When, just now, I tried to plug in the Christmas tree lights, I couldn't because I couldn't lean over long enough to find the blasted outlet in the dark. I needed to turn on the light above the fireplace just to find the plug. When I finally had it in my hand, I held onto the the window frame in order to reach down behind the tree. My back told me in no uncertain terms that such movements are questionable. My knees popped as if I were a kid cracking knuckles. The tree is glowing now, but getting it there is a tussle.
It's hard to believe, to remember, that long ago, I played a pretty decent game of volleyball in a tiny Christian school gym, on a team of old bucks who squared off against a league of other old farts. Once upon a time there was still enough spring in my step to lift this considerable mortal coil of mine off the ground high enough to spike a decent set. Our old team did well, I remember. We may not have been league champs, but we were formidable. Whoever we played knew they'd been in a game.
There were no crowds and we had no cheerleaders. We were ancient warriors. I suppose our wives just hoped we didn't come home with a concussion or a broken something-or-other. What happened in that gym was only occasionally pretty. We could do the job, but we were hardly a well-oiled machine.
But it was fun. Sometimes old men's dreams aren't all that formidable--just a good set or two or three, and the chance to work up a sweat and play your heart out.
The setter was, as most setters seem to be, short and squat and quick. Geno wasn't a young man either. He was older than I was, by a stretch too. He was a veteran. It was his job to field bumps--more than a few of them errant--and somehow serve them up to me for the kill. Sometimes it worked in that classic textbook way, and when it did, we left happy. Life was good. We were formidable, even a little fearsome, I'd like to think.
If I do the math, it seems that the era of town-league volleyball in a tiny Christian school gym was forty-some winters ago. That makes me 70 and Geno even older. The obituary says 84, but that seems a stretch. I'm thinking he couldn't have been that old really--at least I don't want him to have been.
In my memory, I'll always see him next to me, husky shoulders, barrel-chested, a lefty, trying his best to lift a bump up high without carrying the ball, a guy who was maybe a bit too old to be playing volleyball, even town league--but then maybe we all were, or most of us. The thing is, we still had some fight in us, enough testosterone to get us off the floor for a good block at the net.
Geno died last week, surrounded by his family, many of whom I know, a loving family because Geno was a loving man, a sweet guy with a gentle disposition and a servant's soul. You got to be if you're going to be a setter. You've got spend your time and energy serving up the goods for the tall guy next to you. Comes with the territory. You got to give it away. Setters do.
Town-league volleyball didn't last. I don't know what killed it, but by the time our family returned from a few years away, what once had been was no more. Occasionally, I'd meet him and his wife, say hello, share a smile or two and maybe a memory of the days when he used to set me up.
Like a thousand ex-students of mine, Geno will always be the age he was when I knew him best, when he'd scramble around the gym floor, trying to magically turn bumps into sets for spikes to be kills. I'll always see him beside me back then, always remember him smiling, loving the game.
There was so much more to his life, so much that town league volleyball hardly merits a footnote. But I want to believe that Geno himself would tell me I could do worse than hold on to those memories of a time long ago when he took the floor right next to me on an over-the-hill gang playing their hearts out in an otherwise empty Christian school gym.
Geno was a setter. He was always a setter and will always be in my book. Today, even now, even today on Christmas Eve, at his funeral, he's a gift, a blessing.
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