FRONT-PORCH GOSPEL: This life story begins in 1973 (kind of) part 79

I am sure Corrina needed our moments over at our vacant lot much more than both of us realized. That time gave us something to reflect on later when things were not as worry-free as they were on that third Friday of July, the year 1973.

I do not know how many times I’ve thought of this scene with Corrina through all the years – about the fire station sitting down almost at our feet, the two of us talking about the old man Santiago with his many struggles out at sea and even the great author Hemingway himself and his tragic life. I don’t remember when I figured out that the movie I watched as an eight-year-old was the classic Hemingway novel. But some years later, I experienced another of life’s great ironies, again making me marvel at the Lord’s work.

It was my first year of teaching English out in Houston, Texas. I was a rookie then, just as I was a rookie out on that bricklaying job the summer of ’73. I am not sure which proved to be more difficult, facing a classroom of 15-year-old scholars or facing the scholar and gentleman named Doocy Dew, the Breeze, the ol’ Knocko Pine, as Pee Wee says.

We had not studied literature in the early going of our first teaching year in 1984 until around October, and I was anxious to get to it. The first novel assigned was what many – including me – considered to be Hemingway’s greatest work – “The Old Man and the Sea.” Just as it was with the memory of watching the classic movie, my distinct memory is the magic of discussing the story of noble Santiago, the boy who believed in him, the marlin that became his greatest brother and nemesis, the resilient Joe DiMaggio, and lions walking proudly on the beaches of Africa. All of those things were Hemingway’s version of my own great nemesis Doocy, and Corrina, too, I suppose, if we look at her as one of life’s challenges, which, I guess, she was. Doocy was the determined marlin, no doubt about that, but Corrina was my dolphin.

Sometimes teaching a class becomes nothing short of a miracle. A great class just happens, just like the summer before my senior year just happened. Thinking on it now, that group of freshmen I taught were not that far from being the age I was in 1973. I was a young junior soon to be a senior, provided I somehow could survive my own eighty days out in these treacherous waters of the deep.

80 days. A full summer would make up just about that amount. The only difference, the Pup caught his fish, some say, in less than two weeks. And she was a dolphin.

Mama brought me into this world in August, so there wasn’t much more than a year between our ages. Besides, as the years went on, youngsters grew up faster than they did at my age. Television alone accomplished that.

I think about those 15-year-olds sitting in my first English class, how young and innocent they were, how much they had to learn yet how much they loved learning, young sponges who had that rare innocent look at life awaiting ahead. They were still young enough to be as naïve as a child. One young lady asked me one day if Tennessee was a state or what, and the same blonde beauty named Laura went on to win runner-up to the Miss Texas pageant a few years later. Ah, the simplicity of their youth was inspiring. It was the youthfulness of the summer of ’73.

How that discussion must have interested them – Santiago’s fighting that marlin tooth and toenail, his thinking about lions on the beaches when the pain and agony gets almost unbearable, and then thinking of Joe DiMaggio who played many years with a bone spur, and of the boy back home whom the old man knew believed in him and was pulling for him for all he was worth!

Some of the great scenes flashed back to me as I told this story again to another young man of innocence and dreams:

Do you believe the great DiMaggio would stay with a fish as long as I will stay with this one? the old man thinks. Ah, but I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.

Doing all things perfectly?

I had to pause at that. I could endure the challenges and tragedies that the summer of ’73 would bring, but who ever could say I came close to doing all things perfectly?

Cheyenne asked, “Popman, who do you think you were in the summer of ’73? Were you Santiago, or were you the great Joe DiMaggio?”

He had just learned who DiMaggio was, although he knew – as all young men do – the blonde-headed beauty to whom he was once married. I thought through that question, just as I also thought through so many questions my 15-year-old scholars of 1984 asked me during the magical day of study of my first novel. But the answer may go to the reader.

Many Santiagos emerge in the story we are now telling, I thought. The Pup, certainly was like the old man in that he was in one of the greatest battles of his life – and Mama, too, fighting for her life; or, perhaps more accurately, fighting to give the Pup as much help and strength as she could that he would be able to use when the time came that he would have to “take to the river alone,” as Huck Finn would say. Mama’s struggle was far more than the physical battle with the brain tumor. That was only a measure of her struggles.

Even Corrina was like the old man. Hers was vicarious, but it was still real, and her life was impacted as much as any in this drama; this summer was her crucible, too, her rite of passage. She would not walk into the school halls of Roanoke’s Handley High School come fall the same person who left those halls late May. She had her own marlins with which to fisticuff and battle.

“How about my great-granddad Zion, Popman?” Cheyenne asked.

I nodded.

“Yes,” I said, and it was as if in a moment, my daddy’s whole life passed before me, “Daddy was the old man, and his battle with life, with addiction, with fear of that Milledgeville hospital, with the fear of losin’ his children and Mama – I cannot even imagine how heavy the load he had to bear. I’ve often thought of the torture of that hospital, with shock treatments and other devices that today would be considered torturous. The hospital had a cemetery beside it, and that’s all you need to know. I’ve wondered if it was loneliness, or the torture from without, or other inward storms that brewed every day that afflicted my daddy the most. As I’ve grown older, I’ve sympathized more and more with his plight.”

I paused.

“Cheyenne,” I added, “it may be you who will be able to learn more about mental illness and the causes of it, the trauma of it. We didn’t know much about it back then. I hope you can learn to understand it better.”

Cheyenne thought a moment.

“I hope so, too, Popman, and I’d like to understand my great-grandpa Zion’s courage, too, because he must’ve been a man of great courage, something most people probably missed.”

I’ve thought about it all through all these years, although I had blocked out many of the thoughts more than I had remembered them. I could only think deeper into my daddy’s plight after I unshackled the memories and dealt with them. When the story of Mama’s Zion can really be understood when it is told and retold, we may realize about him the way Santiago thought about DiMaggio. Maybe my daddy did do all things perfectly. We just never knew it.

Coach Steven Ray Bowen served as a teacher and basketball coach at Red Oak High from 1998-2012 and recently spent two years teaching and coaching at Ferris. He and his wife Marilyn (the “amazin’ blonde”) served many years with the Church of Christ of Red Oak at Uhl/Ovilla Roads, but now spend time evangelizing in several states in addition to Coach’s work as a writer and author, including the writing of the ongoing novel/memoir here in the Press. Call or text (972) 824-5197, or email coachbowen1984@gmail.com, or see frontporchgospel.com.