Marty McCrone has found a way to have good days.
The Barrie man tells us how in Sweating the Small Stuff and Loving It, a book which chronicles how he, his wife Julie and sons Luke and Jake survived, but mostly thrived, in very tough circumstances.
Marty, 68, has battled two kinds of cancer.
His book tells the tale of how that affected his family, his friends and his career, but that it does not define the man.
“I didn’t want this to be a book about ‘woe is me’, look what happened to me, because stuff happens to everybody,” said Marty, a teacher and athlete known for Thunderhoops basketball camps in Orillia and Barrie. He was a long-time teacher and coach at Twin Lakes Secondary School in Orillia where he and fellow Twin Lakes teacher Paul Hopper started the basketball camp.
“It is a little like that, but it’s more about how you see people. I want people to open books by talking to people,” he added. “I’ve turned into that guy who makes conversation in elevators. It makes your day so much better.”
Marty said he wants people to have empathy for what others are going through in life — whether you’ve lost your job, your marriage has failed, you’ve retired, or you get sick and lose your identity to a disease.
“You didn’t get cancer. The whole family got cancer,” said his son Luke to Marty in the book.
All the medical stuff is there in Sweating the Small Stuff and Loving It. How a healthy, athletic, six-foot-five man weighing 220 pounds was laid low by radiation treatments at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital, how he lost 60 pounds, how he endured the pain, the fear.
But Marty doesn’t dwell on it. Instead, he tells us some of his stories along the way.
Such as working at the Athabasca tar sands one summer to earn money for university, sleeping in a tent, working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and gaining new respect for wolverines.
Or about how he and his lifelong friends spent a week at Huntington Beach, Calif., staying at the 1950s-style hotel Surf City, USA and hanging out with surfers, buying a $20 barbecue and having cookouts in the parking lot.
And perhaps best, how an American university professor got to the essence of how people should be treated no matter their station in life.
Marty tells personal uplifting stories, too.
His elementary school friend visited Marty in hospital — someone he hadn’t seen in 15 years, and someone he hasn’t seen since.
“He helped me get closer to the surface and back to the land of the living,” Marty writes. “I will always be grateful to him. Small kindnesses have more value than I’d ever realized.”
Sweating the Small Stuff and Loving It didn’t begin as a book, but rather as a speech to Gilda’s Club in 2007.
Julie suggested he keep on writing, since it did Marty good, then Luke said Marty should post it on Facebook, so he wrote two chapters a week.
A publisher liked it, too, but more was needed.
“She said, ‘You are writing to people that know you, so you’ve got to write to people that don’t know you’,” Marty said. “So, ‘instead of saying my wife Julie, explain how you met your wife Julie’.
“It did turn out to be something that was a lot more detailed than what I thought it was going to be. My first version was a Coles Notes version, and then I expanded on it.”
Julie read it, of course, and approved after fixing the punctuation, an admitted weakness for Marty.
Marty also uses others to explain his feelings, quoting from songs in the book, such as American musicians John Prine and Jimmy Buffett.
But he closes the book referencing his favourite song The Weight, by The Band, written by Canadian musician J.R. (Robbie) Robertson.
Marty compares the cast of characters in The Weight with those in his life, and that the song can be seen to be about dealing with burdens we all carry.
“I want people to have a better understanding what others are going through,” Marty said of his book.
Published April 8, Sweating the Small Stuff and Loving It is available on amazon.ca, and in selected book stores.
