My life dribbles out

I am Elvis gyrating his hips on Ed Sullivan. I am four mop-haired boys from Liverpool singing and playing on the same stage several years later to the screams of millions. I am walking around in a daze, inspecting intercontinental missiles in the soft, spring grass on a cub scout tour of Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. I am wandering around my father’s IBM offices in Indianapolis and Huntsville and Atlanta, trying to figure out how it all fits together: three rooms full of computer. I am typing this page out on a small plastic box full of electronics, the boxes the size of two small carry-on suitcases.

I am eating barbecue with vegetables and corncakes with my family in the Pic-a-rib restaurant across from the old wooden railroad station in Clarksville, Tennessee. I am catching an L&N train from the white Queen Anne-style station in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, bound for Marietta, Georgia. In the blackness of our midnight departure, I am thrilled to board the train, my father waiting for us on the tracks in Marietta.

I am sitting on a blanket in the infield with mom and dad and Frank, watching the tube-shaped race cars, with the old Offenhauser engines, screaming around the track in Indianapolis. I am running down the field with a junior-sized football at Murphy Candler Park in the fall sunshine. I am waiting my turn at bat. I am eating sandwiches at Lum's restaurant in my cleats and uniform, with the smell of line chalk and bermuda grass following me around the room. I am chasing around with my friends, teammates and siblings, like the nuisances we are, while our parents drink beer and laugh and enjoy the opportunity to act like adults having fun together.

I am walking off the football field in Athens, my head down, after a loss to Cedar Shoals High School, holding the hand of a little African-American boy from Athens, who is offering me an unexpectedly potent brand of hero worship. I am re-living the same experience in Georgetown, Virginia, on the campus of Georgetown University, five years later, leaving the sight of my last football game as a participant. My dad is in tears; my mom is just beaming.

I am staring with wonder at a little female baby in the nursery window of Piedmont Hospital and combing her blonde hair to get her ready for school. I am making a sandwich for her lunch and leaving the paper on the cheese, as an unintended surprise. I am driving a beat up old Volkswagen Jetta to school, singing folk songs with my daughter because the radio doesn't work.

I am walking through the wet and cold of the French Quarter in New Orleans in January with someone I, maybe, barely knew from years past but now is completing my thoughts and sentences, and I, hers. I am waiting nervously at the front of a modern Methodist church in Irvine, California and trying to catch her eye as she stares at the floor and tries to navigate the walk down the aisle toward me on her father's arm.

I am throwing my portly catcher's body toward a foul ball in the late spring dust on the Dundee Park infield in Griffin. I am speaking a sermon based on the events of my life and the changes I have seen in forty years of life to the congregation of First Presbyterian Church, Griffin.

I am looking forward to a hearing in court tomorrow and driving around the state of Georgia, selling the homes of those who can not make the necessary payments. I am trying to keep the payments of our house current to escape the call of the foreclosure sale.

I am catching the Allman Brothers in concert with friends of mine in Roanoke, Virginia and hearing the sounds of REM coming from the second floor nightclub above me as I walk through downtown Athens, Georgia toward the Varsity.

I am visiting my great-grandmothers in their nursing homes. I am listening to my grandfather cough through his emphysema. I stare at the familiar, but blank faces of my dead grandmothers at their funerals in the dead of winter, both times. I am wondering at a little wooden box carefully placed in a small marble crypt in New Orleans in September. I am JFK in Dallas and RFK in Los Angeles and MLK in Memphis.

I am two planes flying deliberately from Logan Airport and sailing incomprehensively into the twin towers in New York, while I watch in the semi-darkness of morning breakfast on the bayou in Bayou Lacombe. Another plane from Logan Airport in Boston is winging me surely across the Atlantic to Heathrow Airport, where a train trip into London leaves me with the feeling that I am very, very far away from who I was and what I know and those who love me.

I am watching my daughter walk down the corridor toward a waiting plane and a semester spent studying in Prague.

What waits ahead?