Do Overs

C.O. was his nickname, and I don’t believe I have yet met a person with better posture. C.O. wore a black suit with a tie every day in school; I don’t ever remember it being wrinkled and I wondered if he ever sat down. His pure presence demanded respect. His smile was one that generally was followed with a question. I never feared him but knew who was in charge and learned enough that debate was fatal. This was my high school principal, Clarence O. Riddle. C.O. and his son Rick are responsible for my love of baseball. There is no doubt about their skills for teaching the game, they made learning and playing as fun as possible, along with
maintaining the importance of being competitive. Their influence was considerable in my growing up. The older I got, the more my respect for them grew.

Two or three years before covid—Mentioning this seems to be a critical factor in setting up a story nowadays—I was in a bathroom of a local dance hall, a place I’ve been familiar with since my teens. At ten o’clock p.m., I had a bit of a perfect buzz from the blues band that was playing, and longtime friends of mine had driven their bikes up from Milwaukee to join us for the
evening. It was all good, and the groove was on. I needed to take a leak and return to Kathy, my friends and the blues band. Standing in front of the urinal, I looked up and turned my head to the left and, to my ultimate surprise, caught the glance of my 95-year-old high school principal/little
league coach. “C.O. Riddle,” I greeted him, not paying attention to where we were. “Fred Forseth,” he replied. Still standing next to each other in front of the urinals, he asked me, “Are you still fooling them?” I laughed as we both went to the sink to wash our hands; he smiled at me and walked
back out to the dance hall. That was the extent of our conversation; I was reeling from the brief encounter with him and could not wait to tell Kathy and my friends who I had run into.

Oblivious that he asked me a question, I have no idea why I blocked it out at the moment, but maybe it was the fact that he never waited for an answer. “You still fooling them?” Those four words have haunted me off and on since that moment. What was he referring to? Was he referring to my choice of making a living as society’s caricature of a car salesman? Was he
referring to my learning disability and how I had to disguise many things about my limitations growing up? That’s a polite way of describing how I bullshitted about many items to mask my insecurities. I don’t want to say that I was like a lot of other kids back then because that is not taking any ownership of where I was as an adolescent and how I minimized my self-
discovery over the years. Who am I now, and how have I crawled slowly out of low self-esteem from being attention deficit to pursue self-discovery and keep those self-disparaging voices out of my head? But now I had allowed a man that I respected to put his voice in my head and worse,
his question became mine: “Am I still fooling them?”

C.O. was justified in asking his question because what he knew of me was what I presented to him many years ago. I was certainly a young man conflicted with issues, but I was lucky enough to have people around me who accepted me, nurtured me and knew that struggle with those issues wasn’t all of who I was. They believed I had many positive attributes despite the fear they knew that I carried every day that I wasn’t worthy. I survived all of this despite being my worst enemy and critic. I did try to fool people and hide who I was. So C.O., your question was justified, unfiltered, to the point and insightful for coming from anyone but certainly from a man in his mid-90s—amazing! I will hold your memory in high regard for so many reasons. (“Look the runner back before you throw him out!”)
Am I still fooling them? I would like to think that I have the ability to present who I am in a way that is less restrained by my limitations. I would like to say that I don’t exaggerate, but that would be a lie. I would like to say that for the people that I call friends and for my family I
present the real me. Do I still feel the fear of exposing my limitations, minimizing them and dismissing them at times? I do!

The daily question that is helpful to me is “Am I still fooling me?”