When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears

Our moral framework is fragile. Judging from my reading and from conversations I hear, many of us worry that our sense of our humanity and the sanctity of human life is crumbling ever more quickly, like cliffs of wet sand tumbling into the sea. When a mass shooting is not the lead story at your preferred news “outlet,” when most of us simply sip our coffee and shake our heads over such events (unless, of course, it happens in our town), then we can be sure that something has happened in the collective conscience… and it can’t be good.

However, the op-ed piece that has occupied my mind the most these past few weeks appeared in the New York Times on May 2nd, 2023. Writer Dennis Overbye takes the bleakness to a cosmic level as he contemplates the long-term (to say the least) effects of dark energy on the universe, including the token snuffing of humanity and all human achievement:

The End is coming, in maybe 100 billion years. Is it too soon to start freaking out?

“There will be a last sentient being, there will be a last thought,” declared Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College, near the end of “A Trip to Infinity,” a new Neflix documentary directed by Jonathan Halperin and Drew Takahashi.

When I heard that statement during a showing of the film recently, it broke my heart. It was the saddest, loneliest idea I had ever contemplated. I thought I was aware and knowledgeable about our shared cosmic predicament — namely, that if what we think we know about physics and cosmology is true, life and intelligence are doomed. I thought I had made some kind of intellectual peace with that.

(Overbye, “Who will Have the Last Word on the Universe,” NYT, May 2, 2023)

Sad? I suppose so. Truly we have no word for the kind of loneliness that derives from the consideration of a world in which there is no trace that you were ever here - that any of us were here - and where no one is left to care either way. The greatest of us will have been no better off than the least, and Shakespeare or Einstein or Beethoven or Picasso will have been no more significant than the spot on the rug where your dog wiped his ass. Furthermore, murderers will have been no more or less than saints, and the laws against the most horrific of crimes will have had no dominion over the crimes themselves.

But…I know people - really smart people - who would have a good laugh at this news. “A hundred billion years?” they’d scoff. “I’d say the world is more likely to end sometime in the next few days.” Not merely evangelical Christians, but deeply spiritual people of all faiths, believe the end of things as we know them will be the beginning of that rare sequel which is far better than the original installment, in which heaven (is there another word?) is not in the clouds above us nor anywhere else in the physical universe, but in a realm that we pathetic dwellers in three dimensions cannot begin to predict or comprehend.

By contrast, the scientific certainty that our existence will end with slabs and chunks of meteors and finally subatomic particles drifting endlessly through a self-destructing cosmos, long after the world we know has been scorched like an overdone French fry, is the ultimate in Determinism - the theory that all events are determined by pre-existing conditions and causes, and so there really is no such thing as free will, or sudden change, or spontaneous creation. If we are doomed, (and we are), then that’s that. Hence, all of our laws, written and unwritten, are pretense and must be merely evolutionary adaptations - the stilts, as it were, that hold up the One Law that binds all living things: survival…or extinction.

As it happens, I am not the first to pursue this line of thought. It is an important pursuit, though, because if our survival instinct is not the real source of our ideas about justice, fairness, equity, and so on, then we must think about other sources. Natural Law, which can be traced back to Pluto and Aristotle, emerged as a possible answer over time. Natural Law professes that in a just society, laws are by no means social constructs or adaptations, that our understanding of good and bad, right and wrong, is intrinsic. Under this theory, every human being is granted certain birthrights and a sense of those behaviors that are inherently correct. This is why most of us feel repulsion, shock, or great sorrow when we witness human suffering or acts of brutality. It is also why we are capable of feeling guilt. Simple reasoning then leads us to a question: if these birthrights are “granted,” then who or what granted them? It makes sense that some theologians, moral leaders, and philosophers - the ones that believe in a divine Creator - have also been believers in Natural Law.

However, to hold such beliefs is complicated; it requires us sometimes to do things we don’t wish to do and to give up some things we don’t wish to give up. Determinism dispenses with these dilemmas, and If we are doomed (and, again, we are), then we need not fret about such tricky concepts as accountability or Free Will any longer. Being good will not help us.

Yet I’m not at all sure the Determinist point of view is entirely applicable in this case (but then again, maybe it was pre-determined that I should say so). According to Forbes contributor Jamie Carter, a handful of researchers now argue that the prevailing theory about our universe’s beginning, the Big Bang, cannot explain such fundamental concepts as the order of the galaxies or their abundance of elements. While I understand the rationale of a big bang (I think), this seems to suggest a tremendous unpredictability.

So, let’s get to the meat of this matter. Predictability in the universe must be based on what we have learned through the science that exists at any given time. Remember: once, Galileo’s views were deemed to be hogwash, and though many of Einstein’s spectacular visions seemed to derive from an over-active imagination, they continue to become acknowledged truths. I am not a physicist or astronomer, but I tend to agree with Carl Sagan’s remark that “in some respects, science has far surpassed religion” - that is, so long as we understand that religion, like science, is simply a method for seeking truth. Each is a guidebook, or perhaps a lens through which we sometimes glimpse the real power, the brilliance and majesty that brought about such a world.

And in regard to our place in it, Bill Bryson, in his ambitious and extremely informative tome called A Short History of Nearly Everything, wrote:

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting storms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope), these particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under-appreciated state known as existence.

(Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Doubleday, 2003)

This passage is written in a scientific context, obviously, but someone might argue that is it actually a compelling illustration of (dare I use the word?) the miraculous.

Now, a miracle is, by definition, a supernatural occurrence, an event that happens beyond or outside of the bounds of nature as we know them. But clearly, there is far more that we don’t know. I suppose I ought to go ahead and confess that am stumbling toward the notion that the rise of human life and the Big Bang itself were miraculous - rather as they are described in the Book of Genesis. It is very good to remember that all myth, including creation myth, carries its own weight of truth…but that will have to be a discussion for another day. If even my suggestion that human evolutionary theory and religious faith are not opposed to one another (as Pope Pius XII acknowledged back in 1950, by the way), we must admit that predictability is still not certainty.

A lot can happen in a hundred billion years, after all.

Trap Doors and Memories

So many of us live inside our own pasts. More aptly, we re-live events, relationships, experiences both great and small, distinguish the beatific from the blasted. Some recollections are tinted with gold, but others carry curses long-affixed.

There is a danger in lingering for too long in the realm of memory. Some of us - and I am often one - prefer the company of the old friends and kin who still wait for us there, who knew us when we were young and blessed with charm and affability. But be careful; they are illusions speaking to us from the vaults of the past as real life pulses around us, carrying us too quickly toward the only certainty we have.

For me, social media has convoluted our general perception of the past. There is no way in heaven or on earth that the bald, sixty-something year old fellow who has ‘friended’ me on Facebook is the same one with whom I labored in the trenches of glory on a high-school football field. In the same way, he looks at me, sees the wrinkles and thinning gray hair, and says to himself, “It cannot be.” But here is the thing: when we think of ourselves, neither of us sees the aging man or woman who really is. We see the boys and girls that we were. Have you  ever caught sight of your reflection in a storefront window and thought, “Who is that old fart?” If so, then you know what I am getting at.

I experienced this jarring collision of past and present again three years ago when a friend from college days, Quynh Ngo, reached me through those ubiquitous, invisible filaments. Of course, it is always the face that first gives us pause. Could that really be Quynh, the 18 year old kid with the easy smile and the quick, dark eyes that missed nothing? And then, after a moment or two, I saw him: the boy was in there, looking back at me, and I heard him saying, “Trippe! Whatchu doing?”

I first met Quynh in 1983 in Gainesville, Florida, when I wandered (almost on whim) into the Cuong Nhu Center for Oriental Arts on University Avenue. I was a graduate student at UF, working hard most of the time and drinking too much the rest of the time, and I felt myself falling into poor physical condition for the first time in my life. Quynh was a young black-belt instructor from Vietnam, and after just a few minutes talking with him, I knew that I would become an unlikely student of karate and that Quynh and I would become good friends.

His family - his parents, two brothers, and a sister - were from the city of Hue in Central Vietnam. His father, Ngo Dong, had been an officer in the People’s Defense Force of Hue and spent time in a “re-education camp” after the war. In 1977, in a daring effort that has been well-documented in the Gainesville Sun and other publications, Dong formulated a plan that would drastically alter the future that had seemingly been laid out for them by the new ruling communist party. On a dark night in June, all six family members secretly boarded a small fishing boat and left Saigon behind. Many days later, they were picked up by an Indonesian freighter in the South China Sea and eventually made land at Djakarta on June 27th.

Somehow, months later, through the same tenacity and resolve that have long been characteristic of immigrants to the U.S., the Ngo family was well-established in Gainesville. The children were doing well in school, and Dong was a doctoral professor of etymology at the university. He was also the founder and creator of the Congo Nhu style of martial arts, which has ultimately grown to include more than seventy-five schools worldwide. He became somewhat of a legend in Gainesville and beyond, a man who had seen combat and yet professed peace, a philosopher with the spirit of an ancient warrior. When he died in 2000, his second son, Grandmaster Quynh, was named the head of style for Cuong Nhu.

At this point, I should inform the reader that Quynh Ngo died from the COVID 19 virus on September 1st, 2021, at the age of 56. Many of those who knew him best, including his younger brother Anh, himself an accomplished practitioner and instructor of martial arts, have said they knew of no one who was in better physical condition, of any age, than Quynh. A lifetime of training had also made him mentally tough and resilient in the extreme. As a child, he had survived not only a bloody war in his homeland but also a dangerous bout with malaria. Without question, his death was tragic, unjust, unnecessary, and infuriating; but I do not intend this piece as a lament or elegy, or even simply as a sad, true story, which it certainly is.

I have two purposes here really. One is to say that, although life as it occurs is certainly not much like any of the best stories I’ve ever heard or read, in that much of it seems random, accidental, meandering, senseless - there are stories that we can discern only long after their context has expired. The meaninglessness of the present and recent past gains clarity with time’s passage. We may only learn years after an event what has really happened to us. Stories, like any worthwhile craft or art form, must be told only when they are fully formed in the mind, and this process can take decades. To reiterate, then: we must not live too much in the past. To do so means that we miss too much of the raw material that is all around us at any given moment. We must not let the portal of memory become a trap door. To my second, perhaps even more cryptic point: those who inhabit our memories are static; they cannot - they must not change. But to be fair to their humanity, when we meet our friends again after many years, we must accept the people they have become, the ones who dwell in the present.

I am not shouting “Carpe diem!” This is no rehashing of the “Live for the Moment” mantra that comes and goes with various generations of young Bohemians. Memories of ourselves and of others as we may once have been are well and good (except when they become nationalized nostalgia and thus potential fuel for political agendas, as though simply moving backwards through time will make us all “great again”). Quynh the boy was an alluring figure. He gleams in my thoughts, and the things he had endured as a child - war, malaria, a long journey to freedom - made the spark all the brighter. But Quỳnh the man also exuded the kind of love that defies the bonds of time as we know them.

If you were to ask me whether I would go back, would return to those salad days, that academic life of reading and writing and discussion and then afterward the warm intensity of the dojo on University Avenue, the camaraderie of young people strong in body and mind, all in our white gis, snapping obediently to attention at the barking of Quynh’s voice: “Left side! Left-hand block! Right-hand punch!”, when my only responsibilities were to myself and to my friends and I had no other real ambition because I had opportunity and ability and things seemed to come to me easily, I would probably say…yes. I would go. But…what would I stand to lose? What of the wisdom that really does come with time, and the long arc of joys and sorrows mingled more poignantly than the best of artists might conceive?

Ultimately, when I had earned my master’s degree at UF, I had risen to the rank of brown belt, but I soon left Gainesville and drifted away from Cuong Nhu and the Ngo family. Yet when Quynh contacted me online, I truly felt that I was speaking to a member of my own family. When I learned of all that he had achieved both in the business world and as a master and instructor of martial arts, I felt the pride that one might feel for his own brother. Past and present, memory and awareness, were no longer divided.

I am lucky to have known Quynh and his family, even though when I was around them all, which was nearly every day during the early eighties, I was oblivious to my own good fortune, of course. How could I have known that the Vietnamese meal that Quynh’s mother, Chau Thanh, made for me when I visited their home, would stand the test of time and rank against the finest meals I’ve had in Paris and New York City? How could I know that Dong’s calm voice would return to me in times of personal turmoil? And how might I have guessed that any meager understanding I may now possess of human relationships in the context of time, as it shoves the days and weeks and months and years between us, would one day be changed and deepened by a friend named Quynh?

Quỳnh Ngo (image from cuongnhu.com)

Metaphors For Sale

For many years, word games and wordplay have been an important part of my life. For me, the fulfillment of any real responsibilities depends very much on the day of the week: Mondays through Thursdays, in general, I am available for meals, doctor’s appointments, bathing, and other mundanities. You see, on these days, the New York Times crossword puzzle is reasonably solvable - for me, anyway. But Fridays through Sundays? No, on those days, I must wrestle time away, steal the minutes and hours here and there from the people - family members, students eagerly waiting for their essays to be graded, friends wondering what they’ve done to offend me - who, no doubt, would say I should be doing something more constructive than scribbling letters into little boxes.

And this is to say nothing of the time I expend playing Spelling Bee, Wordle, the Word Jumble, and the cryptogram.

I am a very good Scrabble player, too. Although not at the level of Grand Master, I can usually beat most people I know (the exceptions will not be named here, damn them). However, my true obsession is with solitary games in which it is just me and the clues in front of me. Still, now that I think of it, the player is, in a sense, engaging with the delightful minds of puzzle editors such as Will Shortz and, years back, the brilliant Eugene Maleska.

My broader interests also include puns - a far more spontaneous art form, a dash of impromptu wit. I have often used puns in my English classes when teaching vocabulary, although I am not sure that it actually enhances their learning. I think the best one I ever came up with, on the spot, concerned the word “turnkey.” My example for its usage in a sentence was…

For Thanksgiving dinner, the rebellious prisoners had stuffing, cranberry sauce, and

roasted turnkey.

Of course, a pun such as that one must always be immediately followed by a sincere apology.

In teaching poetic forms, when seeking a diversion from sonnets, villanelles, and odes, I sometimes offer my students limericks. For some reason - perhaps because of its overall ridiculousness - a good limerick practically guarantees a laugh. At one time, I could actually improvise limericks using my students’ names. Example:

I once had a student named Hugh,

a very bright kid, in my view.

I railed when I heard

he’d been labeled a nerd,

but he said, “Sir, no worries. It’s true.”

Obviously, that’s just good clean fun, but in younger times, during an especially odd phase, I took to memorizing dirty limericks. Believe me when I say that dirty limericks can be very dirty, gutter dirty, triple-x-rated dirty, full-dumpster-rotting-in-the-midday-sun-dirty. Just think of all the filthiest swear words in English that you know, and imagine the possibilities. I once knew some of the dirtiest ones, far too dirty to print here (but if you send me a private email request, I’ll be happy to share one with you). In fact, I was once kicked out of a faculty Christmas party for reciting some of them. What follows is the tamest one that I can recall. It is not particularly dirty, but it makes for a good opener.

A jolly old sailor named Bates

could do the fandango on skates.

He fell on his cutlass,

which rendered him nutless

and practically useless on dates.

Now, all of this presents a problem for anyone who regards himself or herself as a writer: an obsession with words (“word flu” I like to call it) can creep like kudzu into one’s attempts at serious work. You begin to wonder how well the reader might be paying attention and what you might be able to get away with. Case in point:

All that summer, Contessa spent the heated hours hoeing among the rows of pole beans on her uncle’s farm outside Modesto. By August, all the villagers agreed that she was the best hoer on the farm.

Nonetheless, I have tried in vain to concoct a scheme by which a competent writer who is not an international bestseller might actually be able to earn a living without having to go to work as a teacher or a copy editor or as a writer of manuals for the assembly of vacuum cleaners. For instance, I thought, the publishers of those trashy, pseudo-literary novels might wish to spruce things up a bit by including carefully crafted, descriptive metaphors in their books. “That’s it!” I exclaimed. “I’ll come up with a few random, meaty passages and try to sell them on the open market!”

Here are some of the results:

    His voice was a swirling leaf, tossed briefly upon the wind but dying, finally, in the

silent muck of the turd-colored pathway.

And…

      From somewhere deep beneath Elizabeth’s crinoline skirt, a fart puttered up and  

insinuated itself upon the air, rather like a broken tractor rolling to a stop in a wet field.

      She glanced up coyly and smiled at the gentleman seated across from her in the 

train compartment.

Here’s one I’m particularly proud of:

    Simon gazed down from the tall bridge’s railing and contemplated the river’s 

undulating foam far below. ‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘only three seconds of terror, and then…

and then…’ He knew that he must go through with it. The dull grey light over New York

had broken in upon the sickbed of his memory, all his devil-may-care-years and his

willful refusal to separate the paper, the plastics, and the glass bottles, throwing them all

wantonly into the same bin. He could no longer stand himself, and he felt his foot

edging outward into the thin air…

This one was actually under consideration by a small publisher of romance novels, briefly:

    Henry thundered into the bedroom with the Visa bill in his thick hand. He reminded 

Joan of a bull moose in the spring, his horns shorn of their velvet, uncertain whether he

is driven mad by anger or desire. She turned softly on the settee, letting the sequined

straps of her teddy slip even further, further, across her slender collarbones and scented

shoulders, until the angry blood in Henry’s eyes began to ebb, and then, as always,

collapsing into her arms, he became the fawn… Yes, that’s it, a fawn, all brown and soft

and furry and fawn-eyed as she stroked him…

Although none of these has quite hit the mark yet, I haven’t given up on the idea. On the other hand, if nothing ever comes of it, an adage will be born: No matter how badly you try to do a thing, there is always someone who can do it a little worse. It reminds me of a remark made once by Groucho Marx, who was a great punster. One of the directors for the Marx Brothers’ films at MGM during their heyday in the 1930s was a fellow named Sam Wood. The story goes that Groucho, at a cast party, overheard Wood complaining about the comedian’s lack of training as an actor. Not knowing that Marx was standing behind him, Wood said,

“What do I think of Groucho’s acting? Well, you know, you can’t make an actor out of clay.”

Groucho leaned his head into the conversation and quipped, “That’s true. And you can’t make a director out of Wood.”

Tranquility Garden

A few weeks ago my wife and I were visiting our daughter in Brooklyn, and we rode a city bus twenty-five blocks or so up Fifth Avenue to Green-wood Cemetery. It was a mild spring day, with enough sun to have coaxed forth the forsythia and the snowdrops, and enough chill left in the air to paint the tips of our noses and ears pink as we wandered in that vast land of the dead.

It was not my first trip to Green-wood. I had gone there in wintertime a couple of years earlier to search for the grave of Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work I had just seen at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Basquiat’s marker is unimpressive, a hunk of beveled stone amid those hulking mansions that hold whatever remains of some of New York’s wealthiest and most celebrated, its famous and infamous - that is to say, they were wealthy and celebrated once. Now they are merely dead. These neighborhoods are not all gentrified, however; there are plenty of commoners, too, among the roughly 570,000 who sleep here.

Riding With Death, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1988

Green-wood, as is the case with many things in this city, is quintessential. Certainly it is not on every tourist’s checklist of attractions. Many people do not enjoy being surrounded by the most tangible reminders of our mortality. There it is, etched in stone: We Will Die.

And yet, in this place, one is somehow lulled into the moment: the grass is the grass, the shadows bend around the stones reliably, as promised by the physics of light and shape. The big red-tailed hawk falls silently toward the warbler, and the wind across the pond called Sylvan Water writes in a script known only to the goddesses of nature.

Oh, by all means, it is a place that makes for good copy, compelling “human interest” stories.  The Times and New York Post trot out the old tales from time to time, perhaps on some languid summer day when there are no mass shootings to report on - only past catastrophes and morbidities. How about the Brooklyn Theatre Fire of 1876, after which the bodies of 103 unfortunate patrons who had been burnt beyond recognition were interred at Green-wood in a mass gave (according to Harper’s Weekly)? What about the catacombs that link thirty underground vaults, with tall skylights commissioned by 19th-Century tapheophobes buried below?

Something for the naturalists? Consider the monk parrots that thrive in and around the massive Gothic gateway at Green-wood’s entrance. They make for a lovely discordance against the brooding stone; they are lime green, tropical green, thrilled in their bird-hearts to swoop or flit in the airy spaces all around. The legend goes that there was a surge in the monk parrot population in the mountains of Argentina, roughly sixty years ago. Among that country’s strategies for reducing their numbers was to export millions of parrots to the U.S. to be sold as pets. Supposedly, the ancestors of the Green-wood clan were accidentally freed when their crate broke open at JFK Airport. I suppose one might say that they have embraced their refugee identity and prospered.

The stories offered by this place, I do understand. But I understand nothing of death, which - whether I like it or not - is the prevailing theme here. Like most ordinary people, I am simply afraid of it. When I was a young atheist, I would hear other atheists say things like “Oh, don’t be afraid. Death is natural,” and even then, in my own mind, I disagreed. It does not seem natural to me at all; what seems natural is to go on walking across the new spring grass, marveling at the small masterpieces of crocuses and daffodils, rather than to lie beneath them in darkness. As I grew older and more interested in matters of the spirit, it made far more sense that if someone believes he has a soul, or even simply a fully functioning consciousness, then the body is merely a casing, a conveyance in which we travel for a while. Hence…what? A cemetery is a glamorized junkyard, in fact. No souls or ghosts dwell here - it is only for tourists, and after all, Green-wood is on many of the lists of “things to do” for visitors to the city. What fine irony.

Otherwise, this place defies categorization, in that it is both more and less than a cemetery. Certain sections of its 480 acres seem almost out of a movie set: the sepulchers, crypts, charnel houses, the tilting headstones stabbed into the ground seem like Halloweenish mockeries of western burial rituals, or a spooky ride at DisneyWorld. And yet, everywhere a silent dignity prevails. The iron-gray roots of ancient, authoritarian trees have no intention of relinquishing their grip on the earth, and when you walk up to one of the crypts to put your face up to a small, latticed window, in one breath you know that this is real: it is the deep, cold air of the earth reclaiming all that is hers. The dead are indeed here.

Many of the names are also written in history: Leonard Bernstein, Horace Greeley, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Charles Ebbets, William “Boss” Tweed… But I think that my favorite part of Green-wood is Tranquility Garden Columbarium, which houses the ashes of some 8,000 people, mostly from New York’s Asian community. Completed in 2006, the structure’s Eastern design - Koi pond, Japanese steps, etc. - is in stunning contrast to the Victorian weightiness of the rest of the grounds. I like to save it for the final stop on my “tour.” The last time, this past April, as I sat alone (my wife and daughter had gone to use the rest room at the gate) on a cushioned bench and watched a robin hopping about near the glass pyramid outside, I could hear a woman praying softly in an adjoining room. It may have been a Buddhist sutra or a Catholic prayer, for all I knew, as I did not know the language.

I went to the door and peeped in.

She was elegantly dressed in a trim gold waistcoat and pink skirt; her hair was very black with strains of white. On either side of her were two children, a boy and a girl, perhaps five or six years old. All three sat facing an encased urn, their heads bowed. Abruptly, sensing my presence, the little girl turned and looked directly at me, her deep-brown eyes and cinder-black hair catching the gentle light from above. She smiled at me and gave a little wave.

I smiled back, but then realizing my own awkwardness, I turned quietly and exited.

We decided to take the subway back my daughter’s apartment, and within a few minutes we found ourselves squeezed among the other passengers, hurtling towards the tumult of the city.

Tranquility Garden Columbarium

Honor Among Boys

Warning: adult language and situations (oh, the irony)

Sometimes a story chooses its own time to be told.

In Brunswick, Maine, about a twenty-minute drive from my home in Yarmouth, some high-school football coaches have made the national news. According to CBS Sports, head coach Dan Cooper was fired last month after an investigation into a “sexually-charged hazing incident during a preseason team retreat.” For those who may wish to know (meaning most of us, I’d suspect), the incident “involved a player being held down and having a sex toy put in his mouth.” Evidence included videos shot by other students on their phones.

As horrifying as this may be, it is not by any means an anomaly. As we have seen, young athletes are sometimes abused by those they would trust. Training techniques, equipment, performance standards, data research…all these things have improved and helped to advance the sporting world. Human nature has not.

Now, to be quite honest, Maine does not have a storied American football tradition. Google reputes that the most famous player to hale from the Pine Tree State was someone named John Huard, drafted by the Broncos in 1967. By way of contrast, even though it wasn’t really my decision, I grew up playing sports in Jacksonville, Florida, where the pressures on young athletes tend to be greater. By the mid-1970s, certain high schools had become showcases for college prospects, and as I was merely an average player, I was never in that exclusive gene pool. But my alma mater, the Bolles School, was and continues to be one of those places. The stakes are high there, and upon them rests a carefully balanced table of measures: not simply athletic potential, but also such intangibles as personal reputation, popularity, economic opportunity, family legacy, and - among boys - a peculiar sense of honor.

High-school football in Jacksonville is a religion whose churches convene on Friday nights, whose congregations are often composed of adolescent alcoholics-in-training,  half-drunk by halftime, of fathers whose own dead dreams for themselves are carried in corn-meal-sack-sized guts pressed against the chain-link fence, and of mothers who adore their little messiahs and brood like Mary on the aluminum benches of the grandstands.

Below, on the field, the passion play unfolds, a story of ancient male rituals and a barely bridled savagery spoiling in the dank September air.

I was there once, and I played my part. In the long week leading up to Friday’s contest, the team must prepare, of course, but in truth it would all begin for us in late August, when our coaches would require all players to attend a ten-day camp during which we moved into the dormitories at Bolles, situated on the banks of the St. Johns River. It was the part of the season we dreaded the most because of its physical, mental, and emotional demands.

Here are some of the ways in which our bodies were tested:

• Coaches roused us every morning at six for a one-mile training run before breakfast. On a typical August morning in northern Florida, the grass is well-soaked in a sticky dew, and the sun begins to breathe down your sweaty neck as soon as it appears over the treetops. The mosquitos are up early, too, busy about their never-ending search for their breakfast of blood.

• After our own breakfast (usually consisting of waffles and sausages from a frozen box), we would dress out and take the practice field for morning workout. We had dubbed the practice field the “Dust Bowl” because it was exactly that: a grassless pit of dark-gray dust that would collect on the sweat that streamed down our faces and arms. Warmups included calisthenics, stretching (misnamed because it amounted to bouncing on one’s muscles rather than stretching them), “drop-and-roll” drills, and a thing we called “six-inch killers,” done prone on our backs with our legs and feet raised six inches off the ground. It hurt like hell. After that, we ran drills using blocking sleds, a spring-loaded tackling dummy that we called “Big Red” (it could break your neck if you didn’t hit it just so), and various other torture devices.

• Following lunch, we were soon dressed and on the field again for the afternoon practice, which would typically include a full-speed, full-contact scrimmage, the prime time when you attempted to prove your worth to coaches and teammates, if you didn’t keel over with heat stroke first.

• Evenings, after a five-thirty dinner and a chance for the sun to begin to bleed back beyond the trees, we would be in the weight room, clanging and puffing away, and then we would meet at the track at 7 p.m. We never knew how many laps Coach would assign us, and he always relished the dramatic moment when he would smile, lick his lips, and then call out, “Gimme…gimme eight!” Or ten. Or twelve.

Suffice it to say that an early bedtime seemed a brief reprieve in between sessions on the rack.

Of course, I suppose there were certain kinds of ignorance for which we could not have held our coaches responsible. They did not know, for example, that bouncing on your hamstring rather than patiently stretching it actually increases the likelihood that you will injure it. They did not know that withholding water (or the nasty concoction that Chuck Solomon, our head coach, called “salt peter”) from young athletes did not make us tougher, but simply caused dehydration and possibly heat exhaustion. Nor did they understand that leading with the face mask when making a tackle would one day be deemed one of the most dangerous things to do in all of sports. Nor did they know that such a thing as concussion protocol even existed: I saw teammates knocked unconscious, out cold, in games, only to be sent back onto the field once the fog had cleared.

We could not necessarily fault them for those things, but their ideas concerning mental, psychological, and emotional tactics…well, that is another matter altogether.

Public humiliation was high on their list of instructional strategies. Name-calling was common: “shit-head,” “shit-for-brains,” “dip-shit,” “shit-bird” - all varieties of shit were articulated, but so were the conventional emasculating terms, such as “creampuff,” “peaches-and-cream,” “homo,” and the quintessential “pussy.” These were even more effective when served up with some sort of physical underscoring. Consider, for instance, the virulence of Coach Morgan’s remark, “Hey, cream puff, I’m gonna pull my leg back and cock it, and then I’m gonna swing it on the snap count. If you don’t fire off that line when you’re supposed to, I’m gonna put my foot right up your ass, cleats and all.” Now consider the effect of this declaration if you knew that Coach Morgan meant every word of it.

Praise be that Morgan was blubbery and hairy and really could not move very quickly (why he chose to come to practice without a shirt on, I will never know). Coach Solomon, on the other hand, was fairly nimble, and he was redneck-strong, like someone hired to sling tires off of the track at a monster truck rally, or who could chug two pitchers of beer and then beat everyone at the table in arm wrestling. Nonetheless, Morgan held the edge over him in psychological abuse. God help you if you had any glaring flaw about your appearance, as I did in the form of a bad case of acne, made worse by the sweat and dirt in which we were basted from day to day. During the football season, not only my face but my back and shoulders would bloom like a topographical map. Once I was waiting in a line at the water fountain outside the locker room after practice. We were all shirtless, having torn off our shoulder pads and our stinking, wringing-wet t-shirts as quickly as we could. Morgan walked behind me and sang out in a booming voice: “Damn, Trippe, you ‘bout got some acne, don’t you? Looks like a pizza I ate last night.”

It is odd how your best friends can laugh at your expense at such times, but I did not know then that it was that nervous laughter that says, “Thank goodness it was Trippe that was humiliated, and not me.”

In fact, as students of history know quite well, pitting citizens against one another is a tried and true practice in any tyranny. The same can be applied to a football team. But what is the point of it? The point is to strengthen the tyrant’s grip, because he is a frustrated egomaniac, and when he fabricates a conflict, only he can resolve it, thus fortifying his tyranny.

Coach Morgan had two favorite practice drills, one he called “Morgan’s Mountain” and the other “The King of the Kennel.” Morgan’s Mountain was a training run in full pads, with a twist added. We players would run a circular route, down the steep, sandy bank of the St. Johns River, through a stretch of malodorous mud, and back up another steep section of bank to start over again. One time through the course, and you were gasping for air, ready to puke, and besotted by heat, but you forced yourself to keep moving because of the caveat Morgan had added: “If you catch the guy in front of you, you’re allowed to do anything you want to him!”

I suppose he expected that we would be inclined to do bad things to each other: assault, vicious ball-kicking, forcible sodomy… In any case, through mortal fear, I always managed to keep just ahead of the kid behind me, as did everyone else.

By contrast, the rules of King of the Kennel, Morgan’s other brainstorm, demanded that each of us, at some point, would show what we were made of. The kennel was essentially a cage constructed of a metal frame with chicken wire stretched across its top and two of its sides. Two players would face each other from the open ends, in three-point stances, and we would wait for the whistle. On that signal, we would go at one another, with the object being either to drive your opponent back out the side by which he had entered, or turn him on his back, at which point you were supposed to attack him viciously, punching, kicking, anything that seemed apropos to the moment. With helmets and pads on, there was little danger of anyone actually being hurt, but the trauma of squaring off with your teammate in what seemed at the time a fight to death was unsettling to say the least.

I remember punching my good friend, Chris Vann, over and over, until one shot slipped under his face mask and caught him on the chin. We abruptly stopped our grappling, and he gave me a look that was both surprised and sad. On our next go-round, Chris was able to turn me over and ended up sitting on top of me, with Morgan hovering over the kennel and yelling, “Hit ‘im, Vann! Kick his ass!” But Chris did not hit me; he simply stared down at me with that same sad look. He and I knew - hell, all of them knew - I had sacrificed my honor, but he had not.

Still, I suppose it is one thing to smack your teammate under duress. I am certain that it is entirely another for a grown man of thirty or forty years, a coach no less, to physically attack a teenage boy. Yet that is what happened, time and again, on those dusty playing fields in the long-ago seasons of 1973 and ‘74, surrounded by scrub oaks on one side and the glinting river on the other, as the whistle faded away and the underling tribe fell silent. The film reel exists in the attic of my memory, where I attempt to let it lie, and yet sometimes, perhaps for no reason at all, it is taken out and played once again.

“Damn it!! You! Get over here!”

But before the terrified offender can take a step, Coach Solomon is on him. Maybe the kid has fumbled the ball (a mortal sin), or maybe he has not fulfilled his blocking assignment, or maybe his tackling technique is all wrong, or maybe he has simply smiled and laughed at the wrong moment. One never really knows what small thing might bring on the fever of rage, but there it is. Whop! Whop! Two stiff blows up against the earholes of the helmet. Now grab the face mask of this worthless piece of shit before he can instinctively recoil, and sling him around by it (but not too hard - we don’t want to risk any diagnosable injuries). Now pull him close and snarl redneck gibberish into his panicked boy-face before slinging him away and consigning him to some place of shame - the bench, or the back of the line when at last it comes time to drink the salt peter, with a kick in the ass for an exclamation mark. And the rest of us turn away silently, each of us wondering… Am I next?

But the thing we had just witnessed was quickly sealed up in the tomb of shame; I, for one, never said anything to my parents about these kinds of episodes (for one thing, I knew how my father would have reacted; he had no reluctance in disciplining me himself, but God be with anyone else who ever laid a hand upon me), and I suspect the same held true for my teammates.

The rules of good writing prescribe that the writer must not comment on an action he has just rendered. If he has done his job, there is no need. In this case, however, I am troubled by questions: What was the rationale for all of this? Was it supposed to prepare us for “the game of life”? Was it crafted to make us tougher and more determined than our Friday-night opponents? Or was it the displaced anger, driven by certain failures, of men whose own pasts had been peopled by monsters and demons? Secondly, why did we players, as fairly intelligent youngsters, continue to go back day after day, week after week, season after season? Was it because we, too, believed it was good medicine? Was it a restless desire to be accepted, to be somebody - a football player? Or was it simply a distorted code of honor thrust upon us by men whose time had come and gone long before, who wielded the club of authority not because they cared about us but because they hated us and the opportunities that being young would hold out for us? 

I don’t have the answers, but I can offer a few postscripts to this recollection.

Our lives (and hence our subsequent memories) were changed significantly in my senior year, when an entirely new coaching staff was put in place. Our new head coach was a former college quarterback from Ohio, young, with up-to-date ideas and a philosophy of optimism and encouragement. The days of King of the Kennel and salt peter were over, and to us, it was to be a season for the ages.

A good many years later, I was out enjoying a couple of beers with an old high-school friend and teammate, with whom I am still in touch, and who has been a successful attorney for many years now. We were talking about the old days of football camps and related tortures, and he remarked, “You know, Jeff, the truth is that if that type of thing happened today, our coaches would probably be up on child-abuse charges.” He was not smiling when he said it.

I heard that Coach Morgan died in 2014, but a few years before that, I happened to run into Coach Solomon one afternoon when I was still in my forties. He was working in a Jacksonville sporting goods shop, and I went in to buy my son a new bat for little eague baseball season. When I walked up to the cash register, Solomon recognized me first.

“Trippe,” he said quietly. I looked up. “It’s me. Coach.”

We chatted briefly about nothing. Yes, yes, I’m a teacher now. Yes, I knew you had left coaching. No, I haven’t really seen much of anybody from the old days. They’ve all gone off in their own directions, I expect. Then I gathered up my packages, and he looked at me, smiled his lumpy smile, and said, “Well, take care.” Over time, I have managed to convince myself that I saw a small glow of regret in his dark eyes.

Another friend told me that he’d had a similar experience around that same time, had gone into the same store and, just like me, encountered our old football coach, except that in his story, Solomon had gone into a lengthy reminiscence that ended with a heartfelt apology for having “lost his cool” with us a few times, all those years ago.

Otherwise, I have lost the trail of my old coach’s life.