and found the bird, ranging back and forth not more than 200 or 300 yards above and beyond our deck on the hillside, and not more than a quarter-mile to either side. Yes, he had an ugly head, red and wormlike. I watched him anyway. Watched him for a couple of days. He had the span and the presence of a condor, soaring and wheeling on wide wings whose elegant tips and trailing edges flicked in fine-tuned equilibrium with the faint signals from the hot, still, noonday air.

At his wingtips were long, slender feathers, fanned out aristocratically, individually changing pitch (I could see through the binoculars) with every nuance of lift and drift. Not many creatures enjoy such rapport with their element, and I envied his.

The sun was directly overhead. The bird was in a low, watchful glide over the hillside when he apparently had a change of mind. He let the air lift him higher, and turn him in lazy circles, until he was several hundred feet above me. I tracked him with the binoculars. He could see me – I thought he looked at me – though I don’t suppose he was watching me. I wanted to imagine some communication going on, and so I did, even if it was me with me.

He drifted toward the sun. It was so bright that I had to look away. I picked him up again on the other side of the brightness. He came back to the center, circling the brightness as I watched, spiraling nearer to it. I thought it was magnificent, and symbolic at least of opportunity. I watched as long as I could, until I saw him touch the edge of the sun. Then I looked away. I blinked my eyes for only a couple of seconds, then lifted the binoculars again, to pick him up.

But the bird was gone.

I dropped the binoculars and scanned the wide view, from sun to horizon. I turned quickly around the 360-degree circle, searching the sky, feeling very much on the earth point of an axis. The bird was not there.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I looked back at the brightness. Maybe he was still orbiting there. I watched the vicinity for 10 minutes, and the bird didn’t emerge. For the next half-hour I tried to watch all of the sky at once, looking for him. I had watched the bird fly into the sun, liking the symbolism of it, and then the bird had disappeared. For a minute I wished it had been a condor, then was glad it was not. Condors should fly into the sun only for holy men. My turkey buzzard, though lacking romance, had made the same mysticism perfectly accessible to an ordinary man with the sun in his eyes.

The bird did not reappear. I was compelled to wonder what it might mean, to see what I had seen, when a man saw a bird fly into the sun. If I, for whatever reason, had been assigned to be the one to find out, then I was willing. And that changed me.

I saw the bird a couple of hours later, cruising the hillside as before. So I had not been chosen, or assigned, after all. But I was changed nevertheless. I still have no idea how he got out of the sun, but I am not disappointed. In those minutes when I believed he might be gone, I accepted the contention that anything is possible. And when anything is possible, what is there to fear from the unknown?

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Posted by Michael Grant at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments

August, 2005 - Medical research suggests that as men and women start to get older, a man’s brain atrophies – “dies,” actually – three times faster than a woman’s.

This news comes at a bad time. I have reached a stage of maturity where a perfect stranger might glance at me on the street and think, “There is a man who is starting to get older.”

I don’t feel particularly older, and I don’t think I am old. Mature, maybe. All my parts are 1943’s, and I wouldn’t hesitate to drive them long distances across the desert at night. But I couldn’t walk up to a perfect stranger on the street and say, “If you think I am starting to get older, you are wrong,” while looking him straight in the eye. I am more realistic than that. I am at an age where, in the context of medical research, I can look forward to a rate of personal brain deterioration that is three times that of a woman, and I just want to say to the scientists how grateful I am for the information.

In a way I expected it. I remember feeling inferior in adolescence on learning that girls “matured emotionally” faster than boys. Why should it be any different on the other end? Women my age will still be playing bridge well into their 70s, while I have retired to a corner to drool. The researchers apparently are aware that men are not likely to be happy about that. One researcher, a younger man apparently drawing conclusions while he still could, said the study “may predict that men are more likely to get grouchy with age than women.”

The research indicates that women apparently lose brain cells equally on both sides of the brain, while men tend to lose “about twice as much brain on the left side as the right.” The research also supplies the information – letting me know what I’m in for, I guess – that the brain’s left side (the side where my cells begin to slough off in heaps) involves language, speech, logical reasoning and analytical thought.

At the very hour that I learn my brain is turning into compost, I am dependent on at least a dozen different sets of numbers, passwords, etc., to get through an ordinary day. There are numbers and passwords that I am supposed to remember. The ATM people and the voicemail people and of course the Webmeisters are forever warning me not to write those numbers down anywhere. I can count at least a dozen. I may have other codes, but I can’t remember them right now. That is a bad sign.

The other day I was in a modern public building that required a code to get into the men’s room. In light of the research I think that is sexual discrimination but it’s not going to do me any good. Before I am dead but after I am so right-brain heavy that my head lolls on my shoulder, all makes of cars will be unlocked by number codes. Groceries will be bought by number codes. Homes will be entered by number codes.

It will be a woman’s world. I don’t mind that. But I don’t look forward to becoming such a burden. I don’t look forward to being a blithering old grouch, yelling from the garage, “Get up from that bridge table and come out here and unlock the car for me!” at my wife. If any woman will have me.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 6:46 AM | Permalink | Comments

July, 2006 - This consciousness train began with a truck from a concrete delivery service backing onto a job site right next to an identical company truck, both white, both new. I passed them as I was driving back from a trip to the supermarket before lunch.

At the lumberyard where I worked during the summers in high school, there were Chevrolet trucks, same year (1959), same flatbed model with dump feature, identical in every way but one. One truck was blue and the other was green. Usually when there are two identical trucks, you still develop a preference for one or the other. But blue or green didn’t make any difference to me.

I believe it was the green truck with which I tried to bring down the telephone service on the south side of Abilene, Texas, late one afternoon in the summer of 1959. It was a house site, the foundation just poured, and I was delivering the framing lumber – studs, two-by-sixes, etc. – all neatly boomed down on the flatbed. I drove up the alley and backed onto the lot, which was muddy after an earlier thundershower. I placed the junk-lumber cross pieces on which to dump the load, got back in the cab, pulled the “Dump” lever, and up went the front of the flatbed. When I felt the load slide, I pushed in the lever, slid into first gear, and pulled forward to slip out from under the load.

But I couldn’t pull forward. The wheels spun and spun until I noticed a motion over my head and saw telephone poles swaying for a couple of blocks in either direction. The top of the flatbed was hooked beneath cables overhead.

I had no choice but to risk my life and unboom the load, which was under great tension, then back up on it, scattering the neat stacks like pick-up sticks. Then I pulled out and had to re-stack the entire load. It was after 5, and I had a date. But I wasn’t too mad, because they were telephone cables. If they had been power lines, there would still be crispy wisps of me in the dirt under the lawn where that house now stands.

I had earlier cheated death on an airplane, a DC-3, carrying the high school football team – I was a sophomore fullback – that in November, 1958, missed by 25 feet being in a mid-air collision. Our pilot saw the other guy, cut the power to his engines, stood the DC-3 on its wingtip, and dropped a couple of thousand feet before recovering and flying on.

The airplane in “The High and the Mighty” is a DC-4, the earliest four-engine airliner in the DC line. The movie, from 1954, has just been released in DVD, its first release of any kind by its owner, Batjac, a company partly owned by the late John Wayne, who is one of the stars in the movie. We ordered it from amazon.com and just watched it last night. Great theme song, but boy, disaster movies sure have changed since the 1950s. The trip in “The High and the Mighty,” from Hawaii to San Francisco, took more than 12 hours, which is about how fast the movie moved. Too many flashbacks and actors chewing the scenery, Phil Harris being the worst.

I misspelled Lucille Ball’s name in a blog yesterday. Left out an l. The consciousness train is now half an hour old. I’d like to say something about how fabulous the human brain has turned out, to enable such interesting trips that start with concrete trucks. But it’s time for lunch.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments

May, 2005 - If X is history, and Y is service, and you plot an ordinary parabola, then humanity has clearly reached the apogee of Service Heaven and is hurtling down a rocket roller-coaster descent into Service Hell.

The apogee was reached, of course, with Nordstrom, whose business model was the service stations (remember when they called them “service stations”?) of the 1940s. At service stations, an attendant came out, asked how much gas you wanted, pumped the gas, checked your tires, washed your windshield, checked your oil and water, and brought you change. The tab for this was never over $5. You can still see service stations in TCM movies.

Nordstrom improved on that model and was in fact Service Heaven. I remember feeling a little “this can’t last” uneasiness in Nordstrom, and sure enough, at the peak of the Service Heaven apogee, in the mid-1980s, banks introduced the ATM card. It was first presented as a “check guarantee card,” making you feel privileged and secure while the banks let you gradually get used to the idea that the ATM card made you your own teller.

When banks proved that human employees could be eliminated, along with the messy salaries and benefits, other businesses jumped on the model and Y started downhill. Slowly at first, ironically with service stations, that regressed to card-operated gas stations, and then the descent picked up speed. Overnight, it seemed, we became our own telephone receptionists and switchboards.

For a long time I assumed the phone tree was the bottom, and that Service Hell had been reached. Then just the other day I went to IKEA. It was very interesting. We walked up some stairs and then began walking through furniture groupings and displays. Our progress was along a sort of trail, well-marked, like you would follow through the great outdoors. Then we reached a stairway taking us downstairs. It was a welcome sight to me, because by then I was hot and tired and imagined we would find the trailhead, if you will, at the bottom of the stairs.

But the foot of the stairs was only the top of the peak, so to speak. At the bottom we trudged on. And on. I remembered an old movie, “Fantastic Voyage,” in which medical people, Raquel Welch among them, were miniaturized and injected into the circulatory system, from which there was no escape, of an individual whose life needed saving.

It was my situation exactly. I was trapped in a circulatory system, and my life needed saving. Raquel Welch could have run into me naked, at her movie age or her age now, and I would not have noticed. Finally we passed into a cavernous warehouse area where all the furniture and appointments and accessories had been digested into aisle upon aisle of compressed brown bundles, and at last we were extruded through checkout lines into air and sky of a sweetness I didn’t remember.

We didn’t buy anything, but we saw something we liked. A china cabinet. We shopped around and found nothing better. So we went back. We found the item and looked around for someone to do business with. In the next hour came the dawn of the real truth about IKEA: IKEA has taken the phone tree business model and CLONED IT INTO HUMANS.

I must point out that the people who work at IKEA are fine. Friendly, knowledgeable, willing to assume authority and responsibility for your shopping success. But an IKEA employee’s sphere of knowledge and authority extends only about 12 inches outside of his body. An IKEA employee in Lighting or Couches or Pickup has no knowledge of any other department in the building, upstairs or down, or the authority to ask about them.

Thus 99 percent of the shopping knowledge, labor, authority and responsibility became vested in me, the shopper. It was brilliant. Diabolical, but brilliant. Can Y go any lower? I don’t know, but lately I have been in a couple of supermarkets where you HAVE TO CHECK AND BAG YOURSELF OUT. So I think it's spreading.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments

Sunday is Father's Day. Here is a story from Father's Day three years ago, June, 2006.

Interesting trip. It was my first time through an airport security gate with my new metal hip and yes, it sets off the buzzer. I will never fly again without getting wanded and patted down first.

We were on the first American flight to Chicago, departing at 6:17 a.m.. It was also the very first airplane to take off that morning. Karen and I both like first flights of the day for two reasons: you know the airplane is already at the airport and not trying to get there from somewhere else; and, the security lines are shorter.

We buttoned up early, pushed back, taxied very slowly to the end of the runway. And sat there. The captain, Don Partridge, told us on the intercom that the Lindbergh Field curfew forbade any flight to take off before 6:30 a.m. I looked at my watch. It was 6:25. “If you can’t take off until 6:30,” Karen wondered, “why do they schedule the flight for 6:17?”

I shrugged. “Hitting for an average. If they schedule it for 6:17, it means they’ll probably get everybody on and seated by 6:20 or so, then make a couple of announcements, push back slowly, mosey down to the end of the runway and get there just at 6:30.”

At 6:29 and 30 seconds, Capt. Partridge nudged the engines and swung the S-80 into takeoff position on the runway and braked again. We waited, and I could imagine the tower counting down: “Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . go!”

And we went. Very first plane out of Lindbergh.

For breakfast, I had brought some cubed pork barbecue and a slice of CostCo’s rosemary bread. You can’t count on the airlines any more. In fact, here is where in-flight service stands now: the lead stew said they would be coming down the aisles with a choice of muffins: blueberry or bran, $2 each. I girded my loins, waiting for the charge for coffee, but it is still free, for the time being.

We were going to Kenosha, Wisconsin, an hour north of Chicago, right on Lake Michigan, to see Karen’s son Bill and his family. Before my first trip with Karen to Kenosha last year, I pictured it as an iron ore town with a grimy waterfront, huge smokestacks and gray streets. Instead it is green and clean with wide streets and manicured parks and shoreline beaches, population about 100,000 and bratwurst shops every half a mile or so. The only smoke in the air comes from cigarettes. Lots of smokers in Wisconsin, indoors and out. You don’t get a real sense of the value of California smoking laws until you visit places without such laws.

We ate well. Bill loves to cook, and for Father’s Day he got a Weber Smokey Mountain cooker, a huge smoker that Karen says looks like R2-D2. He bought a 10-pound brisket and put it in the smoker for nine and a half hours and it was the best home barbecue I ever had. I feel totally faithful to the Weber kettle I have had for 30 years, but that cooker, with its results, has wiggled its way into my thinking.

They do good pizza in Wisconsin, too, and of course the brats. “We should also hit The Spot,” Bill said. “A cheeseburger with grilled onions and a root beer whirl.” Time was getting away and we had not yet hit The Spot when I mentioned it one lunchtime. Everybody was still full from a late breakfast, so I went by myself. The Spot is a low, red, windowless structure on a corner with a painted, wrap-around menu board facing the street. The cheeseburger was $2.29. I pulled in, parked, got out, walked around the corner, looking for the door. I ran into a waitress who said, “Be right with you, hon.”

“You come to me?” I said. “Sure do,” she said. Then I looked again at the cars in the lot. A couple had trays hung from the windows. This was a drive-in! I had not seen a tray hanging from a car window in 40 years. There were three small tables under an overhang and I sat there; too hot in the car for a California boy. I ordered as instructed: “Cheeseburger, grilled onions.” “You want everything on that?” she said. “Yes,” I said.

In a few minutes she was back. I unwrapped the cheeseburger, which was piping hot. It was small, a soft, fragrant, bun, the meat bigger than the bun and griddle-fried until its uneven edges were crispy. “Everything” turned out to be pickle slices, mustard and catsup. It was perfect. There are times now – three or four of them in Kenosha, in fact – when I wish it was 30 years ago and I could eat two or three of The Spot’s cheeseburgers.

Bill and Erika’s son, nine-year-old Andrew, went four for six with three RBIs in his two Little League games while we were there. Andrew’s sister, Caitlin, age four, shared with me her concession stand box of popcorn that was as salty as it was half a century ago. The Little League parks were grassy and exceptionally well-groomed, a feeling we had about all of Kenosha. For Father’s Day, Bill took us to Wrigley Field. I wish all ballparks looked and felt like Wrigley Field. Being there was an experience in itself, which was good, because the Tigers hit three home runs in the top of the first and won, 12-3. There were 11 home runs in the game (the wind was blowing out) and one kid, sitting behind the Cubs’ dugout, caught two foul balls.

Coming home, the airline offered a snack box for $4, but I had leftover pizza, brats and coffee cake made from biscuits, cream cheese, orange zest, sugar, pecans and melted butter. Good trip.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments

This is an excerpt from my 2004 book, "Warbirds – How They Played the Game," a story about how the 1954-57 Abilene High School Eagles became the "Team of the Century" in Texas high school football. The book, in my mind, began as a recreation of forgotten details about the Eagles' 49-game winning streak, but it quickly became a story about how they played the game. That's the only way to understand this excerpt, describing the 1955 Texas Class AAAA state championship game. "Moser" in the first graf is Abilene head coach Chuck Moser.

DECEMBER 17, 1955

During the week in the statewide media, Abilene was established as a one-touchdown favorite over Tyler, and the feeling was that it would be something like 21-14, based on the Eagles’ power to score. Moser himself felt that way. For several weeks he had been telling his coaches (but no one else) that the 1955 Eagles were the best offensive team he ever saw.

“If we can hold them to two touchdowns,” Moser told the Eagle Booster Club, “we’ll win, I believe.”

Abilene, in West Central Texas, and Tyler, way over in East Texas, had never met on a football field. They had some mutual adversaries in Waco, Wichita Falls and Dallas Highland Park, but their meeting at Amon Carter Stadium for the 1955 state championship would be their first.

Having won the Love Field coin toss, Abilene, as the home team, got to pick its jerseys. Moser told his team leader, quarterback David Bourland, that new white jerseys had arrived. Bourland quickly voted in favor of the old gold jerseys. The belly series depended on deception, particularly on the part of the quarterback, and Bourland had become very good at it. He always liked to wear the gold jerseys, because the ball was too easy to see against the white.

Moser had taught his quarterback a trick that made the belly option even more effective. Bourland walked into Moser’s office before the Lubbock game and the coach tossed him a deflated football from off his desk. “Pass it behind your back,” he said, and Bourland did, first right to left and then left to right. “Can you do that with a real ball?” Moser asked. “Sure,” Bourland said. In the game, when Bourland faked to the fullback, he then passed the ball behind his back, from right hand into left or vice-versa depending on the direction of the play, making the ball actually disappear for an instant. It was a very deceptive move. The Eagles’ dark gold jerseys with black numbers helped the illusion. So the Eagles would wear gold and Tyler would wear its white jerseys with shiny blue numbers.

Abilene and Tyler both had 12 straight victories against no defeats. In the playoffs, Tyler first defeated Corpus Christi Miller, 22-7, then Baytown, 20-0. Abilene had averaged 39 points a game, Tyler 29. The Eagles had surrendered 10 fewer points than the Lions, 77 to 87. Against their lone common opponent in 1955, Abilene had beaten Highland Park, 34-0, in the season opener; Tyler beat the Scotties, 33-13, in their next-to-last district game. Abilene’s scouts, Blacky Blackburn and Wally Bullington, told Moser the Lions were a great team. Moser told the Eagles they would have to do “everything right” to win.

The Lions were big and fast. Center Jim Davis and tackle Billy Sims both weighed 200 pounds and both were all-state candidates, as was 186-pound halfback Joe Leggette, who had 980 yards rushing. But the star of the team, and probably the best all-around high school football player of the 1955 season, was 6-2, 190-pound quarterback Charles Milstead.

“Another Walt Fondren,” Jack Holden wrote, “a Doyle Traylor,” comparing Milstead to star Southwest Conference quarterbacks of the era. Tyler ran the same belly option offense as Abilene, and Milstead’s ability to run or pass gave the Tyler system a dangerous extra option.

Members of Abilene’s state championship teams of 1923, 1928, 1931 and 1954 were special guests at the Friday pep rally. The team left for Fort Worth on the Eagle Bus right after the pep rally and headquartered at the Texas Hotel. More than 5,000 Abilenians made the 140-mile trip the next day, including almost 1,000 on a special Texas & Pacific train. The Victory Bell went in a truck and the 100-plus members of the Eagle Marching Band went in buses. After about 8 a.m., two-lane U.S. 80 was lined up with cars going east, through Baird, Cisco, Eastland and Ranger, streaming black and gold crepe decorations, headed for Fort Worth. About the same number of fans came from Tyler. Crowd estimates at kickoff went as high as 30,000 in the 37,000-seat stadium, meaning as many as 20,000 people from Fort Worth and other parts of the state came to the game. It promised to be a big game between two powerhouse teams, maybe even a classic. It turned out to be a classic, all right, one that had fans shaking their heads that afternoon and 45 years later.

In Fort Worth it was a beautiful Texas December afternoon for football, but windy. During warm-ups, the teams had trouble making the football stay on the kicking tee. Moser argued for taking the wind if Abilene won the coin toss. “I was afraid we might bog down and have to kick into that wind,” he said.

But his assistants talked him out of it. When they won the toss, Eagle co-captains Sam Caudle and Henry Colwell chose to receive. Then, disaster. Glynn Gregory had trouble fielding the opening kickoff and slipped on the badly worn turf and went down at the Abilene 5. Immediately five white shirts were around him. Tyler had come to play. “I really thought we were in trouble,” Moser said. So did everyone else. Tyler fans roared, Eagle fans caught their breath. This was a game in which breaks could make the difference.

The Eagles lined up at the 5 in the straight-T. On Moser teams, the quarterback called almost all of the plays. But to start the game, Moser sent the quarterback in with the first three or four plays. Abilene’s first play was a straight-ahead handoff to right halfback Henry Colwell. The line’s rule blocking for the play was also straight ahead. Colwell picked up five yards behind blocks by guard Sam Caudle, tackle Homer Rosenbaum and end Jerry Avery.

The second play had been created for this game. The Eagles never went into a game without some special play or strategy based on scouting reports. This play was designed to exploit the Tyler defensive line’s quickness and ability to penetrate. It also addressed the scouts’ assessment that most of Abilene’s plays should be run to the right side. In the Eagle playbook it was named “Tyler 4 Trap.” It began as the same straight-ahead dive, only to the left side, to Gregory. Bourland took the snap, pivoted left, and handed to Gregory, moving forward. The other backs, Colwell and fullback James Welch, sprinted to the left and the Tyler line and linebackers leaned toward that flow.

But as he took the handoff, Gregory cut sharply to the right. In front of him, left guard Stuart Peake had “pulled.” He had taken one step back and was now streaking across to block Lions’ left defensive tackle Tracy Webb who had in fact been allowed by Rosenbaum to penetrate across the line of scrimmage. Caudle and center Elmo Cure sealed off the inside, Peake hit the tackle square – in the next three minutes, Webb would see enough of Stuart Peake to last him several lifetimes – and the hole at right tackle was wide open. Leggette, rushing up from his defensive back position, almost got to Gregory but Avery cut him off.

Gregory veered outside, got two more blocks, and was off, up the sideline, for 48 yards. He was caught, amazingly, by a linebacker, attesting to Tyler’s team speed, but the Eagles were out of the hole. It was the biggest play of the game. “I know that stunned Tyler,” said Abilene assistant Bob Groseclose. “Those Tyler boys didn’t believe their big linemen could be moved that easily.”

First and 10 on the Tyler 42. Gregory went straight ahead for six yards. On second down, fullback James Welch ripped through the middle, a standard fullback trap play just off the center’s right hip, for 13 yards. Bourland ran the same play again and Welch got 15 more. Eagle blockers Cure, Caudle, Rosenbaum and Peake were chewing up the left side of Tyler’s defensive line and Peake, pulling on every play, was more or less dismembering Tracy Webb.

From the Tyler 8, Bourland faked the trap to Welch and handed to Gregory coming across, who followed yet another Peake block to the 3. Gregory carried again on the straightaway play to the 1, then Welch burst through cleanly on the trap play again for the touchdown.

On either side of the field, people didn’t quite know what to think. After a nerve-rattling start, the Eagles had moved 95 yards in eight plays, all of them rushes inside the tackles, and they did it in three minutes and seven seconds against the unbeaten Tyler Lions, who had allowed only one touchdown in the playoffs and only 87 points all season. On the field, the Lion players were shocked.

“They were twice as good as we thought they were,” said Milstead, a safety on defense. “We had no idea they were so terrific,” said all-state end Mickey Trimble. “They played like they knew they were going to win from the start.”

After a wind-blown kickoff, Tyler had the wind at its back and excellent field position at its 38. Two belly options and a fullback dive netted eight yards. Moser said line coach Hank Watkins “did a tremendous job with our line in setting the strategy to stop Tyler’s option stuff.” Defensive ends Peake and Guy Wells were coached to turn all of Tyler’s option plays inside. “Hank worked with those ends all week and really did a tremendous job,” Moser said.

Milstead punted and Gregory let the ball roll dead at the Eagle 10. Fifteen rushing plays later, the Eagles scored their second touchdown, on a four-yard sweep right by the fullback Welch. Milstead had a shot at him at the 2, but Welch muscled underneath the Tyler star and dived across the goal line just inside the corner flag with 43 seconds left in the first quarter. The key play in the drive came on third and six at the Eagle 14, after Abilene was penalized five yards for moving before the snap. Bourland faked to Welch up the middle, then waited for Gregory, who was circling around to the left, and thrust the ball into his belly. But then the quarterback pulled the ball out again and as defenders veered left toward Gregory Bourland took off around right end. He got a clearing block from Colwell and broke up the sideline for 18 yards and a drive-saving first down.

Tyler all-state center and linebacker Jim Davis thought that second drive broke Tyler’s back. “When they stopped us on our first drive and then they drove 90 yards for their second TD, we never could get going,” Davis said.

The first quarter ended. Abilene was leading, 13-0, and Tyler had run five offensive plays for a net of 11 yards. In the second quarter Colwell made a leaping interception of a Milstead pass at the Tyler 48 and returned it to the 25. Three plays and a penalty later, Abilene faced fourth and 25 from the Tyler 40, out of field goal range. The way his defense was playing, Moser didn’t mind running a play on fourth down from the opponent’s 40. He sent in a play to Bourland.

The Eagles came to the line in a flanker left, with Colwell lined up far outside left end Freddie Green. Bourland took the snap and dropped back. Welch moved to the right to pass block. Three white shirts surprisingly broke through and rushed toward Bourland. The first one reached him and hit him, but at that instant Bourland handed the ball to Gregory who had taken a couple of stutter steps to the left, then circled back and with perfect timing crossed behind Bourland for the handoff.

It was the Statue of Liberty play. Gregory took off to the right, his cleats kicking up chalk dust at the 50 as he turned upfield. The right side of the Eagle line sealed off Tyler defenders, while the left side had brush-blocked their defenders and then sprinted downfield. In front of Gregory was left tackle Rufus King. Gregory galloped across the 40, then the 30, with King five yards in front. At the 20, running at full speed, the 185-pound King hit Milstead with a block that knocked the 6-2, 190-pound Milstead five yards backward and to the ground at the 15. Behind King’s block, Gregory cut back across the field. Of the nine players near him, six wore gold jerseys. Green, racing across in front of Gregory, knocked down one defender who in turn rolled into a second Tyler back. Near the goal line, Colwell set up to screen off the last defender, who wasn’t going to catch Gregory anyway as he strode into the end zone.

The Eagle line of 1955 got downfield to block with a speed and intensity rarely seen at any level of competition on a football field, then or since. “They had terrific blocking,” said Tyler coach Buck Prejean, “by far better than we’ve faced this year.” “They had lots of speed,” said defensive back Joe Leggette, “but their blocking was the difference.” Gregory missed his second PAT in the strong wind and the Eagles took a 19-0 lead to halftime. They hadn’t thrown a pass.

“I told David to lay off throwing,” Moser said. “Heck, we could make five yards running our handoffs, so why risk passing? I’ve never seen as fine a blocking line in my life. We’d run a handoff on first down, and then we’d have second down and five to go, or three, or one. That kept the pressure on Tyler the entire game.”

Colwell, who was born in Tyler, scored the Eagles’ fourth touchdown on a one-yard run to climax a 45-yard drive late in the third quarter. Gregory closed out Abilene scoring with a four-yard run two minutes deep into the fourth quarter, and Abilene led, 33-0. In three quarters against Abilene’s first-team defense, Tyler had managed a total of two first downs. And Milstead looked nothing like the Charles Milstead that had led the Lions to 12 straight wins. Moser thought it was because of the pounding Milstead took while he was playing defense.

“We were sticking a helmet in his stomach on those blocks every play,” Moser said, “and that took a lot out of him. I know he didn’t look at all like he did in earlier games.” Specifically, Moser cited Rufus King’s block on Milstead during Gregory’s 40-yard scoring run in the second quarter.

In fact it was Ken Talkington, Tyler’s backup quarterback, who led the Lions to their first touchdown in the fourth quarter. Talkington threw a 33-yard scoring pass to Newell McCallum with 4:32 left in the game, and then Milstead came back to lead a short drive after a fumble recovery that ended with Leggette’s 10-yard TD run with 2:26 remaining. For the game, the Lions finished with 52 yards rushing and 80 passing, on five completions. Gregory had 171 of Abilene’s rushing total of 351. The Eagles tried only two passes, completing neither. “Abilene was brutal,” summarized the Associated Press.

Milstead, approached after the game by a young Tyler fan wanting an autograph, told the boy he should go get Abilene players to sign instead. “Everybody on that team was great,” Milstead said, “simply great.” He said the Lions “could play Abilene every day in the week and never beat ‘em.” “They hit hard and never let up,” said Trimble, the Tyler end. “They’d knock you down, and when you got back up, knock you down again. It was tough.” In the Eagle locker room, senior co-captains Caudle and Colwell were blubbering into their coach’s shoulder. They and the other seniors were the first class to play all three years under Moser.

“Coach, I can’t play any more,” said Caudle, a starter on both offense and defense for both the 1954 and ’55 champions, and a two-way all-district selection as a senior. “Sure you can, son,” Moser said. “You’ve got college games ahead.”

But that’s not what Caudle had meant. He couldn’t be an Eagle any more, part of a team that had won 23 straight games and a second state championship. It was a feeling of achievement and of belonging that might be part of this black and gold gang for a long while, with junior players like Gregory, Jimmy Carpenter, Stuart Peake and Rufus King in the room. It was not an easy thing for an 18-year-old to leave behind.

Culmination

In the days after the Tyler game, Jack Holden of the Reporter-News tried to get a handle on the Eagles’ greatness. “The Eagles’ ultimate success can be traced to several things,” he wrote, “and whether we have them in the right order or not we don’t know:

“1. Superior coaching (and we definitely think this comes first). Moser and his staff had every detail organized to perfection. There was little lost motion. The assistants did a terrific job. Moser gives them credit for doing most of the actual coaching, but it was his organization that made it possible.

“2. An unbeatable attitude by the boys themselves. Almost all the coaches have remarked repeatedly: ‘These kids want to be coached. We’ve never seen any boys as eager to learn.’ The boys studied hard and worked hard. They kept themselves in top condition.

“3. A good foundation in football. Abilene’s junior high coaches and even those in elementary school instilled in the Eagles a love of the game, a desire to learn and taught them good fundamentals. They just needed to be polished in high school.

“4. Teamwork On this team there was no star. All 11 were stars, and they worked as nearly like a unit as possible.

“5. Fine support from the city, the Eagle Booster Club and the students. All these groups went all out for their boys.”

Holden might have added a sixth element: time. Witnesses, coaches and media have routinely used the word “perfect” in describing the Abilene Eagles’ performance in the first half of the 1955 state championship game against Tyler.

Even Chuck Moser said it. “That game was something a coach lives for,” he said the day after the game. “Our first team played a perfect game all the way.”

It was the 23rd victory in the streak, but in history the Tyler game stands out from all the others. It was a culmination of all that had happened since the Friday the 13th meeting at which the Abilene School Board voted to offer Moser the job, and Moser accepted it, and the news was published on Valentine’s Day, 1953. All the mimeographed policies, all the coordination, all the teaching, all the drills, all the decisions, all the chalk talks, all the practices, all the eligibility slips, all the plays in practice, all the plays in the 35 previous games that Moser had coached the Eagles, all of it was practicing to be perfect, and it all came to 24 minutes of fruition in the first half of the 1955 state championship game.

From his first day in his 10-by-10 office in the old Eagles’ Nest on Peach St., Moser taught perfection. All that attention to detail was motivated by Moser’s desire to give his team its best chance to be perfect. That was always the goal, though Moser realized that some percentage of perfection, 75 or 80 percent, would provide his team a great advantage against its opposition. That advantage was obvious in the Tyler game. In the films, there is a glaring difference between the two teams. The Tyler players carried out their assignments, then stopped. The Abilene players carried out their assignments and kept running to the play and then ran back to the huddle.

Watching films of the 1955 Eagles, a person can start to wonder if the Eagles didn’t have 17 or 18 players on the field; 11 at the line of scrimmage, then after the play starts, another seven or eight downfield. A team could not be perfect unless it hustled until the whistle blew. You couldn’t be perfect if you didn’t play perfectly for every second of the game. Moser taught that from the first day of spring training in 1953, and people who were watching understood it immediately.

“We know one thing for sure,” Don Oliver of the Reporter-News wrote during those first spring training days, “win, lose, or draw, they’ll be the hustlingest ball club that has represented Abilene in a long time. Those that don’t hustle won’t play for Chuck Moser very long.”

But it took time to reach even a percentage of perfection, and three years to approach the sort of potential that the Eagles realized at Fort Worth. Expert witnesses to the Tyler game knew they had seen something climactic. Said Waco High School coach Carl Price: “Abilene’s state champions of this year are 30 points better than the 1954 champions. If they improve another 30 points next year, they might as well get in the Southwest Conference.”

“Abilene’s triumph was the most complete victory scored in championship play in 21 years,” wrote Dave Campbell of the Waco News-Tribune. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram was even more definitive: “There was general agreement among the long-time observers that Moser’s 1955 champions were the most powerful in the 35-year history of the Texas Interscholastic League. What made it a great team was the coiled-spring swiftness and the lightning reactions of the linemen, the versatility of the backfield which made every ball carrier a threat, and the tremendous defensive efforts in the clutches.”

Jack Stovall, an Abilenian living in Dallas, sent a telegram to the Reporter-News: “Have started rumor that Abilene High used star players from (Abilene colleges) Hardin-Simmons, McMurry and ACC against Tyler.” He had the right idea, but a weak concept: Abilene might in fact have beaten the collegians he mentioned. Nearer the mark was Hunter Schmidt, who covered the game for the Tyler Telegraph: “I’d give anyone Notre Dame and 14 points against Abilene.”

Labels: Archives, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments

This is a story from almost four years ago. I was trying to capture Karen in light, just as I was trying again this afternoon, in the image below.

Karen and I are relatively new together – it was a year ago tomorrow that I heard her name for the first time – and I think we’ll still be saying that 30 years from now, because every day with her is original.

I can see it in her face. Every day, in some new way, Karen’s skin does amazing things with light as it comes in from the window. By this summer, it was something that I decided needed to be captured and interpreted in a portrait. I commissioned Dottie Stanley, the San Diego artist (you can Google her) whose work is noted for the way she sees and handles light.

She came to Alta Mira and did a photo study, taking maybe 100 photos of Karen by the window in the kitchen nook, in the study, and by the French doors that open onto the west terrace. When they were developed, she brought back about a dozen to show me.

I selected one, and gave Dottie a second photo, that she liked and that I had taken, of Karen in a red jacket in light from the south windows. Dottie thought the light in that photo was terrific, and hit Karen in just the right way, and I couldn’t disagree.

Dottie said she would do a portrait from both photos, then I could select one, and the other would go into her portfolio. Six or seven weeks later, she came back with the portraits. Both were terrific, but I immediately fell in love with the one of Karen by the French doors. In it, she is not looking straight at you, but down and to the side, in a pensive posture with arms folded in front of her.

As we talked, it became apparent that Dottie liked the other one best, and I agreed it was a great portrait, Karen in the light, smiling in this one and looking at me. Karen liked that one best, too. It caught her eyes perfectly, she said. But viscera are viscera, and all my visceral content wrapped around the pensive Karen and held her tight.

Dottie said she could leave both portraits with us for awhile, and as friends dropped by, we would ask which they liked best. A month passed, and all friends who dropped by preferred the perfect-eyes portrait. I gave them their say but stuck with my favorite.

Last Friday, Dottie called. She was having a Sunday showing at a café, and would I bring the portrait we weren’t going to keep. It was a hard choice, even when my choice was so clear. Both portraits were on display, one by the front door and the other where we could see it both from the living room and kitchen.

Karen has not been exactly comfortable with either portrait, as I might not be, either, if there were two oils of me in the living room. Not too many people, in fact, would know how that felt. Talking about which one to keep, Karen’s comfort with her portraits showed a definite lean to one over the other. The one she preferred was not her pensive self.

It was an easy decision. Didn’t take me a minute, sitting there in silence. It didn’t ease my visceral grip any. For two days I clung to the pensive portrait, but Sunday afternoon I took it to the café and gave it back to Dottie. My compensation – there is always compensation – is knowing how romantic it will be, to let this portrait go, a love forever lost, not know where it is, who purchased it, where it hangs, who is the person who loves it as I do. With its element of a beautiful woman caught in a moment of pensive mystery, it is clearly the more commercial painting of the two, and thus the appropriate one to return, to find its special admirers in the world, and I like that.

And there is the chance I will walk into the grand salon of a beautiful residence one day and there she will be. Romantic as hell, I tell you. Meantime, every morning, I see Karen with her perfect eyes and red jacket by the front door, and I love her there, and then I see the subject herself, and I see in what her face is doing with that morning’s light what the artist will never see, and that, naturally, is forever original, and priceless.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments

Life is totally complicated, and trying to understand it takes a lot of work. At unexpected moments during that work, you might be looking at something and suddenly everything will "line up." This is a story, published Thursday, Jan. 10, 1990, about one of those moments that, for me, arrived on the evening of Jan. 8.

Looking at the moon Tuesday night, I felt a sudden awareness of betrayal. Oh, the moon was innocent, pretty as ever in its full phase and unusually high in the sky for the 8 p.m. hour. It seemed to be in the company of a star or bright planet that had appeared to keep its relative position (a finger’s width to the south) since nightfall. They might have been two different stars, of course, but that would not be the romantic notion.

Through the years, I put a lot of stock in that moon to do my romancing for me. Most people have. For reasons of their own – and every human on the planet comes as a complete set of reasons of his or her own – people don’t trust themselves to get the job done.

A few people admit that, but it takes enormous courage. You confess your fears – be yourself in other words – and take your chances. Most people won’t go that far. They don’t want to take a chance; they want to get the girl. So even if they could, they won’t present themselves directly. They send what lovers have in common: the moon, the stars, the sky, the sun, the clouds, rain, the ocean, music, champagne, roses and Baby Ruths. It seems very romantic, but romance with the moon as intermediary is mostly an exercise in managing fear.

It would be funny if it weren’t also sad. Those who were doing their first romancing in the 1950s will remember the late, great Tommy Edwards, singing “Please Mr. Sun.” It sounded romantic at the time, but here was a man scared out of his mind. He begged brooks, wind, raindrops, rainbows and moonbeams, among others, to do his romancing for him, with Mr. Sun watching to see they all did. Some of us did Tommy one better. We took all his stuff, and the song, and sent it along as our personal John Alden. It’s amazing, the binding power we give to simple songs. I doubt that my high school girlfriend and I will ever speak again, but neither of us is likely to hear (I am blushing now) “Susie Darlin’” without feeling emotion for days and nights of long ago.

Chris Isaak, singing in the late 1980s, more or less put his finger on it: “Strange, what desire makes foolish people do.” It makes them bay at the moon for one thing. That night, head thrown back, face turned up to the moon, I was a person very much in the baying position. It was the same position foolish people everywhere assume, beaming the most heartfelt romantic thoughts at the moon as if it were a satellite that would bounce them back, across miles and darkness, into the heart of the intended, who would hear, and stop eating, or wake up, or push herself out of the arms of another man, who had naturally brought roses and champagne.

I turned around and looked at my shadow on the driveway and laughed. Then I stared at the moon again and for the first time saw it simply staring back, powerless to commune with anyone but me. I was the betrayer. And the betrayed was time, amounting to years and decades, time on both sides, lost to foolishness, left for fools to measure, in remembered melodies and spent corks and crumbled petals, by the forgiving light of the moon.

For the moment I was angry. But it was a beautiful night, clear and warm and unexacting. The moon moved on, just out of Orion’s reach. I stayed out awhile, wondering how beauty is shared, among fearless lovers.

The next morning I went out to start the car to take my son to school. It was 6:15, and the moon was just setting, in the north-northwest, in the same place the sun would set if it were June, near the solstice. The moon was as gold as a setting sun, and puddled the same way at the horizon. I watched it until it was gone, thinking how romantic it was, or maybe just very personal, that the moon should set at the dawn of this particular day.

Labels: Archives, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments

Can animals talk?

Sure they can. The most famous talking animal in the world reigns over an international entertainment empire worth billions. He dresses up and strolls the grounds of his entertainment fantasylands from California to France and we happily pay $65 (last time I checked) a head, including kiddies, so the kiddies can find him and run up to him and tell him all their secrets while the parents stand to one side and smile as happily as if their children were talking to the President of the United States. We even try to get a word in edgewise, and at the end we always say, “Thanks, Mickey.”

Believe in talking animals? I cried watching “The Lion King.” People buy insurance from a company whose spokesman is a gecko. But my favorite talking animal is – still is – Hobbes, the charming, witty, erudite tiger in the old comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.”

And it is Hobbes who tells the secret of our affection, and our need, for talking animals. Hobbes, of course, is Calvin’s sidekick. Calvin is about seven years old and lives almost every moment of his life outside the box, in his imagination. It is in our imagination that animals can talk. Calvin and Hobbes can be having the grandest time, and then one of Calvin’s parents comes into the room. When the parent is there, Hobbes is a stuffed animal propped up against a chair. The parent at that moment is inside the box, and Hobbes can only live where imagination lives.

Imagination is so important to us all. Inside a box is no way at all to live. All you can see are the insides of the box. I was in the 32nd grade when I learned I was in the 32nd grade. An adult is living way too boxy a life when he doesn’t know what grade he is in. Wouldn’t you know, the day I learned that I was in 32nd grade (gosh, that was 25 years ago) was a day I was at Disneyland. We were standing in Main Street, looking up the street at the Fantasyland castle. I had seen the castle before, on earlier Disneyland days, and I was sure its spires soared with all the majesty of the finest castles of Europe and other romantic lands.

But this day, workmen were sprucing up the castle with new paint and other maintenance, and they had scaffolding up. I knew the dimensions of scaffolding, and looking at it now, it looked like a grid of known dimensions overlaid on Snow White’s castle.

And the castle was incredibly small. The grid to me represented a known box – data – and inside the box, the soaring castle was no bigger than a two-story house.

In that instant, I learned something of vital importance that I had not known before, and in that same instant I realized that happened all the time. I had learned things that year that I did not know the year before, and I would learn things next year that I did not know now. I was, and ever would be, in a grade in school. That day at Disneyland, I figured out that I was in 32nd grade. Now I am in 56th. My God, I have learned a lot since then. Just last Sunday, I learned one of the most beautiful lessons of my life, and so now I know much more about love than I did in the first 55 grades.

What I learned at Disneyland, staring at the amazing shrunken castle, was the importance to me of imagination. I was six years old once and, like Calvin and Hobbes, lived life freely, every day, outside the box. Then I started to school, and I started acquiring data. It was data I had to have – two plus two and so forth – but it was also data that overlaid my imagination and started to contradict it.

Staring at the castle, I knew that I never wanted to lose that imagination. In that moment, I learned that the perfect life would be to have the imagination of a six-year-old, and the wisdom of a 65-year-old. At the time, I had to settle for keeping the imagination and my, what a difference that has made.

But I would have to wait to acquire the wisdom of a 65-year-old. Now, in 56th grade, I am drawing perilously close to that goal, but a goal it still is, which must be why I feel so damn happy this morning. Great God Almighty, I am outside the box.

Labels: Archives, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments

Interesting flight. Nonstop, Singapore to Heathrow. At one point, 361 cellphone conversations under way all at once. Seventeen arraignments on assault and battery charges before the magistrate in the tiny but sumptuously appointed court chambers on the lower deck between the Baccarat Lounge and the Raquetball Court.

But now the captain brought the superjumbo Airbus 380 to a full and complete stop at the Heathrow gate and 800 passengers rose as one to collect belongings from overhead bins.

At the back of the aircraft, Laura, in Seat 221-T (aisle), made eye contact with Tommy, in 223-W (window). The airplane’s vastness made it possible for them to stand upright, even beneath the overhead bins, and Tommy could readily appraise Laura’s bosom, as her eyes surveyed his lean jaw and wide shoulders. Though her bin was above Row 219, Laura glanced up at the bins over 223, the last row in the aircraft, as if her belongings were there and so the reason for her maneuvering back to 223.

In the silence typical of passengers waiting to deplane, but made distinguished by their number, like 800 people riding one elevator, Tommy whispered to Laura: “Hello.” She smiled at him and said “Hello.” Several hours later, they were holding hands and could speak at conversational level, the silence having dissolved into numerous conversations between and among passengers discovering mutual backgrounds, making business deals, comparing childhoods, starting novels, falling in love. And for a time there was the thrum of cellphone conversations until batteries steadily began to go dead.

At the front of the aircraft, passengers struggled with overstuffed luggage, skis and ski poles, baby carriages, musical instruments in their hard cases, exotic Malaysian totems, disassembled rickshaws, office equipment, computers, mystery crates strapped in duct tape and yellow “Police Control” ribbon, etc., until one by one the items yielded and fell heavily to the aisles, making room for the next passenger’s struggle. With each success, the victor joined the queue at the stairway descending to the metered ramp for merging into the queue of passengers moving forward from below.

Just as they detected the first deplaning motion far ahead, Laura and Tommy shared their first kiss. It was at Row 207 that Tommy said, “Laura, will you marry me?”

“I need time,” Laura said, smiling and pleased, but confused. Eddie was waiting to meet her, out on the concourse. Yet she had never known the pleasure of lovemaking such as she and Tommy had shared at Row 214, where they had paused to watch a movie.

At 199, Laura embraced Tommy and said, “The answer is yes.”

“I’ll make your wedding dress,” said a kindly woman behind them. “My Singer is in the overhead bin, and several bolts of Javanese silk.”

At 171, Laura’s dress was ready. The magistrate married them in Row 167, and they drank champagne and danced at their reception in the galley between Rows 165 and 164 while the London Chamber Orchestra (flying in from Sydney) played.

They honeymooned at 143 and enjoyed the birth of twins behind the curtain separating Coach and Business Class. The children, Full and Upright, completed first and second grades in the 20-seat elementary school below First Class and emerged with their parents from the jetway into the concourse happy children well adjusted to the new age.

Furtively, Laura searched for Eddie and actually walked right past him but didn’t recognize him for the beard.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments

After giving it some thought, I have decided to pass up my opportunity to become a subscriber to the “Great Thinkers on Cassette” series.

The subscription material said these cassettes were designed to make your driving time more rewarding. As I commuted to work, I could punch in the “Giants of Philosophy” cassette and hear the narrated works of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and the others. Or, I could punch in, “Giants of Political Thought,” and hear Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Hobbes, Thoreau, and so forth. If economics were my mood, I could punch in that tape and hear the essays of Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes.

Naturally I declined. A freeway in Southern California is no place for great thinkers. I tried to imagine Soren Kierkegaard, driving along in the Los Angeles rush hour, thinking the thoughts he did, and I thought how quickly Kierkegaard would become completely uninsurable, assuming he survived at all.

Sure, I let my mind wander on the freeway. I don’t concentrate 100 percent on the pickups, SUVs and gravel trucks thundering by. But when you think about the concentration levels required of Machiavelli’s discussion of the Florentine Politic, I start to feel uncomfortable. I feel even more uncomfortable thinking about the driver of the black Hummer with oversized tires, who has become completely immersed in the thoughts of St. Thomas Aquinas, on Scholasticism.

I wondered what the great thinkers would think about this. I saw us on the freeway. I was driving. Thomas Jefferson was in the back seat, along with John Stuart Mill and Jean-Paul Sartre. Plato was riding shotgun. Jefferson didn’t say anything. He just sat and rolled the power window up and down. John Stuart Mill sat with his head down, thinking. Then he looked up and spoke:

“Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest,” he said.

“That’s profound,” I said. “Why, just in the last presidential campaign . . .”

Sartre, in a sour voice, interrupted me and said, “Keep your eyes on the road.” Ah! Divided opinions, I thought: Mill for great thinking on freeways, Sartre opposed.

Then Plato spoke: “There is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink.”

“Oh, shut up,” growled Sartre. I glanced approvingly at him.

“How quickly you pick up our clichés, I said.

“Well,” Sartre said, “we are great thinkers, aren’t we?”

Plato shrugged. “Until philosophers are kings,” he said, “cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.”

I looked at Plato. “It would mean the end of freeways as we know them,” I said, just as we rear-ended a Toyota Tacoma.

“What in the hell were you doing?” said the Toyota’s driver.

“Talking to Plato,” I said.

“Tell it to your insurance company,” he said. I wondered what John Maynard Keynes would think about that.

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Posted by Michael Grant at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments

Until this afternoon in January, 1991, I had been studying the concept of "taking back power" for three years, but still only understood it academically. Then the 727, taking off, put it on the ground for me.

A cold front had just passed through Dallas, bringing the usual winds howling from the north. The overcast was giving way to blue sky as our flight taxied from the Delta terminal over to the west runways.

Ahead of us was a Delta 727, hurrying along, probably late, like we were. Without pause he took the runway and began his takeoff roll. I lost sight of him as we maneuvered on the taxiway, but when we turned to enter the runway, I saw him again.

He had just lifted off, climbing sharply through 200 feet, presenting to us a topmost profile of white fuselage and silver wings.

He was flying sideways; that is, the fuselage was skewed two or three ticks to the right of its direction of travel. It is not unusual for airplanes, particularly small ones, to fly sideways. They call it “crabbing,” when a pilot, to fly straight, has to steer right or left into the wind.

But this was different, this glimpse of a 727, 200 feet off the ground, flying sideways at takeoff. Here was a three-engine aircraft, 100 feet long, weighing 115,000 pounds, driven forward by 45,000 pounds of thrust, and the wind had blown it sideways the instant its wheels left the ground. The pilot had to steer left to fly straight. It showed how strong the wind was, and how effective the countering design, a design that joined flexibility with control. It was a triumph of equilibrium.

Then we turned onto the runway, and the 727 was gone, but its image remained. It occurred to me, at that moment, that the ability to fly sideways is the central theme in human happiness.

Those who live in happiness will tell you that it feels a lot like freedom. Personal freedom, like political freedom, consists of the power to make choices. That is, of course, a great power. People who come to experience happiness are amazed when one of its features turns out to be a feeling of great power.

People without choice-making power live in fear. Personally and politically, the remedy is to take back power. It requires courage, but people make that decision all the time, because otherwise life is miserable. They start to take back power that most of them lost, or gave away, as children. It is a wonderful moment in their lives.

What they are gathering is the power to take off. In aviation, the point on the runway where the airplane reaches takeoff power is called “rotation.” The pilot can lift, or rotate, the nose, and the airplane will fly.

Both airplanes and human spirits are safest on the ground, but on the ground, both are out of their element. People have associated flight with spirit since the first recorded human thought. Daedalus invented wings on which Icarus, his son, soared free of the Labyrinth. Daedalus was a prophet of happiness. Unfortunately, Icarus in his exhilaration flew too near the sun, which melted the wax that held his wings, and he fell to his death in the sea.

People reach rotation at their own speed and usually not without professional guidance. It may take years. One day they realize the power is there, and it is as if there is no alternative but to lift the nose and take off. Some people call it commitment, but it also feels very much like surrender. They surrender safety, surrender the ground. It is a feeling of liberation they have known only in their dreams.

The spirit, entering its element, instantly feels equilibrium take hold, and that is the moment at which people understand how great the power of happiness is. The wind will still blow you sideways sometimes, but steering into it, you can fly straight. It is as exhilarating as life should be, as long as you don’t fly too near the sun.

Labels: Archives, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments

I have a theory about photos and mirrors. I think people look better to themselves in mirrors than they do in photos.

But then Karen said she couldn’t see any difference. Photo or mirror, she looked the same to herself.

There goes the theory, I thought. Then again, maybe not. Karen is beautiful. She is beautiful in photos, and she is beautiful in the mirror.

I am not beautiful in photos. In fact in photos, with only a few professional exceptions, I think I look drab and jowly.

But in the mirror, I always look pretty darn good, at least after a shower and I have combed my hair. Why is that? I have a theory.

I think what I see in the mirror is the result of a long and selective process. I have been looking at myself in the mirror for almost 60 years. Never once in all that time have I looked in a mirror for any purpose other than making myself look better. I think that is true of practically all people. I have never heard of a person using a mirror to try to make himself or herself look worse. If they hit the street looking like Michael Jackson or Tammy Faye Bakker, that’s their business.

If I hit the street looking like Michael Grant, well, that’s the best I could do. That is why I can get so discouraged when I look at myself in photos.

The difference is, I think, the camera sees me the way the camera sees me, without interpretation. In the mirror, I see me the way I have learned to see me. I have spent almost 60 years looking for good things. At the same time, I have chosen not to see bad things. Your perspective starts to get shaped. I am positive I look better in the mirror than I do on the street. That is because I have saved every little good thing I ever saw about me in the mirror, and eventually a template has emerged. The template has been forced to submit to reality and revisions over time, but the basic geometry still is of a 20-year-old lean-jawed college sophomore looking for something to like. I am looking at a vain portrait of myself, assembled stroke by stroke. A dumb camera can’t do that.

There is something else, and for this I will never have an answer. I am the only human being on earth who knows what I look like in the mirror. No one else can see me that way. When I look at myself in a photo, my left eye is on the right. I am seeing myself as anyone else sees me, with my left on their right.

But when I look at myself in the mirror, my right eye is on the right. When I first discovered that, it was disorienting. I had to devise a test before I could be satisfied. I raised my hand on the side of the eye my right eye was looking at in the mirror. I raised that hand to my face. Then I looked at my hand. It was my right hand. There was the proof: In the mirror, I was looking at myself backward, and I am the only one who can do that.

It reminded me of the funny and interesting results achieved when a person cuts two identical photos of himself down the middle, then puts the right side with the right side, and the left with the left. It’s like looking at two different people.

In the mirror, is the same principle at work? I don’t know, and I have stopped thinking about it for the time being, because a new question arises. Millions of people look at Sean Connery and drool at his good looks. If he is like me, in his mirror he must look even better to himself. But he is the only one who can see it. What would it be like, to be Sean Connery, and be the only one in the world who knows what you really look like? I will ask Karen. She is beautiful, and maybe she will know.

Labels: Archives, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments