Some thoughts and other things that go whack

This does not compute

So much happening so quickly. Within three hours I have picked up, started up and something-upped a new (replacement) laptop. This is the third Dell and the second replacement from Dell. I restarted my computer a short while ago to see if I had properly restored my backup bookmarks and I get a completely different look for my desktop and font. I see this keyboard also cannot tolerate speed typing.  Or maybe it is the tremors in my hands. Oh well. I wish these laptop keyboards would handle like an old IBM Selectric or a Smith-Corona. Electronic typewriters. Man, they were cat’s pajamas!

Being cautious for justice’s (and my) sake

I didn’t get picked for court, yet. I am part of a panel for one day this week. I don’t think it would be proper to write about it because I have been sworn in. I’d say my chances are very low at being picked although stranger things have happened.

Next week I will pick soccer matches

My games didn’t go as I  had hoped. Sure, Stephen F. Austin beat Lamar but I didn’t expect it to be a 70-point massacre. The Texans-Cowboys game. I knew that could have happened and I said so. It still sucks.

If there’s a Football Heaven (Then there must be a hell of a coaching staff)

This was a rather odd and also somewhat sad weekend for football in my neck of the woods. Only a week ago Southeast Texans learned that 17-year-old Reggie Garrett, a star quarterback for West Orange-Stark High School collapsed and died shortly after throwing his second touchdown in a game with Jasper. The cause of his death is still unknown. On Friday night, Texas high school football coaching legend Curtis Barbay fell ill during a game his Newton Eagles were playing at Buna. (Geography lesson forthcoming). Barbay, 68, died the next evening of a heart attack in a Beaumont hospital. (Beaumont, for those who don’t know southeastern Texas, is about 90 miles east of Houston. West Orange-Stark is in Orange, on the Texas-Louisiana line, about 20 miles east of Beaumont. Newton is a small town about 60 miles north of Orange and about the same number of miles northeast of Beaumont. Finally, Buna is about 30 miles north of Beaumont. Give yourself an A after taking this open-book test.)

Coach Barbay, as I always called him, was the fourth most winning high school football  coach in Texas. In his more than 40 years as a coach, he led Newton to three state championships over Spearman, Daingerfield and Argyle. His teams were runner-ups for state titles also with Daingerfield and with Boyd. In his more than 30 years as head coach, seasons without playoffs were pretty much as rare as East Texas springs without a yellow coating of pine pollen. I have written about Coach here before, particularly as it relates to his special place in my butt’s history. He was the last teacher every to paddle me. He did so, after I had initially intended to forego it. However, good old Mr. John Singletary, our principal, said either I got a paddling or I would be suspended for three days.

In my mind, my reluctance to get my ass whacked was more principle than fear. Or so I imagined. Coach Barbay was then and still was at the time of his death a pretty big fellow. He delivered a pretty massive wallop when it was all said and done and perhaps I would have been wise to have feared it, though that would have accomplished nothing just as my trying to buck the system was all for naught. Oh, my offense? Talking in class. I think as I mentioned here before, it school was to help prepare for the workplace, then it should terrify the hell out of you if you are going to get your ass beat for talking when you shouldn’t.  I did feel like beating the hell out of some co-workers at times when they were gabbing or shouting at each other and throwing a beach ball around the office. This while I tried to concentrate on something or other for deadline.

The fall of 2005 presented a challenge for a lot of folks around Southeast Texas after Hurricane Rita. Newton, where I grew up and hung out with my brother and his family during Rita, was hit pretty hard for being more than 70 miles from the Gulf. Many houses hit in that storm included those of young Newton football players. Coach Barbay was able to both rally his young players and eventually the community, in short and the Eagles went to their third state title ever that year. I had mentioned here that if Newton was to pull off a championship that year I would finally give up the grudge I had against Coach Barbay for whipping my butt for talking in his World History class so many years ago.

That was all just some sort of hyperbole though. If I ever had a grudge against Curtis Barbay I had lost it long ago because I came to admire the man for both his coaching genius and the fact that he really cared for the people and his kids there in Newton. He wasn’t one of those high-paid coaches you hear about in Texas that make six figures.  I was looking at some of my friends and relatives pages on Facebook who had either been coached, teached or just knew Coach. Those people loved him and it was more than he just turned out great football teams each year, although winning certainly helps.

I never really thought about it until later on, but I guess you could say in a rather ridiculous way that I was “touched by greatness” with the heavy whack of a  paddle when the coach whipped me that day. People of Curtis Barbay’s ilk don’t come along every day.  Some people gather their remembrances by autographs, or by a fly ball that knocks them out and leaves them with 20 stitches, others who are knuckleheads like me end up getting paddled. I guess the lucky people just get their touch of greatness the easy way, by just learning from those who have something to teach them.

In the end, no pun intended, we all learn something. Rest in peace Coach Barbay.