He Threw Back His Head And Clubbed Me On My Nose

I’ve been called cocky. The guy with the cocky smirk. The guy who has to have the last word. The guy who likes to kid and tease. The guy who asked annoying questions. Through it all I had escaped being slapped, hit, stabbed, or shot. So at nineteen I traveled to Argentina to serve a two year Mormon mission. On my preparation day, I was playing basketball with my fellow missionaries. I was guarding one of these missionaries who had earned All American high school honors in basketball. All of the sudden he threw his head back and tagged me squarely on the nose. It nearly knocked me out. I stumbled around for a bit, holding my hand over my nose. Thinking for sure it was broken and it would start to bleed. It didn’t bleed, and it wasn’t broken. After I gained my senses, I chose not to say anything to the guy. He offered no apologies. My only question was, “how in my long life of near misses, did I let this happen?” I began to have more frank encounters with this guy. He happened to outrank me in time and position. I made a point of getting under his skin. I knew full well my time would come to get even with him. And it did. We met at the Alta Club in Salt Lake City fifty two years later. Things had changed. To start, He couldn’t remember knocking me in the nose. His older brother had been a real tough guy. They brawled. The way to get tough Is to fight tough guys. If you can believe it, after all those years he still had residual dark spots around his eye socket from having his brother take it to him. He learned to fight. He became real tough in the process. His hair had turned silver. He stood to greet me as I entered the lobby. He was shorter than I was, because he was slightly stooped over. He had a slight limp. I was bigger, heavier, and much healthier than he appeared to be. He could not stand for long periods of time, and when did stand, he leaned up against a chair. He remarked, “look at how straight you’re standing.” As we walked down the hall to the club’s grill, I looked over at him and stared at his ear. I said to myself, “I could hit his ear and lay him out.” I was tempted. In all my life I had been hit directly only once. That was by this guy. I had a finely tuned sense of when I was in danger of being hit. I knew a split second before I had gone too far with my aggressive way of popping off and joking. I was tempted to double up my fist and hit him as hard as I could. While we were eating, I was startled when he would intermittently start crying. Initially, I thought he was showing signs of senility. As he talked, it was apparent he had been suffering from acute deprivation of intimacy with his wife of forty nine years. As he talked about decades of insufferable marriage, I felt like I was living through a Kofkaesque moment. Life only got worse. He seriously contemplated suicide. He divorced her. He met a Brazilian woman on a dating sight. Months later they were married. He said, “She’s not beautiful, but she loves me.” He started crying. I have long ago concluded that love is the only authentic experience worthy of living in this life. All else has a start and a finish, and disappears as soon as it appears, good as it might be. He said the two of us had always been able to talk frankly to one another – not that we had talked that much, maybe three or four times after our missions. I guess that counted for a lot in his mind. I confessed to him there were four people in my life that I admired and had copied, hoping by doing so I would be like them. He was one of them. The guy who decked me. The guy I’ve always wanted to smash. I wanted to be like him, yet I wanted to knock him senseless. How does that make sense? It doesn’t. Or does it? In the end don’t we want to be better than those we most admire? Even had I not been clobbered by him, I would have wanted to be like and then best him. And because he sucker punched me, I wanted all the more to better him. I couldn’t bring myself to telling him I had also harbored the desire to hit him in the face. I knew if I did, he might start crying again. He was fragile. I’m telling you right now life is very, very tricky. We all age, but our memories do not. They are fresh, but not profound. So, I listened. Those memories changed. The gaps filled in. What I saw now saw was a different view. He was as tough as those toughs I knew. I tricked myself to think missionaries were a docile crew. I let my guard down, and boom I got knocked from here to you. I hadn’t even trash talked him as I guarded him. Is he fooling me now? What if I swung at him. Would he still be as tough as he was back then? Would he block my swing and hit me again? (FLASHBACK: I’m thinking of two times when I put on the boxing gloves with two of the toughs. As we sparred the first few seconds, I casually threw a left jab. Both times, I was shocked when I hit their noses. Their eyes started watering. They didn’t swing back. I was so dumbfounded I just stood there. The fights were over. I have long arms, in our teen years I outgrew these two. They stopped growing. They actually ended up being short, but they both had very large noses.) My friend started crying again. I put my arms around him and said everything will be OK. (That’s the phrase I most often use as a management consultant. I believe it to be so. It hasn’t failed me in thirty five years.) He thanked me for the time we spent together. He didn’t ask for a follow up. His routine is to call once every ten years. That means we’ll get together maybe one more time. Two more times might be asking too much. We may not be in any condition to remember each other twenty years from now. That’s ok. After we’re gone, no one will know we ever met. Tricky isn’t it. So how did we come to live on earth in the first place? Because of the crazy, highly improbable fall of the dice in our favor. Not even the preacher can come up with a better answer. Yes, I continue to feel more and more and more an honor to be here right now experiencing consciousness in a body of flesh and bone. So live as big as you can right now. Don’t get bogged down with memories that hurt you. They’re probably subject to a lot of editing. Do I worry anymore about tough guys, hurt noses, revenge? No. And I count my big mouth a singular attribute. What do I think of the guy who clubbed me? I still admire him. And I have no desire to sucker punch him, if I ever REALLY did. Did I best him in life? I’ll keep that to myself. It’s unworthy of our time to consider it. Much love and kind thoughts to you all.