Circle Game - The Plus One

 "As a police wife, I learn every day the value of patience and understanding." Unknown

Unknown.

I can imagine Pat saying this. She was a police wife for twenty-eight years before I retired in 2019. She did the things a police wife does. She sacrificed the way police wives sacrifice.

Uh huh. What do you think she said to her friends, her family members? How do you think "patience and understanding" is defined in a world where her husband worked long and odd hours that wore on him? What sort of things does she think about while her guy is somewhere doing things that often frightened her beyond description?

Well...

I suppose I could go through the usual litany - I worked weird hours, many weekends, holidays... She managed the household, kept the kids quiet and busy, did the menu planning. She put up with the crankiness, the emotional roller coaster the job put us all on. She watched me stare at a pager during birthday parties and knew by the look on my face I had to leave. She was there when the phone rang at 3AM. She was there when a co-worker was killed, and attended the funeral alone while I attended to family issues in New York.

The night my dad passed away we found out as we parked our car so she could march in a parade as a member of a clown brigade. That's right. She put on her costume and makeup, and a happy face for her colleagues and she did what she had to do. My dad would have been proud of her.

I flew to New York several days later, to be with my mom. The first morning I was there I received a call from pregnant daughter Katy from Michigan - she was in the hospital. There was a chance she might lose her baby. There was a chance she might not survive, either. Both were in critical condition.

I called Pat, at what was zero-dark in Colorado. "I need you to be awake, Pat. I need you to understand what I'm going to tell you."

 "Okay, umm." There was a pause, followed by a series of questions - what hospital, who is with her, what happens, now? Finally...

"Do what you have to do. Let me know how I can help." 

That same week we moved out of one house to another. She got the final steps done - the closing, the moving out, the moving in - while I tended to my mom, and Katy (it worked out. Like the cop's kid she is, she did what had to be done. Graham is almost 16 and you'd never know he got off to such a dynamic start). 

It was Christmas time. Moving (with help from lots of friends and family), she got the dogs into kennels and joined me in New York. After the funeral she was staying behind in New York to help my mom during the transition. I returned home... Home.

I had left one house and returned to a different one. The night...early morning hours...I walked in the front door it was the first time as "home." She'd been sick when she left, but there were still decorations put up, stockings hung. It was, in fact, home in a real sense.

We had work ups and downs. I had a pretty spectacular one. "You know, if you'd  talked to me I'd have told you that was a bad idea." That's all she said. No recriminations, no angsting. We moved on. Some months later, it was her turn. "Thank God you got in trouble," she said. "It was good practice. We know how to deal with my stuff."

It's what a cop's wife does. Identify the issue, adopt coping mechanism, enable solution. Rinse, repeat.

Even when retirement is interrupted by a rare and virulent form of cancer.

I left for the hospital... Yeah, there's a story or two.

There was the "Don't dig up the big box of plutonium, Mark" moment that still makes us laugh. The poor doctor was so earnest and we - both of us - laughed and laughed. The cop's wife, with the cop's off-beat sense of humor. Cancer? Well yeah, but there's no reason you can't wield a sense of humor against it.

There was the clear PET scan that made us celebrate. Only one thing to worry about...now. And, there was a dog moment.

We were given detailed instructions about...everything. I was wearing the clothing they recommended, we had arranged our day around the out-patient procedure. Daughter Katy was headed down from Windsor to sit with Pat. It would be simple, straightforward. I was otherwise healthy, I'd tolerate things. There were COVID complications - it was October 2020 - but we were managing them. As a final act prior to leaving, I let the dogs out.

When we let the dogs in at 4:45 AM... They'd both been skunked. And, of course, when the dogs get skunked, everyone shares in the experience. We had to quickly de-skunk them. We had to de-skunk us. How did she react?

Like a cop's wife. Assign tasks. Assemble the necessary supplies. Set priorities. Implement.

Somehow, we arrived at the hospital on time. I was radioactive for a week thereafter, meaning that I stayed sequestered in my office, sleeping on the love seat bed, while she did everything. Oh, the peirogies...

Recovery was bumpy, there were more surgeries. Still, she was there to do what needed to be done. And now...

Tough beginning to the weekly chemo routine. Placement of an IV port. The uncertainty of an unproven new drug that gives hope, but maybe not much else. Was this just preamble to losing her husband?

The recent PET scan suggests the chemo is working better than expected. I read the results off of my patient portal and grasped the strange, wonderful implications immediately. I sent off a few quick text messages and waited for her to come home from dog training. Then my wife of 34 years, my best friend, the love of my life and I embraced and cried together. A lot.

"Okay," she said, wiping tears. "So, what happens, now?"

Because she's a cop's wife.       

  

 

Circle Game - Cop's Kids

 Usually I start a blog with some sort of pithy quote. When I searched "Cop's kids quotes" all Google gave me were "Kindergarten Cop" movie quotes. Somehow - "It's not a tumor" doesn't seem pithy right at the moment.

What is pithy is how hard it has been to give this post its due. I wanted to address something I can be authoritative about. 

I've written, deleted, re-witten and deleted this blog enough to know that the subject matter - Cops' Kids - is less for me to write than for them. One of my daughters has written on the subject - Kung Fu Birthday, and Behind A Badge - she should write more often, btw. Our oldest daughter - It's the Fifty Yard Line about the strong women she grew up around. Their brother could write about being a cop, as well as a cop's kid, if he wasn't so busy.

I can be authoritative about the kids we raised, and what they have done with the lessons imparted by thirty-five years of watching their parents wrestle with a cop's life. To wit:

In an odd turn of events, I learned I would be hospitalized for "observation" after each of the first three chemo/immuno infusions I received as treatment for this new challenge. It is a novel treatment protocol and the side effects are potentially...well, not good. The best place to core out would be in the hospital, so there I would be.

Beth volunteered to take the first overnight - to take time off from work and away from her own family to stay with me in my room. Of course I told her it would be a waste of time. Katy made arrangements to fly in from Oklahoma City to take the second week's stay. It was all very unnecessary, I told them.

Until the first infusion, which put me on the Pain Train the likes of which I'd never known. Thank goodness Beth was there, to advocate for me at points where I was...the right word is delirious. Ultimately, things improved to the point where I could understand what had happened and explain it to the doctors, but for about 48 hours Beth and Pat made sure I got the care I needed, because I was a little loopy.

Katy, who has worked in and around hospitals since her preemie first was delivered in Ann Arbor, MI almost 16 years ago, took the second week. Not only did she speak the language ("We would probably be friends if she lived closer," said my night nurse) but she knew where all the hidden goodies were on the floor - midnight chocolate pudding from the stash? Hell yes. She knew how to unplug the IV gadgets so I could make a nighttime pit stop and get coffee in the morning. And, she made sure that the pain drug protocols we'd established didn't get lost in the nurse handovers.

Matt, dealing with this all from afar (new home, new job, new responsibilities in Houston) kept up a running text dialogue with encouragement, some levity and soliciting information as thing progressed. He volunteered their home as a base, if I needed advanced care at a famous cancer clinic in Houston (not quite yet). If I needed anything to increase my quality of life, he would make it happen

And, there were gifts. Beth found a hospital-approved t-shirt with snaps along the seams - eminently more comfortable than the gowns. She also had a few other things in a basket - eye masks, hand lotion and those great hospital socks. Katy's gift bag included more socks, a notebook and pens, and a 2026 Oklahoma U women's basketball poster. And, snacks.

Matt's contribution was a great mug (delivered at Christmas, between radiation and chemo) that was... Well, apparently I'm the best dad ever. No question. All other dads are losers. Etc. You probably get the drift.

They are cop's kids. "Tell me what needs to get done. You don't need help? Oh... Did it seem like I was asking for permission to help?"

It is a tumor. And when I needed back-up, they showed up, each in their own way.

That's what I know about cop's kids. Self-sufficient, intentional, resourceful, flexible. Ready to step in when Dad has chemo brain. Un-intimidated even in uncertain times. Generous.

I love them all. 

   

Mr. Kidder's Gift

Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing about. Benjamin Franklin

What are your top five favorite books? I'm suggesting this as broadly as you like - most important to you, most entertaining, most informative. If I asked for the list, what would you say? This is what I'd say about one of mine.

It was 1981. I worked "shifts," which meant graves (9PM-7AM) with weekdays off. Since most of the people in my life worked regular people's hours, I had plenty of time on my hands, since it was pre-kids. I suppose I could have done almost anything. Mostly, I read.

The Soul of a New Machine arrived in hand an unlikely choice. I learned early that I was a victim, or was it early practitioner, of "Greer Math." Dad was an engineer, Mom the money-smart daughter of a banker. Me?

"Two plus two? I dunno ... Four-ish?"

So why I would pick up a book about designing and building a computer remains a mystery. Given the circumstances, it was probably a Book of the Month Club selection I failed to reject before the deadline.

As is sometimes the case, Fortuna ineptos favet - fortune favors the inept. The book is not entirely, even primarily, about computers.

It's about the people. It was about personal struggle, corporate wars, "ego, and the money to buy things for yourself and your family." Kidder, who (in the modern vernacular) was embedded with the engineers, was a gifted storyteller. He presents his subjects as distinct individuals, using the most ordinary observations about character traits that are not unique to engineers. In the nuts and bolts of writing, it creates a connection, a rapport, commonality between writer and reader. Writing worth reading.

One of the Data General employees, the machine's architect, is an abrasive, blunt, hard-boiled New Yorker who wears cowboy boots and evidently prefers...insists on ...getting his own way. To him, building the "box" is a giant fuck you to a company he believed had turned its back on both the project and the Massachusetts plant asked to "save the company." He built it, he said years later, to prove the company brass wrong.

Another, the main character (as it were) is a former folk singer, clock-maker and - Kidder met him on a windjammer cruise - literally a "good man in a storm." Tom West was more than just a computer engineer, he was a corporate infighter, a tough-minded manager who would make his company do the right thing when it seemed hard-wired to fail. He tenaciously held upper management at arm's length, allowing his grunt hardware designers and software code writers to bring the machine to life.

"Not everything worth doing is worth doing well," West wrote on his white board in the midst of the project. Was he giving his team permission to cut corners, or reminding a gaggle of early-twenties perfectionists that if something works, overengineering it is a waste of their talents, and time? Kidder lets you decide how to handle a subtle, but powerful life lesson.

The book ends ... I'm tempted to write badly, but here the lesson is broad and repetitive. They have built this wonderful machine that does nearly everything they wanted it to, and breathe new life into their company. And now? "I guess I have to find someone to design the plug," says West. Because the customers will need one.

Kidder passed recently, after a long and successful career writing about real people in the real world. Among the accolades he received was the Pulitzer for Soul. But, no doubt unknown to him, a young police officer opened his book on a day off and discovered an amazing world that had less to do with computers, and everything to  do with how his own future might unfold.

Writing something worth reading. That's what Mr. Kidder did.

Circle Game - Jim Buys a Gun

"Someday, you will be old, and you will be slow, and you will be frail. Someone will ask you what you did in your day, in your prime, when you were young, and strong and fast. You will say you were a New York City fireman. When the day is done and the page is turned, that will be enough." Veteran NYC firefighter Pete Critsimilios addressing fire academy class.

I grew up in... That's sort of subject to definition. I told a person in conversation I grew up "Back East." That was apparently unsat, allegedly because that term suggests there is something superior about The East such that naming the actual state or city is unnecessary.

It was a him thing.

I was born in Philadelphia. We lived in the suburb of Southampton until I was nine, moving to Rochester, New York. College (Boston) in 1972, and finally Colorado in 1977. So, when I say I grew up "Back East" there is validity to that claim.

When Gary Christenson called to say, "Buy a gun" I knew I needed to get right on it. New York laws were complicated enough that owning a handgun involved applications and legal gymnastics and the cops... But, wasn't I going to be a cop?

Greenwood Village gave me a list of approved handguns - all revolvers - and I headed for the nearest gun store. I had to borrow the money from the credit union, since I was all of twenty-four and most of my disposable income went to skiing. But, I was going to work as a cop, and I went to buy a gun.

I found what I thought was just the right firearm - a Smith and Wesson Model 64, .38 cal in stainless steel. It felt comfortable in my hand, was solid and seemed like something a police officer might carry. It was $100, which I could afford. "Okay, I'll take it. What do you need from me?"

"A hundred dollars."

Wait...what? No waiting period, no approval from the local sheriff's department? Not even some kind of letter from Sergeant Christenson that I was being hired by them?

"Where are you from?" the guy asked.

"New York." Nobody can say I'm impervious to lived experience.

"Yeah, that explains it. Nope. Fill out this federal form that says you don't have an arrest record, give me the money and you leave with your new gun. Good luck at Greenwood."

The shock of buying a handgun like that was replaced by a new shock. I was getting into my car carrying a gun. I would soon start my new job (May 1, 1979) and I needed the gun to complete my... Wardrobe?

Bullets. I'd need bullets. But, what kind? When should I load it? Should I practice?

I didn't want to appear naive to my new co-workers, so I didn't ask the hundred questions on my mind. I didn't ask the day Gary and I went to a police supply store to get uniforms. I didn't ask when we went to the small headquarters tucked into the Denver Tech Center off I-25 and Belleview to fill out employment forms and get a bunch of hand-me-down gear. I didn't ask when I got the next shock.

All of the cop cars in the parking lot had shotguns mounted in vertical racks, accessible to the driver.

My handgun was one thing. I'd become somewhat familiar with how it worked. But, a shotgun? A shotgun is a brutish, no joke weapon. The slang - "Scattergun" - means more than scattering the shot contained in the shell. At close range, it scatters the target, too. I was about to climb into a patrol car that contained a shotgun, in case I needed to...shoot someone with it.

Shit had definitely gotten real.

I met my training officer, a guy named Tony who was also from "Back East." I met a guy named Sam, who didn't seem to think much of the fucking new guy. I met a sergeant named Rick, who was nice enough to lend me a holster.

And on my first day wearing the green and tan uniform I got into a police car and went to work.

Tony showed me how to work the car radio (there were no portables), in case something happened to him and I needed to call for help. He showed me how to work the unitrol, the gadget in the car that turned on the overheads and worked the siren. He showed me how to handcuff people, how to make a traffic stop.

Three weeks later, I was on my own - "Working solo." I went to the police academy - 8 weeks at the Colorado Law Enforcement Training Academy in Golden - later in the summer. Yes, you read that right. Three months after I put live ammunition in my handgun, and my shotgun, I received my first formal training. Small agency Colorado law enforcement, 1979.

Before you get the wrong idea, Colorado law has changed dramatically since then. 

Many years later, working for the Lakewood Police Department, assigned to the Training Unit with supervisory responsibilities at the police academy, I would meet many police officers and sheriff's deputies on their first day. They were dressed in suits, they sat in a classroom. We spent the better part of the day (after the "Stars and Bars" had welcomed them to our little shop) establishing the pecking order.

They would meet hundreds of established cops over the next six months of academic and practical training, we told them. Each of their instructors had proven they could handle the street, could survive the hazards involved in policing a free society. Them? No matter who they were, no matter what they'd done - they would have to prove to us they were worthy before they ever put duty rounds (as opposed to practice rounds) in their guns, put on an agency uniform and called in service for field training.

POST standards require certain levels of formal training and certification before anyone can work solo as a cop. Firearms training is demanding. Practice scenarios, law classes... Six months being in classrooms, out on practice fields, always being evaluated, always being assessed. Then, generally sixteen weeks in field training. That's the Twenty-first Century, here in Colorado.

Forty-seven years ago I had been a cop for four months, three of which were live - I was in uniform, on duty. Two and a half of them I was alone in the police car. I was making $9800 a year at a small police department. I was twenty-four, in my prime. I was strong, and fast. I was a working police officer, awaiting certification at the completion of the academy. 

I was sitting with a group of my peers, listening to a veteran officer talk to us informally after an academy run. We were interested in his perspective - what would our careers look like?

"Most of you will not complete careers in law enforcement," the guy said softly. "By the end of five years many of you will have concluded that it isn't for you. That's the usual progression. If you make it past five years...maybe you stay in, promote, do something meaningful. The rest will find another job. That's just the way it is."

That was the most important lesson of those early days. It wasn't a career for everyone. Even those of us in our early twenties, in our prime, at our strongest...

What would the next four years look like, and what conclusion would I draw.?

To be continued... 

 

  

  

Circle Game, continued

Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck):
I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.

James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner):
...Whose car are we gonna take?

"The Town" (2010)

That much thought went into my decision to ride a bicycle across the country. Depending on how long you've known me, your next comment is likely - "The planning stage was a feat of overthinking for the books." Depending on how long you've known me...

I've written profusely about this adventure, and will do so many more times during this 50th year anniversary, Good Lord willing and... All that. We intend to return to the bike trail in Eastern Colorado, camping near Eads and looking eastward across the Plains, as I did so many years ago. Return with the love of my life, the dogs, and the memories of a transformative road that led to...now.

Camp, Day One, Bigfoot Country

There were so many adventures, so many days of wonder and exploration, of finding that I could accomplish something wonderful if I let myself. I've told the story of Jeffrey City, WY and the unabashedly flirtatious teenage girls ("Long Time Gone"). "On Gossamer Wings" put the ride into a life's context.

I wrote two pieces about the late Charles Kuralt ("Preparing for the Road to '76" and "On the Road To '76") and his years-long journey to see an America most people either drive past, fly over or live in without noticing. Right now I miss Charlie, for the balance we desperately need as we are on the road to '26.

Glen Griffin makes a second appearance in "Like a River." Barbara Beck gets a paragraph in "It's the Mileage." Both figured far more prominently in the ride, and in where the "ride" took me afterward. than would be suggested by how many words I've granted them. 

Barbara and I kept in touch, met for a ski week in March 1977, and dated briefly after I'd moved to Colorado later that year (she was a student at DU). This is where the "intellectual exercise" of crafting life themes mentioned previously (Circle Game) collides with Alan Jackson's "Here in the Real World." When hearts get broken... Not fun enough. Not fun at all. But, stick with me. Shit continues to get real, and it's cool.

Glen...

I knew how to ride a bike when I started Bikecentennial, and the months of hockey coaching had given me the legs to begin the journey. Glen taught me how to be a cyclist, how to suffer in the saddle and not make a thing of it. How to solve problems on the road and make light of them. How to tell bike stories that involve you, but aren't about you.

We were in a camp in the Tetons. I'd been in an accident the day before and suffered minor injuries. He prescribed beer, a lot of it. A second group of riders asked if they could share the site with us, and then settled down to have a brew of their own. We were swapping stories, life on the road kinds of stories, and one of the new arrivals turned to me.

"Do you know who he is?" he asked, pointing at Glen.

"Glen."

"He was the road racing champion of California a few years ago."

No wonder I had such a hard time keeping his wheel. He'd told a bunch of race training stories, but never that he'd won a thing.

Some readers, especially those five of you non-family members who know me best (that's an inside joke) are now saying, "Wait a minute. That's a great story but do you really expect us to believe you sat around telling stories with people you hardly knew?" Yes. It was that kind of transformative experience.

Years later, as a bike patrol instructor... The echos of a thousand B76 miles in Glen's company - ha, in his wake - resonated as I tried to teach by example, to impart not just skill but the true love of spending a life on a bike saddle. Show, don't tell. 

We kept in touch for several years after, went skiing together (and he showed me some very interesting M-1 Abrams prototype photos). He sent me a wedding present in 1980, a stained-glass lamp he'd made. I still think of him often.

In Kansas, I learned a valuable lesson about saying "Yes." I was camping, alone, at a rest stop when a pickup truck pulled up. The gregarious, cowboy-hatted obvious rancher got out and struck up a conversation. He was delighted to hear the story, had a million questions and invited me to toss my bike in the back of the truck and join them for dinner at their nearby farm. Whenever I think about him and his very Kansas manners I regret saying no. It's what introverts are inclined to say, and this encounter helped me to say yes more often in life, if only occasionally.

The East Trailhead, Yorktown, VA

Ah, the painfully shy introvert side of me - it took an awful thrashing. People would just walk up to me, or us, and strike up conversations. By us, I mean other riders whom I'd befriended, which in itself was a miracle. We got used to the repetitive questions - most of us used up two sets of tires and, yes, the saddle sometimes made us ache - but tried to be good natured about it. I learned...humility.

My parents and younger brother drove down to Virginia, to pick me up after it was all said and done. I was sitting in the lobby of a hotel when my mom caught sight of me. Her three steps toward me covered the fifty feet in nothing, flat. I had had an adventure. She had worried every day. I would only understand when I had kids of my own. 

I returned home, and enrolled in the police science school at the Rochester Institute of Technology, intending to transfer the credits to Northeastern, to graduate there with my Class of '77 as I had promised my parents. A course in Creative Writing sounded like fun, and it was. It gave me the chance to write a few essays about the summer I'd just experienced. It gave me something far more valuable.

The prof asked me to read one aloud, the story of a rider who was killed on the road. I had passed her group as they gathered at the local police station shortly after she'd died, and then encountered the woman's entry in a guest book. Someone had placed an asterisk next to the writing, noting that she had passed on the highway nearby.

I wrote about the anguish of losing someone to a road accident, how it made us all feel vulnerable. How the bright sunshine of enthusiasm and zest for life contained in the guestbook writing had made it all seem worse. How looking at the beauty around me was muted every time the sound of a vehicle approached from behind.

When I finished, there was silence in the room. The professor said she had encountered one of her assistants weeping at a copier. She'd been given the task of making copies, and had read the essay as the machine droned on.

I think it was the first moment I realized that, perhaps, I might explore being a writer. I had written from my heart, and touched someone.

A little over a year later I found myself in Denver, alone. I'd long since said good bye to Barbara, who returned to California and enrolled at USC. I was working a nothing job that allowed me a small apartment, with an occasional chance to ski. Police departments were hiring, but I was very slowly learning how to answer their oral board questions. It was a painful, often embarrassing process.

I was driving near Washington Park, looking for a place I would visit for one of our client insurance companies - yet another small change case where I interviewed someone on disability. There were crowds standing along the roadway within the park, so I stopped to investigate. Anything to delay a work assignment I hardly relished.

It was a bike race, the 1978 Red Zinger Washington Park Criterium. It was the day I truly fell in love with Colorado.

Less than a year later, I got a call. Maybe the call.

"This is Sergeant Christenson, of the Greenwood Village Police Department. We're ready to hire you. Go buy a gun."

To be continued... 

Circle Game

 First, I wasn’t hearing it. I had 19 different things on my mind, but then I did, and C.J., it was magnificent. It was genius. He built these themes, and at the beginning, it was just an intellectual exercise, which is fun enough, I guess, but then in the fourth movement, he just let it go. I really didn’t think I could be surprised by music anymore. I thought about all the times this guy must’ve heard that his music was no good...

Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen), The West Wing, "Galileo" (2000) 

There are certainly a few things that focus a person. One of them is to have a nurse hold out an IV bag containing this week's bi-specific chemo/immuno infusion and confirm - "Jim Greer, (birthdate) 71..." One can have nineteen different things on their mind and suddenly eighteen of them are bullshit.

The one thing that does not fade away as the nurse accesses the new "IV Port" surgically implanted in my chest is that the fourth movement has been played, for all of the world to see. What is left is reflection on the themes I have built in my life - bicycles, hockey, police work, family. We are, as Joni Mitchell wrote, captives on a carousel of time.

It's easy to write them in that order, because it's the way I built them. Bicycles were part of life from almost the beginning. Riding around our little neighborhood in Southhampton, PA with friends, tinkering (until she passed in 2015 my mom bought me a screwdriver every Christmas, as a reminder), and exploring ever larger circles of my home town.

We moved to Pittsford, NY in 1964 and had an even bigger, more rural environment to explore. My parents bought me an "English" bike - 26 inch wheels and three speeds in the rear hub. My brother Dave chose a purple Huffy Sting Ray, with high-rise handlebars, a banana seat and a 5 speed derailleur. I loved my new ride but the exposed shifting mechanism on the Sting Ray - there was technology to fire an imagination. It began a lifelong obsession.

1968 Schwinn catalog.

I bought my first ten-speed bike with paper route money, a blue Schwinn Continental.
27" wheels, down-tube shifters, hooded brake levers... There was no place I couldn't go - up hills, long rides in the farmlands surrounding Rochester, to work at Ward's Natural Science in the Village...of Pittsford, near the high school. This was not just useful technology. It was freedom.

I also bought skates, a particular kind. A very special kind.

Western New York introduced us to what actual winter looked like, and with it to skating. And hockey. We grew up on the frozen ponds surrounding our neighborhood, and one winter convinced our dad to build a rink in our back yard. My brothers chose wisely - Dave a forward, Mike a defenseman - the "tools of ignorance" fascinated me and I became a goaltender.

I didn't play organized hockey until, giving in to an insistent father's "suggestions" I tried out for the new high school team, expecting to be an early cut. By whatever fates I'll never know the young volunteer coach, a retired Rochester American professional named Don Cherry (you might have heard of him) thought I had some skills. For the next three years I improved from a fair pond hockey player to an established high school starter.

But, I needed goalie skates. As you can see, they are different than those worn by the other players. They are built lower to the ice surface, and are honed flat. Oh, that big plate on the side? The puck still hurt like hell after a "kick save, and a beauty." This is what they looked like, circa 1970.

Which takes us to a day in the fall of 1975.

My youngest brother was trying out for the new high school team - the Pittsford High I'd graduated became Pittsford Sutherland, his school, the new one, Pittsford Mendon... Named after the streets they were on. My dad - "There aren't any war heroes in Rochester they could name them after, for Christ's sake?"

 I took my brother to try-outs and sat down with a book. I was on hiatus - my mom refused to let me say I'd dropped out - from Northeastern University in Boston where I studied criminal justice, preparing for a career in law enforcement. I was working nights as a security guard at Xerox Corp. (1970s Rochester, remember) to make money for the cross-country bike trip I had planned during the Bicentennial summer, which left my afternoons free.

The team's goaltender situation was...fluid. The young coach, in his first years of teaching after growing up on Long Island, consulted with his senior players about how to solve his dilemma. I would later learn the conversation went something like this: "See that guy standing there," one of them said, pointing at me. "He was Pittsford's starting goalie when they went undefeated and won the league championship."

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that has outlasted time, distance and difference of opinion. Two and a half years later, in the booklet distributed at the season-ending banquet, I was "Asst. Coach Greer, who rode his bike across the country last summer and will complete his studies at Northeastern University this spring in anticipation of a law enforcement career."

At that point, it was just an intellectual exercise, which was fun enough. 

To be continued...     

   

Easy Read

 "I was in line behind this man, he was very skinny. I love skinny people, we are all God's children, but he says, 'How small is a small?'"

"It's small. The Mediums are medium, the Large is large. If you have to ask how small a small is you're not hungry enough, come back later. GET OUT OF THE LINE." 

The late John Pinette, at a Phoenix, AZ Dairy Queen.

I monitor my Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) dashboard periodically - meaning I look a couple times a day, to see what's cooking. Usually, it's "Eight-Balls." Zeroes. A few times a month I make a sale or three, or someone reads some pages. When your marketing budget is k-cups and internet access, even something weekly is worth celebrating. Then, there are moments...

Yesterday, someone picked up A Matter of Principle and read it. I mean, they read it. They blew through 477 pages (out of 497), the last twenty of which they polished off today. Holy cow.

There are several explanations for this much, this quickly. Here is the most plausible, derived from several comments and reviews from other James Greer novels.

Principle is an easy read.

How easy is easy?

Amy Painter is a straightforward kind of character. She is happy to share with the reader what's on her mind, and in her heart. She does hero things but doesn't require notice, or accolades. She is a professional without driving the point home unnecessarily.

And fully capable of making a point.

The story isn't complicated. It's believable, a reader can point to people they know who would do the things the characters are doing. They know people like Amy who have stood up when being counted mattered. Then, they look at the trade-offs in their lives and say:

"I'm not hungry enough."

I don't take "It's an easy read" personally. In fact, I glory in it. If it only takes you a day to see what Amy Painter does when confronted by bullies, it leaves you more time to discover what happens to Karen Sorenson when she goes undercover on a sailboat in the Bahamas.