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Reflections upon reflection, until all turn to dust (or, more accurately, burnt bone):

When I returned home from a recent exercise walk which, I hope, will stave off the dust bin of eternity a while longer, I found the red message light on the phone’s answering mechanism flashing. It does this because we are old and still have a landline, as well as cell phones. Usually, this red light makes me blanche, because I am averse to the telephone.

Many hours of the more than 40 years I gave to journalism were spent trying to extract information, facts, and other story resources from coaches, players, and team insiders, not to mention pols and other hardworking unelected public officials when I wrote editorials. It often went for naught. They could stonewall better than the cagey Amy Coney Barrett in the Senate hearing considering her Supreme Court nomination. What’s to consider about a fait accompli?

I would have been better off going to dental school and taking up pulling teeth. It would have been easier, and less painful for the “extractee.” That clouds and continues to hover over my response to the telephone.

This flashing red light, however, was not a warning. In fact, when I played the message, I smiled. The caller was Charles Dugger, once my football teammate and my friend since childhood in Nowata, Oklahoma. I immediately thought of the post (10/07/20) I had written addressing Jarvis Landry and Odell Beckham Jr.’s lengthy friendship and how it made the key roles they played in the Cleveland Browns’ victory over the Dallas Cowboys even more meaningful.

Charles talked to me and emailed memory stimulants to supplement my own as I worked on Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart. They were particularly helpful in filling gaps—along with those of Bucky Buck, another friend/teammate—that existed because a move to advance my father’s career ripped me away from the hometown and people I loved. He had to go. I had to go. It did not work out that well for either of us. But Charles? Charles has always, always been there. And the flashing red light meant that he was there again for me, as it turned with reassurance that he liked the book.

As important as that was to me, it was not the most important thing. When the next day I returned Charles’s call, we talked for 45 minutes. Old friends and teammates always have lots to say. I prefer shorter conversations. Of course, my verbosity contributes mightily to the length. For a guy who hates the phone, I cannot seem to shut up. Though I should learn to do so—even at this late stage—but things inevitably seep into our conversation that I find golden.

Charles mentioned he had learned something from the book that he had not known—and he knew practically everything about me and our closest friends—and then shared a story with me that I had never heard. It was illuminating.

Early in his working life, Charles became the youngest city manager in Oklahoma. In the well-to-do suburb of Oklahoma City, Nichols Hills, he had to deal with all manner of people. As he explained every year he spent as city manager caused his list of enemies to grow. I understood this from a journalism career of writing opinion columns with which people often disagreed. This shouldn’t have happened to Charles. He might have been a perfect city servant. He was diplomatic and smart. He found ways to listen to problems and solve them or, at worst, steer the complaint in such a way that made him see and recognize the holes in his complaint.

Then an older gentleman called to complain about what the “homosexual dogs” were doing next door. He wanted Charles to make them cease and desist. The man was bedridden with physical problems and sought the enjoyment of looking out his bedroom window to observe the world. What he saw shocked him. The neighbor dogs were cavorting in a way that used to get people thrown in jail. Charles, bless him, did not laugh. He treated the complaint seriously.

Charles politely questioned the complainant: Were the dogs running loose? No. Were the dogs on his property? No. Were the dogs in their own yard? Yes. Charles understood the problem. He was about to add to his enemies list. He contacted the person in charge of animal control and asked him to visit the man and assess the situation. The dog police sprang into action.

When he came to the Nichols Hills City Hall to report his findings, it was a short conversation but one that said it all about public service and changed Charles’s life. Charles said something like: What’s the deal with the dogs? Were they doing the nasty? Can dogs even be homosexual?

“Mr. Dugger,” the man reported, “they are dogs being dogs.”

That was the moment Charles knew: As good as his job was and as much as he liked it, he had to ask himself if he wanted to do it the rest of his life. Nichols Hills city managers stayed. There had been only a couple since the town came together in the late 1920s and early ’30s. So after thinking, Charles marched into City Council and resigned, and remade a career in banking—closing them (in Texas!), then reopening them, and ultimately engaging in mortgage banking.

This is what a person can learn when he has a friendship that lasts a lifetime and that friend picks up the phone and shares how two dogs doing what dogs do affected the course of his life. (The Duggers did not entirely abandon public service. Tom, Charles’s younger brother, represents the Stillwater area in the Oklahoma State Senate, and wife Leigh Ann still teaches and works with young children, as she did for years before her “retirement.”

As illustrated by the photo above, football in Oklahoma was the end of our rainbow when young. While I worked to reclaim it, as a newspaper columnist, and did find my way home, I kept leaving. Charles, on the other hand, remained steadfast to the game and place we both love. Most falls he attends University of Oklahoma games in Norman, but this odd one has him hanging closer to home with Leigh Ann on the grandest of lakes where they now live fulltime.  Charles does not even have to worry about the sexual persuasion or proclivities of the dogs.