Acoustic Decade

2000: Dr. Binder says, “It’s a ten-pounder, and it’s a boy!”
Despite spending the last two weeks of 1999 in some potato sack, zip-front lounger, lying around eating pies and watching Monday night football seven days a week, I was not able to have the “millennium baby.” At least I was not able to have one of the first ones born in 2000. Sam was inducted into this world the second week in January. Dr. Gary Binder delivered Sam, in what would be the good doctor’s last year of practice before he succumbed to lung cancer. I had told Dr. Binder that Ella was almost too big for my small hips and made him promise to induce me if he had any inkling that this baby was over eight pounds. He is lucky I did not throw anything at him when he said, “It’s a ten-pounder, and it’s a boy!

2001: Beckley says, “A plane flew into the World Trade Center.”
I was dressed in a suit for the hospital, holding Sam in my arms at the edge of our drive, waiting for Beckley to drive down the street in the Jeep to pick me up for work. It was a changing of the guard. Some days he went into the Rich lab at Baylor early in the morning, returned mid-morning to take me to the med school, and he then stayed with Sam until one of the Polish sisters could come take care of Sam. September 11, 2001 was a beautiful day in Houston. Beckley seemed a little late. He pulled up, and I put Sam in the car seat and then took my place in the passenger seat. That’s when Beckley said, “A plane flew into the World Trade Center.” Later I was in my office, at the microscope, diagnosing cancer on glass before I learned of the second plane. The other doctors in my department and I went about quietly doing our work, shaking our heads at each other when we would pass in the hall hospital corridor. This was the day that it became hard to live in this world without tears.

2002: Mamaw says, “I’m praying for North Carolina.”
We were in a cornfield drive-in theater in southern Indiana, passing the phone around, talking to my mother’s mother, aka “the belly rubber” because she once walked up to Beckley at a party and rubbed his belly apropos nothing. My kids had picked the movie Stuart Little. We had traveled to the Louisville area for my 20-year reunion at Sacred Heart Academy. That summer we still didn’t know where we were moving for Beckley’s post-doc. All we knew is that we were leaving the Enron-ravaged Houston. The choices were Scripps or UNC. No one in my family favored Cali. When we hung up that night, Mamaw said, “I’m praying for North Carolina.” Those were her last words. She had a stroke and spent the next days in Baptist Hospital East. We did move to North Carolina, several months later. Mamaw always got what she prayed for when she prayed to the Virgin Mary, as her neighbor, Babe Fisher, told me when I was a kid. She was right. So put your hands together.

2003: I recall that in 1987, my dad said, "Father Time gets us all in the end."
We were leaving Resthaven in 1987, in the back of a limousine, having just buried my mother, and my father says to me, “Father Time gets us all in the end.” In 2003 Father Time took my father. As I drove through the Smoky Mountains on my way to Kentucky for his funeral, I recalled all the trips to the Smoky Mountains with my parents. Once we neared the southern Kentucky border on I-75, my father would begin the chant: One-uh-see, two-uh-see, three-uh-see… until he got to Ten-uh-see. I hold onto those Smoky Mountain memories.

2004 Jesse says, “I remember that night better than entire years.”
Before Sunset is one of my favorite movies, and Ethan Hawke (Jesse) and Julie Delpy (Celine) have one of the best on-screen chemistries ever, "even if it doesn't seem quite right."

2005 Dr. Richard Deichmann says, “There’s no need to euthanize anyone. I don’t think we should be doing anything like that.”
In 2005 friends of mine who had been working over a decade to get the training they needed to return to their beloved Louisiana and practice medicine had to pack up their belongings and leave their dream house on Lake Ponchartrain. He was the head of his department at Ochsner Clinic. In the days following Katrina, he told me that he was sleeping in his office at the hospital. I contacted a practice in Austin and found someone willing to talk to Gregg about hiring him in Texas. He was offered the job and took it. Other physicians made more difficult choices, and this article is about the doctor who had to decide what to do with the patients who could not be evacuated from Memorial Medical Center. The article, written by a Pro Publica physician journalist, recreates the ethical dilemma weary caregivers faced while tears were rolling down the street.

2006 Walter Tragert says, “You can only have two requests.”
It’s a dark and stormy night, and I’m in Westlake, between an Okavango Delta lion and a Kalahari Desert lion. You’re thinking Africa and I’m describing the in-law compound in Austin. Backstory here is that my in-laws are hunters and they go on safari each year. I was in their heavily holiday-decorated media room, where the stuffed animals wear Santa caps, but two of my faves, Scrappy Jud Newcomb and Walter Tragert, were playing my Austin birthday party. Scrappy gave us unrefined sugar from Turbinado and songs that would later be released on Byzantine, and ironically Walter played a song about a man with the heart of a lion. I made a special request for “Sleepless Nights in Shining Armor,” and then another for a cover of Jimmy Cliff's “Many Rivers to Cross,” but then mentioned that it might be nice for them to play the Stones “Beast of Burden,” given the beasts in the room. Scrappy immediately said that they could do that, but Walter told me I could only have two requests. After their performance I found out that Scrappy was in the Highlands during the Louisville snowstorm (15.9 inches) of 1994, because he was going to play Snagilwet. Where did the time go?

2007 Al Gore says, “We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency.”
I spent the last days of 2007 in the nation’s capital, on a museum run with friends from Louisville. Susan and I spent a wonderful day in the National Gallery’s Turner exhibit. The beauty of the sun in the clouds through Turner’s eyes left a lasting impression on me. Earlier that year, in Oslo, Al Gore accepted a Nobel Peace Prize and urged us to think about global warming. If we can't get together on the issue, there's no way to feel alright.

2008 Jeff Eugenides says “How do you get to the point where you won’t sign your own books?”
I like to call the summer of 2008 the summer of my second Pulitzer, but first let’s go back to the summer of 2007. On 7/7/7 my sister and her boyfriend read Shakespearean sonnets to each other on their neighbor’s porch in Groton, Connecticut, and declared themselves mated. They hosted a party at the Brown Hotel in Louisville in the summer of 2008 to celebrate. For dinner my sister seated me next to her mate’s brother, Jeff Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, for which he won the Pulitzer in 2003. Jeff’s favorite author is Saul Bellow, as has been previously reported, and mine is, of course, Larry McMurtry. When I talked about the sign that is purportedly taped to McMurtry’s bookstores doors that says he will not sign books, Jeff said, “How do you get to the point where you won’t sign your own books?” In his nonfiction Mr. McMurtry makes no apologies about his bum moods in the land of steers. I met him at one of his bookstores in Archer City, Texas, in June of 2001, the summer of my first Pulitzer. He did sign my copy of Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Despite these brushes with literary giants, I'll still settle on being a paperback writer.

2009 Mike Leach says “I steadfastly refuse to deal in any lies and am disappointed that I have not been afforded the opportunity for the truth to be known.”
It’s the year of the college search for my daughter, and I’ve been devoting an inordinate amount of attention to college athletics this fall. My daughter wants to attend a college with a vital athletic department. Some people in my family think athletic programs should not be affiliated with schools. I’m starting to wonder. The issue of football head injuries and dementia has been on my mind lately. If Adam James really was mistreated after his concussion, I’m happy to see Mike Leach walk. This fall I heard a story about a college wrestling coach that makes this one seem trivial. Let’s see, now we need to decrease our carbon footprint, lower the cost of medical care, and reform college athletics. I’m tired before the new decade begins.

It’s been a challenging decade. I think I’ll end it on an encouraging note. If in this decade we can’t all make it back to the top, maybe we could settle for the top of the bottom.