No Mountain High Enough: Raising Lance, Raising Me - Rilegato

ONE

REFLECTIONS

I would like to say right up front--I did not know about the fireballs. Obviously, if I’d known my twelve-year-old son was lighting gasoline-soaked tennis balls on fire and batting them around the yard with oven mitts, I would have been all over his case. No, I read about it in his autobiography, just like the rest of the world, and I guess I’d feel bad about that if I didn’t know this: there’s not a kid past middle school who hasn’t done something that would chill his mother to the bone if she knew about it. And I’ll bet I’m not the only mother with a few fireballs of her own--moments from the past that would take her child equally by surprise.

That’s the way it is between mother and child. You grow up, grow together, grow apart, grow old, never really knowing the true life story of that other person whose life was so entwined with your own. Mothers see what they want to see. Children see what they need. And that’s as it should be. Everyone should have a moment to believe they’re the center of someone’s universe, and my son and I gave that moment to each other. That’s what I want to tell people who ask me about Lance: that he’s my son, fireballs and all, and I would think he was the most amazing man in the world even if the world had never heard his name.

Watching him take his sport by storm (and occasionally worrying about the sport taking him), I’m continually astonished at the all-out beauty of that boy and the enormous love he brings out of me. It swept us both outward like a riptide from the day he was born to--well, right now. Right here, in the lovely foyer of my lovely home, where TV people are swarming, switching, scurrying around. They flip through my photo albums, searching for the secrets of his success. They mine my memories, stirring up dust and ghosts and odd little gremlins I thought I was done with long ago. (You know how you tuck things away in little dresser drawers in your head.)

Vivaldi was tuned in on the satellite dish when they arrived, but Motown was the music in my mind. It always is when I revisit those days. It was in the air back then, hanging in the humidity, breaking up the exhaust fumes that turned the taste of the heat smoky and brown. When I think of walking down the streets of Dallas, my freshly ironed hair swinging to the Supremes, I hear the drill team chants mingled with a girl group beat, the bluesy lyrics pattering back and forth between the boys in the sweltering alley. The harmonies lifted worn white sheets that waved on wire clotheslines between the tenement buildings, flagging the surrender of the people inside. Motown drifted from shop doors by day, from car windows by night. Now James Brown and Diana Ross and Little Stevie Wonder play alongside my memories like a movie sound track. I can’t separate the music from the smell of hot asphalt. It’s one of the ways in which my memories have been mellowed--healed by time, rewritten by compassion, surgically enhanced by this dog-with-a-bone optimism that won’t let me give up on anyone until a tree falls on me.

My son doesn’t like to revisit the past. He is a man perpetually in forward motion. Always has been. Love that kid. Head down, into the wind. No time to look over your shoulder. Nothing back there is as important as what’s ahead. But I don’t personally mind it. Revisiting. I like that word. That word makes it sound like I’m knocking on the door at Granny’s house and she’s still there to open it. Or like I’m passing by that Mooneyham girl who sits on the crumbling cement steps in front of some god-awful apartment building, fanning herself with the want ads from the Dallas Morning News. If I could drop in on that girl like a fairy godmother, whisper in her ear through the summer breeze, I know just what I’d say.

“Don’t give up. You’re gonna be okay. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

I can’t remember where I first heard that one, but I used it a lot. Even then I knew some clichés got to be clichés for a reason: because they’re true. The false old saws about knowing your place and following the rules--those don’t seem to wear as well, and anyway, I never really thought they applied to me. Even then I knew if I was going to make the life I wanted, I was going to have to color outside the lines. But that is so much easier to say at fifty than it is at fifteen.

From this perspective, I feel a great affection for that girl. I don’t cringe at the polka-dot bell-bottoms or the daisy-splattered minidress. I’m proud of what I was, where I am, and how I made the trip from there to here. And it frankly boggles my mind that a television crew is setting up their light trees and tripods in the middle of my foyer, having traveled to Plano, Texas, from New York City just to ask me all about it.

“Who’d have ever thought?” says my sister Debbie in absolute wonderment.
“Who ever would’ve?” I agree.

Back in the days when we played Lawrence Welk Show (Debbie and I were Kathy and Dee Dee Lennon, while our little brother Alan was pressed into service as Myron Floren), we thought, to be on television, well, that must make you something pretty special. Poverty has this way of making a child feel invisible, I think. Maybe that’s why we dreamed so dearly of being someone worth noticing.

When Lance was fourteen or fifteen, he was interviewed on an ESPN program called KidSports, and I’ll tell you what, I saw my son on national television and--oh, my God! There was my son on national television! I was immediately on the edge of my seat, trying to coach him through the glass. “Okay, son, stand up straight. Look at the camera--no, wait! Maybe you’re supposed to look at the guy with the microphone--no, wait! Look at the crowd. And smile! And--and be sure to thank the--”

Lance was unflappable. He was so caught up in the thrill of winning, he apparently forgot to be thrilled about being on TV. He’d been riding hard for two hours, so he was breathless and sweaty and still in his Speedos. He bounded to the platform like some big goofy puppy--completely raw, innocent, and radiating a child’s liquid joy.

“I’m just so excited to win!” he said happily. “Sometimes I even get paid if I win, and my mom doesn’t have a lot of money, so that really helps her.”

“So I guess it’ll feel pretty good to get home and rest up for a few days, huh?” said the guy with the microphone.

“Oh, no,” Lance replied, “I’m gonna race again tomorrow! That’ll really cap it off.” He hoisted a gallon jug of water, slugged some down, and wiped his mouth with the side of his hand, still breathing hard and grinning larger than life. “I was gut-checkin’ out there! Had to get away from that other guy. Man, he has a motor on his bike!”

That’s all it was about for him. The race was the thing. Winning was the goal. Losing was an opportunity to learn what might help you win next time. Being in that inner circle, being recognized and applauded--that was part of the rush, I suppose, but not enough to make someone go through what he had to go through to make winning happen. He was never nervous about getting up on the platform at the end of a race, smiling for the cameras, talking to the microphones. He was eager to share his joy. Isn’t that the heart of celebrity? Celebration? It took us a while to figure out that all those accolades--well, it’s like a big ol’ peach pie. Wonderfully sweet. But eventually it draws ants. Hornets even, if you don’t keep a lid on it.

Nonetheless, ya gotta make hay while the sun shines. That’s what I tell my son. There’s a window of opportunity for an athlete, and it’s nothing so enduring as Motown. Someday in the not-so-distant future it’ll all be a scrapbook, so today praise the Lord and pass the Colgate. I’m gonna mug every photo op like a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader. I am a bona-fide show dawg. I fix up quite nicely, if I do say so myself, and the camera and I have a mutual understanding: it adds ten pounds but subtracts ten years. I am unutterably proud of my son and happy to do whatever I can to make sure the rest of the world feels the same way. Sign me up. Lights, camera, action.

“Gotta go,” I tell Debbie. “They’re looking at me like they expect something.”

“B’bye,” we both say to our stylishly tiny phones.

“Do you mind if we remove the swag?” asks the producer, but apparently this is a rhetorical question. She has already dragged the swag down and yanked the tall drapes closed. Too much sun, I guess. The artificial light is sharper, narrower, easier to harness than all that dayshine. But it irritates me, this lack of regard for the labor of love it was. The interior decorator--a terrific lady who owns a little shih tzu just like Sam--and the window treatment lady--who had a baby last year--reverently fluffed and tugged and smoothed for half an hour to get it just so, and it’s hardly been touched since, except with a feather duster.

“Oh, hon, set that on the rug,” I tell a young man who has pushed aside a standard of silk gladiolas and is opening a huge metal box on the round mahogany table. I see the glance he exchanges with another crewman, but I don’t care. Let them think this is some rich lady’s house and she’s all uptight about it. I make no apologies for loving my beautiful things. Isn’t that terrible? Materialistic or something. But I’ve worked very hard for what I have and know what it’s like to do without. This house is quite literally my dream home. A Technicolor Emerald Ci...