Friday, October 31, 2008

Basketball Monster . . . (Listen)

Finally, it’s here. After months of waiting, the college basketball season is beginning here in Michiana.

Apropos for Halloween, my Mama reared a monster! So afraid that her frail little darling, a giant 3 feet tall on entering the first grade, would waste away, or at least develop tuberculosis from lack of exercise while lying on the bed reading books, she coerced my father into installing a basketball backboard and hoop in our yard. She then forced me out there for “some fresh air.” In retrospect, I think that she hatched this unlikely idea not only because she was a big basketball enthusiast herself, but because it got me out from underfoot for a while. In sport’s parlance, it was a win/win: at least short-term.

Long term is a little “iffier."ť What she produced was a vertically challenged daughter with a tall case of short-man’s disease: a woman who lusts after a bass boat because of that big tall seat, and a rabid basketball fan!

So, you can imagine this short monster’s delight at the thought that the Notre Dame men’s basketball team takes the floor this evening. Come 9 p.m., my teammate, Larry, and I are gonna be in our seats for the season-opener. Trick or Treat indeed! But this is no late-blooming enthusiasm. Both of us have lives that prepared and shaped us for this destiny. Louisville, Tennessee, Princeton during the Bill Bradley years, Bethel College here in Mishawaka: basketball venues all. This fate was inescapable.

That inescapable fate has taken us to some surprising venues. Years ago, I was in Las Vegas for an exhibition game. While riding an elevator, the doors opened and several of the players joined me. Then, my just-over-five-foot self had Shakespeare slap me in the face. Remember in Julius Caesar where Cassius says, “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about?”

This summer, Ireland was the surprise venue. While beautiful, Ireland is not yet perfect; it’s not a basketball-hungry nation. However, when we were there in August to watch the Notre Dame Irish men play, we met some folks who are working on correcting this. (In one of those twists of fate, while at a game in Dublin, I also talked with a man who, just as I did, grew up in Louisville rooting for the Cards and was at the game to fill his need for a basketball “fix."ť Nice to reminisce about those glorious Denny Crum years!) Through their Emerald Hoops program, the Ireland Irish are starting youth teams, so that, just as my Mama did with me, they instill basketball as a lifetime passion. Remember that dictum, “Give me a child before he’s seven and he’s mine for life.”? Truth: one of the reasons that old sayings survive.

Although I hugely admire “smart” players, team-members who appear always to be thinking, for me, as a spectator, basketball calls up a lot of emotion.  I abandon my normal Anglo-Saxon reticence and cheer unreservedly; when necessary, I boo. I try, however, to avoid being an old-lady-behaving-badly who lets forth streams of invective when bad calls happen. Curious, the turn this took. My Mama, a “lady” in the old sense of the word who wouldn’t say “excrement” if, as they say, she stepped in it, produced a child who has to be careful not to offend bystanders when poor officiating fuels my desire to be a jumping, gesticulating, spittle and swear-word spewing old lady. Talk about a monster! Sometimes it’s better that I stay home in my big, fuzzy slippers and watch on television in order to protect other fans. Larry is more cerebral and restrained in his enjoyment of the game. Doesn’t seem right somehow, but whatever.

So, this little monster is saying, “Happy Halloween. Let the games begin.  Stand tall for basketball!”

Broadcast by Jeanette Saddler Taylor on October 31, 2008
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Sports & Recreation • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, October 17, 2008

Babies! . . . (Listen)

When things go sour in America we look for someone to blame, because a good solution always depends on punishing a likely culprit. But too often we can’t admit the real cause of our pain. In short, why is it so hard to point a finger at babies?

America faces severe challenges. But look at babies. There are ten million of them – ten million! – and they are uniformly disengaged and unknowledgeable. Yet I can already hear people raising their voices, saying, “Don’t blame the babies!”

Here’s a test. Take the balance sheet of an investment bank like Morgan Stanley – and show it to a baby. Ask her how to heal the financial markets. The kind of response you’ll get is this. She’ll either grab hold of the paper and shake it gleefully or pull it to her mouth and start gumming it. Why do we put up with it? We blame the government and corporate leaders – and they have been negligent; but the fact that the experts are no better than babies in this regard is no reason to let babies off the hook.

If there were even one bipartisan commission of babies hard at work on health care reform, I’d hold my peace. But you won’t find an activist among them. You’ll hear people excuse babies based on their cuteness, as if having a big lolling head and round sparkly eyes and chunky feet with incredibly tiny toenails were a free ticket to knee-bouncing idleness. There’s a baby in my neighborhood (I won’t name names!) who rode up and down the sidewalk all summer in a stroller, gazing about with the calm air of royalty. All this, while the stock market was crashing and gas prices soaring.

Like you, I do my part. I never take a break from complaining to my wife about inflation, taxes, the national debt, our costly wars, and my mounting credit card bills. When we watch the presidential debates, she can’t hear the candidates for all the vituperation I’m slinging at them. I pace, jump up and down, and shout questions like, “When are you going to bail out my retirement account?” Soon I’m face-down on the living room floor, kicking and wailing. Even on ordinary evenings I can hardly swallow my food, and my wife has to mash it up for me. But I can’t get as much as a nod of sympathy from a baby.

A couple we know had a baby recently – so I figure, this is my chance. We pay them a visit, and just as I’m about to launch into my lecture, I see that my wife is cradling the infant in her arms, and he’s staring up at her expectantly. Newborns are the worst. Frankly, they aren’t as cute as older babies, but their sense of entitlement is absolute. Soon my wife is cooing to the child and indulging him in all manner of flattery. Before you know it, it’s my turn to hold him, and there he is, drooling on my shirt and making googly gah-gah sounds. Our friends exclaim how much he seems to like me. He clutches my index finger in his fist, and when I shake my finger he laughs, as if spontaneously thrilled. And I’ll be darned, but I’m beginning to feel pleased with myself. After a while – god help me! – I’m raising him into the air and making explosive sounds with my mouth, and he can’t get enough of it, he’s so happy. By the time we leave, everyone is saying how unusually relaxed I seem. The boy’s mother remarks that she hasn’t seen me smile like this since 1999.

On the way home, I say, “It’s so frustrating! You can’t get angry at a baby. You just can’t. And meanwhile, the world is going to hell.” And my wife says (get this!), “Joe, don’t blame the babies!”

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on October 17, 2008
Family & Friends • News & Editorial • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, October 10, 2008

Facing Facebook . . . (Listen)

Hey, everybody … uhh – just give me a sec-ond here [sound: typing].  There. I just had to update my status on my Facebook page to “April is Facebooking while talking about Facebook.” And maybe you are, too?  We’re at a clear tipping point, and suddenly loads of people my age have been sucked into the Facebook zone.  And while Sarah Palin blasted Joe Biden for “You know, lookin’ back instead of – doggone it—lookin’ forward,” the surging popularity of Facebook tells us millions are obsessed with looking both ways in order to make sense of the present.

For you folks not yet converted to Facebook, it’s a social networking site designed a few years ago for college students, but now over a hundred million users of all ages check their pages constantly to keep tabs on friends and family. Facebook is more writerly than the music-rich teen world of MySpace, but more playful and political than the buttoned-down professional network, “LinkedIn.” In fact, Facebook has been activist-minded from its start, according to the absorbing book, Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky; it appeals to people who relish the truly viral growth potential of social and political collaboration.  Given current politics, the lightening-fast ease with which you can post and analyze, say, the now-famous Sarah Palin “debate logic flowchart” or sign political petitions, make Facebook deliciously the flavor of now.

But why have a tsunami of middle-agers recently logged onto Facebook?  Maybe because mortality throws a too-casual arm around many of our shoulders, we relish the ties that bind us to the earth, and Facebook lets us collect and display the tapestry of people whose lives have threaded through our own. Like the Seinfeld episode in which George Castanza feels his “worlds colliding,” it’s a mind-blower to see the Venn diagrams of one’s relationships looped into one cozy circle—the face of a high school prom date next to a current colleague, a college roommate living two states over next to a neighbor from around the corner.  And because the system cheekily reshuffles with every visit the order of friendly faces on one’s page, I enjoy endless serendipitous surprises as I see cheek-to-jowl folks I love who may be strangers to one another at first, but not for long.  For example, after the recent vice-presidential and presidential debates, I raced to my Facebook page to decompress about what the commentators got wrong (Short answer: Plen-ty!), and relished a current colleague trading witticisms with a high school pal, who could respond to a next-door neighbor, and so on!  If our connections constitute who we are, Facebook enriches us exponentially.

But by far the most addictive part of Facebook is the “status update” function at the top of the page that constantly asks, “What are you doing now?” and even offers a sentence-starter: “April is …” Oh, wait; let me update my status. [sound: typing] Let’s see: “April is waxing rhapsodic about status updates.” Now, this may seem to be mere technological navel-gazing, but I place “status updates” in the long and noble tradition of autobiographical genres that foster self-reflection.  Puritans were consumed with spiritual self-scrutiny, and you can see aspects of the metaphysical in many responses, like “Brian is … lost, but hopeful.” Many are practical: “Mary is pulling on filthy gloves to harvest the beets.” or, “Karen is trying to talk sense to her toddler.” Unlike composing individual emails, a scan of the updates page offers windows into the worlds of dozens of friends, so you can learn more about them, and consider yourself in relation.  Autobiography scholars claim the genre reflects a poignant, human desire to impose coherence on our lives – to invent a story of continuity and logic; but most autobiographies reveal this as a lie at every self-contradictory turn. Facebook displays what rings far truer – a Walt Whitman sense of ourselves as a collage of relationships, some harmonizing, some clashing, all evolving.  In Whitman’s words: “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then, I contradict myself,/ ( I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The accumulating faces on my Facebook page make me feel as swollen with richness as all those tomatoes that split on our vines after the deluge of rain a few weekends ago.

Facebook connects, however messily, our past to our present, and helps us imagine what’s next.  It’s timely, now, when we’re still eating summer’s melons but we hanker for pumpkin pie. And it suits the political season, too, since we know change of some kind is coming, but it will surely drag plenty of the past on the heel of its shoe. What do you think?  Better go update your status!

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on October 10, 2008
Community • Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Media & Technology • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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A random selection from more than 300 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:

Joe Chaney -- Babies! / More essays by Joe

Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise

April Lidinsky -- Facing Facebook / More essays by April

Jonathan Nashel -- Let It Rain / More essays by Jonathan

Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff

Ken Smith -- More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- Basketball Monster / More essays by Jeanette