“Get off the stage, Cash, get off the stage,” Johnny used to say. The country-music legend, known for his growly delivery of born-from-real-life lyrics, found the line between “fairly average” and “truly one-of-a-kind” a razor thin tripwire. In the early 1990s, music producer Rick Rubin began recording Cash singing and strumming in Rubin’s living room. As he asked the musical storyteller to play the songs of his life, Rubin found himself mesmerized by the intimate connectivity of the lyrics pulsing through the man. After a while, the two decided that the informal sessions of self-expression would make an enduring album, so they set up to record. As soon as the light turned red, however, Rubin noticed a change in Cash. The iconic balladeer began performing instead of musically telling his truth.

Part of his heart was missing. 

Aspen trees bow at the base. Almost every single trunk, whether small enough to make a fist around or way too big to encircle even with two fully outstretched hands, has a curve in its trunk that reveals its try. It’s hard to find one of these iconic white main stems that is chopstick straight from the ground to the clouds. And yet, when looked at from a distance, Aspens appear as if a plumb line has been used to plot their path.

Most of us leave an ant trail. We take the same route to work and then back home again...  day after day after day. We have a spot where we grab a coffee, a market where we shop for food, a pew we sit on at church. We have a handful of restaurants where we like to eat, a place where we prefer to get gas, a corner where we buy ice cream. You could jab the spike of a compass at our home address and stretch the pencil arm to trace an arc that delineates the territory where we roam. Occasionally we venture out, but mostly this is where we “live.”  In cities of 100,000... 500,000... 2.5 million, we hang out in our own zones. Most of the houses we pass by look a lot like ours. Most of the cars in the drive-thru where we order our burgers and fries look a lot like ours. It’s like the weather in San Diego: every season is the same.

Sometimes things have to get worse before they can have a chance to get better. Ask anyone going through a home remodel, or chemotherapy, or the reinvention of a golf swing. What’s not great goes to awful enroute to pretty good. And mostly, we accept the detour the same way we accept flying from Oklahoma City to Dallas to get to Minnesota. We do what we need to do to get to where we want to be. Even though it usually takes much longer than we think it should.

We had a reverse sleepover last week, my granddaughter and me. Reverse as in, I pack my toothbrush and go to her turf. We play on her swing, with her toys, in her room with the purple wall (“GG, I love purple, do you love purple?”) and the trundle bed with dinosaur sheets that slides out for sleeping two. 

Despite all that’s crooked and upside-down across the landscape of collegiate sports, Saturdays in the fall are still for football. I love the precision and near perfection of  teams that line up on Sunday, but there’s something about the next-in-lines who take the field the day before that I’m drawn to even more.

Every woman wants to know. Many men, maybe, too. But we don’t hear them asking nearly as much. Not all urgent, anyway, like we do. We pose the question to one another, to the “gurus,” to the Universe at large, our honest yearning squirting out unselfconsciously because we need to know:  How do you balance it all? 

My granddaughter tells me hot and cold are opposites. “Large and small are opposites,” she says, popping the Ps so that each of the three syllables of the word pack an equal punch. “Light and dark are opposites. Fast and slow are opposites. . . .” She can go for days. Her three-year-old brain is creating buckets for where to put things, most of which are cut and dried.

My husband was born in Kansas, but he moved to Wyoming a couple of years before he started school. He was the middle child of schoolteacher parents, so he began kindergarten with one foot already on third base.  What he hadn’t been taught, he’d overheard, and what he hadn’t actually done, he’d watched.  So, no one really should have been surprised at his response when early into semester one of organized schooling, his teacher asked the class to name the four seasons.  A simple question to which he supplied an obvious answer: “Duck, Quail, Pheasant, and Deer.”  One really ought to be more specific if wanting to talk to Dane Coale about temperature and trees. 

Sitting on a park bench in Sausalito looking out into the bay, I couldn’t help but overhear. About ten yards to my left, a lady dressed in Lululemon, white Asics sneakers with arcing pink stripes on the sides, and a ball cap with her ponytail poking through the hole in the back had claimed a seat like mine with a view. She was feverishly talking on her phone.

"Actually, nobody owes you crap." That's what the bumper sticker on the otherwise nondescript Geo Prism at the stoplight in front of me said. I laughed out loud when I read it. Then I started chasing rabbits while waiting for the light to turn to green.

We’re on the bumpy asphalt behind the school building and I am in third grade. Some kids are swinging, some are climbing on the monkey bars, the broody ones are sitting next to the red brick building scowling because they have to be outside in the heat. My friends and I are jumping rope.

“What’s the best piece of coaching advice,” a young wanna-be recently asked me, “you received early in your career?”

“Stand and clap - no matter what - during the play-offs.”

I don’t know if that’s the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given or if it’s simply the one that elbowed its way to the front of my mind, into my throat and past my lips, but it’s been living in my head for over 30 years.

At his 2024 season-ending press conference, Oklahoma City Thunder GM Sam Presti compared the orchestration of a team to the controlling of a mixing board. When producing music, for effect, some sounds need to be softened, some amplified. If all the instruments and voices are at an eleven out of ten, the final product is just noise. Presti spoke specifically about Thunder forward Lou Dort’s willingness to “turn down the volume” - to do less, to “refine” his game rather than “expand” it so that younger players around him had space to become. He said the upside-down gift was that Dort got better because of the downshift. The younger players’ games blossomed given room to root, explore and rise while Dort’s sharpened as his focus tapered to specific skills. The final product was music to everyone’s ears.

She ducked into The Ice Creamatory for a reprieve from the heavy, hot July. Looking more for a distraction from the heat than a particular flavor-of-the-day, she perused the Board of Choices from her end spot in the snaking line. She also checked out the pallet of colors behind the glass of the display case.

Getting started is like trying to burrow a hole in a rock with a needle. There are days when it feels like I can’t possibly get in. The only hope is to out-will the granite. Who will be the first to blink?

I dribbled inbounds. From outside the court boundary where the referee handed me the basketball for the throw-in, I just took off as if someone had lifted the gate to let the ponies run. Understandable for a third grader – maybe – but I wasn’t in third grade. I was in COLLEGE! My faux pas hit me and the man in the striped shirt with a whistle around his neck at precisely the same time - about two steps inside the baseline when I turned back to toss him the ball. Before he could even engage in the mechanics to illustrate the call, I had begun jogging toward the bench while verbally and demonstrably urging my coach to take me out – as if I was the only one in the arena who thought that was a good idea. Surprise to none, I got no argument from him.

It was the only thing I could think to do at the time that might keep me from bleeding out.

Every once in a rare while you get to meet someone you respect and admire from afar only to discover that they are even better in reality than you could have imagined they might be.

I met Jack Nicklaus today.

Our rubric was one thing, two ways, three times. Keep the message simple and clear, deliver it so that it can be both heard and seen, and don’t be so naïve to think that once will be enough. In the throes of a fast-paced basketball game, little is more important than the sharing of information. Accurate intel has to get in, come out and be constantly passed around. Everyone has a hand in it, but the point guard is the one most responsible for making sure the word moves up and down the chain.

In the Oklahoma Women’s Basketball era of Stacey Dales, our games actually started about 50 minutes before the opening tip. During warm-up. Though no one really realized it but us. The way our 6’2'' leader took the floor granted us an immediate advantage over the competition. Opposing coaches and players couldn’t keep their eyes off her. Stace would bounce out onto the court—shoulders thrown back, a “look-out” expression on her face—and the other team would start to wilt. Our point guard made everyone believe that we would win.