“Who’s Mike?” she asked.

“A basketball coach we first had in junior high AAU basketball.”

“What made you think of him?”

“He made us feel like anything was possible.  I wasn’t talented, but he believed in me.  In exchange I gave him everything I had.  I wonder what happened to that kid and his effort sometimes.  He used to call me the whirling dervish.”

“Sounds ferocious.”

“I was constantly in a state of falling down.

He taught us man to man, obscure zone defenses, and a full court press for each.  The teams we played against knew only the 2-3 or man to man.  Perhaps they knew one full court press.  We quickly understood the importance of knowledge, and the advantage to be had by aggressively putting it to use.

We had a kid so talented, Mike would have the rest of us set up in the press, then he would give the ball to Ryan and have him break it.  He taught us respect for one another.

There was a kid who got nervous anytime he had to go in.  One game we were down to six players with a quarter and a half to go.  The kid had a long time to think about it.  One of us finally fouled out, and Mike looked to the bench and found him white as a ghost.

‘You only have four out here, Coach,’ said the ref.  ‘He needs to come in.’

‘Those four can handle themselves.  Let me talk to my guy here for a second or two.’  Mike draped his arm around him and cracked a joke in his ear.”

“What happened to Mike?”

“He wore his heart out.  He’d always been a heavy smoker.  There was something about him that seemed to love the anxiety and stress of life.  He was born to be a coach.  It was his calling.  Hip deep in the thick of it, always making adjustments.

I remember going into see him in the hospital.  He was gray.  As a boy I found it hard to believe how a strong man could suddenly look so weak.  Then he opened his mouth.  He was as cantankerous as ever.  Still in the thick of it, making adjustments.  Undefeated.  All heart.

He got his transplant.  He quit smoking for quite awhile.  He set some goals for the rest of his life.  He died over ten years ago.”

“What sticks with you?”

“Mike had asked them to play ‘My Way’ at his funeral.  The pastor obliged.  I was twenty something and still a kid.  I thought the song was about pride.   Years later it struck me that for Mike maybe it was simply about him knowing who he was.  Not many know that about themselves.

We played for him.  Some coaches only desire that.  We played for each other.  Some coaches understand that.  I think what Mike most wanted was for us to play for ourselves.  Few really get that.”

“So he wasn’t a ‘there’s no I in team’ guy?”

“I don’t think he would have known how you could function in a team without knowing your own strengths and weaknesses.  He knew his.  He knew ours.  He knew something about who we could be.”

“Sounds like he made an impression.”

“I loved him.  He loved us.”

I first met Barry Dunn in 2010. It was at a leadership program sponsored by the American Simmental Association, and it was hosted by South Dakota State University. He had just become he Dean of the College of Agriculture and Biological Sciences. He’s since become the president of the school itself.

I recall him to be a slight man, tall and thin. He wore wire rim glasses. It all made it hard to picture him working cows. There didn’t seem to be an ounce of profanity in him.

I was there to learn new things. I suppose I thought I already knew a great deal at the time. A few of the things I thought I knew, I still know. One is that the cattle business is a people business.

The topic he chose to discuss was related to cattle production. Its application went far beyond that, however. Occasionally, I am able to dust it off and make some use of it.

“Have any of you heard of the idea of Systems Theory?”

I hadn’t. If anyone else in the room had, they decided to keep it to themselves.

“Systems Theory is an idea that has been around for awhile. It pops in a lot of places, and can be found in several of the sciences. The idea is that in order to properly understand something, we need to look at how the thing or individual functions and is impacted by the whole of the system it is in.

The popular author, Malcom Gladwell, uses the following story to describe the ideas of Systems Theory. It goes something like this:

On the most basic level there are two types of systems in life: simple and complex. The simple system works along the following lines: You are in your house. You are cold. You turn the thermostat up. You are warm.

The complex system, on the other hand, functions as follows: You are in your house. You are cold. You turn the thermostat up. You get colder.

We spend most of our lives convinced that we live in simple systems. What we fail to see is that most of the systems we are in are actually complex. In such a manner, we spend our time actively working against that which we most desire.”

from the comfort of my house
across a slickened stoop
into the brown grass
that laid in an icy tomb
with a silent hint of green
glistening its way through
ventured I in the January rain
into a frozen world
on the day for MLK

the only sound to rise
against the murmur of the mist
was the cattle who milled
discontented against the trees
and in the heat of living
kept the ice at bay
I thought of people
in another day

headed home from town later
on six lanes that lay new
built to carry those
who hadn’t got there yet
every star extinguished
by this icy mist
in the comfort of the car
heat and noise within

I met Gary Bailey while I was a student at the University of Iowa.  He was an associate professor in religion.  I first met him when he assumed instructing the tail end of a course taught by the college’s most popular professor, a rabbi named Jay Holstein.

Holstein had an abrupt, drill-instructor type style.  He paced.  There was a cadence to how he spoke.  He’d occasionally force a stutter to keep the beat.  He swore like a sailor.  When Bailey came in after him, the class would find he possessed nearly all the same eccentricities as Holstein, minus, perhaps, the profanity.

It was so uncanny, within 10 minutes of the start of his first lecture, you could hear the scoff from the several hundred kids in the auditorium.

“What’s this guy trying to do, imitate the last guy?”  Attendance would drop by the score.

The assumption of the students was natural. What I would subsequently learn, however, is that it was simply who he really was.  It was an unfortunate coincidence.

As much as I loved Holstein for the way he read the texts of the Bible, and those of  Melville and Hemingway, there was something about Bailey that read even better.  I would take a small seminar with him.  In that class was Holstein’s son.  Towards the end of the semester I would confide in him.

“You know, I once thought Bailey was just a hack copying your father.  Anymore I think he might be the first genius I’ve ever met, if that were something I could judge.”

“Bailey is a genius.  He’s got a real problem, though.”

“What is that?”

“He’s a white protestant trying to get a job at a time when any religion department that still exists is looking for diversity.”

For Bailey it would be another unfortunate coincidence.

Bailey had asked an interesting question in class that day while we were reading Hemingway.

“What do you guys think is the opposite of love?”

“Hate,” was the response scattered back from those in the small class room with large windows that looked over the street below.

“I’m not going to take that as the right answer.  You guys ought to do some thinking on that.  Let me ask it another way.  What is it that stands in the way of truly loving or hating anybody?”

“Fear,” came from the long, lanky kid who hung out in the back of the room and seldom said much of anything.  He was a loner-type, both in class and out of it.  The only other words I remember from him were the brief, inaudible murmurs shared between he and Bailey whenever our papers came back.

“Fear,” echoed Bailey with a smile of approval.  “You know a very wise person once said that it was a very fine line that separated love or hate from fear, and it was very difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference.”

I’ve never found what came of Gary Bailey.  I have never found who to attribute his quote to.  What I have found, however, is that generally we are quite certain we can tell the difference he spoke about above.  We seldom ever contemplate it.  An unfortunate coincidence, I suppose, for all of us.

Somehow I always wind up coming back to re-dig the dirt I’ve already dug.  This in spite of beginning with the conviction that I have started on something new.  That conviction usually resigns itself as soon as it encounters a sign that I have been there before.

In the first days of December, I came back to add more drainage tile to a place I had worked three years ago.  I was certain I remembered which side of the draw I had been up before, so I set my machine in on the opposite side and went.  The dirt was deep and black, and I sunk the tile down to match it.  About a hundred feet up the waterway, I saw a bit of plastic tile come around, snagged in the wheel of the trencher.

It figures, I thought.  I hadn’t remembered correctly.  I was where I had been before.  Daylight was waning, and I was in a hurry to get done before I lost it.

I hit the line at the slightest of angles, about 6 inches below the four foot depth I had placed it at before. At the bottom I could see the jagged end of the tile I had hit.  I fished a knife out of my pocket and hopped down in the trench to cut the jagged end smooth and connect it back up.

I thought nothing of it.  The ground wasn’t wet.  I hadn’t seen a sidewall cave in a month.

Down in the bottom, on my hands and knees, I had just cut the tile clean and was closing up my knife.  I heard something.  It was the slightest sound, and a split second later I felt a clod hit my shoulder.  I remember trying to get my knees up, and then I remember the quick and silent, heavy stillness of the weight that caught me at the middle of my back and down.

I tired to do what I always try to do:  go forward.  It is the simplest of all desires.  What strikes you is how bad you want it.  I was successful.  What strikes you next is the thought that desire has little to do with it.  It is shared equally by those who were and those who weren’t.

That’s humility, I guess.

A few deep breaths, and I was climbing out to get the excavator to clear the dirt away, and get back to where I had been, now for the third time.

“It’s a funny thing, you know?”

“What is?”

“The way we keep going.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“I suppose it is how we are wired.  Some go on in defiance.  Some go on in the faith that it is going to work out.  Sometimes I just think it is the best way to pass the time.”

“You should be more careful.”

“We all should.  Something is always trying to swallow us up.”