Never Give Up

This I believe: Never, ever give up.

My father said it to me for the first time twenty-five years ago. He gripped his sooty hands around the steering wheel of his beat-up Chevy truck and stared out through the windshield, while the wipers batted away big, fluffy white snowflakes. “You just can’t. You can’t ever give up. No matter how hard it gets. No matter how it hurts.”

He said the well-chosen words firmly and tight-lipped, while his head nodded to the rhythm of his speech. I don’t remember why he was telling me to never give up, I only remember that he never stopped doing so after that day. I only remember these words, whenever I do anything.

Sure my dad was notorious for giving his “I’ll tell ya what” speeches after each one of our basketball, baseball, football and field hockey games–but those lectures would come many years later.

On that particular snowy day I was only five years old and I hadn’t even picked up a sport yet. I hadn’t yet earned the right to hear one of his go-get-em speeches. I hadn’t yet missed a free-throw shot. I hadn’t yet stood over the plate and watched the third strike pass without swinging my bat. I hadn’t yet only received a 98 on a test. (“Where are the other two points?” He would ask.) To be honest I don’t think I ever did anything to warrant the oft-heard never-quit speech in its many variations, but that didn’t stop him from giving it.

Like him, and like all his kids, I worked my ass off from the day I was born just to keep up, just to survive. But, still we heard it from him:

“If you give up, someone else will eat the last and only piece of bread. If you give up, you can’t win. If you give up, you only have yourself to blame. If you give up, you’ll live a life of regrets. Only the strongest, fittest and ablest survive. Only those who win scholarships go to school. Only those who go the distance, finish the race. Only those who work for it, earn it. Perseverance is everything, kid. It’s the only thing.”

But, then again, looking back–maybe he wasn’t speaking to me in the truck–at least not that time. Maybe, in the solitude of his Chevy he had forgotten that the fifth of his eight kids was sitting beside him on his way to the liquor store on a stormy, cold winter morning–the morning after his best friend died while fighting a fire with him. Maybe he wasn’t speaking for my benefit. Maybe he was talking to himself, like he would inevitably do throughout his entire life, all the while trying, in his own meager way, to talk to us–to teach us what it took him a lifetime of regrets, loss, pain and missed free-throw shots to figure out: “No matter how hard it gets out there, you can’t ever give up.”