Confessions of a hoarder

My beautiful bride says I’m a hoarder.

I’m in denial.

It’s merely a little pile here and a little pile there of stuff.

Important stuff.

I have two excuses.

It’s genetic. Lauderdales, I am told, save everything. They may not file it, but they save it. This came from the beautiful woman who married into our family and organized important stuff in her mother-in-law’s “plunder room” into a priceless book of family history.

Lauderdales tend to stop to smell the roses. And the gardenias. And the lilies, lilacs and magnolias. And we’re like the eight Presbyterians it takes to change a light bulb — one to screw it in and seven to wail about how glorious the old one used to be.

Secondly, it hurts to throw away important stuff as if it were nothing more than a Big Mac wrapper.

In a cleaning binge last week, I came face to face with a pile of muddy shoes hidden beneath sweatshirts on a closet shelf.

They were our son’s track and cross country shoes at Hilton Head Island High School. He graduated with the class of 2000.

How could I glibly toss into the garbage can one of the most important chapters of my paltry life?

‘Rock steady’

We’re talking about the era of kids in the dog days of August choosing to run 10 miles at 7 a.m. to prepare for the season ahead — and the constant question from their classmates: “Why would you do that?”

The old shoes represent coach Bill Wrightson, who is really a volunteer who started out under coach Chuck Rudolph, who called him the team’s “Minister of Propaganda” for all the stats he keeps.

Wrightson and coach Max Mayo still bring this sense of purpose and goals and dreams into the flighty heads of kids. They learn that it takes great sacrifice to catch the elusive rabbit of their personal best.

We parents followed the kids from meet to meet like Deadheads. We brought the tent, and the heater if it was cold, or maybe even an air-conditioned Winnebago to the state track meet in a breeze-less burner of Columbia’s famous heat they humorously call Spring Valley. Our kids were chilling out, getting jacked up on “Prefontaine” on VHS while their competitors were outside melting into puddles in concrete bleachers.

We crisscrossed South Carolina and Georgia to watch this old pile of shoes perform, our kids sometimes stopping in mid-race, clutching the shorts covering their bone-thin bodies and leaning over to barf.

When our son Burke started hitting a wall and cramping up on the cross country course, Mayo said something to him, and it went away. I asked him, “Oh, great one, what did you say?” And he said, “I told him to look at the tops of the trees.”

And now, when I hit a wall, I look at the tops of the trees. It’s cheaper than a therapist.

I pick up a shoe and remember the day I stood in the searing bowels of Spring Valley’s football stadium watching Burke, along with David Adams, Shawn Cunningham and Cameron Bishop, win a state championship in the 4-by-800-meter race.

Burke had worked on it for years, with Wrightson taking him down Beach City Road to run over and over and over again between orange cones he set up on the slim hope of an 8-minute dash to glory on some future spring day.

In a fluke of fate, I stood on the rail for that final race next to Bobby Cunningham, Shawn’s daddy. He was the best basketball player and most popular student at Erskine College when we were there together. Now here we were so many years later, sharing a precious moment as so-called grown-ups. As I stood daydreaming at the closet door, I could hear again the soothing voice of Bobby, the old competitor, saying to the boys running down below: “Rock steady. Rock steady.”

And today, when I hit a wall, I think: “Rock steady. Rock steady.”

‘Wings like eagles’

It was supposed to be the other way around.

The pile of shoes represents what we parents and coaches wanted for our kids. I wanted Burke to know competition, eyeball to eyeball. I wanted him to have what Johnny Cash sang about to the cheers of prisoners at San Quentin:

“But ya ought to thank me before you die

For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye.”

As I stood there smelling the roses of these muddy old shoes, I realized they had to go. And, yes, I threw them away.

But first I looked up one more time what was written in pen on one of the shoes: “Isaiah 40:31.”

And I realized the important thing in this grind of life is what’s in your heart, not what’s on your feet — or buried in your closet.

“But those who hope in the Lord

will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles;

they will run and not grow weary,

they will walk and not be faint.”

This story was originally published July 2, 2016 at 7:31 PM with the headline "Confessions of a hoarder."