Vacations and Elections

My wife and I recently returned from a week in Cabo San Lucas. We have vacationed in Mexico countless times, and I have gradually developed a strange love/hate relationship with the country: I love the Mexican people but I hate the country. This isn’t a casual observation; we have traveled to Mexico every few years since 1971, we have stayed in a dozen cities, and I’ve learned an essential truth:

Stripped to its core, Mexico is an open toilet surrounded by beaches.

More precisely, Mexico is a brown toilet surrounded by white beaches. The coastal beaches are white - sparkling, glistening, shimmering, antiseptic white - and the interior is a drab brown desert. The whiteness is shallow – a thin layer of sun-bleached sands and sun screen-coated tourists – but the brown is deep. Centuries deep. Travel a few miles inland from almost any beach and there is little but bone-brown sand and poor brown people and fetid brown fields of vegetables fertilized by anything brown. An open toilet. It’s like falling asleep and waking up in 1732. Some towns somehow manage to be magical, but vast areas are lawless, run by crooked drug smugglers and crooked government officials and crooked crooks.

No wonder Mexicans are so willing to risk crossing the border to get back-breaking work for wages no American would accept. America must seem a more enticing paradise than the one with those 72 virgins that we keep hearing about. (Actually, I’m not so impressed by the virgins. Dennis Miller says that after 6 or 8 virgins, he would want a pro.)

Regardless, we went to Cabo. We needed a vacation. After three years it was finally time to play and we did. As the old expression goes, I may not be as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was. And to tell the truth I was never that good even once so I had a low standard to maintain. Didn’t have to work hard.

Most vacations are memorable for something. This one was most memorable for nothing. By choice we did nothing for eight days. No fishing, no sailing, no hiking, no touring – not even any shopping. We sat by the pool, read books, had quiet meals, and enjoyed each other’s company. It couldn’t have been better.

We came back to the US on Election Day, learned that our connecting flight had been delayed, and spent three hours in a remote LA terminal watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN. I actually shouted “YES!” when CNN showed a large screen with the words “DEMOCRATS WIN CONTROL OF THE HOUSE.” I was thrilled, even though in shouting “yes” I knew that my vacation was over. I had left the imperfect magic of Mexico and come home to America. Home, to the cesspool that passes for American politics. Home, which has become infested with crooked drug smugglers and crooked government officials and crooked crooks. Home, where hooligans masquerading as Republicans have turned the nation’s capital into a kleptocracy. Home. When I saw that the Democrats had taken control of the House of Representatives I rejoiced.

In 2000, I was a Bush admirer. He cleaned Al Gore’s clock twice, even though Gore held the stronger hand each time. However, my admiration didn’t last long. Two years later I learned to despised Bush and his administration, and I’ve mourned for my country as our national debt was doubled, our environment was trashed, our most precious freedoms were eroded under false claims of ‘national security’, and we were subjected to a non-stop barrage of lies told by a disgraceful collection of liars.

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Jay Garner, Mike Brown, Michael Chertoff… they comprise a partial list of the worst presidential appointments in modern history. Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham, Kenneth Blackwell, Mark Foley, Conrad Burns, Richard Pombo, Dennis Hastert, Michael Scanlon, Scooter Libby, Ralph Reed, David Safavian, Grover Norquist, Tom Noe, Jack Abramoff, … Google these names. They comprise a partial list of officials and supporters of the most corrupt party in American history. Democrats have had their share of crooks from LBJ on down, but the current crop of “Republicans” stole control of the legitimate GOP and turned Washington into a third-world-style free candy store. This is an historical consortium of sons of bitches.

Stripped to its core, the Bush White House is an open toilet surrounded by bitches.

The toilet surrounded by bitches was itself surrounded by fools. Far-Right Fools willing to believe anything they read as long as it insults Liberals and the Clintons. Evangelical Fools who worry about the people teaching evolution instead of the people stealing their tax money. Frightened Granny Fools who believe the next terrorist attack will be against their local shopping mall. Frightened of Brown People Fools who believe poor illiterate Mexicans are going to steal their high-tech jobs. Frightened of Gay People Fools who act as if homosexuality is contagious. Unwilling to Pay Their Fair Share of Taxes Fools who believe that the greatest and most powerful country in the world can be run by borrowing from their grandchildren. And let us not forget the assortment of overwhelmingly White Voter-Fools whose numbers peaked at a still-incomprehensible 56 million in 2004.

Excuse me while I take a breath. And a nitro.

I switched from believing Bush was merely ineffective to hating him earlier than most - in September 2002. I stopped trusting him when he suddenly switched topics from Al Qaeda to Iraq and then started chasing a minor dictator instead hunting down America’s Number One Enemy. It was as if Roosevelt, after the sneak attack against Pearl Harbor, had ignored Japan and declared war on Italy. (Imagine this picture: Hitler’s ground forces invade London, Japanese troops march into a defenseless Moscow, but Mussolini swings from his lamppost. And Roosevelt appears in front of a giant sign proclaiming, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!” Now picture Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity holding hands high and shouting, “We’ve won! We can bring the troops home as soon as we can pacify the Italians!”)

In 2002, I argued with both Conservatives and Liberals who bought into the ridiculous line that “We have to fight them there so we won’t have to fight them here.” Apparently, the inconvenient fact that we were fighting “them” where they weren’t didn’t matter. Even my liberal friends accused me of being a leftist appeaser, despite the fact that I’ve been a war hawk since Scoop Jackson converted me in 1972.

In October of 2002 George Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had helped Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda as they planned the 9/11 attack. Utilizing all the international experience I had gained from running an ice cream store and reading an occasional back issue of Time Magazine while waiting to see the dentist, I knew this claim was false. Osama is a fanatical Shiite whose goal is to devolve the world into a single Muslim state; Saddam is a lackadaisical Sunni whose goals were to maintain power and steal oil revenues. These two lunatics would hate each other. If I knew this, why didn’t the President and his advisors?

I write this not to brag but to complain. Everything in the preceding paragraph was common knowledge in 2002. I knew it because literally millions of others knew it. No serious scholar of the Middle East believed that Saddam and Osama had plotted together, just as no serious scholar believed that Saddam had WMDs. However, serious scholars were ignored. Bush et al spread transparent lies about non-enemies, non-existent WMDs, and non-threats from non compos mentis terrorist wannabes, and not just the Wacko Right but the American Center lapped up the entire steaming pile. How did the country get taken in by such obvious deceit?

And how did we allow the worst element of the Right Wing to take control of most of the media even as they whined about Liberals controlling the media? Wild-eyed extremists like Ann Coulter gained a fervent national following by loudly proclaiming, of the Middle East, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity!” Now, looking at the disaster in Iraq caused by similar mutton-headed policies, are there any Conservative leaders with the backbone to publicly call Coulter a sociopathic pinhead? Sure. Just as there are thousands of Mullahs writing fatwas to condemn Osama to death for crimes against Christians and Jews. Cowards all.

As you can see, more than a week after the American public finally came to its senses, I remain angry. Thank G-d the System worked this time. However, if Bush and his Radicals had had a few more years to gerrymander districts, to take away our constitutional rights under the claim of protecting us from big-time terrorists like John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla, to invent new bogus terror alerts to frighten grandma, to erect more straw men to frighten the Evangelicals, to pass more laws allowing warrentless searches, etc, then Radicals would have taken control of our country. The System worked, but it almost didn’t.

Perhaps the worst sin committed by the Bush Administration and the current crop of Republicans is the damage they may have done to the Conservative Movement. This is a strange thing for a lifelong Democrat to write, but the country needs a vigorous Conservative Movement almost as much as it needs a vigorous Liberal Movement. Historically, most great change has come from the American Left. However, the Right has served as a valuable brake, preventing the Left from moving the country too fast or in the wrong direction. Now, given the events of the last six years, I fear that future voters may confuse legitimate Conservatives with the Radical Right-wingers who have driven the country into a hole in the ground. Into an open toilet.

The Bush Administration was a toilet surrounded by liars and fools. Today it is newly surrounded by enthusiastic “Under Construction” signs. Will the Democrats tear down the kleptocracy erected by the Republicans? Some will try. Can they erect something better? Only if they can do what the Bush people were incapable of doing: learning from history. However, if the Dems win the White house in 2008 and control all three Houses, sanity will not last past 2009. We may all move to Mexico.

I have one enduring memento of that vacation. While standing in the shabby AA terminal in LA and watching the scratchy image of Wolf Blitzer on election night, I took out my cell phone to call my son. Then the announcement came from CNN: DEMOCRATS WIN CONTROL OF THE HOUSE. I used the phone to snap a picture of the TV and the image is now my screen saver. Every time I see it, I calm down just a little. But I’m not home yet.

J

It's about Time

My mother passed away three years ago. It was her Time. Recently, going through a box of her personal items, I discovered the photo album from my Bar Mitzvah. Clearly, Mom had leafed through it often yet it seemed unbruised; it had scaled the decades like some casual mountain climber, effortlessly moving forward, unchanging, while those around it turned brown and dry from the sun.

I became a Bar Mitzvah in 1958, upon turning 13, and yet those faces in the old album - unseen for almost fifty years - were fresh and alive. How could that be? Some were faces I have never seen since, some were of people I saw a few months ago, most are dead. And yet here they were, not merely photographs but alive, leaping off the pages to greet their old friend.

I had invited almost everyone from my ninth-grade junior high school class and was not surprised when I instantly recognized every one of them. This would not be true of pictures of classmates from my sixth or twelfth grade classes, or most of college, for that matter. I remember no one and feel no loss. But these pictures of 1958 were different. I entered junior high as a child and left as a tall awkward pile of hormones. No wonder I remembered everyone so clearly – I had known them when my parts suddenly began to function, in a disorganized, thirteen-year old way.

1958 was the first time I realized the power that girls can have over boys twice their size. Boys tended to follow in their wakes, lumbering barges meekly trailing darting jet skis. I did more observing than trailing, as I remember. I did my share of lumbering about, of course; I was a 5’ 8” child wearing size 13 shoes: lumbering came naturally. But so did shyness. It would be years before I was ready to lumber in the right direction. These days, alas, I do a lot more typing than lumbering. Those jet skis are still out there but they are glistening dots on the horizon, unreachable, and not worth squinting into the sun to see.

It’s strange to think of all the people who reside within us as we age. That recently awkward junior high school student is close by, ready to visit at any time, but the agile high school student who followed him disappeared decades ago. The college student is gone – Vanished! Forgotten! - but the young man who hungrily courted the girl who would become his wife and who lived with his parents surrounded by friends who were (and remain) like brothers remains strong and alive within me. That the forgotten college student and the hungry young man were once the same person, inhabiting the same time and place, is not contradictory.

Places remain alive, too. I held the best job of my career from 1972 to 1974. I worked for a division of Rockwell International: the people and the events remain as current as this hour’s lead story on CNN. Memories of more recent jobs have faded but that thirty-year old position at Rockwell seems to have happened yesterday. No, it is as if it continues to happen today, as if I could still get into my car, drive to my office, and go back to work. I clearly remember the projects I was managing and could easily pick up where I left off when the company suddenly collapsed. Like junior high school, that place in Time remains fresh and sweet as a crisp salad, alive and vibrant, crunchy as I savor the memories.

Sometimes I think that Time has a definite shape and direction, depending on our stage in life. As children, Time flowed pipeline straight. Movement was restless, rapid, rushing irrevocably forward. The stream of Time carried us swiftly away from the safe, solid shores of our parents and into the misty rapids of our futures.

Now, Time has become a series of places, geographical places to which I am able to return if I simply travel in the right direction. Junior high school is… just over there! A plane flight and a school bus ride away! My entire class still attends, simultaneously 12 and 13 years old. My parent’s home in 1950’s New York is close by. Close!! Always a few miles from wherever I happen to be if I could but take the right road; they live there now, still in their forties, still vital. The Brooklyn apartment where my wife and I lived in 1968, with the burnt-orange carpeting in the great room and the heavy ever-present chicken soup aroma outside in the hallways and the hot dry incinerator room filled with three-day-old copies of the Sunday Times is waiting for me; I just need to take the IRT to Nostrand Avenue, stop for an egg cream, then wave to the fat funny half-drunk doorman in the building next door. That glorious job with Rockwell, my son Eric’s little league team, our Hebrew school carpool, all remain in some sense real places, not memories. I can come and go at will, like a Jehovah’s Witness canvassing a neighborhood, except no one pretends that they are not home. I am always welcomed into the neighborhoods of my past.

Eric and Molly came by while I was going through Mom’s things. Today, Eric has a lovely house, a growing business, and a wife and son who adore him. His life coalesced so quickly! Yesterday, he lived here and spent every weekend watching TV on our family room couch - a solitary marathon that lasted six lonely years. How did he put together such a successful life from nothing, in such a tiny sliver of Time? I don’t understand it; I’m just proud.

Eric saw me rummaging through the ancient Bar Mitzvah album and quickly our conversation shifted to what we were doing together when he was thirteen, and then sixteen. I mentioned a story about little league, and then about high school, and was astonished by his reply. “It all happened so long ago.” he said. “I’ve forgotten the stories.”

Forgotten? How, when the stories happened so recently, in places so near? Our little league team had a practice a few days ago. I can walk to the field and see our equipment lying on the grass. Eric just returned from high school football practice, and his coach is still his hero. If I walk into the family room and look in just the right direction, I will see him sprawled on the worn mauve leather couch, staring at the TV, with a lovable, drooling, 100-lb Rottweiler nestled like a kitten on his belly. How can he have forgotten these stories? How could the places seem so distant?

At 30, Eric is still shooting through the pipeline of time, with life surging forward in great pulsing leaps. He isn’t old enough to have rediscovered his timescapes, the places he can revisit in safety. When he visits his parent’s house he is forced to slow down, to travel backwards to a lonely, chilly Time from which he bravely escaped. Today, he prefers to have us visit his house, where he is warmed by his wife and his son and his furniture and his cat, and by the hilarious 1958 Chevy station wagon that he bought on E-Bay and now occasionally drives to work. Who owned that now-anachronistic car while I was studying for my Bar Mitzvah? Frankly, I’m not interested. I can easily visit the 1958 of my Bar Mitzvah, but not the 1958 of some stranger’s station wagon.

Sometimes I wonder what Time will be like when my wife and I are much older, when the past becomes the most precious asset we possess. The Pipeline and the geographical places are sturdy structures but Time cannot remain safe and solid forever. It will surely fragment and fracture, a drained glass slipping from our drained fingers. Near the end of life, will crystals of memory drift randomly from the sky like snowflakes, to moisten parchment lips? I’m not afraid, but I wonder.

I return to the Bar Mitzvah album from Time to Time. My mother is always there, vibrant and alive, waiting for my next visit, her love surging through death, rainbow smiles leaping out of black and white photographic emulsions. I did not begin to write seriously until long after her reading career had diminished from reading biographies of every president in the country’s history to skimming through romance novels. However, when writing about the death of Pat Tillman, or about the growth of my sons, or about how I have fought heart disease to a draw, or about the failures of the most incompetent administration in the history of the country we both have loved so much, I know that somehow my mother is with me still, reading over my shoulder. And I know that somewhere in this bald head a thirteen-year old boy wearing a dopey grin is having the time of his life showing off.

© 2006 Jacob Arthur

Pat Tillman and Other Old Friends

Pat Tillman and Other Old Friends

On Mother’s day this year my wife and I went to Sonoma for a three-day weekend. We traveled with old friends we have known and loved for thirty years.

Our friend Elise had heard of a beautiful B&B in Guerneville, a tiny town near the Coast. When she saw that it had a culinary institute on the grounds she booked it immediately. She then carefully downloaded the menus from every other restaurant within 25 miles. Elise has always been a passionate woman; after they met, Derrick had a happily exhausted look for years. However, that was during the Seventies - a different century. Now, during the last few years, food has become her only passion. (Alas, poor Derrick. I knew him when.)

None of us had been to Guerneville before but it didn’t matter – every town in the Sonoma Valley is surrounded by wineries, and each town and each winery is more beautiful than all the others.

Or so I thought. Guerneville is surrounded by slums. Slums, as Derrick put it, that were probably a lot nicer before the white trash moved out.

We turned off highway 101 (beautiful), drove along about 13 miles of vineyards (very beautiful), entered a dark corridor of gloomy trees and then emerged into… a rural slum in Appalachia. Have you ever wondered where your old car went, the one that you drove in 1968? It’s now in a front yard on the outskirts of Guerneville and weeds are growing through the springs in the back seat. Your 1968 garbage is there, too, in case you need a receipt.

Guerneville itself is touristy, not slummy. It is a major destination for lower class middle aged gay men with friendly smiles and bad teeth, most of whom could use a makeover from someone who has a clue about how to dress. Michael Moore, maybe.

Or even me. On our first morning I bought a ridiculous Australian Outback hat to keep the sun off of my ears (and off my bald spot, which now reaches down to my nipples.) I kept getting admiring comments from gay guys who wanted to know where I bought it. “Walk three houses past the house with the Chevy truck in front and the transmission on the front lawn and…”

And so we relaxed. There is something remarkable is spending time with friends you have known and loved for decades - a comfortable bond that new friendships, regardless of the depth of emotion, cannot emulate. We laughed for three days and then came home early Sunday morning, refreshed. Later I saw a fine parallel: we cut short our vacation with friends we met thirty years ago to spend the rest of Mother’s day with a friend I met over fifty years ago.

Roz Silver will be 94 in July. Our sons have long thought of her as their third grandmother, her two grandchildren are more like their cousins than their friends, and Rozzie is an integral part of our family.

For many years, Roz lived two blocks from my parent’s house in New York. Her son Marty was like a second brother to me as we grew up. In 1973 Marty and his wife moved to the SF Bay Area a few months after my wife and I did; his parents soon followed. For years, our boys knew them better than they knew Sharon’s parents or mine.

Marty died of a massive heart attack in 1979. He was 38; there was no warning. His father died three years later and Roz has been alone ever since. Or she could have been alone. Exhibiting an unflinching courage that John McCain would admire, she resolutely created a life for herself within the San Jose community. She is never alone for a holiday; she turns down as many invitations as she accepts. She has grown to look rather weedy but at her core she is an ancient bonsai, bent and scarred and clinging tenaciously to life, rooted in an insignificant plot of land, nourished by the love of people she met long after she turned eighty.

Last year on Yom Kippur, two months after Roz turned 90, many of us broke fast at a friend’s house. I picked up Roz and she spent the night in her usual fashion, entertaining us with wonderful tales about the lives of our own children – stories we had forgotten but that Rozzie remembers with Hubble-like clarity. Around 10 PM one of the women volunteered to drive her home. I walked them out and saw that the woman was driving her son’s SUV, a corn silo on tractor tires, and that there was no way for Roz to climb up. She tried, failed, and laughed, tried, failed, and laughed, failed again, laughed again, then looked up at me for help.

Roz had been a tall, sturdy, muscular woman, and she had looked me straight in the eye for decades. Now, those decades had taken their toll. She looked up at me. Without thinking I picked her up and gently put her into the passenger’s seat. She was fragile as sea foam, and light, light, astonishingly light. Dust mote light. I have heard about the ‘weight of the years’ and always imagined that it was heavy but I was wrong; as Rozzies’ life evaporates it is taking substance away with it. Traces of life, dust from the wings of a butterfly, are gently fluttering away, floating from my frail friend, and rising, rising. And suddenly I too was lighter. Friendship can be a heavy burden but loving an elderly person, and spending time together for the sheer pleasure of her company, had made me buoyant, lightheaded, weightless.

Our extended family is quite large. It includes people I met last year and people we met as children. I love them all, but there is a sparkling durability to the friendships we made as young people that coats them until they glisten.

In 1980, Sharon and I joined a small social group within our synagogue and the parents and children have remained close ever since. We have watched each other’s children grow up and even enter middle-age; we have gone together from starting careers to ending them; we comfort each other. We age together.

Best are the friendships from childhood. I had four extremely good friends in high school and remain close with three of them. One lives in New Jersey, one in North Carolina, and one in Florida yet I have seen them all twice within the last twelve months. Sharon and I are blessed. Love is a constant in our lives.

I think the irresistible force of childhood friendship explains why our son Eric took the death of Pat Tillman so hard. They were together every day of every school year, from kindergarten through high school graduation. They played soccer together at four and five – I was the coach - and then, throughout high school, played on a succession of progressively better football teams.

In 1994, their senior year, when Pat became locally famous for flying tackles, Eric was almost as admired, almost as feared on the field. He was literally the strongest person in the history of Leland High School – he set a record in every lifting category – and he brought that raw strength plus an intellectual dedication to the playing field. As seniors, their modest team won several championship titles that should have been beyond their reach. The team bonded with that irresistible, lifelong bond of youth.

Pat Tillman was the first of Eric’s friends to die. Any cause of death - aneurysm or drive-by shooting - would have been tragic. But dying in such a noble cause was so extraordinary… Eric will still be learning lessons from Pat forty years from now, when he plays with his grandchildren as I do today.
About ten days after Pat was slaughtered (for reasons that remain murky), the City held a memorial service in his honor. The service was a nationwide event, covered by all the networks and carried in its entirety by ESPN. It became a media circus, with speeches by Maria Shriver, John McCain, etc. 3,500 people showed up. Most had never heard of Pat before that week and few cared that he would have hated every minute of the spectacle.

Sharon, Seth, and I chose not to go. We didn’t want a collective memory superimposed over our own. Also, Eric and I had already been interviewed by ABC News and I had been contacted by People Magazine, and I didn’t want to struggle with more questions about a young man I admired but hardly knew. (This shows how pathetically desperate reporters can be – fighting to interview some guy who coached the Fallen Warrior when he was four years old.)

Eric went, as was proper. Just about everyone on that astonishing 1994 Senior Year Leland High School football team went, in grim reunion. At his request I taped the entire service. I tried to avoid watching it but near the end I happened to see Pat’s dad address the crowd and the national audience. I cannot imagine Pat Sr.’s emotions as he thought about his son: high school hero, college all-star, NFL player, Army Ranger, sacrificial lamb. He spoke from prepared notes and I forget what he said. But to this day I remember his last sentence. He wanted to summarize his son’s life and he did so perfectly. He mentioned not one of his young son’s many famous accomplishments. Instead, he reached back to obscurity, to what counted most in his son’s life. He said, “And one last thing to remember. Not even G-d could have made the 1994 Leland High School football team.”

Pat Tillman Sr. is a wonderful if imperfect man. A man with a temper. A brooding sort. But he understood that he was teaching our nation a great lesson. At the end of the day, after fame and accomplishments wither, old friendships remain the most important constants in our lives. We age, but old friendships grow more beautiful.

© Jacob Arthur

On the Death of Pat Tillman

Reflections on Pat Tillman

Most of my friends know the tragic story of Pat Tillman, the NFL player who, after 9/11, walked away from a $3+ million football contract and joined the Army Rangers. Some have written to ask what I know about his death, as if Almaden residents have a secret flow of information from Washington. I know nothing, of course. I learned about his loss soon after the information was released to the public, when I received an e-mail from my son Eric with “Terrible News” in the subject line and a link to an online news service.

Pat was a local boy. He grew up here in San Jose, in a remote portion of the Almaden Valley called Old Almaden. The area is just a few miles south of my house but somehow it remains quite hidden – 99% of the people who live in San Jose do not even know it exists. It is a paradoxical place: a primitive, lost village adjacent to thousands of acres of housing tracts, an abandoned 19^th century mercury mining town located a few miles from the technological center of the planet.

Old Almaden is a paradise for some boys – the kind who aren’t afraid of solitude, who enjoy a few deep friendships, and who live to push their bodies as only boys can. There is very little development - just a few strips of old ramshackle houses, private ranches with pet horses, overgrown shrubbery, and endless miles of hills and canyons, redwood stands and California scrub oaks, and everywhere poison oak for the unwary.

Abandoned mineshafts are scattered through the hills, some carefully sealed and others waiting silently for a careless footstep from an unskilled adventurer. Pat grew up roaming the hills, exploring the forest, developing his remarkable skills, contemplating his world, and never fearing an unexpected fall. Thinking back, it is almost as if he willed his parents to live in Old Almaden, so close to Silicon Valley. Few areas in the world can match the astonishing mixture of raw wilderness and raw intellectual power that surrounded him; few could have been more appropriate for his childhood.

I knew Pat from the time he was 4. He and Eric were the same age; they went to Greystone Elementary School, Bret Harte Junior High School, and Leland High School together, where they played football for four years.

On the field Pat was an extraordinary talent, half the size of my son but with an uncanny ability to dominate a game in a way my boy could never emulate. Somehow, he always knew exactly where the play would be, precisely where the receiver carrying the ball would run. Countless times, as my wife and I would sit in the grandstand watching some poor kid on the other team chugging upfield towards a certain touchdown, Pat would materialize from nowhere, literally flying through the air to tackle his unsuspecting target.

Professional football players occasionally make flying tackles. After they do, they inevitably revel in their accomplishment and often perform a war dance to please the crowd. Pat would simply stand up, help the other boy to his feet, and walk off the field. Grandstanding was as alien to him as suicide bombings.

I didn’t see Pat very often. We would occasionally meet at school or in a store, we would wave to each other, shout, “Hi!” and that was it. He and my son were friendly but not friends; like Pat, Eric has always had a few deep friendships and has not needed more. I kept tabs on Pat’s career, of course. It was unavoidable. The SJ Mercury News followed him with some regularity throughout college, and although he wasn’t a standout in the NFL he was a favorite of the sports writers because of his intelligence.

I often played a small joke while he played in the NFL. I would work into a conversation the fact that I was Pat Tillman’s first coach. I’d brag that I taught him how to size up the field, how to put himself in the middle of the action, and passed on a variety of other athletic skills that in reality I can barely understand, much less teach. Eventually, someone would ask where I coached him – in College? High school? The Pros? And then I would tell the truth – I was his soccer coach when he and my son were four. At the time, it always seemed funny. Now, it seems appropriate – he learned what little I had to teach him when he was too young for first grade.

None of us were surprised to learn that he had volunteered for the Army; it was classic Pat. And none of us were surprised when he died a hero. That too, was classic Pat Tillman.

An hour after Eric sent me the e-mail about Pat’s passing I received a similar e-mail from a friend whose daughter was friendly with both boys. I sent back a note of thanks, and added, “He was an American Hero.” My friend, a retired FBI agent who, like anonymous law enforcement officers everywhere, is an American Hero, replied, “He was my hero.” The national recognition that came a few hours later was wonderful, and comforting to our community.

A few weeks later, while listening to a report on NPR about two anonymous American boys who were blown up while searching for chemical weapons in Iraq, I heard a gleeful Iraqi terrorist repeatedly screaming in fine English, “We destroy the American technology! We destroy the American technology! We destroy what they send here!” I wanted to spit. “Any monkey can destroy things. Human beings build things. What have you built since 1492? Bigger roadside bombs?.”

Pat Tillman gave his life to help monkeys like that ignorant, boastful, bomb-planting terrorist. What a waste.