Did you ever feel noticed? A fourteen-year-old tenth grader, I moved with my family to  North Nodaway high school. That first year went okay. There were some teachers I liked and I began a part time job after school and weekends at Barnett’s Hy-Klas grocery. Basketball was just there. I was young and not grown up yet. My sisters were in the middle school and they talked often about their coach Marvin Murphy.

Coach Murphy came to the high school when I was a junior. Early in the year he asked if I would be interested in being ‘student trainer’ for the football team. When I liked his job description, I began to keep the team’s statistics and filed its scorebooks with the State after each game. During practices I did errands for the coaches.

Coach Murphy’s own chiropractic training had stopped when he was drafted during WWII. After the war, he began professional life in coaching, teaching and educational administration. He shared his knowledge of muscle and bone structure, teaching me to give football players muscle rubdowns – on their shoulders, necks, backs, and calves. That was something I did it every day as part of regular training during football season.

Basketball, though, was my main sport. In my senior high school year Coach made me a starting forward on the Varsity team. I was doing okay but one night I scored 30 points. After the game, in a room surrounded by teammates I was quietly getting dressed by my locker. My feelings were mixed, proud, disbelieving, practically overwhelmed. Coach Murphy usually went around the locker room after games. On this night as he came by I said I couldn’t believe it. He put his arm around me saying, “I knew you could do it, and you’ll do it again!” Over and over I did.

One night we played Forrest City. They had a star player, Dennis Klassmeyer, who routinely scored 30-40 points a game. Forrest City’s season team record was better than North Nodaway. Before the game, Coach told the rest of our team he wanted me to abandon our traditional zone defense. He wanted me to go one on one with Denny Klassmeyer.

“Be in his face all the time,” Coach Murphy said to me, “and don’t let up. When he doesn’t have the ball, be between him and the ball, uptight in front of him!” After the game, Coach came by player lockers as he always did. When he was by me I said to him, “Klassmeyer is all-star material!” “Yes he is,” responded Coach, “but you held him to 7 points.”

During those three final years of high school, in addition to being student manager for the football team, playing track and basketball I took driver’s education from Coach Murphy and a mandatory heath class, but I have several further memories of him.

First, one Saturday morning after my senior basketball season, Coach Murphy met me in the gym where he had played for his college Alma Mater. He had arranged an  introduction to Dick Buckridge the college basketball coach. When fall came I did try out for the college team, but Coach Buckridge told Coach Murphy that three new freshmen had made the team. I was the fourth, but the cafeteria of college life had already become exciting. Basketball was important, but there seemed so much to sample, learn and do.

Years later I was a new teacher in an old boys school in New York City. Two years prior to my coming they had admitted girls for the first time, and they wanted a basket ball team. Their coaching staff was committed but my previous experience got around and I was asked to be coach. Of course I was willing, but you might guess who my model was as we won a few games with some wonderful girls.

Coach Murphy came to my 40-ieth high school class reunion in 2005. By then he was solely devoted to his own adult sport of softball. He had been a summertime softball pitcher when I had known him during my school years. Girls’ softball had become his special interest, and he had become Missouri’s foremost girls’ softball pitching coach. I hope the picture of he and I, with his perennial coaches baseball cap, will always be part of my historical archives.

In 2008 Mom sent me Coach Murphy’s obituary from a local Maryville paper, the Daily Forum. A funny man, Coach had always called it the Daily Fool – em. Though his corporeal presence has died from this earth, I still think of him many times a day. I realize how important he was to my ‘physical’ education and sense of self in this world. He sought me out, offering steady encouragement. When I was proud he applauded, but I often realized he had seen it there before it ever happened.

Coach Murphy always said, “Girls don’t know how to punch!” That didn’t stop him from teaching them in every girls gym class each year. As I help lead punching exercises in my assisted living now I laugh, as those older women punch straight ahead, straight up, round houses, and finally finish off with upper cuts. I tell them, “If only Coach Murphy could see us now!”

Pursuing my goal to be a walking guy after thirteen years of going the opposite direction, Coach Murphy’s voice is for sure inside my head. As I walk now, I think of how I learned to stand and move in balance as an athlete under his guidance. Somewhere I learned the term ‘kinesthetic awareness’, and I don’t know if that term came from Coach or not. Certainly it was what he always talked about, being aware of where you were, how you were doing it, and what might come next. As I walk with the formerly broken right leg from a fall, that doesn’t fit quite like I remember from when I used to walk, I think every step I take of how Coach might say to do it right.

The first full day at Green Manor Nursing Home, at 8 AM a group of ten employees including the Director of Nursing, assorted registered nurses, aides and one African-American woman, came into my room. I could not get out of bed, so we introduced ourselves. They were there to meet one of their latest projects, me.

 Super Fly was a black television detective at the time, with a show of his own. Sheila, the black woman’s name, appeared to be a woman Super Fly. She stood at the edge of the crowd, attractive, arms akimbo, hair in an Afro, watching me. The group developed a plan of action; if they discussed it in front of me, which I doubt, I remember none of it.

The next morning Sheila came into my room right after breakfast, announcing my colon was completely blocked. We would clear it all out with the help of a super enema. “It would probably take us two sessions in as many days. People called her ‘the queen of enemas’ and “I am,” she said, “pretty gifted!”

Minutes later she was back wheeling a large black enema maker, and she said we would get to work. Time did not fly while she coached me to cooperate with the enema. I worked as hard as I ever worked in my life. With a good portion of the morning gone, Sheila announced that we had filled four bedpans and that tomorrow we would be complete in one more session.

Next day we finished, but compared to the first session it was small stuff. When we were done I had bonded with Sheila. I hugged her and kissed her and felt like I loved her. Though I was in the nursing home for two more months that feeling never left me. Every morning Sheila would start my day with her big smile, maybe talking about a solution to one of my medical problems as she breezed into my hospital type room.

Sheila taught me to dress myself, then to wash in the bathroom. Finally, when I could stand and sit again, it was time to go in the shower.

For years I had been diagnosed with exacerbating-remitting Multiple Sclerosis. What I had just gone through was both typical and atypical of chronic MS. Having lived for six years in our weekend home near Albany in upstate New York, care for myself and personal safety had become more difficult. I had purchased First Alert, advertised on television. You wore an alert necklace around your neck. If you fell you pressed a button, saying, “Help me. I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.”

One morning I fell in the bathroom and pushed my button. Three people had agreed to be called in case of emergencies, and First Alert began with number one, my good friend Frank.

My constant companion, Standard Poodle Chloe, padded in from the front room, and sniffed my head and ears where I lay on the bathroom floor. I told her I had fallen and that I couldn’t get up. Chloe turned, trotting back from to the front bay window. She barked steadily and rhythmically until Frank arrived twenty minutes later. By the time he arrived, Chloe was hoarse but she had never stopped barking; it was a Lassie moment.

I was taken by ambulance to Albany Medical Center where my neurologist supervised a standard treatment with intravenous prednisone for six days. From there he sent me to Green Manor Nursing Home. Weeks later I had worked through some of my stunned feelings and found myself with Sheila learning how to shower.

Sheila sat me down, and said, “You are gonna take care of yourself; you are not gonna be a burden to anybody!” She knew what was a stake even if I didn’t, and she taught me how to do everything in a shower by myself. Thirteen years later, I am in an adult home where most people have shower assistance. I still don’t.

When I graduated from the Nursing Home, Sheila took me next door to adjoining Adult Assisted Living. I asked for her email address, and we exchanged information. Having done great work together, we were mutually bonded. That day, neither of us wanted to say goodbye.

Our correspondence dwindled. Sheila was a ‘doer’ and not a ‘talker’. Jim the van driver said months later that Sheila had left Green Manor. “She got sick of ‘it – all the crap’,” he said. As for me, I believe that during my time of distress, God had sent me a black angel named Sheila. She had led me back to life.

“When did you realize your father was a success?” I could ask myself. In a way Dad and I had lived in different worlds. His formal education had ended at fifteen; mine had continued until I was twenty-eight. His life had been in farming and agriculture in Northwest Missouri. My adult life had been spent in New York city as an educator in religion and psychology.

Taking myself thoughtfully by the hand, I might journey back in time. First, my Dad when I met him was an intelligent new father. His own father Walter had died when Dad was a teen-ager. After graduating from high school at fifteen, Dad took care of Grandma Vira’s farm, and Uncle Dingley’s farm ¼ mile away. Because Dad was being the ‘man’ of the house, a younger brother and sister were able to complete college and become teachers. Younger brother Jack chose to become a successful small businessman.

When Dingley died his 120-acre farm was left to my Dad, and that was first home for me and my six brothers and sisters. On our small farm Dad terraced and put in a centrally located big pond for planned water management, all according to latest conservation knowledge through the County Agricultural Stabilization and Conversation Service (ASCS), coordinated throughout Missouri state.

On this diversified farm, we raised corn, soybeans and hay. Part of it was pasture for the dairy herd of 20 Holstein and Jersey cows. These cows produced cream and milk for sale. Mother raised chickens and produced eggs in the new long pole shed that my Dad built. Each year young chickens were purchased. When mature, they were often all slaughtered on the same day. Frozen, they became our family’s poultry meat supply for the coming year.

Dad bought and sold tractors, and miscellaneous trucks and machinery. He would buy things low, often broken, fix them up to sell or trade off. In the eyes of a critic, he might be dismissed as a ‘horse trader’, as if that were something bad. In reality he was shrewd, always alert. Only rarely (maybe never) did he lose money, and his trading income helped his big family.

When I was middle school age he took up traveling livestock feed sales for Lucas Products, a local business. I enjoyed hearing of his sales and training meetings, and I sometimes went with him as he traveled the country from farm to farm. Able to talk to anyone (it seemed to me), he was always looking for new sales prospects. His ease at palaver was aimed at establishing relationships, thereby making  sales. While I remember seeing unproductive visits, I never felt that a door had been closed. Ground had been laid for future business.

Besides conversations and livestock sale barns (always mixing business with pleasure), his main recreation seemed to be hunting coons (raccoons). Again, not wasting time completely, he skinned and sold the hides from animals he caught, simultaneously training and selling the tracking dogs (coon hounds). I remember Spot and ‘Old Blue’ two special dogs that trained the others, and somehow never got sold.

When I was thirteen, Dad bought a bigger 320-acre farm, fifteen miles away in Hopkins. That farm would be terraced in the same modern, for those times, way. It too, would have a farm pond, bigger than our first, as part of the terracing system. As part of a water system for the whole farm, those ponds of ours were fenced to keep livestock out. They were part of a guarded conservation system, more than natural ‘mud holes’.

Our first pond was like a Missouri lake to neighborhood boys. We had no sea shore to go to. Swimming pools were miles away, in towns and for city kids. At our pond, we swam, fished and camped every summer. Older neighbor boys, the Pruitt’s, built a diving board there. Dad always stocked our ponds with Bluegill Crappie and Largemouth Bass, their minnows secured through the County Extension Office. Our ‘fishing’ helped maintain a healthy water environment so it wouldn’t get overpopulated.

In our new neighborhood, Dad went to work again as a traveling salesman for a bigger company, Walnut Grove. He continued the farm’s planning, how all acres would be used, and what would be row crops, pasture or hay. Busy as he was, he always helped with the work too, but that was also a part time job for me as a student. Especially during summers I worked on the farm with chores and crop fieldwork.

The oldest of us seven children, I went to college directly out of High School. One week after graduation I got married and in the Fall went to seminary 2 ½ hours away in Kansas City. Two years later, son Chris was born. Now I had a new young family of my own, and had been accepted at Union Theological Seminary in New York City for doctoral studies,

How I was going to pull it off? The untold possibilities for my future, and the financial commitment, seemed huge. In exploring all my resources, I asked Dad if he could help me. He said he would give me $1000 but he would not be able to do more. This expression of his confidence in me was worth more than the money so valuable then to him and to me.

I got that  PhD in American Religious History, sister Annette has a PhD in Educational Psychology, and sister Kay is a Judge. My four other siblings graduated from college Brothers Mike and Mark are successful businessmen in Texas and Oklahoma. Sister Sue has three beautiful girls, just received a sixth grandchild, and is writing a book on Fairy Tales. Sister Diane, who I always thought was the smartest of us all, is a successful businesswoman in CA, an accomplished poet, and my advisor on computer publishing.

All of us have married and most have children or stepchildren. Only baby Mike (at 52) is too young to have grandchildren. I have lost count of how many times I am a grand uncle. As of last night it was one more.

Dad, everyone can see, was a wonderful man, both in numbers and in his many contributions to our character. From him we learned life was positive and upbeat. His wonderful sense of humor is a family legend. Working hard at everything, he succeeded as father, farmer, salesman, trader, tireless conversationalist and raconteur, grandpa and great grandpa.  Dad has been universally liked, held in high regard in his community and family.

Most important to me, he was a model. None of us are perfect. I suppose he wasn’t, but neither am I. Always looking ahead, ever busy, my 90-year-old Dad was his own man. Under whatever pressures of life, his glass always seemed half full. Isn’t that as good as it gets? I don’t know just when I knew. I may have been a slow learner, but some things about my Dad are clear.

When I was nine years old, I wrote to my Swedish great grandmother Emma Olson in Michigan. She said she was astounded that I was so talented a writer; she said I had to consider writing as a career! She had a seventh grade education, and how she knew my talent and destiny I did not know, but my mother’s side of the family knew she had said it, and she was their matriarch. What I heard was her pride in me. It made me feel good, and made me think about what I might do as an adult.

On Dad’s family side, when fourteen I wrote to my musician uncle Dick. He was my model, and I wanted to be like him. In my rural, emotionally subdued environment, Uncle Dick was educated, talented and flamboyant. When he graduated from college his first car was a 1954 two-tone green and yellow Chevrolet. That seemed like flare to me, and what I wanted to be like.

In response to my letter, at the next family dinner he loudly told everyone that I was clearly gifted and could be a writer if I wanted. In Uncle Dick’s eyes, I could also have become famous as an actor or a musician. According to his description of me I was approaching the cafeteria of life with a huge and effective appetite.

All I needed was to continue to prepare myself. Going to college was a given. I started piano with Uncle Dick when I was six, and the clarinet when I was twelve. I took clarinet lessons, and by the time I was a senior in high school I was a student with John Smay, who taught clarinet at the college I planned to attend. In ninth grade I had Bob Dreher as Music/Band Director for my school. He started a Jazz Band and got me to play tenor saxophone for that. I thought he was good, because he was, and as proof he had his own professional jazz band, Bobby Dreher and his orchestra.

A music career took a different path though. When a senior in High School I lost the contact with my Uncle as a role model. Having planned to major in music in college I instead pursued interests in philosophy, religion, business and economics.

The first time I saw my Uncle after I started college we did not have much time to talk, but he was insistent, “Don’t go into music, there’s no future in it!” Though I stayed with the college orchestra (called band in those days) through senior year, I only did it because leader Ward Rounds caught me each opening registration for classes. When he asked if I were signing up for band I often told him I didn’t think so, but he persuaded me to do it. Even though I told him I wasn’t practicing anymore, he said, “But we need you, you’re so good anyway.” Beyond senior year in college I never played again.

Many years and many academic papers later, I sat with my doctoral dissertation advisor Bob Handy. In an early advisory session he said to me, “You have a gift. What you write in first draft usually needs little revision.”

With this in my background, what people had said and all the academic papers of thirteen years of higher education, I worked for years as a teacher and school administrator in New York and spent years in training as a psychoanalyst. This changed at forty when I became the freshly fired Head of a New York City private school.

Dr. Greenstein gave me a thorough check-up. That included tuning fork hearing tests, flashlights for my eyes to follow side to side then up and down, sharp objects touching each hand and foot while my eyes were closed, a hands-on strength test all over, a look at my latest MRI on a 3×3 screen, a walk across the room holding him on one side and my son on the other. We all sat down again. His written file on me at the nearby table was 1 ½ inches thick.

He looked at me (the new owner of a third electric wheelchair) and said, “ I want you to walk again.” He outlined his plan, and we discussed how he wanted to do it. He said his goal was for me to be able to use my crutches again. I was overwhelmed, that anyone would care so much. My emotions rolled from my eyes down my cheeks. As I said then, “I had never expected to walk again!”

Giving a prescription for Ritalin (at its lowest dose) and one for Physical Therapy (PT) aimed specifically toward walking, he ended the visit saying, “I will see you in a month to evaluate.” Three weeks later PT Charol measured me walking 225 ft. with a walker, taking a rest, and walking back. In four visits Charol had taught me several new leg exercises and we began to run the gauntlet of increasing difficulty. I began wanting to know if my crutches (I had three pairs of Lofstrand) were still stored at my son’s house.

At the one-month follow up with Dr. Greenstein, the Ritalin dosage was increased to 10 mg, 3 times daily at mealtime. He renewed the prescription for Physical Therapy just for walking.

Tomorrow I see him again. Since my last visit I have the first measured walking distance, and my standing time have both more than doubled. I can step sideways and backwards like a clumsy ballerina. The hallway outside my room has hosted a slalom course of paper cups for me to successfully navigate.

During Tuesday’s Physical Therapy I left my room on a walker, opened the door to the hallway and went to the elevator. Taking it downstairs to the living room I rested in a chair and then came back to my room and through the door. Friday, I went down the same elevator, this time continuing to the lunchroom. Sitting in a chair at my table in the far end of that lunchroom I took a break. Then I retraced my steps and took the reverse elevator trip to my room.  I have no negative side effects to report from Ritalin or from increased and new exercises.

PT Charol says we will do the Dining Room routine once more for practice, but after that I might want to try it on my own. Tomorrow, I have a second follow up with Dr. Greenstein.

Hey, I used to say that a good day was being able to stand up and pull my pants up with two hands. Now, I’m beginning to think of myself as a standup guy. No, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and what I have described sometimes seems like training for the Olympics — but look at me; here I stand. (Having read this to a group, I stood before them). 

2004

“Ronnie, stop frowning, when you are older you are going to have lines in your forehead,” fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Dew, said. I didn’t think that I was frowning. What worried me by the time I was nine years old?

I was in a new school. My country school of three years had closed. Now, instead of two in my class (with me being pretty independent), there were 24. Most of them were new. Sharon Linsky seemed smarter than me. Getting to school meant a four mile plus bus ride with lots of other students. That was different from a quarter mile walk up the hill on a country road. All the bathrooms were indoors for the first time in my life. We had organized gym classes three times a week. In winter we played indoors in the gym at recess. While life for sure, that sounds like a lot going on for a nine year old.

I think I worried that my father had more financial obligations, including six children, than he was able to meet. Dad worked all the time. His only recreation was hunting ‘coons’, but he skinned and sold the furs from what he caught. Mom cooked, cleaned and did laundry for nine of us all the time. In the winter her fingers would bleed when she hung clothes on the outside clothesline to ‘freeze-dry’.

In rural America mail was delivered to a box on a rural route. Where we lived, boxes didn’t have numbers, but our address said RR #3. Getting the mail from the box as soon as the mail carrier dropped it off was a minor thrill, as we soon found the answer to, “What came today?” I was about six when I learned that some letters came with a red stamp. When I asked my mother what those were she said they were overdraft notices from the bank.

She explained to me what those were. In rural America, overdrawn checks were mostly not returned, but an overdraft notice was sent to the check’s writer. To a kid sometimes picking up the mail, overdraft notices seemed regular in our mailbox.

The oldest child, as one Christmas approached I asked all of my brothers and sisters to meet me in the living room. Everyone sat on the couch or a chair, facing straight ahead and I was at the front, in charge. “We don’t have very much money,” I began, “With Christmas coming, let’s all try not to ask for much!” Solemn looks returned to me. No one had any questions or comments.

When my father told me I as going to have another younger brother, going from five to six siblings, I think I surprised him by being angry. “Why would you want to do that?” I said,  “We already have enough!” I could tell he was mad. He didn’t hit me. That wasn’t Dad’s way, but the conversation was over.

One other incident, I remember, was when I as working at Barnett’s Hy-Klas grocery. I admired and adored Alva the owner. Once he was behind the checkout counter on one register, checking accounts of those who owed the store money. Some customers, as they checked out, said “Put it on the tab please.” On this day, Alva said to me, “Would you ask your Dad, if he could pay some on his bill?” I was angry and felt humiliated. I would ask Dad I knew, and I did. I didn’t want to and still wish that Alva hadn’t asked that of fifteen year old me.

My frown lines are now permanent. Daily they seem more like etched in stone. I sometimes self-consciously work to make them better by relaxing my forehead and by massaging my brow as I learned in meditation classes. While I can make them better I can’t erase them. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Dew, was right once again, but what she was observing was an way that showed in my face.

When it came time to raise my own family, we had one child. Of my four sisters, two of them had no children; one like me had one child. Did having one child avoid all the problems of a large, poor family? Maybe it did, but no one told my son. What looks like a perfect childhood to me falls short in his mind?

I don’t think there is such a thing as a perfect childhood. Some growing up experiences are better than others, for sure, but perfect is not the human condition. We’ve got to go with what we’ve got. That’s all there is. In my case, I look at where I came from and feel blessed.