The lady at the airport bookstore in Denver wasn’t wrong. But she wasn’t right either. She said people shouldn’t write in the margins of books. She said books were made to be read-- not written in-- and that marking them up lowered their value. This was information she chose to volunteer as I prepared to take a chance on a New York Times best seller from the display in the front and a random collection of essays I found hiding behind the journals on a crowded shelf in the back. “As a matter of fact,” the chatty salesclerk added, “books that have been written in, cannot be returned and exchanged as part of the bookstore’s share program.” A truth that followed an opinion as it came to her stance on books.

Every spring on the last day of school before summer break, a bittersweet “Hoorah!” lassoed my heart. I was the weird little kid who loved summer but couldn’t wait for fall to come so that I could go back to school. Summer was fantastic--it was basketball camp and softball tournaments and riding my bike and running through a sprinkler in the yard--but I loved school. And I loved all the teachers in it. So much so, that when I grew up, I wanted to be one. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a life.

“What do you do with all your time?” they ask, as if somebody gave me some extra, like a bonus spin on the Price is Right. I know what they mean when they ask, though, and while my insides are always smirking, I hope my mouth isn’t as well. What the curious really want to know is, “Now that you have retired, how do you spend your days?” (And yes, I’m not a fan of the word “retired”, though it does by definition mean “to leave one’s job”.) I have all kinds of answers to the question—however it comes out--in a can inside my mind. And all of them are true. But time isn’t really the prize you get when you jump off the hamster wheel. Though everybody thinks it is.

…Something happens to a man when a baby comes along. Something happens to everyone remotely connected to the baby when a baby comes along, but the shift that occurs in a dad is palpable. It’s like his skin turns inside out. The tough stuff is still there, it’s just way more concentrated in certain areas and way less all inclusive. Suddenly, there are fissures where things can travel in and out.  

I was walking out of the alcove where all the teacher mailboxes were housed at Norman High School when I heard the news. I had just picked up the attendance sheets from my box and was headed hurriedly through the lounge back to my lair in the north gym when a couple of sports junkie teachers who were posted up during their planning period listening to local talk radio shared the news.

“Hey, did you hear that OU is dropping women’s basketball?” they said.

“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.

(The final in the series of three for those walking to “Pomp and Circumstance” this spring…)

I heard a story when I was little. I’m not sure if it was from a preacher in the pulpit or a teacher in a classroom or my Granny while we were hanging the laundry on the line, but it stuck, and I remember it sometimes, usually right after I’m smugly disappointed in whatever I have found.

You will fail. Ouch. I know, but hear me out.  

You will succeed, too.  Some of you in the most extraordinary ways.  But trust me on this, if you’re trying to do much of anything at all you are going to fail.  And it’s not going to be any fun when you do.

The Japanese have a saying that in translation reads: “Fall down 7, get up 8.” I bought a t-shirt with that splattered across the front for my daughter when she was a toddler. It’s a pretty good idea however old you are. 

Over the past couple of years, a lot of traditions have been kicked to the curb. I’m glad the pomp and circumstance of high school graduation isn’t one of them. Something about medieval robes and silly mortarboards held in place by reems of bobby pins says the individuals wearing them are somebody—somebody going somewhere—somebody going somewhere toward something--even if they haven’t figured out the particulars yet. And that is such good news. Their percolating potential gives us all a little gas.

My granddaughter has just learned to wobble-run. She does so, carrying her hands like tiny purses in front of her armpits, where they act as natural backstops that spring out in immediate extension to protect her perfect face. The falling is just part of the moving. She seems to get that instinctively. It’s the price of doing business in an ambulatory life. Crashing doesn’t faze my girl. She just pops right back up like Gumby and goes on her way again. I’m the one on pins and needles. At least once a day I jolt—too late and too far away to prevent disaster. The tiny miracles of near misses punctuate our day.

If you’re reading this, you have one. Or you had one—though I can’t imagine a mom being past tense even if she’s gone. It’s the universal tie that binds, the inextricable link of life. We are because she was.

And is.

And forever more shall be.

Mothers have the most demanding, integral job on the planet—and yet what’s crazy is nobody knows how to do it. None of us. Not even the supermoms who self-profess by the stickers on the SUV’s back glass. We all just grope around in the dark hoping against all hope that we don’t break things as we go. And yet, mothers are supposed to know… how to do things, when to do things, and what the best things are to do. But there’s so much we do not know.

My first tennis coach suggested that we do 90-minute lessons, instead of an hour. He said it always takes at least 5 to 10 minutes to get warmed up, even if you’ve stretched and jogged and your body is ready to go. And, he said, people always quit early, so what we’re left with then is about an hour where we can really get things done.

Then I said, “Hmmm,” while in my head I was thinking, “Who are these people he trains?”

Quit early? Who does that? Stopping before the finish line was not a thing that I signed off on, was accustomed to, or would be doing when I trained. Nonetheless, I was ecstatic with his 90- minute proposition. (More is always better, right?!) I could not wait to dive in.

On an ordinary Wednesday in the spring of 1995, I hustled out the side doors of the gym at Norman High School during my morning planning period to grab a fast-food biscuit from the joint across the street. I drove because it was faster than walking and I had to hurry back for my next class, but I vividly remember thinking, I should have enjoyed the air. Oklahoma weather can be cantankerous, especially in the spring, but April 19th was in the early stages of a picture-perfect day.

One day somebody just decided that there was no longer any reason to put two spaces after a period. And whoever it was didn’t tell anybody. It feels like a secret initiative designed to age shame. I remember when it hit me, and I just couldn’t believe it was a thing. My daughter told me I had too many spaces after my periods, and I of course, responded, “No I don’t.” I was a typing champion. There are things I know some things about.

I wonder if when they built it, they knew what it would become. Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts were iron-willed men on a crusade to create a thing they could see and taste but on earth were unable to find. So maybe. Maybe they had an idea. But it would be impossible to have known then what an icon it would become. When the two men first laid eyes on the abandoned 400 acre Fruitland’s Nursery running parallel to the Savannah River, Jones said it seemed as though “the land had been lying here for years waiting for somebody to lay a golf course on it.”

So they grabbed it, and with the help of Alister MacKenzie, that’s exactly what they did. They built Augusta National’s sweeping fairways between the trees, and layered dogwoods and azaleas in the straw underneath the pines. They used the bends and hills as guideposts; they built water and sand to act as foils. And for the last 88 Aprils, it’s been hard to tell what the “and 1” is at the Master’s, the landscape or the golf.

I figured out what I didn’t want to do with my life in the summer of 1982. In between my junior and senior year of high school I worked in a downtown office for an oil company about 20 miles away from the small town where I lived. I dressed up every morning, made the commute, then sat in an office for 400 hours a day logging numbers for something that had to do with drilling, though I can’t for the life of me remember what. Mostly what I did was sigh a lot and pray for 5 o’clock to roll around.

It’s March and the world’s gone mad. People who don’t even like sports are paying attention. And the NCAA tournament, per usual, is proving to be worth the watch. On both the men’s and women’s sides Davids are slaying Goliaths and players the world never heard of are taking center stage. Possibility’s nectar is so sweet and so strong!

We can’t help but be lured in.

We used to call our staff meetings “Happy Accidents” because the best stuff almost always happened around all the important stuff I had planned. We tripped over it when our paths crossed walking in and out of the room.

Small talk in the doorways often led to big ideas. And afterthoughts in the hallway or in the parking lot on the way to the car frequently paved the way to simple solutions that seemed impossible to find inside the room. The edges of our meetings proved more fertile than the middle ever was. All I had to do was call the caucus, sweet serendipity did the rest.

The recruitment poster cut to the chase:

“Men wanted for hazardous journey to the South Pole. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.”

Not exactly the kind of advertisement that got folks pushing and shoving to get to the front of the line. And yet it did, so says the legend of Sir Ernest Shackleton.

They entered the building respectfully, as if they were going back home for Christmas, but their parents had a new house. Twenty years had passed since they did what they did together, but you wouldn’t know it by the way they looked. Or the way they talked and laughed. I was reminded (like I could ever forget) of the things that made their journey so grand, and how only a sliver of it had to do with how many games they won. These were remarkable women who simply did anything the way they did everything. That much is obvious when you look at them thriving in the middle of their forty-something lives.

One year at the Women’s Basketball Coaches’ Convention that annually surrounds the Women’s Final Four, I was asked to be on a panel at one of the seminars about “Work-Life-Balance”. I was a head coach, and I had a husband and two kids, so I suppose somebody assumed it was something I should know about. Assumptions can be dangerous things.