ON JANUARY 21, 2009, exactly a month after my release from the hospital, I sat in my big chair with a whopper of a headache, nervously awaiting my parents’ arrival. Much like a soon-to-be-adopted child, I wondered if I was going be accepted and vice versa. I clutched my parents’ picture and studied their faces so they wouldn’t seem like such strangers when I opened the door.
Alice and Lou Bolzan were seventy-two and seventy-four and felt they were too old to travel alone, so my sister Bonnie, who is six years older than me and three years older than our sister Candi, was coming with them from Chicago. They had been planning to come out in May for Taylor’s graduation, but when my memory wasn’t returning as the doctors had predicted, they decided to visit now. My mother, whom Joan described as an eternal optimist who never wanted to hear anything negative, didn’t want to wait four more months to look me in the eye and make sure I was okay.
Joan had given me a bit of history about the relationship between me and my sisters, cautioning that she was conveying my past feelings about them without adding her own perspective. If and when my memory came back, she said, she didn’t want me thinking she’d been trying to fill my head with her views. There wasn’t any bad blood between my sisters and me, she explained, although in the past Bonnie and I had experienced some painful personal disagreements. But I was never really that close with either of them because we didn’t have much in common.
Around 2:00 P.M. the doorbell rang.
“They’re here,” Joan called out.
I let out a big sigh and hoped the visit would go smoothly. It was important to me at this point in rediscovering myself to get a sense of who I was from someone other than my wife and kids.
“Scott!” my mother shouted as we opened the door, lunging to embrace me and kiss me on the cheek. I reciprocated by doing the same.
My father, who was slightly taller than me at six feet five inches (about an inch shorter than he used to be) and about two hundred twenty pounds, came toward me. At a loss for how male family members were supposed to welcome each other, I stuck my hand out awkwardly. When he came in for a hug, I hugged him back.
“Hey, you’re looking great,” he said, pulling away to look at me. “How are you? It’s good to see you.”
I instantly felt connected to them. I’m not sure if this was because Joan had told me I would feel the same bond that my children shared with me or if it was something instinctual, built into my genetic makeup, that let me know, deep down, that I’d been here with them before.
I was surprised to see that my dad looked frailer than in the photo and that he walked slowly. I was expecting someone with a more muscular build, like mine, partly because I’d forgotten that people shrink with age. My full-figured mother, in contrast, looked sprightly for her age and much younger than my father.
Bonnie, who was chunky with short dark hair, gave me a hug and kiss like my mother, only it didn’t feel the same, and neither did I. Her hug wasn’t as warm, and I didn’t sense the same kind of connection; I also felt guarded as I had during the hospital visit with my NFL acquaintance. With Bonnie, it almost felt as if I was meeting a stranger whom I’d rather had stayed in the car. This puzzled me at first. I realized that I hadn’t studied a picture of her before the visit and vaguely remembered Joan pointing her out in family photos, but based on what Joan had said, I figured it was probably something more complex. Nonetheless, my uneasiness took away from the comfort I felt with my parents.
We sat down to visit in the family room, with me in my chair, my mom on the couch closest to me, and my father next to her. Bonnie sat quietly some distance away. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to give my parents more time alone with me or if she was preoccupied with her own thoughts, but I sensed that she felt just as uncomfortable as I did. When she asked how I was feeling, it seemed forced.
In contrast, both of my parents seemed genuinely concerned about my health and asked lots of questions, telling me to lie down if I needed to. “How are your headaches?” my mother asked. “Are you getting any fewer?”
“No,” I said. “They’re pretty much constant all the time, but I try to control them with the pain medication.”
We made small talk for a while, chatting about their flight and the Thunderbird Hotel, where they were staying in Scottsdale. Because I couldn’t engage in conversation for long without closing my eyes for fifteen minutes, they let me rest while they puttered around in the kitchen or watched TV.
After my little shut-eye, my parents showed me the scrapbooks they’d brought with them, the pages tattered, with yellowed tape holding down photos and news clippings that were faded and crumbling after thirty-five years. As I flipped through the years, I saw myself as a little boy, in my teen years with surprisingly long hair, almost touching my shoulders, and throughout my NFL career. I could see my adult self in that happy kid’s face, unlike Grant, who looked nothing now like he did as a child.
Yeah, that’s me.
My father had taken a majority of the photos, and he seemed to remember every sporting event down to the plays, the touchdowns I made, and how I’d plowed through the other players when I was quarterback. Seeing myself in a football uniform at such a young age told me I’d loved that sport from way back.
“Whose idea was it for me to start playing?” I asked.
“It was your idea,” my dad said, adding that I used to watch kids playing in the park even before I was old enough to join Pop Warner. “But you couldn’t play until you were in the fifth grade. You wanted to start playing the year before that.”
Although the album had photos of me playing Little League, at that point I knew very little about baseball because the season hadn’t started yet and there were no games on TV. I knew even less about wrestling other than I thought my uniform was strange and tight, with weird headgear.
The love and care that had gone into collecting these mementos was obvious; I heard it in my parents’ voices, and I could see it in the white ribbons and buttons that read, That’s My Boy, which my mother had attached to several of the high school photos. She’d also painstakingly recorded scores for each football game and enclosed every congratulatory note and letter I’d received, even my letter from the U.S. Air Force Academy thanking me for my interest in attending. Apparently my aspiration to be a pilot had taken root early on as well.
Taking turns narrating, my parents explained the relevance of each photo or news story as they turned the pages. My dad proudly described taking me to football practice, noting that he and my mom had never missed a game. “I just loved watching you play football,” he said.
During the California Bowl in college, he said with his eyes sparkling, he was on the field taking pictures because he’d talked my coach into getting him a press pass. I was amazed and yet flummoxed that this man in his seventies could recall the minutiae of my life when I couldn’t remember a single thing.
Still, I couldn’t believe or understand why they’d kept this stuff for so long. “Why did you save all of this?” I asked.
“Because that’s what mothers do,” my mom said, as if she were stating the obvious. “I wanted you to be able to share this with your children and grandchildren. And thank God we did!”
The more stories they told me, the more my head hurt, so I had to stop after a while even though I wanted to hear more.
Around five o’clock we decided to get some dinner. I didn’t feel up to going out, so Joan got some Mexican food from Nando’s, the restaurant where Taylor worked as a hostess.
When we sat down to eat, Joan tried explaining my condition in a bit more depth; we were waiting and hoping, she said, for my lost memories to return.
My mother, however, didn’t want to accept that I had changed one iota.
“Scott, I don’t see any difference in you,” she said. “When I opened that door and I saw you, you looked the same. You act the same as you always have, your sense of humor is the same, and your personality is the same except that you’re a little calmer.”
“Really?” I asked.
I wanted to believe her, but inside I knew that wasn’t possible. How could that be if I couldn’t even remember who I’d been? I also didn’t feel that I had much of a sense of humor, even though I did make my mother laugh when I joked about noises coming from the bathroom while my father was inside.
My mom was concerned about my pain, which she could see in my eyes, but she kept reassuring me that everything was going to be okay. I think I was the only one who realized that my condition might not go away.
“Scott, this is probably a temporary thing,” she said, “but you have to be patient. There are two things you can do—you can laugh or you can cry. Doom-and-gloom doesn’t get you anywhere.”
She said she had a problem with some people’s woe-is-me attitude, but I’d always been mentally and physically tough enough to overcome challenges. Still, I wanted to make her understand that my condition wasn’t easy to suffer through.
“It’s so hard because I have so many things I have to learn,” I said.
“Keep looking forward,” she said. “You being who you are, you will be able to accomplish all of this.”
Although I wasn’t as optimistic as she was, I still appreciated her maternal, albeit Pollyannaish, efforts to try to inspire me. I could tell that neither of my parents realized how difficult it was for me just to get through the day, but I didn’t push the issue because I didn’t want to worry them or ruin their vacation.
A few days later my parents, Bonnie, and her daughter, Sydney, whom I was meeting again for the first time, came over to visit with me and attend my nephew Aden’s second birthday party. Jamie filled the house with Aden’s favorite blue and green balloons and brought party hats that said “Happy Birthday.” Grant, Taylor, and Anthony joined us as well.
I had yet to hear about Sydney and was quite surprised to see her show up at my house. I felt a little uneasy because I didn’t have enough information about her—other than that she was a product of Bonnie’s second marriage—to make me feel comfortable.
I enjoyed having Aden and Noah around because they provided me with endless entertainment and helped distract me from my pain and the feeling of being lost. I felt at ease with the boys. They felt the closest to me in mental age, so I related to them better than most adults. Talking to adults was more like work or being interviewed, but with the boys I could just play and relax. They didn’t judge me, they didn’t care if I was sick or had a headache, and they didn’t treat me any differently. They were also the only two people around whom I felt smarter. Still, as Aden was bragging to everyone that he was now two, I felt as if he was actually older than me.
This being the last night before my parents headed back to the freezing temperatures of Chicago, I felt sad. I didn’t know when I would see them again or if I’d remember them the next time.
The boys ran around, squealing as they chased a ball and the dogs around the yard, while I spent some time alone with my dad on the back patio. Even though my head was aching, I was eager to do another question-and-answer session.
“Tell me some stories,” I said, asking how he was raised and how he raised me and my sisters. If I could learn who he was as a man and a father, I figured I could learn more about myself and how to father my own children.
Sometimes I found myself staring at him because, as his son, I knew I had to be a lot like him. Joan said we looked alike, had the same work ethic, and were both good family men, but I needed to see that for myself. In the back of my mind I was also struggling with the logic that if I took after my father, then Grant took after me, and with the way he’d been acting lately, that thought didn’t sit well.
“Why did you have kids?” I asked.
“We wanted to raise a family and share our lives with our children,” he replied.
Watching the boys racing around, I asked, “Was I a lot like Noah and Aden? Those kids never sit still!”
“Yes,” my dad said, “you were fast.” He recalled that I came home from school one day in such a hurry that I ran up the stairs, tripped, fell and hit my head, and had to get stitches.
One Easter, when I was four years old, he said, my mother dressed me up in a new suit. He wanted to take me for a walk, and my mom told him to hang on to me. Things were fine until our next-door neighbor, George, came outside. Excited, I broke away from my dad and ran toward him. On my way, however, I fell down and ripped the knees of my new suit. Needless to say, my mother was not pleased.
My dad said he used to take me to a barbershop, saying, “If you’re real nice, and let the barber cut your hair, I’ll take you across the street to the tavern and you can play pool.” Apparently I was a terror at the barber’s, and this was an incentive. I was too short to actually play pool at the time, but he’d let me toss the balls into the holes.
“You were a good kid,” he said.
“What was your job?” I asked.
“I worked at General Mills. I was a millwright, like a mechanic, for thirty-one years.”
“Did we go places?”
“We went to Florida almost every year,” he said, adding that the trips started when I was thirteen and I came down with chicken pox on our very first venture.
My mother joined us outside and told a few stories of her own. Like my father, she often started off saying, “Scott, do you remember . . .” before giving me the details. I’d let them finish then say, “No, I don’t remember that. I don’t remember anything before December 17.” They kept forgetting, and I had to keep reminding them, but in my condition I couldn’t complain.
As a little boy, my mom said, I constantly exhibited spurts of energy, getting into everything. I was so active they had to double-lock the front door so I couldn’t open it on my own. “We used to call you Flash,” she said.
She said I was also a jokester, even at age three or four. We were on a family outing one afternoon, waiting at the river for the bridge to come down so we could drive across. Candi and I were sitting in the backseat when she asked my dad why the foghorn was blasting. I replied matter-of-factly, “Candi, are you dumb? They do that to tell the frogs to get out of the way!”
My mom said I used to hide my sisters’ books in the morning because I didn’t want them to go to school without me, and I’d hide their cookies in my toy box, forcing my sisters to search for them.
“What did I want to be when I grew up?”
“You wanted to be an astronaut,” my father said.
“No,” my mother argued. “He always wanted to play football.”
After five or six hours playing Happy Birthday games with the boys and talking with my parents, it was time to say good-bye. My parents were flying out the next morning, and I could tell they didn’t want to leave with me still feeling so bad, but they were coming back in a few months.
“I’m so happy that I came because now I can go home and know what I saw, that this is Scott,” my mother said. “You’re everything that you were before.”
I wasn’t ready for them to leave either. I still didn’t have all the answers I’d been seeking for how to be a good parent, but I realized there were no shortcuts for that. Nor did I feel I had enough information to know who I was as a son, and I’d only gotten a glimpse of what I was like as a child, an adolescent, and a teenager. I’d been hoping that they could tell me who I was as a man too, but sadly, I was slowly realizing that no one was going to be able to define that for me. No one but me.