Coaching Dad

In ‘Coaching Dad,’ readers get to reconsider the contention: “You can never go home again.” If you were given the chance to do it, even at the risk of screwing up the space-time continuum, would you go? And if you did go, or went without knowing why, would you embrace the opportunity even if it meant eventually meeting and then coaching your father on the basketball court when he was a teenager? One minute, 50-year old, San Diego divorcee, Charles B., is on the couch expostulating before the $250/hr shrink his ex-wife’s current paramour, Lance, referred him to, wondering if he’s on the verge of insanity, or simply insane for taking Lance’s referral. The next, he’s spiritedly strolling down a South Shore Long Island main street, in June 1948, admiring ill-fated Edsels and steel fortress Ford Deluxe Coupes, while contemplating how he’s going to scrape together enough money for an egg salad sandwich over at Joe’s Café, and where he’s going to find a room to rent tonight. Good thing Charles has a mind for historic baseball stats and modern basketball strategies. He'll need both to survive. He meets his dad as a teenager and the grandfather who died before he is born, finds the love of his life, and becomes a high school basketball coach at his alma mater long before he is born. Along the way he finds out who he is, who his father was, how to live without cell phones and cable TV, why love across the decades is both satisfying and terrifying, and if he can make it as a basketball coach in the 1940s. What a journey! Can you actually go home again? Find out in 'Coaching Dad.'