Not Quite Ready for Some Football

I spent last Friday night with my dad. We went to see the Minnesota Vikings American football team play the Buffalo Bills in a preseason game. These days, unlike in my youth, I am not a big fan of football. Many of you can count as many reasons to not like the game, but I will watch football with my dad. Not just watch, but appreciate some of it’s finer points.

There are two things that I continue to appreciate about football. The first is that football is one of the few places in our society where a Black man can come close to being recognized and paid for his efforts on par with his White counterparts. There are still hurdles of biases that most players must overcome, but the results on the field are hard to argue. Some try to run a subconscious and sometimes conscious sabotage. The stumbling blocks are not unfamiliar and not unique to football, but that sabotage often backfires in an atmosphere where any kind of anger or animosity have a very welcome physical response in kind that is likely to be rewarded on the field. However all the factors figure, the field is more even than most aspects of society.

The other thing I like about football is that it is how dad went to college. He paid his way into school on an athletic scholarship. (The photo on the banner of this blog is dad from his college playing days.)

There was a time as a kid, when my favorite sport was whatever sports season was in full swing. In the winter, I wanted to grow up to be a professional basketball player and then, later a professional hockey player. In the spring, I wanted to become a professional baseball player. In the fall, it was football. Those fantasies added to any fun that came with being out with the other boys, to play in the fields and playgrounds or just play in my imagination. Later I had fun playing on the team dad coached, a volunteer job he held for 29 years at Holy Spirit School in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Like with so many of the boys who became men on a journey boosted by their learning from dad, football was not so much fun after 8th grade when I was too old to play on his team: when football came to mean less about personal and social life and more about how important football was to our elders.

It was not that we did not learn about football. Those who played for dad carried with them a reputation of skill and how to play well and safely. We also learned to practice and play with pride, with respect for teammates and opponents, coaches and officials, and that ideally, we would carry those ideal back home, to school and on the streets of our community. And I knew that even as a kid who would not get his growth spurt for a couple of years, I could still bring down a running back who outweighed me by 50 pounds.

But unlike experiencing the game alone or with someone else or the television commentators, talking about what happens on the field that honestly critiques the game and not the players, talking about the players knowing what they had to do to get there and like they are the physical and emotional beings they are, and hoping that their experience in the National Football League will help support them and their families during the rest of their life time.

Friday, we watched, not “ready for some football,” like Hank Williams, Jr., or the masses of onlookers that drive the pseudo-capitalistic machine that paid Williams for that song that sounds more like the soundtrack to accompany the guy with the beer on the sofa than the majestic athletes on the field. I am not sure if I have a song for those athletes, the ones who have been encouraged to weigh 300 pounds but are still quicker and faster than any of us watching, the guy who will be injured giving his best to please the crowd who will forget him a minute after he leaves the field, the tears of joy from a mom or dad who is seeing their son on the NFL’s field for the first time or that exceptional player who goes home every night to the love of a woman and maybe a child–whether that week they are in the same city or not.

After I left for college, my youngest sister Jennifer became dad’s football partner. Today, she is the biggest fan, still as cognizant of all the social, political and cultural shortcomings, and still, even as a resident of Chicago, a Vikings fan. She is the true lover of American football. It is very charming, the two of them, intelligent discourse on a brutal game. But this Friday–his time, I got to hang out with dad. Thanks dad for taking your boy to a game.

A Return to Baseball's Cathedral

The rain let up with an hour to spare before last night’s Twins-Phillies baseball game. In the quiet overcast of the day’s storms, I remembered in my haste to get out the door that I had forgotten an umbrella. Moments later, I remembered that I had forgotten our scorebook. Sid gave a shrug of his shoulders at omission of the umbrella. The missing scorebook was of more concern.

The umbrella would be unnecessary. We substituted the scorebook with an inexpensive scorecard and a pricy pencil from the gift shop.

Sid and I arrived at Target Field on the light rail train that was less packed than Sid expected. The girl who would turn four in three days, wearing her heart-decal-ed Twins t-shirt would not sit down and exerted the power of “NO” quite often. A cute couple nestled with each other in their seats, the man totally oblivious to his surroundings and the woman somewhat distracted by us. Outside, waiting at the platforms for trains headed the other direction, lonely faces of women and men who stayed too long at work, nothing, no task and no one who would have waited for them to step off the 4:30 train.

Even under the heavy gray sky, the threat of rain had passed. Sid and I made our way to seats. The air was calm and pleasant and the only weather menace was the beads of rain that clung the the green seats that were much better than either of us anticipated.

Close enough to the field to notice the blades of grass that were disturbed by the sliding play of Twins second baseman Alexi Casilla, vivid numbers sewn onto the backs of uniforms, the chance at a souvenir foul ball. Behind us sat a father and his primary school-aged daughter, a bright girl of whom her father is proud and may grow up to be as much of her fathers baseball buddy as Doris Kearns Goodwin.

We saw Julian Loscalzo, a native Philadelphian and reason d’etre for Ballpark tours and of “Save the Met” fame, wearing his hometown insignia sitting down in the seats in front of us. I had enough time to start a conversation before he realized that his seats were in the next section over and the people to whom the seats belonged eagerly wanted to sit down.

It was an interesting game, satisfying to Sid’s baseball mind. A nice night and still air that produced three home runs, one by Jim Thome, now playing for the Phillies, again, launched into the right field flower boxes and which, even into the next morning, had not been found.

The Twins lost to a struggling, injury-laden but usually powerful Philadelphia Phillies ball club. No matter. It was a sweet night, our first successful trip to the ballpark, where we belong.

The last month of this summer, Sid will be in China. I do not know if I will make a trip to the ballpark. It is not the same without him. I don’t know with whom I would visit the park. It might not matter if I go—does not matter if the thunder storms saturate the ground and air. It does not matter if the stillness is disturbed and the air swirls and the atmosphere is filled with electricity and the smell of ozone. They will keep me company, even if I forget my umbrella.

When There Is Crying in Baseball

There is a difference between crying over spilt milk and grief.  Or maybe not.  There are some things about which we should cry and others, not so much.

Having baseball tickets stolen might seem like the loss of a material thing or the chance to hang out in the elite company of those spectating the gladiators.  It would be sacrilege to say that it is on par with being told that you cannot come into the church for worship.  But what unholy transgression was it?

My son Sid and I had planned a trip to see the Minnesota Twins play the Detroit Tigers. It was to be our first outing of the year to the home field. It was a trip to do what fathers do with their sons, some of my mother friends do with their children, a gift that some of these mothers and fathers are passing along to their sons and daughters and a place where so many stories of the love between them have been told, written and lived.

It also was a spot, in that gray-skied Saturday afternoon where many of our friends waited in seats adjacent to the ones we had for the game. They were there for the same loves that get entangled in watching and playing that game and for the love of our friend Mel, who knows all of those loves and people well.

But Sid and I did not make it to the game. In the moments before we boarded the train to the ball park, the tickets went missing.

I reached to my back pocket to feel the void where the envelope holding the tickets should have been. The pocket felt as empty as the gap left by a missing tooth and as crazy as a lost child: the lost slice of childhood that I planed to share with Sid that day.

At first, I told myself that I must have let them slip from my pocket. We ran from the train platform, tracing our steps back to the car, the Mexican fast food restaurant where we ate—a place much cheaper than the extra meal we might eat from the ball park concession stands. I looked hard, back and forth, in the car, on the ground, in the restaurant, in the eyes of passers by: something that would tell me it was okay, place them in my hand and make everything okay.

As I looked, though, the image of a man on the train platform kept appearing in my mind, a man who lingered too close as we swiped the pay strip on the fare box, the image of the man who, I am quite sure, lifted the tickets from my pocket moments before we would be on our way.

After those moments of the frantic, Sid and I got home and were quiet in the living room.  I tried my best to hide my sadness, but not so much as to fake something happy, fake a substitute that would not have even worked when he was younger. 

He did look sad on the sofa.  I asked him how he was doing, and he said he was pretty sad.  "And this one was for Mel's birthday, too--wasn't it?"  I told him yes, the man who took his not-quite-two-year-old self to the second baseball game he could even notice.  He cried a little.  I tried not to show much of my sadness, tears, frustration or anger; and how do you show grief over something like this?

We are sorry to have missed the chance to share baseball with each other, with you and everyone else who was there for the happiness of baseball.  While the money it cost us to participate in that day is significant in these days, but even at the greatest cost, it doesn't describe that what was missed was more than just a fun event, recreation or a chance to get out.  I don't know how many people will understand or how to describe the loss--even to a lot of people who know baseball. 

I think I can only have other people describe it.  They know, somehow, maybe from watching the two of us, seeing the game not through our eyes but through our sharing with each other and with anyone willing to get close enough.  Those who love us like seeing us together--seeing us in ways that are accentuated by baseball.

I am not sure which parts of what was defiled and violated are sacred.  I know that it is more than a violation of our personal space.  More than my friendships.  More than spoiling a game.  I just know that I feared such a catastrophe as much as I feared missing an important flight to an important event: like I had missed a relative's wedding. 

It is not a wedding.  It is just a game.  Just a birthday.  Just a day out.  Just another day filled with hazards.  But it is that day that remembers the first time I walked into the Bowie Bay Sox stadium with Sid in my arms, then settling in our seats, his eyes fixated on the animated diamond with more attentiveness and fascination that I thought was possible for a pre-toddler and my eyes welling with more tears than are allowed in baseball.  

I would not experience the kind of emotion I felt at the ball park until the first day we sat together, the two of us in church.  These are things that can define what fathers can do with their sons, friends with their friends, love with love and joy with joy.  (See “Crying at the Cathedrals.”)

For a moment, that is what was taken from us.  For a moment.  We will recapture it another day.

miniStories: The Boy Who Did Not Like Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches

This piece first appeared at at mnartists.org as a part of their flash fiction competition, miniStories.  As they wrote with it’s publication, “This winning story written by Clarence White (selected by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl) offers an understated but affecting little tale about the love between fathers and sons and the power of peanut butter and jelly.”  Thanks to mnartists.org and to 3-Minute Egg for recording the event publicizing the competition and publication series, attracting established, emerging and aspiring writers to create works no longer than 500 words. 3-Minute Egg captured some of the voices from the winners’ circle, reading their pieces in the lobby of the Ritz Theater.  See a video of the event HERE.

miniStories: The Boy Who Did Not Like Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches

Who ever heard of a little boy who did not like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Or puppet shows, pepperoni pizza, the sandbox or the caramel part of a candied apple? 

Peanut butter and jelly. It is, of course, the perfect breakfast food. I remember as a child listening to the episode of School House Rock that suggested:
Peanut butter and jelly
Any time of day’s a treat.

It urged kids to eat a good breakfast, and I felt proud that my mother had already discovered the virtues of PB&J. Three decades later, as a parent, I realized how great it was—the discovery that this sandwich was a lot easier than making a lot of other breakfasts, and it dirtied few dishes, which is important when housekeeping is a personal challenge. It helps to know that it’s enough protein for a child and not too many calories for someone who spend most of his day running after nothing at all—that nothing which is everything for a child, that something which is as real as an invisible friend that somehow gets lost between the sofa cushions just before adulthood. 

But Elliot would not eat peanut butter and jelly. A profound disappointment, not just for the nutritional and housekeeping ramifications: it also meant my son was missing out on one of life’s basic comforts, one that would help him cope with a series of life’s rainouts, missed birthday parties and bad afternoons at the principal’s office. 

But other kids are usually better influencers than parents. Kids know what’s important. 

It was Elliot’s friend Brandon who created the breakthrough one morning of a sleepover. “Can I have HONEY on my peanut butter and jelly?” he asked. 

“How about it, El?” he turned to my son. 

It was a disproportionate joy that accompanied the sandwich making. I made two sandwiches, the middle topped off with a drizzle of honey. I was a little bit too proud of my five-year-old son and myself. “Hey, this is pretty good,” Elliot said. Of course, the crust was left on both boys’ finished sandwiches, which didn’t spoil the triumph. 

Nothing could spoil the triumph. Not even the day months later when I forgot the honey—and was absent-minded enough to blurt out the fact as we were driving to mommy’s house. His quivering voice threatened to summon a crisis that could easily last through the rest of our week’s final moments together. “Try it Elliot.” I hoped, “It’s okay.” 

I could hear the first bite into the soft sandwich as sure as I could feel the lump in his throat that would make the peanut butter part hard to swallow. I was quiet, hoping for the best and concealing my own voice’s quiver. 

The sandwich was fine—and not just because PB&J tastes the same without honey. It was fine because five-year-olds know how to keep their daddies from crying. “It’s pretty good, even without the honey,” he said. I cried later. On the drive home. With a smiling crust in the passenger seat. 

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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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