Bonus chapter, Sins of Liberty
Joe visited one day when Nicky was away at school. The housekeeper and butler were on duty, but they didn’t know who this priest was—a priest could go anywhere with no questions asked, a little like a policeman. Only Catholics worried about them.
I realized as I looked at him that I carried no spark for Joe. We’d had our worries together years earlier, while Nicky was a baby, before George arrived with his ship of rescue. My first husband was now wearing the collar again, sitting on the porch with me and glasses of tea. I adjusted my lavender skirt with its lace trim while he hemmed and hawed about an apology.
My mind wandered then. His failure to provide so many years ago hadn’t offset the love he was generous with, but a mother can’t feed a family on song and words at the table. We came to the calamity of Nicky’s sickness without enough saved to save him, and, being on the outs with the Church, Joe didn’t have access to the diocese’s charity. He had to give us up, when he should have tried harder to give us more.
The wicker chairs squeaked as we moved in them, his more than mine. He crossed and recrossed his legs. The tea cooled in front of us on the glass table. George was a knight at providing, and pretty good at love, too. Here was my first husband, sitting before me, perhaps hoping our love was not lost.
“I want to be forgiven,” he said.
“That’s what a priest is for, silly.” He liked it when I scolded him gently.
“We’re all men, though.”
“I’ve noticed. What’s your point?”
In a flash, it looked like he had found it, his idea. He leaned toward me, not enough to make an eyebrow arch across the street. Just enough to make my heart quicken as it once did.
“A woman can forgive a man, but only if he confesses. I never did confess, not to you, my love. You were my love then.”
“So you want to confess to me. I’m flattered, but no.” I spooned sugar into my tea. “Or not yet, anyway. First you have to confess to yourself. Then, to another priest.”
“Well, there’s Father Frank.”
“That will do, I suppose. Once he’s given you penance—“
“One of the sacraments—“
“Then you can do that penance, and then confess to me. I just think I’d be no good at penances, especially about a sin that was committed against me.”
He picked up his saucer and balanced it while he dropped sugar into the cup. “Montenegrin said, ‘Where there is love there is no sin.’”
“Pretty words. You were always good at that part. There’s sin, or you wouldn’t want to be forgiven. When one priest confesses to another, how’s the penance? Tougher, I’d hope. You fellows, you men, you’re supposed to know better, to act better. Be closer to sacrifices.”
“I wanted to.”
“That was our dilemma, Joe. You weren’t devoted to sacrifice.”
“I wasn’t a brute about it.”
“Not a major point. It feels the same at first, even if your intentions were good, when your partner isn’t pulling their share. I had Nicky, plus a job, somehow.”
He sat in stony silence. “I swear I’ll repair it,” he said after a few moments. “I need your love too badly to let it remain broken.”
“You mean your promise, don’t you?” I wanted to meet him halfway, just to give him a chance at the forgiveness. “Penance. Please. Maybe Frank doesn’t even know how you failed us.”
A tear crept into his eye, and he didn’t wipe it away quickly. “Whatever Frank says, I’ll do.”
“It might be enough for me.”
Trail of Danger
On a day when America was dipped in death, I stared into the eyes of something wild that stood on a forest trail. Our response to the danger determined our hopes for survival.
My contested turf in September of 2001 was in California’s Redwood forest. It came on the day Americans watched death on endless TV loops. The legendary tragedy of 9/11 played on screens that were many miles from our forest trail. The wild eyes belonged to a 800-pound Roosevelt elk, staring out from under 12 points of horns aimed at me and my wife. The three of us — buck, man, and woman — met on a switchback that was not wide enough for all.
Abby and I were on a seven-day anniversary trip as far away as possible from our work in publishing. We planned our week as thoroughly as any meeting might have been scheduled in a Twin Towers office. Our newsletter that we owned was a kind of child to us — we’re a couple without any son or daughter created together, only the blended kids of second marriages. We published stories about business technology, developments that sprang up as relentlessly as the maidenhair ferns lining the Fern Canyon Trail in Redwoods National Park. When we hiked on that deadly day we’d already crossed Home Creek a handful of times, toiling uphill to the crest of the King Mountain range, anxious for the trail’s downslope. Our map promised that the Butler Creek Trail would end on a pristine Pacific beach.
We picked up a climbing pace after about 20 minutes of hard work alongside spruce and redwood trunks, our breath coming regular and deeper, rarely looking up to see what lay in front of us. There’s a point on the trail where the sound of wind through the trees shifts to a rush of waves. That wooded breeze was irregular, while the waves had a rhythm, one we could can match to our heartbeats. I was yearning toward that point of transition, following my wife up the trail and then around the folds of the canyon near the crest. That was when she met the buck head-on. None of us, hikers or beast, were prepared for the day’s danger. This was not Manhattan and never would be as deadly, but our stakes were high.
Everyone froze in place, while only the tree limbs moved in the breeze. The buck blinked furry gray lids across the huge orbs of his eyes, taking us into an uncomprehending gaze. He seemed as unchecked as any jihad of that time. I had been on many trails before and seen nothing so beautiful and dangerous so close. But all the advice I’d read about elk, poring over park brochures, told me to regard any encounter with caution. Males in particular are aggressive and territorial.
Beyond my moment of comprehension, the fear rolled across me like the surf on the beach miles away. I knew the rules with elk, but my wife did not. Her deep experience lay with black bears, dog-like animals that a hiker can cow off a trail with enough noise. Her experience left her without my fear, but standing closer to danger.
Danger, we have seen in the years since that day, can spark a faulty response. Our leaders choose not to respond to terror’s danger by regarding it as a crime, one of enormous and tragic scope. Instead, this danger on America’s trail sparked a war, where thousands more died to defend that day’s deaths aboard jets and inside towering targets.
My wife is as hale and hearty a trail partner as anyone could want. It’s her spirit that makes her such a pleasure to hike with, a beacon to follow into unlit shadows and unwalked paths, like the spirit that Americans have spread worldwide. They fly the flag with their can-do attitudes. But we don’t reach for caution when suddenly come upon things we think we understand. Instead, we plunge ahead with responses we know.
Frozen at an impasse in the steep canyon, my wife simply stepped forward at the buck, then began to tap her hike poles together to badger him away with noise. She wanted him off of the narrow, steep trail.
The buck regarded the approach as an act of war. He dug in his hind hooves and lowered his head several times. It was his signal he was ready to charge. I relayed the message to her in our own language, but she could already see his counter-attack coming on. She pressed flat against the sheer slope of mountain that ran down to the base of the trail. She was a quick study while facing death in the wild, miles from help and with nowhere to escape.
On the opposite side of America that day, thousands faced peril just as unexpected. They responded as instinctively as we did, fleeing their scene of fiery death in Manhattan’s canyons as quickly as my wife fell onto our canyon’s pine-covered slope. For a time on our trail, and in America, there was a pause before the next response. We all pulled together for awhile. It might have been the last time the country felt undivided.
On the trail, we acted as one. Our response was to step back, rethink, and try to understand our situation. Being gored at a spot several hours’ hike from medical help could have been the same as death. The buck wore scars along his flanks where he’d been in battle before. He knew how to attack, as well as how to survive.
Terrorists know the same skills, sharpening their horns on both innocents and foes alike. But our leaders mislabeled those terrorist crimes as war. Terror is as different from war as any elk differs from a black bear.
With her surrender, my wife gave the beast room to drop his battle stance. The longest minutes of my life passed, a time that I felt I could do nothing to help myself. Doing the wrong thing, however, was clearly a far worse choice. Finally the elk ambled downward off the trail to graze, moving just far enough away that we could resume our hike. We took calm and steady steps.
The aftermath of our encounter was exhilarating, once the terror of the stand-off lay behind us. I won’t ever step with the same innocence onto a trail again. Experienced woodsmen would consider that a good thing. Any other hikes along Fern Canyon will feature much more awareness. I won’t build up my stride without regard for the world around me.
A brush with death has lasting effect. When we returned to our lodge that afternoon, we learned how others faced death in America. They were not so fortunate.
Leading our lives heads-down on our trail of plenty, we were stunned to face a wild beast. It was a trail that we thought was tame: our own country. We knew of terror that lived in the wild, elsewhere. We expected it to stay put.
I fear the next sign on the world’s trail will be like the elk’s response. Terrorists’ crimes will escalate to respond to war. Then warlike response will seem as sensible as tapping hike poles before the elk. It’s a sound almost identical to horns being locked in combat.
We’ve seen endless combat since that day. The response is as wrong as if we’d returned to that forest trail with a platoon of elk hunters. Terror must be met with reason and awareness, the weapons of compassion. When we arrived at the beach, the sound of the surf that afternoon washed deep into my soul. Any trip through a forest contains a chance of death. We walk with a ready, steady response at hand. We want to return to our trails, hiking toward a beachy, blissful life.
The Rough Guide to the Texas Book Festival
If you’re headed to the Texas Book Festival, congratulations. You’ll be going to point of the book galaxy that’s 180 degrees offset from the world of ebooks, Amazon and its ilk, or any remote on your coffee table that summons streaming versions of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or Mockingjay. The BookFest is thick with paper books, authors in person, and stories you’ve never heard about but may want to buy and carry home under your arm. And it’s all free, except for the books and the eats.
Location: All around the Texas Capitol, the BookFest is much more of an outdoor event than before. I’ve been going for 15 years, and the Texas House and Senate floors both once hosted the big-name author talks and panels. Now it’s just in the House, but it’s fun to sit in a chair usually occupied by a politician. You always feel like “this government stuff is no big thing.” Massive tents go up on 11th Street, down Congress, and along Colorado Street to the west of the Capitol.
Other talks are inside the Capitol complex. Some venues are small and others take place in the Auditorium, all of it below ground level. The chairs inside are comfy and the distractions few, but the authors speaking are less famous. That’s how you discover a book you didn’t know you’d love though: the unfamiliar. Bring a notepad (old-school) or just open your phone’s notes app. Since you’re a writer you’re sure to hear a line you’ll want to take back to your desk.
Access: Inside spots like the Capitol rooms can be crowded. Line up early for a seat if you’re intent on seeing a particular author. A few years back the BookFest organizers started up a Friends Pass for some of the higher-flying author talks. Pass holders have a VIP line for those talks, but they do open the regular line if there’s nobody in the queue in the Pass line. You can still donate your $100 right up to the moment you arrive to get that Pass.
Kids: The BookFest has been enthusiastic about making programming for children, and we’re not talking just YA here. There are hands-on booths for crafts and sing-alongs and storytime readings. Just about all of the kid activities are outdoors under one tent or another.
Food: You won’t go hungry at a BookFest, with a fleet of food trucks all up and down Congress and in front of the Capitol, too. Cookbook authors demonstrate in the Central Market tent, but alas, there’s no tastings afterward. Save your $6 a bottle and bring your own water. Prices are reasonable for an event that will draw 20,000 readers over a single weekend.
Parking: This is easier than you’d think for a downtown event. The State lots along 15th Street as well as the garages are free, although you want to be careful to avoid reserved spaces in the lots. From 15th it’s a short walk to the Capitol and its rooms.
Books: All you’d want for sale, including many you’d struggle to find for sale elsewhere. The authors with big distribution and traditional publishing contracts have books for sale in the Bookpeople tent. That’s where signings take place for the authors you may know. The indie authors sign at booths in the tents along Colorado. The children’s and cookbook authors sign, too. In the Bookpeople tent you tote the book from the register to the table where the author is inscribing and have your two minutes of one to one with a successful writer. Last year I chatted up Pulitzer winner Jennifer Eagan while she signed a $28 hardback of Manhattan Beach. You can get your signed book personalized with a motto for your work you do on your soon-to-be-finished book.
Indie authors and presses: The most fun (after those personal book moments with the authors) comes in the bazaar tents along Colorado. Individual authors, self-published and doing their own bookselling, man their booths. At about $800 these sales outlets will need to sell more than 80 books over the weekend to let these authors earn back their rent. Just about everybody takes a credit card these days using a phone. If you bring cash they smile brighter, but don’t tote a checkbook (if you can even find yours anymore).
The presses include university imprints selling books from established authors and new and focused voices. Trinity has a polished array of titles, including the likes of the San Antonio Spurs history and Home Ground, the latter an amazing guidebook crammed with geography terms (know the difference between a wash and a draw?). Charms like that abound in the aisles of the book bazaar tents.
Readings: Many authors read from their work and many of them are reading in front of the biggest crowd they’ll ever see. You can go to one reading after another in a revel of author admiration, something pretty much impossible in the world where these usually happen inside bookstores. It’s usually one reading per day in the stores. Be a part of an audience that applauds an author for their work. That kind of affirmation in person is so rare, delicious, and inspiring.
The BookFest always has some surprises from one year to the next so be sure to pick up a copy of the printed guide to learn what’s new. There are handsome book totes all around on the streets to tuck away what you’ve bought. You’ll find books at the BookFest that are virtually out of print, but most of all you’ll find authors. Selling books is complex and hard work. The BookFest is an event to expose authors to audiences using the sizzle of in-person contact. Authors would like to hear your questions at the end of their reading event, so raise your hand and stick around for the session’s finale.
Did I mention it’s free?
It inspires an author to be at this festival of writing. That’s what it’s done for me since 2006. That, and helped me fill a bookcase or two. Go hear an author, buy a book, and tell your friends.
Pip-pip, Mom
May, 2013
It’s a week after Mother’s Day, but this Sunday we lay her to rest is my mother’s day. Since my sorrow is steep I’d better start with just one word. I found a word, one that might tell you how my mom lived. She was a pip, a word with just as many letters in it as mom. A word with more than one definition, just like my mom. The word is British. She would’ve liked that, because her people came from British Isles. Pip, an excellent person. Pip, a crack of a baby bird’s shell. Pip, a small, hard seed in a fruit. Me, my sister, my brothers, we were her fruit. So when you hear somebody called a pip, you know they’re complete, complex, bold.
As bold as any woman who started a new set of children at 30. If you weren’t widowed back in the 1950s, that just wasn’t done, unless you wanted whispers about you and divorce. Ginny Seybold didn’t care about all that. She reached out for what she wanted: love, the feeling of kids like me and my brother Bob, both of us in diapers at once — what they’d call Irish Twins, I suppose — and somehow each one of us balanced on her childbearing hips.
Those hips that would bring my sister into life, into all of our lives, when Ginny was 35 and she had tried three times to deliver her little girl. She wanted to be a mother more than anything that she ever told a story about. And being mostly Irish, she was full of stories. Some of them were not so full of truth, but that’s the way it is with stories — you just want them to be the best they can. She taught me to read, taught Bob, taught Tina. She taught us all about manners, and yes, she even taught us with her mistakes. Because it’s the flaws in all of us that make us beloved. They can even make us teachers, so we can learn to practice compassion.
How much did my mom want to be a mother? I had the luck of the Irish to be able to take her to Ireland, at 75 visiting the Old Saud. And what did she do there in the Emerald? Talked to people, total strangers and especially the ones who pushed the prams with wee ones through the park in Dublin. Or in the grocery, her beloved Smith’s where they all knew her in Vegas. I took her there once for a basket of groceries and followed her around while she reached out for every wee one riding in a basket. As we did, when she’d push us through the aisles of Foodtown and A&P here in the Point, riding in the basket and asking her for a box of animal crackers that we’d eat while she did her shopping for her family.
And because we were small, she would lift us up out of that cart and into the white Plymouth Valiant station wagon. She was as valiant as that car’s name, learning to drive it after Tina was born; driving for the first time under the stern and steady commands of our dad. Not the easiest of partners for her to parent with, and so she protected her family the very best she could. More than a quarter-century after she married him, she lost dad, by his own hand.
And so I saw valiant again, first by just carrying on, and then carrying out everything in that house that we’d all left, everything she’d built over more than two decades of kids: stamp collections, scrapbooks – aw mom, you didn’t throw that out… But someone had to stay on to the end of that house that sits here in the Point, to take care of what was left. Because that’s what parents do.
Then she knew what grandparents do, because my mom came from a time when grandparents lived in your home. Maybe as much as anything, her time as a grandma sealed up her salute as a pip. Needing, striving, reaching for a fresh generation of arms and little hands, sometimes coming too close. The word vicarious is another word that’ll tell you about my mom, because that word’s root is life.
She was vivacious, too, at her very best. She was lively in her latest chapter, like the night when I saw her dance on roller skates at age 52, to the night the banged a tambourine onstage in Vegas, 80 years old and smiling through way too many choruses of the Beatles’ “They Say It’s Your Birthday.” My mom, turning around to look at the cover band playing at that faux Irish pub inside a casino. Turning as if to ask, “Surely you must be done?” And the band looking back at this marvel of a pip, maybe saying, “Wow, I hope I can do that at 80.”
And so later on, when my sister and my brother rescued her from the invalid indignity of oldest age, they brought her back here. To home, where she created our home and our family, where she was a girl without a diploma, a mother without a husband to help, a wife to face down a suicide, and then a double amputee. Through it all, to survive. “She’s like a tank,” my sister would say when we’d talk about her health, here in the last haven that Bob and Tina found for her. And for some good years full of grandchildren and even a great grandchild, she rested in that haven.
On the too-rare visits I would make from Texas, she would travel, too — in her wheelchair. It’s hard to say without tears — and so I hope you’ll forgive me here — how it feels to have your mom wrap her arms around your neck, while you wrap yours around what’s left of her body, as we would move her from chair to car. “I’ve got you you, mom,” we all learned to say. We wouldn’t let her fall. So near the end we got to return that carrying that she gave us as babies, lifting her up into what was left of our lives together.
My mom was a pip, like the tune of an Irish flute, a real person. There’s a prayer that says that a person never dies if they live in the hearts and minds of those who love them. It’s sad to realize those memories are what we all must live upon now, but it’ll be alright. She’d want it to be alright. So I’ve got her, up in there. I’ve got her, right here. I can still feel those arms of hers around me. I’ve got you, mom. Pip-pip.
My Real Father’s Day
June 03, 2019
It is June 3, my genuine and personal Father’s Day. This is the calendar day Dad was born, his birthday that we celebrated in cakes and songs, wrapped in the sweet hugs that children give a father who’s a little lost about when to embrace his growing-older kids. That was my dad, many times, unsure whether the best thing to do and say was to correct and critique, or to praise us without any regard for the truth.
Father’s Day was created by greeting card companies, he would tell us whenever the floating holiday would appear. His day was always June 3, as immovable as his efforts at loving us.
He was born into a world that was already in full roar in June of 1927. His brother was nine years older and his sister five years past him, so Bobby Seybold might have been a surprise baby. He grew up sickly and small for his age, although by the time he became my dad I could never believe he’d ever been small at anything. He could be loud and harsh, or uncork a belly laugh that made me certain that whatever was happening was funny to its core.
I have no clear memories of any particular birthday of his, other than the one I missed because I was away in Army service. I’d been in Texas since November, and in the weeks before June of 1977 I sent him a box of contraband fireworks from Tennessee. I’d driven past fireworks stands on my way back from Ohio, reporting for duty in Killeen, Texas at Fort Hood. Along the way, I got the idea of giving him a box of rockets and roman candles and M-80s.
I sheltered the contraband away until June approached, then simply dumped it into a cardboard box and put the powderkeg into the US Mail. He might have got it during a year when he was at sea, emotionally. Dad was turning 50 in 1977, a birthday when a man sizes up what’s become of him and what remains. It was that way for me, anyway, so perhaps the day gave him pause, too.
One of my cherished photos of Dad is from that day he opened that box. He is professional in his dress, the close-striped collared shirt unbuttoned at the neck, a pair of ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket. He’d been losing weight that year, maybe the result of the depression that pulled him down with its undertow. Yet on the face of this giant chieftain of my life is a childish grin.
In the box was the explosive fun, the same kind he shared with me and with my brother. Daddy shot off firecrackers on the concrete driveway that he poured beside our tract house in Point Place. We’d light the fuses and run together, even if it was just out into the yard. The strings of Black Cat firecrackers, 30 to a rope, were the most fun. He was good at imagining the danger in them, warning us in a steady voice to be ready in case the fuse burned too quickly.
He was good at creating a kind of silence that warned me. Downstairs in his lair, where silence was broken in his workshop only by the sounds of radios and the squealing of just-built circuits, he would escape from us. He loved us in an effort that failed him whenever he spoke to us. He could mimic my mom’s voice, all rich with her notes and melody, that voice of hers not yet rasped away by another 40 years of Pall Malls and Virginia Slims. But my father—we called him Dad to creep closer to his heart, to encourage his nurturing—could not mimic mom’s Irish cheer and benevolent lies. Dad had no script or incantation to send to me, no voice to let him heap praise where it was deserved only in part.
He was quiet and focused in the logic of electronics, the echo of his job in television. He worked at the bench in our basement during the era when TV was the shit, as we would all say someday later about computers and then the Internet. His TV career was like novels were in the 20s, like radio in the 30s, like movies before the Big War and beyond. He loved himself in that silence that he infected our wood-frame house with, the home he painted in Sherwin Williams aqua, a time when such names of paint colors didn’t evoke fruits or confections. His silence was as tactile as play-doh to me.
His 50th birthday was the last the family would ever see. The next year he took his own life. Maybe his fuse burned too quickly for even him to predict. His departure was stunning to me, in large part because I was not at home to watch the undertow.
He made me in ways both great and small, grand and petty. He would have been 92 this year, an age he might have not seen in any case. I cling to the loving lessons of the smile under his brusque mustache, the nights he taught me in the basement photo darkroom, developing the images of family that endured as his legacy.
Charged Up Fatherhood Lessons
My father taught me to respect electricity. Like it was the Pope, to us Catholic boys, but a Pope who could reach out and smack you dead. Dad worked with it all the time — rare was the moment when he simply read a book, or even a magazine, or worked with tools that had no power cord attached. So it was “keep your hand in your back pocket when you touch that wire, so you can ground yourself.” Or it was “touch a wire or a power source with the back of your hand, Ronny. So you won’t clamp down on a live wire with your reflex.” Other kids thought reflexes were what your legs did when a doctor tapped a knee with a little mallet.
Whether my father learned those things that he taught about electricity at the DeVry School of Electronics in Chicago, or the Great Lakes Naval Station as a Seaman First Class while working as a projectionist, or even in Toledo at the hands of an uncle or his father, I don’t know. These rules about electricity stood as a mystery to my Mom. There must’ve been some agreed-upon gender roles in the 1960s. Guys handle the dangers of juice, the power.
My father did not teach me how to comfort a child who’s crying. Tears, maybe he only saw them as a weakness, a sign of failure and defeat. They were as mysterious to him as the electricity was to my mom, the trickle of tears as frightening as the trickle of current off a live wire. She had the knack for comfort on a boo-boo, or after a scary dream in the middle of the night. Did I ever crawl into bed after a scary one? I did.
But pulling back the covers to let me in, that was not a skill my father taught me. You can make your own photographs in a darkroom, he taught me.
“Ronny, here’s how you use an enlarger, projecting that negative down onto the workbench. Here’s an armful of porcelain-lined pans we fill with chemicals, fixer and developer that we mix from powders. We time everything with that wide-faced clock that counts down to a buzzer, its face wearing a gentle painted glow of numbers that shine well under the red safe-lights.”
The artistry came in creating more than the picture in the camera viewfinder. It comes in creating the print in the darkroom — the same place of magic that Ansel Adams perfected to become famous. My father never taught us about Ansel Adams. But he taught me how to begin to practice the craft that made Adams famous. You could only enlarge so much in making a print, and then it would come apart just as surely as any JPEG file when you print it too big today. The first few nights in the darkroom were more errors than trials, and the printing paper from the yellow and orange Kodak boxes was not cheap.
There was a quiet pride my father taught me to take up the stairs to Mom along with those black and white prints, the paper already dried by hanging on a clothesline and then pressed to ensure it wouldn’t curl. He taught me that when you create something in solitary, even under the safe-lights in the dark, you can expect somebody who loves you to praise that work. That she would marvel over it, and over you. But that was the thing he couldn’t teach me, and Mom did: how to praise instead of criticize, how to avoid the urge to say, “there’s always room for improvement,” how finding favor would help as much as finding any fault.
Share success, and score powerful goals
[Written for a 3000 NewsWire Editorial, 2001]
In a season of sunshine and riotous green, I am thinking of ice. It’s not a diversion from the blistering weather of Texas. Here in May that remains more than a month away, thankfully. No, my awareness of ice comes from my son Nick, who visited me last month just as the National Hockey League began its playoffs, the Quest for the Stanley Cup. Nick’s focus on a chilly sport made me aware of the power knowledge carries, and how sharing it might bring bounty for 3000 users.
Nick cares about hockey this year in a way that sparks my own boyhood memories. He’s no boy now, having made a place for himself in Buffalo at 18 and braved the worst winter in 25 years up there. His job with Americorps had him patrolling those snowy streets for hours each day. It’s no wonder he developed an interest in hockey.
He’s serving his volunteer time on the eastern end of the same Great Lake where I grew up, Lake Erie. He brought a passion for the sport back with him to the Texas spring, a season which can pass for summer in places like the Great Lakes. I hadn’t heard anybody reel off point totals, passing percentages and hockey line shifts like Nick since I followed the sport up there as a boy. I spent many nights lying in front of the radio, twiddling the dials to catch WBZ in Boston, hoping for a whisper of the breathless play-by-play of my Bruins. In an era before multiple sports networks and the Internet, the effort of following a distant AM broadcast proved my mettle as a fan.
Back here in Texas, Nick proved his mettle by watching a full game, plus a full overtime period, that I had taped for him while he was out with his girl. It must have been 3 AM when he saw his Dallas Stars win on a goal scored just as time was running out in sudden death.
That my son remains a fan of a Texas hockey team while he lives in Buffalo is a mark of his confidence. To be a Stars fan in Buffalo is something like being an e3000 manager inside Sun Microsystems. A few years back the Sabres played Dallas for the Stanley Cup finals, and Buffalo lost. The loss was debated more than last year’s Florida election results, because Dallas beat Buffalo with a goal scored by a player standing in the crease — a big no-no in hockey, but missed by the refs. To this day, Sabres fans wear shirts around the city that say, “No Goal!”
Nick wears a Dallas Stars jersey. He knows who he is, even in a blizzard of passion for an opposing view. His tenacity reminds me of your passion for your platform, especially among those of you who wear shirts proclaiming its praise.
That passion poured out of him in a wonderful day we spent together, while the Stars played on TV and we watched every minute of it sitting on Abby’s purple leather sofa. There’s something about watching the dreams of your offspring that drives us to look closer, especially at things complex and foreign. Hockey has changed plenty in the 25 years since I last gave it serious notice: helmets are mandatory, teams now track tons of statistics never before noted, and dazzling checks draw the cheers instead of fist-fights.
Nick stayed at my house for most of a week, and so the brimming slate of first-round games was not far from our minds or talk while he visited. I missed him fiercely when he returned to his Buffalo posting, and so found myself tuning in Buffalo and Dallas games even while he was far away. I imagined we were watching the same check, pass or save, and it brought me a little closer to the lad I love.
And so while watching a Buffalo game I found a practice that felt familiar instead of foreign. I recognized it from HP 3000 owners, along with an inverse practice of managers who run 3000 IT departments. Knowledge is powerful when withheld, but more powerful when shared.
See, the Sabres second-round opponent was Pittsburgh, and the Penguins’ star got hurt in the first game. The commentators noted that nobody could find out anything about how injured that star really was. In fact, they said the hockey league has a rule which permits teams to withhold all information about injuries during the playoffs. Several teams have kept opponents guessing about when an injured star might return.
It sounded like the kind of practice I see from the most powerful of e3000 owners: major companies who say little about their IT success. Like State Farm or 3M, General Electric, or Hertz. You hear little from them, even though us reporters keep trying to get their stories. What they know about success, involving HP 3000s, is the source of their power.
This is the kind of belief that keeps your computer one of the best kept secrets in the industry. It’s frustrating to the press, and probably the 3000 division’s marketing types. But the right to secrecy is just as ironclad as any Stanley Cup tradition. I just wonder how essential it is in our more-connected world.
The inverse practice might be steeped in pride, but its real root is generosity. Some IT managers share how much the 3000 has meant to their companies’ success as easy as the ice goes soft in Dallas in the spring. They seem to know that knowledge has a return power when it’s shared. People approach you with their stories when you share what’s at your heart. I have seen it happen at user group conferences, and in messages when I’ve opened my heart here about family, passion and dreams. You get what you give, and a little more, if you’re keeping close account.
If you have a chance to spread some knowledge of your platform’s success, it looks to me like a good strategy. Secrets have their place, but I’m betting more often on the power of sharing. As our 3000 community’s climate heats up through the release of new systems and software, you’ll find your chance to thaw out stories of success. Sharing what works may keep your Cup filled through every season, even those with cooler weather.