This is the first episode of Word to the Weisman that I’ve posted in more than a year, so check it out. You can also get it on Apple, Spotify, etc.
Month: March 2020
My wife hates to fly. She gets very anxious, more so with each passing year.
I’m pretty good on airplanes. I completely buy into the data that it’s safer to fly than drive, and I know driving almost as much as I know breathing. That’s not to say I enjoy a whole lot about air travel, but I’m pretty calm about the mechanics of it all. It’s one of my few great strengths as a husband.
Turbulence is part of the equation. So many flights have it, and for the most part, it’s a series of speed bumps. You go through through the bumps, and you go on your way.
My wife finds any turbulence deeply unsettling, and if I’m next to her, I take her hand. I try to reassure her. It’s one thing I can reliably do. It’s neither ironic nor coincidental, but on point, that when I proposed to her, it was after midnight on the wet tarmac of the Binghamton, New York airport after a difficult flight from Washington D.C. through a rainstorm.
But sometimes the turbulence gets rough. Really rough. Rough like some hidden hand has picked your plane up in the air and is shaking it. The ride isn’t bumpy, it’s jagged. I’m being jerked around, literally and figuratively. And then my mind takes me places. And I worry about dying.
Remnants of a tree, Calabasas, February 1. One person I showed this photo to asked, “Who is that?”
In some ways, there’s nothing better than being awake in the middle of the night. It’s only a shame you have to pay the price later in the day.
I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. It wasn’t because of these thoughts, but as the next hour passed, it seemed like as good a time as any to get them out of my system.
It’s 1988. My favorite baseball team has won the World Series. My favorite basketball team has won the NBA championship. My college’s baseball team has won the College World Series, and I am on the ground in Omaha to cover it for the school newspaper. Our men’s basketball team is about to have its best season in 47 years, and I am the one telling the story. As a sportswriter and sportslover, I am at the top of my game. One of the sentences I write is Xeroxed from the newspaper and placed on a window in the editor’s office. Handwritten underneath it with black Sharpie in capital letters are the words, “SENTENCE OF THE VOLUME.”
I have great friends. I don’t have a girlfriend, desperate as I am for one, which is all you need to know about that story. I’m in love, but she loves someone else. That’s my biggest lament. It’s not the first time nor the last time that happens.
I play pickup basketball, like I’ve been doing since I was 3 or 4. When it began, in our family driveway in Encino not all that far from the exterior of the Brady Bunch house, my older brother says he is Gail Goodrich and tells me I’m Happy Hairston. Now, in 1988, I’m just me. And I’m not really all that good. I’m fine, I guess. I can make plays, even a great play, but I can’t be counted upon to make them. I’m never the best player on the court or on my team, not for lack of trying. I’m just missing something.
