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Friday, Nov 21, 2008
It was the wisest decision of my life -- and not just because she tolerates cheerleader ogling and other male vices.
Dec 5, 2005 | So I hauled my aging carcass out of bed just before dawn one morning last summer, something I do as rarely as possible. After staying up to catch the late edition of "SportsCenter," it's hard hitting the floor that early. But it was my morning to feed horses out at my friend Randy's farm, a chore I do in return for boarding my two middle-aged geldings there. Actually, it's a pleasant ritual. My big buddies are always glad to see the man with the feed bucket coming. Also, in Arkansas, where I live, it was getting on toward that time of year when the hours around dawn are the only bearable time of day to be outdoors.
The date, which I remember precisely for reasons that will presently become clear, was June 10, 2005. I got back to the house around 8:30 a.m. and was mildly surprised to find my wife, Diane, pottering around in the kitchen. It seemed she'd taken the day off from her job as a hospital administrator.
"Oh, man, that's great," I said. "You know what today is, right?"
She turned with a heart-melting smile and embraced me. Diane's got one of those faces that appear almost sad in repose, but lights up when she smiles. It still knocks me out.
"Yes, it's our anniversary," she said. "Thirty-eight years. Can you believe it?"
"And I'm still crazy about you," I affirmed, nuzzling her hair while listening to the sound of angel's wings beating over my head. The angels that saved my sorry ass.
Because I wasn't talking about our anniversary at all, which I had, of course, forgotten. I'd marked the SOB on my office calendar in red ink, then couldn't read my own handwriting. No, I was referring to the first Chicago Cubs-Boston Red Sox game since the 1918 World Series, due to be televised that afternoon on WGN-TV. I'd already checked the Chicago weather report online. It was definitely going to happen. As a passionate fan of both teams -- and baseball means more to me today than it did when I was 10, the year Willie Mays and the New York Giants swept the World Series, when baseball meant everything -- I didn't know who I wanted to win. I guess I thought the Cubs needed it worse.
Well, the Cubs always need it worse, don't they? Anyway, here's the punch line: She watched the game with me. Wouldn't have missed it. Greg Maddux was pitching, and Diane rarely misses a Maddux start. She admires his finesse, competitive zeal, and cunning. She's bemused by Maddux's wry, card sharp's expression as he peers in to take the sign, and the graceful way he fields his position. She likes it that he knows how to bunt, and to execute the hit and run. She even thinks it's funny the way Maddux barks out a quick "fuck" when somebody takes him deep. Finally, Diane thinks Greg Maddux is seriously cute, and if he'd consider a fling with a woman not quite old enough to be his mother
Well, let's not go there. The blessed fact is that I married a coach's daughter, one of the wisest decisions of my life. Not that it was entirely a rational act, understand. We met at a reception for incoming grad students at the University of Virginia. I was this New Jersey Irish kid, fresh off the turnpike. If I close my eyes, I can still see her standing there in a little cotton shirtwaist dress, and recall how exotic she seemed to me then: small, brunet, hazel-eyed, intangibly Southern and intensely feminine, to put it very politely. I probably wouldn't have approached her on my own, but the dean, a fellow Arkansan, decided to have some fun with us. Steering Diane by the elbow, he presented her to me and a beaky, red-haired New Yorker I'd been talking to.
"Mr. O'Connell graduated from Notre Dame. Mr. Lyons is from Rutgers University. Miss Haynie is a graduate of Hendrix College," he said. Turning to me, he asked, "Mr. Lyons, have you ever heard of Hendrix College?"
In those days, I pondered college football scores the way some people study the Kabbalah. I'd heard of Transylvania, Slippery Rock and Hampden-Sydney, but not Hendrix. "Dean Younger," I guessed, "they must not play football." She gave a happy, unaffected laugh and my heart turned over. Hendrix, a Methodist liberal arts school in Conway, Ark., had dropped football a year before she enrolled. The coach's daughter thought it perfectly normal that my knowledge of academia derived from the sports page. Some months later, I ran into her on campus and she let me know she no longer had a boyfriend. On our first date, she told me about her daddy, and how much my little joke had put her at ease. By the end of the second, I was pretty far gone. After she got us tickets to the fourth and deciding game of the 1966 World Series, courtesy of her childhood friend (and her dad's best player) Baltimore Orioles third baseman Brooks Robinson, I decided I'd better marry her quick before she got away.
Diane's parents had met at LSU, where he was a baseball and basketball jock from Arkansas and her mother a phys ed major. She'd grown up on school buses filled with wisecracking teenage baseball players, as her father's American Legion Team, the Little Rock "Doughboys," traveled all over Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas. They finished second in the nationals one year. Brooks Robinson -- genuinely the nicest guy in the world, as everybody says -- had been Diane's first major, unrequited crush. (She was 13, he 18.) She'd even forged his signature to a photo and showed it around until another girl asked why he'd given her a newspaper clipping. One of the proudest moments in her father, George Haynie's, life was attending Brooks' induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. At his funeral two years ago, her daddy's old players stood up -- most in their 50s and 60s by then -- identified themselves by position and year, and said a few words about all Coach Haynie had done for them. It was terribly moving.
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