Canvas

More than seven years after my dad passed, I often think about the words KG generously posted as a tribute to his former coach and longtime friend. I am reticent to return the gesture knowing I can’t and won’t be as eloquent as he, but trying is a solemn, sacred duty.

RIP Gene Goll.

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If you’d told me during the summer after graduating high school I’d earn money by being commissioned to paint an entire house with my friend Kevin, one my dad’s basketball players and a lefty pitcher for whom I was essentially a designated courtesy runner, I’d tell you I hardly remember any of it due to the oil-based paint fumes.

But apparently that is how I spent a goodly portion of the summer, most of which was consumed discussing protestants and Catholics, The Boss, and baseball, like old men in a deli. Even better, his jovial mother Hilary and acerbic-witted father Gene welcomed me into their daily existence.

They eventually, mercifully released us from the back half of the job due to family travel plans, as well as some reluctance to continue bleeding hundreds of dollars in supplies, seeing any flat-planed surface covered in molecular ceiling paint particles, witnessing the mass slaughter of brain cells from aforementioned oil-based cabinet paint exposure, enduring yards of torn sheetrock lining from paint rollers, and a few other odds and ends. 

Thus my painting career ended early, but my friendship with the Golls stuck like primer. There was a wholly unwarranted patience and bemusement that I now realize was likely Gene and Hilary realizing they were paying for a half-assed paint job and a lifelong friendship.

And to know Kevin (or Karen and Brian) is to know Gene. All in their own way analytical, bemused, principled, deeply caring. I’ve never seen a dad leave a stronger imprint upon his children. We are all the better for it.

I saw Gene only a few times in recent years but know in my bones he loved them all to his last day. He and my dad differed in innumerable ways, but Gene reminded me greatly of him in that regard. There is no higher compliment I can pay to a man and father than that.

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Cancer is a cowardly disease, leaching life from our most vibrant. But it also illuminates: a subtle glow, clock hands — the time given to appreciate someone, to care for them, and to articulate our love to them before the darkness draws. Its cowardice in taking time to steal someone spurs us to be mindful, to appreciate all we are have and to give the same freely to others. 

Our time is short. Gene’s time has run out. Shine brightly until yours is up.

Crossing the bar

Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea,

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

      Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,

      And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

      When I embark;

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

-Tennyson

Apple fritter

Perspective

Concert

Before the past couple of years, I could probably count on one hand the concerts I’ve attended:

• Steve Miller Band at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in high school, featuring underwear-bearing and panty-throwing middle-aged women

• A clenched-jawed, violently hungover 21st birthday gift to a roadhouse to see Randy Rogers

• Sister Hazel at Fort Worth’s Main St. Arts Festival

• The LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl, twice — once under the charismatic Bramwell Tovey and once under the venerable John Williams

I’m surely missing some, though surely I’d have no need to incorporate toes for an accurate number. Concert attendance remained an uncommon enough event that most of them stand out, and most were undertaken at a once-every-few-years cadence.

Why? Part of me thinks the vast majority of artists sound better when recording music in a controlled studio environment. Partly it’s the noisy, crowded environment, anathema to an introvert. Partly cause I just didn’t get it – why would you go to a chaotic, live, possibly lower-quality event where everyone is singing or yelling, when you could listen to an album with a good pair of headphones and catch all the nuances in the recording?

Partly it’s the simple fact that I like music, but I am probably in the midpoint or lower of music appreciators. Music will move me emotionally and has been the soundtrack to my life like any normie, but I certainly don’t have the range or depth of interest to separate me from a passionate fan or proper artist.

If anything, my relationship to music has cooled over the past few years. This grief journey, which has led to being emotionally open to new experiences, also coincided with developments like owning newer vehicles that don’t even have a CD deck anymore – gasp! Forced to enter the era of compressed streaming audio, I’ve enjoyed indie radio stations and discovering new music but became more likely to treat music as background noise rather than an album to be experienced.

Which naturally leads me to Albert Camus.

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In a recent piece, philosopher Sean Illing explains the dangers of living in a society that elevates abstraction over experience. He references Camus’ post-WWII concerns about hazards inherent to abstractive ideologies and the resultant spiral to political nihilism. Particularly incisive is his observation that nihilism doesn’t necessary refer to believing in nothing, but to refusing to believe in the world as it is. Nihilism is despair. But he also elucidates how braving those hazards can lead to sharing some of the noblest human bonds.

Like Frankl’s logotherapy, Camus posits that there is a certain solace amid horror, be it disease or war or disaster – any horror sufficient to forge necessary community among calamity. Right now, that could mean we share outrage at the plight of Ukraine, or a coursing pandemic, or for Uvalde, but…we share. Being together in that resistance – that defiance – for something better is a collective bond with your fellow citizens, our fellow human beings.

“The problem is that solidarity often slips away in the mechanics of everyday life. But the empathy and love fueling that desire to help in a crisis is a constant possibility.”

And that possibility is a choice we can choose to make every day. Within that choice is the lens we will use to see our world: defiant optimism or ideological pessimism. Or to paraphrase Camus: optimism is to resist despair.

Which naturally brings me to Garth Brooks.

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The day before Garth’s literally earth-shaking concert at LSU’s Tiger Stadium, I probably could’ve been convinced to give my tickets to a deserving pair. They were a cherished gift, but hey – it’s just a concert. I don’t really go to concerts.

Fortunately, nobody asked, so I went in expecting merely a pleasant experience in a hallowed location. But before Callin’ Baton Rouge tipped the campus seismograph, 102,000 of my colleagues gave me a revelation. As did Garth. Some residue of self-consciousness had obscured it until then, but all those people were there to sing songs with him, and he was there to listen to them sing. The point of the concert was to be there together.

Hello, Samantha dear.

Reflecting on why I was so emotionally moved by a community singalong, it occurred to me that for an admitted word dork, it hadn’t occurred to me before that “community” etymologically refers to together-service: one voice among many, among 102,000, but singing one song.

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On the drive home, I stopped to visit Menachim Aveilim, the cemetery in Lafayette where my dad rests. The grass has grown over the gravesite. The dirt is level. It looks like it belongs there, not like a fresh maiming of Earth. It is a scabbed-over wound; the healing is underway. For the first time since his interment, I did not cry when standing above my father’s grave.

I visited during the ongoing Festival International de Louisiane, a music and arts festival. Amid the drizzle of a spring shower and poncho-muffled voices of the gathering celebrants, the sounds of fiddles and gospel choirs drifted through the raindrops.

Spirit

In the summer of 2006, my brother and I worked on our uncle’s ranch northeast of San Diego. We cleared trees, fed horses, split wood, mowed grass, laid rubber pellets in a horse pen, and (in my case) got a scorching case of poison oak.

In the bucolic mountains, before the era of the ubiquitous smart phone, there was extremely limited cell service. (A stump you could stand on in the driveway of the main house marked the spot.) The only things you could hear besides the tractor and machinery were the lows of cows, whinnies of horses, and tinny Panic at the Disco songs from the under-cabinet radio in the workers’ house kitchen, which picked up three stations depending on the time of day.

Aside from weekend trips into town for groceries, all we had for entertainment was that radio and a Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine that he’d yanked on his flight out, because it had an article about wiffle ball. 

We read every page of it, repeatedly. Every page. The tantalizing ads for Vegas restaurants. The wiffle ball tips, though we had no wiffles. The Donald Trump real estate seminar (featuring George Foreman) in the back. The crossword prompts, cursing the son of a bitch who did it in pen. The corporate ephemera and infographics. Towards the end, the fine print on ads. Every page. “It’s my turn,” we would angrily mutter halfway through our sandwiches. 

It felt like stilted, abject boredom at the time, but I just paid $22.75 on blessed eBay for a copy of the June 2006 Spirit magazine. What a great memory.

Darmok

"He who was my companion through adventure and hardship is gone forever.”

I am a dork, not to be confused with a nerd (who is productive), and I watched Star Trek as a kid. We watched it together. The “Darmok” episode’s take on interspecies communication and the Epic of Gilgamesh flew a bit over the head of a second grader, but it reappeared later during my brief stint at Rhodes, his future alma mater.

Like any good liberal arts college, Rhodes has two tracks of required humanities programs students must take: Search or Life. Life focused more on religious text, so if I had to guess, he was like me and selected the Search option, which is more broadly about the foundations of western cultural values. As I recall, they kick it off at the beginning — a look at Gilgamesh.

Back then the words meant very little to this dumbassed 18 year old, but they do now. As does the letterboxed episode of a sci-fi show produced thirty years ago.

Sir Patrick Stewart delivered a performance worth remastering and putting on Netflix, so now I can watch and rewatch S5E2 if I want to remember either a runty dingus who pretended to be Geordi La Forge, or a grown man who was a source of great joy during adventure and steadfast reliance during hardship.

It gets easier, but it is not painless.

Should not my cheeks be emaciated, my expression desolate;

Should my heart not be wretched, my features not haggard;

Should there not be sadness deep within me;

Should I not look like one who has been traveling a long distance, and should ice and heat not have seared my face;

Should I not roam the wilderness?

The gate of grief must be bolted shut, sealed with pitch and bitumen.

Greatness

My grieving process began in 2016 — March 5, to be specific, the day my grandmother passed. Her protracted decline offered a front-row seat to the heartbreak of my chronically ill father, undoubtedly also grappling with his own mortality in his own stoic way.

I drove him down to Baton Rouge to visit her, near the end. It had been several years since I’d been close to someone who only had a foot left in the door of life. In that familiar living room turned hospice ward, I felt for the first time the chest-crushing grasp of anxiety that would be become a close companion in coming years.  

I ignored it, as I had any emotional vulnerability for years. I cried during her funeral service, an ocular contact allergy to funeral services I still possess. The heavy weight of loss was leavened by the Hebraic tendency toward levity.

So I moved on. Her decline was so protracted and her stubbornness of life so intractable, it felt like she had evaporated away slowly instead of being here and then gone suddenly. A lioness was gently pet to sleep by devoted nurses and doting children.

Which naturally brings me to Kobe Bryant.

About a month later, he was going to play his final game: the 16-65 Lakers vs. the 40-41 Jazz. The all-time great deserved to go out more honorably than hobbling through a tanking season, but we don’t get to author our own screenplays; we just write the dialogue.

I sat down to watch this little digestif of history, expecting little more than a curtain call for a staple of my youth and formative adulthood. He was the Xennial NBA star, sandwiched between Jordan and LeBron. I had even been treated — an odd word for a Houston fan — to seeing him hitting a dagger three against the Rockets in the momentous 2009 season.

It felt inevitable: The Rockets took a single-point lead with under a minute to play, but Kobe buried a 27-foot three with 27 seconds left, and that was it. We all felt it coming; he simply felt it; and that inimitable shot and swagger was impressive to witness in person.

The Lakers and Rockets would go on to a six-round heavyweight fight for the de-facto championship in the conference semifinals that year. The Lakers won, of course, then claimed the penultimate championship of the Kobe era.

Fast forward several years, and the tyranny of aging and the cyclical nature of NBA rosters had reduced the Lakers to a rump state and Kobe to a Wizards-era Jordan: A legend you dare not besmirch, but not because the Mamba still had venom.

But I watched. I admired his commitment to a single franchise, to retire wearing a single uniform whose colors I admittedly don’t mind. I have a distinct memory of watching a late-era Jordan take a game-winning shot and missing it. Would Kobe follow the same quiet end, or was there one more 27-footer in him?

So I watched.

The Lakers were losing, unsurprisingly, but Kobe was scoring buckets, with more than 30 points through three quarters. Down 12 with under 10 minutes to play, he hit a three. Under 10 points is doable. The Jazz responded with a three. Kobe hit another one. The Mamba flicked his tongue, tasting victory.

And I watched.

Down 10 with just over three minutes left, Kobe Bryant scored 17 straight points for his team, dished an assist for the icing dunk and a 101-96 lead with four seconds left, and left the court a winner.  

Most of the talk about that game centers on his 60-point performance, but that’s not what impresses me; it was the way he emptied his tank in the last quarter of his playing career. He didn’t score points to look good. Kobe abjectly refused to end on anything but a win.  

I wept for a player I’d never possessed any specific affinity for, on a team I didn’t care about. Maybe because it was so esoteric, a titanic performance for a mere 17th win on the season. Maybe it’s because I knew these events were somehow connected, somehow.

Part of me recognized I was witnessing an end, albeit of a different kind, and my refusal to process the grief of losing my grandmother was manifesting itself in tears for a basketball player.

Which naturally brings me to my dad.

My dad had a saying: End on a make. I’m sure all of his players learned that during his coaching days, but it was just as true shooting hoops in the driveway as a child. You don’t walk off the court (or concrete) without your last shot going through the hoop.

Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it took losing all of these people to recognize the temporal nature of greatness, in all its forms: Player. Coach. Parent. I cried again yesterday, but not because I was sad a basketball player had died. I cried for the grieving, with sympathy for the pain of sudden loss. I cried for the loss of idyllic childhood moments.

I mourned the loss of greatness.

Atonement

Perfection is in a moment. It is not static. It is a fleeting experience. Perfection is a painting hanging on the wall that somebody observes and passes by. Perfection is not a word we can use often.

Last February, I was given the opportunity to visit LSU’s locker room, walk through the chute, touch the Win Bar, and enter a silent Tiger Stadium. It never rains there, of course, but it was cloudy and gray that day. Welcome to Death Valley, the sign said. I believed it. And I believed this team would become champions again.

I did not believe it would only take 10 months.

On New Year’s Eve 2012, I sat with my brother in our dilapidated townhouse and watched a listless team get kicked to the curb by an elated Clemson squad. We’d started 2012 sleeping off the bitter denial of a national championship game shutout in an even more dilapidated Lakeside tenement.

The Clemson loss, even more than the Alabama shutout, marked the beginning of a decline that lasted most of the decade. Often touching greatness without grasping it, these Tigers would pour their hearts out onto the field but were unable to beat Bama nor vindicate the program with a championship.

Then a homegrown new coach restored pride in 2016. 2017 brought humility. 2018 touched that greatness again, ringing like a distant bell. And then came 2019.

“I don’t think a lot of people are used to LSU scoring 40, 50, 60 points a game,” Joe Burrow said in the preseason, burnishing the reputation of the nation’s offensive punchline.

And then they punched touchdowns into the endzone of every team they faced. The legend is well known now, and most of it came on the road: 3rd-and-17 in Austin; Roll Tide What?™; mangling a succession of top-5 teams in Atlanta and New Orleans.

Alabama is the game that mattered more than any of the others. The season began and ended in Tuscaloosa. The Tigers sauntered in and dropped 46 on them, more points than any team has ever scored there in regulation. In the truer-than-he-realizes words of Jason Kirk: “They haven’t known fear since [46-41] happened.” They threw off the crimson yoke, and then they finished plowing the field anyway.

Success this century was imperfect: In 2003, they won a title with a single loss; in 2007, they won it with two losses; in 2011, they smelled perfection before having the cloche lifted to reveal nothing but wisps of steam. But in 2019, they feasted.

Then they danced on the carcass.

Like I wrote last winter, I concede it might just be a game. Already, coaches and players are moving on to the next stages of their professional lives, good memories of their championship season tucked away like snacks in picnic baskets. Maybe it’s just football.

Maybe it’s not. Try telling that to the generations of Louisianans, from Grand Isle to Ida, crying together over the outcome of a game. They won’t get mad; they’ll pity you, shaking their heads because you just don’t get it.

Tell it to the teeming thousands in the Superdome. We roared alongside the head coach, Bebe from the bayou. He vindicated himself to the country in the one state that can truly understand him, an hour from his hometown, in the very same building where our world had tilted off of its axis in January of 2012.

Fans leaving the Superdome entered a New Orleans concealed in fog yet clear as a sunny spring day. We walked, danced, and stumbled into a shrouded midnight in America’s most haunted place, a city alight with smiles and joy.

We had seen perfection.    

On the way home, those gray skies finally opened up over Lecompte, right as I passed the exit for Lea’s Lunchroom, an oasis in the pine desert of I-49. We shared a ham lunch there years ago on a shambling trip home after a win over the Aggies.

The raindrops battered my windshield, but this time I did not shed a tear.

I am both over and very much not over losing my brother.

Welcome to Death Valley

It is a pantheon of concrete and steel.

It is a city that rises defiantly in the delta alongside the father of waters.

It is the humidity of autumn evenings that drapes stately oaks and broad magnolias.

It is haunted ... and it is loud.

It is Halloween night and Cannon blasts.

It is a Louisiana gumbo of humanity that cheers its Tigers to victory and destroys the dreams of invading foes.

Chance of rain is ... never!

It is the cathedral of college football and worship happens here.

When the sun finds its home in the western sky, it is a field of glory for sure...

But much more than that, it is a sacred place.

And it is Saturday night in Death Valley.

—“Saturday in Death Valley” by Dan Borne

I grew up a Tiger.

Nevermind the handful of pictures of toddler me in A&M shirts or sweatshirts; I was born in Bryan, Texas — practically in the shadow of Kyle Field — and I don’t remember wearing them, anyway. I have no memory in my life of a time before purple and gold, nor of spelling “go” without a few extra vowels.

I grew up attending games, but my first year as a student brought me the 2003 season, and the UGA game in particular. I got chills just from typing that, as I do every time I think about the crowd spontaneously bursting into the L-S-U chant after the Bulldogs tied it up late. The crowd willed victory into existence. Skyler Green’s ensuing catch was preordained.

Then followed a slew of great memories of LSU football’s modern glory years:

Paying witness to the defiant will of Louisiana and her inhabitants during the hurricane-marred 2005 season.

Then graduation, hopping onto the 2007 roller coaster season and carousing through the French Quarter to celebrate a home-brewed championship.

2011’s greatest regular season of all time. (And thanks again to the Quarter, precious few memories from that year’s championship game.)

In 2010, the girl I brought to the Alabama game took a tailgating-assisted tumble on the sidewalk. Scraped up and offhandedly complaining about a sore shoulder, she was still a trouper and made it through the game. Two weeks later she had to have surgery for a grade-two dislocation. (I sent flowers.)

I’m still grateful for her toughness, because since then I sat through the consecutive crimson heartbreaks in 2012 and 2014, and the consecutive shutouts in our last two home contests.

That bitter taste has been bolstered by the bold seasonings of sleepwalking through a shutout to basement-dwelling hogs, last-second bowl losses, and the ignominious ends to our winning streaks over Miss State and the Aggies.

But it’s the bitter that makes the sweet, and we still win more than we lose. There’s no team in this country — nor any fan who attends — who leaves a Saturday night in Death Valley the same.

So... I get it. I know what makes Louisiana, and LSU in particular, special. I’m a fan not just by upbringing, geography or pedigree. I’ve lived it.

I’ve paid my Tiger taxes: Making the long drive across I-20 and  down I-49 for games, and buying tickets, parking passes, and the new branded Nike Free shoes (which are, by the way, the most comfortable I own and worth every penny).

But those things aren’t what true fandom is about.

I’ve spent many years reveling in worship in the cathedral of college football, but I admit my rites and rituals were empty. I’d never claim to actually bear the purple and gold stigmata.

My indifference was justified by practicality, equivocation: It’s a business. It’s a fun hobby but only a game. They’re just kids trying to get a degree or make their living.

And then suddenly last year, my father and my little brother — fans, true fans — were gone within four months of each other. The former unexpectedly, from a cardiac event; the latter after a rapid but agonizing battle with cancer.

Yet neither were officially alumni: My dad left LSU a semester shy of graduation, and my brother was an ABC after graduating from Rhodes College in Memphis. How true a fan can you be without the necessary paperwork? Purely, it turns out.

My dad: In 2013, he suffered symptoms we feared might be a stroke. As a type 1 diabetic, he had a number of health problems, and our family was familiar with both of Fort Worth’s main hospitals. We asked him which one he wanted to go to. His answer: "The one with ESPNU." The game (UAB) would be on the next day.

As he was checked into the ER, the triage nurse asked him standard assessment questions, including if he'd ever thought of harming himself or others. His slurred response: "Do you know who Nick Saban is?"

My brother: He was an Aggie-leaning youth, but we really won him over as a teenaged guest to the student section at its best, amid one of those frenetic moments — the snarl of a tiger, cornered, ears back, vicious, continuous — when he turned to me with his eyes wide and mouth open, unable to hear his own screams. And later, as a former high school defensive backs coach who appreciated good defense.

On his deathbed in October, four days before he’d be gone, and the day after the Miss St game — after a family friend got word to Coach Aranda that a guy to whom he’d already sent an encouraging note was in his final days, and Aranda replied that they’d “dial one up,” then throttled Moo U — my little brother pointed at the door and said he wanted to go to Tiger Stadium.

No framed sheepskin of mine outweighs the credentials of men who saw death waiting on the other side of the chute and touched the Win Bar on their way out to meet it.

The diseases that killed them weren’t infectious, but the Tigers are: Now my Aggie mother and Badger sister-in-law say they’re our fans, too.

In September, I cried in Jerryworld because my dad missed the Tigers’ playful romp over Miami. I shed tears writing this thinking about the last text my brother would ever send me, amid the riotous celebration following the unexpected delight of beating down previously unbeaten UGA in October: “Looks like crunkville down there.”

I tear up thinking not just about how much I miss them, but how much they will miss: More heartbreaks, assuredly, but also more championships.

They’ll miss our post-game debriefs at my uncle’s table, around cold Jay’s BBQ sandwiches or steaming bowls of crawfish stew. They’ll miss cursing at Gary Danielson’s haughty insolence and the interminable length of CBS commercial breaks. They’ll miss the inevitable ecstasy of throwing off the crimson yoke.

Now, and always, the tree near Gate 6 on the west side of Tiger Stadium will have a plaque sunk into the dark soil beneath it. That stately young oak will pay tribute to my brother, Cory; my father, Richard; and my grandfather, Johnny — probably the only person my dad would admit was an even bigger fan than he.

Those of us who remain will gather there, savor a moment of quiet reflection before the coming storm that never rains, then enter the gate that takes us to season tickets our family has held for more than three decades.

Welcome to Death Valley, the sign greets all visitors.

“It is haunted,” but not just by the ghosts of Halloween night. “It is loud,” and not just with Cannon blasts and cheering fans.

I don’t know the whole poem by heart. And though I know the words, I don’t typically sing the alma mater. I probably still won’t. I don’t know if my rites are pure. I don’t know if my rituals are enough.

But now I know what it means to be Forever LSU.