Moby Dick, the most elusive prize in all of literature.
Captain Ahab, the most obsessive, most human, most pitiful character to ever cross the written page.
I am Ahab.
A Hole in One in golf is my White Whale.
Tune in Wednesday 2/14 at 8:40am to the livestream of WJTN’s Bill Burk Talks; About Sports and Life at: https://radio.securenetsystems.net/cirruspremier/WJTN
Apologies in advance to Herman Melville….
Time has come today…The Chamber Brothers
Hi Friends. Another installment of my essays this Wednesday 1/17 at 8:40am on WJTN. Streaming at https://radio.securenetsystems.net/cwa/index.cfm?CFID=eb6dc10d-c215-45d0-b2e7-e39b6ee456ab&CFTOKEN=0&stationCallSign=WJTN
Time tugs, inexorably, incessantly at the world in general, and you and me specifically. It doesn’t waiver, it doesn’t sleep, takes no vacation, no days off….
Check it out…
Hear it on WJTN Podcast
https://wjtn.com/podcasts/bill-burk-talks
I recognized him as soon as he walked in the gym, the father of an old friend. He comes to watch the local high school teams play basketball.
His face is familiar, he knows most of the other fans (though fewer and fewer each year). A walk from the doorway to his favorite seat is fits and starts of conversation, handshakes, well wishes; “How’s your mom doing?” “You get that tractor fixed? Snow tires soon, going to be cold winter.”
He’s stooped at the shoulders, hunched, but just a little, head bent slightly forward. Gravity has done it’s inevitable, inexhaustible work on him for a lot of years. He wears a driving cap that covers a bald pate and sits above bushy eyebrows. The hat is soft and worn. You can tell the two of them, man and brim, put in some miles together.
This time, walking through the gym, he has his grandson in tow. A young boy who’s tenth birthday is somewhere in the future. The boy holds the old man’s hand firmly, smiles easily as grandpa makes his slow, sure way to the far end of the bleachers. They stop and watch the home team do warm-up drills.
A stray ball bounces where they stand courtside. The boy instinctively lets go of the man’s hand and bends down to grab the ball, picks it up and holds it to his chest. A player run over to him and holds out his own hands, palms up. The boy looks to the old man as if to say, “The ball, Don’t I get to keep it?”
The old man waves a wrinkled hand from inside a too-big coat. The boy frowns and pushes the ball to the player, who steps closer and bumps knuckles with the boy, an adult move from a teenager. The boy smiles, the old man smiles.
From the scorer’s table, the horn blows. Game time.
The PA announces the visiting team. Then the home team.
This same scene is playing out all over the county, the country. Boys and girls are lining up across a thousand foul lines. Toeing the hardwood in various degrees of physical and emotional condition, some strong, some weak; some confident, some wary. Some hurting, some hurtful. Some filled with excitement in their full flush of youth. Some in pain and confusion at their increasingly awkward and vulnerable place in the world.
But all are trying, to do well, to find their place, to hold their heads somewhere important in this gym, along this continuum of time in their lives. None are trying to fail, to do harm that is outside their capacity for reason and accomplishment. That’s a good thing to remember, for everyone assembled to understand. We all act at our capacities of experience and development, we are what we’ve been built to do, by society, by our upbringing, by our relatives, our situations and our teachers. The old man will bark at the officials, demean the coach, question the motive and effort of the kids playing the game.
Or he won’t. He’ll sit and watch and enjoy and appreciate all that the game has to offer.
The boy will take it all in, he’ll learn, he’ll remember.
The national anthem begins. The man drops the boys hand and places it over his chest, motions for the boy to do the same. The boy does, and the Star Spangled Banner plays, not the note dragging Whitney Houston one, the fast one, all horns and percussion.
“What so proudly we hailed…”
The boy, righthand across his heart, reaches across and tugs on the old man’s sleeve. The man, a little distracted, frowns and looks down at the boy. The boy points to the man’s head where the old friend, the driving cap sits. The man’s eyebrows go up, and a quick flush of embarrassment crosses his brow. He removes the cap and returns to the flag. The boy mouths the words, “oer the land of the free…”
I watch this from across the gym,
“and the home of the brave…
And I smile.
Hi Friends. Another installment of my essays this Wednesday at 8:40am on WJTN. Streaming at https://radio.securenetsystems.net/cwa/index.cfm?CFID=eb6dc10d-c215-45d0-b2e7-e39b6ee456ab&CFTOKEN=0&stationCallSign=WJTN This one titled “We’re doing it wrong”. Suggesting there might just be a better way consume our entertainment. Tune in, give a listen and share with your peeps. Thanks. Bill
You can hear the live readings at https://wjtn.com/podcasts/bill-burk-talks
The Mother, The Son and The Buffalo Bills
When the Bills scored, timely, surprisingly (this was years ago, before the recent resurgence), it propelled them to the NFL playoffs. Finally. It had been awhile. Mid-cheer, the Son looked at his phone, waited for the call. Silent. He frowned, shrugged it off, pushed himself off the stool and celebrated with his friends. Probably busy, he thought. He moved around the bar, high-fived everyone in his considerable reach. Let’s Go Buffalo!
It didn’t completely escape him that the phone didn’t ring. It almost always rang when something good happened in a Bills game. The first seeds of doubt were planted that day, way back in his mind, germinating in the form of sour thought.
Something’s off.
The Son is an enduring fan of the Buffalo Bills national football team, year in year out, roster to roster, coach to coach, one-dimensional classic logo (the profile of a regal buffalo) to three-D Jumbo-Tron videos. War Memorial Stadium (“aka The Rockpile”) to Rich, The Ralph, New Era, and now Highmark Stadium. Joe Ferguson and Juice, the glory days of Reed, Kelly, Biscuit, Thurman and Bruce. The son played both ways in high school, a lineman, so he’s partial to Joe Delamielleure, Kent Hull and Fred Smerlas. He’s a fan of Shane Conlan, played against him in high school. Has replica jerseys, club-head covers, hats, gloves, socks. He models exactly one tattoo, on his arm, conspicuously hidden by a sleeve. It’s an old-school buffalo colored the distinctive red and blue of his favorite football team.
Like a lot of western New Yorkers he’s suffered, rejoiced, suffered and rejoiced again. It’s the way of sports fans everywhere, different for Bills faithful because of how close the franchise has come to perfection. He’s realistic, fatalistic and dedicated. He can pack a living room or a bar with his infectious enthusiasm. He’s the mayor of Bills-Town, USA.
The Mother, also a Bills fan, found in the local team a language she and her football-loving son could share when traditional ways of communication stalled out. It started when he was young, an absent father, and a mother looking for points of contact. It carried into adulthood, common ground, those phone calls every Sunday.
“Did you see that Son?”
“Yes Mom. I saw it.
“Wasn’t it great?”
“Yes it was. It was.”
You can call your child when you need help around the house, an errand run, a chore done. But that’s not nearly the same as calling when you share a visceral moment, even if it happened on T.V., even if you’re sharing over the phone.
“Hang on I have to take this. It’s my Mom.”
Then came that time the phone didn’t ring.
Because we have surety, we can bear existence. We know things to be true, real. We’re confident that we’ll wake to find a familiar world, that we’ll recognize the faces of people in our lives, identify the halls we roam, the rooms we inhabit. We travel our roads without a map, gather wool, positive we’ll arrive at our destination. We know who we are.
When that changes, when the familiar world shrinks and uncertainty creeps into our everyday lives, what do we do? How do we negotiate daily rituals, the grocery store, gassing up the car, Thanksgiving dinner? How do we remember who we are?
Sport is a great match-maker, a conduit for easy communication, a real-time experience to share. It requires only basic understanding, no memory or complicated thinking (it can accommodate those, but doesn’t need it). That’s what makes it a generational conversational structure. You don’t need to recognize a face to celebrate or commiserate a win or loss, you don’t need recall, you don’t need to know where you left your keys to travel, which relative is which, how to mail a letter. You don’t have to track characters or plot. You can sink yourself into moments of feeling, one at a time, as they come and present themselves to you in a blessed solitary series of experiences.
The descriptors of dementia are cliché, there’s no new way to portray it; diabolical and sinister, defiling and brutal, life-sapping, a thief, a hostage-taker. When our veracity slips, how do those left carry on? How do we figure a world where your mother doesn’t recognize your face? Who teaches that class? Physical diseases are certainly hate-able. Curse heart and lung disease, rail against cancer, look it in the face and judge it, name it and fight it. Mental deterioration is an unforgivably insidious betrayal of our capacities, more so because it leaves caregivers to gather the puzzle pieces and sort through them.
We are robbed too soon of our people by disease, accident and catastrophe, they go away plenty fast. We don’t need them pushed from our lives by a memory-starving condition.
The Mother passed recently. It wasn’t unexpected or easy. The day the Bills won and the Son’s phone stayed silent was the first sign of a downward spiral of her faculties, a hole she couldn’t climb from. Rarely, but treasured, she had moments of clarity, when everything was like it used to be. More often she forgot the Buffalo Bills, forgot the Son, familiar people faded in and out of her awareness; here one moment, gone the next. Sometimes replaced by an offset, a memory untethered to reality, sometimes just a hole where recognition should have held.
Inevitably comes that day for all of us when the phone simply doesn’t ring.
For this and more of my writing, please go to www.billburkwrotesomething.law.blog Or check out my book RUN! From Civil War to the NFL; The Jehuu Caulcrick Story, available on Amazon.
Would love to hear from you with a comment or review.
TUNE IN WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6th at 8:40am to WJTN, 101.3 on your FM DIAL, or live streaming at https://wjtn.com/listen-live
Our mothers, those of my friends, like most who raise bunches of young boys, put up with a LOT. A special one when I was growing up was Georgia Porter, the mother of my good buddy Bill Wassman. She was tolerant of a couple decades of nonsense and shenanigans….ooohhh the stories she could tell.
Well, have told. She passed recently (me and my guys are at that age when having parents is much more rare than having buried them), and it inspired me to try to capture the very cool relationship Bill and Georgia had right up to the very end. That’s the second installment of Bill Burk Talks; About Sports and Life. It’s called The Mother, The Son, and The Buffalo Bills.
I hope you enjoy it, Give a listen and leave me a review. I’d greatly appreciate it.
Special thanks to Macey Estes for producing the production!
You can revisit the live readings at https://wjtn.com/podcasts/bill-burk-talks
TUNE IN WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22nd at 8:45am to WJTN, 101.3 on your FM DIAL, or live streaming at https://wjtn.com/listen-live
When I was real little, the song “I Got You Babe” came on the car radio. I remember thinking Sonny Bono (the OG Bono in my opinion…did I use OG right there?) had a great voice. I said as much to my mom, she in the front seat, me rolling around the back of the wood-paneled station wagon with the mono-phonic AM push-dial radio, belt-less and perfectly safe. She made a face, I saw it in the oversized rear view mirror, and said, “No…he doesn’t. Someday you’ll understand.”
And I do, I understand. Sonny Bono did not have a good voice…he must have had an indomitable ego to believe he could sing on a record that anybody would want to listen to; Cher the vocal Mozart to Sonny’s Salieri (look it up, kids).
Anyway…I hate the sound of my voice. I have no such ego as Sonny Bono, or Paul David Hewson for that matter (look it up, adults). And yet, here I am, reading essays aloud and putting them on the radio.
Check out my first installment of Bill Burk Talks; About Sports and Life, a Thanksgiving piece I hope you’ll enjoy and relate to (yes, I know I’ve now ended at least two sentences in prepositions…it’s called artistic license).
If you enjoy it, Dennis Webster and WJTN have agreed to put their listeners through my (meh) voice every other week, Wednesdays at 8:45am. Give a listen and leave me a review (of content and not voice quality, please…PLEASE). I’d greatly appreciate it.
Special thanks to Macey Estes for producing the production!
You can revisit the live readings at https://wjtn.com/podcasts/bill-burk-talks
Bill Burk's collective writing...and some other stuff. 