Chapter Fourteen: I Guess It Doesn’t Matter Anymore
As I was driving the Tercel today, I tossed in a Buddy Holly cassette—yes, I still have cassettes—and listened as the legend of Lubbock crooned I Guess It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, and thought back to an incident with Taylor when I stupidly continued to be a teacher rather than a father.
A week after Taylor’s first brain surgery I took a day off from school to drive Taylor to Martin County High School so she could turn in a paper in a dual enrollment class. Dual enrollment classes were classes taught through Indian River Community College, but on the high school campuses. I taught two dual enrollment classes at my school, South Fork High School, Martin County’s rival. So we walked onto campus so she could turn in an English paper. A week after surgery and she was walking with a limp, for God’s sake. Surely a brain tumor would have been a good enough reason to turn a paper in late, but I encouraged her to get it done and turn it in. God, looking back on it, I was just like my father who forced me to play football from 7th through 12th grade even though I was a geek on the gridiron, a benchwarmer, who, during the games generally played “left out” instead of left tackle. My father had been a good football player in both high school and college and I was his last hope, being the last son he sired. Oldest brother Mike had lasted two days of high school practice, having had the good luck to obtain a concussion and consequently a 4-F for football; brother Tom, who was always able to find a way out of things and would thus go on to a successful business career, literally and figuratively ran away from football by lettering in cross country. So it was up to me to fulfill my father’s fantasies of a son winning the Heisman Trophy. I resented my father for the football obsession, and there I was, forcing Taylor, after brain surgery no less, to turn in the silly English paper, which Taylor later informed me she had finished under pain killers. My rationale was I had to continue to be my teacher self in encouraging her to turn the paper in. Any deviation in my behavior and Taylor might sense I didn’t think she was going to beat this “brain cancer thing.” That’s the way I honestly felt, and looking back, that was really a rationalization for me, part of my own denial; I was terrified that Taylor was not going to beat this “brain cancer thing” and I coped with it through her courage, not my own.
As Taylor, wearing a blue bandana head covering that would become her trademark, hobbled across the campus that day to turn in her paper, I stood stoically like the idiotic pedagogue I could be, contemplating that no student in my classes would ever have a reason for turning in a paper late if my own daughter with a brain tumor had turned her paper in on time.
And as Taylor turned the corner and limped out of sight down a hallway, I began to cry. Hell, I didn’t just cry, I blubbered like a baby, sobbing for several seconds before I regained control of my emotions. I was relieved that no one saw me as all of the students and teachers were in class. I was proud of Taylor and wondered where she got her guts. Obviously not from her crybaby father, I remember thinking. She probably got her guts from her mother. I remember thinking that my ex-wife Pam was a tough old bird, I’d give her that.
Within a week, Taylor’s girlfriends were wearing bandanas in sympathy for Taylor. It was a touching show of friendship which caught on among the senior girls and became a fashion statement at the oh so preppy Martin County High School.
Looking at Taylor’s journal now, I noticed an entry from October 18th 2000, about ten days after she turned in the English paper. It was that poem, reproduced earlier about the doctor’s “sad look upon our face.”
As it turned out Taylor received a C+ on that paper which she considered a gift considering she typed the paper’s last paragraph three times due to the influence of the Percocet.
I later apologized to Taylor for pressing her so hard about the English paper but she forgave me and laughed about it. Looking back I was sorry I was such a hard ass, but when I beat myself up, I think of Taylor as a little girl, sitting in the passenger seat of the Tercel as we shoot up Interstate 95 to Pennsylvania and Nana-land and Buddy Holly is on and Taylor is singing slightly off-key in that tiny little voice: I Guess It Doesn’t Matter
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Meanwhile, back in Durham, North Carolina, things didn’t go as smoothly as planned with pheresis….