New Year’s Baseball Glove

The best Christmas gift I received this year was the reaction on my son Sid's face when he opened the box containing a new baseball glove. It was a look of joy and appreciation. Not at getting a new possession. The glove meant more: it meant hope promise, joy and opportunity.

During Fall baseball this past October, Sid's glove disappeared in a case of mistaken identity. During batting practice, he glove went missing. What was left behind in the batting cage was a glove that looked a lot like his, slightly older and smaller, but at first glance and even at second glance, looked enough like Sid's to mistake the two gloves.

We are guessing that the glove left behind in its place was itself a borrowed or second hand glove because the name on it did not match or resemble the name or family name of anyone signed up for the league or clinics that autumn and the numbers I called from the phone book matching the name were not missing a glove nor had any children that age playing baseball.

Still, we both handled the grief over the loss quite well and Sid finished the season with my glove, a worn, slightly larger, Derek Jeter model, which worked quite well for him, even though he prefers second base to Jeter's short stop.

It was sad to lose the mitt regardless. Sid had taken a couple of summers to completely break it in and, as many of us will remember from our childhood, baseball gloves are the kinds of precious things we sleep with at night and that fuel our fields of dreams.

The lost glove sadness was overtaken as Sid continued on with a conviction like the Whos of Whoville after their Christmas presents had been taken. Each inning, he ran out to his position with dad's beat up but more-than-functional glove and played the game he loves the most. He was not going to let the loss of his possession ruin his chance at celebrating on the green grass and ag-lime base paths.

With the help of his aunt Jennifer and my good fortune at finding the last of last year's models at one of the sporting goods stores, which meant that it was about 40 percent of the price of this year's model, Sid has a new glove to break in. We started the process the day after Christmas, in this rare warm-aired and brown-grassed winter.

On the 26^th, we went over to the park near grandma and grandpa's house with two of Sid's cousins and his uncle Michael and played catch, hot box—and we played long enough to make it official.

We played long enough to stir our hot stove dreams of the coming season, which have been spliced with a smattering of newspaper pieces about players and for whom they will play in the upcoming season. And roused by activities like Sid's school History Day project that is largely about baseball's free agency and the biggest hero of that piece of history, the late St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Flood)

Sid presenting 4th grade biography project to Biography Day guests.

Sid is learning that baseball isn't just about the game, which it is. It's only a game, but it is also about life; it is about the politics that we cannot avoid and it is one of our strongest parallels to American culture and history. It is an ongoing lesson about small-and large-scale justice, on and off the field. It is about how to care who wins and what we win—and what we lose; how to love those things in the right way, appreciating them when we have them and letting go when they are gone.

I think deep down, these must be lessons that we, as kids, yearn for and maybe are as much a reason we play so hard as for the fun of the game. Maybe that is why Sid has done three class projects on Jackie Robinson, one on the 1919 (Chicago White Sox) Black Sox scandal and now Curt Flood.

Not long ago, Sid took his Brooklyn Dodgers replica baseball hat to a chess tournament. We originally got it to go with a costume he had for his Biography Day presentation several years ago, playing Jackie Robinson, of course. During one of the rounds of chess play, it got lost.

He's not a little kid anymore, and it seems that losing the hat did not phase him as he continued to play. At the end of the chess tournament, we looked all over the tournament area for it, finally finding it at the officials' table in the gym. As he and I walked out, I noticed that he was a little weepy. He wasn't going to cry. He does not cry easily these days, but I had to ask him if something was wrong.

He said, “Well, the hat really means a lot to me.” At that moment, my idea of what the hat meant to him turned into a strong mental and emotional knowledge. I knew it was an important hat, even wearing it during Little League when he was younger instead of the team issued hats of the same color. One of his grandmothers remarked that baseball season how proud he was of it.

But what he carried home with him after the tournament, wore on the baseball field and for his history day project was more than just a floppy piece of sewn Dodger Blue cloth with a bill; it is a badge of so many things he and other young people need and want to learn about the joys and sorrows of our stories—of life. It tells us we have something to unwrap every day, things that will elate us and bring us tears.

Maybe that is the lesson for the coming year—a lesson from the last one. I am still learning, and maybe this coming year will be better, smarter and more joyful than the last. I hope it will be for you.

(Please leave comments at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com)

Six-year-old Santa

Forty-two years ago this morning, I woke up to a Christmas tree that hovered over a pile of presents—and I knew from where the presents came.

That was the Christmas that I learned who Santa Claus was.

Christmas Eve, dad pulled me and my sister aside. I was six. He had something to tell us, in the darkness of the living room lit up my little more than Christmas tree lights and ambient rays from the kitchen.

Of course, there were no presents under the tree, yet. Of course, we were waiting with anxious excitement at what was going to happen that evening. Dad had something important to say. You can imagine that he knew the challenge of getting a six-year-old to pay attention when they are waiting for Santa.

He got down to my eye level. I think he placed his hands on my shoulders and gave the most earnest look, a look coming from an exceptionally earnest man.

Then, he told me: that Santa Claus was made up, a concept—that Santa was really him and mom, and grandma and grandpa. That is where the presents came from. I don't know that I said much. I guess that I nodded as he spoke, taking in the deep revelation.

He said that Christmas was something he and mom did, gave to us because of how much joy they received from seeing us open the presents each Christmas morning. He said that there was no way that he was going to let some strange man walk into the house at middle of the night, no matter what he has with him—that if an unknown man walked into his family's house, that man would have daddy to deal with.

I think I might have uttered something about how it made more sense then the fat red-suited guy story. I was relieved on several counts. First, the idea that we were visited in the middle of the night was a bit scary. Second, our chimney let to a fiery furnace, not a fireplace like all of the popular fairy tale depictions. Third, it meant that I didn't have to hold up my end of a farce.

I was also a bit proud. It was a sign that my parents had taken one of the first steps showing respect to me as a person who was growing into the real world. It was if he was saying, you are ready for this information. I was.

It was also important because it allowed him to reinforce the important story of Christmas, that what it is meant to be and is important to our family because it is the day on which we celebrate the birth and coming of Jesus, something that continually gets lost in what most of of spend our Christmas on.

There are as many ways in which parents I know do this, as many ways as there are parents. One friend said something to her 11-year-old son just this year, to which he responded that he had pretty much figured it out, and then with what I imagine was a sly and loving grin, that he didn't let on because he figured that he would get more presents if he played along. (I think this is one of the great pre-teen conspiracies.)

Another said that she never wanted to tell her kids, not because she wanted her kids so much to believe in Santa as she wanted them to believe in the possibilities and capacity of magic in the world.

Her statement made me think: is Santa an idea, belief or hope in magic? I don't know. I like to think that it is something other than a miracle like we speak of when we talk about Jesus. But the concept, at its origin if not in recent execution, comes out of the same kind of hope and love: one of giving and providing, like that of Jesus feeding the multitude with meager loaves and fishes.

There seem to be a couple of popular ways to view the feeding of the crowd that day. Some will say that Jesus made the food multiply with his superhuman touch, making much out of little with the wave of his hand. Others believe that the miracle was the phenomenon of the masses being moved to share, that Jesus compelled a kind of love not just from himself for the hungry but that he infused love in many to feed the many, share what they had and brought it to the gathering—hungry and those of means, together.

So, is the magic of Santa that there is a guy who rides in a sleigh around the world in one night leaving gifts for children, good ones (ones whose parents can afford and want them to have everything they ask for) and not as good ones (whose parents are not of such great means or who are just rotten beings and get coal in their stocking)? Or is the magic that the idea of Santa makes us want to give to our children and people we love?

What moves us? What do we believe? What is the meaning of Christmas? Do you celebrate Christmas? What is your favorite holiday, and why?

That Christmas 42 years ago was my favorite. That morning, my sister and I crept down the stairs with the same anticipation, excitement and wonder as we did before we knew the secret. Like all the years before, we slowly made our way down the stairs after asking mom and dad if it was okay for us to go look and instead of running back upstairs to our sleepy parents who had spent the night wrapping and assembling and yelling in their sleepy ears, “Mommy, daddy, come look at what Santa brought us,” we knew that they already knew and that we just needed to wait a little while so that they could find the camera before we tore through the wrapping paper.

We were big kids, on that day, and in years to come, we would have the fun of helping mom and dad make a Santa Claus Christmas for our younger siblings. We got to be Santa, just like mom and dad.

COMMENTS CAN BE LEFT AT http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/six-year-old-santa/

frozen in/out of love

Gray day

hiding behind the brown

of a winter

i never lived

i feel frozen ground

remember how

i took for granted green

soft, supple blades

recalling that i did not

take my shoes off

in the warmer day

sun-filled, asking me to

run my toes through its hair

like only a lover would allow

and to lay down with it

another invitation i let pass

and now its caress has

grown cold and hard

mocking me naked

its blanket of snow cast aside

so late in this season

with trees who

have not dropped their leaves

in a last gasp of vanity

tomorrow, in may's solar rays

another boy

will play, walk and love

run his toes through the grass

while mine hide safe

in steady shoes

that will not tell the secret colors

of spring's thaw

Sun Worship

Sitting at my computer, the sun's ray are creeping closer as it sweeps across the southern sky of our North American Winter. Soon, it will obscure the view on the screen. Too much light cast on light and it will wash out what I need to see, illuminate. I will be helpless. Why?

They tell us not to look directly at the sun. They tell us that if we gaze up at the eclipse, we will go blind. No one dare look upon it's royalty, it's deity without suffering the consequences of such blaspheme.

So, then, can we see anything? Or is it like two sources of light, two suns send us into a funky orbit, never quite knowing which way we will be tugged next? Is this why God only wants us to have the One?

But I don't have to worry about it, today. I am warm, with the sun piercing through the window that braces me from the cold of this high winter day. The day has been made mercifully short and will keep me from too many temptations to attempt too much knowledge that might toss me out of this Eden.

A Child’s Thanksgiving Leftovers

My friend Judith said today that she wondered what other people's attitude was about Thanksgiving leftovers. I know what my father thinks.

Other than the red beans and rice that were a staple of his childhood and that my mother still cooks for him and her children and a grandson who has the greatest affinity for them, the one thing that dad could eat every day is leftover Thanksgiving turkey.

There was a time when I was not sure if this affinity was one of convenience, necessity or of a favorite taste on the pallet and stomach. My mother assures me that it is a favorite. My introduction to this affinity made it not so clear.

A day or two after the Thanksgiving when I was four and my sister was three, we found ourselves, for several days, in a one-parent house. Mom was in the hospital. Dad was left alone to take care of us. Lucky for him, he had what was left of a 24-pound turkey and other fixings that were never going to be consumed by two people and two little kids.

So, the first day, we had Thanksgiving leftovers. Easy enough. They second day? We had Thanksgiving leftovers. The third day, dad served Thanksgiving leftovers. It was either on that day or the next that my father's two lovely children sat at the dinner table, not moving a muscle, not lifting a fork and not budging an inch in spite of dad's urging us to eat.

Dad was not a clean-the-plate kind of person, but it was important that his kids get nourishment, and excuse from the table was did not come unless enough of the right nutrients made their way into our bodies, enough protein, enough green, yellow or orange vegetable and enough to make his kids healthy. So, it must have been some kind of pity, mercy or grace with which he viewed his children's sad faces, tired of turkey, tired of missing mom, and too tired to know we were hungry.

I suppose dad was tired, too. He did a good job in mom's absence. We were well cared for and generally were in good spirits in spite of knowing mom was not there. We did miss her. I can only imagine his sadness, as he relented and packed us up to go to McDonald's. Sadness for his kids, who endured without mom, without something new to eat. Sadness that his lovely bride was in the hospital. Sad from fatigue.

It was many years before we know why mom went to the hospital. That holiday weekend, she almost lost the pregnancy that would in months become my brother Michael. I am still amazed at how my parents handled this episode. I remember being woken up early in the morning. Mom stood in the kitchen. I don't remember much except that they told us that mommy had to go to the hospital—right now. I remember mom holding herself up by the kitchen counter on one side and dad's strong arms on her other.

I remember that during one of the most frightening events a couple can go through, my parents said that everything was going to be alright, that mommy was going to be fine, but they also instilled in their children, with some kind of calm spirit, that everything was going to be alright. We were not afraid. Even for the trip to the hospital, we were well cared for.

Mom and dad did this with such skill, care and love. Kind of like today's President, there was no drama—at least not for us kids.

Months later, mom and dad felt confident enough to talk to us about having a baby brother or sister. We still wondered where this baby was going to come from, where would we get it. I think at one point, I asked if we went to a baby store to pick it out. And that May, we had a baby brother. We were kids. And four days of Thanksgiving leftovers was a small price for my sister and I to pay for him. It was a great reward for what my mother endured and the character, faith and enough judgment to know when to let the kids have McDonald's that pulled us through.

I do remember sitting speechless at the dinner table that November. But I can only imagine what was going through dad's head and what was in his heart that evening as we opened the wrapped hamburgers and placed the french fries in the messy pools of ketchup three- and four-year-olds make. I have sat at McDonald's, being a dad in speechless moments, hoping the hamburgers and play room would sufficiently mask hints of sadness on the face of my son's dad. I wonder if I have been so good at freeing my son of such burdens of the grown-up.

This year, I still have some leftovers from Thanksgiving in my ice box. I will have to finish them soon, frozen or not. They are quite good. Not just turkey. New Orleans gumbo. Mom makes it every holiday season. But I still know when it's time to eat out. At least I think I do.

If you have any leftovers stories, I'd be glad to hear them. Share them here, if you like. Or any holiday story. Especially the Thanksgiving ones. Good or bad. Funny or not. I don't want to forget.

Counting the Places at the Thanksgiving Table

November 25, 2011

.It is one’s duty to be thankful at this time of year. I see and hear so many statements of thanks. Enough to create more than just a little dissonance when I see them pasted next to pictures of our real world. Still, maybe today’s lesson is that thanks is not the antithesis of those sometimes sad pictures. Hard days sometimes accentuate those things.

This Thanksgiving Day was, like many others, was spent at my parents’ house. Mom and dad have made a good home, always a good place to be. It is a good place to visit, for me. It has proven to be a great place for others whom we have invited over the years and my parents are people who I love to show off.

This Thanksgiving morning, my son and I rode up to mom and dad’s, a happy escape from a hard week. It was a quite drive, this time with no radio and only a book in my son’s lap, leaving his hand-held video games unlit beside him. The silence let in a lot of thoughts from the previous days, things I guess I needed to talk about and may tell you later—and some that I will not, but all things that I need to process. (Maybe some of today’s stories will make enough sense and find the right emotional space to retell, and maybe, with time, wisdom will tell me that there is no story.) Apart from the half hour slowdown as we left the outer ring suburbs, the speed of our trek let my thoughts disappear in the slipstream and vaporize on the freeway.

Grandma was so excited to see her grandson, the first of three grandchildren to arrive, she almost forgot to greet me, her first of four children. The other grandchildren would follow, with their parents. What was different this year, is that there were no friends, no neighbors, and no strays who mom and dad so kindly invite into their home on a day that should be shared.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It is a holiday where everyone is supposed to be welcome without having to fake obligation to a particular religious perspective, and a time when people can just get together to be with each other around a special meal. And be reminded why everyone who joins us around that table is special. No obligation to buy the right gift or spend money we need but don’t have on things we don’t have or need and no code besides a heightened idea of how we should treat and enjoy people we know well or met for the first time.

What is missing is more than just the chance to show off mom and dad—two people who are more than worth showing off; more than the stories we get to retell to guests who have missed the previous 40 Thanksgivings at our house, but have to be shared, especially the ones that embarrass one of us.
This year, there were few stories. This is the first time in a couple of years that we’ve been guestless, and as much as I love my family, my siblings, my nieces, my parents and my son, this year’s empty places at the table left an empty place in my heart and a lots opportunity to share the a great spirit with which I was raised with people who are special by their being there.
I am thankful, without grudge, for the blessing of having this place, this home to call my own and from time to time to give to people I love and people who need to receive the love that lives at mom and dad’s. Driving home, the freeway, I am left again with my thoughts, including all the reasons why there were no Happy Thanksgiving visitors, but, also why and how I am blessed to have the place share.
It has been a hard week and I know I have a hard week to come. And, yes, I am still thankful.

Post-Halloween Modern: A Poem by Sidney Carlson White

What lies at the bottom of the Halloween bag?
Monsters, ghouls, vampires, ghosts perhaps?
The forlorn wrapper of a Snickers bar?
The chocolaty smell of the scrumptious?

Trick-or-Treat, Trick-or-Treat
Effervescent gleam, candy scream
House to house, they run and skip
The Candy beckons with chocolate dreams

Which house is more finely dressed
Decor combat, the new game
Pumpkins and lights hold court here
Flickering glow in the darkness

–Sidney Carlson White

The Only Respect He Will Ever Get

Don’t complain
When you see him
Looking fierce
Baggy pants
Not the man
Who you want to even
Sell you your french fries.
Because to make you cross
To the other side of the street
At the mere sight of him
Is the only respect
He will ever get.

E's Body

This story will start in a short bit, but first I have to explain why it is a day late and will be a page short. This weekend, I am spending my time with a handful of great writer-colleauges at a retreat mentored by the prolific fiction author Percival Everett and poet Philip Bryant. It is a great time talking—sharing with them. We are laughing our heads off and getting filled with more stories that we wish we could all write ourselves—and listening to our new friends find that we don’t have to write all these stories ourselves.

The color of the weekend tells me how pale my telling of this weeks story is, that I cannot do it justice—and that many of the things I have written here in this forum are waiting for more color, texture, flavor and sounds that will want readers to linger with the stories and hopefully share more of their own.

And I don’t know why this story came to mind—seemingly unfortunately, early in this morning. Unfortunate, only because I know it is important, especially to one friend of mine, but I do not have the mental space to give it justice today, with so many other writing projects that are filling my days, my note book and the many conversations that my co-Givens Retreat Fellow, story-telling voices are too eager to join. For most of the weekend, my mind has been somewhere else, on other issues, other things about which we must write—and I will tell you more about this experience in coming days. But at the moment, I have to get out at least the notes for this story. And maybe you will fill in the color. Maybe you will fill in the details from your own life movie. The story is not uncommon.

This is a story of my friend E who called me one summer evening, tears of hurt and anger filling the stream of rant I heard as she told me, “Can you belief what he just did?!?!” She said she was, “So mad,” and with the sounds and tones I could tell that the outstretched arms of the tallest basketball player where not long enough to show just how mad “so mad” was.

I don’t know how to tell the story and in a real sense, it is not my story to tell, or at least tell the best so that it means what it needs to mean. It seems so awkward, painfully awkward that I have trouble getting it out. It is that her boyfriend had just helped her put in a large air conditioner in her apartment. After, he said something to the effect that he should now “get his reward,” as in she should give him sex.

I was not thinking of it that way. I thought, for sure, he was just having tongue-in-cheek fun in their intimate space, a little play in that is a part of noticing the space that two lovers occupy to figure out if they will make love now, later or spend that moment in each others’ space in some other way—or spend a moment apart. It was hard to imagine that he was thinking in those terms. It was not hard for her.

And the more I listened, the more I knew I just needed to listen to her and how she felt. The more I listened, that night and in later days, I realized that maybe he really did expect sex for service.

The more I listened, the more I saw that her anger was deeper than the absurd implication that sharing her body was worth help with the air conditioner. I listened, that night and over weeks and months enough to realize that while it might not have been solely the help with the air conditioner that he was offering—that he was holding out other things: THINGS and was asking for her love, her body and sex.

He is a wealthy man. But for most of their relationship, she resisted having him buy things for her, do things for her, buy her. She was as fierce about paying attention to not setting up a dynamic where he expected sex because he paid for stuff, a dynamic that I increasingly became aware was part of his psyche. She avoided it as strongly as I avoid having woman friends do any of my cleaning, especially girlfriends… because it harkens to another dynamic that doesn’t cast the roll of women duly. (My mother may not have won the battle to get her son to do a good job taking care of his house, she, and other influential people in my life, have taught me well that it is not the job of some woman to take care of house cleaning for me.)

When I see her, some days, she is very plain looking and on others strikingly stunning—or stunningly striking—and as I say this the redundancy of either phrase is not lost on my, but the emphasis is intentional. And it should not matter and I would not mention it, because in the most critical and final analysis, it is irrelevant.

What is not irrelevant is how she feels about how she looks, how others contribute to her sense of beauty—or detract from it, and, more importantly, her sense of her own humanity. As one of the girlchildren of our society, she feels the urgency of establishing her sense of worth, power of her sexuality and the human care that needed to take care of both. She knows the passing and the intimate gazes that will evaluate her as not pretty enough just as well as they will trigger the desire to make love to her. She is aware that this gaze will often come with an attitude of male supremacist entitlement, that the few bread crumbs off his plate of power and goods are sufficient payment for what is most precious.

E is not wealthy. She is one of the millions of people in our country who are very challenged to keep health insurance. She has a resume that, while is shows fast and deep talents, puts her in line for employment that barely keeps in her tiny apartment and in a nifty but old car. Those things are important. Health. Home. Job. Money. Those are things about which she worries and things she knows she could make less of a worry with a man who would buy that security for her. For her, for all of us, that price is seen when she looks in the mirror each morning and has tells herself what she is worth.


Not sure why I am thinking about this story now. Maybe it is because I am communing with a group of articulate, smart, creative people, all of them with black bodies, all of us who know what it is like to have our bodies, our image subjected to alternately an object of hatred and desire—and often experiencing those as one in the same.

Still, this is not my story to tell. It is hers to tell with more color and truth and clarity. It is hers to tell in a way that tells me why she was mad enough to spit profanity, what it is that is so important that it is an issue of protecting ones sense of self.

She tells it in a way that reminds me that I want to be beautiful, for that to be acknowledged and to have the people in my life respond with their beauty. E tells me she knows and has to remember she’s worth a whole lot more and tells me with a melody that give it meaning. I hear her. We know.

For now, back to the task of Sisyphus.

Friday Night Baseball: Game 7

It is Friday night. I am getting to this post a bit late. I have an excuse, or a few.


My son Sid and I have been spending a lot of time with the World Series. It is baseball. The best of baseball. It calls for my attention. Even now, as I type, Game 7 is pulling my attention from this craft. That is my story of the moment. Baseball is full of many more.

One of the big ones this year is Ron Washington’s story. Ron Washington, former Twin, former 3rd base coach for the Oakland A’s, and current manager of the Texas Rangers. He has led them to their second consecutive World Series. Interesting man.

He is getting a lot of attention for his animation in the dugout. They call his stirring “The Wash,” a dance of excitement that shows his emotion more than what we see in most Major League managers. He stops his feet as his players round the based and waves his arms.

This dance is not just about his personality. “Wash” is a Major League manager by merit, but a 3rd base coach at heart. The 3rd base coach, as his players round the bases on their way home, has to guide them home, using hand signals and moving his feet as quickly as a player to get in position to relay the signals to a fast-moving base runner. It is one of the most exciting dances in baseball. Windmill arms, the body English guiding a runner to home.

Being a 3rd base coach also requires a quick mind that can communicate complicated instructions to base runners and batters using an even more complicated system of clandestine hand and body signs. The job requires a fast-paced understanding of baseball situations, individual players and strategy. In short, a good 3rd base coach is smart.

We don’t hear much about Ron Washington’s intellect. It is hard for Black men to get that piece of respect. On top of having the visible animation and the smarts to run a team, he also has the quality of being able to understand and respond to the emotional disposition of his players. This was never more evident in how he spoke with Game 4 of the World Series, meeting this young pitcher at his emotional apex.

Sid and I, along with his friend Otto, went to see the movie “MONEYBALL” a couple of weeks ago. It is the story of how Billy Beane built a winning team for the Oakland A’s, a team that had far fewer resources than large market teams like the New York Yankees. It is more than just a good underdog story.

Sid loved it. So did I. Still, our favorite line is when Billy Beane and Ron Washington are visiting are talking to Scott Hatteberg about playing first base after spending his whole career as a catcher and having nothing left in his arm–and Billy says, to Hatteberg that first base isn’t all that difficult and turns to Ron Washington and says, “Right, Wash?” and without missing a beat, right on the tail of Beane, he says, “It’s ineradicable difficult.” It was one of many laughs tow baseball fans

I am writing this as the last game of the 2011 World Series plays next to me. I am writing this to describe why baseball is a love of mine, and my son, and some other people who find the stories of human character and beauty. And the complications of social realities, shortcomings of that human character and what we do to make our way past the imperfect.

I will finish watching the game, this time without Sid sitting next to me on the sofa as is the usual (apart from those moments when he jumps up in excitement as one of the many nuances and not-so-subtle events that make fans cheer or groan). We’ll see how this story turns out.

The Eternal Paper Anniversary

The Eternal Paper Anniversary

A 5-year-old's cardboard box Valentine's day has “be mine” written all over it. This, often our first social lesson in love is such unfair pedagogy, veiled in the simple aesthetics of arts and crafts. It was said that “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten, ” where we learned that love flowed from that red and pink heart shape.

Can you recall the shock upon seeing for the first time a picture of a real heart? We learned what it really takes to keep blood and live surging through our veins and to keep us alive. But why did we not find a new course for our scissors, still cutting out the same heart shape, pasting in over our chest with a happy smile of undying immortality?

And do you recall the shock when, after all those years, when our life's love faded as surely as the red construction paper in a sun that could not compete with the coursing throbs of life's true passion? And even though we knew what the heart really looks like, we go to cut out our heart shape, like a young lover who still has not see what the heart looks like?

He said, “She is not the construction paper cutout that I married.” She said, “But I cut the edges so carefully. Why does he not like it?” I said, “I would never make that mistake. I will be sure to buy different paper and use a better pair of scissors.”

One Reason Poetry is Important

Last night, my son Sid and I went to a poetry reading. I will go blue in the face trying to explain why it was important to be there. I am glad that I did not have to explain why to Sid, that for some reason, he knew, that he would go there for more than the several out-loud laughs he had or for the treats that did not come until after the reading.


It was important to be there. It was important to learn, remember, and respond to and from those words, the ideas, the emotion. How much can we learn from poetry?

Last night's lessons: They are about poetry, art and life, and why humans need all three.

We learned that there are things that we will say in poems that we won't say to our parents, won't say if we are shy and won't say if we are pretending to be polite at the expense of telling the truth. That there are things that “people” will say in their sleep, and you can make wonderful verse by just capturing those words. We say, “people,” but in the poem, it reads true, reads “lover” or “the one I love.” Sometimes we are so shy, but how else do we learn what people say in their sleep?

I was reminded that the devil so someone who will ask you to accept a deal that he himself would never accept. And that such men will call themselves gods in order to justify their carnivorous appetite for human mortals and their love and their souls.

I was reminded of what it takes—what factors must be in place—for a grown man to take the life of a boy: how he gets to take the safety of other children and women to whom he is privileged to become too close.

I was reminded that the collection of people with whom I share last night's event is a sufficiently rare collection in that we all understood that to take things like this is wrong.


We learned that we had a place where we could talk about it, even if changing the world would require us leaving that comfortable space. We were happy to know that just as those snippets of art moved us, we, too, could move people and the world will change just a little.

And it is time to write. For all of us, it is time to write, and share. And we won't have to explain why poetry is important, because, today, even though I put them to paper, I am at a loss for words.

someone told me

today

i don't believe in these things

almost as strongly

as if i did not believe in God anymore, and

the moon, stars, sun, wind, are

just cruel props

setup to help lure away the best of

my attentions

because it was not real

an illusion

or just so paper thin that

it is an easily pierced ear drum

that will never hear again

except maybe a faint whisper.

careful, I was not

are the sea, the moon for real

or are they a hoax?

did the Apollo ships really go there?

did Columbus not fall of the edge of the earth?

or is the horizon, a tired trick

that keeps getting repeated

as we chase it?

all a mock discovery

i am the fool, like the horse that runs

into the barn after it has been

set ablaze while today

someone tells me

it was the “for real”

shelter from danger

someone

Swallow

Many things have crossed my mind this week. Some of them, I am still not sure are worthy of the space they might take up here or your time. Or this may be a Minnesotan excuse not to share. Or maybe the best ideas came to me on the edge of sleep and I neglected to keep my journal by my bed and they have since been forgotten.

One thing I remember from the past week is meeting writer Patricia Anita Young. We met at an informational meeting about a writers' retreat and workshop to which we are both applying. We are writers, so I guess we talked about stories. Our stories. Stories of our people.

I don't know how we got on the topic, but we spoke of the stories of the civil rights era. She talked about her mother and relatives who lived through the Jim Crow south, and her visits there as a young adult. She talked about the difference between the “Colored” restroom and the “White” one. Not equal, she said. Just like everything else.

She talked about how the common story of discrimination and segregation was not one all African Americans wanted to speak. She said that one of her elder's favorite words was “swallow.”

“Favorite.” So many of us are required to shut up. Pat spoke of a relative who was raped by a white cab driver with whom she had to work each day. When a white man raped a black woman, what gets said? What could she say? It was a generation and a half ago, in the segregated South. What could she say today? Who would listen? Who would be on trial? Or would her plaint even register as a sound on the tin ear drums of racial and gender injustice with which we still live?

Her family elder had words. Not just words, but a scream. I suspect that they were just left as tears on a pillow or a boiling blood rage in a night that had to be turned down in the light of the day in front of the ruling class—in front of the man whose privilege allowed him to touch her most sacred places, a place that is only for her to decide who goes in, not him, not her priest, not a law, not anyone. Allowed him to do it with absolute impunity.

She could not say. She had no voice. She had the words, emotions, understanding of what happened to her, what happened to that space that she might share with a love or at least someone with whom she consented to share, what happened to her body, what happened to any sense of safety or security she might have each day when she went to work. Instead, her words were swallowed.

But we swallow everyday. Some of us more than others. We talked about another local African American writer who had a book published a decade and a half ago about her experiences working in a very male, white dominated occupation, as a “lineman” for the phone company. It was supposed to be one of those what-it's-like-to-be-black-and-female-in-America stories that tells it like it is. Instead, every time she got to one of those places where it need to be acknowledged that what described what we face and how and why it is hurtful and destructive, she would pull her punch. She would say, well, it wasn't so bad. That it was just an interesting, funny story, ironic and silly, maybe even absurd. But not speak to the substance of what we live day to day that has left us with a caste, apartheid system enforced with terror.

She swallowed, just like we do so often. Whose comfort was she protecting? Who do we protect?

We swallow, because the hurt and anger of our speaking would hurt those to whom we direct our words that must be said. We swallow, not out of compassion, but for the knowledge of the consequences of speaking that is feeling that rage powerful enough to create that terror and apartheid.

We are trained to swallow that mouth full of dirt, instead of spitting it out back to the place from where it came. I do it every day. So do most women and most people of color. And those who will not be quiet often do not survive long, even doing so in the name of justice and self respect.

Maybe as we write, Patricia and I will spit out the words that we've swallowed for so long, that our foremothers and fathers swallowed, words that we swallow and words that we hope our daughters and sons will not swallow in the future. And maybe the people who care, care about us and care about our society, will get to hear the stories they have longed for.

And maybe some of those words will be worth your time. Some day, if not now. Some how. I hope so. 

LEAVE COMMENTS AT http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/swallow/ 

stolen kiss

what was your first kiss like?

was it happy?

sad?

did it make your toes curl

a smile all the way

into the next day?

or did you hide it

in darkness where

no one would know

what he did?

because it is not love

that takes a first kiss away

forever

into scary depths

that will not surface

for a thousand kisses

you tell him

“this is not love”

he is angry

should you be angry?

should i?

i already am

or am i

projecting my own anger?

about what, I won't tell

don't know

happy. sad.

smile or hidden shame

are remembered or forgotten

because neither is to be believed

for “the questions of a thousand dreams”

spout the answers of a thousand fools

who, like me

think our kiss

could be the one

to fix it all.

LEAVE COMMENTS AT  http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/stolen-kiss/

The Lingering Aftermath of 9-11

The day after the 9-11 attacks, many of the food court vendors at Union Station in Washington, DC, sported American flags at their counters and stands. Most of them were immigrants. Many of them middle eastern or Asian. So many were non-white. Looking at their faces, I could tell that they were more afraid in those days than I was, than the threat that most of us realistically faced in those days.

The flags hung like door post lambs blood, begging that the plague of scorn would pass by their houses. They remember the days of collective accusation from the Oklahoma City bombing that lasted until it was discovered that the attack was more associated with fair Christianity than Islam. “We are believers,” their flags said, as if they were more familiar with Christian Identity than much of America.

In the mean time, there was a quiet that hovered over a city that was usually busy with air traffic crisscrossing the sky and the hustle of the town that seems to think it is the most important city on earth. We had an excuse to be something other than ourselves for a while, and to be even more ourselves as we attempted to conceal who we had been all those days behind the tragedy and our facades of solemn sorrow.

So many points on our day-to-day walk were covered with flags. It was like seeing the streets of my childhood on Flag Day or the Fourth of July. Flag lined streets, house after house. We did not have a flag. But the grandsons and granddaughters of the German immigrants that dominated the city's population—some of whom had kin folk in the outer reaches of the community's geography that still spoke German, or something closer to that than the English of their brothers and sisters who moved into town—decided on the flag on their front step.

I was envious. One day, I asked my dad if we could get a flag for our house. I am sure he asked me what it meant to me to have a flag at our house—what did a flag mean, in general? What did it mean in front of the homes of so many of our neighbors? I am not sure I had a good answer to any of those questions. But in the quiet that hovered over the holiday streets, with no self-important traffic crossing in front of us, he had an answer to mine. “I don't need a flag,” he said. “Everybody here knows I'm American.”

Most days, I do not need a flag. As this past week demonstrates, after ten years full of days after 9-11, we are still waving loud stripes and lonesome stars as if we do not know who we are. We will wave them until our arms are tired and then we will truly know.

LEAVE COMMENTS AT http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/the-lingering-aftermath-of-9-11/

is this how my love grows?

tears hover
over sod lying dry
limp and brittle
in long rigid fingers
forearms of sweat

moist eyes
too little to
bring this clump of
promise
back to life

sod cutter’s mark
shows how it is so easily
pulled away
from the ground on which it was
planted

and how a grandfather’s hand whose
hubris and old
naivete
made him think it would be there
forever

muddy cheek streaks
I will not wipe them
with stained hands

that only smear the
sorrow
from its graceful trail
down my face

like a sad irrigater with
broken main and a
futile attempt to
water a field
already sewn with salt

Veronica and Ivan: Civil Rights Leaders

I love my friend Jennifer’s blog, My Life on Mars. She does not live on Mars. A few years back, she moved to St. Cloud, where I grew up. Her jaunt was from the hipness of the trappings of the Hungry Mind Bookstore to the confines of the place where I grew up, the place I left and soon after landed at… the Hungry Mind, after a couple of sessions at the Minnesota State Senate and odd jobs and avocations that almost used my talents.

She is back in St. Paul and in her latest blog post, “Dog Days in Frogtown,” she talks about her children’s end-of-summer experience—the one that comes just before school starts and the summer programs have run out and you really need something compelling and constructive for kids to do and a good place for them to do it. Her kids encountered and embraced an experience that most of us avoid: being a racial minority of one or a couple and having to navigate being the “other” and maybe finding out if there is even an other in spite of the fact that our social structure tends to enforce that otherness, especially on the less privileged and less powerful.

Her kids, Veronica and Ivan, had an experience that reminded me of two things: one, what it was like for my siblings and me to grow up constantly being the other and being a minority of one, two or a few. The other thing it reminds me of is of Bill Bradley. Some of you will remember him for his run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2000 and for his years as a U.S. Senator. Others will remember him for his years as a player for the New York Knicks NBA basketball team. I remember both, well.

Bradley had a unique experience which he met with the totality of his exceptional intelligence and his education. He tells the story much better than I, but he, as a white male who came from more privilege than even most white males, found himself at the top of his profession which was largely populated with exceptional African American athletes. He was, numerically, a minority. 

In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, in July of 1991, “Race and Civil Rights In America,”Bradley said this about the many times he was confronted by, as he says, mostly white Americans about how his understanding of race evolved:

       “Listen,” I’d say “traveling with my teammates [mostly Black men who had given their life to be at the top of the elite in the world] on the road in America was one of the most enlightening experiences of my life.”

       And it was. Besides learning about the warmth of friendship, the inspiration of personal histories, the powerful role of family in each of their lives and the strength of each’s individuality, I better understand distrust and suspicion. I understand the meaning of certain look and certain codes. I understand what it is to be in racial situations for which you have no frame of reference. I understand the tension of always being on guard, of never totally relaxing. I understand the pain of racial arrogance directed my way. I understand the loneliness of being white in a black world. And I understand how much I will never know about what it is to be black in America.

Read Jennifer’s post (and her others; she’s funny and smart) and Bill Bradley’s speech, and you will see how Veronica and Ivan have begun that transformation that, I hope, is a more common social evolution and not just that of two smart kids or a smart Princeton grad cum U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate. Below is my response.

**********
Growing up in St. Cloud, part of one of three black families that moved there AND STAYED, I can give you a clue about walking into the all-white room of strange kids, made even stranger by the fact that the apartheid was of cultural intention if not by the design of the parents who filled the room with their kids. My sister and I were Veronica and Ivan’s ages in the late 1960s and early 1970s. EVERYONE was white or at least hid the fact of their Native American past–the relative(s) that don’t get mentioned, left behind.

It was hard knowing that everywhere we went, there were children who had learned form their parents and elders not to like or want to be with us. It was also hard that the kids who had not learned that destructive lesson yet had no clue about our tentativeness at letting our feelings run freely into a fray of barbed wire hostility hidden in a few meager hay stacks of fun. 

We did not dive in. I carefully poked around, tested each pile, checking to see if it was okay to plop down and almost relax. Even with an invitation from someone who was not versed in the racism, I needed to tentatively walk through that door, look to all corners of the room and poke around for land mines of hate.

It was different for my sister, who was more extroverted, a born dancer who dared (me and the rest of the world) to accept her dancing at the bus stop, so conspicuously–and even more so as a deep-brown skinned child. Meanwhile, I lived with the illusion that we could ever be so inconspicuous. 

Having fun in those situations was an issue of navigation and management: finding and navigating sources of hostility and unwelcome (more than the “We’d rather not hang out with you—you are not cool enough for our club.” It has a tone more like “We don’t want your kind in our parts and it is only our Minnesota nice that lets us wait for your ‘other’ to be uncomfortable enough to leave”). Manage emotions, mine and theirs; manage perceptions; prove I’m a good person, better than they expect, better than the picture that was painted by their parents’ fears or base hatred.

Ivan is lucky. He is young enough to have escaped that lesson of reflexive hostility, one that is so pervasive and gets to people as they begin to merge into adult-like (and often immature) consciousness. We were not so lucky, maybe because our lesson was so stark, immediate and too often uncloaked, even in that Minnesota Nice. I knew it before I went to pre-school. My sister, if she did not know before, learned it the next year when the woman who we suspect is a relative-in-law of a current Congresswoman who will not be named here decided that my sister could not ride in her car with the other four-year-olds to the Bethlehem Lutheran Nursery School with her grandchild. Her “Christian” attitude created more than just an inconvenience of car-pool disintegration. 

Dis-integration. Segregation. Yes, it is easy for us progressives to say we have not problem with race, gender, ethnicity, religions identification, gender issues, social views, class, privilege and the rest when we don’t have to deal with it: when we are in the comfort of ourselves; when our nice German Catholic town was suddenly “overrun” with THOSE Vietnamese refugees who came to our school; before a transformation of economic realities that ended the days when a dad’s high school, college or professional diploma was enough to support the family, and mom was supposed to stay home and wait for the bacon to fry; and before we even knew what gay was.

And the legacies of that fueled the car pool complications have been ushered in nicely to present day.
Today, Veronica and Ivan are a mile ahead of us, better equipped to deal with the real world and the people in it–their lives, feelings, rights and dreams. Not that they will have it easy—for them and the other children on this journey. But being a civil rights leader never is.

The Part She was Supposed to Play

She wakes up on stage

Disembodied, alone

Is this the definition of empty?

Corner to corner, bare

Vacated, both sides of the proscenium

She thinks back

To her mother's pantry

Jars, lids recently misplaced, broken

She and Junie tried to lick the insides

Tongues searching for some cool sweetness

Or sour grape

Not long enough, agile or acrobatic

To reach those cracks, corners

Laughing into the glass

Short echo from the shallow chasms

Do you feel so full of something

The part you were supposed to get

Your lines, your turn to speak

Shine? You are a good partner

Lover, friend

She is not acting

Still, no one to speak the other lines

No props, set or audience

Plays her part like a teenager

Singing her song in the mirror

Is she in the wrong play?

This plane to New York, Broadway?

Her words reach

Toward the hall's edges

A brief echo, she smiles nectar

And decides who she will be, today.

Guest Blog From Sid: Not Too Many Conversations: A Bearable Reunion Weekend

This week’s guest blogger is Sidney Carlson White, my son. He agreed to this gig after much pleading, against protests similar to those that accompany those at events to which he has been dragged over the years—and much like my reunion weekend promised to be. Too Many Conversations turned into not enough meetings and conversations and memories. The highlight of the trip for Sid (and my father) was seeing a St. Cloud River Bats baseball game at the complex where I played most of my high school baseball. It was the substance of the trip as well. Maybe that and the fact that my parents got to see their grandson.


Our precious moment may have been the time spent at the baseball game with my dad, the three of us. It may also have been my best chance to meet some old classmates who did not bother with the other events at which I appeared. What we will do for baseball and love.



At any rate, I did have one other good moment: when looking at old newspaper clippings at the alumni house, Sid pointed out a box score that showed that I went 2 for 2 at the plate in one baseball game from my senior year. I also pointed out that I went 0 for 3 on my 18th birthday, against city rival and the school and teammates I left two years earlier, Tech High School. I guess it helps to have kids along to point out the important stuff. Here is Sid’s contribution.

* * * * * *



Sidney Carlson White

For the record, my dad’s high school reunion wasn’t that bad for me. Dad met a total of five people from his class, at an event I did not visit (a few more conversations I would be required to endure). The next day, Saturday, was picnic social was anything but—but we got an interesting and somewhat fulfilling tour of Cathedral High School. The fried chicken served needed more flavor (and salt), and the amenities of the picnic were a little kid bouncy castle, face painting, and the nearby alumni house (which was rather interesting and informative, I will admit). I got to visit a St. Cloud River Bats game, the local team. They fell to the Alexandria Beetles (good) after experiencing a 100 minute rain delay. Sadly, the game ended too late for season-ending fireworks after the game. They could not be launched due to noise ordinances.


The brunch social in the school cafeteria the next day fell to similar causes as the picnic, this time around maybe a dozen in attendance, about a third of them were high school staff. The food tasted terrible, like cafeteria food. The day before involved a golf social and an event at a local bar, both of which neither of us attended, but were most likely attended by more people than the events we visited Cathedral itself probably expected a bigger turnout (we all did), but they got what they got.


I survived the event, but you could say I didn’t enjoy it very much. Nobody was there, and there was absolutely nothing for a twelve-year-old to do. When I think hard enough, no one really seems to cater to us. Inflatable castle or tour of a high school I hadn’t even heard of until a few weeks ago. What a selection! It was a weekend of rain-outs, both literally and figuratively.


–Sidney Carlson White

COMMENTS CAN BE LEFT AT http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/guest-blog-from-sid-not-too-many-conversations-a-bearable-reunion-weekend

Too Many Conversations

I am hours away from confronting my former high school peers.  In doing so, I am realizing a few things.  One is that my son is dreading the likelihood of a lot of adult conversation.  Two of the events of this reunion weekend involve family.  This means that he will have to endure my running into people with whom I could possibly have a lot to say.  It has been 30 years.

But this is one area in which my son Sid and I have our greatest conflict.  Too many conversations.  It is not just that wherever we go, I seem to know someone and wind up in what I am told is a boring conversation.  It is that it takes from our precious time and often involves bragging about him.  The mere existence of a parent can be embarrassing enough.  The highfaluting, self-consciousness raising prattle is more than any tween should have to live through.  I am guilty.  I DO know too many people.  And they all have to hear about Sid.  They know this.  They usually ask, first.

Another things I am realizing is why I have not been to one of these gatherings before.   It is not so much that I am recalling my lack of motivation for going, or motivation for staying away.  It is reading comments, sharing, private and public about the dread that comes with the idea of returning to a place that might have been wonderful for a select few, returning to a context from which everyone will be judged, not wanting to be judged, evaluated or compared, not wanting to return to a place that might be much the same as it was when it became clear that we had to escape for more than just opportunity, but for sanity and ideals.

In going back, I am ready to through more than vanity out the window.  I don't care.  I did hear from one of the most dear people who greeted me with kindness and welcome when I first arrived at the new, strange school.  She is not going to the reunion.  As a comment from Jennifer from last week's post ("My First Reunion") reminded me, she is one person who I would like to say thanks to.

At the same time, I am urged by several people to either have fun or make the most of this context-providing experience.  In the next week, I will be sure to share  something.

At the very lest, I will bow out of one of the high-profile events, the evening hanging at the pub on Saturday night.  I will be at the St. Cloud River Bats last home gave of the season with Sid and my father.  In a few minutes, we will get in the car and drive northwest, where grandma and grandpa will be waiting for their son and grandson.  They will feed us.  They will worry as much as I should about my reunion experience and care most that it is a good excuse for them to see their only grandson--and to give him the chance to watch more baseball.And soon, I will be confronted with the truth about how old I really am.

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My First Reunion

A week from today, I will head to my home town for my 30-year high school reunion. Until now, I have not had any desire or inclination to show up at one of these events. Apart from the inquiry of a long-lost classmate a few years ago, I am not sure what kind of motivation is prompting me to join the festivities. I have arbitrarily assigned motives. Not sure how valid they are. I am ready to test them, though, on the fields of high school nostalgia.

Wondering how to prepare, emotionally and otherwise. I will not bring a padded resume, a spouse nor date, nor a fancy car. I will bring myself and my son and maybe a few memories—just enough to facilitate filling dead air in the middle of a gathering.

I don't know if it is being on the younger side of a threshold peering into middle age, but I have only minimal compulsions to impress or care about what anyone will think of me. Or maybe I just think that I am good enough as I am; or maybe my security comes in the hope that, in the next week and a half, I will not gain any more weight, not lose many more hairs and keep only the gray ones peaking out of the corners of my head.

But the biggest rationalized motivation, as I have told a lot of you, is that I am going back to my high school, not to chase fond memories or reconnect with old friends. I am going back to see how old I really am.

I look in the mirror every day. I see changes, but they are so gradual, do I notice the difference? Like when seeing my son after a week of vacation with his mother, he seems taller—because he is; but even clothes that no longer fit and a child that now fits into a men's size 9 shoe seem not to bring the message home as strongly as the difference before trip and after trip.

My current friends who are my age have children graduating college, are grandparents, have been widowed, and have reached other milestones that we could not imagine in the faces of our old class mates, peering from the pages of our old yearbooks.

As the time approaches, I am sure that there will be moments of a persistent low-grade nervous excitement or a little bit of dread. Both will be triggered by many aspects of my time in the halls and on the fields of that school. Even more will be carried by the prospect of running into the women on whom I once had school boy crushes.

I am not worried that anyone will realize that I was not as good of a student as they though I was, not as big of a hockey star as it felt like in that long-lost small world, and not worried that the kindness and niceness that I experienced from several of my class mates will likely fail to translate into the close intimate friendships that seemed impossible even then.

“When I look back on the the crap I learned in high school,” I still can't figure out what that was. Being at the Catholic high school, I learned that being a Baptist, I knew my Bible better than most of my Catholic classmates. I learned that Catholics were not the heathens that they were made out to be by some Baptists—even if they worshiped statues and did penance over grace for forgiveness. I learned a fight song that played for us each time me and my hockey teammates hit the ice or the football team took the field:

Fight, fight Crusaders

Big, brave and bold

Towering to the sky

Your banners, blue and gold

So onward to victory

Fight for your fame

With heads held high

Your battle's cry

Hey, team win this game!

C-R-U, S-A-D-E-R

Crusaders, Crusaders, rah rah rah!

(I remember one of my Baptist friends questioning the wisdom of nicknaming the school after the Crusades, not a pretty piece of Catholic church history, followed by noting the irony of our church's association with Campus CRUSADE for Christ.)

Maybe going back, I will learn something. Maybe I will remember things I learned but had forgotten. Maybe I will remember enough names and faces as to not be too embarrassed. I know I will be remembered.

I will be easily remembered not so much for who I am or was then as much for the fact that I was the only black kid in the school. In years past, I worried that some black guy would show up and be mistaken for me. I then realized that I did not really care, but felt sorry for the man who might have fallen into that discomfort zone. This time, it's me, the real thing.

And maybe my old classmates and I will learn a new perspective on that reality, that there was a black kid in the school and what that meant for him and for the rest of the school community, the good and the bad, the easy and hard, and the stuff that we are still learning today.

In the mean time, I will work on comfort zones, both for myself and for whomever I run into. (It will be better if I remember everyone's name.) I will wear a shirt to the picnic that I wore during my days at the school. (I don't think anyone will remember it.) I hope the reunion will be interesting. I hope it will be fun. I will pretend that I'm really not that old. 

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An 11-Year-Old's Profile in Courage

It is a good collection of boys, my son Sid's Midway Stealth baseball team. Two nights ago, they lost a tough playoff game after winning their previous two. It was a season of wins and losses on the field, in the life of the team and in the lives of our families.

The biggest victory came with the biggest loss for one of Sid's teammates. It was an unparalleled profile in courage, not just for him but for all the boys.

I don't know how many times I have watched a sports telecast to hear how one of the participating athletes had recently gone through a terrible loss, loss of a parent, sibling, someone close. Commentators talk about the bravery of the athlete, how they fight through the pain and grief and continue to perform, to live. We feel for those women and men. The stories help us appreciate and admire them. At these times, we are reminded of the important things in life, that we are witnessing humanity even as we enjoy what is “only a game.”

Still, most of these athletes are, while relatively young, are not children. Sid's teammate, Patrick is 11. In the middle of the season, Patrick lost his dad to a long battle with cancer. Patrick is winning his battle with courage.

Patrick had been missing from games and practice for weeks. He was along for his father's trips across the country to visit important people in his life, saying his last good-byes.

Like a lot of us, Russ Connors shared baseball with his son, Patrick, as an act of love. We show our sons and daughters that this baseball love is about so many things of life, not just learning how to win, how to lose, or even being good at the game. It's about more than fun. It is about a list of things that is too long to share in one sitting, in one life time. It is about things that are too big for an 11-year-old to understand and bigger than many of us grownups want to contemplate.

When someone dies, someone close to us, even as adults, we are often at a loss for what to do with ourselves—with others. Somehow, as parents, we want to be able to prepare our children to do what we have trouble doing ourselves—hopefully before we pass. We want our kids to be a little braver and on a path that is more mature than the one we strode. Credit Russ, because at age 11, Patrick learned enough of this lesson in love, love for a game, but more love for his father, that on the day of his father's death, he knew what he was supposed to do.

That evening, under a solid gray overcast sky, Patrick, in full uniform stepped out of the car of a family friend, who met a couple of the coaches to formally and gently deliver Patrick and some important pieces of the story of the day.

The stories were shared with us by family friends, while Patrick and the other boys took their warm-up cuts in the batting cage and did their drills on the field. We learned about the time that Patrick spent with his dad in the last days. We learned about how they shared baseball. We learned enough to know why, even on what is likely the hardest day of his life, Patrick was playing baseball.

We are told that Patrick said, “This is where my dad would want me to be." There was little question of that. It was the place for him to be, for him, his dad, his teammates and all of us who needed that life lesson.

The Midway Stealth won that evening's game with Patrick closing out the game on the mound, pitching a great inning of relief.

After the game, coach Jay, brought the boys out to right field, as he does after each game. I don't know much of what he said. What he and coaches Allen and Jason have said in those team meetings over the course of the season has produced some lessons for the boys in how to be the important young men they have been for each other throughout the season. What he said definitely prepared the boys to be there for Patrick that night and beyond.

Days later, coach Jay organized a team presence at Russ' visitation, with the team attending together in their game jerseys. After, the coaches took them all to Dairy Queen, a due summer salve and just reward for stepping up on a difficult day—because just as life and baseball are important, treating ourselves along the way is, too.

Russ said, “Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. To live without love or joy or meaning or hope would be the far greater tragedy. And there’s the faith in resurrection to which Christians can confidently rely on.”

I think Patrick worked out some of that resurrection the night of the game. That night, he played in honor of is dad. His teammates played in honor of Patrick. The team played the rest of the season with an “RC” on their hats.

This story has made me cry only a few times. Just a few. It has made me quite proud of my son and a group of boys with whom he shared a great season of baseball. And this is one of the reasons why baseball is important. 

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