Second Place

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I was holding the trophy when he got to me.

Second place. I hate second place trophies. Nobody builds a shelf for them. I’d worked on that speech for weeks, rehearsed it in the truck, rehearsed it in the kitchen, ran it for people who’d tell me the truth, and I walked into that contest expecting to win. Then they read the names in the wrong order and handed me a piece of wood with a little plate on it, and I walked off the stage trying to figure out what had just happened.

I got maybe ten steps.

A man I’d never met stepped in front of me, put a hand out, and said, “Let’s talk about what you could’ve done better.”

Here’s the part I’ve had to be honest with myself about since. He wasn’t wrong to think I needed that conversation. I did. Walking off that stage, the only thing in my head was how did he beat me? I truly didn’t understand. The other speaker was good. I thought I was better. Call it pride or call it competitiveness, whichever fits. I wasn’t mad about losing so much as confused by it, and confusion is worse. Somebody was going to have to explain it to me.

It just wasn’t going to be him.

I’ve given more evaluations in Toastmasters than I can count, and taken more than I’d like to admit.

Feedback is the whole point of the place. Every speech gets one. There’s a person whose job that night is to stand up after you sit down and tell you, in front of everyone, what worked and what didn’t. That sounds brutal from the outside. It isn’t, and the reason it isn’t is the room.

You know the evaluator. You’ve watched them bomb a speech in March. They watched you lose your place in April. You’ve eaten bad cookies together during the break. By the time they stand up to talk about your delivery, you decided months ago whether they get to. The evaluation lands because everything around it was built first.

And when you want feedback from somebody outside the club, you go find them. You pick the person. You ask.

What almost never happens is a stranger walking up cold with a diagnosis.

So when that man opened with what I could’ve done better, I wasn’t hearing an evaluator. I was hearing somebody who’d watched a contest, formed some opinions, and decided my ten seconds off the stage was the right moment to deliver them.

He may have been dead on. I’ll never know.

I said something polite and kept walking, which is about the best I had in me.

I think about that when I’m the one in the audience.

I’ve sat through a lot of speeches from people I don’t know and I’ve had plenty of thoughts about them. What I say afterward, if I say anything, is this: I really enjoyed your speech — if you ever want to talk about it, I’d be glad to.

Then I let it sit.

Most of the time they smile and say thanks and that’s the end of it. Every so often somebody finds me a week later and asks what I saw. Those conversations are good, and they’re good because they asked.

The other contestant beat me.

It took me a while to be able to say that without the word “probably” in front of it. The explanation came eventually, from a couple of people who’d known me for years, who’d heard early versions of that speech and could tell me exactly where it had gone soft.

They were right. He was better that night, and the reasons weren’t mysterious at all once the right people said them out loud.

The trophy’s in a drawer.

Her Chopsaw

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There was a Canadian comedy show in the nineties called Red Green that my wife and I used to watch together, and one of its running lines was that “if she can’t find you handsome, she might as well find you handy”.

I was not handy. Not even slightly.

She was. Around 2001 or 2002, a couple of years into our marriage, she had a chopsaw and she knew how to use it. I’m fairly sure the first thing I helped with was shelves.

I was hesitant, and I want to be accurate about why, because the obvious answer is wrong.

It wasn’t the tool. I wasn’t nervous about a spinning blade. What I didn’t want to do was get the measurements wrong and make the thing badly — turn good lumber into firewood while somebody watched.

What I did not understand at twenty-three is that you have to make a fair amount of it wrong before you get to making it right. That isn’t a stage you skip by being careful. It’s the price of admission, and everybody pays it, including the people who look like they never did.

She learned from her dad, who is one of the best carpenters I’ve ever been around. Genuinely gifted with his hands. I’ve since learned plenty from watching him too — but she’s the one who put a saw in front of me first.

Twenty-some years on, I build most of what needs building around here.

A seating bench in our dining room. Cabinets. An oak cover for the vent hood over the stove, which I’m still pleased about. A long list of smaller things nobody notices unless they’re gone.

It keeps getting easier. Not because the work gets simpler — because I’ve stopped being surprised that I can do it.

I do have a hard line. I don’t touch plumbing or electrical inside the walls. Anything outside the walls is fair game and I’ll take a run at it. That’s not fear, it’s just knowing where my competence ends and where a licensed man’s begins.

Here’s the part I noticed only recently.

I can’t name one thing I’ve taught her back.

What happened instead is that I got good enough that she hands it to me. She doesn’t run the saw anymore. She tells me what she wants built and I go build it, and that arrangement suits both of us fine.

She trained her replacement. On purpose, as far as I can tell, and without ever mentioning it.

The thing I say most often about all of this is that it isn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

I say it about projects at work. I say it about writing. I said it about a chopsaw in 2002.

I have a chronic habit of building things up in my head to be considerably harder than they turn out to be, and I’ve never fully broken it. The difference is that since about 2002 I’ve had proof that I do it, handed to me by a woman with a saw and a pile of shelf lumber.

Ninety-Three Degrees

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It’s ninety-three degrees in downtown Oklahoma City and I’m walking in it.

There’s enough wind that it’s a convection oven rather than a regular one, which I’m choosing to count as a mercy. I was in my office this morning working a problem and at some point my brain informed me that it would not be cooperating further until the body moved. So here I am.

I didn’t used to do this. Anything over about eighty-five and I’d have found a reason to skip it.

What changed was three years ago in Texas. The company I worked for was in merger talks and I could feel what that was doing to me, and I knew I needed to move and I badly needed to be somewhere nobody could reach me. There was a walking trail that ran around our building and the one across the street, past a golf course. I started using it.

Then Texas summer arrived and my first thought was that I’d have to quit for a few months.

My second thought was: why?

I liked the walk. I liked the quiet and the room to think and being temporarily unavailable to everything I was carrying. None of that stopped being true at ninety-five degrees. So I kept going. My longest one in triple digits was about forty-five minutes and I came back soaked through and completely satisfied.

Sunday we had a guest pastor at church, preaching out of Acts.

It’s the passage where Paul is teaching in an upstairs room and goes long — really long — and a young man named Eutychus, sitting in a window, falls asleep and drops out of it and dies. Paul goes down, and the boy is restored, and then everybody goes back upstairs and Paul, as far as I can tell, keeps preaching.

I’ve sat under men who could have used that as a cautionary tale. Paul isn’t one of them. That church was weeks old, the doctrine was being laid down for the first time, and some of the people in that room had probably seen Jesus with their own eyes. I’d have stayed in the window too.

But that story was the setup. The question underneath it was the thing that got me.

If you have an expectation, is your preparation at the level of that expectation?

The pastor’s point was that if you’re praying for something and doing nothing to get ready for it, you might want to look hard at what you’ve actually got. Faith prepares. A wish just goes up into the sky.

That one caught me square and I’ve been carrying it around for four days.

Here’s the honest inventory. My expectations this year have been enormous — turn a corner in my writing, build income outside the day job, actually be successful at something I made. I’ve said all of that out loud, some of it in public.

And my preparation has been better than it’s ever been. Two books finished. An album. Something written and posted every single day since January first. Nobody can tell me I haven’t worked.

But when I hold the two things up next to each other, there are mile-wide gaps and I can see every one of them.

What I do is get so locked onto the expectation — and onto what I don’t have yet — that I stop building the capacity to hold the thing when it shows up. I’m praying about the harvest and I have not been checking the barn.

The strange part is that I already know how to do this. I just haven’t been doing it everywhere.

Three years ago I decided a walk mattered enough that I’d take it in a hundred degrees, and I’ve never once renegotiated that. When it’s time to walk I don’t stand at the door and debate about it.

That’s what preparation matching expectation actually looks like, and I’ve had a working model of it strapped to my own feet the entire time.

I’m forty-eight as of two days ago, and I’m two miles into a hot walk, and I know exactly which barn needs building.

Fifty Pounds

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a photograph of me from Christmas 2004. I’m twenty-six, grinning at the camera, holding a fifty-pound punching bag my wife had just given me.

Two weeks before that picture I’d had surgery to remove a tumor. The doctor’s instruction was that I was not to lift anything over ten pounds.

I don’t remember deciding to pick it up. That’s the part that gets me now. There was no moment of defiance. I reached over and lifted the heavy thing, because that is what I did, because that is what I was.

I watched Trouble with the Curve the other night for the first time.

Clint Eastwood plays an old baseball scout who is going blind and telling nobody. His whole life runs on his eyes — he evaluates players by watching them and by the sound of a ball coming off a bat — and the the most important tool the whole thing depends on is failing, and his response is to keep driving at night and say nothing.

The title refers to a hitter in the film who can’t handle a curveball. If you don’t follow baseball, the problem with a curve is almost always that the hitter commits too early. He’s looking for the fastball. His hands start moving before the ball has finished doing what it’s going to do, so he swings at the place he expected it to be rather than where it went.

The old man’s version of that isn’t baseball. He lost his wife when his daughter was six, and he responded by gripping the one thing he still knew how to do, which was the work. He swung at the pitch he’d already committed to years earlier, and his daughter grew up on the other side of that swing.

I had committed to a pitch too, and I’d done it long before 2004.

I was the strong one. In my house the man who lifts heavy things. I had never once in my life been the one being carried and I had no framework for it, no plan for it, and no intention of finding out.

So when they told me I had cancer, my whole approach was that I’d muscle through it. Same as everything else. That is not a strategy — it’s a reflex — and it worked right up until March, when the chemo treatment started and took the strength first.

I couldn’t eat. I started to lose weight. The one attribute I’d built an identity on was the exact thing that went, and it went early.

My wife took care of me.

I want to be careful with that phrase because people use it loosely. What I mean is that she waited on me hand and foot for months, and I am sure I was not an easy patient. I’m no good at being sick. I had a very fixed idea of what I was for in that house and none of it involved my young bride giving me my medicine.

She’s told me since that it was very hard on her, and I believe her. She was trying everything she knew to comfort me and most of it didn’t land, and I’ve spent years since wondering how much of that was the illness and how much of it was me not letting it work.

But here’s the thing she never said out loud and demonstrated for months.

She was more than equal to it. She carried the whole house and she carried me, and she did it in such a way that a man who wasn’t supposed to lift ten pounds never once felt like less of a man in his own home.

I didn’t understand at twenty-six what an achievement that was. I began to understand it more at forty.

The hit wasn’t the day my strength came back. It did come back, eventually, and I’ve got more of it now at forty-eight than I had then.

The hit was being carried, and letting it count.

I picked up a fifty-pound bag two weeks after surgery and I took it, because I could not yet imagine a version of myself who put it down. It took a woman I love four months and considerably more strength than I had to teach me otherwise.

Halftime

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I turned forty-eight today and spent almost all of it in my own house.

My son made waffles. My family gave me cards, and the things written in them were better than the presents (and the presents were awesome too!), which is a thing you can say honestly at forty-eight and mean it.

Then we went grocery shopping. All three of us, because the house needed food, and we talked and laughed our way through a store for an hour doing something completely ordinary that I don’t get to do on a workday. They picked up what they needed to make me a pineapple cheesecake, which is one of my favorite desserts I haven’t eaten in forever.

Pizza for lunch. A nap. Kung Fu Panda, which I hadn’t seen in years. Then hamburgers and Trouble with the Curve, which I’d never seen and which is a whole separate post.

That was the day. Waffles, groceries, a nap, two movies, and cheesecake.

It’s the best birthday I’ve had in a long time.

We were out earlier and my son ran into some friends at a coffee shop. One of the girls wished me happy birthday and asked if I’d gotten everything I wanted.

I told her I’m getting to be a little bit of an old man, and that the older you get the less you want — you mostly just want to be around the people you love, and I was doing exactly that.

I said it to be friendly. Then I thought about it and realized I’d told her the truth.

There were more than sixty messages by the end of the day. Some of them were the auto-generated kind and that’s fine. A lot of them weren’t. People from a long way back who wanted me to know they were still out there and still thought well of me.

My wife got me a couple of bottles of wine we’d had on the cruise a few weeks ago. She knew I liked them but wouldn’t likely get around to getting them. She was just paying attention, the way she does, and bought them without saying a word.

My son’s gift is that he’s taking me out to eat and paying for it himself. An experience instead of an object, which is an awesome present. Time with him and good food? That’s a win.

I’m in better shape at forty-eight than I was at forty. Stronger, lifting more, and considerably better at my job. More patient than I used to be, and steadier.

What I’ve lost is the not thinking about it. When I was young the future was theoretical. It sat out there somewhere and I never once did math on it. Now it’s close enough to see and I do the math without meaning to.

That’s a strange thing to say for a man who has had cancer twice and should have lost that feeling at twenty-six. But that sense of being invincible is stubborn, and it does eventually go.

Here’s the part I’ve been turning over.

I’ve always thought of fifty as halftime. It’s a comfortable frame — I’d be genuinely grateful for another fifty, and it lets you feel like the second half hasn’t started.

If I’m honest, I’m in the third quarter. And I’ve got some ground to make up.

The thing I don’t want to carry into forty-nine is the inability to act. That, and the assumption that a thing won’t be well received before anybody’s had the chance to receive it. Neither of those has ever been true and both have cost me.

The wine is still in the house, unopened. I am saving it for some special occasion down the road.

I’ve got no idea yet what the occasion is. But I’m counting on there being one. A random Tuesday may work too.