I’m not sure I ever traveled as much in a four-month period as I did i the period that included Christmas 1989.
It was the last of four seasons in which I had a traveling college basketball beat, and I followed Nevada-Reno all around the Big Sky Conference and non-conference road trips. That took me to Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, Eugene (OR), San Diego, Ogden (UT), Boise (ID), Moscow (ID), Spokane, Flagstaff, Missoula, Bozeman, Pocatello and back to Boise.
I had four other trips unrelated to UNR. I covered the first two weekends of the 1990 NCAA tournament, spending one weekend in Salt Lake City and the second in Oakland.
The other two trips were personal, and both were related to the finest person I ever knew.
My maternal grandmother celebrated her 94th birthday in August 1989, and my mother was somehow convinced that 1989 would be her last Christmas. She asked me to come home to Virginia for the holiday, but the logistics of it were pretty difficult. I was covering a basketball game in San Diego on the evening of the 21st and another one back home in Reno on the 27th.
Ordinarily I would have flown in and one of San Diego for the first game, and there wasn’t anything timely I could get to the East Coast from the city of my birth.So I flew into Los Angeles early on the 21st and drove down to San Diego to cover the game.
Nevada won easily, and I filed my story before heading back to LAX and turning in my rental car. It was about 2 a.m. and my flight east was scheduled for 7 a.m., so I went to the gate and napped in a chair until morning.
It was dinnertime on the 22nd that I was at my parents’ house. I essentially spent three days and four nights in Virginia. I spent as much time as I could with my grandmother, knowing it would almost certainly be the last chance to tell her what she meant to me. Some of the happiest times in my life were spent in her house. and most of the most meaningful lessons I learned came from her.
She was born in 1895 and I remember talking with her on numerous occasions about how vastly different the world had been then. I also remember her telling me how much she should love to live in three different centuries.
From the last day I saw her, she would have had to live an additional 10 years and six days to make it.
She lived only 53 days after I last saw her. I was covering a basketball game in Bozeman, Montana, on Saturday, February 17th, when my office contacted me to let me know my grandmother had died. She was the last of my four grandparents to go. Two of them died before I was born, and I was so lucky to have the most special of them in my life till I was 40.
I love my children and my grandchildren very much, but circumstances have made me a much smaller part of their lives. My children — and their children — live much farther away than I from my own grandparents. Since my first grandchild was born, they have lived In Beijing, Indonesia, Jamaica, Guatemala and Tunisia, with a few short postings in Northern Virginia so my daughter could learn the language of her next posting.
My son did tours in Greece, Mexico and Paraguay before deciding on a relatively permanent posting in the D.C. area. He lives less than 700 miles away, but he and his wife haven’t blessed us with grandchildren.
I remember the trip to Ohio for my grandmother’s funeral. We completed our road trip flying from Bozeman to Seattle and then back to Reno on Sunday. On Monday I flew from Reno to San Francisco to St. Louis to Columbus.
Tuesday we buried my grandmother.
After the service, we went to the house where my mother and my uncle grew up and where the nine of us who were the next generation had spent so many wonderful times.
My cousin Peter Kindinger, who was the fifth of the nine grandchildren, summed it up perfectly.
“We all have so many wonderful memories here,” he said. “And this is the last time any of us will be in this house.”
The next morning, I flew from Columbus to Chicago to San Francisco to Reno and resumed my life.
I never had another year that I flew as much.
But I will never forget that last Christmas with my grandmother.
The only ones that compare came later, with my own children and grandchildren.