Bikes and Apologies

Lance Armstrong was featured on a documentary on ESPN, and I watched to see if there was anything new about him: 16-year-old triathlete in Austin, biking whiz, winner of Tour de France in 1993, continued wins through 1996, cancer survivor, creator of the Livestrong Foundation which raised millions for cancer victims, champion again for more Tour De France events, constant source for doping charges, repeated rejector of doping accusations, final acceptor of drug use in 2013. I knew all that and that he had paid out millions in lawsuits and watched his foundation erased. I suppose I wanted him to get teary-eyed and say, "I'm sorry" because I had never seen him do that. But he didn't. He said he wouldn't change a thing.

 

Apologies aren't just for the world's greatest athletes. It can be for an entire county. In 1941 over 100,000

Japanese-Americans were forced to leave their homes and businesses and were put in barracks surrounded by barbed wire fences. There was no cause for the action other than blind fear. But one exception was our new neighbor Isabel who came to Denton with her 2 daughters and father-in-law. Her husband Paul was a surgeon who was being trained at a nearby base to go overseas with Army medical units, and Isabel had to find a place for the family 30 miles away because there was no housing. Mother went over the first day to welcome her(so like Mother to do that), and the two became immediate best friends. The Japanese-American mother and the Irish-Scottish-American mother cut across the shrubs every day that separated our houses to look at magazines, discuss the weather, show sewing shortcuts, talk about Clark Gable, or complain about the ration books that everyone had. Mother taught Isabel how to cook pinto beans and cobbler, and Isabel showed Mother how to do sticky rice and dorayaki(a sweet pancake). I played with the 2 girls who were my age and watched in fascination as their grandfather ate with chopsticks. He spoke no English but always laughed when I would see him eating because he knew I had never seen it before. When we walked around the Square to shop, some people would not walk on the same sidewalk as the Oriental-looking family. Mother would say, "Don't pay any attention."  The first time we went to the A and P to get groceries, Isabel took her ration book and asked for a roast. The butcher looked at her and said he had sold his last one. Mother was watching from a distance  and knew it was because he didn't want to serve Isabel, so she sent her to the other side of the store but kept her ration book. She walked around the store nonchalantly, killing some time, and then came back to order the same kind of roast that Isabel wanted using Isabel's ration coupons.  Are you amazed that the butcher had just what Mother ordered? From then on, they used the same trick with Isabel staying away from the butcher, and everyone got the meat they wanted. The family was Catholic, so we attended special services with them; our family was Baptist, and they attended special services with us. They had to leave about 1944 when Paul was about to get orders to go overseas, and we never saw them again. But Christmas 1946 we got a package of 4 coffee mugs hand painted with our names on them, and every morning since that time someone in my family has had coffee and thought of friendship that knew no color or facial shape or religion.

But maybe Lance or the U.S. aren't the only ones who need to say "I'm sorry." I offer those words to:

any friend I meant to call and didn't;

every family member I should have said "I love you" to before they were gone;

to every younger generation member like sweet Chris and Leigh Ann, Michaeline and Ben who didn't sign up for caring for us old folks but have to;

to every student I didn't prepare for the real world but concentrated too much on outlines and paragraphs;

Let's see. That might be the first 1% of the people who mean something to me. Maybe I'm the one who is teary-eyed.

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