...while wondering what ever happened to the Guatemalan schoolteacher

The day started like any other in the life of a fifteen year-old in West Columbia, South Carolina. Up at seven or so, a really bad breakfast, out the door and on to school. At least that's that I think happened. I really don't have any idea, so unremarkable was this day.

At about 10:00 or so I was called to the office. This was not an infrequent occurrence. When I got there, they told me my mom was on the phone.

I knew it was over.

He had gone in for a physical the week of the Fourth of July and received a clean bill of health. By early August the lump he felt in the area up and to the right of his breast had grown to about the size of a grapefruit. Now here, about seven weeks later I was on the telephone with my mother, who was telling me the cancer had spread to my father's brain. She was coming to get me.

There were signs over the weekend that something wasn't right. He stopped me midway through selecting the week's games on our football pool, something we had done since before I even knew how to write.

"I just can't think right now. Sorry, buddy."

Then on Monday he got mad at my mom for disagreeing with him when he insisted that I was just there at the hospital, going so far as to describe what I was wearing -- on Saturday. For her part, mom chalked it up to the morphine.

My mom showed up and we zipped over to the hospital. He was downstairs having tests when we got there, so we just kinda waited in the room until they brought him in.

Wow.

Eyes rolled into the back of his head, breathing labored, drool out the side of the mouth. I had never seen anything like that in my life, and certainly not my dad so compromised. It didn't take long. It may have been an hour, it may have been a week. But soon enough, the breath got shallower and he began to slip away.

My mother held his left hand; I held his right. I told him over and over again how much I loved him. And I could swear that for a moment, just a scintilla of a second, he focused. Probably just wishful thinking. Eventually, he took one last lungfull of life...then passed to the great beyond.

My life fundamentally changed that day twenty years ago today. It also had a lot to do with many other things that have happened on other September 25ths in my life.

My dad was a great guy. The kind who everyone truly liked. Cancer nurses are a tough bunch. They see death every day and many of those that die are patients a much longer time than my dad was. Yet as we left, they were a mess. There was not a dry eye on the floor. I don['t remember her name, but there was a large, black nurse who was particularly upset. She kept sobbing, telling my mom how much she loved my dad. I was really proud to be his kid right then.

I never really questioned why my dad died. I just figured it was his time. My life would have been different had he not, and I would have been spared a lot of pain and bad decision-making, to be sure. But I was blessed with sixteen years with a wonderful man. And never in those sixteen years did I ever feel unloved, unrespected or -- most importantly to an insecure little kid -- uncool.

_____

I graduated from Basic Training at Lackland Air Force Base on 28 July 1990. As I was to go on to the Security (Military) Police Academy from there, I only had to cross the base, as it too was at Lackland.

In Tech School, you have more freedom than in Basic, including pretty much free reign on the weekends. Technically you were supposed to stay within a certain radius and be back on base at night unless you let them know, but it was rarely enforced. Unless you fucked up. Beyond that, it was pretty much, don't ask, don't tell.

Shortly after Tech School begn, I struck up a friendship with an Airman Rooks, from Grapevine, Texas. His first name escapes me after all these years, but in the military you rarely use them. Now Rooks and I soon became running buddies. Our normal routine had us leaving base on Friday after training and heading down to the Riverwalk, where we would sit at the bar at Olive Garden and scarf down as much salad and breadsticks as possible, while knocking back strawberry daiquiris. Yes, I said daiquiris. Never was a big drinker. After that we'd take in a movie then head back to base. They were good times.

So one Friday night we're at the bar and I ask, "so where's Arlington, Texas?" Rooks is like, "That's outside of Dallas, man". I had always thought it was out west somewhere, like by Odessa. Anyway, the next Friday we went AWOL after class. Downtown to the Greyhound station, up to Dallas, bummed a ride (I still have no idea how he did it) over to Arlington and we were in our seats by the third inning. By the fifth we had girls with us. By the eighth we were making plans for after the game. And once the game ended (Texas 6 - Oakland 2), we jumped in their car and headed to the West End in Dallas for dancing and drinking.

These chicks could drink. His was Tiffany. Mine was Regina. Much alcohol, much dancing and a good bit of debauchery later, it was Sunday afternoon and I needed to get back to Lackland. Rooks had headed back on Saturday. I had also fallen in love. OK, I guess at that stage it was merely lust, but it quickly evolved into love. After that weekend, almost every Friday I would head back up to Dallas to spend the weekend with her in Irving, where she lived.

An ankle injury held me in training longer than anticipated, so Rooks' class moved on without me. I finished in late September but was able to spend Regina's birthday with her: September 25th. Maybe when God takes something away, he gives something back, I figured.

While I was in Tech School, Saddam Hussein had taken his troops for a little stroll through the desert, into Kuwait. About two weeks after I returned to South Carolina, my Air National Guard unit was activated to go do something about this. In December we left for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Before I left, Regina had flown in to see me twice and I had flown out to her once, to see a Billy Joel concert -- her early Christmas present to me. While over in the middle east, she wrote to me every day and sent me packages weekly. Her love played a large role in getting me through the war.

The day after we got back stateside, I flew out to Dallas to see Regina. I bought a car and drove it back. Three weeks later, my things were in a U-Haul and I was headed back west, moving to Texas.

About three weeks after that, it was over. Unrestrained passion, frenzied sex, but in the end it was a fantastic supernova, destined to flame out fast. The first adult heartbreak of my life. Certainly not the last.

I was at the Gingerman a few years later, drinking off my September 25th blues when several women and I got to talking about what had brought us to Dallas. Jobs, school, relationships. When I told my story, one of them said, "Regina S...?"

My jaw dropped.

"She has a little kid?"

Now she was freaked out too.

"Well, he's almost a teenager. Might be one already."

Now back to me being freaked out.

And at the same time we said, "named Chris?"

It turns out she used to work with Regina.

"So I guess you don't know the cancer came back."

Regina had died the previous fall. She wasn't even 35.

_____

The sun was clear, and it was just a little bit chilly as we sat at Fountain Place, on the west side of Downtown Dallas. We had last spoken about a week prior, in another little downtown park, just off Jackson Street, about a block from the Manor House, where I was living at the time.

Elsa and I had been together for two years. We had met at Trees in Deep Ellum, at a Cowboy Mouth concert. As I was currently in a dying relationship with a very good woman who I did not want to hurt, I didn't call Elsa until about a month after meeting her, after I had ended the other relationship.

Our courtship was fast. And passionate. She was a high school English teacher, the first of her family to have been born in the United States. She was brilliant, well-read and one of the most fundamentally good human beings I have ever met. And she was stunning. Not a day passed during our time together that at some point she would take my breath away. The hair, the eyes...the nalgas!

But we had problems. We argued often. And with different styles, me the yelling and screaming irrational one and her the slow-burn "you don't know you really pissed her off until it was too late" one. It was a combustible mix. When it was good, it was amazing. When it was bad...

A big problem was that she didn't feel as though I respected her views. And I probably didn't. It's ironic that the guy I am now probably has much more in common with her than the guy I was then did. Another was my daughter. While Elsa accepted her intellectually, in practice it just wasn't the same. She would say -- and I have no doubt that she truly believed it at the time -- that should she ever become Chelsea's step-mother, she would then be more involved. My view was that you can't turn maternal instincts on and off like a switch. Either way, it was a constant underlying source of tension.

Then there was Matt, or as I call him, "the Lurker". You know the Lurker, he's the guy -- the "friend" -- who waits in the background for you to blow it. This cat was out there for seven years. Seven years!!

Anyway, the tension got to be too much after about a year, I completely exploded, told her to go to hell and never call me again.

I know, subtle.

Well, she didn't call. Imagine that. Soooooo, I start groveling. She took me back, but I had given up so much ground in the negotiations that my original issues, the ones that drove me over the edge, were never addressed. So there remained some bitterness, I suppose. I'm pretty sure she and Matt bumped uglies while we were apart, but didn't really figure that out until much later.

In any event, we spent another year together and it was actually really nice. Still, often times it was one step forward, two steps back. Around the end of the summer of 1998 it just got to be too much. Elsa had decided to convert to Catholicism and had asked Matt to be her sponsor. Not me, her boyfriend of two years.

This is what probably got me really thinking about the relationship and where, if anywhere, it was going. I had told her I loved her about three months into the relationship. Her reply was, "don't say that". So I never did again. She later claimed that she meant, "don't say you love me for the first time in bed, right after doing the deed." Not sure I buy that one, but it doesn't really matter because she never said it either.

It came to a head in late September when we had a huge fight right there in front of 20,000+ people at the Stars game at Reunion Arena. The next night we walked to a park and talked honestly for the first time. we decided to give it a week then get together and see where we wanted to go with things.

So a week later we're sitting at Fountain Place and I say, "Elsa, outside of Chelsea, you are the most important person in my life. I love your mind, I always enjoy the time we spend together and the only word I can use to describe the sex is 'Olympic'.

"But something's clearly missing. I don't like ultimatums and I'm not big on having to hear specific things, but I need to hear two things from you right now or I need to go. I need to hear that you will accept my child in practice and the words 'I', 'love' and 'you' -- in that order."

And much to her credit she replied, "I can certainly make the effort with Chelsea. But I can't say that I love you and I don't know that will ever be able to."

She and Matt moved in together about a month later. They are now happily married.

_____

I tell my friends to avoid me now on the 25th of September. I try not to drive. I have a small child serve as a taster. (He's only been around what -- a couple of years? They won't miss him).

Seriously, this a day that makes me take stock of my life. It makes me thankful for the capacity to love, to laugh and yes, to suffer seemingly unbearable pain. For if we don't walk up to that edge, if we don't risk the agony of having our beating heart ripped right from our very chest, have we really ever lived at all?

~

They say that these are not the best of times

But they're the only times I've ever known

And I believe there is a time for meditation

In cathedrals of our own

Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes

And I can only stand apart and sympathize

For we are always what our situations hand us

It's either sadness or euphoria

So we'll argue and we'll compromise and realize

That nothing's ever changed

For all out mutual experience

Our separate conclusions are the same

Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity

A reason coexists with our insanity

And so we choose between reality and madness

It's either sadness or euphoria

How thoughtlessly we dissapate our energies

Perhaps we don't fulfill each-other's fantasies

And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives

With our respective similarities

It's either sadness or euphoria

--B. Joel, 1971