I remain fast, furious, and in a-Few-Good-Men fashion, Tom Cruise-like "crystal clear" about many things in this life: I believe in faith, family, friends, freedom, fitness, films, food, fumbling around in the garden, and forgiveness...not to mention finding lessons along the way.
I am not young, but not old either. But whatever I am, I do have to admit ~ as I step up the ladder of years of this aging life ~ my memory does get foggy about things I once recounted well.
So today I recall with both clarity and murkiness this one evening a while back when I was a first grader who was coming to terms with the fact that segments of her weekend were forever going to be dominated by the reality that her father was a high school football coach.
It was the early seventies when I was forced to accept that Saturday morning cartoons were going to be routinely interrupted so that I could be stuffed into a station wagon not exactly manufactured for what ultimately became an eleven-member clan traveling to high school football games in a region of Pennsylvania spanning about a sixty mile radius.
I wasn't happy to get ripped away from The Jackson Five almost most every weekend. But, okay, okay, I utlimately learned to deal with that.
But this football thing soon started to take over other parts of my life. One weekend, my high school football coach dad was trying to manage all of us children while my mom explored a part-time job at the local hospital. I was getting set to watch Little House on the Praire (or something like it that evening ~ here's where I get a little unsure...)
Though my memory may not recall every single detail, it is crystal clear on others: whatever program I waited all day to watch never found its way into our modest Philadelphia surburban living room. What occupied the only little black-and-white televison in the household for two hours that night was a movie you couldn't even get on VHS or DVD to this day even if you tried.
The film, without a doubt, starred Ernest Borgnine. Also unquestionable is that I saw this movie one time in my entire life.
I never forgot it.
If you Google it, you will find a little-known TV film called Legends in Granite: The Vince Lombardi Story, released in 1973. For a girl who was beginning to think that football was wrecking her entire young life...this was the movie that started to turn that thinking around.
In the beginning, all I saw was this mean coach (kinda like my dad) who punished Paul Hornung for breaking curfew.
In the end, I saw a man who raised the standards of expecation, and, therefore, excellence...and not just regarding how one approaches football, but how one approaches anything in this life.
Football just happened to be Lombardi's thing.
And it was also my dad's thing, my brother's thing, my nephew's thing, and the "thing" that has become the way many a young man discovers responsibility, teamwork, dedication, commitment, and so many of the values we want our young people to embrace.
It also happened to be my son's thing who, as a senior, went down just three days ago with a fractured arm and what some labeled a season-ending injury.
Like I said, some things in life are clear and others are murky.
What is sure for me are the words from the gap-toothed legend whose biography overtook my TV one evening when I had hoped to watch Laura Ingalls, or someone like her, grace the little family TV screen.
Because we don't always get what we want in this life. In fact, we can not only be sure, but we can be crystal clear certain that we are going to be handed adversity. It may show up as an injury, a cancer, a loss, a betrayal. What is certain is that it will show up.
Funny how I was so upset as a six year-old that whatever I wanted to watch that night was overtaken by a show you can't even purchase on digital media today, but whose subject spoke timeless, truthful, and poignant words about inevitable adversity that ring true no matter what you love, who you are, what you do, or when in history you exist.
And these are the words I wish my son to know ~ be it football or anything else:
"The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That's the real glory. That's the essence of it."
~ Vince Lombardi, Jr.
Have a wonderful weekend.
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