Because of Chuck Noll...

Ironically, because I was trolling Twitter the night of Friday the 13th trying to keep up with the Pirates while watching the Stanley Cup Finals, I was likely one of the first people to see the breaking news, but now, as other sad commemorations crowded in on the week, I'm probably one of the last of the Steelers Nation to publicly comment on it.  Yet so much of my life is framed around the fact that I'm a Steelers fan, which, let's be honest, wouldn't have happened had they not rose up out of the ashes to become a marquis franchise that got lots of air time even in the far away Rocky Mountains that I simply cannot stop for a moment and comment on Coach Noll's passing.

What you realize when an icon from your youth passes on is that you're hit hard by it because it drives home a fact that you know intellectually, but struggle to accept emotionally:  the carefree days of being young are truly, irrevocably gone.  There really is no returning to lazy Sunday afternoons by the fire listening to your dad explain what just happened on a particular play while he takes a sip of Hamm's, and you're explaining back that you just like it when a bunch of people all pile on top of one another (seriously, my first memories of Steelers football is that Steel Curtain defense just all swarming to the ball like it was a magnet and they were - well - steel).  And I guess it was for that reason that it took a while before I could accept it.  I saw the Pittsburgh Post Gazette announce via Twitter that Chuck Noll had passed away at his home in Sewickley and my first thought was, "Wow, isn't that interesting?  There's another local celeb who shares Coach Noll's name.  I wonder if I'm supposed to know who that is."  There was a good 30-45 second gap before it hit me maybe they meant the actual Coach Noll.  Then I moved on to the next stage of grief:  denial.  I figured it was a mistake.  I switched over to ESPN.  Nothing.  I pulled up Facebook.  Nothing.  Root Sports.  Nothing.  I began to relax a little.  And then I saw it - a scroll across the bottom of the screen. The Twitter-sphere began to pick up on it as well.  Finally, at intermission between periods in the hockey game, the local news broke in to announce it.  Denial was no longer an option.  There it was, all vestige's of my youth truly gone.

As I tried unsuccessfully pay attention to the OT hockey on the screen in front of me, I thought of his family and what they must be going through at that moment, and I've thought about them often in the intervening days.  I wonder if they felt a sense of comfort their dad and husband meant so much to so many that he's on the cover of the Sports Illustrated sitting on my table downstairs, or if all of us wanting to share their grief seems intrusive.  I hope it's the former.  Because what I've also reflected on since that night is how sports is more than a game (and hence people like me crawl into laundry rooms to cry when their team loses a big one), it's a unifying force that brings people together and gives them pride and hope and joy where they might not otherwise have any.  No city needed that more than this one in the 70's.  I must have heard a hundred stories over the next few days of how rough those days were as the steel industry collapsed and a quarter of the population was out of work.  As it was said over and over, for six days a week, there was nothing but worry and misery, but on Sunday, all of that was briefly forgotten.

I have been reminiscent of that speech of Admiral McRaven's that I quoted from last time. Coach Noll embodied the message that one man can truly change the world.  Think about it.  Because of Chuck Noll, Mean Joe Greene came to professional football and learned to control his temper and turned into a household name.  He broke racial barriers when he starred in a Coca-Cola commercial.

Speaking of racial barriers, because of Chuck Noll, an African American man was a starting quarterback in the NFL.  Not so stunning these days, but to our shame as a nation, as recently as the 70's it was.

Because of Chuck Noll, the team I love are six-time Super Bowl Champions, boasting such greats past and present as Rod Woodson, Jerome Bettis, Hines Ward, Ben Roethlisberger, Troy Polamalu, and the list goes on.  All because of what Chuck Noll began when he brought together the men who became one of football's all-time great dynasties.

Because of Chuck Noll, a soot laden city in the middle of the greatest economic collapse since the Depression began to recover its reputation, gained a sense of pride and hope and never looked back.  Look at this city now - it took a lot of people and lots of faith to reshape it, true, but I believe that became a bit easier once the world saw Pittsburgh as something more than a dying city; when they began to perceive it as being as tough as the Steel Curtain defense.

Because of Chuck Noll, a little girl growing up in Bozeman, Montana learned to love football and became such a Steelers fan that she lives in their town now.  So, if someday I do something wondrous for the people of this city, then you can know - it was really because of Chuck Noll.

So, Coach Noll, I never met you and you would never know who I am or what you meant to me.  Take it to the bank, though, you changed my world.  And I thank you for it.

Justin Osborne

Make Your Bed

For the last several years every June 20th I've written a letter to my daughter and posted it on my blog.  I'm not sure I've got anything left to say to her really.  She either knows we love and miss her or she doesn't.  She knows the sins and shortcomings I committed as a parent and caregiver that I've confessed or she doesn't.  I don't know if she somehow hears the words or doesn't.  One more attempt won't change that.  So, rather, on this somber anniversary, I write instead to the parents of those whose children are battling ED or maybe have lost the fight.  And I'll share a couple of little snippets from a commencement speech I read recently from Adm. William H. McRaven, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command that resonated with me - as a parent who both went to her own war and lost.

My boss sent several of us the transcript because it resonated with him and he wanted to share it with his team to think about how it might apply to us in our work.  It was very inspirational - he was right.  But, when I read it, I didn't translate a single word to my work environment, but all of it to my personal life.

It was a very structured speech as one would expect an Admiral and Navy SEAL to give.  He would tell a vignette from his SEAL training and then sum that particular story up with a one sentence tag line to make a particular point out of it and then move on to the next point and so on until he took all the lessons together to reach the larger goal of the speech (SPOILER ALERT:  that you can change the world).  Very concise and precise.  A soldier's way of doing things.

I'm much more chaotic, so let me see if I can take his wise words and scatter them around a bit to make the point I would like to.  And let me start by repeating the thing that almost gave me chills, "If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed."  Weird that I would be so impacted by that, right?  Well the reason is I made a big deal out of making the bed every day throughout the last five years.  There were some exceptions - this winter maybe most especially when the cats would snuggle in the warmth of the llama's wool blanket that was my mother's to stave off the vicious cold.  Then I would leave them to sleep in the tumble of sheets, blanket, pillows, book, remote control and scattered clothing.  Or if I'm really sick and really never made it out of the thing all day.  But, for the most part, no matter how horribly depressed or in despair I was, I would make the bed.  What he said about it was so spot on he could have watched me and drawn from my own life.  "If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter," he said.  "...And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better."

It's not the first time someone else has honed in on that.  I got caught up in The Bridge last year.  It was pretty much Game-of-Thrones-meets-Texas.  Lots of tragedy, lots of injustice, lots of personal and physical pain.  In short, everything you want to make you feel better about your own life.  So, one night not long after my husband left to move back to Texas himself,  I'm watching all alone as the main character tells her partner, who just lost his son, to be sure and make his bed.  When he looks at her as though she is mad, she explains that her mentor whom she lived with after her own personal tragedy always told her if she did nothing else in a day she had to make her bed.  So, if you are out there wondering how you're possibly going to take the next step in your life because you're just so overwhelmed, follow all of us in our "professional" opinions:  start with making the bed.

The Admiral also said much later in the speech, "If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moment."  I don't know if any of us who have struggled to care for a family member - whether it be someone sick with an eating disorder, or Alzheimer's or cancer or anything else - really is thinking about changing the world at that moment.  And if they lose their loved one, they probably most certainly are not.  Yet, there's no doubt for most of us that's our darkest moment.  I think the thing Admiral McRaven might say, though, judging him by the content of his speech alone, is that if you persevere in that personal quest you might just end up changing the world somewhere down the line.  Maybe your son or daughter will recover to find the cure for some disease - maybe even ED.   If you think all is beyond hope because, like me, you lost your child to the disease, it's not.  There are other people's children out there who still need you, even though they may never even meet you.  There is still a monster out there stealing promising lives away from the world.

Take the time you need to recover yourself.  For me, it's been five years today.  These aren't the years I thought I would live.  But they are what I have been given.  So, what can I do with the next five?  Can I try and change the world?  I will never know if I don't try.  So today, I will get out of bed and then I will make it.  Then I will face the world.

You can as well.  I believe in you.

Daddy Dearest (a Father's Day Ode to a Pennsylvania Dad)

I've talked some about my dad since I began blogging, but he's been overshadowed by my mom for a lot of reasons.  For one, he passed away of bone and lung cancer in 1992, a while before I learned about this thing called World Wide Web and certainly long before I ever heard the word "blog".  But also because Mom was the one who drove me to blog in the first place.  It was in the lonely, hard days of caring for her in her final year that I turned to this venue to have an outlet.  I just never stopped after she died.  But mostly because Dad isn't the sort of man who would enjoy being the center of a blog post.  But people - total and complete strangers - have beat me to posting information about my father on the Internet.  I was a little shocked actually at the amount of information about both my parents I could pull up from a simple Google search, so I figured the dam has already been broken, so I might has well add to it.  I have, of course, talked about him before.  It's hard not to really.  While I was much more co-dependent with my mother, there isn't much about me and my personality that isn't primarily influenced by my father.  I am my father's daughter even though we don't share a single drop of the same bloodline.

He was a complicated man.  Forged in the hard fires of the Great Depression, and had that metal tested during World War II and the Korean Conflict.  He was in his mid-40's before I came into his life.  Me, a post-war child of relative privilege who grew up watching young people rebel in the 60's and self-indulge in the 70's.  Our very diverse backgrounds made it hard for us to relate to one another.  I was too young for him to understand.  He was too old for me to get.  I wore him out at the end, I think.

I never did understand him for the entirety of his life.  Or rather, I thought I did at the time, but I've learned somewhat recently that I had him pegged completely incorrectly and unfairly.  Ironically perhaps, when I was out of work because I was caring for Mother, I read Flags of Our Fathers.  There was something about reading a peer's account of his own father and his discovery of what his father had done in the war and the emotional scars it had left him with really drove it home for me.  I remember sitting out on the back porch just sobbing at one point because it hit me full on.  So many things he did and the way he was just became crystal clear, but I realized I would never have the chance to say that to him.  I was always proud of his service, and I think he knew that, but I never really got what that cost him for the rest of his days even following him to his deathbed.  I knew it.  I didn't understand it.  There's a difference.  A lot of the "issues" I had carried all my life about how my dad was as I was growing up melted away that day.

The rest took me moving here to resolve.  For those of you reading this who are from Pennsylvania, see if any of this sounds familiar:  my father was a determined provider, even onto making himself miserable to make sure he was bringing home the bacon.

He was of firm convictions about certain things, to the point of pig headed stubbornness.  Occasionally he would enjoy a good debate, but not because there was any chance of swaying his opinion, but just because he enjoyed thinking he had bested the opposing argument.  But there were other times when debating a point was out of the question.  Firmly.  It was going to be his way or no way.

He loved sports.  With a kind of unamused passion.  Meaning, it wasn't a casual, oh-it's-just-fun-to-watch-the-game sort of a thing (unless alcohol and parties were involved - I'll get to that), but it was a rather explicit expectation that the athletes should perform well because that was their job.  He did his job to the best of his ability.  So should everyone else.

He had a robust sense of humor, but it had a sarcastic, somewhat cruel tinge to it.  Sometimes it was hard to tell when he was kidding and when he wasn't.  As an overly-sensitive child, that used to just traumatize me to an extreme.  To this day, I dread April Fool's Day.  And he liked a good time with friends and plenty of libations.  I loved their New Year's Day parties because they would let me gamble.  They would run a board on the games for some nominal amount a square and it amused all the men when this shy kid would "buy" a square or two.  I used to do pretty well with it too.  I don't remember that I ever got to keep any winnings though.

Once I moved here I would find myself watching people - men in particular - and thinking, "that's just like my dad."  Or, "that's something my dad would do."  Sometimes I was amused by that, sometimes I wasn't, but I can now fully appreciate who he was and what made him the way he was.

I think my father had an appreciation for life and wanted to live it to its fullest because he had brushed up way too closely to the alternative way too early in life, but he would make that a secondary consideration to making sure he took care of his responsibilities.

Whatever else he was or wasn't, he was my dad.  So Happy Father's Day, Daddy.  I love you more than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

An Embarrassment of Riches

So, I was contemplating my little cottage last week because I had spent Memorial Day weekend griping about it to myself. I spent the entire weekend (except for a few hours spent at a Pirates game) trying to maintain it.  It's a constant battle with a house this old, a yard this big and weather this wet.  Paint peels, yards grow almost before your eyes and weeds do sprout that fast.  I kept shaking my head thinking if only I liked Shelties and Toy Poodles instead of Collies and Huskys then I could live in one of those chic apartments along Fifth Avenue carved out of grand old houses and pay someone to take care of the place so I could spend more time just enjoying the city.  That conundrum is front and center this weekend, so I'm trying to reason out what I'm going to do.  In addition to the big summer movie opening this weekend that I'm desperate to see (not because of the leading actor, mind you, but because lots of things blow up and I admittedly have a girl crush on Emily Blunt), there is the Three Rivers Arts Festival, the Pens are doing their Fan Appreciation sale on Saturday when it's the only time you get a shot at buying street banners and there is a big assortment of used hockey sticks that I covet, there is the Panera Pup Walk with one of my favorite Pittsburghers, Charlie Batch, bumping up against the Pirates series against the Brewers.  A neighbor is having an estate sale and there is the little issue of the Stanley Cup Finals (hey, it's hockey...).  How in the world am I supposed to stay at home spreading mulch with all this stuff going on?

I've decided that I simply can't.  I've just got to participate in all this wonderfulness happening around this city I pulled up stakes to move to.  And that's the thing that sometimes I think native Pittsburghers lose sight of.  This is a vibrant city and there is always a lot going on.  Anybody can likely say that about just about any city, I suppose, but there is a reputation that I think Pittsburgh still fights:  the dour steel city.  It's not that at all.  It's full of art, museums, sports (of course), festivals, farmer's markets, parks, rivers, and a lovely zoo.  If you can't find something to do here on a weekend, then you're really not looking.  For me, it's not always such a crowded agenda, but it's always a little bit of a moral fight:  do I stay put and tend to my little cottage or do I abandon my responsibilities and revel in the wonders of the city?  Sometimes I do the right thing, sometimes I do the fun thing.  What I hardly ever do is work and eventually that will end up being an issue too, but I am at that point in my life and have had enough challenges that I want to spend some time outside these office walls.

And as to that, I've written before about living life like a tourist, and it's something I do advocate strongly for many reasons.  I realize it may ring hollow for some because being a tourist means spending money.  And for some of my favorite things, that's true.  The zoo isn't free, for instance.  But lots of the wonders of the city are, or they are modest in price.  But I get it.  I'm not rich and I understand it's all a trade off.  But if you spend your life just working, going home, then getting up to go to work again you will lose sight of what it truly is you're working for.  You have to feed the mind, not just the body.  There is your heart and soul to think of as well.  And there is a wealth of brain nutrients right outside your doorstep, I promise you.  So, to unlock some of the wonders of the city without emptying the wallet, try this website, which a friend sent to me when I first got here.

Seriously, it's less about unleashing the wonders of the city than it is unchaining yourself.  So, Dear House, please forgive me, but I won't be home this weekend.  To the rest of you:  I'll see you out there, but stand back, I get first dibs on that Sidney Crosby used hockey stick!

My House in the Middle of the Street

I've been ruminating about how people - mainly me - make decisions and why.  In my case, I can't really decide if I make them based on emotion, instinct, a careful consideration of the facts, or just a roll of the dice.  I realize that might seem strange - that uncertainty about my own thought processes.  But, really, how many of us think about how we think?  We just do it.  But I'm faced with a couple of hard decisions that I've struggled with, so all of that's been on my mind lately.  And I can't really get a bead on how my own decision-making process goes because, by my very own estimation, I'm all over the page.  Except when it came to what is unquestionably the largest decision one can make in life:  where to live (if you want to argue that the larger decision really is who you're going to live with, I'd ask you to consider the divorce rate and then get back to me on that).  But, as I sit here in my little post war cottage listening to the sounds of birds chirping outside my window and a distant rumble of a lawnmower - almost a constant at this time of year - I realize I made the decision to buy this house sort of on a wing and a prayer.  As many of you know, I never saw the house aside from 16 carefully crafted photos on a Realtor's website until the Saturday night before I was due to buy it on the following Monday.  And then I got about 10 minutes as dusk hung heavily around it to get a sense of it so I could go back to Texas and finish packing, plotting where everything would go.  When the time came and everything finally arrived here, I realized that I hadn't taken the floor vents into account so all this furniture I had spent the last six weeks envisioning in specific locations wouldn't fit where I had wanted it.  Then some of the rooms - mainly my office -weren't nearly as large as they were in my imagination.  And then the cruelest surprise of all - the low ceiling and narrow staircase made it impossible to get my four poster bed and cherrywood armoire upstairs.  So the armoire sits in the dining room holding my china and table linens while a chest designated for my dining room holds my shorts and bathing suits, and my four poster frame sits in the garage, while I use Marissa's bed and she uses the twin bed meant as a spare.  Necessity:  the mother of invention.  Necessity can be a real bitch.

But, here we are.  Settled in with a lot of the crap I thought I couldn't possibly live without (all those Star Wars collectibles...) up in the attic.  And, for all my griping about the constant maintenance required on a house that's older than me, I like this little old house.  It's comfortable.  Meaning it has a good aura.  If that sounds weird to you, then so be it.  But I do think houses have a sense to them.  It's why, as much as I've cussed this decision many times when spending all my weekends trying to maintain it, I wanted an older house.  A house that has some history to draw from.  And I like this one.  And as small as it is, it's big enough for us.  Not the kitchen.  But everything else.  So, I guess making a decision on a wing and a prayer worked out this time.

So, why is it that I drive around and see all these bigger, "better" houses with stained glass windows and wrap around porches that I feel jealous and covetous?  Maybe because I'm human.  And it's a natural trait to always want to reach upwards for more than we have.  But I was struck the other day about how beauty is in the eye of the beholder when one of the workers here to install a new roof bummed a cigarette from my daughter and exclaimed, "This is a nice house!"  Of course when she told me that I thought rather cruelly that if he worked a little harder and bummed a few less cigarettes from his clients, he could have a nicer house too.  But, it also made me stop to think that, compared to most people in the world, we are pretty lucky.  We've got what we need.  And I've got a roof over my head that doesn't leak.  I should be grateful for what I have, not worried about what I don't.    So, that's what I'm going to do:  dog hating neighbors and all.  I'm going to be content with my little old house in the middle of my street!