When I told my mother I wanted to quit the spelling team—I was ten at the time—she related to me how Mike Tyson never really recovered from getting KO’ed by Buster Douglas. The point, she said, was never to stay down.
Spell “indomitable” she said.
I did.
She nodded like it meant something.
I won’t even subject you to the trauma surrounding my first menstruation. But suffice to say that while the mind tends to block things that it cannot adequately process, I do seem to remember her telling me to get in there and win one for The Gipper.
My sophomore year, when I told her I was having a tough time of it with theater, competitive ceramics, AP classes, and twenty hours a week sacking groceries at the Piggly Wiggly, she related to me how Roger Staubach, legendary Dallas Cowboy’s quarterback, broke his pinkie so many times—fourteen in all—that it looked like a Z.
He broke it fourteen times and he still played, she said. He taped it up and played.
Later, when I was ending things with my first serious college boyfriend, I looked at the phone for a long time. If I called, whose story of triumph or cautionary tale would she trot out? Would it be Greg Louganis, or maybe Daryl Strawberry? Dick Butkis or Satchel Paige?
I never found out.
I still keep in regular contact with her, but whenever she asks how things are, I tell her that things are just dandy.
Couldn’t be better, I say.
