I pushed the exit doors of the Milton Sports Dome open and walked out into what part of the day that remained. The darkness and cold were making their mid-November, New York rush the day after the clocks were turned back. I had just watched my youngest daughter play her last high school field hockey game of her career. Although she plans on playing in college there was a melancholy feeling of finality, a literal, and metaphorical end to a season. Although my wife and father had attended the game, I had made the trip solo. My car was parked facing outwards, close to the exit road. As, I started the car engine I knew I was not prepared to head directly home.
The open road was ahead of me and the music was of my choice. No teenage girls blasting Gangster Rap, only the rifts of Jimmy Paige and David Gilmour. In the last six months I have spent much time going back to places, music, books, and people that I had not paid any mind to for years. I have become familiar again with my home town, high school friends, frat brothers, old teachers, even some distant family members. The “Closed” sign I had worn on my chest for 35 years now said “Open for Business”. The clock in my car read 3:44 and without much convincing I made the detoured turn heading for New Paltz. Cruising down Main Street I could see the Mohonk tower sticking up at the top of the mountain. I had ignored it for years, but it was always the monument that marked my home. The village I had come of age in had matured quite a bit . There was more traffic, stores, people, and commercial real estate than I could remember from my youth. Certainly I had driven down Main Street on several occasions the last few years, but today, unlike any other, I was focused on the past.
It didn’t appear that there was much of a change in the Sunday afternoon crowd in Pat and Georges. The tavern was as much a New Paltz landmark as the tower at Mohonk. The majority of the patrons had their eyes on the 12” flat screen TVs scattered about the barroom. I got a little chuckle out of my own thought that my return might somehow interrupt an NFL Sunday at 4:00 P.M. Before I could order my first Corona I heard a voice from 30 years ago, “Hey Mr. Siegel!” I spent seven years in my 20’s teaching and coaching in both Pine Bush and New Paltz, so the call out was not foreign to me. “Oh my God, Mike Johnson,” I was 21 years old when I was a History teacher and J.V. basketball coach in the Pine Bush School district. Mike was a thin, handsome, smooth athlete back then. More than that he was a great kid. He was one of the rare ballplayers to excel at football, basketball, and baseball at a large high school. If all the players had the personality traits of Mike Johnson, coaches would never stop coaching. Thirty-some years later we embraced in a bear hug. Mike might have weighed 160 in high school but today he couldn’t wait to tell me he currently weighed 270.
I met his beautiful girlfriend and the three of us shared more than one too many drinks together. With the football games blaring in the background, I more than willingly listened to Mike fill in the 30 year gap. He never left Pine Bush, didn’t have any kids, didn’t attend college, had a 9-5 job he liked, took up golf and dropped some familiar names he played with. Looking directly at his girlfriend Kelley, he said he had met the love of his life and was happier than he had ever been. It was evident to me that Mike has not run from anything in his life. Unlike his old teacher and coach, he appeared to be free of any demons. He was still friends with the people he grew up with. He was that same wide eyed kid I coached back in 1984. He had discovered love and contentment in his own backyard.
Despite the temperature being in the low 40’s, my car window was all the way down as I navigated my way out of New Paltz and back home to Kingston. I was butchering the 1970’s Boston song, “Don’t look back, a new day is breakin’ it’s been too long since I felt this way.” Don’t look back” had always been one of my motivational mottos in my 20’s 30’s and 40’s. Yet, since the release my book “You Can’t do Both’ on May 1,2014, I have been stuck in some kind of time warp. My metaphoric time machine is stranded in the years 1975-1985 during my high school, college, and formative teaching years. The best guess for this awkward trip back in time is twofold. First, the ages 15-25 are so intense for all of us learning real life lessons with virgin hearts. We are vaulted into the arena to face puberty, the opposite sex, leave home, start a career, and look for long term relationships . We spend the rest of our lives making adjustments and repairing the wounds from those battles. In avoiding facing that period for so long, it was inevitable that I would reach a line and start to head back. Second, at 54 I am consciously afraid of the winter ahead and afraid that I have left something behind from the summer of my youth.
Back in my house on this early Sunday evening I have an epiphany. Mike Johnson represented all the kids I taught, all the kids I coached, and he represented a younger version of myself. I looked on Facebook and saw that at 45, Mike was connected to over 200 of his high school teammates and classmates. They sent notes to each other, shared laughs, their likes, they cared about each other, they looked out for one another. Before the release of my book, my connection to the people in my life from high school was nonexistent. I thought about a picture that I had recently seen of my class at our 35th reunion from the fall of 2013. I had been available for many of the reunion parties and had never gone back. Both in real time and the perspective of my life, it is the late fall; the winter solstice is around the corner. The closer it gets, the more I keep returning to those years I have made such an effort to avoid.
In the present I am well aware Winter is coming, still, I see a 15 year old Mike Johnson more vividly than ever. It is December 21, 1984, and we were in a packed gymnasium in Chester New York. Our J.V. basketball team was undefeated , but the underdog Hamiltonians were giving us more than we could handle. We had been 18 points behind and closed the gap to two in the final minute. I was standing, screaming, imploring, motivating, trying to will victory. For the first time in 30 years, I am in that moment, and I can feel it- quiet and easy going. Mike runs towards me without an invitation. His eyes are wide with fire, his sweaty arms are locked around my neck. His forehead is pressed against mine. He has completely broken the barrier of personal space. “Relax coach we got this.” After all this time, I understand what the player was saying to the coach. Until the game or the season is over, we do have it. We are prepared, we have hope, we have opportunity. I left something behind in the summer of my life. Seeing Mike was another happenstance of late that makes me feel like I am closer to finding it. I know it’s getting later in the game for me personally, but before the snow starts flying I want to go back to Summer. Back to the longest day of the year. The Summer Solstice, a day when you can find strength in what is left behind, a day when there remains the innocence of hope and opportunity ahead; a day when a new season is beginning.
