During the school year, I’m a crossing guard — an hour in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon — and twice every weekday I walk to and from my corner, which adds up to five miles, more when I swung by Coyote Coffee to sit outside and schmooze with the regulars.
Now it’s summer and I’m off, along with the students and teachers, and I also have this nerve pain in my left leg — sciatica, I think — so I’m cutting back on my walking, and instead I’m bicycling to libraries or coffee shops with my laptop. I’m retired, but busy — I have a couple of paid gigs, like designing a book about “dying gladly” by a man who’s dying. And I’m writing, in fits and starts, the last two chapters of my comic novel about the houseboat wars in Sausalito, tentatively titled Showdown in Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery True Story.
(The novel is based on a play I wrote and directed this past spring for our local community theater troupe — Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, which you can see here. Or scroll to the bottom of this post.)
Which brings me to “Ted Lasso” and the two audiobooks I’ve recently listened to — Grapes of Wrath and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The paid gigs, the novel I’m struggling to finish, the shows I’m watching, and the books I’m listening to — these things have converged by accident, not by design.
The theme of June so far seems to be “the end.” End of the school year. End of life. End of a TV series. End of books.
I know I’m late to unpack the final season of “Ted Lasso,” which, if you’ve recently crawled out of hibernation, is a popular streaming TV series about an American college football coach hired to coach a professional soccer team in England, even though he has no soccer experience. The team owner, Rebecca Walton, hires him because she hopes to sabotage the team, which used to be owned by her ex-husband, but Ted, who is goofy and cheesy and overly optimistic, turns out to be a successful coach.
The third and allegedly last season recently ended, and I was in tears during the final few episodes. In a good way. It was schmaltzy, to be sure, and the writers trotted out plenty of well-worn tropes, but it was also laugh-out-loud funny and touching in a way that didn’t feel manipulative.
What I appreciated about the “Ted Lasso” ending was how, over the last several episodes, we see the end of a journey for so many of the characters, even minor ones. Like Nate, the underdog former kit man turned boy genius coach turned villain. He quits his high-profile West Ham coaching gig because it turns out he has principles after all.
There were some touches I very much liked in the series, like the “Diamond Dogs,” an impromptu men’s group that Ted and several others convene in their office as necessary to discuss intimate issues like relationships. In the last episode, the sneering, always-swearing, tough-guy coach, Roy Kent, who has previously left the room whenever the Diamond Dogs gathered, says he wants in.
The last episode follows the usual sports story formula, with the team winning a pivotal game, but “Ted Lasso” manages to scratch that itch, without buying into the idea that winning it all is the only honorable end.
The mania that a team can stir up is real and it was fun to watch the watchers of that last game, like Sharon, the former team therapist, jumping up and down on her bed, and Ted’s son and ex-wife, watching from their couch in Kansas City, lumps in their throats.
Which brings me to Grapes of Wrath, which I read fifty years ago and barely remember. But I remember the ending, which was shocking then and still shocking now.
Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family as they leave their drought-stricken, dust-bowl, bank-repossessed farm in Oklahoma, during the Depression, and head to California, where they hear there’s plenty of work and you can pick oranges to eat right off the trees. Of course, when they arrive, there are more workers than jobs, the wages are low, and the farm bosses are cruel. The migrants set up camps along creek beds in little Hoovervilles, and struggle to make enough to feed their families.
As the book draws to a close, Tom Joad, the prodigal son who starts the book returning to his family’s abandoned farm after a stint in jail for killing a man, has gotten himself into trouble again and is hiding from the police. The rest of the family has worked a few days here and there and now there’s no more work and winter’s coming and the rain falls for days and the camp is flooding. Meanwhile Tom’s younger sister, Rose of Sharon, who is pregnant, whose husband has recently abandoned her, delivers a stillborn baby in the migrant camp. The floodwaters keep rising and Ma Joad is determined to get the weak Rose of Sharon to higher ground. They find a barn that’s dry, and inside meet a young man and his starving father. The father has been giving what little food he has to his son and now he’s dying. At Ma Joad’s urging, Rose of Sharon feeds the dying man her breast milk. That’s how it ends. She pulls his head to her breast and smiles.
But there’s no resolution to the rest of the story. None of the main characters’ journeys are tied up. We don’t know how the family will eat or find work or what they salvage from the flooding, or what will happen to Tom, who is on the lam from the law.
Amidst this bleakness, however, there is this glimmer of hope, in Rose of Sharon’s act of kindness, saving the man’s life with her milk. It’s an affirmation of the human spirit.
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Here are two videos, one inspired by Grapes of Wrath — The Ghost of Tom Joad, by Bruce Springsteen — and the other the play I wrote and directed earlier this year — “Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery.”
Here are some highlights — in case you don’t have time to watch the whole thing. 🙂
