Padecky: For SRJC football coach Lenny Wagner, loss is a part of life

There, in front of Lenny Wagner, was the rubble. Too many Californians have seen this view, have recoiled from this view, have had their sleep tortured by this view. It’s a horror movie in real time, and the view is met typically with words not suitable for all audiences.

Said Wagner: “I know they expected me to drop to my knees and scream, ‘WHY GOD HAVE YOU DONE THIS TO ME?’ “ Wagner was escorted to his property off Highway 12 in East Santa Rosa by Jeff Mix, Rohnert Park’s fire chief, and Brian Marvin, SRJC’s safety officer. It was a couple days after the Glass fire burned through the area.

Wagner, SRJC’s football coach, went to his house, saw the blackened walls with nothing inside them. No roof. No baby grand piano. No drum set. No electric guitar. No acoustic guitars. No kitchen. Hollowed out. As if an ash can had dumped its contents on the ground.

“Looked like a movie set from the outside,” is what Wagner thought.

Here’s what Wagner said: “Wow! Catrina (his wife) and I always wanted natural light in the kitchen!”

Mix and Marvin looked at Wagner as if he just said he went on a date with a Martian lizard and, boy, she should have trimmed her nails. Usually people don’t respond to utter devastation with humor. They go quiet, search for salvage or sit on a burnt piece of something and ponder.

Moving on could and should feel like pushing a Buick uphill. Abrupt change is a slap in the face with a steel pot. Wagner, who will be 51 next Sunday, should flinch at the mere mention of “abrupt change.”

“But I enjoy beating adversity,” Wagner said. “I’m motivated by doing something people say I couldn’t do.”

Those words sound generic, cliche utterances from a self-help catalogue. Happens all the time in sports. Players, teams, use it all the time. Adversity is the extra player on the field, on the bench, in the dugout. No one thought we could do this and blah, blah, blah.

But the field of life is different than the field of sport. The temptation would be to feel overwhelmed by something more complicated than a final score. The Glass Fire certainly was that. It cleared his acre-and-a-third property.

It should have cleared his mind of everything else, but it didn’t. Wagner returned to Santa Rosa on Sunday from a memorial in San Juan Capistrano for a friend who committed suicide the week before. Wagner was the Best Man at Peter Ybarra’s wedding. Ybarra was the guy who introduced Wagner to Torey Shinault over 30 years ago.

Shinault became Wagner’s best friend, even shared a bedroom with Wagner for a year when Shinault needed a place to crash. But Shinault died at 19 when his motorcycle blew a tire and crashed into a tree at 70 miles an hour.

“I couldn’t eat, sleep, talk,” Wagner said, who was 17 at the time. “I felt dead inside.”

Around that same time, Wagner lost another good friend, Danny Sweeney, to a motorcycle accident, and another friend, Don Haro, in a car accident.

His stepfather died around the same time as his three friends. That’s a lot to process for a teenager. Especially since Wagner’s biological father was absent. Wagner wouldn’t meet his real father until he was 49.

That could have sent Wagner sideways, especially when he was an only child much of the time, his mom working in a bar in Fullerton in Southern California. Wagner would put himself to bed, feed himself breakfast in the morning, make some money at night cleaning up the bar for his mom, finding loose change on the floor left by inebriated patrons.

“I didn’t always make good decisions,” he said. “I was heading in the wrong direction at warp speed.”

By instinct if not by intent, Wagner listened to adults. Whether they knew it or not, he soaked up what they said, how they said it, how they acted. Hal Sherbeck, his college coach at Fullerton Junior College, became Wagner’s Yoda. Sherbeck showed Wagner a future without mayhem but with responsibility, with the ability to move past adversity. That was the tough part. Enter football.

“It’s a skill,” said Wagner of handling adversity. “A player has 25 seconds to put aside what just happened to get ready for the next play. If a player can’t leave it behind, he’s going to get beat. It’s the greatest skill a player can develop.”

The same skill has a universal application. Move on or move over and let life pass you by. Famed humorist Will Rogers said it best: “Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.”

Wagner never thought he would have to dig deeper for peace than losing Torey Shinault. He was wrong. In 2010, his son, Nate, then 3, was diagnosed with pineoblastoma, a rare form of brain cancer. It took surgeons at UCSF Children’s Hospital four hours just to reach the golf-ball sized tumor. Six weeks of chemotherapy followed. Wagner took a leave of absence from SRJC in 2011 and 2012.

“In our darkest hour one night at the hospital,” Wagner said, “Nate was coughing, vomiting, defecating and urinating on the floor uncontrollably. He had more wires attached to him than the Golden Gate Bridge. Nate looked at me and said, ‘Hey dad, I didn’t get any on my feet.’”

Yep, that’s Lenny’s and Catrina’s kid. Hope, not mope. He was 3 when he said that. He was 14 and healthy when he said this last week when viewed what was left of the house: “That’s OK, Dad. You’ll just build it better the next time.”

It’s OK to go ahead and have a silent moment about the loss of the Sonoma State MVP Trophy he won twice while a linebacker at the school in the early ‘90s (NFL Hall of Famer Larry Allen also won it).

That’s OK, Dad, enjoy those four face masks that didn’t burn that once were attached to four football helmets when Wagner played in high school, junior college, college, semi-pro. Wagner so enjoyed those helmets he posted a picture taken of one of those facemasks and put it on Facebook, smiling.

Wagner one day will save the harp-shaped metal from the piano and stick it in the ground, lighted, as a hint of high art, not as a reminder of bad memory.

“It’s hard to make a piece of art from somebody who dies,” Wagner said.

People can’t be replaced. A kitchen can. Catrina can hug her husband. A coffee table can’t. Nate can make him happy. A piece of burnt wood from God-knows-what can’t.

Wagner didn’t cry at the house that once was. He did cry at the friends who once were alive. He is emotional about players, the ones who died young, from gun violence, suicide or illness. Just in the last two years, five SRJC players have passed away.

“The adversity of losing material things that can be replaced,” he said, “seems silly when I have already lost so many I love permanently.”

Wagner sees people, not things. Things are what people wear. Things like cars and houses and boats. Things that have a price tag. Things that can be bought. Things that look like so many other things.

Things don’t look like Torey Shinault or Pete or Danny or Dan. Things didn’t put Catrina and Lenny in a parent’s house for 16 days while their son was in the hospital. Nate ain’t a banjo.

They evacuated five times in the last four years because of the wildfires. They have been sleeping on air mattresses on a hardwood floor at a friend’s guest house for the last three weeks.

Where they live next, that’s still to be decided. But how they live already has taken shape. I’m betting there’ll be a skylight in the kitchen. Big skylight. Heck, might be the whole damn roof. As a reminder. That they have chosen to live in the sun.

To comment write to bobpadecky@gmail.com.