The Best Gifts Are A Shared Experience

July 23, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When you’ve lived in a place a long time, you accumulate.

There are all kinds of reasons for valuing something enough that you’ve kept it around.

But one downside of this was revealed to me last winter when relatively warm days were followed by a couple of frigid ones which caused a pipe to freeze and then burst behind some floor-to-ceiling shelves that I’d packed full of “things to keep.”

This geyser-fueled alarm bell gave rise to several reactions at the time: relief when my trusty plumber answered the call; irritability when removing the mess of water; and clarity when I realized that most of the stuff I’d set out to dry like treasured cod or leaves of tobacco just had to go.

With some headway into spring yard-work under my belt, I’ll be turning to these shelves and their contents this week. Who’d appreciate 20 clay pots, a serious set of weights, or TVs that have fallen behind the curve? Only one thing is clear: by sometime next week, they’ll all be headed someplace else.

Mine is a fairly common situation, I suspect. How do I get this stuff that I’ve valued enough to keep to those who’ll appreciate having it at least as much–in other words, where there’s enough gratitude around the transaction to benefit us both? As it turns out, while I’ve been in the middle of this quandary, I’ve also been corresponding with a life-long friend who’s discovered that he only has a few months to live. So I’ve also been thinking about how we pass along “what we’ve valued” in a spirit of mutual appreciation towards the end of our lives too.

Coincidentally, a piece called “You Can’t Take It With You” crossed my transom this week. It seems that a couple of trusts-and-estates profs at Yale Law School conducted the first national survey that asked Americans “how they would divide their property among relatives, friends and others if they were to pass away immediately.” Not surprisingly, a survey like this tells us a lot about the people we actually care about during our lifetimes and how we’d like to provide for them when we’re gone.

It turns out that what we thought we knew about these matters was pretty limited before this survey.

Most of the information about how people pass along their property comes from the wills of deceased people that have gone through probate [in state court systems]. But that’s a very biased sample — people with wills are very different from people without wills. Also, wills don’t tell us anything about any of the most complex and interesting family situations because they don’t contain enough information. [For example,] wills can’t tell us anything about how often people make gifts to their stepchildren or nonmarital partners…

According to a companion piece in the Wall Street Journal, 54% of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 2021 that they don’t have wills at all. And this isn’t just poor or middle-income people. Apparently one in five Americans with assets of $1 million or more don’t have wills indicating how they want their property to pass. In other words, if you die “intestate,” state law will determine who inherits whether that’s where you want your assets to go or not. Among other things, someone living with you outside of marriage may get kicked out of your house when you’re no longer around to prevent it, while relatives you thought you’d written off years ago could be surprised by unexpected gifts along with the tax payments that go with them.

The Yale survey also indicated just how widely peoples’ expectations around inheritance tend to vary. For example, Black-Americans, the poor and less well-educated, along with women in general told the pollsters that they would give less to their spouses and more to their children than others. Many of those contacted also stated that there were un-related people in their lives that they’d like to provide for after they die. Once again, the law in most states won’t recognize wishes like these if the deceased has failed to include them in “a last will and testament.”

Another issue that the Yale researchers pointed out was that American viewpoints “gathered by pollsters on the spur of the moment,” are likely to change if there were more time to think about their answers. (In other words, maybe the wife would have second thoughts about the financial needs of that grumpy guy in the other room who’s dribbling on himself while watching reruns of Matlock.) Instead of policy changes that involve tinkering with state laws on inheritance to match spur-of–the-moment preferences, the better course might be for each of us to think though our wishes in these regards with legal advisors and those that we care most about before we die.

But since too few of us want to confront end-of-life realities, there’s no indication in the survey data or otherwise that people are rushing to ensure that their resources will go where they want them to go when they’re no longer around to make those decisions for themselves.

One way around this avoidance may be passing along “far more of what we value most” while we’re still alive and the beneficial glow around our gift-giving can be shared with the recipients.

I’ve written about gift-giving on this page before.

For example, when the Sachler family was being excoriated for fueling the opioid crisis with their company’s lust for profits, it seemed appropriate to comment on how they attempted to cloak their avarice with a veneer of civic-minded responsibility by donating millions for naming rights at various art museums and academic institutions. In fact, just this week, theTimes reported that Oxford University joined others in short-circuiting this honor by “de-naming” another Sachler building. (If Jeffery Epstein had lived long enough or Harvey Weinstein had gotten farther in his defense we might have been over-hearing more of these give-and-take-back debates.)

A little more than a year ago, I wrote a post called “The Art of Passing Along What We Value.” It began with stories about giving people things they saw while visiting and admired, and how I’d been thrilled by some early-in-life gifts that had been given to me under similar circumstances. I thought at the time:

When someone else’s interest meets an object of your affection, the best time to move it into some new hands might be now.

Because spur-of-the-moment giving and receiving can feel that good.

And because we also tend to accumulate a lot of treasure, we cannot (and perhaps should not) keep all of it

From there, the post explored an essay called “The Unbearable Heaviness of Clutter” and it’s advice on avoiding “over-attachment” to our stuff. What interested me most wasn’t the hoarding phenomenon but how and why we attach significance to particular things. I concluded at the time that while “weak attachments” (like to an article of clothing) can be broken by employing one or another clever tactic (like having someone else hold up the item while asking “do you need this?), an equally affective solution might be keeping your attachment to the item in tact and simply transferring it to someone else who will value it is as much if not more than you do.

[S]ince whatever-it-is was never stripped of its [personal] meaning, the depth of the generosity around the giving and receiving of it is often felt-all-around.

The post concluded with a giving strategy I was less familiar with, namely Bill Perkin’s advice about how to (according to the title of his 2020 book) Die With Zero. He urges a level of intentionality “around passing along what you have” that goes far beyond writing a will.

While I go into it more deeply in the post, Perkin’s advice arises from the fact that each season of our lives is blessed with different abilities and resource requirements. He proposes a formula for adjusting the amounts that we spend/give and save accordingly, so that by the end of our lives we’ve experienced the fullness of every season (and maybe helped others to do so as well) while reaching the finish line with essentially nothing left over beyond a life-well-lived.

He persuasively argues that with regular adjustments to your giving-and-saving strategies, it’s possible to lead the experience-rich life that many of us aspire to but too few of us have—while perhaps also getting to witness our children or other young people, and even organizations we care about, “fulfill their seasonal mandates too” with assistance we provide while we’re alive and can still enjoy watching them do so.

To those with less discretionary spending and fewer assets to deploy, Perkin’s “seasonally adjusted” advice also makes sense because it encourages us to examine our capabilities and resource requirements at each point in our lives—including those points that we haven’t reached yet and never considered before—such as “how much less we’ll need as we get older.” For him, it’s better to plan a way “to climb the highest mountain” when you’re 30 than regret that you never did so when you’re 70, and careful planning can help you to have the thrill and avoid that regret.

In this, Perkins advocates a kind of gift-giving and receiving between your older and younger self, whatever season of your life you happen to be in.

Gifts that we give to the dead are often in the form of grave-side eulogies or reflections that you write when you’ve had more time to absorb the loss.

Several years ago, I wrote something like this for a cousin I’d travelled to see and essentially say “good-bye” to as Joe’s health declined. I didn’t tell him the things about him that I was most thankful for, but I tried to convey, in a dozen different ways, my respect and affection for him in the hours we spent together—and I think he got the message. But it was only after his passing that I got into the stories we shared that mattered most me.

Here is some of what I wrote afterwards:

My cousin Joe died after a long struggle with illness last week. What was remarkable was the loving peace he somehow found in the midst of those struggles….

I knew him as a man with strong opinions, not suffering fools gladly—even when they happened to be related to him. He could be sarcastic and stubborn, but also playful and funny. I found that you were ‘in’ when he got ‘a kick’ out of you, and I guess he got a kick out of me.

Joe loved sailing, and took me out one windy day in the New Haven harbor. I had dreaded going out a first, fearing the tongue-lashing my minimal boating skills were sure to invite, but had a great time. Joe was in his element when he was out on the water, loved the speed and wind and spray, and his love of it was infectious.

My strongest memory of the man came after my mother died unexpectedly and Joe offered to help me move her stuff out of the apartment where she had been living. ‘Her stuff’ was a surprisingly large amount of what she had accumulated in a suburban house over thirty years and managed to cram from floor to ceiling in various corners of her apartment. Another day I’d been dreading was elevated by sharing it with Joe, as my right-hand man this time around. Stories, jokes, strength, competence, support. What he brought to the endeavor that day provided all the right counters to the sadness, resentment, and exhaustion I was feeling that day. I marveled at the nuance of his caring then and still marvel at it now.

I spent a day with him in Florida after Christmas. I knew I might never see him again and had visited, in part, to say good-bye. While he was surrounded by the paraphernalia that was keeping him alive, I was struck by how Joe was almost aglow with a loving radiance in the midst of it. It was a place beyond acceptance of his poor health. Being glad to see me and pleased at the respect of my visit also didn’t account for it. More than anyone else I have known towards the end of life, Joe had already found a place in his mind and spirit beyond the afflictions of his body and anything non-essential. It was an honor for me to see that— something quite marvelous and blessed about it—a gift that I will take with me as I get older and try to find that place too. What began as a farewell ended in a hopeful glimpse of the future.

Another companion-in-life named Hunter is dying (a continent away) as I write to you today. He may make it to summer, he may not. But I resolved to have the conversation with him that I didn’t have with Joe. And the only way I could accomplish it was by writing a letter to his son and caregiver, asking Nathan to read what I’d written to his father “on a good day.”

Those of you who read this post know I can be “a man of many words” and I’d originally planned to include all or at least parts of my letter to Hunter here today. It’s too long for one thing, and hangs together as a whole, making any excerpt from it a poor representative. But perhaps more importantly, it’s also fresh in its pain and private in its intimacy, making it too early and too close to “put out there” to others just yet.

But I can tell you, it’s a conversation with Hunter that I’m grateful to be having (whenever it actually occurs) because I think I know how he’ll react to each and every part of it, even though the communication between us passes through the grace of his loving son.

In terms of “parting gifts” whether to a total stranger, to your plumber when he admires an artifact in your home, or to a life-long friend whose days are numbered, it is always better, it seems to me, to squeeze as much benefit out of the gift-giving as possible by making what it provides to the gift-giver and its receiver as meaningful as you can for both of you.

– I valued this thing while it “lived” in my house and am grateful (through your thanks upon receiving it) that I’m giving it another home.

– I’ve taken as much enjoyment as I’m entitled to from this book or photo or souvenir. Besides, I have other books and photos and souvenirs, and need fewer of them these days. The season has come for you to enjoy something you’ve admired here full-time, in your home.

– Instead of giving you resources in my will, you’ll have what you would have gotten now, when you’re young enough and vigorous enough to enjoy it—which you probably won’t be 50 years from now, when I finally get probated out of the courts of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

– I want to share the gift of our stories together while you’re alive because we can’t once you’re gone. Then it will truly be a gift to you as well as to me.

This post was adapted from my May 21, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Patagonia’s Rock Climber

February 19, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Some food for thought (if you find that you’re hungry for it today) from Yvon Chouinard.

(He pronounces his name yuh-vaan shwee-naard if you’re wondering.)

Throughout, I’ll just call him Yvon, because he seems to invite that kind of familiarity with his plain-speaking forth-rightness.

I’m going to be excerpting some quotes from a recent interview for you to chew on, while adding a few of the associations I made from his storytelling, although I encourage you to listen to what he has to say because you’ll know what I mean about “his plain-speaking and forthrightness” the moment you hear the sound of his voice.

When you see Yvon’s name you might expect French Academy, but when you hear him introducing himself it’s pure Lewiston Maine, which is where he was born from stock that likely wandered down from somewhere around Quebec. That’s why, maybe confounding our expectations, he comes across as a salt-of-the-earth American.

So if you haven’t heard of him or recognize him from his picture, who is this guy anyway?

Yvon’s interview, called “Giving It All Away,” was recorded just before Thanksgiving and I heard it just before I edited and sent out last Sunday’s post. The interview title speaks to the fact that he gave away the entirety of his billion-dollar company earlier this year in an unprecedented act of philanthropy. But perhaps even better, Yvon has been “giving it all away” for most of his life, spending himself in ways that I can only imagine.

So I guess if there’s nutrition to be found in his words, it comes from the arc of his remarkably fertile life and thinking about how we’ve lived and continue to live while he tells us about who he is and what he’s been doing.

Yvon Chouinard is the founder of outdoor clothing and sporting goods company Patagonia. In many people’s minds, the company is almost synonymous with sustainable manufacturing practices and products, protecting wild places (most notably in Patagonia itself, which comprises the southernmost tip of Argentina and Chile), and creating a kind of “hive mind” brand of enlightenment in the company’s workspaces.

Moreover, while striving “to do good,” Patagonia has also consistently ticked off that other big box when it comes to American success stories, namely profitability. Yvon’s company (until recently, solely owned by him, his wife and two kids) will bring in an estimated $1.5 billion in revenues in 2022.

So what does he have to say for himself?

_{Some outdoorsmen and women that Patagonia corralled into wearing clothing from its “shell” line of sportswear in a recent mail-order catalog. On top of everything else, it’s about looking good and having fun while pushing one’s mental and physical limits.}

The interview begins with Yvon’s “changed my life” story. This 81-year-old tells us that he was a “serial climber” early-on, which his poor parents interpreted as something that was pretty grounded until they were watching a local news program in California, where they lived at the time, and the news clip shows (in his words):

a helicopter coming by the North American wall of El Capitan [in Yosemite National Park]. And then it zooms in on these guys hanging from hammocks underneath this big overhang 2000 feet up. And one of ’em is their son. They always thought when I said I was going climbing that I was [just] going hiking.

So boy were they surprised, but he’d already been “a serial climber” for years (which shows, among other things, how little parents know about what their kids are doing) explaining: “I’d spent two years just climbing cracks. I’d spent five years just climbing big walls, like in Yosemite. I’d spent years and years learning ice climbing.” And eventually all that verticality and danger took him to the Himalayas, to a fateful climb that ended in an avalanche, to him somehow surviving while others in his company did not, and to how he felt about the bookends of his existence from that point forward.

[I]t kind of changed my life. I’ve had a lot of close calls, near death experiences, but always afterwards you go around sniffing the flowers and being really happy to be alive and everything…but after that climb, all of us were deeply depressed for several months afterwards, and I’ve read stories about people that have kind of died and come back and you resist coming back. And in fact, it’s taught me that there’s nothing to fear about death itself. It’s a pretty pleasant feeling [when you find yourself face to face with it].

I heard it as a kind of relief, a comfort, once you glimpse that just as much as living, an ending “without fear “also belongs to you.

For the sake of his parents and his own growing family, Yvon cut back on extreme climbs after that, but the experience allowed him to settle into his life in a whole different way. “[Y]ou know, when my time comes, I’m gonna go out pretty peacefully.”

At first, I wondered how he could be so sure about that.

I’d already been reading a new book by Susan Cain, who is most famous for her TED talk and a previous book about introverts. She calls this new one “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.” It reminded me of the lengths our culture goes to minimize or hide sorrow, suffering and death even though all of them are universal experiences. So I could understand that when he was taken to a cliff edge by an avalanche at the top of the world, Yvon came to a kind of acceptance that his end was now as much a part of his journey as his moving-on from there, that there was a kind of peace that was waiting for him beyond the physical experience, and that there was a tremendous sense of relief in that deep-seated knowledge.

At this point in the interview, I wondered where I’d found that kind of confidence in the limits of my playing field.

I also marveled at how Yvon described finding his career path. It’s been a preoccupation of mine in several posts (for example, Why We Gravitate Towards the Work That We Do) as well as a theme in my book writing.

I never wanted to be a businessman. I was a craftsman and I was a climber. And I just, every time I’d go into the mountains, I’d have ideas on how to make the gear better. The gear was pretty crude in those days. It was all made in Europe. So I just got myself a forge and an anvil and a book on blacksmithing, and I taught myself how to blacksmith. And that led to making these pitons and eventually ice axes. And crampons and all the gear for mountain climbing and never did it thinking that it was a business. It was at first it was just making the stuff for myself and friends and then friends of friends. And pretty soon I’m making two of these pitons an hour and selling ’em for a dollar and a half each. Well, not too, not too profitable, right? I kind of backdoored becoming a businessman.

I’m sure this sounds more home-spun than it actually was, but meeting his own needs and the needs of his outdoorsy friends was clearly the initial spark. It prompted me to replay my own journey from Perry Mason to courtroom, grade-school Show & Tells to writing in public. (For all of these reasons, if you have a few moments to spare after you finish here, I’d love to hear about the sparks that brought you to the work that you ended up doing too.)

When Patagonia (the company) got to the deliberation phase of its business, it had already begun to lose its way. Demand was growing faster than the company’s capacity to meet it, so Yvon had an extended conversation with his key collaborators about what was most important to them in moving the company to the next level. Those priorities grounded a kind of business philosophy that became Yvon’s 2005 memoir, “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman.”

I mean the name of my book is ‘Let My People Go Surfing’ cuz we have a policy. If your child is sick, go home, take care of ’em, uh, no matter what. I don’t care when you work, as long as the job gets done and if the surf comes up, drop everything, go surfing. None of us liked authority. We really disliked authority and none of us wanted to tell other people what to do. So our management system is kind of like an ant colony. You know, an ant colony doesn’t have any bosses. The queen just lays there and lays eggs. There’s no boss in an ant colony but every single ant knows what his job is and gets it done. And they communicate by touching feelers, and that’s about it.

I’d call what he describes here the hive-mind of an enterprise. Unfortunately, I’ve only experienced it once, and never in “the regular course” of any business that I’ve been involved with. The notable exception was a school.

Several years ago I was a teacher in a school for autistic kids, some with significant challenges and all with unbelievable amounts of energy. Only in the inspired chaos of this place, with a teacher-to-kid ratio that approached 1-to-1, did I experience anything like Yvon’s collective working spirit, manifested in the “touching feelers” of my co-workers.

The immediacy and aliveness of every working minute at Benhaven School in New Haven reminded me (years later) of how Rebecca Solnit’s described lower Manhattan’s citizen rescuers coming together after 9/11 and NOLA’s citzen rescuers after Hurricane Katrina, exploits that she chronicles in “Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.” As I conjured hive-minds like these, and apparently at Patagonia too, I couldn’t help thinking about all of the other places where I’ve worked over the years and how far they’d fallen short of the workers-paradise (at least to me) that Yvon and some remarkable others have helped to create.

Sustainability is another ground-breaking concept for him. It’s about how you make something, but also (his company believes) what you do as a business once one of your products begin to wear out or your customers just get tired of having them around any longer.

For instance, you show your customers how to repair the zipper on, say, your “Reversible Shelled Microdini jacket” or replace the buttons when they‘ve fallen off your “Organic Cotton Mid-Weight Fjord Flannel Shirt.” And when a Patagonia product’s useful life has ended for you, Patagonia even takes it back to try and refurbish it so somebody else can get a second life out of it too, or recycle it into something else if that’s not possible. Because if you pay a lot for quality from a company like this—instead of for one- or two-season throw-away clothes—shouldn’t that item have serial lives too?

Here’s Yvon again, about the lifecycles that Patagonia is enabling for its products:

[Some years ago] we did an ad in the New York Times on Black Friday that said, Don’t buy this jacket, and there’s this photo of this jacket and it said, Don’t buy this jacket without thinking twice. Do you really need it? Are you just bored? Uh, and if so, you know, don’t…[So] If they [our customers], if they made a commitment to think twice about purchasing, we were gonna back it up with our own commitment, which was guaranteeing that jacket for life, repairing it when it needed repair. Helping people find another owner for that jacket. And finally, when it’s absolutely shredded and can’t be used at all, we’ll recycle it into more clothing. And so to do that, we had to build the largest garment repair facility in North America. And we have a van going around to colleges and stuff, showing people how to repair clothes and repairing people’s clothing. We produced a bunch of videos on how to sew a button on so people can repair their own stuff. Cause that’s the best thing you can do is to buy the very best thing you can and try to keep it going as long as possible. And so we’re helping people do that.

When I heard him tell this story I was sorry that I’d recently given my first Patagonia, a full-length rain and wind jacket in a beautiful kind of orange (it had been a really big purchase for me at the time) to a church clothing drive instead of returning it to the company for renewal and transition. Because a circular economy like this is a kind of mind-set, a discipline that can be applied to almost everything if it becomes more engrained in our lives “as consumers”–but I’d never even considered what he’s offering here.

Yvon talks about many other things in this interview (and in his other interviews and writings and speeches over the years) and you might find it edifying to dive into more of his wit & wisdom as a result. But I want to leave you with one of my favorites from last Sunday’s gabfest, where he somehow manages to combine his first career with his current one—which involves lots of interactions with companies that see things differently and governments that almost always do.

How do you convince these people to change the unsustainable and unhealthy ways that they’re doing things when you’re a powerful company like Patagonia or a powerful individual like its founder?

I’ll tell you a little story about mountain guiding. There’s two types of mountain guiding. One is democratic where you, you’re guiding somebody up the Grand Teton, which is a pretty safe mountain. And the client starts freaking out. So you pull out your harmonica and you play your harmonica a little bit. You calm ’em down and you kind of, you know, take your time and, and you get up it, a very effective way to guide on a non-difficult mountain. Let’s say you’re guiding on the Matterhorn and you know, you’re 60 years old, and the guide and you got a family. And you know, you remember the client is always out to kill you. A mountain like that, it’s rotten rock. It’s thunderstorms every afternoon. And the client freaks out. The guide screams at him, pounds on ’em, calls them names, tugs the rope and gets ’em to the top. So what happens is the client is more afraid of the guide than the mountain. And that’s basically how we have to treat our government [and many of our corporations].

I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for truth-telling when it’s wrapped up in a musical story like this.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of his words, that you’ll have a chance to listen to Yvon Chouinard saying them too (because the atmospherics he weaves around them simply can’t be duplicated on the page), and that he’s given you some food for thought to take into the days ahead.

_{Yvon Chouinard is 81 today, which puts him in his mid-70s when this picture was taken in March 2016, “on a classic local route somewhere out West during a new hire orientation.”}

Thanks for reading. Have good week. Signing off today as day-vid gr-icing (since I’m told that some people also find my name unpronounceable).

This post was adapted from my December 4, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right

Too Many Whose Jobs Aim To Hold Us Together Are Getting Burned Out

August 19, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

While the institutions that serve our most important commitments generally receive our support (or at least our tax dollars), we’re not sustaining the flesh and blood workers who toil within them, too often treating them like disposable assets that are easily replaced–when nothing could be farther from the truth.

In our schools, it’s the teachers, administrators and PTA members who aim to assure parents and communities that their children are reaping the benefits of a good education.
In our libraries, it’s the librarians who select and recommend the books that will be available for a community to read.
In our houses of worship, it’s the men and women “of the cloth,” who stand between their congregations and an outside world that’s sorely in need of their faith, hope and love.
In our police and military organizations, it’s the officers who try to bridge a community’s desire for safety with the common threats that it faces every day, whether near or far from home.
In our political organizations, it’s the public servants who safeguard our votes and the overall integrity of our governance from the mobs that increasingly threaten them from all directions.

These men and women occupy pivot points between their institution’s lofty commitments and the public’s demand that its interests be served.

Sadly, too many of them are collapsing under the strain of conflicting desires within these same communities.

Where does the rising toxicity of this “push and pull” leave these essential workers? Far too often, it’s hurt, demoralized, disabled.

And where does it leave the rest of us when they can’t do their jobs anymore, when “other good men and women” see what happened to them and decline to take their places, when their jobs go unfilled or are taken on by those with far narrower views of the public interest?

Where do their voids leave the rest of us?

_{There are increasingly divided pews in America’s houses of worship.}

I have a personal perspective on one of these pivotal jobs that recently got activated while reading an interview with a pastor who’d been forced to abandon his ministry—and his “calling” in life—because of divisions within his congregation that even his Job-like efforts had been unable to bridge.

Before I headed to law school, I studied the history of religion in America as well as ethics in the company of a much larger cohort of men and women who were pursuing careers in the ministry. “Master of Divinity” was the professional degree they were after as they studied the Old and New Testaments, the rituals of liturgy, the growing competition between psychologists and ministers, and how to give an engaging sermon on Sunday mornings.

It was a “slice of life” that came vividly back to me when I read Dan White’s heart-breaking interview in the New York Times this week.

Fresh in my mind as I read it was a post I’d written back in January called “Turning On The Rescuers.” You may recall its story about a school superintendent in Joplin Missouri who courageously stepped into the breach after deadly tornados destroyed half of his community’s schools. Although the multi-year rebuilding effort that followed exhausted him, his personal consequences worsened when some disgruntled residents drove him from public office with cruel allegations after their hopes around community rebuilding became mired in frustration. Their attacks made him contemplate suicide and, after a period of recovery, take a new job with an organization that counsels former public officials on how to redeploy their leadership skills after vocal minorities among their constituents undermined them. At the time, he called it “an exclusive club that nobody wants to belong to.”

(Sad to say, it’s a next generation American job if there ever was one: rehabilitating helpers that are abandoned by their communities when some of its attack dogs turn them into targets.)

These men and women occupy pivot points between their institution’s lofty commitments and the public’s demand that its interests be served.

Dan White, Jr. wanted nothing more than to bring a community of the faithful together. Originally from upstate New York, he became a Baptist minister in the early 2000’s. After a terrible flood devastated the towns around his church, he deepened his vocation by seizing an opportunity to grow his caring community when he jumped into the recovery effort.

We were going to take care of people who weren’t inside our Christian community… caring about people you wouldn’t actually be friends with [already] and helping them overcome that boundary. And so that was another big moment for me in rallying people to care [about one another].

At the same time, his outreach coincided with growing publicity about sex abuse involving the clergy, with many no longer seeing pastors as “shepherds” as much as “wolves.” After attending some social events and “taking the air out of the room” when he identified himself as a minister, White said he stopped sharing with strangers “that I was a pastor,” for the first time feeling “some shame about having that role.”

He began to re-focus almost exclusively on his congregation and, in particular, on their building of a “multipurpose space” (for youth groups, for refugees, to have a place to gather for coffee) and while the majority of his church supported it, a few were opposed. White thought that limited dissent was normal until some who were against the new space made it personal, threatening to “ruin him” if he went forward with it. These opponents sent a mass email to the entire congregation accusing him of being “a bad leader.” As he later described it:

a little faction of people in our church [contended] that this decision was really just my mastermind psychological skills to convince people to do something they didn’t really want to do with their money.

And I realized at that moment that being a pastor is this really precarious little spot you sit in that people project all of their wants, and needs, and demands, expectations, unrealized hopes onto you. And when you don’t meet them, they are posed with a response. Either they’re going to reject you, or ruin you, or abandon you.

And that’s ultimately what started to settle into my own ministry, was just this fear of being abandoned and losing people, and being interpreted in very villainous, demonizing ways and not knowing how to like — that’s the shame. Not knowing how to get that off me.

Around the 2012 election involving Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney, White began to feel even more demoralized about his commitment to bring people together in a caring community. “A dear friend whom I loved” in the congregation approached him and said that as a conservative, she didn’t feel safe in his church, felt “judged here,” and couldn’t remain “with this kind of judgment.” White apologized profusely, told her “you do belong here,” but couldn’t change her mind. Within days, another couple told him about their need to depart because there was “no space for us here” with their more liberal views. White described how he was “in shock” that people with contrary political perspectives “didn’t think they could belong in the same community. And I didn’t really have words to keep them.” When they left his church, it felt like they were abandoning him too.

Matters hardly improved as the next election approached. White characterized it this way:

the election of Trump just threw battery acid on the whole reality. Where people would never have felt comfortable calling another brother or sister in Christ, you know, a horrible name like a Marxist or a white supremacist or a baby killer, I mean, these things just started to — they were just flowing off people’s tongues when Trump got elected.

And then in 2020 came the pandemic, with new opportunities for divisiveness and demonization, like when a church stops meeting in person to reduce Covid’s transmission or decides to reopen, but with a mask policy.

For White, It had finally become too much.

He appreciated the extent of his downward spiral when he took a vacation with his wife. White was shocked by his need to sleep for long periods. When he was awake, his hands were often shaking so much he suspected Parkinson’s. But neurological testing after he returned to work revealed something else entirely: signs of post-traumatic stress. Except instead of PTSD, which is often connected to the experience of a single violent act, his injury was from the accumulation of trauma he’d experienced over almost 20 years of ministry.

How he’d gotten to this traumatized place became clear after a therapist encouraged him to do “an emotional and relational audit.” With her encouragement, White mapped out:

people that I had loved that were no longer in my life. I had to name people that had attacked me. And then I also had to name events that I was privy to in people’s lives that were traumatic for them, and I had to be present to them.

And I mapped out, over a period of 20 years, over 180 people that had come into my life or left in my life. And I had just tucked all of this stuff under the carpet. And what she called it — she’s like these are all little deaths. These are all little deaths that you’ve experienced. And you haven’t grieved [over] any of them.

Instead, he carried the grief and loss inside, and slowly but surely they were breaking him down.

Even with this insight, White was “really having a hard time believing that something I loved” had damaged him this much. He also knew that he’d probably have to stop being a pastor to escape the trauma, but “I just didn’t want to give up on people, and I love them, and I didn’t want to be a quitter.”

When you are “called” to a career by your convictions but become unable to do it because of factors beyond your control, you can suffer “moral injury,” or the same kinds of trauma that many health care professionals experienced during Covid when they could no longer be caregivers in the ways that they needed to be within an overwhelmed health care system. (I wrote about this previously in “The Moral Injury to Caregivers When They Can No Longer Provide Care.”)

White went on to leave his church, to tears from some in his congregation but also to accusations of abandonment from others in their hour of need, so even as he walked out the door he continued to be torn apart. Without a job, he had the space to realize that he couldn’t be alone among faith leaders in suffering this kind of damage, while also realizing that his colleagues had never talked to him about the destructive forces that were buffeting them. He also searched for, but couldn’t find, a version of the Betty Ford Rehabilitation Center that poorly paid pastors could afford. Mulling over its necessity led White and his wife to open a healing refuge for burned-out pastors, which they run to this day.

Much like that former school superintendent in Joplin Missouri, White is working to heal moral injuries suffered in a different (but related) corner of the job market. He and his fellow pastors share the experience of being vilified for their efforts to bring people together during divisive times. But the injuries they share go deeper than name-calling and hurt feelings. When members of their congregations could no longer remain, they abandon their pastors as well–a string of “tiny deaths” that need to be mourned before healing can begin.

We know that injuries like this are occurring in other “pivotal jobs” too—to our teachers, librarians, school board and PTA members, to our election officials and vote counters, to members of our police forces and to key military personnel—all of whom need to be ready to deliver on our most important commitments while being assailed or abandoned at every turn by those they are struggling to serve.

These beleaguered men and women are a dwindling civic resource, and nearly impossible to replace when they leave public service.

The dog days of August are as good a time as any to think about where we’re headed when it comes to some of the most essential jobs in our communities and what we can (and must) do to shore up the brave individuals who are still bold enough to do them.

This post was adapted from my August 7, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (because of reader reactions) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Turning on the Rescuers

July 25, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Just as I was starting to settle into a new year, I was seized by this story on the radio.

It was about a kind of pattern: how people who dive into natural disaster recovery–helping to produce miracles while doing so, and being initially heralded as miracle workers by nearly everyone–seem to become, in the months of hard work and challenges that follow, scapegoats for everything that has not been achieved, and eventually a kind of public enemy.

These first responders often lose their jobs and the luster (if not more) on their reputations as the community around them frays, becomes less willing to follow anyone’s hopeful lead, the disillusion sets in, the naysayers step up, and fingers of blame get pointed.

In this particular story, the arc from celebrating the rescuers to demonizing them was navigated by a heartland community. “The fixes” were to schools destroyed by a deadly tornado and to improving the overall quality of education during rebuilding efforts in a small Missouri city. Their catastrophe always required group commitment, sacrifice and solidarity—not merely the efforts of a few first-responders—but the community that initially followed their lead and called them heroes melted into disappointment as their efforts fell short of its differing hopes, and many of their fellows eventually turned on them.

Somebody has to be to blame, you see. Surely the shortfalls that followed are not my fault, me and my neighbors, due to our failure to cohere, to bury our selfish interests, or to give our initial “heroes” the benefit of our doubts. The “mess as we see it” has to be the fault of the folks who jumped into the breach in the first place.

I almost said: foolishly jumped into the breach.

But what would saying this mean? If the most willing and most able of a community’s possible saviors hesitated–and then stepped back, shaking their heads–when they’d almost joined the rescue effort after an unprecedented weather event, an out-of-control wildfire, too much water or not enough?

What would it mean if good men and women decided that it wasn’t worth the inevitable death threats, the risks to their families and their own mental health, the possible loss of their jobs and reputations if they were to step up and respond to a physical calamity in their community when they might be in the best positions to do so?

Would saying “I pass” matter less if the calamity affected everyone’s health (like a pandemic) or the community’s ability to govern itself and fend off chaos (given its political divides)?

Political philosopher Edmund Burke famously said, in a phrase that’s almost become hackneyed in its repetition:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing.

So what would it really mean if enough good men and women regularly decided that it wasn’t worth the personal costs “of their coming to the rescue” because of the likelihood that their own community would eventually turn on them in personally destructive ways?

_{When the going gets rough, it’s always easier to say “No” than to say “Yes,” and
to continuously put our support behind our initial “Yes.”}

Of course, we’ve seen this movie before.

In recent history—which is written from the distance of a half-century or more—few leaders twinkle more brightly than Winston Churchill.

I fell in love with him and his leadership style all over again while I was reading Eric Larson’s recent book about the man behind-the-scenes at Dunkirk and the Blitz—a biographical sketch that was only possible because of newly accessible diaries that had been written by members of Churchill’s family and staff at the time. (Here’s a link to my discussion of that often delightful profile in “Two Books Worth Reading” from around a year and a half ago.)

Yet despite Churchill’s ultimately heroic efforts to step into a breach that had been created by flailing national leadership at the dawn of World War II, the British peoples’ gratitude wasn’t deep enough or its memory long enough to continue to back him after the War had been won, and more than his ego suffered as a consequence.

Churchill not only lost that post-War election, he became a scapegoat for those who bemoaned the cost in lives and sterling of the War effort, the loss of the British Empire, and once Victory in Europe was declared on VE Day, a “victory” that no longer tasted quite as sweet.

_{British voters didn’t give him a vote of confidence or help him to guide their country into peacetime. It’s hardly of a stretch to say that they blamed Churchill for everything that hadn’t gone the way that they would have preferred it.}

We’re also seeing this movie today.  Whatever you may think of Anthony Fauci (infectious disease doctor, media personality and CDC spokesman), ask yourselves:  Does any 81-year old man really need daily death threats, to put his family in regular peril, to risk a long and hard-earned reputation for admitting when he’s wrong and helping his country stave off deadly viruses? In his fall from early hero to current villain in many eyes, what’s most amazing to me is that he hasn’t already said: “To hell with it.”

That’s also what grabbed my attention in the story I was hearing about Joplin Missouri.  Looking back nearly a decade—from disaster in 2011, to interventions by the first responders, to celebrating these individuals as community heroes, and to the mental health toll that followed for so many of them as members of their community proceeded to tear them down—I was struck by what seemed to be the increasingly inevitable “life cycle” of hero-to-villain.

Both Churchill and Fauci would surely have identified with these Joplin officials who struggled mightily to help rebuild a mile-wide stretch of town that had been torn to shreds by a deadly, 200-mile-an-hour, so-called “multiple vortex” tornado—only to have too many of these locals eventually turn on them when their post-disaster hopes were frustrated by a lack of funds or a unity of purpose.

There’s one more thing that peaked my interest in this story. I’ve spent time in Joplin, Missouri so I felt that I knew at least something about this place and its people.

Some years ago, Joplin was ground zero in a multi-district securities matter that I was involved in as a lawyer. I was headquartered for a month of depositions in nearby Springfield (see The Simpsons) and made a kind of pilgrimage to nearby Joplin, where key players in the alleged investment scheme lived. The cases involved the buying and selling of interests in ethanol plants, ethanol is a by-product of corn, and there are cornfields nearly everywhere in these parts. At the time, I visited Joplin for its silo-full of ethanol entrepreneurs and accountants and because I wanted to know whether their “famous” barbeque was as good as everybody said it was. (“Yes,” to that!)

Anyway, the tornado clusters that hit Joplin several years later were devastating to this farming and light industrial community. They killed 158 people outright, injured more than 1100, and caused property damage totaling $2.8 billion, the highest in Missouri’s history.

Joplin’s loss and recovery are also relevant today because of the devastating series of tornados that ripped a 100-mile long path through Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri (just to the south-east of Joplin) less than a month ago. The life-cycles of hero-to-villain are likely just beginning to turn for the first-responders in those near-by communities.

Immediately after the Joplin tornado struck in 2011, those with the relevant job responsibilities there immediately stepped up and several were interviewed for the story that followed, including Bryan Wicklund (Joplin’s chief building official, who confronted how ill-prepared the community’s building standards had been); Keith Stammer (the City’s emergency management director who had to coordinate relief efforts and wanted to “think big” when rebuilding); and C.J Huff (the school superintendent who confronted serious damage to more than half of Joplin’s schools). Vicky Mieseler, the executive director of mental health clinics in Joplin, and Doug Walker, a clinical psychologist who travels worldwide helping communities struck by disaster, were also interviewed for this story.

Their accounts were as sad as they were striking, Huff’s (the school superintendant’s) story in particular.

Mieseler (the local mental health worker) recalled that the best thing that happened after the tornado struck in May was hearing Huff tell the community’s parents that students would be able to go back to school in August, only three months later.  Given the extent of school building damage and the fact that many students and residents were homeless, his announcement had a stunning impact in countering the community’s despair.

Against the Herculean timeline he set for himself, Huff marshaled local resources and managed to re-open schools in August by building classrooms in abandoned big-box stores. During those early months, he describes himself as “a walking heart attack” as he tried to make the school year happen:

I gained about, gosh, 60 pounds, I think. I’m a stress eater. And we all have our coping mechanisms, and mine was ice cream and lots of coffee – lots of coffee and lots of ice cream.”

It made Huff a local hero, and he soon became a national one too, building on a reputation he’d earned before the tornado by helping to launch Bright Futures, an initiative that brought together the school district, local businesses, faith-based organizations and community members to help meet students’ most basic needs, an effort that had grown to 30 affiliates across several states.

_{During Huff’s heroic phase: President Obama honored him at a local graduation ceremony one year after the tornado, but as re-building continued and hit the inevitable potholes, his growing notoriety may have worked against him.}

As the nitty-gritty of rebuilding Joplin’s schools continued, growing community push-back began to take a toll on Huff. Doug Morris (the disaster psychologist) says Huff became exhausted and distraught as locals began to fight his proposals, and ultimately him personally, at almost every turn.

Huff was demonized by some residents. He says he considered suicide….

Those attacks included a Change.org campaign to terminate his employment as school superintendant (the termination petition ultimately gained 486 signatures) and the platform became one of several sounding boards for his opponents. The comments posted there refused to give him any credit for his early accomplishments or much (if any) support for the school rebuilding efforts that he championed:

_{– T Carl: It’s time to take action. CJ Huff has performed gross misconduct in his role as Superintendent of our school system. He is a detriment to our kids, the parents of Joplin’s school children and the taxpayers of Joplin, MO.

– Brayden Provins: He’s the worst superintendent the school district has ever had. He’s ran the schools into the ground.

– J. Benifield: I have several grandchildren in the Joplin R-8 school district, with some BULLIED everyday. No one does anything about it and Mr. Huff seems to think there’s “no problem with bullying”….yes, yes there is. These kids don’t need all of this drama from Mr. Huff. His disrespect is deplorable. He needs to focus on the kids AND teachers. We CAN do better}.

_{– Randy Long: He is all for himself and not the kids or the teachers.}

Local mental health worker Miesler said Huff was hardly alone in experiencing these kinds of attacks from Joplin residents. “Several years after the tornado,” she said, “you started to see major change in leadership positions” across the community. In addition to Huff, who went on to resign of his own accord, this included the Joplin’s City Manager among many others.

Huff, who is now working as a disaster consultant, reports that “every single one of his [current] colleagues” is a former public official who was ousted from his or her role after responding to a local disaster. He went on to lament:

One of the things I learned is that when emotion and logic collide, emotion wins every time. It didn’t matter what we brought, whether it was data or subject matter experts. It didn’t matter.

And about these former public official and new co-workers, he said with a rueful laugh:

We call it the exclusive club that nobody wants to belong to.

Maybe Huff, the other former leaders in Joplin, and public officials elsewhere who had been ousted after responding to community disasters let their initial status as local heroes go to their heads and started to act arrogantly and unresponsively. But then again, maybe not. I couldn’t gather enough information for this post to know whether Joplin’s post-tornado leaders acted like heroes throughout or devolved into something far less than that. It’s certain that Huff and the others weren’t perfect.

But the two mental health experts who spoke in this story did so because they believed that the hero-to-villain life cycle after natural disasters is an increasingly common one today. It apparently happens almost everywhere, with considerable health consequences for the initially acclaimed rescuers. What these mental health experts didn’t say—and maybe didn’t have to—is that it’s not just those who step into the fray during natural disasters. Those who attempt to provide leadership in any kind of community crisis today are likely to face the same retribution and personal health consequences despite being celebrated in the early days as heroes.

No one should jump into the fray of an emergency who isn’t both willing and able to do so. But if you can do it and deep-down want to do it because of your abilities and the extent of your community’s need, will any reasonable person actually “jump in” and “take the lead” if they know what they’re probably “buying” for themselves and their families at the back-end?

Community members who lack these rescuer’s abilities, track records of service, courage and strength of character can turn on you in a flash, accusing you of serving yourself instead of them, of being incompetent, deplorable and worse. “Sticks and stones,” yes, but their daily assaults can be debilitating, especially when the stakes are high and fewer and fewer around you “seem to have your back.”

The shame, of course, is that good men and women—and maybe the best of them—will step back from any kind of crisis leadership, leaving it in the hands of the less able and less bold, or even to charlatans.

Perhaps this is what we are already seeing in those who stand for elected office, run our school boards, libraries, and other community organizations: far fewer good people than we need to do our most important public work, because we’re scaring them away before they even get involved.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but increasingly it seems to be.

This post was adapted from my January 9, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Who We Go-to To Learn How to Get There

July 5, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

For just about anything you can think of, somebody’s posted a YouTube video to show you how.

It’s like we’ve moved Dad on-line and then made him available to everyone. Literally.

I tuned in to one of them, Rob Kenny and his “Dad, How Do I?” tutorials, because one of you thought that I should. (Thanks, Brian!)  Dad, how do I tie a tie? Dad, how do I shave? Dad, how do I fix my running toilet?

That last one’s had 1.1 million views, so lots of us “kids” are watching.

Rob Kenny’s advice is sincere, never scrambled with snark but always accompanied by a mayonnaise of Dad jokes that make him break up a little when he tells them, pulling you into their vibe even though you can’t remember ever thinking that jokes like this were funny. They pull you into a heartland kind of conspiracy, like the “just-right porridge” did in the wandering fairy tale.

You see, Rob Kenny lost his dad when he was a kid and it made him realize that other kids had lost (or never had) their dads either, so he initially started posting his everyday advice as a kind of public service, never expecting for the hole to be as big as it was or for so many to feel that he was helping to fill it.

When Rob Kenny was having a bad week recently (and hadn’t posted his next vid when he’d planned and viewers were hoping), he got on the horn anyway, to “buy himself some time,” talking about how much he appreciated everyone’s comments on his last dollop of advice—“I’m new at being out in public like this” he explained, but your writing to me things like “Protect this man at all costs” helps me so much “because I need protection” so much–and then How Proud He Was of all the generous people who took the time to care about him back.

To him, it seemed to demonstrate their good character, even those like Joseph, who’d written (like he was some kind of tough guy): “This dude is making my eyes sweat.”

Rob Kenny’s “I am proud of you” post, which comes with an almost tearful dad-joke along with his struggles to get though Teddy Roosevelt’s “Daring Greatly” poem (from those halcyon days when our presidents were also poets) moves straight though the heart of maudlin with the sincerest of intentions.

For me, It brought some tonic to another long week (when is the last time somebody said “I’m proud of you” just for making it through?), and it got me thinking about how much we all need not only hands-on guidance but also an attaboy now and then, even when it comes at the arms-length distance of a YouTube video or an article in the New Yorker, or a self-help book that you can spend all the time that you need with.

Because the best of this kind of outreach conjures those extraordinary times when you were huddled knee-to-knee or hunched elbow-to-elbow over whatever it was, and somebody who cared enough was actually there with you showing you how.

The life-blood in these kinds of tutorials comes from memories like that.

When I was in “start-up business mode” several years back and thinking about ways to change the world for the better, I had the idea for a school, or maybe just an area in every school, where you could learn about practical things that no one else seemed to be teaching.

There were places in my high school like wood shop and the typing pool where certain crafts and skills were taught. Indeed, showing how close we were to the cusp at the time, BHS had already re-branded “home economics” as “cooking 1-2-3” so that boys wouldn’t feel too threatened to take it (and I could learn how to make pecan pie by the last class.) But there was no one there to teach me the soup-to-nuts of traveling by train or reading a roadmap, fixing a broken toaster or finding my way out of the woods if I got lost, traveling in a foreign country or changing a flat tire (although my fellow “industrial arts” students, who’d go on to become our town’s mechanics, might have helped with that last one if I’d asked).

Perhaps because “practical” was not one of the first 10 or 15 words that anyone would have used to describe me, I was drawn to this gapping void in my own experience and maybe in the educational system generally. This un-met dimension of schooling would need to have guides who could show the uninitiated how to do all of those things that had somehow fallen through the cracks of our formal educations.

I got far enough with this idea to wonder how I’d sell it to boards of education that (unfortunately) were already struggling to keep the school systems that they had already both functioning and safe. What was the “value-add” that parents and other civic-minded individuals would be willing to pay for in order to produce more fully-rounded graduates and a more capable community? That’s where the waves of my enthusiasm hit the shoals of feasibility. But I never abandoned the idea entirely.

At least intially, I returned to the need itself and where my urge to satisfy it had come from. I don’t recall wishing that my dad had taught me how to solve all of these lingering mysteries. Instead I came to realize that he’d actually given me some of the tools that I needed to solve them myself. As a businessman who was always on the road having “to figure things out,” he was a regular demonstration of how to turn conundrums into solutions. It was an internal discipline that I had in me too, however little I’d acted upon it.

So if my “problem-solving” innovation was unlikely to fly in our school systems, maybe I had my own ability to find the practical, step-by-step paths that could lead me (rewardingly) to the bottom of whatever I was most curious about. It was a revelation that tracked my other dad-like substitute, the Cub Scout manual, in which every challenge (from making a fire in the woods to creating a successful lemonade stand) began with wondering how and ended after taking one practical step after another.

In the ensuing years, I effectively brought that imagined part of schooling into my head, encouraging its problem-solving wherever curiosity took me, and thinking nothing more about it until I stumbled upon one of the most extraordinary things that I’ve ever read in New Yorker magazine.

_{This isn’t a picture of Kirk Varnedoe coaching the Giant Metrozoids, a well-named team of 8-year old boys learning the art and science of football twenty years ago. Indeed, it’s not even a picture of football players and their coach. But it might help you begin to imagine the accomplishments that a cohort like this can aim for together on a field of dreams.}

During the late 1990s, when Kirk Varnedoe was the curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he volunteered to help Luke, the son of New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, and a clutch of other City boys eager to learn the game of football on a playing field in Central Park. Since Varnedoe and Gopnik already knew one another from their full-time pursuits, on an extracurricular voyage like this one it was like Odysseus finding his Homer.

In the first 10 minutes, Gopnik realized that great teachers can “de-mystify” a painting as well as an athletic pursuit and that Varnedoe was world-class wherever he exercised his vocation. In fact, Varnedoe’s instincts as a field guide were so strong that he’d considered becoming a football coach after graduating from college, offering this post-mortem some years later on why he’d taken a more high-falutin direction.

if you’re going to spend your life coaching football, you have to be smart enough to do it well and dumb enough to think it matters.

But of course, the underlying instincts don’t go away, they just get channeled into explaining, say, something as inscrutable as abstract expressionism to the un-convinced, which Varnedoe went on to do in the Mellon Lectures that he gave (to near unanimous acclaim) in the early 2000s at the National Gallery of Art. It was during this same span of years that also brought his de-mystifying abilities back to some 8-year old boys who wanted to explore the mysteries of football.

If your New Yorker subscription will get you over its paywall, you can read “The Last of the Metrozoids” here. You can also subscribe, “get a free tote,” and read it from “the inside” in the same place. Otherwise, you’ll have to trust in my ability to cull some of its best passages from my own torn-out copy of it and to include them here.

Gopnik sets the scene magnificently:

The boys came running from school, excited to have been wearing their Metrozoid T-shirts all day, waiting for practice. Eric and Derek and Ken, good athletes, determined and knowing and nodding brief, been-there-before nods as they chucked the ball around; Jacob and Charlie and Garrett, talking a little too quickly and uncertainly about how many downs you had and how many yards you had to go. Will and Luke and Matthew, very verbal, evangelizing for a game, please, can’t we, like, have a game with another team, right away, we’re ready; and Gabriel, just eager for a chance to get the ball and roll joyfully in the mud. I was curious to see what Kirk would do with them. ‘OK, he said, very gently…’Let’s break it down.’

After returning to basics they could easily swallow, Gopnik says: “They followed him like Israelites.”

What none of the boys knew however was how far back-to-basics they’d need to go before they actually picked up the ball and threw it around, or even learned which way to run. But Varnadoe understood that this game was less about what “you did” and more about what “you all did together.” So he continued by further bringing their enthusiasm to ground.

‘No celebrations,’ he said, arriving at the middle of the field. ‘This is a scrimmage. This is just the first step. We’re all one team. We are the Giant Metrozoids.’ He said the ridiculous name as though it were Fighting Irish…The kids stopped, subdued and puzzled. ‘Hands together,’ he said, and stretched his out, and solemnly the boys laid their hands on his, one after another. ‘One, Two, Three together!’ and all the hands sprang up. He had replaced a ritual of celebration with one of solidarity—and the boys sensed that solidarity was somehow at once more solemn and more fun than any passing victory could be.

Varnadoe also knew that what they were doing there was about more than the game. They’d all come (himself included) as one thing and by the end of their time together would leave as something else, because learning is always about transformation too, from one level of knowledge, appreciation or physicality to another. At this point, Gopnik disclosed the depth of Varnadoe’s own transformation, from a “fat and unimpressive” kid before he’d become a football player in college. About that earlier time Varnadoe said:

You were one kind of person with one kind of body and one set of possibilities, and then you worked at it and you were another. The model was so simple and so powerful that you could apply it to anything…It put your fate in your own hands.

So he endeavored to put the same kind of fate in each of the Metrozoid’s hands.

As the morning progressed, Varnadoe instilled the lesson by drilling the boys down into each step that they’d be taking on this field when they were ready.

He had them do their first play at a walk, 6 times [Gopnik reported from the sidelines], which they clowned about, slow motion when they were inclined to be ‘terrier quick,’ but he still had them do it. Then they ‘ambled through it’ [making the proceedings take on]… a courtly quality, like a seventeenth century dance.

But the boys were beginning to see how the game was a series of basic steps that they could master, and that they needed to know how to do each step slowly before they could speed it up, and certainly before they could combine it with other steps. “You break it down and then you build it back up,” is how Varnedoe put it.

Some of his teaching also involved recognizing that every boy would come to his “de-mystification” differently—some emotionally, some through reasoning, and others more viscerally, through increasing their body awareness. So when circumstances called for it, he’d take, say a kid who seemed afraid of the football, to the side for some one-on-one instruction. But instead of focusing on the kid’s occasional successes and many failures, Gopnik described Varnadoe’s ability to engage the boy’s deeper drives.

When he caught [a ball], Kirk wasn’t too encouraging; when he dropped one he wasn’t too hard. He did not make him think it was easy. He did not make him think that he had done it when he hadn’t. He made him think that he could do it if he chose.

Between the master and his chronicler, “The Last of the Metrozoids” blew me away when I first read it and still blows me away today because there is something almost supernatural about those who know how to build up the capabilities of others, are lucky enough to be captured in the act of doing so, and somewhere down the line, share those bits of magic with the rest of us.

This post was adapted from my March 20, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any by leaving your email address in the column to the right.