THE YOGA CHRONICLES: CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT YOGI

“FAMILY REUNION”

(TO THE ROBERT E. LEE CLASS OF 1978)

“And if grandpa was here,

you know he’d be smiling from ear to ear,

to see what he had done,

from the offspring of his daughters and sons.”

-The Ojays, Family Reunion

            In a time not so long ago in a place not so far away, black kids and white kids went to separate schools.

            And while my generation did not invent integration, I would like to believe we perfected it early on.

In retrospect, it is almost inconceivable that I began my education in a segregated environment, not because of the historical abnormality of it, but because it simply does not jive with my own personal experience.

My memories and experience were borne out last weekend at my fortieth high school class reunion, where cowboy hats did the “Bump” with (albeit much shorter) afros, and we celebrated our lives together.

For many of us, those lives together began almost literally in the womb: Bert Taylor Pfaff and I were born hours apart in the same hospital and on the same floor in April, 1960. John Wayne Wickware’s grandmother grew up in Rusk, not so far from my own grandmother. Our families knew one another long before we were born. The Justice of the Peace there is another classmate, the Honorable Rodney Paul Wallace, whose first trip to Rusk was to spend the weekend with my grandparents.

            And while that does not make us appreciably different from any other graduating class, we were, in short, not at all like any other class.

            Because time and fate foisted integration upon us.

To which we basically said, Okay, watch this.

Because in the fall of 1973, a very short four years after the riots over court-ordered integration, my beloved Hubbard Huskies won the city championship in football, the first integrated team in school history to do so.

That night, the rafters of the school gym shook as together we whooped, hollered, hugged, cried, and danced our way out of the darkness into the light.

From that point forward, we were never the same. The subsequent victory party was obviously integrated, perhaps one of the first to be so. There would be so many others that it became routine.

After that, other traditional barriers began to erode. Even as we awkwardly navigated our way into our teen years, we managed the uncharted waters of integration and assimilation with remarkable speed and admirable poise.

As we spent time in one another’s homes, our mothers began trading favorite recipes. Sports teams were coached by both black and white fathers. Mothers commiserated over the utter funk of fifteen year-old boys of all colors.

And, of course, boys of every conceivable size, shape, and color had a crush on Cheryl Cicero.

Our tastes in music naturally converged. As much as I cringe at the word disco, it now seems a joint enterprise between black and white cultures, seemingly designed to incorporate both equally. It was a form of dance we learned together, did together and one which, ultimately, brought us together.

Whatever it was, it was ours.

Although I could have done without the polyester.

I watched as the blood, sweat, and tears of sports helped forge a high school class that was too busy trying to win to be preoccupied with color.

So, for those who would like to quit keeping score in kid’s sporting events, I call upon that experience to say, oh, hell no.

So two years later, when the Robert E. Lee Red Raiders made their run at the state 4-A basketball state championship, we were ready.  We traveled together, rooted together, agonized together, and, ultimately cried together as the great Virdell Howland and our Raiders came up just short.

            Just as the Huskie’s win consolidated our common hopes and dreams, the Raider’s loss annealed our common frailties and failures.

            And while you may think that sounds a tad melodramatic, those are your hopes and dreams when you are sixteen years old.

            Hopes and dreams have to start somewhere.

I have coached basketball for almost twenty-five years, not only because I love the game but because of what the game has given me, the insight that people tend to play basketball the way they live their lives.

Some are selfish ball-hogs, others know their role as part of the team. Some play better than their physical talents, while others don’t live up to their potential. Some do the dirty work of rebounding and playing defense, still other others play only for the adoration of the crowd.

I offer it as my humble opinion that these character traits transcend sports and may offer deeper insight into the human condition than all those Russian novels put together.

Those traits are also color-blind.

Basketball taught me that.

That’s why you keep score.

Thirty years later, my daughter and her friends took pictures at our house before her junior prom. I watched (no, positively beamed) with pride as her inner circle of friends posed in their prom dresses with pimply-faced boys in ill-fitting tuxedos.

It looked like the United Nations, except that their interaction was seamless and without any recognition whatsoever that there was any difference in skin tone.

They took it for granted.

Her picture from that night is –and will remain- on my desk. It is not only my favorite picture of her, it is a constant reminder of how far we have come.

My son’s best friend happens to be black. He is not my son’s best friend because he is black, he is my son’s best friend because he is my son’s best friend.

I could have hoped for nothing more and would have accepted nothing less.

Last night, there were not one but three interracial couples who beat me at Monday night trivia at my local watering hole.

They were lovely and natural and seemed completely unaware that forty years ago it would have been absolutely impossible to sit together holding hands in a public place.

Believe me, I know.

But last night I saw a future for my country that was no longer black and white but multiple shades of beige and brown, offering the best we have to offer, without unnatural boundaries.

I wanted to say to them: On behalf of the Robert E. Lee Class of 1978, you’re welcome.

My, how far we have come.

Or have we?

I offer this preface to the following words not out of snowflake timidity but out of genuine respect for all of my friends who might read this, whose friendship I cherish and whose own attitudes and outlooks deserve that respect, especially if they may differ from my own.

            By historical accident, we were on the front lines of integration. As a result of that experience, I do not fear the seismic shift of social change.

Because forty years ago, I watched a bunch of pimply-faced kids grow out of puberty with one hand, while pushing aside the historical tides of two hundred years of race relations with the other.

And look good in doing it.

            It seems extraordinary that we were able to pull this off in one generation.

            And I see that slipping away. All our hard work. All our memories. All our love.

            And I don’t want to waste that.

© Thomas C. Barron 2018

THE YOGA CHRONICLES: CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT YOGI

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY”

            She was the only daughter of the richest man in a small town, a uniform success by the standards of any age. Double-promoted twice at Rusk High School, she graduated as Valedictorian well before her seventeenth birthday.

            The day she was married, she had a nineteen -inch waist and her wedding dress had to be taken up three times. It was a size 2.

            The guy she didn’t marry was the runner-up for the 1955 Heisman Trophy.

            She helped put her husband through the University of Texas, living in Quonset huts built for the Navy in the 1940s. She held a young family together in the sixties, while her husband was on the road half the year. She often did it without benefit of air conditioning or a car. Neighbors would simply baby-sit each other’s children while they went to the grocery store.

            When asked about it, she would shrug and say, “That’s just what we did.”

            She was a Cub Scout den mother, a field trip chaperone, and the undisputed champion of the bake sale, all the while never missing a sports event for three very active sons.

            To return home from school was to find to find her exquisite apple pie, her heavenly banana pudding, or her no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookies, timed perfectly to be warm and gooey for my return home.

            Every day.

            Some of her happiest moments were watching the hordes of hungry boys in her kitchen, devouring her creations. She loved to tell the story of watching Pat Hightower and Bryan Forman finish one of her patented banana puddings in one sitting. With serving spoons. She coaxed drunken fraternity boys to go to sleep with promises of biscuits and cream gravy the next morning, God’s own cure for common hangover.

            She presided over her dinner table like the prime minister of a particularly bad European parliament, raising not one but three lawyers under the same roof.

            She entertained governors and congressman, planned charity balls, and was as comfortable in a honky-tonk as she was at the country club.

            She essentially ran a small oil company when my grandfather was incapacitated.

            She had a shoe collection that Imelda Marcos would have admired.

            She has never missed a Dallas Cowboy football game. Ever.

She got her bachelors degree in her late sixties, her masters in her seventies, and was admitted into a doctoral program at 73.

She is fiercely protective of her family. “Territorial” only begins to describe her. She would throw herself in front of a bus before she let something happen to “one of hers.”

She can be imperious, easily bored, and does not suffer fools gladly. You can tell that by the fixed smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Had she been born in any later age, my mother would have been the dean of an English Department, making graduate students cry and sending professors scurrying to their cubicles, having unleashed the wintry gales of her wrath.

 Or general manager of the Cowboys.

And then there’s the hair.

In her ninth decade, the hair remains …formidable. It is as thick as it has always been and only now are there hints of gray. And while do feel a certain guilt that my mother’s hair may have contributed to that hole in the ozone layer, her hair is somehow comforting, sitting there like a crown on her head, regal and steadfast.

It is the Mount Rushmore of Hair. Mountains will crumble, seas will dry up, and glaciers will melt into puddles before my mother’s hair goes.

            But this is not what I will remember about my mother.

            What I will remember is Parent’s Day at Andy Woods Elementary School in the winter of 1970.

            It was a Friday. I saw her arrive through the window of my fifth-grade classroom, the midday sun shining down on her so that she appeared to be positively sparkling. Fresh from the beauty shop, her hair was elaborately (but not too elaborately) coiffed with the tips frosted just so. Her nails were red and her she was wearing her jewelry, which did in fact sparkle in the sun as she strode from her Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight to my class.

She was wearing a brown mid-length accordion -pleated leather skirt, knee-length shiny boots, and a camel jacket over a jewel-toned paisley blouse that tied at the neck. Over it all was her sable, which anchored the entire outfit. 

As I watched her stride toward my classroom, I felt a tremendous rush of pride as I was certain that, nowhere in the world, could there be a more beautiful or glamourous mother.

I remember her entrance into the classroom distinctly. Our desks faced the door of classroom and when she entered, she seemed to glow, bringing light and energy into the room.

When she stepped into the class, I sensed my classmates felt the perceptible need to rise in her presence, as if royalty had arrived. She became the immediate object of fascination and one could hear the murmurs of approval throughout the room. For her part, she felt obliged to smile an apology to the teacher for the interruption, who somehow sensed that long addition was done for a moment.

As she made her way back to my desk, she smiled at familiar faces, her absolute pleasure in the moment returned with the incandescent smiles of my classmates. A wink here, a ruffled head of hair there, she owned the class with every step.

My mother was a straight-up rock star.

When she got to me, I did something no ten -year old boy has ever done: I hugged my mother in public. Even more interestingly, there was no male-pattern teasing to chronicle it.

They knew.

Lunch with Jackie Kennedy could not have generated more political and social in-fighting than that day in the Andy Woods cafeteria, as my classmates fought and bickered to sit at the table with my mother.

She charmed them all. She held court. She laughed and smiled and told stories.

Oddly, I didn’t seem to mind sharing her but, every now and again, she would smile and wink at me- only at me -and I felt the way a son is supposed to feel in the presence of his mother.

I can only remember thinking this is the way it is supposed to be.

Madre, I could have gotten you another bottle of Chanel No. 5 or taken you to lunch at El Fenix, but this is my gift this year.

This one was always for you.

Happy Birthday.

Love, Me

© Thomas C. Barron 2018