Albert Camus at 100

“Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness,” wrote Albert Camus, one of the indisputably great literary minds of the 20^th century.

Born 100 years ago today (November 7, 1913) in French Algeria, the brilliant and eloquent humanist (he refuted the label of existentialist to describe his philosophy) was a journalist and member of the Resistance who publicly denounced the German occupation of France during World War II. More famously, Camus was an influential novelist, philosopher, and dramatist whose life ended absurdly at age 46 in a car accident.

“You know what charm is,” poses the judge-penitent in The Fall. “A way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.” In The Rebel, Camus asks, “What is a rebel? A man who says no.”

In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” His best-known works, including The Stranger, The Plague, and The Myth of Sisyphus, continue to offer insights into our attempts to find meaning in everyday life.

Why We’ll Miss Mariano

• He never shot an imaginary arrow into the air after the final out.
• Cameron Diaz didn’t feed him popcorn at the Super Bowl.
• He never threw a jagged bat barrel at Mike Piazza.
• He didn’t drink beer and eat wings in the dugout when he wasn’t pitching.
• He never carried an unlicensed handgun in his sweatpants into a nightclub and shot himself in the leg.
• He didn’t change his name to Metta World Peace.
• He never shimmied and pirouetted off the mound after the final out.
• George Steinbrenner never called him “a fat pussy toad” or referred to him as “Mr. May.”
• He didn’t hold a press conference to announce that he was taking his talents to South Beach.
• He never backflipped off the mound and spiked the ball.
• He didn’t marry a Kardashian.
• He never had to testify before Congress about steroids or HGH.
• He didn’t name his children “North” or “Apple” or “Ivy Blue.”
• He never buttfumbled the ball.
• He didn’t bore the pants off anyone by discussing sabermetrics or his fantasy team.
• He never angrily untucked his jersey after the final out.
• His obliques were not hidden behind layers of fat.
• He never jogged a double into a single.
• He never bit off part of an opponent’s ear.
• Suzy Kolber didn’t have to ward off his attempt to kiss her.
• He never called anyone “dawg.”
• He never guaranteed a victory.
• He didn’t get a tattoo on his calf while vacationing in Hawaii.
• Fireman Ed never sat on his shoulders.
• He never blew on his finger after a third strike or mimed holstering a gun after the third out.
• He never said of the Yankees, “The ship be sinking.”
• He didn’t father multiple children with different women.
• He never appeared on Dancing With the Stars.
• He tolerated countless clown questions from beat reporters.
• He never told us that TBS is “very funny.”
• He never called an umpire “the absolute pits of the world.”
• He never uttered a primal scream after the final out or pounded his chest to declare he had heart.
• He was never less than a credit to his number, his team, and his profession.

Goethe, Child Geniuses, and Youth Basketball

“If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses,” wrote Goethe. Contrary to literary theory, the magisterial author of Faust was not alluding to the youngsters’ academic success but to their athletic prowess.

When I first read this, I concluded that Goethe must have had considerable experience as a youth sports coach, and attributed the quote to one too many unpleasant confrontations with disgruntled parents over the coach’s deployment of their basketball-playing sons.

I’ve been there, Johann. Looking back on my 22 years (and counting) as coach of sixth-grade basketball, I recognize that I haven’t heard everything. But I have registered a fairly comprehensive category of outlandish claims by delusional moms and dads of the putative excellence of their offspring.

Just last March, shortly after my undefeated regular-season basketball team lost in the county playoff finals, I received a text message and email from the enraged father of one of my players. I telephoned him.

“How,” he demanded, “could you have taken out [his son] at crucial moments in the game when you would not have been a .500 team without him!” He added, “Why did you stick with a 2-3 zone when it wasn’t working. You were never in the game.”

Channeling Thomas Jefferson (“Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances”), I argued with dad’s math. Overall, the team was not .500 without his son; it was 1.000 in the three games the boy missed. Dad then proceeded to throw two of his son’s truly talented teammates under the proverbial bus for the loss.

I wondered (as I often did at these moments) if he had been watching the same game I had been watching. How else to account for our widely disparate points of view? We were never in a 2-3 zone, I told him, but a 1-2-2 and then man-to-man, although that might have been hard to discern because of the freelancing style his son was playing.

As for our uncharacteristically poor play in the first half, we were down four at the half and immediately answered with a basket off a set play at the start of the second half. So much for never being in the game.

I knew dad was not hearing what I was hearing. Otherwise, he would have caught the bitter curse his son hurled at me and my two assistants after I removed junior a second time, early in the second half, for repeatedly abandoning the game plan and undermining his teammates on offense and defense.

“He was NEVER going back in the game after that,” I told the father.

Dad, however, promptly checked with his son about the veracity of my claim and then confidently reported that, no, his son never said what I (and my assistants and the fans in the first few rows) unmistakably heard. But quickly dismissing that, he returned to his original question while I thought to myself, “Who was it who said that there are none so blind as those who will not see?”

Years earlier, after my decidedly outsized and underdog team had surprisingly held its own only to lose to the defending state champions, a huge thorax attached to a tiny head and bright red face accosted me at the team bench.

“My kid only played 5 minutes,” he said, sputtering. “IT BETTER NOT HAPPEN AGAIN!” His kid was a starter who played major minutes that day and in three or four of the previous games. It took me major minutes to process the implied threat before I asked him to be more specific about it. Namely, what he intended to do about it when it would happen again?

Like all bullies when confronted, he stomped away. There was never a second outburst.

Other confrontations over the years have been less, well, disagreeable. File the following stories under the fearsome category of “Overly Protective Mothers.” I fondly recall one telephone conversation:

“I don’t think you realize that my son is a point guard,” said mom No. 1. I tried to put a positive spin on it, telling her, “I think his strengths lie elsewhere.”

“Did you know that [he] was personally trained by [NBA Hall of Famer] Nate Archibald?” she asked. I told her I was unaware of that while silently calculating that her son had probably been to a summer camp at which Tiny had impersonally addressed the entire assembly.

Earlier that season, with the same team, mom No. 2 quickly sized up the roster and correctly concluded that one Joey Karabbas, an 11-year-old recently relocated to the town, presented a direct threat to her son’s playing time. She did a little private investigation, learned that the newcomer was not a registered parishioner, and turned him in. Like the rabble in the New Testament, she cried to the pastor, “Give us Karabbas.”

We all think that our children are special and uniquely gifted, and they are in different ways. I try to remain evenhanded and cool in the face of so many subjective and less than clear-eyed appraisals of their child geniuses. My friend Terry, who for years ran the local Babe Ruth league, had a brilliant practical approach when dealing with complaints from players, coaches, parents, umpires, and others.

“Profess concern and do nothing,” Terry said.

I remember the first time I had a chance to test that philosophy. During warm-ups before an inconsequential game one season, the father of one of my players buttonholed me on the sideline. He offered an unsolicited three-pronged formula for success that day that revolved around his son. I listened respectfully, nodded conspiratorially, thanked him for the game plan, and retreated to the team bench. My friend and assistant coach at the time, Mike, overheard the entire monologue and gleefully remembers that I turned to him and said, “We’re not doing any of that.”  

But it was not always possible or an effective counterstrategy to profess concern and do nothing. One season, at half-time during a mid-January early-afternoon game, a parent strode purposefully across the court toward me. Because my first-place team was comfortably ahead at the time, and because I had a history with this parent (having coached his two older sons), I wondered what—if any—was his problem.
He got quickly to his point.

“Mike needs to score four points in the second half if the [New York] Giants are to win [their NFL playoff game] later today,” he said. He wasn’t kidding. Understand this: (1) Mike was not his son, (2) he did not explain the transcendental alliance between an 11-year-old’s CYO point production and its significance to the Giants’ odds of victory or (3) how I was to insure that this symbiotic relationship would successfully enable the Giants to take their next step on the road to the Super Bowl.

He conceded one major point, donating his own son’s second-half minutes to Mike to further facilitate the cause.

As it turned out, Mike scored just two points in the second half. Chagrined at having won with St. Margaret’s at the cost of a Giants’ victory in a game that had not yet started, I approached the superstitious parent with some trepidation at the final buzzer. He waved me off. “Mike had an assist to go with his one basket, so he was responsible for four points after all,” he said. I was off the hook and the Giants’ success validated in advance.

In Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust confidently made a bet with the devil, believing that his own spirit was so restless that he, Faust, could never be enticed and tied down by one fleeting earthly pleasure. He wagered his soul, telling the devil,

“When I say to the moment flying;

'Linger a while—thou art so fair!'

Then bind me in thy bonds undying,

And my final ruin I will bear!”       

Unlike Faust, I have willingly tied myself down to the pleasure of coaching and working with young players. When that becomes fleeting, I will not linger.

All Dogs Go to Heaven?

“You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in the late nineteenth century.

Apparently, Stevenson, the author of such thrilling adventure novels for all ages as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, was not a jogger. He certainly never encountered the dogs I’ve met on my daily run. Otherwise, he might have given pause to a few of my canine acquaintances.

There’s Chewy, a hyperactive little white terrier who shares none of the same benevolence of his fellow Scot Stevenson. Chewy would be sitting blissfully in his front yard, or sniffing about on the property, when he’d hear my approach. He’d race frenetically to the bottom of the driveway, only to be brought up short by an invisible electronic fence.

One day, he broke through the barrier and chased after me. Fearful of tripping over him or being nipped on an ankle, I stopped. His insistent yapping, and my attempts to mollify him, eventually brought forth his owner, who unconvincingly assured me that Chewy likes to play and would never bite anyone. When the same interruption happened again, I found it less troublesome simply to redirect my course.     

Chewy, though, must have emitted a secret, kindred signal—some kind of ineffable animal magnetism, like a silent alarm whistle—to his doggy neighbor around the corner. Shortly after I had replotted my course, I was greeted by an aggressive spaniel, who stopped playing with his chew toy when he spotted me—a real, live chewable plaything. I never caught the spaniel’s name, but his owner likewise explained that this was the dog’s way of showing that he liked me. Thanks, but I’d like him better if he were on a leash, I thought. The dog has since come running out two more times to frolic with me.

Finally, last week, as I was in the final uphill stage of my course, a mastiff, on a leash and starting out on his own bit of exercise, made an aggressively hostile pass at me. His owner, initially unprepared for the surge, barely kept his hold on the leash as the beast lunged. I had stopped short, irritated by the interruption but thankful for the quick handling by the owner, who refastened his grip and then punched the dog viciously on the top of his head.

I thought to myself at the time, “What kind of memories do dogs have? How will this one process the blow he just received? Will he now associate pain with my presence? Are we forever destined to be incompatible? Should I make another course correction?” It’s hard to run while looking over your shoulder.

Stevenson’s elegiac poem “Requiem,” inscribed on his tomb in Samoa, says as much about the author in death (he died much too young, at age 44) as it does about him in life:

          Under the wide and starry sky,
          Dig the grave and let me lie.
          Glad did I live and gladly die,
          And I laid me down with a will.
          This be the verse you grave for me:
          Here he lies where he longed to be;
          Home is the sailor, home from sea,
          And the hunter home from the hill.

With apologies to Stevenson, whose outlook I admire, in my case when the time comes, substitute “jogger” for “hunter.”

We Interrupt This Lesson...

One thing I learned as a substitute teacher for elementary school children is to be prepared for interruptions—interruptions that start while I’m trying to take attendance before the morning announcements and flag salute and interruptions that continue during lessons, collaborative work, quiet reading time, tests, assemblies, and conferences, and during walks to and from the library, gym, music and art room—at any and all times throughout the day.  

Some interruptions are for attention or because of inattention, others for real or imaginary illnesses and injuries, and still more for no reason whatsoever. I have pledged myself, like Faust, not to linger awhile over any fleeting moments but to keep a straight face, make a judgment call, and continue to keep the life of the classroom moving on to the next pleasure. It’s a juggling act at times, but the trick is to try to keep all the different balls or objects in the air even when a new one is unexpectedly introduced.

The younger children have not yet learned how to filter the information traveling from their minds to their mouths. I have been innocently informed, apropos of nothing, of some alarmingly personal details of life at home: “My dad had to sleep in the car last night because he and mommy were arguing.” “My mom loves wine!” “Daddy got a ticket for speeding.”

Sometimes the interruptions are for attention and because of a perceived injury. At least once a day a kindergartner would approach.

“Mr. K., my finger hurts.”
Let’s have a look.
She shows me an unblemished pinky.
Where does it hurt?
She points to an invisible dot.    
Run it under the cold water. That will make it feel better (which it always does).

Occasionally, unforeseen circumstances interrupt the students’ ability to perform. One day, filling in for a teacher on sick leave, I was checking the second graders’ work for the week: homework, handwriting pages, math and spelling sheets, and so on. One little boy’s portfolio had fewer pages than those of his classmates.

Where is the rest of the work, Raymond? I asked.
“Oh, I was absent for two days,” he said.
I see. Were you sick?
“No, I had diarrhea.”