Volume 5, Issue 32: Walk Like a Man

"The stuff this kid knows about computers, he set up his mother with a whole website for her ceramics business."

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On Tuesday, my father posted this on his Facebook page.

Ordinarily a parent posting something on their Facebook page is a cause for alarm, but this was a happy occasion: My father turned 75 years old on Tuesday. I found this a clever way to announce such a milestone. (I like how the third quarter is the most dinged up.) My father was born on August 6, 1949, the same month as Richard Gere, Martin Amis, Gene Simmons, Rick Springfield, Keith Carradine, Jim Carroll and Shelley Long. We celebrated the best way the Leitch family knows how: With drinks and a big dinner and a couple nights of Cardinals baseball.

My father, like a lot of men, struggled a little bit when, eight years ago, he got older than his father ever made it. My grandfather, the previous William Franklin Leitch, was perpetually unhealthy, smoking four packs of unfiltered Pall Malls every day and suffering multiple heart attacks before dying at 67. The last time I ever saw my grandfather, the visit we all knew was probably going to be the final one, he was lying on his deathbed, sneaking smokes outside his oxygen mask, pale, weak, fading. He looked like the oldest person I had ever seen—I was 11 years old and didn’t know how a person could possibly get any older than that. He was 67.

My father is far healthier than that. It has been 11 years since he retired from his job as a troubleshooter for CIPS, the electric company he worked at for more than 30 years, the one with the greatest public service advertisements imaginable.

Dad takes far better care of himself than his father ever did. He quit smoking decades ago and has been on blood pressure medication for just as long. He keeps himself in better shape, heads to the YMCA four times a week and goes for long walks with his dog, Alice, who arrived three years ago and I’m pretty sure added at least a decade to everybody’s life like all good dogs do. My father remains active, working as a handyman for various Airbnb owners and real estate companies in Athens, showing up when someone needs something fixed, or wired, or moved. One of the primary concerns for many people my age revolves around the health and care of their parents. But I have no such issue. I took a three-day trip with my father this week and didn’t worry about him once. We watched baseball, we told old stories, we stayed up drinking domestic beers—he was right there with me, like he always has been. I do not take this time for granted. But I also don’t spend this time like I’m running out of it either. And neither does he.

And I think that matters. I think that’s keeping us both healthy.

About a decade ago, my mother, sister and I noticed that my Dad’s hand would occasionally shake. It was nothing major, and if you told him to stop it he could, but when he was sitting idle, it would twitch a little. We didn’t think much of it. It didn’t stop him from doing anything, he could still hold all his tools just fine, his mother had a little tremor like that for the last 20 years of her life and the only real effect it had was to render her handwriting on birthday cards illegible. But as the years went on, the tremor became a little more pronounced, and Dad started getting minor headaches a little more often, so the doctors ran some more tests. In 2021, we got the diagnosis: Dad had Parkinson’s.

It was obviously a scary diagnosis, though I’ll confess to finding it a bit of a relief at the time; we’d all suspected Parkinson’s was causing the tremors, and thus worried that if it wasn’t Parkinson’s, it would something worse, like there was some sort of tumor pressing on his brain or something. The strangest thing was the realization that there actually was something wrong. My father is Midwestern Tough, a man I’ve never heard complain about much of anything other than the Cardinals’ starting pitching and the price of gas; there wasn’t an ailment he couldn’t push aside by going back to work and powering through. What do we do with an actual problem you can’t just rub some dirt on? But then again: Other than the tremor and the little headaches, it didn’t seem like anything was wrong. Dad was fine. The doctor prescribed him his L-Dopa and told him to stay as active as possible.

And so he has. And five years later, he’s 75 and still Dad in every possible way. He goes to the neurologist once a year, and each time they say, “you’re doing great, just keep doing what you’re doing,” and thus he does. When I talked to him this week about potentially writing about his Parkinson’s, something he has never really spoken about in any sort of public forum—there have not yet been calls for a press conference—that was the main thing he said he found frustrating: This sense that he will somehow be seen as “out of it,” or doddering. He was talking to one of our relatives a few weeks ago about the election, and specifically Joe Biden’s debate performance. (This was before Biden dropped out of the race.) The relative, a Biden skeptic and someone who knows about Dad’s diagnosis, leaned over to him and asked, in a conspiratorial whisper, “it’s gotta be Parkinson’s, right? He has it, has to.” While Parkinson’s can of course cause cognitive issues, particularly in the later stages of the disease, this relative—like many people—seemed to equate Parkinson’s with dementia, or Alzheimer’s. But that hasn’t been my father’s experience at all. I find him more worried about how he’ll be perceived than anything else. When we took a picture at the baseball game this week, he wanted to make sure his mouth wasn’t open in any of them, lest someone think he looked lost. All it takes is one minute of talking to my dad to know he doesn’t miss a beat. But how people will see him can’t help but be on his mind.

But I’m telling you—and him—he’s great. He is living his life in a way that his father never got to, and in a way I can only dream of someday having the opportunity to do myself. He goes to ballgames with his children and grandchildren. He fixes Old Fashioneds for himself and way-too-strong martinis for my mom. He drives his reconstructed 1967 Camaro, a car he boasts of “having every piece of in my hands at some point,” in neighborhood parades. He still is the guy everyone goes to when something breaks and they need somebody to fix it. He mows the lawn. He fiddles around in his garage. (Which he built with his bare hands.) He plays with CrunchLabs with his grandson. He goes to Vegas a couple of times a year. He takes Alice to the dog park and takes afternoon naps watching “Law & Order” as she dozes at his feet. He’s living the best possible life. I don’t know how much more a person could possibly hope or expect. Isn’t that what we do all this for?

At his birthday dinner, my wife asked my father a question I’ve been thinking about all week since: Which of those three quarters was the best? The first, the second or the third? Initially we talked about world events that had happened in each. The first saw Vietnam, and the Civil Rights era, and political assassinations, and the Bay of Pigs, and man walking on the moon. The second (which started with Nixon’s resignation, two days after his 25th birthday) saw the ‘80s, the fall of the Soviet Union, and Reagan, and the Clinton impeachment, and O.J., and the rise of computers. The third saw September 11, and the Iraq war, social media, and Obama, and then Trump. I asked him which of those three quarters felt the most tumultuous, and he did not hesitate: Right now, absolutely right now, this one right here.

But we were much more interested in the quarters of his life. The first 25 years laid the groundwork: He grew up, joined the military, met my mom, got married, got a job. The second 25 years, which started with the birth of a son, was about the building: A house, a career, a life, a network of friends and family. He also lost his own father. The third 25: He guided and nursed his wife through breast cancer, lost his mother, watched his kids get married, became a grandfather, retired, moved to Georgia. My wife’s question rose again: Which of those three quarters were the best? Again, he did not hesitate: “The last one.” You’re too busy in the first two trying to keep all the plates in the air spinning, “trying to make sure everybody can eat and have a roof over their head,” as he put it. By the third quarter, he could take a breath and take it all in. In the third quarter, he could be more himself.

I can’t think of a more satisfying victory than that. After all: Next year, I’ll be plunking down that second quarter myself.

I have no idea what the next 25 years have in store, for me, for my family or for my parents. There will be highs, glorious moments when it feels like our feet are levitating a few feet above the ground, when the world seems like the most beautiful place that could possibly exist, and there will be despairing lows, when the world feels lost, when our lives are unmoored, when it feels like pain will engulf us and pull us under. We will feel loved. We will feel alone. We will feel strong. We will feel weak. We will thrive. We will flounder. We will do the right thing. We will do the wrong thing. But we will take it all in, in big huge gulps, and we will do everything we can to remember to take a breath and take it all in.

And when I am looking for faith that it can all work out, that life is a great thing, that it can be done right, that you can change the world just by being in it, I will look the same place I have always looked: I will look to my father. And I will know it can be done. Happy birthday, Dad. May the next quarter be the best quarter yet.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. An Ode to History’s Noble Losers, The Washington Post. The real hero of the USA-Serbia game, I think, was Nikola Jokic. This was a fun one.

2. The Annual World Series Contenders Draft with Mike Petriello, MLB.com. You should be watching his Statcast broadcasts on Sunday nights on ESPN2, by the way.

3. M. Night Shyamalan Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Trap.

4. Matt Damon Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with The Instigators.

5. This Week’s Five Fascinations, MLB.com. Back this week, with notes on the Braves, the Guardians, Vlad Jr., Ketel Marte, the White Sox and Tommy Pham.

6. My One-Week-to-Go Olympics Wrapup, New York. This ran right before Simone Biles finished.

7. Every Team’s Best Pending Free Agent, MLB.com. I think we may be saying goodbye to Paul Goldschmidt soon.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Trap,” “War Game” and “Cutter’s Way.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I were very down after that Cubs series.

Morning Lineup, I did Tuesday’s show.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“What Happened to Ice Cube?” Joel Anderson, Slate. This is my absolute favorite genre of writing: Investigative, personal, funny, sad and urgent.

Also, Joel, shockingly, got laid off from Slate about three days after this story posted. This is a great time to listen his terrific seasons on their Slow Burn podcast. (The Clarence Thomas one is the best one, but they’re all great.)

Also, this was a very informative, and even stirring, breakdown of what makes Tim Walz unique and inspiring from Don Moynihan. It also features an incredible photo contrast, introduced with this:

Many people were first introduced to Walz via a viral image of him being hugged by joyful children when he signed the universal school lunch bill. This image emerged around the same time that the Arkansas Republican Governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, signed a law loosening up child labor restrictions, surrounded by kids that looked like they were about to be sent down a mine shaft. The contrast could not be more stark.

And here is the photo:

I’d call that a stark contrast, yes.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers! (I’m sorry I’m so behind on these. But I am starting to catch up!)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“That’s How I’m Feeling,” Jack White. I have to tell you, I’m obsessed with the new Jack White album. It’s his least self-serious album in years—I’m not always against self-seriousness, all told, but he had been laying it on a little thick—and it’s basically just him rocking out for 45 minutes. It has a dashed-off aspect to it that is extremely appealing. This song is the perfect example: It’s called “That’s How I’m Feeling,” and the song, well, the song is about how he’s feeling, and when the chorus comes, he screams out, “That’s how I’m feeling right now!” That’s all you really need. Keep keeping it simple, Jack!

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Who can tell what these two are up to.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will