Dylan Stafford

      © Dylan Stafford

            I went to Texas A&M University, the first public institution of higher education in the great state of Texas. Some people think the out-sized trade school in Austin with the garish burnt orange color was first but they are misinformed. We at A&M know better and we always refer to “UT” as “t.u.” to commemorate our being first. Texas A&M began as a land grant college out of the Morrill Act of 1862, a future-looking law signed by President Lincoln while our nation was tearing itself apart in the Civil War, when it was not assured there would even be a United States in the future. A&M opened in 1876, the centennial anniversary of these still United States.

            I chose A&M because my friend since fifth grade Steve was going there and because I got a scholarship. Steve and I were both National Merit Scholars which triggered an amazing amount of college material in the mail. Our junior year we attended the US Naval Academy summer invitational. It was 1986 and Top Gun fever infected every plebe and every upperclassman to dream of landing planes aircraft carriers and fighting the Russians. I loved the camaraderie of the Naval Academy Cadets but when they explained the commitment I balked. They told us we would serve in the Navy until the age of 27 which was more than my 17 year old brain could imagine. What if something came along better before I was 27? I didn’t pursue admission.

Texas A&M has its own Corps of Cadets and it is the largest ROTC outside of the academies. The Corps offers the full cadet experience and all the bonding but does not require pursuing a military career. It is a down-home, middle-class version of West Point or Annapolis. The A&M Corps doesn’t have the same ratio of military officers to cadets as the big military academies. It is less supervised and more wild west. The Corps was an in-your-face experience with a lot of yelling, a lot of pushups and a lot of fun in a Full Metal Jacket meets Animal House way.

In 1987, the Corps of Cadets was still primarily all-male and primarily all-white. Most of us cadets were burger-fed Texas boys—cows eat corn but we eat burgers. There were 24 freshmen in my outfit. We came from all over the state, from the big cities of Houston, Dallas, Austin, El Paso and San Antonio, from the big suburbs of Plano and the Woodlands, and from the smaller towns of Joshua and Denison, Sugarland and Pearland. John Harlan came from the smallest town, the west Texas dot-on-the-map called Beulah. When asked by the upperclassmen, “Where the hell is Beulah?” John replied, “Sir, Beulah is near Muleshoe, Sir.” Only James Thome was from out of state and only Humberto Hernandez was from out of the country.

The upperclassmen told us the first week in the Corps that our fellow classmates were to be called our “buddies”. I thought it was a joke when I first heard the word. “Buddy?” Isn’t that from the 1950s? Wouldn’t Leave it to Beaver have a buddy? No one seriously uses that word anymore do they?

Why yes they do, fish Stafford, and so will you from now on. Your buddies are your responsibility and you are their responsibility and you better start acting that way.

            Another word we were taught was “fish”. Freshmen at Texas A&M are “fish”. I guess the etymology is “fish out of water”. The upperclassmen told us “Your buddies will be the best men at your wedding. They will be the pallbearers at your funeral.” We had to take them at their word, that August of 1987, sitting in a hot hallway with our newly shaved, almost bald, fish haircuts. Humberto was the only cadet from Mexico and he became one of my best friends. He proved the upperclassmen right when he came to Rhode Island to be a groomsman for me.

            A&M gave me the camaraderie of the Corps of Cadets without the ten year commitment to the military. It was also an hour south of my family’s ranch in central Texas and I imagined spending weekends with my mom and dad at the ranch.

            After I graduated from A&M, I worked one year as a recruiter for their Honors Program. There are no mountains or ocean near A&M and I would joke with prospective students that the only natural attractions we had were heat, humidity and occasional tornadoes. That wasn’t exactly true. We had sunsets, great college football and beautiful trees.

            When A&M opened in 1876, it was literally an open prairie with almost no trees. Today the huge, 5000 acre campus stretches westward and is covered with trees. The most magnificent are southern live oaks that line the main entrance and canopy the sidewalks. In the historic center of campus, in front of the Academic Building there is one tree that has a special spot in the hearts of all Aggies—the Century Tree.

            The Century Tree sprawls in all directions with long limbs that romantically reach all the way to the ground. It is magical, like a tree in a Harry Potter movie. At the base of the trunk there is a bench where many marriage proposals have been made. Nowadays you can Google it and find videos of proposals on YouTube. We didn’t have that in my day.

            In the fall of 2004, a year into our marriage, Marisa and I went to Texas for Thanksgiving. It was two years after my ill-fated request of dad to perform our wedding ceremony. Marisa had never been to my Alma Mater so we drove the three hours from Fort Worth down to Aggieland to visit. It was Wednesday of Thanksgiving week and the campus was quiet. We wandered and I reminisced. I showed her the quad, the home of the Corps of Cadets, where I had spent all four of my years as a CT. CT officially stands for Cadet in Training, but colloquially stands for Corps Turd. I had to explain how at A&M it was actually quite an honor to be a CT; how we commissioned more officers for World War II than the two academies combined; how I wore a uniform all four years. We saw the Memorial Student Center. We went to the Dixie Chicken, the famous watering hole on north side with the sticky floors and bottle cap alley and domino tables and the rattlesnakes in the big glass case.

            We had seen everything I could think to show. Marisa had listened to four years of my memories and the tall tales that went with them. We strolled back through campus and I showed her the Century Tree.

            “This is where I would have proposed to you if we had met during college.” I said.

            “Oh really, it’s that special of a place?” she asked.

            “For sure, this is the heart of the campus.” I said. “See over there, that bronze statue is of Lawrence Sullivan Ross the man who founded Texas A&M. We all call him ‘Sully’. He was governor of Texas and then he retired and became president of A&M. He even kept the state from closing A&M. The legend is that they were going to close A&M and convert it into an insane asylum—many contend they succeeded anyway—when Sully punched out a legislator on the floor of the Texas Senate, saying “Don’t you dare lay a hand on that little school on the Brazos.” When I was a freshman in the Corps we would run over before the sun came up with Brasso and rags and polish Sully’s statue.”

            It is never good to ask an Aggie about A&M history unless you have some time on your hands. I continued in full Aggie pride mode, “And here in the front of the Academic Building is where we have Silver Taps, one of our most respected traditions.”

            “What is Silver Taps?” Marisa asked.

            “Well, there are over 40,000 students studying here at any given time. As weird as it may seem, sometimes students die. They’re young and all but it is the law of averages with that many people. When a student passes away we have a special memorial right here in the middle of campus. We post a card with their name, class and major at the base of the flagpole. That night at 10:15, students gather silently in the dark to pay respect to the deceased. At 10:30, there is a 21 gun salute by the Ross Volunteers, our honor guard. I was one of those. Then there is a bugle corps that plays a special version of taps known as Silver Taps. They play it three times, once each to the north, south and west. They don’t play it to the east since the sun will not rise on that Aggie again. Afterwards everyone walks back to their dorms in silence. The whole ceremony takes place in the dark.”

            “Wow. What kind of school is this?” Marisa asked. “We didn’t do things like this at University of Rhode Island.”

            “Well, it’s Aggieland. We’re kind of big on traditions around here. If we do anything more than once, chances are we’ll make it a tradition.”

            “Show me this bench, under the Century Tree.” Marisa said.

            We followed the sidewalk from Sully over towards the oak and walked underneath its giant canopy. There was no one around the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving and we were alone at its base, its huge trunk anchored and holding all its many branches.

            We sat down on the bench. “So this is where you would have proposed? This is that special place?” Marisa asked.

            “Uh huh,” I replied. “I would have gotten on one knee and proposed right here. I would have been in my best Corps uniform, brass polished, boots shined, sharp haircut.”

            “Ooh, my Dilly in a uniform. I think I would have liked that.” Marisa smiled. “So this is a good place for good news.”

            “The best.”

            “Well, I have some good news Dylan.” Marisa said, taking my hand and placing it lightly on her belly. “We’re going to have a baby, you and me. I’m pregnant.”

            It was a shock. I had been lost remembering my college years and enjoying the romance of sharing all those memories. Now my bride was telling me something so special about our future. I cried a little. We laughed and we hugged and we kept our secret over Thanksgiving weekend. We didn’t tell my parents yet as Marisa was barely a month along. She had missed her period, gotten tested and found out she was pregnant.

            “I have been waiting for a couple of days, trying to find the right, special moment to tell you.” She said.

            “Well you did a great job my love. I will remember this moment for the rest of my life.” I replied, smiling.

            We drove to my dad’s ranch the next day and had a Texas Thanksgiving weekend. Our turkey and trimmings came from Luby’s Cafeteria and we ate too much pumpkin pie. My brother Jon and I showed Marisa our childhood game with Cool Whip called “hide the pie”. The idea is simple. You serve yourself a piece of pie. You get as big a dollop of Cool Whip as possible with one over-sized spoon and plop it straight down. Then you look at your piece of pie. Whoever hides the pie most completely with just one dollop is the winner, hence the name “hide the pie”.

            My dad’s grandfather was a country doctor in Groesbeck, Texas. He had three daughters and bought them each a small farm in the country. His youngest daughter was a redhead, my grandma Bartlette. She passed away in 1991 and my dad had a heart attack a week later. He recovered after heart surgery and he inherited her farm. Back in the day, cotton was raised on it but these days cattle raising is better business. We have transitioned to cattle too and our family slowly has started to call it “the ranch” instead of “the farm”.

            Marisa and I took walks and talked and I showed her my trees. Since college I have been planting trees on the place. I have planted over 400 trees but only have about 20 survivors to show for my work. The ground is tough and the summers are hot. We have droughts, grasshoppers, and cattle eat the trees when they are small but I do have some survivors. In my mind, planting trees is building for the future. It is a way to honor my family and do something to help my dad even when I’m away living in another state. I have visions of my dad sitting in the shade of one of the trees.

            “This ain’t Dallas…” went the old country song. Marisa had been properly forewarned that the ranch is rustic. The old farmhouse is a work in progress, a shotgun shack built seventy years ago by sturdy people with meager resources. By 1991 it had fallen into disrepair as cattle had started to stand against it in the winters and puddle the water and soften the foundation. Dad and I had spent a lot of weekends fencing it off, shoring it up the foundation and re-roofing. The house kicks off water now and you can warm it up in the winter but it is not the Taj Majal. It ain’t Dallas but we love it. It’s our family spot. It is a place to see the stars and hear the coyotes and build a campfire. We call it Spunky Flats, after the description in a local cemetery that describes how settlers referred to the area. The ground is claylike, spunky, and flat.

            My biggest surviving tree is a Choctaw pecan. The year I recruited for A&M I drove to the ranch almost every weekend to work on the house with dad. One weekend I brought Humberto and we planted six pecans. Five of them died but the Choctaw lived. Over a decade later it is now starting to cast real shade on the driveway. Humberto and I planted it on a rainy day in May. He helped me finish the job, but only with a non-stop litany of comments about gringo-abusing-Mexican. That is how we talked to each other in the Corps, forever ragging on each other for grievances real or invented.

Humberto came to the US at 18 and joined the Corps. I can’t imagine doing the Corps in a second language, yet that is what Humberto did. I can’t imagine doing the Corps as a Mexican in the middle of white bread Texas, but that is what Humberto did. I can’t imagine being the shortest guy out of 2,200 cadets, but Humberto did that too. Humberto’s nickname was “Paddington” because he was hairy all over and brown like a bear.

            After turkey dinner and “hide the pie”, we watched college football on the 3-channel TV set in the farmhouse. My Aggies lost to t.u. 26-13 in 2004. Back when I was in school we beat Texas often, but now it is rare. My freshman year we beat Texas 20-13, won the Southwest Conference and beat Notre Dame and their Heisman Trophy winning Tim Brown in the Cotton Bowl 35-10. In 1987, we were reportedly the largest incoming freshman class in the nation, with over 8,000 students accepting their admission. It was said we ran out of teachers for freshman English, but we felt like kings.

            My freshman year before the big Corps march-in parade for the football game against t.u. we were all supposed to get new haircuts. That week I was stressed out about chemistry and Wednesday night was my first Aggie Bonfire and in all the hubbub I forgot to get a haircut. Thanksgiving morning up at the ranch my sister Lisa volunteered to use a razor and shave the sides of my head, the parts that would show below the garrison cap (we called them biders) that we wore with our dress uniform.

            This seemed like a good idea, but I had no idea how stubborn the hair is that grows on the sides of my head. Shaving cream isn’t strong enough to soften it. My sister resorted to hacking with a razor in short chopping motions down her big brother’s scalp. I flinched and grimaced and ended up with whitewall sides covered with nicks and cuts. From a distance it looked good but up close it was pretty grim. The sophomores inspect the freshmen before a march-in and when they got to me they dropped their normal belligerent disciplining to gather round my shiny whitewalls and my bloodied scalp. “Fish Stafford, that is red ass!” Red ass is high praise Corps jargon. My sister had done well.

            Now, spending the whole weekend at the ranch with Marisa, I was dying to tell mom and dad the pregnancy news but at the same time savoring the secret. Marisa and I had not talked about trying to get pregnant. We were enjoying our first year together and trying to savor each other. If pregnancy happened it happened, but we were not in a hurry.

            This felt right, finding out she was pregnant in Texas, in the heart of Aggieland. Even Thanksgiving weekend added to the specialness. At Spunky Flats, Thanksgiving is one of the best weekends. I am forever nostalgic and I love to look for “connections” that come together like they were meant to be. Marisa telling me under the Century Tree was perfect, my past connecting to our future.

            Saturday night after Thanksgiving we stayed at a hotel room closer to DFW airport to get our early flight the next morning. Marisa wasn’t feeling too well, so she stayed in the hotel room that night while I went to have dinner with my junior year college roommate Jeff and his wife Pam. Jeff’s now a civil engineer and we lamented running out of time in the football game against Texas this year. Running out of time is another Aggie tradition. We have never lost a football game. We’ve run out of time, but never lost.

            Jeff Parsons was our buddy from Parker, Texas. His dad Ronnie was in the Corps back in the late 1950s. Jeff’s first nickname was “Yuckmouth”, for his freshman morning breath. Later, we changed it to “Old Army”, since because of his dad he knew the most history and trivia about A&M. While it is true that Jeff knew the most, I always had a suspicion that when he didn’t know something he wasn’t afraid to guess either.

            We all loved Jeff’s parents, Ronnie and Marge. Ronnie was an airline pilot for American Airlines. That meant his schedule had more flexibility than did most of our parents. Jeff and his older sister Sarah were students at A&M. Being back on campus was one of the happiest places in the world for Ronnie. While most visiting parents would leave for home on Sunday afternoon, Ronnie and Marge often stayed an extra night and left Monday morning.

            Marge usually brought homemade cookies to start the weekend. Sunday night she and Ronnie would take the whole lot of us fish buddies out to dinner at Tom’s Bar BQ. Tom’s was a greasy joint with dusty deer heads hanging from the walls and cold, long necked beer. The sliced brisket and sausage came out steaming hot, served not on a plate, but rather on butcher block paper, three layers thick. The only utensil you got was a wood-handled steak knife. This was heaven and you could let out your inner carnivore while you sliced and stabbed and devoured. The center of the table had a loaf of no-name white bread to share family style, plus Bar BQ sauce, pickles and a big block of cheddar cheese.

            We ate with gusto, laughing and telling stories and relaxing, making fun of each other in the endless way we did, away from the quad and the upperclassmen and classes. Ronnie soaked it all in. He never made us listen to his own tall tales of “old army days” even though we surely would have, grateful as we were to be treated to such a feast. I never thought about it then, but now I think he was hearing his own fish buddies from thirty years earlier, echoed through us. I did realize that Ronnie was a model for how I wanted to live my life. I wanted to spend time with people I loved the way he did. His actions impressed on me the importance of slowing down to enjoy what you really love most.

            Ronnie and Marge adopted all of us but they particularly adopted Humberto as his parents could not fly up from Mexico for all the football game weekends and hype. Ronnie and Marge made sure that he was loved. Half way through our junior year, Humberto’s father passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack. Ronnie and Marge made extra sure that Humberto always had his Aggie family over the next years. What Ronnie and Marge did then was just as important as being groomsmen would be later.

            Jeff met Pam right at the end of our time at A&M and they got married a year later. Jeff asked me to be his co-best man along with Brady. Brady Merrill turned out to be one of the coolest of all of the buddies and we would vote for him to lead us our senior year. We didn’t see his leadership at first, probably because he wasn’t trying to be cool. Brady is one of those guys that other guys naturally listen to and respect. He wasn’t flashy and he was usually calm. He was one of four brothers, an athlete and really smart in math. Brady became an F-15 pilot and flew in the first Gulf War. He would fly again a decade later when we went back.

            Jeff and Pam had adopted their two children from Russia in the years prior. They had all kinds of stories about the process. Jeff said the hardest part was actually seeing the orphanage in Russia. It was clean but it was grey and industrial. The children were in one big room with cribs in long rows and he said he wanted to take every one of them home with him. Jeff and Pam had to miss our wedding because they had gotten “the call” and had been scheduling transatlantic flights to adopt their second child, their son Jacob. Brady couldn’t attend our wedding because he had been called back to active duty for our long war in the Middle East, his second time going there.

            After visiting Jeff and Pam, I got back to the hotel room about 9:30 and found Marisa not looking well.

            “Dylan, something’s wrong.” She looked scared actually. “I didn’t want to call you during your dinner but I don’t feel well. I’ve had bleeding. Every time I go to the bathroom there is blood. There is lots of blood. We need to take me to a hospital.”

            I didn’t know what to do. Why hadn’t she called me sooner? I called the front desk and got the name of the best, closest hospital and we went in a hurry. The hospital was in wealthy north Dallas, but we still sat for almost two hours waiting. Later she told me it was the most scared she had ever been in her life, but I didn’t know it then. They put us in an exam room and we sat there for a long time. She seemed calm but I couldn’t tell what was going on in her mind. We weren’t talking too much. It was hard to know which doctors and nurses were exactly caring for us, who was doing what. They took blood and ran tests. The ultrasound had trouble finding anything. That was when it started looking bad. We waited. And we waited. And the news was not good.

            The doctor was a young woman, roughly our age. “We won’t be sure for a couple of days, but we think that the pregnancy may be ending. This happens sometimes. It is nature’s way. You will be able to fly tomorrow and you will want to see your OBGYN when you get back home.”

            “I don’t even have an OBGYN yet.” Marisa answered. “I just found out I was pregnant a few days ago. Isn’t there something you can do?”

            “The most important thing we can do is to make sure that you are OK. If the pregnancy is not going to sustain at this early stage there is nothing we can do. Sometimes pregnancies don’t sustain. There can be many different reasons. You didn’t do anything wrong. It is nature’s way sometimes.”

            We took care of Marisa. We got home to California safely. We hadn’t been there long when Marisa called me into the bathroom. She wasn’t crying, but almost.

            “Look.” She said pointing. “Do you think that is it?”

            In the bottom of the toilet was a small, still pool of blood and in the middle was a lump. In my mind I knew that in the first month of a pregnancy there was only a cluster of cells, totally naked to the human eye. I told myself that I didn’t know what we were seeing. I told myself that, but I couldn’t help thinking there might be tiny little cells curled up in there somewhere, a little life that had ended.

            “What do we do?” Marisa asked.

            I honestly didn’t know.

            “We take care of you. That is what the doctor said to do.”

            Later I flushed the toilet. It felt harsh, like a scene from Old Yeller or something people had to do in the old frontier days when life and death came swift. I thought about my dad and how he always seemed so strong when there was a crisis. I tried to be strong. We said a prayer.

            We found an OBGYN in Santa Monica and we got Marisa scheduled for an exam. We got the results from Dallas and confirmed she was no longer pregnant. Marisa was going to be fine, but the pregnancy had not taken. We told our parents in the weeks that followed.

            “Mom, dad, are you on the speaker phone?” I asked.

            “Yeah son. How are things going?”

            “Well we have some news, but it is not good news. We didn’t want to tell you yet. We got pregnant but now we are not pregnant anymore.” I wanted to say it quickly, not to get anything confused. I didn’t want mom to hear ‘pregnant’ and get all happy only to hear ‘not pregnant’ in the next breath. I didn’t want mom to ride that particular roller coaster and I didn’t want Marisa to hear the ups and down of it either.

            “Marisa got pregnant and we had just found out, but now the pregnancy has ended. Marisa is OK and we have seen a doctor but we wanted you to know.”

            “Oh, Marisa, we are so sorry. This has got to be hard for you.”

            We told a few friends. We learned more people have had miscarriages than we ever imagined. It is nature’s way we were told—repeatedly. The OBGYN we found told us of five years of trying that he and his wife had been through. “And see these guys right here?” He asked, pointing to a photo of two children on his wall. “These guys are the fruits of those five years. Our kids. You guys hang in there. It will happen.”

            From Wednesday evening under the Century Tree to Saturday night in the hospital was not even a week, a short time from learning I was going to be a daddy to holding Marisa’s hand in an emergency room. Marisa only knew about it a few days longer than me.

            I thought a lot in those following weeks. I thought about the Century Tree, about Marisa putting my hand on her tummy, about hearing her say “I’m pregnant.” I thought about how much I loved A&M but how hard it was when I was there, being a freshman cadet away from home in a school with twice as many students as there were people in my hometown. I thought about Abraham Lincoln, creating future colleges for the country while we were tearing our country apart. I thought about droughts in Texas that could wither everything in sight, even full grown trees. I thought about acorns and how 99% of them don’t turn into trees.

            Marisa and I had planted a seed. This particular seed had not made it, but it had sparked, if even for a short while. We had been parents for a week.

      © Dylan Stafford