Phil Freaking Mickelson

Professional golf gets my attention four times a year, during the playing of the four majors. I can be counted on to faithfully watch The Masters, The U.S. Open, The British Open and the PGA Championship. The rest of the time I wouldn’t be caught dead. Why the majors? Because that’s when the very best players compete, the courses they play on are insanely difficult, and history is being made. Nobody cares who wins the Waste Disposal Open, but you win the British Open and you’re set for life. So yesterday there I was on the edge of my seat watching 50 year old Phil Mickelson trying to win his 6th major title. Literally...on the edge of my seat...

 

Phil Mickelson. In the golf world players are about the most boring people on the planet. Sure, there are exceptions like the mercurial brilliance of Tiger Woods or the brutish power and eccentricity of Bryson DeChambeau. But there is nobody like Phil Mickelson...unpredictable, affable, goofy, thumbs-upping the gallery after every decent shot Phil Freaking Mickelson. He is that rarest of commodities, an entertaining golfer. Watching him trying to win a golf tournament can be excruciating because the man is capable of anything. The same guy who can hole out from a green side bunker can also be counted on to duck-hook a drive into the water at any moment. Even yesterday when he was up by three with three holes to play I’m thinking his chances were 50/50. But then, with all the pressure in the world on him, he steps up to the16th tee and hits the longest drive of his career, a 366 yard bomb that split the fairway. His playing partner, Brooks Koepka was literally in diapers when Phil Mickelson won his first tournament. It must have galled him to be consistently out driven by the old guy. Did I, as a 63 year old who sometimes grows tired of hearing how better the newest version of everything is over anything that came before, take vicarious pleasure in seeing Phil sticking it to all those flat-bellies? You bet I did.

Making Allowances

I don't know about you but sometimes I get some of my most interesting thoughts about important things while cutting the grass. Today was no exception. But I’m about to do something that is probably not a very good idea and that is...write about an idea before I have taken the time to think it through. I’m doing this so I can remember the idea while it is still fresh in my mind. If the reader finds logical inconsistencies in what follows it should not come as a surprise to anyone. The subject at hand is the notion of making allowances and how when we do, life is much more pleasant and agreeable and when we don’t we get modern life in America.

Only the most rigid and inflexible among us don’t ever make allowances. Some of us make more allowances than others. But we all make them. Here are the three examples that ran through my mind as I was using my string trimmer on the edges of my back yard mulch beds:

EXAMPLE NUMBER 1:

You are settling in to your seat for a four hour cross country flight when you notice a row of extremely loud, obnoxious blowhards sitting across the aisle. It’s four of them, all in their early 30’s and even though its only 8 am in the morning they are already harassing the flight attendant for bloody Mary’s. To make matters worse they are making rude and sexist remarks about every female passenger who walks past them. Imagining what your next four hours are going to be like, what do you do? I can’t speak for you but I would attempt to put a stop to this...like, this instant! First I would confront the idiots as politely as possible and if that didn’t work I would try my famous sarcasm and mockery. But the point is, I would at least try to do something about their abhorrent behavior. 

But, suppose you’re getting on that flight and instead of semi-literate A-Holes, you discover that a young single Mom and her two out of control toddlers plop down across the aisle. You notice that in addition to the toddlers, the woman is holding an infant who begins to scream out her discontent. The thought of spending the next four hours next to this is just as disconcerting as the earlier group. So, what do you do? If you’re a decent human being you make allowances. You don’t complain to the flight attendant. You don’t confront the frantic mom and demand that she get her kids under control. I would like to think I would react like the man flying in first class a while ago who I read about. When he heard all the commotion of screaming babies back in coach he got up from his seat and walked back to find the single mom. He saw that she was in great distress so he introduced himself with a kind, understanding smile, then suggested that perhaps he could help with the infant. It seemed that as a brand new grandfather himself he had quite the knack of getting fussy babies to fall asleep. The exhausted mother, grateful for any help at that point handed her baby to the kind man with white hair and a beautiful silk tie along with a burb towel. After a five minute walk up and down the aisle of the plane, the baby was fast asleep. When the man returned to give the baby to his mother he found that she was asleep as well. So, he kept walking the aisle, not wanting to wake either of them. Everyone on the plane suddenly became invested in this beautiful moment of grace and humanity. In other words, everyone made allowances for the young mother.

EXAMPLE NUMBER 2:

You live in a wonderful neighborhood and you love your home. Then one day some new neighbors move in. They are a middle aged couple with no children and no pets and seem nice enough, but it takes no time at all for you to discover that they are both slobs. Within weeks of moving in they have transformed their yard into what looks like a bomb went off in the middle of a yard sale. Its an epic eyesore and the entire neighborhood notices. Soon complaints are made to the Home Owners association and the battle eventually gets joined by your new neighbor’s contentious lawyer who claims that their third world mess is an expression of their free speech rights.

But, suppose instead that your new neighbors are a young couple with three young kids all under the age of 10. They are all adorable and full of life and unlike many kids their age, they spend every spare moment outside doing the same things you did when you were a kid. Before long, their yard is strewn with bikes, balls, games, stuffed animals etc etc...the place always looks like every kid in the county just had a sleep over! So, what do you do? You make allowances. You don’t fuss at them to clean up their yard. You don’t call the Home Owners Association. They’re kids doing kid things. Instead, you lean into it. You learn to love them AND their stuff. They end up loving you in return.

EXAMPLE NUMBER 3:

You’re at church on Sunday morning in your familiar seat when you notice an odd sight. A man has just entered the sanctuary dressed in filthy clothes, smelling of whisky and rotten fish. His eyes are bloodshot, his hair dirty and disheveled. He looks like he’s at the end of his rope and about as out of place as Bernie Sanders at a Chamber of Commerce picnic. If this man, after closer inspection, turns out to be your senior pastor, your church is in heap big trouble. 

But, suppose that the man is just a guy at the end of his rope who has never set foot in a church before and out of desperation has walked into yours? What do you do? Hopefully, you make allowances. You don’t tell the guy that he needs to clean up and buy some decent clothes and try again next week. You maybe even ask him to sit beside you. Who knows what this guy has gone through. So, you make allowances.

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As I’m cutting the grass all of this is going through my head. There were plenty other examples...we make allowances for disabled people by building ramps, we make allowances for kids who don’t speak English in school by using English as a second language tools to help them along. When we see old ladies struggling with revolving doors, we stop what we are doing to see to it that she gets through. We make allowances all the time. Only, in America we never seem to make allowances anymore when it comes to politics or race. Even writing about it has become risky. You can actually lose friends over a political opinion these day. But its even worse with race. For example...

Nobody likes Affirmative Action. Seriously, nobody. Even those who have benefitted from it always know that everyone around them knows they were a quota hire and probably got the job over a more qualified candidate. The pressure of that can’t be a lot of fun. The reason we don’t like it is that we prefer to think that we live in a merit-based society. We certainly hope that the guy who designed the bridge we are driving over wasn’t a quota hire!! But, anyone who has a basic understanding of history acknowledges that for many many years blacks and other minorities were discriminated against in hiring practices in every industry imaginable. The deleterious effects of those years of exclusion are still felt by many minorities today. As I understand it, Affirmative Action essentially was an attempt to make allowances for the injuries of the past by giving those in the present a leg up. Although I think it was a bad program which has probably done at least as much harm as good, I am in total agreement with the idea behind it...making allowances. I get it and if Affirmative Action has flaws, I say fix them or try something new. 

With regards to politics we have become a nation where compromise has somehow been transformed into a character flaw. Anyone who proposes to find some sort of common ground across our political divides is accused of being a sell-out. This is largely a result of the demonization of the Left by the Right and the Right by the Left. It’s been going on for years and it has to stop or we will end up killing ourselves as a nation. As a conservative, libertarian man I naturally recoil from those who propose the empowerment of government to solve all of our ills. But cannot I make allowance for the fact that those on the Left see things like Social Security and Medicare as great achievements for the betterment of life in America. Because of these successes, its only natural that they would lean towards government solutions. It doesn’t mean that they want to enslave the country and send us all to reeducation camps. Cannot those on the left make allowances for the fact that conservatives and libertarians have good historical reasons for being suspicious of centralized power and that deficit spending and endless stacks of government debt might not be a viable option for our grandchildren? It doesn’t mean we hate poor people and don’t want paved streets. Can we not try to understand and empathize with the foundational motivating principles of each side and use the best of both to forge a middle way? If so, we can only do so if we all...make allowances.

Taxes and Texas

Here’s a subject that will send most of you to the delete button...taxes, specifically taxes and fairness. Before I begin this particular sermon I probably should declare my biases. I am an old school budgetary hawk. I hate deficits and deficit spending. I am for lower taxes, a far more simple system than the one we currently employ, and in general would prefer that people get off the public dole. For someone who believes these things, the current environment of trillion dollar spending sprees coming out of Washington feels like a horror movie. Indeed, the past decade has seen our National debt double to a mind-blowing 22 TRILLION dollars. It is incomprehensible.

But here’s my problem, it’s difficult to talk about our national finances without it turning into an austere and arrogant put-down of recipients of welfare. While the welfare apparatus in this country is a hot mess of disincentives and unintended consequences that is in desperate need of top to bottom reform, at least it has the noble intention of trying to help...individual human beings navigate the sometimes catastrophic vagaries of modern life. What really sends my blood pressure skyward isn’t the existence of welfare cheats. What turns me into a raving lunatic is the welfare that gets thrown around to rich people and insanely profitable corporations. Although I could choose among literally thousands of examples to illustrate this outrage, lets just talk about energy and the state of Texas.

Thirty years ago The Texas legislature unanimously passed an enormous tax break and subsidy to the oil business, the natural gas business to be precise. Back then these natural gas wells were considered difficult and chancy propositions and very hard to develop. What was needed, argued slick lawyers for the oil industry was to slash the tax on natural gas wells. The bill was passed unanimously. Back then Texas only got around 3% of its gas from natural gas so the “cost” of this tax giveaway to the Texas treasury was insignificant. Then fracking technology revolutionized the extraction of natural gas to the point where today 61% of all gas produced in Texas is natural gas. But guess what? That tax break is still on the books and costs each Texas family $169 dollars a year.

With delicious irony, last week lobbyists from the Oil Business started their whining campaign against subsidies for the renewable energy business being debated in the Texas legislature. 

What the actual hell???

I thought the business community was against planned economies? I thought conservatives were against the government trying to pick winners and losers in the free market?? No, big business is fine with government subsidies for themselves, just not so much for their competition!

Of course, this mess only exists because of a 500 million page tax code that gets mined for freebies 24/7 by expensive lawyers for the well connected. A flat tax with NO DEDUCTIONS for ANYTHING would wipe out all the cronyism overnight...but that’s an argument for another day.

So, by all means, lets reform welfare. But how about we start by kicking the Oil Business off the public dole?

37 Years

Winn’s Baptist Church, May 19, 1984.

I look at these two people and I don’t know what to think. They were so young and so incredibly unprepared for and ignorant of the ways of the world. They had no idea what they were doing or what they were in for. But you would never know it to look at them, all smiles and giddy expectations. They were in love. They had that going for them, and precious little else. My memories of that day aren’t as precise as Pam’s. I remember being terrified in the minutes leading up to my entrance into the sanctuary. I was down in the basement with my best man, Al Thomason, with sweaty palms trying to remember to breathe. When I got my cue I begin ascending the stairs from the basement into the church with my heart beating hot in my ears. I walked to the duct taped X on the red carpeting where I had been instructed to stand, took a deep breath and scanned the audience. Practically anyone who had been important to me in my 26 years on the planet were there all smiling back at me. Then suddenly a loud series of notes from the organ and everyone stood. That’s when I saw her...

It’s really the only clear moment of the proceedings in my recollection 37 years later. She was standing next to her Dad in the back of the church. The sight of her took my breath away, and for the first time in weeks I was calm. This thought passed through my head...I might have screwed up a lot of things in my life and I’m sure I will screw up a lot more before I’m done, but...this woman...I got this right. It was the most clear-headed, steely eyed thought to ever enter my mind before or since. And it is still manifestly true. 

If I had it to do all over again...I would.

The Nashville Trip

Our Nashville trip was a raging success. The weather was glorious. We ate delicious food. We got to see our kids in their townhouse for the first time, a place they have transformed into a home, filled with warmth and plenty of creative graces. We got to spend part of an afternoon with a dear friend on his enchanting farm. We attended a baseball game for the first time since the pandemic hit. But best of all, we got to visit this very good boy...

Frisco clearly prefers my company more than anyone else’s, a fact driven home by his reaction to our arrival...

On a side note, Patrick and Sarah got me to try something new. This is a common practice with my kids, who are constantly goading me to expand my horizons...

Kids: Dad, try this awesome new board game where you spend two hours working together to end world hunger!!

Me: I’d rather endure a root canal without Novocain...

Kids: (group eye roll)

But, as the old expression goes...When in Nashville...

Yep...Sushi. If memory serves there were four different kinds on this admittedly beautiful plate, crunchy shrimp, California roll, spicy tuna, and some crab number whose name I can’t recall. I tried three of the four, soaked in soy sauce, and must admit that they were not horrible. 

My favorite pictures from the trip are displayed below:

Me and my boy entering a baseball stadium. Almost heaven.

No caption required...

Four-wheeling with Deen...

Five-Daughters doughnuts.

Happy Birthday

Today is my daughter’s birthday. I will not extol her many virtues again here. Some people grow weary of such Facebragging on my part with regards to my children, and I have great sympathy for that reaction, but at the end of the day I couldn’t possibly care less about anyone’s feeling who would begrudge a dad the joy of bragging about his children. Nevertheless, there will be no listing of accomplishments here, no heart warming vignettes, only a declaration that on this day in 1987, the world became a far better place when she entered it, perfect and pink with her ten fingers and ten toes (I was frantically counting), transforming her parents’ lives forever. She has been transforming lives ever since.

Happy Birthday, Kato.

A Lump in my Throat

Today we were driving over to my in-law's house to celebrate Mother’s Day with Pam’s family. The drive always takes me by the house I spent my formative years in from roughly 1968-1981. Every time we come out of the trees on the downhill stretch of road just before you reach Winn’s Baptist Church in Elmont, Virginia I always glance to my left at this old house...

Lots has changed over the years. When we lived there, there were no sidewalks, and that white addition at the far end was a screened in porch. What caught my eye today staggered me a bit, so much so that as soon as we arrived at Russ and Vi’s place I told Pam that I needed to go back and take a picture. I still don’t know why I was so compelled, but there I was, walking around in the yard I had not set foot on in close to 40 years.

When I was a boy there was a beautiful maple tree in the front yard, along with two dogwood trees on either side of the drive way, one pink, and the other white. Both are gone now. Several years ago, the power company committed a crime against humanity the day they, in their infinite wisdom, decided to string their power lines directly through the center of that magnificent tree, the one whose leaves came alive every fall in a burst of radiant yellow...

The results were about as horrific as it gets, but I took comfort every time I drove by that at least it was still alive and growing. I spent a lot of time underneath its branches to escape the heat of the sun when I was cutting grass or working in my Dad’s garden. But, yesterday, my heart sunk when I saw this out of the corner of my eye...

Maybe it was from the wind, or a lightening strike. But her days are numbered now. One day soon I will drive by and she will be gone.

I continued my walk around the yard. Nobody lives there anymore. It’s owned by the church right across the street. I think a Sunday school class or two meets in there. Everything looked different. The trees that were tiny saplings back when I was a kid were now huge and flourishing. One of the few things I recognized from the old days was our pitiful little grape vine which amazingly still persists...

But then I made the mistake of walking around to the back yard. That’s when I saw the back door that led into the old basement. It looked like a set of a horror movie, the door that the stupid blond girl never fails to enter even though everyone in the theatre is saying, No!! Not that door, you idiot!

It’s hard to describe what came over me when I saw this door with the overgrown bushes and the chipped paint. It was something very much like grief, a temporary yet overwhelming sadness. It was in this clammy basement where every summer when it got unbearably hot upstairs, Mom and Dad would allow me to set up a temporary bedroom. An old single bed, a desk and a single light bulb overhead. There was a small window only about three feet wide and six inches high which was open right above the ground right over my bed. At night I would prop up my old aqua colored transistor radio in that window and marvel at the play by play from big league baseball I could pull in from all over the place. On clear nights I could pick up Cleveland Indians games and even occasionally the St. Louis Cardinals. But it was so cool down there. Some nights I even had to get under the covers. I was 12 years old, maybe 13 and I felt safe there. I didn’t know a thing about the world, had no idea what was ahead of me. But in the morning I could hear Mom wake up and walk down the hall above my head from her bedroom to the kitchen. The old floorboards would groan and every now and again dust would drift down on my pillow. As I stood at the forlorn sight in front of me all of these memories came to life as if they had only happened yesterday.

Thomas Wolfe said, You can never go home again, and I think he’s right. Not because it isn’t there, but because what made it home no longer exists. Now, its just a broken down old house, but once a long time ago it was a broken down old house that was my safe refuge from a dangerous world. It was the place where I shared a bunk bed with my brother. It was a place where all six of us somehow had Christmas in that shoe box of a living room. It was the place where two adults and four kids shared one shower, where my mother cooked meal after meal for six people in that tiny Un-air conditioned kitchen. But now, the dogwoods are gone and the maple tree with the power lines going through its middle has just crumbled wide open and will soon be put out of its misery.

After taking these pictures, I walked back to my car, backed out of the driveway and drove away with a lump in my throat.