Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“I’m sorry again,” she says. “I’m just feeling blue today. There’s something about your going away that makes me feel like you’re leaving for a new life and I’m not.”

“I hope I am,” I say, “though I doubt it. I hope you are.” Nothing, in fact, would I like better than to have a whole new colorful world open up to me today, though I like things pretty well as they are. I will settle for a nice room at the Pontchartrain, a steak Diane and a salad bar in the rotating rooftop restaurant, seeing the Tigers under the lights. I am not hard to make happy.

“Do you ever wish you were younger?” X says moodily.

“No. I’m fairly happy this way.”

“I wish it all the time,” she says. “That seems stupid, I know.”

I have nothing I can say to this.

“You’re an optimist, Frank.”

“I hope I am.” I smile a good yeoman’s smile at her.

“Sure, sure,” she says, and turns away from me and begins making her way quickly out through the tombstones, her head up toward the white sky, her hands deep in her pockets like any midwestern girl who’s run out of luck for the moment but will soon be back as good as new. I hear the bells of St. Leo the Great chime six o’clock, and for some reason I have a feeling I won’t see her for a long time, that something is over and something begun, though I cannot tell you for the life of me what those somethings might be.

All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life. Whose history can ever reveal very much? In my view Americans put too much emphasis on their pasts as a way of defining themselves, which can be death-dealing. I know I’m always heartsick in novels (sometimes I skip these parts altogether; sometimes I close the book and never pick it up again) when the novelist makes his clanking, obligatory trip into the Davy Jones locker of the past. Most pasts, let’s face it, aren’t very dramatic subjects, and should be just uninteresting enough to release you the instant you’re ready (though it’s true that when we get to that moment we are often scared to death, feel naked as snakes and have nothing to say).

My own history I think of as a postcard with changing scenes on one side but no particular or memorable messages on the back. You can get detached from your beginnings, as we all know, and not by any malevolent designs, just by life itself, fate, the tug of the ever-present. The stamp of our parents on us and of the past in general is, to my mind, overworked, since at some point we are whole and by ourselves upon the earth, and there is nothing that can change that for better or worse, and so we might as well think about something more promising.

I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history’s continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence. This seems like a fine lineage to me still.

My parents were rural Iowans who left farms near the town of Keota and moved around a lot as young marrieds, settling finally in Biloxi, Mississippi, where my father had some work that involved plating ships with steel at the Ingalls ship-building company, for the Navy, which he’d served in during the war. The year before that they had been in Cicero, doing what I’m not really sure. The year before that in El Reno, Oklahoma, and before that near Davenport, where my father had something to do with the railroad. I’m frankly hazy about his work, though I have enough memory of him: a tall rangy blade-faced man with pale eyes — like me — but with romantically curly hair. I have tried to place him in a Davenport or a Cicero, where I’ve gone myself to report sports events. But the effect is strange. He was not a man — at least in my memory — for those places.

I remember my father played golf and sometimes I went with him around the flat course on hot days in the Biloxi summer. He played on the Air Force Base links which were tanned and bleached out and frequented by non-coms. This was so my mother could have a day to herself and go to the movies or get her hair fixed or stay home reading movie magazines and cheap novels. Golf seemed to me then the saddest kind of torture, and even my poor father didn’t seem to have much fun at it. He was not really the golf type, but more the type to race cars, and he took it up, I believe, in a mindful way because it meant something to him, some measure of success in the world. I remember standing on a tee with him, both of us wearing shorts, looking down the long palm-lined fairway beyond which you could see a sea wall and the Gulf, and seeing him grimace toward the faraway flag as if it represented a fortress he was reluctantly about to lay seige to, and him saying to me, “Well, Franky, do you think I can hit it that far?” And my saying, “I doubt it.” He was sweating and smoking a cigarette in the heat, and I have a very clear memory of him looking at me then as if in wonder. Who was I again? What was it I was planning? He seemed struck by such questions. It was not exactly a heartless look, just a look of profoundest wonder and resign.

My father died when I was fourteen, and after that my mother placed me in what she called “the naval academy,” which was in fact a little military school near Gulfport called Gulf Pines (we cadets called it Lonesome Pines) and where I never once minded being. In fact, I liked the military bearing that was required there, and I think there is an upright part of my character which at least respects the appearance of rectitude if not the fact, and which school was responsible for. My situation at Lonesome Pines was somewhat more than average, since most of the cadets had come there from the broken homes of rich people or from abandonment, or because they had stolen something or burned something down and their families were able to get them off and sent there instead of reform school. Though the other students never seemed any different from me, just boys full of secrecy and not-knowing and abject longing, who thought of this time as something simply to be gotten through, so that no one made attachments. It was as if we all sensed we’d be gone someday soon in a sudden instant — often it happened in the middle of the night — and didn’t want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.

What I remember of the place was a hot parade grounds surrounded by sparse pine trees, a flag pole with an anchor at its base, a stale shallow lake where I learned to sail, a smelly beach and boat house, hot brown stucco classroom buildings and white barracks houses that reeked with mops. There were some ex-Navy warrant officers who taught there — men unsuited for regular teaching. One Negro even taught there, a man named Bud Simmons who coached baseball. The Commandant was an old captain from World War I, named Admiral Legier.

We took our leaves in bunches, out on Highway 1 in the little Gulf Coast towns we could get to by public bus, in the air-conditioned movie and tamale houses, or hanging out in the vicinity of Keesler Air Force Base, in the hot, sandy parking lots of strip joints, all of us in our brown uniforms trying to get the real servicemen to buy us booze, and wretched because we were too young to go in ourselves and had too little money to be able to do anything but squander it.

I went home on holidays to my mother’s bungalow in Biloxi, and occasionally I saw her brother Ted who lived not far away, and who came to see me and took me on trips to Mobile and Pensacola, where we did not do much talking. It may be just the fate of boys whose fathers die young never to be young — officially — ourselves; youth being just a brief dream, a prelude of no particular lasting moment before actual life begins.