Eleven Months Out of the Year

There are two of these a year. State is in March, at Kearney, and the rules clinic is the first week of August, down in Lincoln, in a lecture hall with a sign-in table by the door and a sack lunch with your name written on it in marker. In between you talk to the same dozen people you've been talking to since you were twenty-two. Most of it's hotel blocks and bus times.

Greg Sobotka coaches out by Fremont now. He was at Burke for a long time before that. His beard went gray in about four years.

Last month at the clinic he came up the aisle while I was signing in and put his hand out, and I shook it. He said, good to see you, Paul. He doesn't usually use my name. He'd come in from the lot and his hand was cold from the air conditioning in his car, and he held on a little long, and then he went to get coffee from the cart and I wrote my school and my years of service on the sheet.

I teach five sections of American history and one of government. I've taught the Dust Bowl twenty-three times. There's a laminated pull-down map in my room that was already in there when I got the room, and it still has Yugoslavia on it, and every couple of years a kid notices and I tell him the story of it. I've got one this year who writes everything in green ink and I've quit asking him not to.

I'd like to get the year right, so I'll say it was June of 2003. I'd just finished my first year in the building out on Maple, or it was my second, I'd have to sit down and think about it. It was the Corolla with the tape deck in it. And the College World Series was on, which is how I remember the parking.

He'd taken the upstairs of a house off Thirteenth, about four blocks from Rosenblatt, which had looked like a deal when he signed the lease in January. It's a deal eleven months out of the year. That week there were sandwich boards on the lawns up and down the street charging ten dollars a car, and we carried his couch past two of them. His brother-in-law helped in the morning and left at four for a shift, so the afternoon was the two of us. Ninety-one degrees. The window unit stayed in its box in the hall, because we couldn't get past the couch to the window.

We finished around eight. There was a cooler with a couple inches of water in the bottom and some Busch Light floating in it, and we sat on the floor because everything you would sit on had something stacked on it. He had a little TV on a milk crate with foil on the rabbit ears. The box fan was in the kitchen window pointed in.

It happened once, that night, on the floor of that apartment.

He was up before me. He'd found the coffee maker but not the filters, so we drove down to the gas station at Thirteenth and Bancroft and got coffee and a package of doughnuts and sat in the car with it, and we talked about whether the district would pay for the summer institute in Lincoln or whether we'd be paying for it ourselves. Then I drove home and mowed, because it was Sunday.

He called me on the Tuesday about a set of evidence tubs he had extra of, and did I want them for my novices. I said I did. He brought them by the school that week and we stood in the lot at the back of his trunk for ten or fifteen minutes talking about a kid of his who'd quit over a girl. That lot floods at the south end when it rains hard and they've regraded it twice. Then he got in and went.

Since then we've talked about the speaker point scale, when they changed it and then when they changed it back. His knee. The parking at Millard South, which is bad. The speaker point scale again, I think, at Kearney one year.

He married Kelly in 2005. I was at it and I read the passage from Corinthians. Janine and I got married two years after that, and Greg sent a cooler. A good one. Nineteen years in October.

He took the Fremont job in 2011. For two years after that he sent an assistant down to the clinic instead of coming himself. I know that because I read the sign-in sheet on my way out both times.

Nine years ago at Kearney, after awards, four or five of us were in the bar at the Holiday Inn waiting on buses, and it thinned out until it was the two of us at the table.

He said, that summer I moved into that place by the stadium.

I said those were the worst stairs in the city of Omaha. He laughed and said his back never did come all the way back from it, and then Bev Tichy sat down with a bowl of chili and wanted to know what I thought of the new resolution, and I told her.

I drove the activity van home that night with six kids asleep behind me and I left the radio off the whole way.

My daughter's a junior and she does Lincoln-Douglas, which I had nothing to do with. At state two years ago Greg judged her in a quarterfinal, which happens, because you can't judge your own school. He gave her the round. She wanted me to see her speaks so I read the ballot in the car on the way over to the gym, and I'd forgotten that he prints. He wrote that she should slow down on her taglines and that she was very easy to listen to.

She's signed up for the camp he runs at Fremont in June. Janine paid the deposit in February.

At the clinic last month they went through the new rubric for forty minutes with a projector that wouldn't hold focus. We sat four rows apart. At lunch everybody took their sacks outside because the hall was cold, and he sat down on the low wall by the flagpole, and I sat down on it too, a couple of feet from him, and we ate turkey sandwiches and talked about Denny Hrabik retiring after thirty-one years and about his oldest being at UNO for engineering. He asked after Janine by name, which he does. I asked about Kelly, or I meant to.

Then he stopped eating and said, Paul, that summer.

And I said Hrabik's got a boat now, did he know that, thirty-one years in and the man goes out and buys a boat, and Greg said no, he hadn't heard that. I said they're keeping it out at Branched Oak. I don't know if that's right. Then they called us back in.

I drove home on 80. There was a backup at Gretna, a truck in the right lane with its flashers on, and it took a while to get past it.

I got in a little after four. Janine was out front with the hose on the hostas, and she asked how it was, and I told her the projector was bad the whole time. She had it on the setting that fans out. I went in and got a glass of water and when I came back out she'd moved down to the ones by the step, which don't need it.