When I was in high school in Alexandria, LA I was part of a group called the Lake Charles Highway Boys. We were all the guys from my high school who lived out on the Lake Charles Highway close to the town of Woodworth. The group was comprised of exactly two of us, me and Chris Kinsey. Our podnah, John Horn, was an honorary member. He lived out on Bayou Rapides Road – not Lake Charles Highway, but he was a real cowboy and we liked him a lot. He'd dip snuff in school and in the absence of a spitcup he'd cuff his pants leg inside his boot top and just spit in there. Now there’s a man who’s committed to enjoying Copenhagen.
We were country when country wasn't cool. We did FFA and 4H and we naturally gravitated toward each other. After school, life took us in different directions and we pretty much lost contact. Chris is married and today he lives with his beautiful family in Tyler, TX.
Chris and I made contact again about a year ago on Facebook. His daddy, Doug, was a real man's man and I admired and respected him a lot. He worked for the city but he could do anything country and I still remember him hauling hay with us and wrapping up the ham steaks from the hogs we raised and took to the slaughterhouse. Doug Kinsey died on January 21, 2010.
Chris' boy, Douglas, is a high school baseball player at Tyler Lee High and they played A&M Consolidated High in the playoffs this past weekend in Huntsville, less than an hour away from my house. I loaded up my younger son and went out there to the game to see Chris and his wife, Ginger.
We found each other and sat in the bleachers. Chris had good reason to be very engaged in the baseball game. His son had scored the winning run in the first game of the series the night before. If they could pull this game out, they'd go to the next round of the playoffs. So we watched the ebb and flow of a tight game and caught up on 25 years of missed stories, pausing our conversations to comment on good plays.
It was inevitable that we talk about his father's life and death. He told me he thinks about his daddy the last thing before he goes to sleep at night and the first thing when he gets up in the morning. Chris talked to me about his father's last 40 days of life, then his last two days, and his last hours. There was no doubt that Chris’ daddy was his hero, the absolute biggest influence on his life, and his passing had created a huge vacuum.
The game on the field became like background noise for us. The team from Tyler was scoring runs against a higher ranked Consol team, but Chris’ focus was on telling me about his father as he choked back tears. Tyler fans and parents cheered, shouted and rose to their feet to applaud, but Chris and I sat there talking, two 46-year-old guys worried about hairlines and waistlines, our heads about 8 inches apart.
I was struck by what we get conditioned to think is life or death but really isn't. I still remember the biggest lie my high school football coach told us in the fall of 1980: That at the 20 year class reunion we’d all still be talking about the score of the football game where we beat our arch-rivals. I’d guess that no more than 10% of us even remember who won.
We get hung up on the trivial at the expense of the eternal. We easily get fixated on games, grades, projects, and financial quarters while real life - and death - passes us by.
I’ll do better to treat the projects like the impostors that they are and instead focus on the people I love.
