Ted Lasso barbecues a bully

Today's dispatch from The Dinosaur Notebook: 

It's my favorite scene in my favorite show.

In Apple TV+ fish-out-of-water comedy "Ted Lasso" Jason Sudeikis plays a college football coach from Wichita State who winds up coaching English soccer. 

The character's marriage has fallen apart. His estranged wife needs some space, so the relentlessly positive and unfailingly empathetic Lasso gives her a whole ocean.

The team's owner, Rebecca Welton, a rich blonde with curves like the hull of a competition speedboat, initially hired him to fail in order to spite her ex-husband, Rupert. She won the club in a bitter divorce settlement after he cheated on her.

By episode 8 of the first season Rebecca has been won over by Lasso's optimism and innate decency and begins to soften toward him.

Their friendship leads to this climactic scene.

You know, Rupert, guys have

underestimated me my entire life.

And for years, I never understood why.

It used to really bother me.

But then one day,

I was driving my little boy to school

and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman

and it was painted on the wall there.

It said, "Be curious, not judgmental."

I like that.

So I get back in my car

and I'm driving to work,

and all of a sudden it hits me.

All them fellas that used to belittle me,

not a single one of them were curious.

They thought they had everything

all figured out.

So they judged everything,

and they judged everyone.

And I realized

that their underestimating me...

who I was had nothing to do with it.

'Cause if they were curious,

they would've asked questions.

You know?

Sudeikis' monologue is perfect, a huge payoff for the show's legion of fans, who grow to see that Lasso's folksy charm isn't an act, because he's so consistent. 

In life people often mistake kindness for weakness. They make assumptions. They're dismissive. They send out subtle digs or judgments.

I love my work, the actual physical task of loading the bread into racks and rolling it into the proofer. It's meditative and satisfying. There's something soothing about working in a unit, doing something as elemental as baking bread. I come home smelling like 21 Whole Grain. My wife buries her nose in my collarbone and sniffs deeply when she kisses me. 

But there's an odd thing that happens in a blue collar workplace. It's as fiercely hierarchical as the streets of Mumbai. There's a caste system. Managers wear black shirts. Maintenance techs wear blue shirts. Office staff and administrators wear street clothes. Among the line employees, all wearing khaki pants and company tee shirts, Panners are the lowest of the low. There are people on the staff who don't acknowledge my presence, who will look right through me if I simply say, "Good morning, John." 

That's weird to me. I truly don't understand that mentality.

A portion of our work force are ex-felons. Guys with neck tattoos and a thousand-yard stare. 

People have been underestimating me all my life.

Every workplace has its rules and power structure. A man I know went to Stanford University and earned a degree in economics, built a successful career as a bond underwriter in Seattle. He raised three remarkable kids who went to prestigious schools, one a pediatrician, another a medical researcher, the third a fund raiser for a university in Alaska.

Once he told me, "I never liked my job. It wasn't my dream, I didn't have a passion for it. Every day I had to put on a suit and kiss ass, but I knew it what was I had to do to build a life for my family. So I did it."

He's retired now. This spring and summer he and his wife are hiking from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Along the way I hope they find their two triple 20s and a bullseye, a moment of perfect clarity and peace. But I suspect the success and well-roundedness of their children has been the barbecue sauce, the thing that makes them smile deep in their souls. The people that underestimated them don't matter anymore.

That's the flip side of yesterday's childlike dreams. I have a lot of admiration for people who can recognize the bargain the world offers, choosing to stick to a course in a disciplined way because it's the right thing to do, even if they have to swallow a lot of bullshit.

Be curious. Ask questions. And don't let yourself be defined by others' assumptions. That's a waste of the precious days.

Pablo Picasso, The Helper Squad, and The Dinosaur Notebook

At the end of Jasmine Street in Willamette City where we live there is a thicket, a patch of fir trees under grown by holly with a trail running through it. It's an easement owned by the town, opening out on the other end to a large grassy field belonging to the Grace City Church.

Three children live on our block-long dead end street of single-family homes, ages six to eight. We'll call them Xena, Jack and Ella, for together they are a warrior princess, a legendary pirate and song belted from a mountain top, each in their own way.

(Both the place names and the identities have been changed to protect the children and their families, but their exploits are completely true.)

Jack's Wood is a vital feature of the neighborhood, for its quarter acre serves as a bicycle trail, obstacle course, hideout or the prow of a ship. Jack scans the horizon for villages to burn, churns clouds of dust on his bike, screams warrior screams as he zooms over the bump in the trail at the edge of the forest, the place where we first saw him on the day we moved in.

The three of them are each bright and exceptional with different gifts, cute as kittens, fierce as a stick-sword pressed into your Adam's Apple. 

Xena has dark, straight hair and brown eyes, a few months the oldest, the tallest of the three. She's thoughtful, a planner. For Halloween she put together a block party, complete with menus and activities. Handwritten invitations were tucked inside every screen door. Every household came, a table overflowing with chili and cornbread and three kinds of pie. Her father lit a firepit for marshmallows. The kids carved pumpkins. There was music on a portable stereo. Sharon made a pecan pie.

Jack's the youngest, a kindergartner with a  slightly crooked smile and Tarzan-length hair. His parents have bathed him in love and confidence. He's fearless and sweet. He charges down the hill where Jasmine Street passes the church on scooters, bikes and skateboards. His father takes him skiing, first cross country and this winter downhill for the first time. Once on a walk his mother asked how to ride the scooter. "You just GO," he said, neatly summing up his philosophy of life. He just goes. 

Ella is short and determined with a woolly mop of red-brown curls that explode out from underneath her bicycle helmet like fireworks. Her father is a professor of archaeology at a nearby college, her mother an administrator at the same school. In their garage is an electric car and a large telescope. Ella steers by the brightest, furthest star she can name in all things.

As you might guess, there are no betas in this group. They'll play agreeably for a while, have some disagreement as to direction or purpose, work it out or fly apart for a while. After a break to cool down they'll come back together, resuming play as if not much happened. Over the two years all alliances have proved temporary and no grudges have been kept past tomorrow's breakfast. They're a model for the world.

One of their latest ventures is The Helper Squad. The three decided they would knock on every door within their tether and offer themselves for chores and tasks, cleaning yards or windows for two or three quarters each. Mind you, they are 6, 8, and 8.

In their rounds they came to us and I invited them, with their parents' permission, to help us plant wildflowers in the 18x24-foot patch of ground at the front end of Jack's Wood. Earlier this year I'd chopped away the weeds with a pick axe and laid down a bed of fallen leaves to improve the clay soil. It's nearly ready to plant. At the first of the month my wife Sharon bought us six yards of good garden dirt, delivered, and we'll spread a layer of that this weekend.

It happens that yesterday was the start of spring break, so The Helper Squad will come by for wildflower seed spreading on Wednesday. 

On the porch after school on Tuesday they were jumping up and down with excitement about this choice assignment.

But they wanted something they could do right away, eager to get their business venture started, too ambitious to wait for summer lemonade stands. More jumping up and down, Ella eager for me to name an assignment.  I suggested that the wildflower patch needed more leaves, because there was a section, about a quarter of it, that was still bare. Maybe you could finish it, I said.

The three of them accepted. While I went back to my nap they laid out leafy compost over the bare ground. When I woke up there were three twigs arranged on our front porch in a rough tepee, intended, I think, as sign language to indicate they'd finished. When I walked out to the end of the driveway I was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) at how thoroughly and carefully they'd finished the project.

Last Sunday we had dinner with Jack and his parents. He's a high school history teacher, she's a nutritionist. Marvelous, attentive parents, delightful people. They don't own a TV. Most nights after supper are devoted to reading and games.

Over salad, grilled cheeses and tomato bisque soup we learned Jack had just passed his first 100 days of kindergarten. He and his classmates had each made themselves a hat emblazoned with "100 Days Brighter," shaped like a native headdress. He'd made a "Happy St. Patrick's Day" poster, taped to the front door for our visit.

The next day I was in the Dollar Store shopping for writing supplies, and I snagged two Dinosaur Notebooks, one for me and one for Jack. I got him a congratulations card and my wife and I signed it. "Congratulations on being 100 Days Brighter," I wrote. In a perfect world, we all would be.

I put four singles inside the card. "Seed money for your business," I told him. "You and Xena and Ella can buy cleaning supplies or snacks."

Pablo Picasso once said, "Every child is an artist. The trick is to remain one when you grow up." In the same way every child is an adventurer, an explorer, a daredevil and an entrepreneur. The shameful thing is that life wears down our optimism and yearning to make grand plans, to be boldly childlike in our willingness to dream.

My father was a crass and violent man who died at the age I am now. He was driving a semi the day he died, delivering a load of coffee in Layton, Utah. The Old Man chocked the wheels, pulled up the gate of the trailer and collapsed on the dock, dead of a heart attack. He'd been a smoker well into his 50s and was overweight.

The relevant part of his story in this one is that all his life my father had dreams, a desire to start something big and be a big operator. He'd sketch out plans and budgets. He'd start projects. A trucking school. A barge for harvesting river rock.

Some of his ideas were remarkably ahead of his time. In the 80s he pondered converting an old school bus he'd bought into a mobile restaurant. An avid football fan who'd record games on his Betamax to rewatch over the winter, he'd sketch out plays for an offense: no huddle, with the quarterback in shotgun on every play, a concept that now dominates the game.

Everett dropped out of school after the ninth grade. He didn't have a dinosaur notebook, but by his chair on the lamp table there were invariably scraps of paper scrawled with notes and trial budgets. 

When he died, going through his effects, next to his shotgun shells and a stubby bottle of Mennen Skin Bracer, I found $20,000 in a Metamucil jar under his porch. Seed money for his business. I divided into six envelopes and sent an equal share to each of my siblings.

 

Take me to the river

On Sunday I  took my breakfast walking, like a character in The Canterbury Tales. My favorite Oregon fleece has pockets so I wrapped two slices of spiral ham in a paper towel, grabbed an apple, two boiled eggs and a chunk of crusty sourdough bread left over from the other night, stepping out into the bright, mild midwinter sun for a walk to the river.

I'm blessed to live just a couple of blocks from Meldrum Bar Park along the Willamette River. It's a 30-minute circuit around the park, almost perfect. I ate the ham first as I strolled out of the trailer park where I share an old but neatly remodeled older mobile home with Angie, a former girlfriend who has morphed into a good friend. She's kind and our schedules are opposite, so we rarely get in each other's way, except for the narrow driveway, which constantly requires an annoying shuffling of cars. She's so considerate she usually moves mine when she leaves for work in the morning, me being the night owl who typically sleeps late. Most of the time I'm so far out of it that I don't even hear her getting ready, still the oldest of seven in my ability to sleep through a blow dryer, the sound of a running shower and a blender. Only rarely do I stir, and even then it's easy for me to fall back asleep. Another blessing: both my parents were plagued by insomnia, and my father had a terrible, undiagnosed case of sleep apnea. His snores would rouse zombies. He'd die 50 times a night, not breathing.

Sleep is much on my mind these days, for last week I read an internet article about the power of sleep and its ability to serve as a "delete button" for our brains. I found the article on Twitter, from a newsletter called "Fast Company."

Have you ever woken up from a good night’s rest and been able to think clearly and quickly? That’s because all the pruning and pathway-efficiency that took place overnight has left you with lots of room to take in and synthesize new information–in other words, to learn.

It turns out that the brain uses deep sleep to prune and cultivate, strengthening some connections while deleting others. It resets and heals. Sleep is a superpower in our lives. There isn't much in our mental or physical health, be it weight, stress, sexual performance, problem-solving or energy, that isn't improved by better sleep.

A walk to the river, I think, accomplishes some of the same replenishing and re-sorting. It quiets me. It allows me to sort out my thoughts.

As I turned into the park I ate from the chunk of crusty bread, sourdough, my mother's favorite. The sun felt good on my face and shoulders. I thought about an old Talking Heads song, "Take Me to the River."

"Take me to the river...and wash me down." There is something cleansing, spiritual, healing about a simple walk to the river. In "A River Runs Through It" Norman McLean says "I am surrounded by waters." I think we all are. The river of grace. The river of grief. The river of time. The waters define us, lead us, comfort us and mark our path. The afternoon sunlight gleaming on the slow-moving current speaks to our soul.

I spent a lot of time on the opposite bank of this river, literally, when I was a young man. In high school I converted to Christianity in the summer between my junior and senior years, at a Young Life Camp called Malibu located in the Straits of San Juan, some of the most breathtaking scenery in the world. Mountains rise up straight out of the water, forming fjords. Orcas hunt and frolic in the still, cold, deep waters.

I had my conversion experience on a July morning at the dock with a counselor named Rick O'Bill. We talked a long time and he extolled the virtues of a personal relationship with Jesus, what it meant, how it would give me strength, understanding and comfort. His testimony had a big appeal for a kid from a nightmare family, where anger and anxiety clouded every waking moment. I could be free. I could trust someone. It was a beautiful morning, the water still as glass. I prayed the prayer.

All through the rest of the summer and the warmer days of early fall I walked to a spot in Mary S. Young Park, along the west bank of the Willamette in West Linn, to pray earnest prayers and read from a Philips Translation of the New Testament I'd bought at the Malibu Canteen. The book had one of those thick paperboard covers with a red, white and blue design cross-hatched onto it. Fervently, faithfully, searchingly I read sitting on the sand in a sheltered thicket, beginning with the four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life and ministry, then Acts and the Letters. Revelation only confused me.

All through that summer I prayed as I walked home on Willamette Drive, Highway 43. It was about a mile to home. I'm sure those who drove by, including members of my community and even acquaintances from school, must have thought I was mad, crazy, insane or possessed. I wasn't, just an impressionable boy/man-child in search of passion and purpose.

Religion didn't stick with me. Over the next few years I became increasingly angst-ridden over all the guilt I felt, normal urges I didn't understand, the pull of the world. It seemed easier for my friends to make compromises and accept God's graces without questioning their own purity and behavior. My most frequent critic in faith lived with a series of women, yet he felt free to question my actions and motives with the fervor of a brimstone preacher.

I didn't find any comfort in the church. People seemed full of false piety, judgmental, artificial. For a while I attended a "Charismatic" church and the antics of people. "speaking in tongues," "prophesying," actually scared me. How could you trust that? What was real and what was merely performance and posing? It wasn't comforting to me, I only felt guilty and miserable over being "a sinner."

In college I encountered science, my own budding sexuality, alcohol and girls, and religion faded for me. I became the seed sown among the thorns. Any practice of faith or spirituality has to be ultimately rewarding and restorative or it will inevitably lead to bitterness and regret. It has to feel sound and authentic, in the heart, or it will just hurt.

The one thing I took away from my religious experiences was a practice of profound contemplation and a need to get away, to be quiet, meditative, and seek solace in my surroundings. It's good to moved to awe and silence, this much I know. I still find comfort in the river. Eastern religions have more appeal to me but I don't practice a specific faith. Much of the time I'm content to light a candle, put on an eclectic shuffle of music on my headphones, close my eyes and breath deeply. It's not quite meditation, and it usually turns into a nap.

As I walked along I stepped out of the shade into the full light, and the warmth on my face, rare for Oregon in January, this taste of spring, lightened my mood and my energy. I passed the soccer field and some parked cars. There was a group of children playing on the swings and climbing structure. An old man in a ball cap watched them from a bench. A pretty girl with cinnamon-colored skin and beautiful dark curls sat next to him. She reminded me of Kourtney, my granddaughter, when she was little. One of the children, high on the climbing structure called out to him, "Hi Grandpa," the little boy said. Children want to test their independence and take risks, but they want to be noticed and watched over. I called out to the old man, "Those are two of the most glorious words in the English language," I said, "Hi Grandpa." The old man chuckled.

I find as I grow older I am more prone to talk to strangers, to call out a greeting or make a humorous observation. It's the search for connection, the willingness to be engaged. What's the harm, as long as you're not saying anything threatening or intrusive? It's a form of blessing. When I pass couples with a small child in the cart at a store I will say, "What a cute baby!" or "What a beautiful child!" and smile a broad, welcoming smile. I like to think that the blessing you say into a child's life resonates like ripples from a small rock thrown into a still river. A small flower of pride and recognition planted, a ray of sunlight shone upon a seedling. In some cases not, but the effort is sincere. I shared the old man's delight in his grandchildren, and for a moment we were a community.

A little further along the road turns south and I walked past the community garden, still gated and padlocked for winter. A flock of fat geese pecked and picked contentedly, feasting on the shoots and seeds, making a banquet out of last year's waste and detritus among the once neatly-tended rows. Padlocks mean nothing when you can fly.

The river bends at the south end of the park. Sunlight gleamed on the surface of the waters. My brother Roger is a fisherman, an avid one with over a hundred rods and reels and two boats. He's spent countless hours on the rivers of Northwest Oregon, the Clackamas, the Trask, the Columbia and Buoy 10, the easy pickings near Eagle Creek and the spillway at the Bonneville Dam during the fall salmon and steelhead run. He loves to fish, but I suspect also he derives great comfort from those early mornings on the river, both the stillness and beauty and the community of men he's become a part of. Some of his dearest and most meaningful friendships have grown out of an online community he belongs to, posting for years. The group shares their fishing triumphs but much more than that. A beloved member died this fall and their posts back and forth included ribald stories as well as genuine grief and loss. These men were there for him when our mother died. They are a true church.

I turned up the path between the children's golf course and the softball fields, heading toward home. To my left two middle-aged men were taking batting practice. I heard the solid thwock of a deep flyball to left and walked over to the grandstand to peel my boiled eggs and watch for a minute. The pitcher had a full head of gray hair. He wore a puffy blue windbreaker, kept missing low and inside. The batter, thick and muscular, wore glasses. Right-handed, with a big kick in his swing, a serious player swinging an expensive aluminum bat. He sent several flies out to the 300 mark in the open field, not bad for the first workout in cooler January air. It was about 55 degrees, I'd guess. The ball doesn't carry as far in those conditions, not like summer. He blasted another deep fly on a good launch angle. 

I finished peeling one of the eggs and ate it. Another solid thwock! "That sound is a tonic to my winter-dulled ears," I said out loud to the man at the plate. He turned slightly but didn't look up. "Yep." he answered. I said, "Good job laying off those bad pitches." He smiled slightly and took his stance again, sent another one deep to left, a dead pull hitter.

I finished the other egg and left them, continuing up the hill along the 7th fairway of the pitch-and-putt and the south soccer field. I thought about sports and the large part they had played in much of my life. I'd been obsessive. For a long while, decades, softball into my 40s, golf in my 50s, it had filled a huge void in my life where most men placed family and careers. I trained 4-6 hours a day, hit off tees, did drills, lifted weights. I wrote journals, did affirmations, listened to subliminal tapes, playing 150 games a summer and then 150 rounds a year. For a time softball and then golf were my meditation and religion, deeply into the discipline of the body, the rhythms of the game.

I was a frustrated athlete. I was never able to let go and completely trust, playing with far too much anxiety and a deep fear of failure. I'd get monumentally angry over a pop-up or a sliced drive, alienate friends, abuse family members, enraged far beyond rationality or perspective. It was just a game, I knew, but my expectations and standards for myself were so sky-high it was completely impossible to enjoy it except in rare moments of perfection or serenity. 

My sports career was another failed religion, a different type of discipline and complete immersion. I've always been a fanatic, a fierce believer. As I walked up the path I felt the yearning of those old habits. Maybe I could play one more season or a few more seasons, do it differently, have more perspective, clean off the clubs, buy a nice fielder's glove and work oil into the leather until it felt like a part of my hand. Physically, I could do it. But there's a cost to every choice you make. I have to measure mine in terms of lost walks to the river, decisions not easily made.

At the top of the hill the path narrows between two fences, one to the rundown mobile home park where I live, the other to a crowded, cluttered, sprawling apartment complex. The apartments have little patios and nearly all of them are littered with junk. I found a brochure lying on the ground and I picked it up. "Fairway Village," it said. Even the sketchiest of apartments have fancy names. With my last wife we lived in a 30-unit building called The French Chateau, a drab place with little connection to the romance of French wine country. We called it The French Ghetto.

The brochure was unremarkable, but I considered whether it was a sign from the universe. Apartments are much on my mind right now as I would like to have my own "clean, well-lighted place" ( a Hemingway reference, what he said was necessary to write), somewhere with privacy and a sense of home, with room enough in the kitchen to dance. Fairway Village, named for its proximity to a pasture-like 9-hole par-3 golf course, is neither clean or well-lighted. The scrubby lawns are littered with broken trikes, the parking lot is a wasteland of oil stains and car parts. 

I decided that some things you find are not a sign, just a piece of litter on the walkway.

Even so, the housing search is very much with me these days. Portland is an impossible market. Vacant apartments are snatched up quickly. The average price of a stick-built home has passed $450,000. A studio apartment rents for $900 a month, with water, sewer and garbage on the side. Move-in costs often exceed $2000.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Lanie, the wisp of a girl who works at the convenience store, about the age of my oldest granddaughter. She and her boyfriend are losing their place. clinging to the hope of buying an RV. Their story moved me. I wrote her a brief note, saying I had been homeless a couple of times but now was experiencing some great blessings in my work and situation. I included three twenties and said I hoped the little bit of money was an encouragement for them.

On the river in those high school years I learned that Jesus said to do your charity in secret for a reward in heaven, so already I've blown that. I felt it was important to tell the whole story.

I called yesterday about a few studios but most were already rented. One had no oven in the kitchen, just a sink, a tiny counter top and a 2-burner cook top, as drab and depressing as Fairway Village.

With all this in mind I drove by a mobile home dealer to look, thinking it might be better to buy a place, pay for space rent and at least own something. I could live in a bigger place with new appliances and carpet, no neighbors above or below me or sharing a common wall, annoying each other with the sounds of dancing or lovemaking or fights or angry 2 a.m. rock and roll.

I made my way through the paperwork and promised to return today with a deposit, but in the evening I stopped by the office here at the trailer park. The officers from the park board told me the last two vacancies had already been taken. I called three other parks I found online but they too said there was no room at the inn. The mobile home purchase may have been an ill-conceived plan.

I'm still weighing that out. In spite of my hunger for my own space and privacy I might be better served to remain here. The rent is cheap and Angie is probably one of the nicest and most genuine people I've ever known, an absolute peach of a roommate. We can both use the money we save to pay off debts, which will only improve my credit rating and opportunity to purchase a home later. Sometimes I make the biggest decisions in the rashest of ways.

In my Twitter news feed last night there was a report out of Pullman, Washington about a young man who'd felt compelled to make the ultimate rash decision. Tyler Hilinski, the new starting quarterback for the Washington State Cougars, was found dead in his apartment, the victim of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, a suicide.

Details are scant, but Hilinski was by most accounts a friendly, out-going, energetic and talented young man with a bright future. It isn't yet clear what kind of guilt or isolation or despair that drove him to end his life. He was a good-looking young man and supremely gifted, a backup quarterback as a sophomore who'd led the Cougs to a big comeback victory over Boise State in overtime last September, slated to be the starter this year.

We've all felt the grip of despair, the awful pull of a struggle that seeps into our bones and threatens to pull us under like a hidden current. Sometimes we look out at the river and feel no answers, only hopelessness. We need someone or something to pull us away from the shore. The dark, deep part of the waters play a siren song. Part of us aches to simply surrender.

I finished my walk with the sun again on my aging face, content to have the warmth and the reflection even if I'd achieved no answers. Sometimes a walk to the river is a walk along your own river of time. Today is cold and wet, so I'll take my meditation inside, probably under a blanket. It will no doubt turn into a nap.

It's good to be moved to awe and wonder

When my daughter was about 10 she tried out for summer softball at a schoolyard near where she lived with her mother and stepfather in Southeast Portland.

It was a sunny day in April, the field soft from a rain shower. I sat in the stands with her Grandpa Jerry along the first base side, watching the girls go through playing catch, some infield drills and a turn at the plate. Jerry, a congenial man with a shock of wheat-colored hair that curled on his forehead in a way that made him look permanently boyish, chatted with me amiably about sports and goings-on at his bar, a beer-and-shot joint he owned at 52nd and Foster.

I'd been a poor father and a worse husband in my four tries, but Jerry, a fundamentally nice man, greeted me with warmth anyway, true to his nature, a cheerful guy whose life was run by three generations of dominating women yet he had the good sense to go with the flow of it. His strong-willed wife was sensual and smart, so why not?

Part of the heartbreak of a series of failed marriages is that you lose the families you once attached to, the closest thing to normal love and acceptance I'd ever known in my life. Wreckage, everywhere wreckage. And my sweet, resilient daughter had been the first injury in my long march to becoming a whole man.

At ten Stephanie was bright and wise-cracking, very much like her mother and grandmother in her speech cadences and humor. She had hazel eyes and dark hair, skinny, all legs, a quick bright smile. Despite her mother being a college tennis player and me playing sports actively throughout high school and all the way into my 40s, she had no athletic ability at all.

Stephanie took her turn at the plate batting left-handed  and the outfielders instinctively moved in. She was smaller, only 5-5 as a full grown woman even now. Her stance was all stiff knees and pointed elbows.

She whiffed at the first pitch, and the next and the next. A couple of her friends shouted out sweet, pleading encouragement. One of the volunteer coaches sidled up to her to adjust her hands and shoulders, but she still couldn't make contact. Finally the man held the bat with her and she managed a slow grounder to second.

I cried. I had to step away from the bleachers and turn my back to the small collection of parents and grandparents and started heaving dry, choked-back tears. I cried, maybe for the first time in my adult life and certainly the most significant time, not because I was disappointed in Stephanie but because I was so moved by the sight of her, trying, sweetly, to do something she simply couldn't do. She was ten by then and had little background in sports. I hadn't been around to play catch with her or teach her how to hold the bat. Most of the other girls had been playing since they were six. It was too big a gulf in skill level, particularly for a child without much natural ability.

Hitting or not hitting wasn't the point in that moment. I cried because I was so PROUD of her, at her courage, at her willingness to face that situation and still smile and try so bravely. I didn't care that she couldn't hit. She was my little girl. I wanted to march up to home plate and get on my knees and hug her, tell her it didn't matter. I cried because it was so beautiful watching her, being amazed at her strength, her independence, her remarkable energy and spirit.  I called out something encouraging but I don't remember what it was.

What I do remember was being awed by the moment, by the bigness of her heart and spirit, how we have these feelings and moments and they are overwhelming but our soul doesn't have the words to express them. The little that we do, is it enough? I came to the tryout, but I'd missed so many other things. I was filled with humility at the fragile beauty of watching her fail and still be completely herself, still just as beautiful and smart and funny and gloriously herself as she was before she struck out five times. For a long time my life revolved around being good at sports and throwing all my energy into them, and at that field I didn't care about sports at all.

It's good to be moved to awe and wonder, to be carried away with humility at the power of emotions or the grand sweep of your surroundings. We can reach the same level of prayerfulness of spirit with a trip to the ocean, the Grand Canyon or the Columbia Gorge. Or in watching a child play "Silent Night" from a window as Christmas lights dance on the snow. Be moved to tears. And tell someone why you cry at the memory of them in a vulnerable, poignant moment. Soon, for one day your tear ducts will close forever.

Just a corpuscle in a giant organism, flowing along the stream

The bread courses through the bakery like blood, mixed, panned, proofed, depanned, cooled and bagged over a four-hour cycle, trucked all over the Western United States, Alberta, Canada and Hawaii. We make artisan organic bread in a mass production environment, each stage of the process in groups of six to ten, becoming the corpuscles and platelets of a living organism, making a living product of whole grain flours, yeast and sugar, baked with care.

In the mixing department the ingredients are measured out and rolled station-to-station in 400-pound stainless steel bowls that gleam inside from careful cleaning. They roll like coal bins over a smooth red floor, a floor maintained at intervals with an industrial cleaning machine called a floor cat, which resembles a miniature Zamboni, stiff circular brushes rotating on its underside, a water vac and a large squeegee at the back. Driving the floor cat is a rank of privilege--only senior team members get the assignment, clearing their way with warning toots of the horn as they make tight circles about the production floor.

It's a regimented workplace. Safety glasses, hairnets and ear plugs are required everywhere. We wear plain brown bakery-issued shirts with snaps instead of buttons, the same drab color (just lighter than brown khakis) for our bakery pants, becoming an army of washed-out UPS men as we scurry about our tasks. It's very leveling and democratic, though managers wear black polos. Team leads and supervisors are all in brown like us.

The regularity and regimentation centers me. Monday night we made 30,000 loaves of whole grain bread, filling racks, rolling them into the proofer, mopping floors and scrubbing dishes and we rotated through stations. The bakery feeds us lunch and provides snacks like steel cut oatmeal, vegetables with hummus and yogurt for prework and breaks. Who does that? Around the country most large corporations are busy shelling out bonuses to upper management and sending jobs to Asia. Bread has to be baked reasonably near where it's eaten, but it isn't hard to envision a future where most of us will be replaced by robotic arms and sensors. The dough is no longer rolled by hand, and technology advances every year.

It seems like a reality our country is ill-prepared for. Revolutions are painful. The nature of work is undergoing a profound change. Whole industries will disappear over the next few years. Soon there will no longer be bakery workers or truck drivers or order pullers, only the technicians smart enough to maintain the machines. I'm nearing the end of my working life anyway, so I'd likely transition to subsistence living, reading, writing, taking long walks. It doesn't sound that frightening to me. But what about the millions of ordinary people abruptly stripped of a way to make a living and the foundation for a meaningful life? What will they do? How will they support themselves? The current political leadership seems ill-equipped to handle that massive conundrum with any kind of wisdom or compassion. Meanwhile change hurtles on. In Dubai they are experimenting with air taxis, self-piloted drones and helicopters capable of zipping passengers around the city. Our world isn't as organized and purposeful as the bakery: an egotistical, narcissistic fool threatens to destroy humankind with casual tweets about the size of his nuclear button. How did we come to this? How do we find our way out?

The truth is never simple. It has a few corners that can never be cleaned.

My mother was heroic for her courage, endurance and strength, but there was another side to her. She could be very cold and distant. She could wound with quick, harsh sarcasm, or an icy, uncrossable ocean of silence. She could be brutal and cruel, out of a fierce anger at the life she had come to, its complete lack of graces.

Growing up this way, at one turn her comfort and confidant, at another her profoundest disappointment, left me hopelessly, deeply scarred. I struggled all my life in my relationships with women and my ability to respond to intimacy. I wounded and used people, prone to irrational anger and abrupt changes of mood and tone. I too practiced an icy, cutting silence that built walls and distrust. I have been married four times, all colossal failures.

I carried around a baseline of anxiety that underscored and undercut every interaction with bosses, friends, supervisors and love interests. For a long time I covered it up with an impossibly wide, happy smile, determined to be the ray of sunshine no one could dislike. My insecurity, fear, temper and fundamental anger betrayed me again and again

It's taken a lot of self-examination to reach this point in my journey, where I could tell what I know of the story and look inward with frank honesty. I'm privileged to write every day. I want to tell stories, and not just a self-indulgent one of my own.

Her hands were raw, red and cracked

My mother cleaned with fierceness. She would scrub and scrape until her hands were raw, red and cracked, slathering them with lotions or bag balm only to start cleaning again. She would clean from habit and duty. She cleaned because it was ingrained in her culture, for Germans are a tidy people with a deep love of order.

But it was deeper than that. On the farm it seemed she cleaned determined to scrub away poverty and shame. She cleaned too to quiet herself, to wash the reality of her bad bargain and shameful mistake out of her mind, drive it away in a frenzy of work. Then too, she had six kids. Keeping them fed and cleaned was endless, especially when coupled with animals to feed, crops to irrigate and cows to milk. She had six children in 12 years, and at least one miscarriage. We were irrigating the watermelons when she told me. I was just ten, the summer after third grade. Through everything she kept working.

Rosemarie didn't drive. The few times the Old Man tried to teach her he lost patience quickly and started to berate her unwillingness to learn, her dense German stupidity. In his frequent absences we were stranded 8 miles from town, either relying on neighbors or packing the whole brood into a cab. On the way home everyone held groceries or a baby, or both. No one wore seat belts, and if Mr. Thompson or Mr. Douthit took us, the older kids rode sitting in the bed of the pickup. It was a much different time.

The start of her emancipation came in 1964 when he consented to buy her an ancient blue-green Nash, a squat four-door automobile with dusty beige seats that smelled a little from long storage.  A kindly family friend, Orville, patiently showed her how to work the break and the clutch. She practiced out in the pasture before taking to the road. Orville and his wife lived in Athena, a few miles east and then north. Hes invited one of the kids to stay at their home, but he only wanted the younger children. They had  chocolate graham cracker ice cream bars in their freezer, he said. Eager for adventure, I'd stretch up and say, "I'll go."

"I KNOW you would," he said, chuckling with his barrel-voiced, cigarette-soaked laughter. He only wanted the younger kids, but they were skittish about leaving home.

The Nash had a touchy clutch that had nearly worn out, so the standard practice was to roll through stop signs, including the one that led from East Walls Road to the main highway. Children were assigned as lookouts left and right, calling "Clear!" as mom sailed onto the main highway. A full stop and the car might die, and it was difficult to restart. Somehow we survived the clears.

Later that year she got her first job off the farm, working as a waitress at a truck stop in Umatilla, about 10 miles away. At 8 my sister Therese was in charge of the kids, oversaw bath times, made something for dinner. She did a marvelous, mature job, spooning baby food to Michael and then Monika, except for the time she coaxed Roger into drinking from a cup of bleach. Another science experiment, like the corn grown in a patch at the end of the trickle. A neighbor rushed him to Good Shepherd Hospital in town. The emergency room staff induced vomiting and he was fine. Years later the childhood near-miss is still holiday conversation. Therese, almost saintly in her devotion and maturity at that young age, still shrugs off her curious misstep. "I wanted to see what would happen," she said.

She had this prankster side, this coyote cunning that belied her bright, sweet disposition. One day I got a white straw cowboy hat as a gift and I was strutting around proudly as we played and then did the evening milking. She wanted to wear it but I refused. Therese snatched it off my head and plopped it in a fresh manure pile. Another time, she and my second-oldest brother (he's skittish about being identified on social media) were playing and climbing on some hardened stacks of concrete behind the milking shed. Therese pushed one onto to his head and it made him bleed, a gash, not serious.

How could anyone so ordinarily gentle and nurturing be full of so much devilment? Therese was a model student and startlingly bright. She's worked on the computers at the Portland Public Schools for 30 years.

We were a wild, brown bunch, scarcely ever wearing shoes in the summer. We outgrew them too quickly anyway. My smaller toes are still curled from wearing too-small shoes. At 20 I had the feet of an ancient.

In 1965 Rosemarie took the Nash to Pendleton, the county seat, to take a test for a government program called the MTDA, the Manpower Training and Development Act. Programs that don't exist anymore because they are "entitlements." She took me with her as moral support, to calm her nerves for the big day. If she passed, she go to Blue Mountain Community College and learn a skill, perhaps raise the family out of rural poverty.

In addition to the testing there were interviews, an entire day of qualifying. She wore her best blue dress. I was the smart one, her oldest child, a visual aid to show she wasn't merely a backward German with six children and her accented English. Yet all of my siblings have been more successful in their adult life.