Ronnie in Sketches

I realize how very few of you knew Ronnie...and to my discredit, I haven't blogged a great deal about him. He was a hard person to get to know. And to be honest, I know that I didn't know as much of him as I would have liked. But here is what I know...

Ronnie was born and raised in the smallest of small towns in Mississippi. The kind of town that's outside the town that's outside the town that's closest to the bigger, somewhat recognizable town. Anna mentioned that he had something like 53 people in his graduating class.

He grew up pretty impoverished. His father was an alcoholic. His mother was his saving grace. I don't know that I've ever known a man who revered his mother quite like Ronnie. She died of cancer when he was in college. On their wedding day, Anna had one white rose placed on a little table alongside a candle in her memory. Ronnie cried when he saw it.

He went to a community college and then on to Ole Miss. And I must say, I've known some folks in my time who were college proud, being from the Bulldawg Nation, but I don't know that any of them surpassed Ronnie. I'm not sure you could name an item of clothing or a basic household item that they didn't have imprinted with Ole Miss: sweatshirts, t-shirts, ties, socks, pajamas, rugs, lamps, the trailer hitch on the truck and the Sequoia. Everything navy and red.

As a kid, he used to listen to the St. Louis Cardinals games on the radio. He was almost as die-hard about those guys as he was for the Rebels. He and Anna went to St. Louis to watch the Cardinals play for their honeymoon.

He loved sports - especially football and baseball. He started his career in south Atlanta coaching high school baseball and teaching adaptive P.E. county-wide - meaning he developed physical education programs for the special ed kids. To this day, he's still the winningest baseball coach at that south Atlanta high school.

He moved to the northwest Atlanta suburb to be an assistant coach for football and head baseball coach at the school where Anna taught. That's where they met.

Ronnie doesn't have a lot of family. With his mother and father gone, and a stepfather remaining that he didn't like so much, he's got a brother who still lives in Mississippi and a half-sister who's in Atlanta. His brother didn't come to the wedding. So the family pew on his side was filled with the freshly scrubbed faces and uncomfortably starched shirts and tightly cinched ties of the high school baseball team. Every year, Ronnie and Anna would have the team over for a steak dinner at Christmas.

And when you talk about Christmas, you have to know that Ronnie was Clark Griswald incarnate. In fact, Anna mentioned this similarity in her remarks at the memorial service. He loved Christmas. Over the years, Ronnie collected more than 300 nutcrackers. Small, medium, large and 5-foot tall. Wood, ceramic, glass, dancing, light-up, robotic. Sportsmen, presidents, Biblical characters, tradesmen, cowboys, and your classic Nutcracker prince. They started decorating their house for Christmas the week after Halloween in order to get it all done. Two trees - all decorated with nutcracker ornaments.

Ronnie shopped on Black Friday. He'd get the paper and mark out his purchases and make a plan. He would get up at 4 a.m. to get a deal on the day after Thanksgiving. He usually bought his wrapping paper that day, too. He didn't like it to get picked over.

But probably what everyone will remember most about Ronnie and Christmas was his candy. Every year, he made tins and buckets and boxes of candy to give away to friends and family. Chocolate peanut butter balls, white and milk chocolate dipped pretzels, date balls, white and milk chocolate dipped Ritz crackers with peanut butter sandwiched in between. Baby Ruth bars and Reese's Cup cookies. I would get a gallon bucket stuffed to the brim with all the handmade treats. And so did his coworkers. And the nurses at Emory that administered his chemo treatments.

A year and half into their marriage, Ronnie ran over a rock with the lawn mower and sustained a pretty serious injury when it hit his leg. But after stitches, he struggled with the wound, and weeks later an MRI revealed an enormous blood clot - from calf to groin. He was admitted to the hospital for intensive blood thinning and subsequent tests to ensure there were no more clots. And there weren't - but there were two curious spots behind his diaphragm, clouds that looked suspiciously like cancerous tumors in the lymph nodes. The day before Thanksgiving that year, we got word that he had non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

He underwent chemo, lost his hair, took steroids to bolster his strength. Three months into his treatments, I came home from NC, and on the way to meet Anna and Ronnie for lunch, Mom prepared me for his appearance. But nothing ever quite prepares you for the sick look of cancer - the pasty skin, the distorted body shape, the haggard tiredness. He never missed a day of work. Not one single day. And he only missed coaching one baseball game, because it fell during the time of his treatment.

All along the way, he helped kids in whom he saw himself. One of his former baseball players lived with Ronnie and Anna for a couple of years after his home life fell apart and he needed to get his bearings. At the visitation, he wore one of Ronnie's shirts and ties and stood with the family. Ronnie and Anna put together sheets and towels and all the dorm essentials for a wrestler who had earned a college scholarship but still was tight on money. He bought lunches for kids. He tried to get them to change their errant ways. One of the students who came to the funeral had been disciplined by Ronnie earlier this year; he came to pay his respects, saying that Ronnie inspired him to try to change himself.

But lest it sound like I'm sanctifying him, I'll tell you right up front that Ronnie was just human. He was obstinate and opinionated in the worst sort of way. Everything was black and white, right or wrong...which really translated into Ronnie's way or the wrong way. He didn't cook or clean, and when he married Anna, he was a bachelor to the "T". I remember cleaning out his apartment - oh, the horror. He could be gruff and aloof. But he had an infectious and unexpected laugh. He had real soul - from his hardships and his hard work - and I wish that I'd gotten to know that soul better. Ronnie was 15 years older than me, and I don't think he ever really knew whether to treat me like one of his students or an equal. I don't think he understood me - nor I him - but I like to think that in the end, we loved one another in our own ways.

There are those minute details that make up the forensic evidence of what you know about a person...tiny facts that you cling to and hope to somehow hold on to someone...like, he was extremely picky about dress shirts. Mama and I agonized over getting this shirt at Brooks Brothers for Christmas and I really pulled for it even though I figured he'd hate it; it was hanging in the laundry room, just washed from a wearing when he died. He loved sweet tea. He worried about eating ribs in public because they were messy. Anyone he didn't like was a punk, a turd or a POS. He obsessively cut the lawn every Saturday. He hated lateness. He was a morning person who never needed an alarm. He said Anna had "too much clutter." He bought everyone shoes for Christmas - I haven't bought myself running shoes in six years. He had naturally curly hair, which he kept cut painfully close. He was an avid newspaper reader. He usually stood with his feet spread apart and his arms crossed high over his chest. He mumbled. He always asked me about work - that was his standard question for me, "How's work?" That day in the hospital, when I came in, Anna said, "Smash is here." And that wrenched my heart because I felt that in that moment, if I was Smash to him, I was his sister as much as I was Anna's.

In December, Ronnie had his last CT scan - it marked 4 1/2 year cancer-free. They had moved into a new house in August. He was loving his new job as a high school athletic director - it was what he had always aspired to be. Anna loved her new high school position, too. They had been married for six years...bought their dream house...found themselves settling in to a new community they loved. We celebrated Thanksgiving at their house this year. At Christmas, they came bearing the familiar buckets of candy.

The last time I saw Ronnie before he died was Dillon's birthday. I can see him, sitting on the corner of Justin and Eva's fireplace, Dillon clinging to his knees and him saying, "Hey, buddy" in this voice he used to talk to the dogs. I could mimic it if you could hear me - the pitch, the intonation...the way his voice went up an octave and the "hey" was kind of long and the "buddy" fast. And he chuckled when Dillon had that fistful of cake and crammed it into his mouth.

After he died, I found out all sorts of other things about him. His favorite TV shows ever were Miami Vice, Magnum P.I. and Sanford and Son. He used to have a crush on China Phillips and went to the Wilson Phillips concert back in the day. He once attempted to have two dates in one night - and on another occasion dated a woman he referred to as Hellion 1. His best friend Darryl dated Hellion 2. One of his favorite movies was Grease. He loved disco music.

But I didn't know...and I know now that there are things I missed. And the outpouring of love and compassion and sorrow since he died has made me all the more sad about the parts of him that I never glimpsed. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote at the end of The Great Gatsby, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."