Bring on the Wonder

 

January is a reflective month.  It’s the antidote to the joy-and-light-and-food-and-drink-induced mania of the holidays.  After December, many of us set about making our lives right again, reclaiming health or goodness – or in my case, closets – in the form or resolutions.  Resolutions are, however, quick.  I’m not sure we give them a great deal of thought and more often than not we’re picking up that cookie a scant eight days after we’ve sworn them off for all eternity.   I don’t know if they provide some humility or have a shelf life that induces amnesia to our initial enthusiasm.  Regardless, they can be an annual challenge with which so many of us wrestle– and more often than not – by which are pinned.  Organization is the bane of my existence and a foe that chases me eternally.  More accurately, I chase it and am forever one or two steps behind the chaos and clutter. 

I do somehow manage to pull myself out of bed at the crack of dark most mornings to go for a run with friends.  Some days we have a crowd, and other days it’s just two of us.  On the sparsely attended mornings, the run is more a communion of quiet minds.  While I’m more often known for excessive story-telling (particularly on hills – it’s the supreme distraction from the incline), today the morning was cold – in the teens – and my friend and I were quieter than normal for the first half mile.  The effort of warming sleepy muscles in the frigid air becomes harder as the years pass.  The sky was velvet black, the stars in abundance and Venus hanging low and bright in the pre-dawn sky.  I mentioned to her a particular habit I was wrestling with, one of those resolutions that I haplessly thought would be as easy to keep as it was to make.  My friend agreed, and then made a statement that struck me for its elegant and simple decisiveness:

My resolution is to live every day as if it’s my last.

There can be many interpretations to this but I know for fact that she wasn’t suggesting to throw caution to the wind and live life loud and large, to spin in an external existence free from consequence.   Like so many of us, I can get caught up in the daily routine and rigor of my days.  I’ve been missing the opportunity to experience the wonder and beauty of the details of these routines that provide root and foundation; these seemingly inconsequential happenings are threads in the bigger fabric of life.  When some of those are suddenly gone and the fabric unravels, the hole left behind lays bare their importance and meaning.

This past year has been difficult in so many ways.   I’m getting to that age where my body starts reminding me more of my age.  I’d changed jobs – twice – and worried more about everything in this difficult economy.  I found myself worrying more about the future and living less in the present and this year I was reminded of this folly:  on the last day of summer, my friend lost her husband suddenly and without warning.  When we who were his friends and neighbors emerged from the thickness of our grief, we set about trying to resume our lives in a place seemingly tipped off its axis, the orbit of the neighborhood altered with the addition of unwelcome space.

In the months that followed, I’ve personally felt his loss not in large ways – he was a dear and cherished friend - but in little ones.  Sitting in my home office, I’d often glance up and see him coming back from work pulling up short of the driveway and stepping out in his work uniform of suit and tie to grab the mail out of the box.  Other days I’d see him taking the dog out for a walk, cutting the grass, walking down the driveway in his slippers to retrieve the paper.  I never thought much about these at the time.  It was only after he was gone and I’d look up from my desk and be met with a void that I realized the impact of these small moments, these specks of memory in a day in continual overdrive.  I’d come to unconsciously depend on them; they were an integral part of my day, and I’d sorely neglected to recognize their value.  Isn’t that how it so often is?

Too often I’m closing the barn door after the horse has gone for yet another unauthorized romp.   I’d grabbed that morning coffee and drank it quickly without taking time to savor its aroma, how the cup feels so warm in my cold hands, how perfect the first sip tastes.  I’ve neglected to hear to the music of the rain as it hits my car in traffic that has slowed from the weather, the wipers beating out syncopation.   I’ve sat at the table with my husband or children, reading the paper, no one talking and hadn’t the slightest inkling how different it feels doing the same activity in an empty room. Even this morning I cursed the cold air as I stepped out of my house.  But oh how that cold air assaults my lungs with its frigid perfection, how alive and vital it makes me feel.    Tiny shifts and movement fight for attention; it’s easy to overlook their importance when we come to unknowingly count on them to give us balance.

My resolution is to live every day as if it’s my last.

I know what my friend means: to live generously, free of the petty ambivalence to which we can often be prey.  To remove the blinders of our harried existence and drink in and savor what we see.  And to have gratitude and appreciation for the simple and fragile wonder so abundant in our lives.

Is There a Santa Claus?

*Written for Robious Corridor, December 2011 
Note: The Original Editorial, written in  appearing in the September 21, 1897 edition of The (New York) Sun appears in Normal font.  The updated additions are in italics.

Dear Robious Corridor:

I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, 'If you see it in Robious Corridor it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
 

VIRGINIA O’Handmeacookie

115 West Salisbury Road.

 

VIRGINIA,

First, its not polite to refer to your friends as “little”; they are ‘vertically challenged’.  And yes, your ‘little friends’ are wrong. Totally, utterly wrong.  Like WICKED wrong.  They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. Or by the fact that they’ve never had to do laundry - theirs or anyone else’s.  They do not believe except what they see. Which is Nintendo, Wii Dance Party, Lady Gaga and texts on their mobile phone.  They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds or posted on Facebook. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little, scratch that, ‘vertically challenged’. You know why I know this?  One Sentence: DANCING WITH THE STARS.  In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, and yet there is a show that displays this intellect and insect-like movement against the canopy of music and >boom< it’s entertainment and tops the Neilson ratings…As measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge, we can only reply “SUPERSIZE IT”.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and frankly I know it because I have to pick up Santa’s socks and dirty Santa suit after his 24 hour UPS run around the Earth.  Why he insists on travelling through chimneys and getting soot ground into his suit at the sub-atomic level is beyond me.  The “North Pole Dry Cleaners” is pretty fed up too: how many “we tried as hard as we could to get the stain out but alas” notes do they have to include before Jolly Old Saint Nick realizes that red velvet and soot DO NOT MIX?  Anyway back to generosity and devotion… you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.  Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. There would also be no ‘Atkins Diet’.  Why?  The man CHOWS DOWN on cookies, milk, and hot chocolate for 24 hours – ACROSS THE GLOBE! – It’s a veritable high fructose corn syrup orgy.  When he gets back to the North Pole, his glycemic index is THROUGH. THE. GINGERBREAD. ROOF.  All of a sudden he’s yelling “Mama Claus?  I want SALAD.  Broccoli.  Tofu.  THINK GREEN.”  Green?  WE LIVE IN THE NORTH POLE.  The term “Winter White” wasn’t invented for nothing.  The daylight lasts like 35 seconds.  Is it dreary here?  It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. And for the record, Virginia ROCKS.  Especially Richmond.  Particularly south of the river James.  But no Santa?  There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. But frankly if we wouldn’t have to live through Middle School, that would be OK.  I think EVERY KID would be happy to trade a bit of poetry for skipping middle school.  But NO SANTA?  We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.  Yup, that eternal light thing.  I heard you lost it for several days after Hurricane Irene.  We had reports parents – without TV or internet in their powerless neighborhood – had to resort to the most base and savage of methods to stay alive: they had to GO TO THE LIBRARY.  They got confused by the books (no, they are not kindling) but it was a great place to charge the iPod and surf the net…but I digress…

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! Actually, there aren’t any fairies in the North Pole.  There are, however, elves.  And they are particularly demanding.  They have to make all the toys and they gripe about the hours, poor working condition, and even convinced one to become a Union Dentist.  No lie. Have you seen Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer?  Hermie is the real deal.  He does cosmetic dentistry and is working toward certification in orthodontia. Raffled off a custom whitening tray to raise money for the Island of Misfit Toys.  Did his thesis on the overbite of Bumble, the Abominable Snowman.  But back to you Virginia, and your question about Santa.  You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Honestly, it would prove nothing because – and I have this on Santa’s good opinion- most of these ‘watchman’ dive into the cookies and milk for Santa and are in a happy food coma by the time Santa is making his rounds.  Nobody sees Santa Claus, because eating excessive loads of sweet carbs brings on blissful sleep, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. As we all know, trying to prove a negative is most troublesome.  The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Typically, that involves the santa coat draped on the back of a chair instead of hung up in the closet.  And unmade beds.  And trash that needs to be taken out without being asked.  Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, because Fairies don’t live at the northpole and if they did and they were dancing on the lawn, they’d perish of frostbite.  But that's no proof that they are not there. And neither are pigs in flight.  Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. Well, Steve Jobs tried, which explains the plethora of iPads in Santa’s sack.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but if you do that, your mom is gonna be really really really mad.  She can handle the socks on the floor the garbage that needs to go out, but don’t – DO NOT- mess with the cranky infant’s toys… but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. And that’s because those big strong men would have to hoist themselves from the couch, fling the remote away and say “NO NFL TODAY!”  Yeah right, like that is gonna happen.  Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond ESPN Primetime. Is it all real? Oh for heaven’s sake yes it’s all real.  Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. But… before you get your presents, please go to a dictionary and write out a good definition of the word “abiding”, and use it in a sentence that could be used on terra firma south of the north pole.  I’m just looking out for your SAT scores, girl, NOW GO GET ‘EM!

No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood. However, he will make this glad heart of wifehood elated if he avoids the sooty chimney’s, uses the front door, picks up his dirty socks, and trades the cookies for the Reindeer’s carrots.

Merry Christmas Virginia and God bless us, every one.

Fondly,

Mrs. Claus

Occupy Pepper

I am the 99%.  I’m just like you and citizens everywhere who pay their tab yet have limited access to an abundant resource horded by the 1%.  I’m talking about Pepper.  We’ve all been to a restaurant.  The Salt is freely available, but of course we’ve been briefed for years on the ills of too much salt.   Pepper, however, is a different matter.  When you get your salad or your entrée, the server will appear with a pepper grinder the size of a Louisville Slugger and ask “Would you like some freshly ground pepper?”  Then the pepper grinding ceremony begins.  You sit expectantly as the ground pepper appears on your dish.  The server looks at you at first expectantly waiting for you to say ‘enough’.  However the expression changes to one of abject suspicion as the grinding continues.  Any more than 3 twists of the grinder and their internal alarms go off.  After all: you’re not doing the work for the pepper; you’re just expecting something for nothing.  Personally, I feel the whole thing is a childish exercise.  I am perfectly capable of seasoning my own food.  I don’t need to sit there while someone does it for me any more than I need him or her to cut my meat into bite-sized pieces.

Why is that pepper grinder so big?  Whole peppercorns are tiny, but pepper grinders are enormous.  Why is that?  It’s not like we’re splitting an atom here, we’re smashing up a little dried dot of nothing. We recently had dinner at a restaurant in Staunton, and the pepper grinders were – of course – unavailable for us at the tables.  They were also enormous, about the size of an average arm.  They could have easily been used at batting practice, or converted into a floor lamp.  The evil pepper-hording management stored the grinders on a large rack attached to the wall, a veritable arsenal of spice-grinding majesty in full view of the pepper-deprived population.

And why are these giant pepper grinders only found in high-falutin’ bourgeois restaurants?  Restaurants that cater to those with smaller wallets have salt and pepper on the table.  Of course, the pepper is pre-ground and tastes like dirt.  The little guy always gets the shaft.

Why can’t we use them ourselves?  Is there some kind of liability attached with grinding pepper?  Is it a dangerous activity?  Has the government issued some kind of mandate rationing our access to freshly ground pepper?  Is this more big government creep? Or is it just management being stingy?  Or is it both?   I sense crony capitalism at work for sure.

Maybe it’s an industrial conspiracy to addict the consumer to salt.  It’s freely available.  The more you use it, the thirstier you get, the more drinks you order.  Salt is the cash cow.  Pepper doesn’t make you thirsty.  At best, it’ll make you sneeze.  You’ll be using more napkins and costing the restaurant money. 

We need to fight this injustice.  Why?  Because it can only get worse: the next thing to go will be the fresh parsley garnish.  OCCUPY PEPPER GRINDERS!  Demand that there be a redistribution of pepper grinders to diners across America.  When you go to a restaurant, grab that grinder out of the server’s hand and use it yourself.  Demand every table be given a grinder. Protest corporate greed at establishments with limited pepper access.  Rise up I say, Rise up!  POWER TO THE PEPPER!...er…Paprika!...er PEOPLE!  Now:  pass the salt, and order me another drink.

Requiem

9/11/11   9/11/01

I don’t remember the weather in Orchard Park, NY that day.  People in New York City remember their morning as ideal.  “Crystal clear blue” - how many times did we hear that description?  It was like that this morning in Richmond: quiet and peaceful.  Just like that day.  10 years.  I’ve just gotten up and made coffee.  I turn on the memorial at ground zero in New York.

* * *

I’m working in my home office.  I go to the kitchen for a cup of tea, and return several minutes later.  The red light on my phone is blinking.  It’s a message from Michel, it’s simple and direct: “Turn on the TV.”  I turn on the small set on a shelf above my desk that is normally off except for news.  I can’t figure out what I’m seeing: black smoke billowing out of the World Trade Centers.  I call Michel.  His admin answers and I must sound frantic.  “Don’t worry, Michel is OK, he’s not in New York today.”  I say “Yes, I know that.”  Of course I know that, I’m his wife.  It is then that it occurs to me that he frequently goes to the World Trade Centers to meet with State Tax Attorneys.  She puts me through to him.  “What is this? What am I seeing? What happened?”  He answers my question.  I don’t understand.  He says the same sentence. “Planes hit the World Trade Center”.  I can’t understand this, I can’t process it, his grammar doesn’t sound right.  It’s the word ‘Planes’ that keep tripping me up, the plural nature of it.

* * *

It’s a beautiful day there today.  8:46 am.  A single bell tolls. The families are there and I’m struck by these people and how they are dressed: some are in their Sunday best, others in more humble attire, t-shirts emblazoned with a memorial image or slogan.  Many carry photos of their smiling family.  The people in these photos died in terror; there is no hint of it in the images, they didn’t know.  They are frozen moments, hundredths of seconds in time.   The families slice across ethnic and social strata; they all occupy a common class, bound in grief in thousands of different memories.  Obama speaks, Psalm 46.   Bush speaks, Lincoln’s  letter to a grieving mother.  Giuliani, more echoes.   And then they start the heartbreaking roll call.    This never fails to break my heart.  The names, so many names.  They are read one at a time; it will take hours I think.  I wonder if it would be more poignant to have each name read at the same time as the others by thousands of those left to mourn them.  A cacophony of despair, a towering vocal babel of their loss and mourning.  These names are so varied, some are so common, dare I say American?  No, that doesn’t  fit.  The day after the attacks, a French newspaper said “Today, we are all American”.  I’m struck by the name “Adams” read over and over again.  Could they be related somehow to the Nation’s founding father?  Others have syllables and consonants that would make my tongue cramp.  Did the whole world perish that day?

* * *

My eyes are glued to the set.  The South Tower falls.  The newscasters talk about it being surreal, like something out of a Hollywood action movie, but it is horrifyingly real.  I wonder how many people are in there.  Tom Brokaw said something like “Thirty Thousand”.  The hospitals are mobilizing, every ambulance on call.  The Red Cross puts out a call for blood. Emergency rooms wait for the wounded.  Cardinal Egan is giving last rights on the sidewalk.  They switch to field reporters covered in ash and grit.  It occurs to me that I’m supposed to fly to Boston tomorrow for work.  There is no force in heaven or on earth that will get me on a plane in the near future.  I pick up the phone and call my best friend and colleague BJ.  “You’ve seen the news.”  I say this as fact.  He answers quizzically “What news?”  They’d lost their internet connection before nine that morning.  They know nothing.  I tell him about New York, about the gaping fiery hole in the Pentagon.  I’m frantic, frightened.  I tell him I will not get on a plane.  He reassures me that the safest time to fly is right after a hijacking.  He can say this with detached logic, it’s just a concept right now; he hasn’t seen the images yet.  My eyes are on the TV.  There is a report that another plane has crashed in Pennsylvania.  I gasp for air and scream into the phone “The planes are falling out of the sky!”  How many more will crash?

* * *

The network runs a piece on the firefighters, how they are asked everyday by well-wishers about that day.  It never leaves them.  “The 10 House” , “54 and 4”, nearly 400 first responders were lost, more than ten percent of that day’s death toll came from those who went to the scene to help.  The newscaster is interviewing the last survivor pulled from the rubble.  Jenelle Guzman-McMillan spent 27 hours in the rubble, her head on the body of a firefighter who perished trying to save her and others.  This is her first time back to Ground Zero.  She grips the tissue in her hand and reflects on that day and the decade since.  She has moved on, married, had children.  She finds comfort in her faith; she mentions something about a Tabernacle church.  The interviewer asks her how she feels to be back.  She hesitates, measuring her words.  “We all have to face our fears.” 

* * *

The second tower is gone.  I call my father and break down in tears.  He is quiet.  I’m sobbing, incoherent.  He asks about Michel.  I realize he thinks he was there, that something may have happened.  Reports of where the hijacked planes originate filter through.  Boston, Newark, National or Dulles?  They speculate on the fear of the passengers on board – did they know what was happening?  There are reports of Palestinians handing out candy and celebrating despite Yassir Arafat’s condemnation.  They show pictures.  I don’t understand this. What kind of a civilization is this? This is joy? 

* * *

James Taylor sings “Close Your Eyes” – a lullaby I sang to my own kids over and over and over again.  I feel the tears.  There are many children there, I wonder about the young teens who probably have little memory of the mother or father lost.  I wonder: do they remember only the faces because of photo?  Is there some imprint of them somewhere from 10 years ago?  They open the memorial to the families.   They touch the names etched in the stone.  A young girl does a pencil rubbing: ‘Patrick Qui…’.  Tears on black granite, the names are all they have left that is tangible in this sacred place.

Yesterday I had a thought: what of those working the airport security in Logan and the other airports that day? I used to tell people I was shocked more airplanes weren’t hijacked out of Logan.  I’d flown in and out of it dozens of times and I remember the security being a joke.  I’d put my bags on the x-ray belt and half the time they weren’t even looking at the monitor.   They let those madmen through, they didn’t know.  Were they paying attention?  Were they as complacent as all of us?    Do they carry unimaginable guilt at the role they played?  They were our Maginot Line.

And Bin Laden?  He's gone, dispatched with two bullets from an unnamed SEAL.  I'll admit it: I was happy when I learned he was gone.  Was it joy?  I don't think so.  I don't know.

***

I look at the clock.  It’s after noon.  I’ve lost 3 hours, I haven’t moved from this chair.  I don’t know what to do.  I get up, and grab my keys.  I drive to our church, Nativity, a couple minutes away.  I don’t do this, go to church in the middle of a work day.  It’s empty, dark and cool.  Light is coming through the windows.  I enter a pew and drop to my knees, cross myself, and bury my head in my hands.  “Please, God…” I don’t know how to pray for what I’m feeling.  I want to believe God can see into my heart.  I get up and walk to the memorial candles.  I light three of them, one for each site.  I kneel again and am so scared, I wonder about all we have lost and what will come.  Later that day I'm home, Madeleine and Luc arrive home from school, ages 10 and 6.  I ask Madeleine if she knows what happened.  She says some bad guys flew planes into buildings.  They watched a little on TV.  Luc doesn’t understand.  He’s 6, I explain its ok, that our military will go get the bad guys.  He asks if there will be war, I answer ‘probably’.  He starts to cry; he thinks bombs will fall in our backyard.  I run and get the globe.  I show him where we live.  Where his grandparents live.  Then I show him where the middle east is, Afghanistan.  “It’s very very far away.  You will be safe.” I’m struck at how certain I am of that statement.  Michel comes home and we look at each other and hug for a long time.  The news comes on, I have Madeleine watch.  The video replay of the plane hitting the building runs.  She says “That’s cool…” and I snap and yell at her.  She says she didn’t mean it like it was good.  I realize she doesn’t know how to respond to this, to process it. I think at 10 years old what she sees is a special effect like the movies. She’s too young and innocent to couple that image with very real terror and death.  She starts to cry, she is scared by my anger and I’m ashamed.  I hold my girl.  What have we lost?

* * *

The coverage of the 10 year anniversary runs a segment on the SEAL unit.  They interview a retired SEAL who now runs the SEAL Team Foundation.  He was fishing that day and contemplating retirement.  He didn’t retire.  The interviewer asks him if he changed his mind because of that day.  He answers “My mind was changed for me.”  When asked if he was deployed to Afghanistan he pauses, his face giving nothing away.  “I was deployed as required.”  The coverage returns to the Pentagon ceremony.  A military choral unit sings ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’… Glory glory hallelujah…Flowers are placed on the benches dedicated to those who perished.  The Pentagon is pristine, there is no evidence – beyond this memorial – of the plane that hit it.  It is unscarred.  They are at Shanksville now.  White granite in a field of grass and wildflowers.   It occurs to me that the terrorists thought to hit the symbols of Americas might: The World Trade Center was the symbol of our economic power, the Pentagon that of our military power, and that fourth plane was headed to the symbol of our government – the Capital Building.  Ironic and fitting that ‘of, by, and for the people’ fought them from achieving their evil trifecta.   And still… all that followed… how much have we lost? That day, members of Congress stood together singing “God Bless America.”  Could they do that today I wonder?

* * *

It’s days after the attacks.  No planes are allowed to fly.  I look up at the sky and it is so blue.  There are no contrails anywhere to be seen. . There were few survivors at Ground Zero, fewer bodies.  They aren’t finding much in the rubble.   Despite this attack, I don’t feel like we as a nation are paralyzed.  I feel like we are galvanized. Today though the sky is blue and American flags fly everywhere.

* * *

Madeleine is 20 and in college.  I text her about James Taylor’s song; she loves it.   She reflects today in simple words “Ten years ago, I was a scrawny little 10-year old who knew nothing of true hate, fear, or profound sadness. In an instant, I learned all three. Ten years later, I'm a not so scrawny 20-year old who knows nothing of life, but will always remember a day in which everything changed.”   Luc is 16 and pays tribute on his facebook page to the young man who worked in the South Tower – a lacrosse player and volunteer firefighter known for wearing a red bandana – who perished while helping many escape.  Jean-Marc was 4 and remembers nothing of that day.  He watches the coverage with me, and I explain – during a re-run of the actual coverage – what was happening, what I was thinking.  I’m sharing this history with him, tell him how I felt that day.  

Memory is thick sometimes.  How do you measure the time before and after that day?  How do you measure what we have lost or gained?  How can you measure the change?  How do you balance these scales?  I don’t know.  I may never know.  I may never understand, there are some things that are just too big.

Just now I look out the window, the sun is shining, the sky is so blue.  I see Luc.  10 years ago he was worried about bombs falling in our yard.  Today I see him, and he’s cutting the grass.

 God Bless America.

Field of Dreams

*Written for the August/September issue of Robious Corrior Magazine

The start of the school year is just around the corner.  We’ll head to the store to buy mountains of school supplies trailing our children who will bear a look of pitiful resignation: the summer is almost over.  However, many will take to the fields for the ritual of Friday Night Lights.  I love high school sports.  It’s a joy to see athletes who have graduated beyond the ankle biter juice box leagues, flinging themselves around the field of play, passionate about sport, really getting it. However, there is always the few who wreck it for the many, who exhibit bad behavior and ruin it for everyone else.  And it’s coming from the bleachers: “REF!  ARE YOU BLIND???? THAT’S A BLATANT FOUL!!!!!”  Yes, I’m talking about the parents.  Not all parents, just the nutty few.  You know the kind I’m talking about: they are pillars of society, hold good jobs, keep their lawns neat, help elderly ladies cross the street.  Put them anywhere near a place where their child is locked in athletic combat and they morph into a seething mass of screaming irrationality.   They know their children’s sports stats thin-sliced to the nth factor, but ask them the name of their son or daughter’s math teacher and they look at you like you’re speaking in Aramaic.  The cautionary tales abound of over-the-top sports parents – their patron saint is Marv Marinovich, who started training his son Todd to be an all-star quarterback at the tender age of one month.  His father wondered how well a kid could be developed if ‘given the perfect environment’.  So he set out to create it forgetting that his grand assumption neglected the very real fact that his kid would eventually have to inhabit a very imperfect world.  I think Todd probably woke up one day and couldn’t even ask himself “what do I want to be when I grow up?”  It was probably more like “WHO do I want to be when I grow up?”  He was just a big grand experiment, an athletic monster to his father’s Dr. Frankenstein.  The kid who was never allowed to have a Ding Dong growing up has spent most of the last 10 years in rehab.  The moral of the story is this: LET YOU KIDS HAVE A DAMN DING-DONG. 

The truth of the matter is that nothing kills the fun of kids sports like parents.  The remedy is simple: we need to back off and shut up.  Period.  I know whereof I speak:  My name is Monica and I’m a recovering sports parent.  The following are my own stereotypes of over-the-top parents from my years of half-wit, unscientific  and wholly undocumented soccer, football, hockey, figure skating, lacrosse, swimming, tennis, cross-country field research.  Yes, I know: several of the aforementioned sports don’t use fields.  Its allegory, get over it. 

The Early Achiever

It’s a late summer football scrimmage.  Parents are standing along the sidelines chatting, it’s a lovely late afternoon, the sun is just beginning to set.  The air is fragrant with the smell of trampled grass.  If you were to look at the field, you’d see novice football players and 4 coaches trying to coax some form of organized play out of them.  It would – to the untrained eye – look like an exercise in cat herding.  Next to you is a guy dressed in business attire.  He’s shed his suit coat and loosened his tie.  He stands there, unsmiling.  “Look at them.  It’s pathetic.  You’d think those coaches would have prepared them better.  Look – they can’t even run routes.”  You look at him with a mixture of amusement and confusion; you wonder if he’s joking…you say gently, “Yeah, but… the kids are only SIX.”  You hope you see some sense of logic enter the mind of this guy, but NOPE:  you’ve met the Early Achiever.  He (or she) is the guy (or gal) that didn’t make the cut in high school, or made the team but didn’t do anything extraordinary.  He has ‘it’ all figured out.  “It” is the reason why he/she didn’t make the team and usually heavily discounts an absence of natural athletic ability.  And he is still bitter about it.  On any given day his complaints are like a Chinese menu of excuses and the blame will fall squarely on the coaches, the athletic organization, or the mom who organizes the snacks.  This guy may never graduate to full-fledged screaming in the stands because his kid will get sick of the constant grumbling and give up sports for something that will not attract the glare of parental attention, like Accounting.

The Tennis Mom

This sports parent almost exclusively appears on girls’ tennis teams.  They are close cousins to their northern species, The Figure Skating Mom.  They themselves typically belong to tennis clubs and are active participants in the sport.  They are rarely seen out of their own jaunty tennis apparel, and are always well groomed.  They have an overwhelming need to take over the tennis program and turn it into a junior version of the country club.  They have somehow forgotten that parental participation shouldn’t extend beyond the checkbook and minivan.  Some ban their daughter’s boyfriend from attending matches because “it’s distracting”.  Their daughter’s seed on the team is inversely proportional to their mood.  If another girl challenges their daughter for their spot on the ladder, they get so fiercely protective they make Tiger Mothers look like pussycats.  They demand a buffet at each tennis match that typically includes the following list of snacks: “A sweet, a salty, Gatorade, bottled water, sandwiches, 7-layer Mexican dip” which is I believe more food than is needed for all participants in all 27 stages of the Tour de France.  When challenged on the need for a catered affair, they will icily respond “IT’S TRADITION”.  Do not – under any circumstances – reply “So is rampant obesity.”  Jaunty tennis attire is not appropriate wear for a rumble.

The Soccer Mom

Hasn’t this one been done to death?  Yeah, I think so. 

The Lemon

This parent is pretty bitter.  A close relative of the early achiever, this parent’s child somehow manages to stay with the sport.  The child can be gifted or not, a starter or not.  The complaints aren’t usually about the performance of his/her child but about other kids out there, usually those that are better/faster/stronger.  There is an inherent need to chip away at a performance.   The amount of kid-bashing that goes on would make a Child Beauty Pageant Mother proud.  Anything is fair game: their equipment, perceived dedication at practice, performance on game days, their ethnicity, shoe color, parents’ professions, suspected mental defects.  They often accuse other players of cheating.  You can spot these people from afar by simply looking a guy who is surrounded by other parents squirming to get away.  One of my son’s plays the cello, and I tried to imagine a couple of parents engaging in this behavior at an audition.  This is how I imagine it to go:

Parent A: Did you see Billy?

Parent B: Yeah.  You know he’s going to get the first chair, he’s so good.

Parent A: Pfft.  I know, pathetic.  Do you know his private instructor?  NOT EVEN EUROPEAN.

Parent B: Ok, but…

Parent A: And his parents?  They have the orchestra director WRAPPED AROUND THEIR FINGER.  He gets to leave early because of his private lessons.

Parent B: Well, yeah, but the kid is nearly a prodigy, they’re saying “Julliard”

Parent A: With that instrument?  YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.   He doesn’t even have a BELGIAN BRIDGE.

Parent B: Well the music he plays, it’s so beautiful.

Parent A: WHO GIVES A CRAP ABOUT THE MUSIC?

You get my drift.

The Thief

When I was growing up, there were these two girls who were incredibly gifted runners.  Ridiculously so.  They were a year apart and were breaking national age-group records in middle school.  Their father was beyond intense.  I mentioned him to my dad a few weeks ago and he replied “He was a monster”.  If the girls didn’t run the time he demanded he was known to hurl empty soda cans at them and scream at the top of his lungs.  I’m not sure if the girls ran out of fear or the need to please but by the time they were seniors in high school these girls who had competed at the national level were washed up, burned out, barely able to win a local meet and rebelling hard against their dictatorial dad.  I competed against these girls and despite their handing me my rump in every single meet, I really felt sorry for them.  I’d see them out on training runs and there was no joy in their face.  They’d be out there pounding the miles with this look of – I don’t know – maybe, uncontained fury.  I always wonder what happened to them.   I couldn’t imagine running with that weight of my parents expectations on my shoulders.   

I used “Mr. G” as an example of the over-the-top parent, and we’ve all seen them out there.  Their kid isn’t necessarily a national caliber athlete – that is wholly immaterial.  What they have in common is that they’ve stolen the dream from their child.  Whatever fun their child had is long gone and has been replaced by the expectation to perform at a certain level for the benefit of the parent.  Somehow the term “extra-curricular activity” is lost in the equation.  They morph from reasonable people to thinking the balance of the earth rests in the outcome of the sporting event.  Their entire ego is wrapped up in it, and if their child (or child’s team) fails, they have failed, they lose too.  They’ve forgotten the meaning of the word ‘spectator’. 

I witnessed perhaps the worst example this at a lacrosse game this past spring when a father was thrown out of the facility for verbally harassing and threatening the referee.  I watched this man – who is probably a pretty reasonable guy – spin up and out of control the further his son’s team fell behind.  His intermittent shouts turned into a full-throttled barrage of insults at perceived missed calls, accusations of favoritism and finally – the coup de grace – threatening bodily harm on the ref.  Finally – after 30 minutes of the screaming (during which a substantial gap opened up between him and the next person) – the ref threw a yellow flag for an offense committed off the field of play.  He motioned for the coach, met him mid-field and said – very loudly – “I want THAT MAN OUT OF THIS FACILITY NOW!”   The father threw his hands up in the air and stomped away before he could be escorted out.  I felt only pity for his son, who was left to finish playing the game.  I wondered how he managed to play with the humiliatingly heavy cloak of his father’s public shame draped squarely on his padded shoulders.  For these people, there is only one cure: DUCT TAPE.

As parents, we need to recognize that our child’s best might not be THE BEST.  And while we may dream of our son or daughter reaching the highest pinnacle of sport, of imagining them standing on the top podium,  belting out the Star Spangled Banner, the camera panning to a shot of you, the weeping parent who drove him 2 HOURS A DAY TO PRACTICE!  WHAT DEDICATION TO THE CHILD!  Cue the sappy music… STOP!!!!  STOP IT RIGHT NOW.  I know, it’s hard, but there is a cure.  Be the ride, the financial sponsor, the reasonable cheerleader.  Let the coaches teach them a bit about life using the field of play as the chalkboard.  Let their teams be THEIR TEAMS; you can cry and cheer for them, not with them, because you are – I’m sorry – an outsider.  Back off, loosen the apron strings, and if you’re sitting on the side lines, for heaven’s sake put away your whistle.  Most importantly recognize your kid’s dream as theirs and theirs alone.  They should have sole dominion over them, they are entitled to it.  And you’ll see that in play – not in sleep as Shakespeare suggests – what dreams may come.

And if you can’t do that, then bring a big roll of duct tape.

Ghost Stories

I recently went to Boston for a work-related day trip.  I foolishly left my phone charger behind and I'm convinced this small omission resulted in an upending of karmic forces that caused the delay – and finally – cancellation of my flight home to Richmond.  I found myself in the unenviable position of being at the airport, my iPhone running on fumes, and not even a toothbrush in my possession.   After grumbling to the USAirways representative about the weather (she unsurprisingly grumbled back.  Airline counter people are rarely known for their sunny dispositions), I made my way to the ironically named “Customer Services” desk to try and get a hotel for the evening.  The closest hotel was not exactly close, located in the town of Winthrop.  The hotel wasn’t your generic type of lodging, but an inn that the shuttle driver told me was a converted Jewish Community Center.  I was later to be told it was a converted school.  Regardless, it was a converted something and I noted wood floors throughout and very high ceilings as I made my way to my room with complementary toothpaste but no brush.  When I’d asked for both, the desk clerk went to a closet and rummaged through a small plastic basket.  Apparently they don’t often cater to stranded travelers.  I was convinced my room was a converted squash court and soon discovered that the wood floors, high ceilings, and – I swear - paper maché walls resulted in it having the effect of an echo chamber: I heard people walking overhead and down the hallway all evening.  Voices carried, heels on the floor reverberated; it was like trying to sleep at a Celtics game.

I awoke the next morning having gotten approximately 37 minutes of sleep (none of it consecutive) and felt a displacement and weariness down to my bones.  The weather didn’t help: it was overcast and sprinkling outside.  The inn was without a restaurant and the front desk clerk directed me to “walk two stop signs up the street” to a place called “The High Tide”.  The walk up the street was longer than I’d anticipated, and depressing: every house seemed gray, and trees were dropping blossoms that were mashed and tattered on the damp sidewalk.  The whole place looked tired.  I entered the small town center I saw the effects of the recession everywhere: shuttered up business, empty storefronts.  Peeling signs on stores that hadn’t had a person cross the threshold in many a moon.  One hardware store was still operating, rakes and shovels stacked against the end of one wall.  I opened the door to “The High Tide” and a bell jangled.  Every head turned and looked at me from the counter and I felt like I’d interrupted a conversation.  It was the kind of place that has disappeared from most towns and been replaced by generic chains with food as predictable and unremarkable as the clientele.  It had a long counter with stools, a large grill at one end of the counter,  a few tables, painted blue and white tin signs on the walls touting breakfast specials, the prices taped over many times.  I was clearly a stranger here and after an awkward moment of silence that felt like an hour but was probably more like 5 seconds, I shook off my self-consciousness and made my way to the counter and sat down.  I needed coffee and badly.  I ordered my food and the cook – a thin, craggy older guy dressed in a ball cap and plaid shirt and who looked like the love child of actor Steve Buscemi and Gilligan – got busy on the grill.

These were clearly locals and regulars; they knew each other and their banter easy, their regional accents thick as chowder.  Their dress reflected their blue-collar lives and I couldn’t have been more out of place in my business attire if I’d come dressed as Scarlett O’Hara.  One guy got up to pay his bill, easily chatting with and hitting on the waitress.  I guessed him to be in his 50’s, she a good 20 years younger, and he asked her to go to Vegas with him when he and his brothers take their mother for her 80^th birthday.  Apparently, I found the place in the world where an appropriate birthday celebration for your elderly mother is a trip to sin city.  He was loud and standing right next to me and it was all I could do not to turn and just look at him, to see what a character like this looked like.  I somehow had the feeling that he wanted me to, so he could size up the stranger in their midst, quiz me on who I was, where I was from, what I was doing here.

As I was sipping my coffee, I looked around the room and marveled that this place, for the most part, had probably remained unchanged since it opened.  The only exception came when the waitress brought me my juice in a small plastic cup and was hit with disappointment that it wasn’t in one of those heavy contoured glasses found at diners.  The plastic was an anachronism here, a disposable item in a place that had endured the years.  The remaining patrons chatted about the murder of a young boy at the hands of his mother, his body found on a remote road in New Hampshire.  “I just don’t understand it…why didn’t she just drop him off with someone, a relative?”  “It’s like that mother in Houston who drowned her five children….” They debated the topic for a while – never once suggesting that perhaps mental illness was a factor at play in the commission of the crime – and an elderly heavy-set guy two stools down from me finally shook his head and ended the discussion with “She’s not from around here.  She’s from Texas.”  

My food arrived, my plate heaped with eggs, bacon, toast, and homefries.  I could have taken the plate and shaken it and the food would have remained stationary: this café was either unaware or unconcerned with the ill effects of saturated fat.  It tasted good.  Really, really good.  I’d bought a book at the Airport and had it on the counter next to me.  The man, who’d neatly explained the crime as a by-product of the suspect’s geography, looked over and asked “What are you reading?  Is it good?”  I explained that I’d bought it at the airport, but hadn’t started it.  He asked where I was staying and I told him about the inn, and then offered up the information about the wood floors and the noise.  He then offered up that the building was in fact a converted school… and the noise I heard?  He had an explanation for that too.  “Old buildings make noise.  I didn’t used to believe in ghosts.  But then I moved into the house of my neighbors.  She’d died of cancer.  He was so sad that he committed suicide after.”  My first thought is WHY on earth anyone would willingly want to live in a house with such a history.  But being the outsider I just nodded my head.  “So, we had a ghost in the house.  I’m sure it was him.”  He went on to explain that he was an amiable spirit who didn’t like discord.  If he started arguing with his wife or daughter-in-law, the ghost would turn on the TV or make things fall from the table.  “He liked the house peaceful.  He’s not in the house anymore though.  He left when my daughter-in-law moved out.”  He spoke so matter-of-factly, and the only thing I could manage to ask was “Do you miss him?”  He replied with quiet sadness “Yeah, I do.  He was a nice ghost.”

Another man got up and made his way to the cash register.  He saw my book and asked “Whatcha readin?  Is it good?”  This question is evidently the local icebreaker.  The cook and two guys in stools at the other end of the counter started arguing about sports.  Boston fans are passionate about their teams, and it was at this point that I noticed the cook was wearing a New York Yankees cap.  In Boston, this would be the same as wearing an “I Heart Bin Laden” shirt at ground zero.  I couldn’t believe the chutzpah of a chowderhead rooting for the Yankees.  I said – without thinking – “You’ve got a YANKEES cap on?  HERE?  IN BOSTON?  Are you nuts?”  He smiled at me and opened the buttons on his navy and white checked shirt to reveal a Yankees t-shirt underneath.  “I gave up rootin’ faw the Red Sawx in 1968.  What – I was supposed ta wait 86 yeahs?  Fahget it.”  I shook my head “Wow, you must catch a lot of flack.”  He shot back quickly “I cook ya food – no one says nothin” and laughed.  

I paid my bill – where can you get breakfast for $6.25 anymore? – and made my way on the damp streets toward the inn and the shuttle to the airport for my flight home.  During the trek back I had this thought that these were the most real people I’d met in a long time.  But later, on the flight back to Richmond, it occurred to me that maybe they weren’t, that if I were to go back to the café tomorrow, I’d find “The High Tide” long ago boarded up, it’s tin signs peeling and hanging neglected on the walls and discover that the folks I’d met weren’t in fact real, but spirits from another time.