My father asks me to double-check the directions before we get onto the interstate. I tell him that, yeah, he's going the right way—we need to stay on Hillsboro Road and head toward I-40. "Hillsbur-uh," as he says, is a road he has driven thousands of times in his 40 years of living in Nashville. He's 66 now, but his typically keen sense of direction is just one more casualty of his recent dementia diagnosis.
A few months earlier, I was sitting in the same car with Mom when she first told me something was going on with Dad's memory. She was candid but controlled, as if she'd practiced how she was going to break the news to her children. "I never anticipated this happening," she said. We sat in my parents' driveway for a long time, only getting out when we remembered that there were some groceries melting in the trunk.
Once his dementia diagnosis was confirmed, doctors suggested that, if we wanted to, we could blame a lifetime of football for Dad's condition. And I do.
For Dad, though, it's not so simple. Football is the thing that gave him pride, friendship, confidence, employment, a bond with his sons. He handles situations as they come. He and Mom had nine children (four sons, five daughters—I brought up the rear), and the boys all grew up osmosing football while my sisters and I obsessed over, say, the Newsies soundtrack. Even if money was tight one year, he'd still buy new cleats for all the boys at the beginning of every season. Dad's role was to keep up morale but also to step in as a fixer when someone found themselves in a jam, like if they forgot their lunch (me) or hit a parked car (also me).
Dad played football for almost two decades, so the possibility of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, was raised almost immediately. My family spent the next few months poring over the scientific literature. Since CTE can only be confirmed post-mortem, it is impossible to diagnose while the subject is alive, but one expansive study published in 2017 found that, of 111 deceased NFL players, 110 had brains with CTE.
When my family first got the news about Dad's memory problems, our conversations sounded like we were walking on eggshells. "Dad's been forgetting stuff." It would be several months before we'd call it what it was.
As we merge onto I-40, I am hoping to get Dad to open up about his football career, and whether he thinks it played a role in his dementia. Over the course of three days, Dad's agreed to take me to the three fields where he spent years of his life as a player, a coach, and later on, a football dad. First, we're headed to Sweetwater, Tennessee, the first stop on our summer tour of my father's long football career.
Sweetwater is where my father went to boarding school at the now-defunct Tennessee Military Institute (TMI). It's here he did most of his growing and where his regional football fame resulted in full scholarship offers from schools like Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and his eventual choice, Vanderbilt. Sweetwater is a tiny town, all wraparound porches and horseback riders on Main Street. We pass billboard after billboard advertising The Lost Sea Adventure!, America's largest underwater lake that has been turned into the town's main attraction.
We stop for gas and a snack break. Dad goes in to buy some caramel M&M's, which he offers to me while swiping to the John Williams station on Pandora. Dad can sit with people in silence for a prolonged amount of time and feel completely at ease; he's one of my favorite human beings for this very reason. But today, our conversation is unusually animated. It will be the first time visiting his old schools since his diagnosis, and Dad is eager to take the stroll down memory lane, to talk. After two hours of stories and driving, I check our GPS to tell him that we're only about 20 minutes away.
"I know where we are," he says, almost giddy.
We drive a narrow road to the back entrance of the school, where a few houses stand right next to the property, hiding in the shadow of the school's dilapidation. TMI closed in 2007 and was condemned a few years ago. In its heyday, TMI was an all-boys military school: Dad was on the track team (he ran a 4.5-second 40-yard dash, which I'd come to find out is very fast only after I asked Dad to time me in a 40-yard dash—the results are not important). He played linebacker. And he never really got into trouble, except for the time he and a couple of other boys got caught smoking cigars in the back of a bus after a game.
As we approach the campus, the owner of a nearby house stops mowing his lawn and yells, "I wouldn't go in there unless you're armed. There's mountain lions in there. Black mold, too. And sometimes hoodlums."*
On his property, there are at least ten signs that say, PROTECTED BY THE 2ND AMENDMENT in bold, red letters.
"No kidding," Dad replies. He surveys the campus, weighing the threats, and continues past the NO TRESPASSING sign. He points out each building to me as we walk—the cafeteria, his senior dorm, the gym. "That's where Bible class was," Dad tells me as we passed a basement-level room. On the glass pane above the door, someone had spray-painted FUCK YOU.
Everything here triggers a story, a name, a "that's where..." from Dad. While he struggles with his short-term memory—directions to places he's been going for years, re-introducing himself to people he just met—his long-term memory is intact. He remembers how many games he'd won throughout all four years of high school. He recounts the time nearly 50 years ago when two University of Tennessee recruiters—whose names he remembered—waited for him after a game to offer him a scholarship.
When we finally reach the football field, it's completely barren. B-roll for The Walking Dead. The field, or what was left of it, is overrun with dead grass, cotton plants, and the remains of some air-conditioning units hurled off the roof of the school. Dad's just standing there quietly, taking it all in.
"This is sad," Dad says.
* Before we leave, we take one more lap around campus and come face-to-face with the Second Amendment guy's oversize RV, bumper-stickered with tributes to Papa Roach and Daytona Beach. Fake bloody limbs hang on the back bumper. On the front bumper, a large decal reads, RETNUH EIBMOZ in the same ghoulish font that R.L. Stine used for Goosebumps. It takes me a second to realize that, if you're reading it in your rearview mirror, it spells out ZOMBIE HUNTER.
We drive back to Nashville and sit quietly for a little while. I haven't spent this much time with Dad in years. I moved away for college, which my parents expected, and then decided to move to New York, which my parents did not expect. Still, my decision was met with Dad's choice affirmation: "That's terrific."
Since his diagnosis, though, the distance has weighed on me. I still feel guilty about my absence from the day-to-day happenings of all that's going on. But I chose to move away, to reset my life. Eventually, Dad asks me if I like living in New York. I tell him honestly that yes, I do. I love it. I wait for the question that every Southern person asks you if you move away from the South—"When are you moving back?"—only the question never comes.
"That's terrific," he replies. "So, what do you think of Cuomo?"
We walk into the glitzy, air-conditioned athletic center in the middle of Vanderbilt's campus, thankful to be out of the punishing Nashville heat. I feel as if I've just taken a jog in 90-degree weather and jumped straight into a Jacuzzi, but Dad's never minded the heat much. Maybe it was all those hours spent baking during practice in full Vanderbilt gear.
It's here that Dad met Mom at a birthday party. He was a linebacker for four years, which led to a summer practice-camp invitation with the Redskins, but at the encouragement of his coaches, he spent a year at Vandy as a graduate assistant coach instead. (One time, during sophomore year, he swears, he ate pancakes with Al Green at a 24-hour diner.)
Our tour of the McGugin Center is led by two women who look like they're in their mid-20s. Dad chats with them about all the changes that have happened since he was a student in the '70s while I look around. Vandy is currently in the middle of a $600 million capital renovation project, precisely zero of which is going to its athletic departments. This has caused some slight tension about what, exactly, the university's priorities are between athletics and academics, even though the McGugin Center was the recipient of a $6.5 million facelift in 2016. It's admittedly hard for me to see what could even be improved: Inside, it's a tiny kingdom of full-scale wall decals and state-of-the-art ice baths, with mini-shrines dedicated to players who have gone pro scattered throughout.
At one point we pass a small sign that reads, CONCUSSION? with a bunch of small print underneath. Dad points to it and asks our guide about it.
"Oh, we take head-related injuries very seriously," she assures us.
"That's good to hear," Dad replies. "I've had some memory problems myself."
It's the first time I've heard him tell a stranger, unprompted, about his memory loss. He says it casually but confidently. When I ask him later about how he feels telling people about his dementia, he's honest: He's not eager to share because he doesn't want to be treated like he's somehow less capable. "If someone doesn't have an arm, you're gonna adjust your expectations of their ability," he tells me. "But I have realized that sometimes I have to repeat myself. I have to take the risk of looking silly."
Dad shows me the "star walk," the path that players take from the locker room to the tunnel that shoots them into the stadium. I picture him here, young and vibrant, captain of the team and engaged to be married, thousands of people cheering for him as he slams into player after player.
"Head injuries just weren't on people's radars like they are now," he says. "If we had a hit that knocked us, coaches would take us out. We'd miss a couple of downs, and then the coaches would ask us, 'Can you go?'"
For 21 years, Dad and Mom had at least one child enrolled in my Nashville K-12 school. When we were driving back from TMI over the East Tennessee hills and past billboards about sin and Judgement Day ("The Devil Will Get You!!"). I think about Dad and Mom in their four-bedroom house with their nine children (yes—all biological; no—we're not Catholic; yes—a picture of us all wearing denim next to a Civil War cabin does exist). Everyone was always doing something, often at the same time or in the same room. But, somehow, my parents established an order; it never felt out of control. Crowded? Yes. Late to school every day? Absolutely. Mom and Dad were always in the center, holding all together. We all moved through life as a unit.
I ask Dad how he and Mom did it—how they raised nine kids without the wheels falling off—and he delivers what sounds like a pre-game speech. "I wanted to teach y'all to work hard, not give up, be tenacious, and have integrity," he says, proudly. Despite being the kind of artistic kid who memorized every word of the Newsies soundtrack, Dad's been coaching me my whole life.
We approach my high school's football stadium, the Lion's Den. Dad was always in the bleachers but he also spent two years coaching here in the '90s, and before that, two years coaching at my middle school. When I was in the seventh grade, I towered over most of the boys, but he still asked me if I wanted to be the ball girl for the team, which made me furious. "Over my dead body!" I remember yelling.
The school is in many ways the opposite of TMI, with several new state-of-the-art buildings, more students, and more money. Signs are posted for a "Robotics Camp," which is interesting because science was never one of the school's strong suits. One time, my biology teacher misspelled "water" as "wader."
We enter the stadium, talking less than we had at TMI or Vanderbilt. It's the first time either of us had been back in years, so we are both taking it in as we walk up the metal stands. Even after this road trip down memory lane, there was one thing Dad wanted to emphasize: He never expected football to be such a large part of his life.
"I just didn't realize my own potential," he tells me.
Do you think you still have potential?
"I hope so."
I finally muster up the courage to ask him if he thinks football is what's causing his memory loss.
"I don't like to think of it that way," he says immediately. Dad takes a breath and tells me what he's told me several times over the course of our trip. "It would make me sad if people treated me differently because of this."
In the stands, I'm transported back to waiting for my brothers to finish practice, the tears people shed when we lost a playoff game, the quarterback boy I liked. My whole life I was conditioned to love football even if I didn't really ever like it myself. Meanwhile, Dad is reflective. He sees his son that played in two state championships. He hears the crowds cheering and audibles called and me asking him for money to buy hot chocolate from the concession stands. It was here in the stands that he could have his whole family in the same place—playing, watching, cheering for the thing he loved. I guess there's comfort in holding fast to what you know.
