_____When I was five, I went down to Old Joe's house to play. ( Joe was 5 also, but he is referred to as Old Joe now.) He couldn't always come out right away, but that was okay because I would go in the yard and swing on his swings till he did.
_____One Saturday I went to wait on the swing, and I noticed immediately the not unpleasant smell of the lead paint that was being applied to the house next door---slightly sweet, very heady, powerfully diffused on a warm and sunny day.
_____A new little girl with yellow hair and brown eyes came up to the chain link fence and said hello. I went reluctantly over and was soon the cautious listener to one of the most talkative persons I had ever known. She told me she was visiting Old Joe's neighbor---her relative---while her Dad was painting the relative's house. Her name was Diane and she showed me how she had learned to dance, and among other things she told me right off that she liked me---all of this before I said a single word.
_____She asked if I knew how to do anything like dance, and I said no, although I did remember that I knew how to sing a song I had heard on the radio, "Peggy Sue" (by Buddy Holly). She asked me to sing it, and after much cajoling, I thought I could if I did it while I swung on the swing.
_____Diane loved the performance, and then she offered to show me her newly painted red nails. She thrust her little hand through the fence, making a half fist, and told me I had to open up her fingers. I did. Again and again. It turned out to be our little game for the purpose of holding hands.
_____I spent the entire day there, making excuses to Old Joe to stay and play in his yard. I did the same on Sunday, when by the afternoon I was singing Buddy Holly's song, but changing the words to "Diane Sue."
____ Neither of us crossed the fence over the weekend, but I think we fell in love; because when I went over on Monday, she was gone and I had never been so sad. I continued to sing "Diane Sue" for many weeks, and would sit on Joe's swing, breathing in the smell of the newly painted house---a smell that lingered for many days. Years later, whenever the unique aroma of lead paint filled my senses, I had that warm, sad feeling of loss for Diane Sue.
_____Today, lead paint is almost universally outlawed. But it is used in some commercial applications, and maybe once every couple of years I come upon some location where it is being used. Before even making the intellectual connection, I get the old mixture of joy and heartbreak---and then I have to smile to myself after I realize what it was.
___Next year's Presidential Inauguration will doubtlessly be an occasion for oodles of well-meaning newspaper columns all across the nation, offering advice, predictions and resolutions for the new man on Pennsylvania Avenue. I suggest that we skip the high falootin op-ed pieces on the economy and world peace; we've read them all before. Instead, let's get this new President to make the kinds of reforms that really hit close to home. You know, like the nation's coach problem, for example. A special Giddyup poll has ascertained that 96 percent of all American parents are in favor of an amendment that would make coaching of any kind a federal offense.
___Who is it, after all, that's responsible for infiltrating family life, usurping weekly schedules, canceling summer vacations, and making the family meal an obsolete rite? The mob? The Gestapo? Nooooo. It's kiddie's coach, that's who. Whether it's the guru of swimming, basketball, baseball, football, track, soccer, chess, or volleyball, he along with his brethren are the ones responsible for the millions of nightly car pools and the concomitant hundreds of thousands of tons of air pollution--- not OPEC.
___And on the off chance that the other 4 percent from the poll think all this traffic and mayhem is a price worth paying for junior to spend half his waking hours with the venerable Coach, consider who this person is: in all likelihood, he's an ex-jock whose greatest influence was another obsessive coach who thought mathematicians and geographers were sissies, and that winning was more important than church, grandma, apple pie, Christmas, and, in the more worrisome cases, more important than sex.
___Why, you ask, do I think the President is the one to handle this cultural crisis? Well, who do you think started all this coach adulation, anyway? Another president, that's who! Remember Ronnie Reagan, the Gipper himself, of "Knute Rockne, All American" cinema fame? When he took office years ago, the country became one big half-time locker room that went ga-ga over the memory of Knute and Lombardi, and transferred their regard to Bobby Knight and Tommy Lasorda and Mike Ditka as great teachers and minor deities.
___Well, I've got news for you. Barney Fife would be a great "teacher" too if his class were comprised of an elite few of the very best in the field, who showed up voluntarily to pursue an opportunity for incomprehensible wealth and fame, and whose membership in the squad could be terminated by the "teacher" in a New York minute. But let's see how John Thompson or Bill Walsh would do with a group of thirty street-wise teenagers with no athletic skills and every desire to be someplace else, but whose attendance was compelled by state law, which also prevented the teacher from expelling the worst of them. That's what real teachers must grapple with---but I digress.
___In some communities, coaches have been accorded more prestige and authority than math and science teachers, so that whole families have waited timidly for Coach's next letter home, which told them exactly where in the continental United States they had to drive to by tomorrow evening at seven, and to be there with baked goods for the concession stand and pre-signed letters excusing Susie or Johnny from homework for the next five days because of this important exhibition tournament that would help the kids prepare for the very important pre-season season--all this in a mimeographed letter to the parents with the greeting spelled exactly this way: "Deer Booster Clubb Member."
___And heaven forbid that any parents not make the trip, lest their son or daughter not be pressured by their presence to perform optimally and to develop the same kind of neuroses that Coach said they ought to have in this world, because wasn't it Knute or maybe Ara who said you will never be happy in life unless you know you can swim the butterfly faster than Marge in accounting? The new president's first acts in office, then, should be the withdrawal of all federal funds to any grownup in sweatpants and Nikes (excluding Loop secretaries), and the provision for severe punishment of any adult who willfully interferes in a kid's pick-up game. Once this is done, Mr. President can turn his attention to the next most pressing problem on the domestic front, the maddening proliferation of cell phones sprouting from people's ears...