Be a friend

Be a friend

If you feel like you don’t have any friends, you’re not looking hard enough. They are there if you look for them.

I’m very disappointed. It looks like no reunion for the Class of ’71 in 2021. This is the big one… our 50th reunion. Oh, well. I had paid dues to one of those online services that try to connect high school alums. The service was largely just a nuisance. I did not renew my subscription when it expired.

Before things started shutting down in 2020 due to COVID, I was planning to go to my alma mater’s October 2020 homecoming football game. That would be the 50th anniversary of the Class of 71’s homecoming weekend when we were seniors. However, the 2020 football season was cancelled.

Sadly, there just didn’t seem to be enough interest in 2021 for a 50th reunion. I would have really liked seeing my high school classmates… most likely for the last time… but that’s not what this story is about.

I played football all four years in high school. The fall semester was devoted to playing and the spring semester set aside for training. Players were required to participate in spring training until the final semester of their junior year. During your senior year, if you were not playing another sport, you were assigned to attend regular PE classes during that final spring semester. As you can imagine, it was difficult to take PE or any other classes seriously when you were just months away from graduation. In those days, students were required to take four years of PE. So, as a second semester senior, I was put out to pasture… in a manner of speaking… and assigned to a regular PE class with non-athletes.

As luck would have it, my PE teacher was the head football coach. He directed me to organize the class into six teams to play basketball on the school’s outdoor asphalt courts as well as set up a daily game schedule. I drafted a schedule with pencil and paper. Old school. Remember, Steve Jobs was a high school junior and Bill Gates was a sophomore in spring 1971. I devised a matrix that had teams playing a different opponent every day. Rinse and repeat the following week. Then, the coach did me a huge favor; I still don’t know today whether the favor was by chance or design. He assigned a student named Alan to my team. Alan was a special needs kid. He had great difficulty speaking and he was not very coordinated. The coach made it very clear… Alan was my responsibility.

I remember one hot spring afternoon. All six teams were playing outside. The heat was brutal. Alan would just follow me up and down the court. He knew the ball was supposed to go through the hoop, but he lacked the skill to position himself to take a shot. I turned toward Alan in the middle of the game and guided him to a spot virtually underneath our basket and told him to wait. The game was going on at the other end of the court, so I ran down to our opponents’ basket and joined my teammates. With Alan still standing under our basket, we got a defensive rebound.

My team made a break to our basket. We spread out and a teammate took a shot but missed. I snagged the offensive rebound. I leaned toward Alan and handed him the ball. He pushed the ball skyward and released it. The ball went straight up about eight feet then fell straight down… total air ball. Then I looked over at Alan’s face. He had a smile so big it started behind one ear and finished behind the other. He was so proud that he had taken a shot. I don’t remember if we won that game. It didn’t matter. Alan won.

A week or maybe two later, Alan passed me in the hallway. He looked in my direction and that same smile came back. A classmate asked me… Who is that? I replied, “That’s Alan. He’s a buddy on my PE basketball team.” I thought to myself… zero baskets, one friend.

Lessons in friendship are lessons we teach each other.

Tickets, please!

Tickets, please!

The spirit of the law might be more powerful than the letter of the law.

I returned to working a patrol shift after serving three successful years as the Juvenile Division detective. While working patrol, I wanted to improve my resume so I would be competitive for assignment to the motorcycle unit. That meant writing a lot of tickets. So, I selected an area of town to patrol that would permit me to focus on traffic enforcement. My strategy… write lots of tickets and be ready to help out wherever else I might be needed in the city.

During the state’s seatbelt enforcement campaign, officers were encouraged to be on the lookout for seat belt violations. It was July 2004, I had already written some radar speeding tags when I stopped an elderly woman for not wearing her seat belt while driving.

Her name was Pat and she was very, very nice. When I told Pat that I had stopped her for not wearing her seat belt, she explained she recently had a mastectomy and that it was painful for her to wear the shoulder strap across her chest. Well, at that point, I knew I would not be issuing a citation.

I advised Pat that she could get a doctor’s note to excuse her from wearing a seat belt while she was receiving treatment following her surgery. I said to Pat… no ticket today just information. She thanked me then sighed. She told me that it had been a rough year for her and her husband, Harold. He was recovering from cancer surgery, and it was not going well. I looked down and asked Pat if I could pray for her and her husband. She said… yes. Pat moved her hand so it rested on the top edge of the driver’s door panel and leaned toward me. I placed my hand on top of hers, closed my eyes… yes, a police officer purposefully closed his eyes on a routine traffic stop… and I said a brief prayer for Pat and Harold after reciting Romans 12:12. That scripture says, “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.”

I felt something on my hand. I opened my eyes and saw a couple of tears had dropped onto the back of my hand. What a blessing! Pat thanked me and drove away. A week or so later, she sent a handwritten note to me. It read… Thank you so much for your kindness and humanity on a most difficult day. I will never forget you and be grateful that a man like you protects us in such a caring way.

My law enforcement career ended many years ago. Along the way, I collected plaques and certificates for a job well done. However, I cherish Pat’s note more than those professional accolades. Many years later, I drove by the address written on Pat’s note. I stopped and knocked on the door; a woman I did not know answered. She said she knew Pat and Harold, and that they had moved to the coast. I asked the woman at the door to say “hello” to Pat from the cop who did not give her a seat belt ticket. The woman said she would.

This story has a postscript.

About 18 years had passed since I met Pat that sunny July morning. I decided to return the favor and drop her a line thanking her for her kind words. After a little online sleuthing, I came across a likely address on the coast. I sent Pat a note and told her how much her words of thanks meant to me. My note came back stamped “Return to Sender.” I set aside my note addressed to Pat for a while.

As I was getting ready to post this story to my website, I decided to try one more time. After some more online detective work, I discovered that Pat and Harold had moved to the Midwest. Sadly, I also learned that Harold had passed away a couple of years ago. I called the funeral home listed in Harold’s obituary, and spoke to a lovely woman named Sheila. I told Sheila that I wanted to send a note to Pat, and I asked if she could help me. Sheila agreed to contact Pat and ask if it was OK for the funeral home to forward my note to her.

I got a call about an hour later from Sheila. She left a message. Pat had moved again and she was now being cared for by her sister. The sister told Sheila that Pat was struggling with some medical issues, but Pat’s sister agreed to give my note to Pat if Sheila could forward it to her.

I sent the note to Pat again. Yes, the spirit is more powerful than the letter.

Birthday

Birthday

They say it’s your birthday / Well, it’s my birthday too, yeah

“Birthday,” John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1968

The pandemic made 2020 a rough year for everyone. My mother passed away early in 2020 from a heart condition. I had some serious medical issues that year followed by multiple surgeries in 2021. For Christmas, my wife gave me a leather-covered notebook. It was a journal with blank pages, and the expectation was that I would fill those pages. I wrote fifty stories in 2021. This is the first one.

Today is my birthday, and I feel ancient. I am 68. That’s twenty years or more older than my teachers in high school and family friends I knew when I was a kid. During that time in my life, I thought those teachers and family friends were the ancient ones. On the occasion of this particular birthday, I am twice as old as my son. Whew… I’m old.

I didn’t know what story I should write first then I recalled a chance meeting with someone famous. Ten years earlier, in 2011, I became interested in learning about the tragedy of human trafficking. Modern slavery is a terrible crime and maybe the most important human rights issue of our time. I attended a weekend anti-trafficking global conference in Silicon Valley hosted by a local nonprofit organization. One of the guest speakers was San Francisco Giants pitcher, Jeremy Affeldt. Jeremy is a standup guy who talks the talk and walks the walk. He pledged $100 to the anti-trafficking movement for every batter he struck out. In 2011, he struck out 54 batters. I was coaching offensive and defensive line as an assistant high school football coach that fall, and Jeremy’s example inspired me to donate $25 for every touchdown scored by the team I was coaching during the 2011 season.

I had to find a way to say “hello” to Jeremy at the conference.

Later that afternoon, I saw him outside the auditorium being interviewed by a sports reporter. As a member of the Giants team that won the World Series in 2010, Jeremy was a local celebrity and fan favorite, but he became the stuff of legend in the 2012 World Series. With the fourth game tied in the bottom of the ninth inning at Comerica Park, Jeremy struck out three Detroit power hitters to preserve a 3-3 tie. The Giants won that game in the tenth inning to complete a four-game Series sweep. As I waited patiently, Jeremy noticed me standing off to the side and he had “that look” on his face. A look which seemed to say… Oh, no. Here’s some old guy who probably pitched in the minors somewhere and he wants to talk baseball. I waited for the interviewer to wrap up then I walked up to Jeremy.

I said hello and told him that I was inspired by his example of making donations for strikeouts and added I had pledged at the beginning of the 2011 season to donate $25 to the anti-trafficking movement for each touchdown scored by the team I was coaching. I thanked Jeremy then turned and walked away. That was it.

My guys played that evening under the Friday night lights and lost 41-21. The next morning when the conference was nearly ready to resume, Jeremy noticed me sipping some coffee waiting for Saturday’s events to start. He gave me a one of those nods guys give each other from across the room before walking toward me. He stopped and asked… How did your team do last night? I replied that we lost but the team scored three touchdowns. Jeremy said… That’s great!

On Monday, I told my players what Jeremy had said… they were very excited to hear that Jeremy Affeldt, a major league pitcher, was impressed with their touchdown production. The season ended two weeks later; we scored 31 touchdowns that year. Before my players turned in their gear, I thanked them for their hard work which just might have made a huge difference in someone’s life.

And that difference is a whole lot better than a birthday.