The Raging Elitist

One of the ways my father used to express his dissatisfaction with my pursuit of coaching was to liken swim practice to “recess,” the implication being that the time I spend with my young charges is unserious. I think of this slight when I joke with the swimmers that “This isn’t school. We don’t have all day to sit around.” I typically say it when I’m urging a group on to the next activity, and nobody ever laughs. Maybe the kids feel a similar resentment to the one I felt toward my father, accused as they are of spending their days unseriously. Probably they’d prefer to be at real recess, enjoying those few minutes of freedom away from their adult overlords, practicing at who they’ll become while the people in charge pay them little attention. To a child, recess is not unserious; it’s a precious and fleeting resource, something to be savored, not dismissed. To minimize recess is wrong.

Life’s momentary pauses, its little recesses, are the reference points that break up our monotonous race toward death. Their brevity and their bittersweetness hint at our actual condition. A cup of coffee, a weekend getaway, a summer romance – these are the moments when we sense the clock ticking toward zero, when we cling to a sort of aching pleasure and desperately try to slow time’s relentless march. The rest of the time we sleep-walk. “Everyone knows they’re going to die,” said Morrie Schwartz, the subject of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, “but nobody believes it.” He was dying of ALS at the time, explaining the experience to his much younger former student Albom. “I look out that window every day,” he said. “I notice the change in the trees, how strong the wind is blowing. It’s as if I can see time actually passing through that windowpane. Because I know my time is almost done, I am drawn to nature like I’m seeing it for the first time.” Certainly, one approaches this sensation more closely during recess than during the more “important” hours of the workweek.

These days, I feel a creeping belief in my life’s impermanence and see the passage of time through Morrie’s windowpane when I look at the ever-changing faces of my two boys. I always expect to find them the same as before – soft, incapable, uncomprehending, but they continually surprise me with a glimpse of what they’re becoming: young men. Maybe it sounds silly to talk about them in such terms when they’re still just seven and nine, but I see it happening so clearly. Already they’ve turned into boon companions, easily as like men as they are babies, and in the moments I notice the suddenness of their maturation, I look back and wonder at the seedlings they used to be, the ones I still expect to see staring back at me. Then, I feel a bittersweet pang such as a person might have at the end of a pleasant weekend or during the waning minutes of a quiet lunch break; I feel how quickly my boys will grow up and how quickly I’ll grow old. Like Morrie said, I know it’s true, but I can’t fully believe it.

Small things trigger my recognition. I notice Cartter, my oldest, opposite the ping pong table from me, looking much the same as he always has when wielding a paddle – somehow unformed, his movements slightly spastic, like a baby’s – until he smokes a backhand to the corner. Then he does it again, and again, and I notice the way he’s shifting his weight, the way his eyes zero in on the ball and his face scrunches up as he unloads. It’s like watching him emerge from some juvenile exoskeleton, and it’s so wonderful that I finally burst out laughing, prompting him to beam sheepishly across the table at me, proud but a little embarrassed, knowing he’s surprised me. He makes the same face after he reels in a monster trout, and I exclaim, “That’s the biggest trout I’ve seen in twenty years.” He doesn’t say anything. He just makes a little chuckle and keeps beaming at me from the front of the boat. When he says later that the rainbow he caught a couple months before off the boathouse was bigger, I can hear that he’s telling the truth, and I finally understand what he tried to tell me then – that he’d caught the fish of a lifetime, alone with his little brother. During all the time I spend distracted, he doesn’t stop speeding toward adulthood. It should come as no shock, yet when he starts talking about Clemson sports and mentioning players by name, when I call out chord changes and he actually plays them on his guitar, when he cruises freestyle up and down the pool at swim practice, I can’t help but be caught off guard. I know he’ll become a man soon, and even though he keeps showing me, I can’t believe it.

Looking back is about the only way I have of comprehending the pace of what’s happening. In the springtime before the mosquito blooms, I walk Sammy beneath the pines and across the lawn abutting the neighborhood playground thinking to myself how the days of sitting and watching the kids play there are over. I remember the countless hours Danyelle and I killed sitting at the picnic table during Covid while Cartter and Scotty pretended they were operating a restaurant take out window under the slide, bringing us piles of pine needles and acorns and mulch all mixed together in their tiny toddler hands. We cherished that game. It was a welcome break from the veritable infinitude of pushes we gave Scotty on the swing. Back then, swinging put him in a singing mood, and he’d look to his surroundings for inspiration, making up words to go with the nursery rhymes he learned in preschool. He’d sing “Hi-Ho-Day-Wo, the pinecones stayed with the cow,” and other such nonsense as he swung back and forth. What a melancholy delight it is to realize that for just a moment longer, my playground days remain. Scotty has led me back. He keeps taking me to our old stomping grounds during that most precious of daily respites, the evening walk.

I never expected that Scotty would grow to be so eagerly insistent on taking a walk each evening, but at seven, that is exactly what he is. An after-dinner walk is his time to unwind his mind: “Cartter holds Sammy’s leash,” he says, “and I do the talking.” Weather might deter the rest of the family, but not him. He’ll don a rain jacket and head out with whomever else is willing. His need to let loose the thoughts in his head while he pumps his little arms and legs around the street is nothing short of pressing. All I have to do is listen while he leads the two of us to the playground and says, “I kind of want to swing.” We swing back and forth next to each other, rain jackets beneath our shorts so our butts don’t get wet, and he says, “This is what I do at recess.” Darkness is beginning to set in, and warm, yellow lamplight is shining from the windows of the homes that ring the park. I remember all those Covid trips to this very same spot, and I think to myself, “This is what I did at recess too.”

Neck Surgery

The sight of my sister lying in a hospital bed unable to move her legs or open her eyes constituted one of those moments when knowing and believing are two separate things. I’d been fooled by Betsey’s years of nonchalance about her neck pain, and in the twenty-four hours since she went in for emergency spine surgery, I hadn’t considered that the outcome might be anything other than a relief. Once the nurse left the room on the tenth floor at MUSC, I leaned over Betsey’s bed and saw the way her face twitched so that the dried saliva stretched between her lips. She weakly said something about the pain, and I thought of my late grandfather lying in bed after his stroke. I caught the eye of her boyfriend who was sitting in a chair against the wall. We exchanged a silent look, and my eyes threatened to water. I swallowed, looked down again, and noticed Betsey’s hospital gown. It had pinstripes on it. “Well,” I said, “at least you’re dressed appropriately for once. That’s an improvement.”

It was days later when I finally allowed the idea that Betsey might not get better to seep into my consciousness. I was in Sapphire sitting on the porch staring across the lawn to where the short, moss-covered stone wall that lines the walking path ends, and the trail bends into the dark cover of the woods and heads toward the Upper Lake. Betsey and I used to race down that path to go fishing at the boathouse. I remember when Bets caught her first fish there. It was a small trout that she caught on a little toy punch-and-throw Zebco. It was raining, and she was standing inside, underneath the gable roof in her rain jacket. The fish took her lure right below one of the canoes tied up to the dock. Mom and Dad were there, and they of course made a big deal about it. I doubt they remember my first fish; I know I don’t, but we all remember Betsey’s. Sitting hunched on the picnic table in the corner of the porch, staring at the path descending into darkness, I thought of Betsey and me sprinting toward the boathouse, how we’d occasionally hit a slick mossy spot and skid, and my eyes watered again.

Betsey’s always had a way of capturing the family’s attention with periodic crises. When she was in high school, she was so persistent in her refusal to get out of bed and go to school that the police got involved. After she dropped out of college and moved to California, she started drinking and gave herself stomach ulcers when she wasn’t even twenty. When she moved back into town, she eventually started dating an older guy who was into amphetamines, and I ended up driving her to the ER one night when he headbutted her in the face and broke her nose. I’ve always had some role to play in response to these troubles. When she was struggling her way through high school, my job was to talk to her on the phone from my dorm room at Clemson. She’d refuse to hang up, and my roommates were always perplexed at the way we called each other “bitches.” When she was drinking a hole in her stomach in Long Beach, I flew out with Dad to visit her and stayed in her apartment in the barrio. She had a pullout couch in the living room; there was no heat; and it got plenty cold at night. After her recent surgery, I was guilty to have spent just five hours with her in the hospital. Friends came to visit her, and Mom came down from Virginia to stay with her. I wondered what I was supposed to do to fulfill my duty. My friend Matt knew almost right away when I texted him what was happening. “Is Maddux staying with you guys?” he asked.

Danyelle and I planned the trip to Sapphire at the last minute. It was our tenth anniversary that weekend, and we had planned for a night out without the kids. Then we changed our minds and decided to take them to Sapphire. Then Betsey stopped being able to open her eyes or go to the bathroom by herself, and Mom asked us to take Betsey’s 11-year-old son Maddux with us too. Maddux has a touch of autism and is diagnosed ADHD and was coming off his meds as we were heading up the mountain. During the last two hours of the drive, he bobbed up and down in his seat, wildly intoning about video games, pretending to be different characters, and generally talking to himself without end. I pursed my lips, gripped the wheel, and reminded myself that his mother was laid up in the hospital. Then, when we finally arrived at the house, I slouched on the picnic table and wondered to myself what would happen to us all if Betsey didn’t recover. Quickly, and involuntarily, I ruled that possibility out. It simply couldn’t happen.

Death Valley

We initially decided on spending our anniversary weekend in Sapphire so that we could take the kids to their first Clemson football game, a noon affair against Syracuse that was a sure win. Then, we got saddled with Maddux, who isn’t fond of sports or loud noises, and we decided to spend all weekend hiking and fishing instead. But when we woke on Saturday, Danyelle and I were gripped by the urge to join the throng in and around Death Valley; we convinced Maddux it wouldn’t be so bad, bought tickets on my phone, and sped down the mountain.

The game was a bust. The heat was so unbearable that Danyelle, Scotty, and Maddux spent almost the entire first half in the concourse standing in line for concessions. Meanwhile Cartter and I roasted in the top deck, getting pummeled by the incessant noise from the new jumbotron, and watching the Tigers lay an egg on the field. Clemson gave up nearly 300 yards in the second quarter alone in the most lackluster effort I have ever witnessed in my years of following the program. Still, Cartter smiled at me with delight and satisfaction, probably content that he’d be able to tell his friends at school he did something over the weekend, possibly feeling that his attendance at the game made him a little bit bigger, a little bit more my equal. “Why are they so bad?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “At least the cheerleaders are doing well. And the band is trying.” In truth, neither could be heard above the relentless blare of the jumbotron. We left at halftime, and when a ticket-taker asked if we’d be coming back in, I told him, “We might not be coming back in for a long time.”

Return of Pooh

Cartter is always very happy to see me lately. He’s started making a little snort of a laugh to indicate that he gets the humor in a joke or sees that something is ridiculous. It comes across a little forced and awkward, a little nervous. It feels like he wants to impress me with his maturity more now than ever before, to prove his masculine identity, to show how capable he is. It makes me worry for his tender little heart. I hate to think of the meanness and rejection he’ll encounter, and the way it will beat the innocence out of him. When I found him playing with the shower curtain, draping it over his back while his brother stood inside the tub rinsing soap off his body, I admonished, “Stop. You’re gonna flood the bathroom. Goodness, it’s like you guys are three-year-olds.”

“Okay,” Cartter said sadly, the slightest hint of a waver in his voice. I felt his shame as I walked out of the room. Being likened to a toddler is probably the worst insult he could suffer.

Cartter’s musical abilities make him feel more my equal. He rushes to grab his guitar and try to play along when I sit down at the piano. He’s learning Stairway to Heaven, and I taught him the changes to Norah Jones’ Don’t Know Why. I’m stunned by how quickly he’s picking things up, and he delights in my praise and my willingness to explore different songs with him. I played the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach album for him on the Sonos, and I could tell he logged the band’s and the two brothers’ names away for future use with his music school mates, his guitar teacher, and his Porter-Gaud classmates. We talked about the differences between Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers, about Southern Rock, and about Greg’s musicianship vs. Robert Plant’s pipes. Knowledge about different groups and genre classifications are valuable to Cartter insofar as they support opinions that he might try out. Babies don’t have informed opinions, but big kids do.

Besides music, sports is a natural arena for Cartter’s burgeoning opinions. I was shocked when he started casually mentioning Clemson football and basketball players by name one night. He was sitting at the kitchen table with Scotty while Danyelle and I were prepping dinner for them. I thought, “My God, he can talk sports,” and then I thought, “Oh no, I’ve made him a Clemson basketball fan.” I can see clearly the look on his face when the two of us were sitting next to each other in the top deck in Death Valley at his first game, the same one he wore after I watched him reel in one of the biggest trout I’ve ever seen, a look of embarrassed pride, a look of suppressed laughter at the knowledge he’s surprised me, a look that says, “See . . . I’m like you.”

Against all odds, Winnie the Pooh has made a comeback during this time of Cartter’s emergence into all things big. Perhaps, he is feeling a little more self-assured that he is not, in fact, a baby, and that enjoying the likes of Winnie the Pooh will not make him one. I was sitting in his desk chair while he and Scotty were hanging out in his room before bed when I offered, “You guys want me to read to you?” They both said yes, and immediately popped up and started perusing the shelves for something good until I said, “What about Winnie the Pooh?”

“I know where it is!” Cartter said, and he ran to the shelves in the living room and hollered, “I see it!”

At first, I thought Cartter’s enthusiasm might have been misplaced. It had been years since we visited the Hundred Acre Wood, and I wasn’t sure how the boys would take to it. Turns out that now it is much more enjoyable for them than it was before. Now, they understand more of the humor in the dawdling stuffed animals’ aimless adventures, in the bittersweet encounters with a world that is somehow always a bit beyond the characters’ comprehension. The boys lay in Cartter’s bed together listening and giggling at Pooh saying things like, “Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t,” and, “You never can tell . . .” Cartter enjoyed Pooh and Piglet following their own pawprints while hunting “woozles,” and Scotty’s eyes lit up when he stared at the picture of Pooh’s bottom stuck in Rabbit’s burrow. I could see his mind transported as he etched the image into his brain, exploring its nooks and crannies, brushing his fingers over the rough walls, and picking up and examining the “hunny” pot on the little wooden table. At the end of a chapter, the boys would sit up in bed looking drunk as they asked for another. They wanted to know what “hostile” meant when Pooh mused about the possibility of “hostile animals,” but of course, there are no animals of “Hostile Intent” in the Hundred Acre Wood, only Christopher Robin and his fellow innocents.

Scotty is thrilled at the renewed acceptance of Pooh. He is put off by the violence he’s encountered in books like Watership Down and White Fang and in movies like Indiana Jones. “Remember when we used to make fun of Pooh, and say it was for babies?” he asked me from under his covers as we were saying goodnight in the dark of his room. I thought of him sitting at the kitchen table humming the sing-songy tunes from the movie as they played over the speakers. “Can we watch Pooh again?” he asked. I told him of course, and he asked, “How does the song go?” I hummed it, and he said, “But what are the words?” It took me three more tries to remember. After the first, Scotty told me, “Hum it again.”

The Truth about Santa

When an email about team travel went out discouraging parents from driving to the upstate to watch their swimmers compete, I ended up playing the role of counselor for a disturbed family. These parents homeschool; their oldest daughter is thirteen; and they didn’t like the tone or the content of the message. I didn’t find fault with their hurt feelings; I even anticipated them when I read the email; but my immediate position was that the best thing for their daughter was to go on the bus with the team while her parents stayed home. She’s an anxiety-ridden swimmer, the same as I was, and sitting in the bleachers with her father, I related my team travel experiences as an athlete; I told him how being with the team and handling the day-to-day without my parents nearby distracted me from my nerves and helped me perform, but I also admitted that I didn’t know how I’d feel in four years, when my nine-year-old would be eligible for team travel. Then, when I went home that night, I had the following conversation with my son Cartter in the dark of his room.

Cartter called for his Mommy after lights out, but as is usually the case, I was the one who went to him – he might cry out “Moommmmyyyy!” but he really means me. I went to the side of his bed like I always do, felt around for his head, slipped my arm underneath him, and bent over to hug him next to me. “What is it buddy?” I said. This is how our nighttime conversations always begin.

“Daddy?” he said. “What happens if you lose a molar?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“My molar is wiggly,” he said squirming a little.

“A little or a lot?”

“A little.”

“Well, leave it alone . . . Did you bump it?”

“No,” he said, and then I sensed the wheels in his mind turning as he added, “I didn’t brush my teeth tonight.”

“Brush them in the morning.”

“Daddy? What happens if you lose a molar?”

“I don’t know,” I said, just a hair frustrated.

“What happens?”

“I don’t know. The dentist puts it back in.”

“They put it back in? What does it feel like?”

“I don’t know. They might put a fake one in.”

This sort of thing is totally ordinary for Cartter after bedtime. Many times it’s some affliction, feigned or otherwise, that is the stated cause of my being summoned – a hangnail, an ant bite, an itchy spot – and more often than not, I’m able to cut through the bullshit, give him a cuddle and a laugh, and he’s satisfied. On this occasion, however, Cartter continued to pursue his line of questioning about molars until my patience was starting to wear. He was asking about silver teeth when I was finally about to give up and tell him goodnight for the second time. That’s when he blurted out, “I know about Santa Claus.”

Suddenly, my frustration fell away. I could feel him under me looking up at the stars glowing on his ceiling. I remembered taking him to the market downtown to buy presents for his brother, lighting luminaries on Christmas Eve to help Santa find his way, driving the neighborhood to look at all the decorations in people’s yards. My mustache was rubbing against his cheek, and I said softly, “Well, I know Santa flies in on his sleigh with his reindeer, and he lands on our roof, and he says, ‘Ho Ho Ho’ and comes down our chimney and leaves presents for you and Scotty.”

“Mommy told me,” he continued. “I know about the elves too. She said I could help with them.”

I think he knew long ago Santa wasn’t real and that he’d been waiting to admit it for years. He’s clever that way, kind of like I was as a kid. I always had my doubts about Santa as far back as I can remember. As a four-year-old, I attended a Christmas Eve party at my grandparents’ house on Lookout Mountain, and an older cousin took me to the window and pointed at a satellite blinking in the sky. “Look!” he said, “There goes Santa!” I wanted to believe him, and maybe part of me did, but mostly, I just appreciated him trying to give me a thrill.

“I don’t know about the elves,” I told Cartter. “All I know is . . .” and I told him again the story of Santa and his reindeer landing on our roof. He lay still on his back, not saying anything. When I was done, he didn’t argue. He let go a tiny laugh, a little snort that spilled out of him in a whisper, and we said goodnight and blew each other kisses as I walked out the door. My boy knows about Santa, but that doesn’t mean I have to end the story for him right this second. I reckon I might think the same way about a swim coach telling me to move on when he turns thirteen.

Part-Time

When I view my coaching obligations as temporary, they’re far more bearable, pleasurable even. Once I make the decision to leave and set an end date in my mind, a job goes from something that is suffered to something that is savored, whereas if there’s no end in sight, all the small tasks, combative personalities, and overarching responsibilities seem to build until they dominate my thoughts and make life impossible to enjoy. In my experience on the pool deck, the line between Heaven and Hell is a fine one.

“Do you even like coaching?” my boss Doug asked me recently. I was on the phone with him sitting in my living room; I’d just suffered six weeks of abuse from a high school team whose raucous shenanigans made running my age group practices almost impossible. I nearly made it through our time of sharing space without incident; however, after the high school team’s penultimate practice in which they deployed a boom box to add to their noisy effect, I decided to celebrate prematurely by gathering my twelve-and-unders and having them sing goodbye. You definitely know the tune I chose. It’s a popular number among home crowds in the waning minutes of a victory. It’s often accompanied by the jingling of keys and is titled for its refrain, “Na Na Na Na Hey Hey-ey Goodbye.” The kids did a great job, and the cheer certainly hit its mark. I had no idea the impact it would have on the high school coaches, who were so infuriated that they approached me on deck the next day in the middle of practice, in front of the children, and yelled in my face. When I refused to speak to them and led them instead to a supervisor, they called their school’s athletic director, who happens to have kids on my team, and who stormed onto the pool deck and yelled at me some more, informing me “man to man” that he “sees what kind of coach I am” and that he’d “have to think long and hard about what year-round team his kids were going to swim for.” I was on the phone with Doug to find out what was to be done, and his response was to ask if I even like coaching.

To say I was disappointed in Doug’s reaction would be an understatement. I pleaded for weeks for him to do something about the situation with the high school team, whose coach told me there was nothing she could do for me. My age groupers couldn’t hear me during practice. I actually strained my back from yelling. During the six weeks this was going on, Doug, the Aquatics Director, didn’t come down to the pool where I run swim team once. I run three groups and sixty kids at the site; I do all the lesson planning for our 150-person team; I handle a chunk of the communication and admin duties, and Doug pays me as a part-time lifeguard. For assistants on deck, I’ve pulled in at various points my wife, my sister, and when my sister had emergency spine surgery, my mom. All of them share my negative opinion of the high school team’s coach, and none of them get paid. When Doug asked me if I didn’t like coaching, I told him I didn’t like working in a bad environment, that I didn’t like being alone, and that I didn’t like not having any support.

Over the next several days, I pondered all the things I wanted to say to Doug, the things I wanted to say to Doug’s boss, and the things I wanted to say to the high school’s principal about his athletics department staff. I thought of my continuing efforts at the pool as essential, and it was Hell. Then, when I decided that my best course of action was to spend another six months fulfilling my obligation to the team’s families and to look for an escape route in the meantime, that Hell ended. I was relieved and could again sleep through the night.

The next week at practice, having decided to leave my coaching job, I was reminded of how much I actually like coaching. I took small moments to hang out with the kids and enjoy their company. I joked with my “minnows” group that I had magical butterfly instructions that would make everything in their lives better – their parents nicer, their girlfriends prettier, their boyfriends brawnier, their girl scout cookie sales higher. I calmed down about the kids performing the skills perfectly and remembered that the learning process will be long for them. I listened to their inane stories between swims. In short, I had a really good time.

How ironic that something I enjoy so much is only enjoyable if I view it as temporary. Now, with an end date in mind, I don’t care how incompetently Doug manages his department; I’m not worried about the kids’ near-term performance; and I’m immune to the opinions of the high school coach and her athletic director. Instead, I’m happy to see the kids at practice, and I’m sad that I won’t get to coach them forever. Deciding to quit almost makes me want to stay. I have two sons on the team; the kids are coming together and improving; and in another year or two, the program out at Park Circle could be something really special. I can see it clearly. I want to be the coach to see it through and for my sons to reap the benefit, but after another two years, my oldest will be eleven, and all the other families would be even more attached. Surely, the situation would feel more permanent. Thank goodness I’m not counting on coaching or the city aquatics department for retirement.

Miscellaneous

Things around the pool deck are starting to normalize again in the wake of Magnet High School’s departure, although the year-round team continues to swim beneath the banner Magnet hung – a visible reminder of North Charleston Aquatics’ ineptitude.

Coach Granny’s (Mom’s) voice has grown louder, with intonations of anger, as her patience for the slower swimmers with whom she’s been working appears to be waning. She’s had two lanes of kids who are the types that seem to become immediately lost once immersed in the water, no longer able to understand English, much less swim on the correct side of the lane. Shouts of “Move over!” and “Griffin!” have risen to the point that I actually sidled up next to her at one point and suggested, “Say his name less,” and I may or may not have glanced toward the parent bleachers as Mom’s voice boomed and echoed around the building. Next week will most likely be her last helping on deck, as she is counting on the doctor granting Betsey permission to drive, at which point she will return to Lynchburg where Poppin is in hospice care.

Scotty is the only kid in his minnows group who wears a teal silicon sharks cap. He’s also the only kid in that group who can swim butterfly. He comes up to me when I’m giving the warm-up to the following group (Cartter’s group) and tries to hand me his glasses in the middle of my instructions, indicating with authoritative assuredness that it is my job to handle them while he showers and changes.

Cartter is getting more and more comfortable with the pool and the team. The last two nights he’s hung around with me while I coached the older girls. It’s amazing how much he and one of my top athletes, a 13-year-old girl named Hannah, remind me of each other. Last night when Hannah was stopped at the wall, and Cartter was standing by my side, I said, “Good news, Hannah, Cartter hit his girl scout cookie quota,” and they both had the exact same laugh at the exact same time, a sort of eruption through the nose that their natural embarrassment was unable to stifle. Cartter learned how to take splits with my stopwatch, and he kept tabs on Hannah’s teammate during a long swim while I guided Hannah through her shoulder work on the deck.

Scotty has taken over the role of grand inquisitor at bedtime. Before, Cartter’s room was the one that was always inescapable once the lights went out and it was time to say goodnight. Now, I find myself backing out of Scotty’s room hoping it might be a smooth getaway, inevitably stopped in my tracks by a quick peppering of questions. Last night Scotty wanted me to remind him what Pooh said when he looked down the rabbit hole. He also wanted me to remind him how Pooh got so fat. Then he quoted Rabbit, who upon finding Pooh stuck at the mouth of his hole said, “I thought at the time . . . that one of us was eating too much, and I knew it wasn’t me.” As I thought, the picture of Rabbit’s burrow that accompanies the story “Pooh Goes Visiting” in my 1961 edition made an impression.

Sammy is putting less weight on her surgically repaired right foreleg all the time. Her latest nickname, which she has accepted in typically good humor, is “Limp Bizkit.” She still insists on pouncing and flouncing around the house with a ball in her mouth, eager for someone to chase her, but she fatigues noticeably more quickly. Danyelle took her to the boat landing for a swim yesterday, and she only made two trips out into the creek for her ball before she was done. Then, she slept the rest of the day.

When I think about Sammy being gone, I immediately think of Cartter and wonder how devastated he will be. At nine, he’s reached the age where he’s eager to be the one to feed her, and when we pull into the driveway late and instruct him and his brother to go straight to the back to get ready for bed, he retorts, “After some Sammy pets,” as if we have forgotten the most important aspect of our return, which of course, we have. Danyelle takes some exception to the fact that Cartter is the only person Sammy will “drop it” for on command. With Cartter’s attachment strengthening and Sammy’s health worsening every day, movies and dog literature are strictly off limits in our house for the foreseeable future.

While she’s still with us, Sammy is focused on the second massive acorn dump of her life. Following last winter’s snow, the live oaks around the neighborhood have produced a “mast year” crop to ensure some of their seed survives the apparently harsh conditions. Meanwhile Sammy is filled with a sense of purpose to ensure just the opposite. She keeps her nose to the ground on her daily walks and vacuums up as many acorns as possible. She can be very sneaky about this, waiting until her leash holder’s attention drifts and then gobbling the tannin-laced nuts into her belly. One must remain ever diligent and always keep the leash taut to deter this behavior, as the acorns are everywhere, and Sammy’s appetite and determination know no bounds.

The last time the live oaks produced such a bounty was six years ago, when Sammy was still full of youth and vigor. As frustrating as it is now to walk her around the neighborhood, tugging her leash while she sniffs and snorts at the ground and the acorns underfoot transform sneakers into roller skates, dealing with her in the wake of the last acorn dump was much, much worse.

As a four-year-old, Sammy had acorn fever, and we devised all sorts of ways to rid our yard of the mildly toxic temptation. We raked them into piles; we sucked them up with a shop vac; we tried to convince the kids, who were toddlers at the time, that picking up acorns was a fun game. We discovered that staying ahead of the live oaks was impossible and eventually gave up hope, turning our focus to the equally impossible task of training our dog. Sammy wore a shock collar in those days, which was paired with a now defunct electric fence and an app on Danyelle’s and my phones. Each time Sammy went outside, we watched, and when she started munching on the nutty morsels that littered her domain, we pushed a button to deliver a shock. As this method failed to produce the desired result, we gradually raised the intensity of the shock until it was at the highest level. Sammy, apparently in a panic that some strange power was threatening her continued feasting, snarfed the acorns down faster.

The other day Cartter was trying to wrap his head around the idea of non-existence and death. I told him that the good news was that if and when he didn’t exist, he wouldn’t have to worry about it. When I think of Sammy’s coming death, the first thing that comes to mind is the horrible aching loss that my oldest son will feel, but there is a little bit of solace in the idea that at least Sammy won’t have to worry about getting at those acorns anymore.

We’ve had two Fridays of perfect weather recently. Both times we visited Hazell Parker playground and Waterfront Park downtown after school. The tide has been all the way in, stirring the marsh grass in circles as it sloshes against the low seawall. On one occasion, the water was so high that it burst through the slats on the southside pier. The sky was so clear yesterday afternoon I could see the sun glinting off cars all the way past the Ravenel’s twin cable supports on 526’s Wando bridge. The boys and I watched a fleet of sunfish head out from the nearby Yacht club, and I enjoyed sitting at a picnic table watching the oak canopy above the ballfield sway in the breeze coming off the harbor.

Two weeks ago we visited the park on the eve of the boys’ first year-round swim meet, an intrasquad affair that wasn’t technically a real meet. Cartter was worried about his flip turns in the days leading up to the event, but he ironed out the kinks in practice. His first ever 50 back was near the state cut; he grew noticeably fatigued on the back half of his first ever 50 fly, and his brother Scotty was very eager to get changed and go home after completing his two 25-yard events. It reminds me of what he said last year when I floated the idea of a travel meet: “I don’t want to spend my weekend that way.”