Game Time

Previously published by Mainely Agriculture, Spring 2022

I can still see my father with a pool cue in his hand.  He holds it upright at his side, its rubber bumper pressed to the floor.  A Chesterfield smolders between the fingers of his other hand.  He’s waiting for his turn to shoot.  More than that:  he’s watching me play, watching me learn.  The game of billiards is probably the thing we shared most often during our time together.  I grew up with a pool table in our living room.  But it’s those quiet afternoons at The Long Branch I remember best.  

Dad taught me to play pool before I could see over the table.  I learned while standing on an empty Budweiser case turned upside-down.  He provided helpful hints, telling me which ball to shoot first, how hard or soft to strike the cue ball, and where to strike the object ball to cut it at the proper angle.  He taught me bank shots by placing his index finger on the rail and saying, “hit her right about here.”  He referred to billiard balls as “she,” and “her,” the way people refer to boats.  Dad possessed his own unique billiards vernacular.  He called striped balls “the big ones,” and the solid balls, “the little ones.”  Leaving yourself without a follow-up shot meant that you had “stitched yourself,” and his announcement of “game time” meant you were about to lose.  Sometimes, he said things I did not understand, such as the idea that shooting pool was all geometry.  Geometry, he said, was about angles, and I would learn about it in school.  He told me that when he studied geometry, he once solved a problem for the class by sketching a theoretical bank shot on the chalkboard.  

Dad played pool very well, having honed his skills as a youth while hanging out at the local pool hall during the 1920s.  He played with finesse and was a master of the bank shot.  Most impressive, though, is that he played for position—that is, he knew just how to make each shot so the cue ball would line up perfectly for his next shot.  The game offered competition and camaraderie, two things he greatly enjoyed, and I suspect he viewed playing opportunities as a major benefit of owning a bar.  On slow afternoons, he often played against customers, and if his opponent wished to wager some cash, even better.  During the early 1960s, he and his friend Teddy, a local forester, regularly bet fifty dollars per game.  That was a lot of money for the time.  It’s still a lot of money for Greenville.

When Dad and I played, he allowed himself to take only one shot at a time—a voluntary handicap meant to give me a fighting chance.  This ended abruptly one day when, at age six, I beat him with a bank shot on the eight ball.  I’d driven the cue ball the entire length of the table where it ricocheted at a steep angle and rolled back seven feet to gently nudge the eight along the last foot of rail and into the pocket.  Mind you, this was no accident.  I’d called the shot.  Dad knew I’d made it as soon as he saw the cue ball’s trajectory.  “Well I’ll be go to hell!” he exclaimed.  The eight was still rolling to its resting spot inside the table when he looked at me with one eyebrow raised in mock incredulity.  Then a big grin spread across his face and he chuckled.  “I guess it’s time to end that ‘one shot’ rule.”

In my mind’s eye, he moves around the table, calling his shots with a point of his cue, then gazing down the cue’s shaft with concentration and determination deep as the blue of his eyes.  He always tried his best, but was never a sore loser, even when playing for money.  He sometimes muttered an “aww, shit,” upon missing a shot, but never anything more.  Winning meant nothing to him compared to the thrill of competition.  He just loved to play, and he never beat himself up or put himself down when he lost.  This is surely what he wished for me when I struggled with my own failures.  When I shot too quickly, he would say, “Take your time, dear.”  When I grumbled at a missed shot, he would gently tell me to be patient with myself.  Only when I struck the cue ball out of anger would he speak sternly.  “You didn’t hit it hard enough,” he’d say.  He never had to explain what he meant.  And yet, I kept getting angry.  At myself, always.  Not every game.  Maybe not even one in three, or one in five.  But often enough that I can still close my eyes and hear him say, “You didn’t hit it hard enough.”

What I remember most is his left hand, the way he curled his index finger around the cue, with his thumb and other fingers fanning out across the felt.  Whenever he shot, I always watched that hand.  As a boy, I could not articulate it, but in that hand I saw strength, and elegance, and supreme confidence.  My dad looked as in-charge with a pool cue as Ted Williams looked with a bat.  To this day, whenever I encounter someone playing pool, I watch the person’s lead hand.  It tells me all I need to know about their knowledge of the game, their comfort, their confidence.  Or their lack of all three.  I have always held a pool cue in my father’s fashion.  But for too many years of my life, I would stare down my cue’s length to my own hand and know that I was faking everything it meant.

My Hometown

From Bangor Daily News, 5 June 2015

This spring, after 20 years residing in the burbs of a state to our south, I moved back to my hometown in the Maine woods. It’s a vastly different place than I remember. The veneer mill is gone. The lumber mills are gone. Log trucks no longer rumble through town. Locals try to compensate for these losses by selling T-shirts and hats to people from away. It helps, a little.

The good news? The town is still the gateway to God’s Country, a place where you can open your front door and walk in Thoreau’s footsteps. In the village you can still borrow a book, sit on a park bench, rent a canoe, visit two museums, order a Slush Puppy, fill a prescription, attend a church service and eat breakfast, lunch and dinner — all within sight of the lake. I’m grateful for all of these truths. But most of all, I’m grateful for the people.

Before I share my story, a qualifier: I believe that people are the same everywhere. Bangor or Boston, Brunswick or Bakersfield — it makes no difference. And so, despite the occasional rumor to the contrary, there’s nothing in the water that makes the residents of my hometown especially friendly or kind. Indeed, I’ve known a few who were neither. But the people of my town are all special, and they’re special in a way unique to small communities: They’re inextricably connected to each other.

Counting the snowbirds, the population of my hometown hovers around 1,600, a number that has varied little for more than a century. Grow up in a town this size and you’ll know most people by name. You’ll know their parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and classmates. All these people will know you, too. You’ll encounter each other at the post office and the hardware store, the grocery store and restaurants. You’ll attend the same church services, baked bean suppers and high school basketball games. Over the course of years, you’ll learn about each other through your intersecting lives. In a small town, everybody is a neighbor. The community makes the people, not the other way around.

Now, my story:

A week or two after relocating to my childhood home, I drove into town to run errands. I parked on Main Street and walked over to the bank to deposit a check, then stopped at the library to check email and the headlines. From there, I headed for the drug store to buy some postcards, only to realize en route that I didn’t have my wallet. Believing that I’d left it at home, I turned around and headed back to my car. (That I’d been to the bank only an hour before failed to cross my mind.)

On the way home, I stopped at a local convenience store and ordered a small veggie pizza. The store owner said it would be ready in about 35 minutes, say 4:30. “I’ll be back,” I said, “Gotta cruise up to the house and grab my wallet.”

I looked for my wallet on the kitchen counter, my desk, the dining room table and in the pockets of the previous day’s pants. No luck. Thinking it might have fallen onto the floor of my car, I went outside to have a look. I heard my cellphone chirping as I opened the door. I had a voicemail. The message went something like this:

“Hi Travis, this is Sierra at the bank. You left your wallet here. We’re closing in a minute, but rumor has it that you’re picking up a pizza at 4:30, so we’re sending your wallet over there.”

A man I had not seen for more than two decades found my wallet on the floor of the bank and handed it to the teller. This man had the presence of mind to telephone the convenience store where he recalled that I often stopped. When the store owner said I’d be back at 4:30, the finder of the wallet turned to the bank teller and offered to drop it off. The teller, in turn, started to ask the branch manager’s permission to hand it over, but the manager waved off the question. “Oh, that’s fine,” she said, “Go ahead.”

It’s good to be home.