Especially the more unnerving today feels, the better off we are rooting ourselves in the wisdom of our ancestors and the good old days. There’s nothing like jumping into a good memory so we can muse about something other than you-know-what, which spirals into doom and gloom thinking. Let’s find a good story to lift our spirits instead.

I have a Grandma story about Dad for you now. I just love this photo of the two of them.

Dad always hated peas and one fateful super, Dad thought he could outsmart Grandma and he hid his peas in his pocket. Grandma didn’t say a word. She waited until he asked to be excused from the table and when he was about to head upstairs, she asked, “Are you forgetting something?” And she mashed the peas up real good. It was one of my personal favorites when I was trying to process that my Dad had a Mom, and she was even older than he was, and she called him by his first name. She obviously knew things about my Dad that I did not.

But before we get to the good old days, I had to get nostalgic the hard way–just like you.

Last Thursday, I signed up for a talk with Dr. Lisa Damour, a psychologist, an author, a monthly adolescent columnist for the New York Times and a regular contributor to CBS News. http://www.drlisadamour.com She talked about how to manage stress, anxiety, and parenting and I knew I needed to hear her, screw the kids, this was for me. (Okay, it helped with the girls, too).

But since I can’t get that session back for you, here she is on CBS News just so you get the gist of what she had to say. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dr-lisa-damour-coronavirus-interview-5-things-i-learned/

As you can imagine, she makes you want to just take her and put her inside your head. She broke down the sources of all my stress and made it seem normal. She called it “adaptation demands”. We do nothing the way we did it a month ago. As long as it doesn’t become chronic, it’s normal and healthy. It occurs naturally when we need to adapt. But let’s take a look at what’s going on even more:

1. There’s “decision making fatigue”–it’s taxing to make decisions and to have our routines upended. So the more routines we can get implemented the better our mental health will be.

2. There is also a stress source with “daily hassles”–don’t underestimate how important a toll this can take on us. What researchers have found is it’s not the event itself whch causes stress, it’s all the compounded problems we must deal with. Take them seriously and find postive coping techniques (ie write my blog about the good old days).

3. There’s ongoing uncertainty–To deal with this, we can sort problems into groups.

Group One: Identify and recognize the problems within our control that we can make a decision and do something about.

Group Two: Learn to practice acceptance with the problems beyond our control. Preserve our energy for what we can do something about.

Dr. Lisa Damour

I like to think I took her words to heart but that was a week ago. Already they seem fuzzy. In real-time, it goes like this, I talked to a friend who had just talked to a friend who was worrying about what her son should do next year! Suppose the colleges go back to online learning in the fall, he doesn’t do well with online learning. Does he take a gap year? Big decision that’s plaguing them. We are all plagued with decisions right now, big and small, so what’s the big deal if we just add this to our list? I don’t know about you, but I’m already feeling more stressed just talking about it again.

So I got off the phone and told Alex about it. He would have to know because just in case we don’t have enough daily hassles of our own, let’s consider our nephew who has to decide what he’s doing next school year. What a problem! I mean, “what do you do?”

And at that very moment, like a perfectly timed SNL skit, a USA Today article popped up on my phone newsfeed about, none other than, the very same topic. Now before we argue whether the phone was listening in on my conversation, I went on Twitter and a mother, who doesn’t have a high school senior either, tweeted about the same problem, different article.

So that’s how I came to my aha moment. Dr. Damour was right. Life is challenging right now, we are redefining our lives one decision at a time. Do we really need to complicate things by worrying about other people’s decisions that we have no control over anyway? We can only be empathetic. And don’t underestimate what a gift that can be.

So it’s time for me to bury myself in the past once more. I get into a lot less trouble this way!

So that brings us to today’s post, “Growing Into Your Height”. It was mentioned in Act As If https://stephanieortiz.com/2020/02/21/act-as-if/ and I meant to explore it further, only it got sidelined the following week for Julius Erving’s birthday, when I paid tribute to him, instead.

Just like it was fun to hear stories of my Dad’s childhood as a kid, I still get a kick out of it. Dad was only 6’4″ and 175 pounds the year he graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and entered college at UNC-Chapel Hill. And when he was 21, he had grown to 6’6″ and 225 pounds. Not that height mattered, there were guys who played pro who were under 6 feet. But he definitely grew into his height over the years.

But let’s backtrack to another great Grandma story when my Dad had a lot more growing to do. He was only five (good thing Dad and I are having these conversations because I would have told you Dad was in Grade School). So he got a basketball, I think it was for Christmas, and “for whatever reason” he went to the schoolyard, it was a couple of blocks away from his house, maybe a five-minute walk. He must have come home crying and told Grandma that the boys took his ball and wouldn’t let him play, so she marched Dad back to the schoolyard and said, “This is Bill’s ball. You can use it just make sure you let him play once in a while.” They were probably 10 or 11 and they always let him play after that.

“I fell in love with it right then when I got my first ball at five,” Dad said. I had never heard Dad tell that part of the story before.

Then he got older. There were so many schoolyards in the area to choose from, he’d try three or four others looking for a game. On the weekends, the schools would lock up so Dad said, “You’d have to throw your ball over the hurricane fence, which was close to 20-feet high, and climb the fence. So that was Dad’s idea of getting into trouble.

There weren’t a lot of schools with gyms. Even his high school, Erasmus Hall, as big as it was, had a gym that only sat a few hundred people. But he wasn’t supposed to go to Erasmus. St. Francis Prep was a wonderful school with a lot of good basketball players who went there. They had a Christmas tournament and Dad’s grammar school played them in 7th or 8th Grade. One of the brothers asked him if he wanted to go there; they had a scholarship for him. He took the entrance exam and when Grandpa found out they didn’t have a scholarship for him, he marched Dad down to Erasmus and enrolled him there .(My grandparents did a lot of marching around those days).

Dad was the only one of his siblings who didn’t go to catholic high school, but Dad said he got to meet a lot of different kinds of people where he went, so he was happy with how things ended up.

No matter what school you went to, everybody played in the playgrounds. He told me about taking a train when he was in High School to go play at Manhattan Beach, next to Coney Island, during summers. That’s where you’d find people from all over the city: the really good players, top college players, the pros and the people they would call the “old-timers”, people in their thirties. It would get so hot on the ground, he’d have to take off his sneakers and put his feet in the ocean.

Even though it wasn’t “organized” the way I think of sports today, there was a process, Dad explained. They’d play “three on three.” If a game was going on, the others lined up on the sidelines. Whoever was next in line was “next”. The team of three that lost would leave and whoever won would stay on the court. The person who was “next” in line would pick two other teammates to play the next game.

It was a physical game, and there were no refs. You’d call your own foul. If it wasn’t blatant, then the arguments would ensue. “I never touched you.” And in some cases, it could get out of control, there would be fights. If nothing else, there’d be a discussion. And for those that were really terrible, they were out.

Looking back, Dad recalled that it was physical, people tried to hurt you. There would be a poll with a basket attached and guys would bump guys into the poll and knock them out. Dad was knocked out in a similar fashion in Kindergarten, when he played against a brother and the brother knocked him into a poll and he got knocked out for a bit.

Without those schoolyards, Dad said he never would have played basketball. Where else would he have gone to when he was five and he needed to use his basketball?

And playing basketball taught Dad that there was no such thing as prejudice. When you got a bunch of guys together on a court, even if you had to climb a fence to get to a couple of baskets attached to a pole, you either liked a guy or you didn’t.

Dad said he grew up living in a bubble, where the city was his playground. He made a lot of great friends in those days. When it came time for him to decide where he was going to college, he didn’t have much of a choice. The basketball coach of UNC-Chapel Hill, Frank McGuire, came to his home to recruit him, but he spent most of his time talking to my grandparents. He barely even acknowledged Dad. You see, Frank McGuire’s sister lived down the block from Dad (and to this day my aunt is best friend’s with his niece). My grandparents were concerned that Dad would lose his faith so Dad’s choice was either a catholic university or Uncle Frank.

Dad didn’t know it at the time that the person lurking in the background at his house that day was Dean Smith, assistant coach. He might have been in the shadows that day, but he stepped up to be Dad’s coach. Dad was the last player that Frank McGuire recruited to Carolina that year.

I guess that’s the point, isn’t it? Sometimes we feel we can conveniently plan and predict the nuances of the future so we can wrap it up and put it in our pocket. Only the future is so much grander than we ever could have known and it just mashes those peas into something, unlike anything we could have imagined.