Happy Fathers Day

My big sister Carol posted this picture on Facebook on Fathers Day. I got breakfast in bed and spent the day with my three daughters and Suzy (the best wife and mother any man could ever dream of) and when I look back and think of my father I am so grateful he taught me what really matters in life.

We are what truly mattered to him. We are all that mattered to him. He wasn't perfect. He was my Dumb Dumb Daddy-O and I will always love him.

Heart and Soul

Football has been a major theme of this blog for obvious reasons, but my dad was good at anything he seemed to do. My wife recently paid me the compliment that I too was really good at just about anything I tried, arguably the best. I begged to differ, but in the end said, "thank you."

I have thought a lot about that compliment. I'm not that good at a lot of things. But I get what she meant and I credit it to good coaching.

Whenever I would play exceptionally well in a game. My dad would always say, "You played with some real 'heart & soul' today Biddy Buddy!" I remember one baseball game in particular where I went 5 for 5 with a double, two triples and two home runs. I scored 5 times and we won 10 to 9 in the seventh. We were the home team and on the last out I had a diving over the shoulder catch that seemed so unreal that I remember it as though I was watching someone else catch it. At the time I told my dad that I didn't remember doing it and that is was like I was watching someone else do it and then there I was with the ball in my glove getting mobbed by my teammates. He said it was because I was playing with some serious heart and soul.

He said he saw me running for it before the ball had even left the bat. He said I had had a premonition and since I was playing with real heart and soul you went where your spirit led. And that is how you played and that is how you should live your life.

He said, "Today you gave your soul a chance. When you do this the soul will take care of the body, but the body can never take care of the soul. Pay heed to all of you premonitions. Cultivate them. Regard them as an extra self, above and beyond your mortal self. Regard that other self as a watchful angel, a friend who's got your back."

He went on to explain, "The mind is to the body as the spirit to the soul. There are things that cannot be seen but that are surely felt, like fear. It may be simply that fear is born into the mind because there is fear in the world. Or again, it may be that the mysterious agency of the mind has thrown out invisible tentacles and drawn the truth out of the void."

He would always say, "Fear is usually a big waste of time, but it will always keep you safe." I think what he was saying, now that I've had thirty years to chew on it, was in life always follow your heart. Because when you follow your heart you bring together your mind and spirit, and your body and soul. Pretty deep and profound stuff for a Dumb Dumb Daddyo.

SFO

"We're going to fly you to SFO for the next round of interviews. How does that sound to you?" Sounds great, where's SFO? Sometimes I am not a smart man. I told my wife I made to the next round and their flying me out to SOF next week! She said for people in the know it's SFO, but you call it San Francisco! "Cool!"

I think my genius lies in not worrying so much about being an idiot. I always felt bad for Forest Gump when he would be so concerned about not being a smart man. He never saw it. His brilliance in following his heart and just doing what he knew was right. My dad was so much like Forest Gump it's crazy, except for the whole low IQ thing. He was from Alabama. Played football on scholarship at a major university. They even had the same jersey number, good old #44. They both learned a lot about life and being a man serving in the military during a war. They both met Elvis and bunch of U.S. presidents. They both traveled the world, both being pioneering American citizens making historic trips to China. They both married the only woman they ever loved. And without a doubt lived uniquely huge lives.

So here I sit in the airport waiting to fly to SFO for yet another interview feeling like Forest on a bus stop bench. Thinking about my dad and realizing he never said anything about no box of chocolates. He did once tell to stop worrying so much about life and that it would take care of itself. He once said, "Life ain't meant to be figured out it's meant to be lived!"

Time to board.

Wish me luck.

ps
Not being a smart man is not so bad. My dad taught me I could still become educated (it just may take a little longer) but I see that there is a lot of brilliance in you biddy buddy and soon you will see it too.

Why

Why is the critical question. My dad used to tell me, "If you don't know why don't do it." Another one of his many sayings I never really got. Why do you have to have a reason to do everything? I guess now I get it, sort of. My wife just asked what am I blogging about and I told her I don't know. But I think I do know why I am doing it. Why do I post in DDD, because it brings me closer to my father.

I wish he were here now. Eight years he's been gone and still I wonder what he'd say or what he thinks I should do. Of course he is in my heart and in my head but that is not the same. He would never tell me what to do. Mostly he would say do what is right. Most of the times he would say if I haven't taught you the difference between right and wrong by now you'll never learn. Guess I'm still learning.

He once told me, "If you don't like what you are doing then do something else." I think it was when I was complaining about my first real sales job. He went on to explain that he didn't mean give up, but try and do it differently. He said, "The surest way to make something permanent is to give up. The surest way to succeed was to try again." He had a way of making the profound profoundly simple. I went back to that job and instead of going out in the field to make sales I went out to make friends. Things turned out pretty well.

I hope to start posting a little more regularly because I really could use his advice right now. The start up business I was hired to save just went out of business. So I find myself unemployed for the second time this year. If it was just me no problem, but I'm a dumb dumb daddyo now. My family is counting on me and lately I've been kind of down to say the least. He'd probably say something to make me smile and then say something like feeling sorry for yourself is not the solution. He was never shy about saying what had to be said.

So there it is...thanks DDD.

Best Newspaper Photo Ever

2012 Holy Family Bless Your Pets Day!

Wood Box Wisdom on Struggle

 

It has been far too long since I looked in my dad's wood box. As usual this scrap was the first I read and as usual struck me a as just what I need to hear. "The things you treasure more and more are the things you had to struggle for..." What do I treasure?

 

My dad's first "big job" was with the Lumberman's Association and this clip from a lumberman poet is obviously from that time in his life. It was the mid-1950s and since that's ten years before I was born it is the time in my dad's life that this blog was created for me to discover. A lumberman poet? I must look this guy up. His wisdom my father share is solid and true. What we truly value and desire are things for which we are willing to struggle and the things we will treasure as time goes by are those very things that were not easily acquired. Family, Love, Respect, Education, Friendship, Wisdom, Good Health, Happiness, these things I treasure and struggle for and none are easy but all make life worth living. These are the ends. There are many means. I struggle at time for the means to these ends. I think the wisdom in this clip is to discover what you treasure so that the daily struggle is justified. Struggle is a funny word to me. It's like strut and giggle. There I go cracking myself up again... My struggle will never be the same! Thanks Pops.

Thank you John Grisham for the "Best Book Ever"

Best book ever if you are still wrestling with the memories of a coach who pushed you way harder than anyone had a right to push. Sometimes fiction has a way bringing understanding to me that instruction, education or study never could. Every once in a while, by chance, I will read a really good book that so dramatically affects me that I have to try and get away from it for a while to be sure my initial impression is true.

 

This book is one of those books. Over a month ago I could not put it down. I read it over two nights and must admit it has changed how I look at my past. Growing up I played a lot of sports. A lot. And In doing so had a lot of coaches. Some great and some, not so much. Like John Grisham, I played football and was not an all-American. Unlike him I do not have a gift for fiction. In, "Bleachers" he tells an incredibly moving story of an all-American football player who has returned home as an adult for the eminent death of his estranged legendary high school football coach.

This book struck me on so many levels I do not know where to start. I am glad I waited for this story to sink and in doing so was able to find a deeper more significant moral that now I must share. Those who have made us greater than we are or could have ever hoped to have been without them are very, very special people. Love them or hate them we are their legacy. A legacy is not what people leave us, but what they leave inside us. I believe the human heart is a blend of our intellect and soul. I know in my heart that my father, my greatest coach, left me a legacy I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand and appreciate.

This little book that I bought for 50 cents to save it from a dumpster did more to further this understanding and appreciation than anything, save the love I have for my wife and the birth of my own three children.

My dad had a coach like the one in this book. They had experienced the kind of success described in this story. In his senior year at Maryland my dad, under the legendary coach Tatum went undefeated and in the 1952 Sugar Bowl defeated #1 ranked Tennessee. The book helped me understand why he spoke so little of his coach and how he always seemed to diminish the magnitude of such an accomplishment. I think sometimes people are so close to your heart and buried so deep in your soul that to speak of them distorts your very essence.

As I read this book I could only think about myself and the great men who coached me over the years. The best being Coach Rodger Manuel, who first cut me from the eighth grade basketball team, but believed enough in me to advance me to varsity baseball as a sophomore. Coach Cameron and Coach Rose, my high school and college football coaches still ramble around in my heart and mind and I may never know or be able to articulate how I feel about them, but their affect on my life is immeasurable. Both these men made me make similar stands as the primary character in this book. Both these men made me the man I am today and for that I am begrudgingly grateful.

As this book has set in I think more and more about my Dumb Dumb Daddy O. He was a great coach. He was an awesome father. He is in my very heart, soul and mind.

Thank you John Grisham for the greatest football story ever.

why joy?

The post that precedes this one was a major style change. I wrote it in the classic Facebook inspirational post style because that is how I saw it in my head. Late in the afternoon on Friday I got the bad news I didn't get the job in Nashville. On Wednesday morning I got the call I had made it to the final three and was invited to interview in Nashville 8am Thursday. It was four hours of intense interviewing with a national director, operations manager, and two district business managers from Pfizer. After booking the flights and hotel arrangements and in the next 24 hours speaking to 6 of 9 team members of the district I would be joining, studying all the research I had gathered on the key accounts of the territory I would be working, learned the specifics of the managed care environment for Tennessee, familiarized myself with the human growth hormone drugs I would sell, studied the disease states of Human Growth Hormone Deficiency and Macromegaly, arranging for two letters of reference emails for the interview team, traveling halfway across the country and back on less than 2 hours of sleep and by 5pm Friday back at my desk taking the call that I didn't get it. Once again Pfizer very politely said they didn't want me. Saturday morning I woke up severely depressed. It was a horrible funk. I was so upset I found myself avoiding my family because I was afraid I would loose it. I just felt like crying.

Later that morning I saw on my Blackberry an email from the national director who I had interview with and he had sent a reply to my thank you email from the day before. He obviously knew I wasn't the chosen one, but he sent a reply that changed everything. He said he hoped my youngest daughter's ear infection would heal quickly and wished my family a joyful weekend while baptizing my other daughter. And there it was. There was all kind of joy to be had and I wasn't letting it happen. I cried tears of joy in a very hot shower and all I could think was, "Joy Will Happen if I Let It...Joy Will Happen if I Let It...Joy Will Happen if I let It!" And It did. I got myself out of the way and there it was. My wife introduced Chloe to the congregation in awesome fashion and I performed the baptism and we celebrated later with friends at the Golden Corral. There was real joy in our family. The kind of Joy I had been standing in the way of since Christmas morning almost a month earlier. Being laid of is stressful, but I now refuse to allow any worldly circumstance to exclude me and my family of the Joy God has given us.

Joy will happen if you let it.

joy

Joy

Will happen

If you

 let it.

Get it?

Silver Tuxedo at the White House

Nancy and Jeff Keith

White House State Dinner 1980 (something)

 

This is my mom and dad at a White House State Dinner and yes that is a silver tuxedo. I think it was during Regan’s first term. I don’t remember much about this night, but I do remember that tux. I think I remember them being picked up at our house in Potomac by a chauffeured limousine. That would have been no big deal because whenever we would fly somewhere as a family we would always be chauffeured in a stretch-limo to the Presidential Suite in whatever hotel we were staying in, isn’t that how everybody traveled? Being an Executive Director of a major association did have its perks. Every year there would be several big trips. The family vacation and then there would always be the convention where he was in charge and then there would be the ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) convention where he was a member. At one point he was the President and the Chairman of the Board for ASAE as well. He was the Executive Director for AMSA, NTDRA, NPSA and lastly ADTSEA while I was growing up.

He once confided in me his biggest regret. I was in my mid-twenties and was helping him with rehab and physical therapy after his second major stroke. As he was starting to come out of a major funk he started confiding in me a lot. We were doing our stretches in the hot tub at Sneakers and he said, “I always regretted leaving Cleveland. Leaving the Stamping Association was the dumbest thing I ever did. It was my big shot to bring your mother home to Maryland, but within a year of moving here we put your sister in the ground and I knew I had made a mistake.” I told him I thought moving here from Cleveland was the best thing that ever happen to me. And I meant it.

That was the summer of 1993 and I had moved in with my parents in Ocean Pines for two reasons. I was a broken hearted failure of a salesman with nowhere else to go and my mother asked me too. She was sobbing on the phone and she said she was sorry but had to ask. She said, “Since this last stroke your father has given up. He is just waiting to die and you are the only person on this earth who can raise his spirits.” So I went. And it was the best summer I had ever spent in Ocean City and that’s saying something.

It’s hard to write about those times. It has taken me over a hundred posts in dumbdumbdaddyo to finally get here, but what my father-in-law always says, “No matter where you go there you are!”  I guess this project never was about celebrating what a great man my father was when he was young but how hard it was to see him get so old. When you are one of the toughest men on earth it takes a lot to finally put you in the ground.

 

Thirty Seconds of Incredible Bravery

My Dad once told me with thirty seconds of incredible bravery you can accomplish almost anything. It only takes thirty seconds of incredible bravery to acknowledge the fear and then push forward. Being brave is usually about taking that first step or speaking that first word. Everything is a lot easier once you get rolling. With thirty seconds of incredible bravery you can become unstoppable.

He knew thirty seconds was the average span of attention. He also knew his youngest son was way bellow average, in fact, comically low in this regard. He changed his philosophy on being incredibly brave to something more my speed. He said once, "Bitty Buddy, I know you, and you my son only have to be incredibly brave for three seconds and you can change the world. It takes only a couple seconds to punch a bully in the jaw. It only takes only a few seconds to decide what's right and then doing it is easy."

He always said, "The more you do something the easier it gets." Facing your fear is the same way. The more you do it the easier it gets. Being brave is not being fearless. "Being brave is being scared shit-less and still moving forward. Being afraid is natural.  Being brave takes practice. Being brave is taking that first step, taking that first swing, taking that first leap, speaking that first word knowing that you will most likely fail, but trying anyway. Being incredibly brave is trying again and succeeding."

He also always said, "Fear is a waste of time!" He had had a lot of practice.

My Dad

Jefferson Donald Keith, 1945

A Marine in the South Pacific.

Maryland Terrapins, Jan. 1952

My Dad after beating #1 Ranked Tennesse, winning the Sugar Bowl, and completing a perfect undeafeted season. Under coach Tatum's left hand. It was his last game. He knew a little something about being brave and about moving forward.

Best Christmas Card Ever!

Jeff Keith and Ben Pratt, 1983

Ben and my dad at our Senior high school banquet for football. In his Christmas card Ben enclosed a note that his father had died recently and while going through his stuff he found these pictures and thought I might want them.

Andy Keith, Matt Leahfeldt, and Burke Slater, 1983

 

Notice my DDD giving me horns! He was a kidder, teaser, tickler and loved to make us laugh. I almost didn't notice the horns but seeing them hit me pretty hard. I think I missed a lot of things back then especially a lot of really good things about my dad. It was definitely his horns because that's the way he did it, with both hands and not with the more popular one handed peace sign version. What I would give to go back to the last few years of him being playful and silly and happy. This was my senior year so this marks the demise of the man I started blogging to remember. He had already lost his last, "big" job and was about a year away from his first heart attack.

I  just recently lost my job. Laid off just before Christmas and I have really struggled emotionally. Finishing this post is the first blogging I've done since I got the news a month ago. A friend of mine who was also laid off at the same time called me the other day to ask if I've been writing. He confided that he is a professional writer and has had writers block since the day we were "displaced". His theory is that as stress increases creativity decreases. I agree with his theory. This leaves me two alternatives; one, stop blogging or two, learn to cope better with the stresses of unemployment and learn to enjoy life again stress or no stress!

I was in the cardio-cinema at Gold's Gym humping out a few miles on the treadmill today when I had a revelation. I have become my father, and not in a good way. The one who's pain and suffering and frustration and anger I lived with as I was becoming a man. The one who had his identity all wrapped up in his career and while I was in high school lost it all. When you have had so much it's hard to loose it all. I witnessed him loose his career, his wealth, his homes, and his health.

Several times since I started this blog these cardio-cinema revelations have hit me like a ton a bricks. Fortunately it's dark because no one likes to see a big bald guy like me crying like a baby. What came to me was a memory I've buried deep down inside and I wish I had just forgotten all together. It's when I told my dad I had been offered a football scholarship to Miami University and I was hoping it would make his day. Instead through tears he sobbed an apology. He said he was sorry. He didn't want it to be this way. He said he didn't want me to feel like I had to take a scholarship to be able to afford to go to college. He said he always thought when I got my scholarship (he said he always knew I would get one) that he was going to tell me not to take it. But if I didn't listen and accepted it anyways (which he knew I would) he was going buy me any damn car I wanted (I was driving my sisters old beat up Pacer at the time). And then he said he was sorry he was crying and he was very proud of his Bitty Buddy.

The Keith Kids 1968 - ish

This is by far my favorite picture taken by DDD! One of my earliest memories is from this day. Their was this narrow rock ledge over a ravine that you had to put your back against the cliff face and shuffle your feet to climb up to the trail. At the time it seemed very scary, high up and dangerous I would love to see it now and see what my Dad thought a good outdoor adventure for his kids. Knowing Dumb Dumb Daddy-O it probably was very scary, high up and dangerous!

Karen, Carol, Jay and Andy, 1969