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Some belated Father’s Day thoughts

6/27/2019

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Charles City Press, 6-22-19

My first solid memory of a lesson learned from my father came in the fall of third grade, after a tragic personal failure at a “Punt, Pass and Kick” competition. I’ve no doubt there were hundreds of lessons before that moment, but this is the first one in my memory.

Father’s Day was a couple of weeks ago, of course. I didn’t take my father out to lunch or send him a card on Father’s Day this year, or even give him a call.

I did send him a little message and put a handful of photos of him up on Facebook, but that was about it. I was extraordinarily busy that Sunday for reasons I won’t go into, and honestly, that’s about all I had time for.

Now before you start telling me that I’m a lousy, ungrateful son, or start speculating that there must be some family issues, or begin reciting lyrics from “Cat’s in the Cradle” to me, let me explain.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time with Coach Dad. You see, a while back, I had a recurrence of cancer — a battle I’ve been fighting for a few years now — and I’ve needed a series of chemotherapy treatments in Iowa City. Dad’s retired, and unless there’s an important fishing trip on the agenda, he’s got nothing better to do than drive me down and back every couple of weeks and keep me company.

I have to tell you — there aren’t many positive things I can say about fighting cancer. It’s an awful, horrible, hateful condition that turns your life upside-down. But I have to tell you it’s not a the death sentence it once was, and I’m not taking it passively. I’m aggressively managing my own health care and using every weapon at my disposal to battle the disease.

That’s an attitude I learned from Coach Dad. And Mom, too, of course. But this one’s about Dad.

The support I’ve received throughout this struggle has been breathtaking. I’ve received tons of advice and offers of help from people who have been in my shoes. I’ve reconnected with dozens of old friends and relatives and resealed bonds that hadn’t been sticking for decades, though they were always there.

I’ve made new friends, too, people who barely know me but still kindly offer to help me with whatever I need.

My last chemo trip was earlier this week, and as relieved as I am to have it over — at least for now — I’m going to miss the trips with my father. Cancer has given me the opportunity to spend hours with Coach Dad that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and strangely, to every cancer cell we kill together, I give it a little “thank-you” salute as it dies.

Dad was an educator who, for over 40 years of his life, coached baseball, basketball, track and wrestling. But mostly, he was a head high school varsity football coach during an era when he and dozens of men like him were re-inventing the game.

He was a pretty darn good coach — hell, he was a great coach. He should be in the Iowa Football Coaches Hall of Fame, but for inexplicable reasons, he isn’t. At least not yet. But that’s a whole other article.

He’s a fisherman, a hunter, a conservationist who has planted hundreds of original American Chestnut trees all over the United States in an effort to repopulate the nearly extinct species. More than all that, he’s a father, a grandfather an uncle, a friend and a husband. He’s been around.

You might know him, and certainly you know someone like him — perhaps your own father or grandfather, or perhaps an old coach or teacher who made a difference in your life.

And so, the first time I participated in “Punt, Pass and Kick,” I failed miserably in front of him. I predicted the failure. I remember saying to him before I went out there, “I really don’t care how well I do, I just want to try this out.”

And try I did. My punt went off the side of my foot, so far off track that the penalty put me in negative numbers. My pass was straight, but way below average. And my kick never really went off the tee — it bounced about two inches in front of me and added nothing to my total — which was the worst of the day for anyone out there.

Afterward I went up to Coach Dad and looked him in the eye and started crying. The old coach took his only son in his arms and hugged him and comforted him and reminded him that everything was OK, and that Mom was cooking something good at home. I felt better.

And then he said something I’ll never forget.

“You said you didn’t care, but it sure looks like you did,” he said. “You know, if we work at it, I think next year you’ll be a lot better, maybe even win a trophy. That is, if you care.”

And he was right. I really did care, obviously. We worked on it. And my punts, passes and kicks improved remarkably. The next year, I finished third and received a bronze trophy. The year after that, a silver. Second place. Not first — nothing to brag about, but still something to be proud of, especially with the memory of finishing last still pretty fresh.

There ends the lesson. Of course you care. Telling yourself you don’t is a lie — and an excuse. Saying you don’t care is the first step toward quitting. There are proper times to quit, but they should be exceptions, never the rule. When you don’t care, they become the rule.

Coach Dad doesn’t say too much as the nurses tend to me and pump the chemo into my system. He watches, he listens — as best as he can, his hearing aid isn’t always working well — and he pays attention. He fetches my prescriptions and sometimes brings me a sandwich and some chips.

His being there gives me a sense of security. He’s got my back. It’s a perpetual reminder of why I’m fighting so hard to whip these cancer cells and live as long as he has.

So happy belated Father’s Day, to my dad and all the old coaches out there like him.

Throughout my life, every time I’ve thought of quitting, I remembered who was watching


http://www.charlescitypress.com/charlescitypress/opinion/2019/06/26/grob-some-belated-fathers-day-thoughts/
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‘Back in Black’ with an old buddy

6/6/2019

2 Comments

 
Charles City Press, 6-6-19

Last Friday night, I was ringing “Hell’s Bells.”


As the song goes, I wasn’t taking prisoners, and I spared no lives. Nobody was putting up a fight.


An old, lifetime buddy sent me a message last week, wondering if I was interested in joining him at a free concert in the park back in our home town. The band was called “Rolling Thunder,” and they were advertised as an “AC/DC tribute band.”


I’ve never been a big fan of cover bands. I like the original groups, and I have every song in the world that means anything to me downloaded on Apple Music. If I want to hear one, I just ask Siri to play it. No need to go watch some guys pretending to be someone else.


But my buddy’s invitation intrigued me. I had no plans for Friday night, the show was only about an hour away, and I always like hanging out with an old friend. So I was considering going.


Then, my buddy shared some tough news with me.


My old friend is a cancer survivor. He beat the disease more than 20 years ago, but he found out last week that he’s had a recurrence and will need surgery and treatment.


I’m a cancer survivor as well, and I also recently had a recurrence and am getting treatments, and will probably need surgery at some point. Through it all, very few people in the world have been more supportive than my old friend.


So it was settled. I was going to a fake AC/DC concert. That’s all there was to it.


My friend and I actually went together to see a real AC/DC concert nearly 34 years ago, when we were high school seniors. The show was in Cedar Rapids, on a school night. We got done with football practice, hopped in the car, picked up another buddy and sped down there, to what was then known as the “Five Seasons Center.”


It was a great show. With AC/DC, what you see is what you get. Unlike an AC/DC cover band, the real thing was — and still is — popular because they never pretended to be something they were not. Keep it simple, stupid. Nothing fancy here. Just loud, crunching music.


The hall of fame rock band, originally from Australia, has sold hundreds of millions of albums and sold out thousands of shows because they have always kept it simple, and that’s the way their fans like it. Life can get complex, the world can be a complicated place, sometimes up seems like down, sometimes everything that’s right is actually all that’s wrong. It can get confusing and frustrating, even for the most nuanced of intellectuals.


AC/DC’s music is not complicated. It’s same song, different hook. Nothing nuanced, nothing subtle, nothing remotely intellectual. The guitar is going to blare, the vocals are going to screech, and the drums are going to steadily pound through your entire body, like the hammer of the gods, for about four minutes. End of song. The next song starts, more of the same. It’s not music as much as it’s a repetitive deliverance from inner confinement, it’s a temporary short-attention-span-revolution, it's existential emancipation.


If AC/DC came with written directions, they would read, “Riff. Rock. Release. Repeat.”


Perfect music for killing cancer cells.


Of course, an AC/DC tribute band jamming in front of about 100 people in a small-town Iowa park isn’t quite the same thing as the original rockers in their prime, lighting up a sold-out arena. But that’s OK. My cancer-fighting buddy and I, in our 50s, aren’t quite the same as we once were, either. Our days of banging heads are far behind us. We are not elitists. We can accept a substitute.


So we sat in our comfortable lawn chairs and watched and listened. The weather was gorgeous. The band was entertaining and fun. They dressed up like the members of the real band, and tried to behave like them. We guessed which songs they would play, and which songs we wished they would play, but knew they wouldn’t. AC/DC has a tremendous catalog, but we were not surprised, not once. We were pleased. And we enjoyed each other’s company.


And I remembered being 16, and calling up my buddy, and asking, “do you want to come over and listen to some heavy metal?”


And he’d come over and we would talk and laugh and brag and tell stories and listen to music. It would last a couple hours.


It wasn’t about the music, or the conversation, or even the laughter. It was about the couple hours.


When you’re 16, a couple hours with a friend doesn’t seem like all that much. When you’re older, and facing a cancer diagnosis, a couple of hours with a friend might be all the time that’s left in the world.


So the next time an old friend sends you a message, and invites you to do something somewhere, I recommend you go do it.


Take no prisoners. Spare no lives. Put up a fight together.

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