It's important to make an effort to be kind

"Only Phineas was never afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone. Other people experienced this fearful shock somewhere, this sighting of the enemy, and so began an obsessive labor of defense, began to parry the menace they saw facing them by developing a particular frame of mind. ...

"All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way -- if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy."

-- JOHN KNOWLES, A Separate Peace, 1959

I read Knowles' wonderful novel before generations of high schoolers had to read it as an assignment. I think it must have been 1961 or maybe '62 when I discovered it, and there are few stories that have meant as much to me over the years.

If all of us -- boys, at least -- were either Finny or Gene, I don't think I knew any of the former. Nearly 60 years later, I'm still not sure I have.

He was a young man with complete confidence in himself, someone who never had to make himself feel better by making someone else feel bad. If he teased people at all, it was to encourage them to rise above themselves.

Oh, to have been a Phineas.

Oh, to have been a person who never tried to make himself feel better by making someone else feel worse.

For most of my teens and 20s, I was not a very nice person. I was the worst to my younger siblings, inventing a veritable dictionary of nicknames that were not designed to make them feel good. There is no way I can ever take any of that back.

I can try and have tried to be better.

I got a very pleasant surprise a year or so ago when I was talking on the phone with my youngest sister about an ongoing family dispute I have not really been a part of. I made some sympathetic comments and said I would try and be part of the solution after it was over.

"What a surprise that you turned out to be the kind one," she said.

I may never be Phineas, but I can be -- and am -- better than I was.

And that's something.

***

Our moral leader

If kindness -- and yes, class -- is in short supply these days, part of the problem is that people we expect to be role models are anything but.

We have always looked for our president to epitomize the best in America, to be someone who makes us proud.

Instead we have Donald Trump.

Enough said.

Fifty years ago, but still so vivid in my memory

I love listening to Harry Chapin.

I saw him twice in concert, and I think at one time or another I've owned nearly all of his albums. He died at the age of 38, which cost the world another 30-40 years of great songs. Maybe even more if Chapin had been as prolific as his hero, Pete Seeger.

Anyway, there's one song that always touched my heart and evoked strong, wonderful memories. Chapin's "Old College Avenue" tells the story of a young man's first love affair while in college, and it always makes me think of the winter of 1969-70, when I was at George Washington University.



Her name was Shelley. She was 18 and beautiful and I was 19 turning to 20 and still pretty innocent when it came to girls.

We had a winter and a spring together, but we didn't survive a summer apart. We did so many things together, goofy things like walking in the rain and eating pizza at 3 a.m. and wonderful, optimistic things like falling in love and planning a future that never came.

America drifting apart into two different nations

Note: This is a piece that originally appeared on a different Website in the Summer of 2008. I thought it might be appropriate in 2019.

I remember a conversation I had with my grandmother in the last year or so before she died.

My grandmother, Florence Kindinger, in 1960

She was born in 1895 and lived until 1990, and amazing changes took place during her life. When she was born, the telephone and the electric light were still relatively new; most folks in small towns didn't have either.

The very first automobiles were being built, but 99 percent of Americans hadn't even seen one. Motion pictures were still a few years away, and radio and television, airplanes and computers, were still off on the distant horizon.

In her lifetime, men went to the moon.

I'm nowhere near 94 yet, but I've been thinking about the ways our country has changed since my own birth in 1949. Many of them aren't as dramatic -- planes fly faster, computers do more with less space, there are a lot more channels of television and things that weren't portable are now.

But not all the changes have been positive ones; indeed, many of the things we would call "progress" have actually served to balkanize us and divide us from one another.

I always get a kick out of comedian Jeff Foxworthy talking about growing up in the '50s and '60s and saying kids had it tough because there were only three channels of television -- ABC, CBS and NBC.

"And if the president was on, your evening was shot."

Now there are hundreds of channels, on all the time, and a hit show is lucky to garner 20 percent of the audience. You can watch television for women (Lifetime), for kids (Nickleodeon), for guys (Spike), or for almost any interest group you can imagine.

So nobody watches the same show.

Nobody has the same frame of reference anymore.

But on January 19, 1953, 44 million Americans, nearly 72 percent of the audience, watched the episode of "I Love Lucy" in which she gave birth to her first child.

Think about it. Seventy-two percent of the audience. Super Bowls don't draw that well; the Olympics or the Academy Awards would kill for that kind of viewership.

I started thinking about this yesterday when I found the YouTube clip of Sarah Brightman singing on the Johnny Carson show in 1991. I can't remember the last time I heard someone reference something that happened on late-night television, but there was a time when folks who were still awake at 11:30 p.m. tuned to NBC so they could at least hear Carson's monologue before falling asleep.

Are we one country anymore? I don't know. I've heard so much about red states and blue states that I'm starting to hate those colors. But we're far more divided than that. We're secular America and Christian America. We're beer America and wine America. We're meat America and vegetarian America.

2019 update: And of course, the greatest division of them all, Trump America and non-Trump America.

Is there anything other than a 232-year-old idea that still holds us together?

2019 update: 243 now.

I wonder.

After all these years, not so strange to be 70

It was the spring of 1968 and I was about halfway through what I'd have to say was one of the three or four worst years of my life.

I had been at the University of Virginia for more than six months. My grades were beyond atrocious and I hadn't made a single friend. Pretty much all I had was the music, and when Simon & Garfunkel came out with their long-awaited "Bookends" album, I found myself listening to it again and again.

The song that touched me the most was "America," about a couple who went on the road "to look for America," something a lot of us thought of doing back then. I was 18 going on 13 and desperately unhappy. If "Old Friends" and its wonderful line, "How terribly strange to be 70," didn't much register with me, it's probably because I never thought I would ever see 70.

Heck, I didn't think I would see 30.

Was the day of greatest success as far back as 1967?

I had an odd question pop into my mind recently.

What was the happiest day of my life that didn't involve other people?

So that rules out falling in love, wedding days, anything involving children or other family members.

Senior year

As trite or even corny as it might seem at first, the day I came up with was the first time I was ever on television. I don't remember the exact date, but it was in April 1967 as my senior year of high school was winding down.

The story began in the late spring of 1966. "It's Academic" was a fixture in Washington, D.C., a high school version of the "College Bowl" quiz show. Each D.C. area high school sent a group of juniors down to the WRC/NBC studio to try out for the show.

I believe there were 15-20 in our group, and we sat in a semicircle facing the questioner. It took about an hour, and one of our guys -- let's call him Ralph -- dominated the hour by answering 25 questions correctly -- and first, of course.

One year after, let's be happy for Cheryl

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of one of the worst days of my life.

Not for anything that happened to me and not because it was the 55th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Nothing like that.

Instead, I opened a message on Facebook from one of my closest friends in the world.

"Cheryl died today."

His wife of 39 years.

The mother of his three children, a woman who had been ill one way or another for most of her adult life. Her three kids -- a boy and two girls -- are older than she was when she got married in 1979. She considered being a mom the great joy of her life, but she didn't make it to grandmother.

People talk about three score and 10 as the expected Biblical lifespan. Cheryl didn't get the 10, and however long Mickey and their three children live, all they will have from her is memories.

It's not enough, but it isn't nothing either.

Unless Cheryl was mistaken in her beliefs -- beliefs I agree with, by the way -- she is happier now than she has ever been. In Paradise with Jesus and looking forward to the day she is reunited with her loved ones.

All the bad stuff -- fear, anxieties and the rest -- is gone now.

Or so we believe.

Instead of saying how much we miss her, we should say how happy we are she finished strong. How glad we are we have a friend to put in a good word for us.

I'm reminded of a short poem in one of Allen Drury's last books, the thoughts of an elderly man just before dying.

"The course is run, the race is done.
"I hardly knew it had begun
"... Son of a gun!"

How to end this?

There's really only one thing that comes to mind.

"Happy first birthday in Heaven, my friend. Maybe you live a billion years ... and more."

Worst day of the year? Maybe, but what a great year

"People ask me what I do in winter when there is no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

-- Hall of Famer ROGERS HORNSBY

We are the champions.

If the best day of the year for a baseball fan is Opening Day, it's pretty obvious which day is the worst.

It's the day you wake up and realize the World Series is over and there will be no more ballgames that mean anything for five months.

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the ball alone."

It's a shame Bart Giamatti didn't live longer. He had the mind of a philosopher and the soul of a poet.

I have loved baseball longer than most people have been alive.

As a kid in southwestern Ohio, my first favorite team was the Cincinnati Reds. I was overjoyed when they won the National League pennant in 1961, even though all that did was put them in line to be slaughtered by one of the greatest Yankee teams.

I have always been a voracious reader, and I have devoured baseball fiction whenever I could.

I remember the Duane Decker books in the '50s, a series that went position by position through a Yankees-like team called the Blue Sox. I would love to acquire some of them, but even used versions are $150 or more per book.

I read all of Clair Bee's Chip Hilton books and John R. Tunis's books about a fictionalized version of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Whe[n I was a little older and more mature, I discovered Mark Harris's incredible books about Henry Wiggen. When the middle one was made into a movie, "Bang the Drum Slowly" became one of my very favorite films.

Of course I read a lot of non-fiction as well, and one of the highlights of the early part of my sportswriting career was the three hours I spent in April 1983 in my kitchen talking with the great Roger Kahn while he drank most of a fifth of my vodka to keep away the cold.

My goal was always to cover a major league team as a traveling beat writer, and while that never happened, I did spend the 1990 and 1991 seasons covering all the Dodgers' home games.

Half a loaf, I suppose.

In 1995, I did cover all the games -- home and away -- of a baseball team, but it was the Class A Rancho Cucamonga Quakes of the California League.

I saw the rarest play in baseball that season -- an unassisted triple play. Runners on first and second, no outs. Batter hits a low line drive up the middle on a hit-and-run play.

Second baseman spears the line drive for one out, steps on second for the second out and tags the runner coming in from first for the third out.

Most baseball fans have never seen that in person.

Today is the day after another season has ended. As bad as that is, this season was something special. It ended last night in Houston with the team I care about the most -- the Washington Nationals -- winning the World Series for the first time in franchise history.

Not just winning, either. Fighting hard after a slow start to get to the playoffs and then coming from behind time and time again to stave off elimination and win.

Some wonderful memories to savor as I stare out the window this winter and wait for spring.