team player

My son spent his summer rising at 5am to get to football practice by 6am. When September came, he went to practice every weekday afternoon until 6pm and sometimes on Saturday mornings as well. Thanksgiving has always been a favorite holiday for him. He usually goes with his father to Oregon and hangs out with beloved cousins. This Thanksgiving, he stayed home. Alone. His team had made the championship for the first time in forty years, and even on Thanksgiving morning, they were on the field, practicing.

I watched all this with parental wonder. I don’t get sports, period. I spent most of my P.E. hours in high school feigning cramps, and I associate football especially with a whole bunch of things I am against. Like running into people and hurting them. I went to his games when he was a freshman and sophomore, patiently waiting for this reactionary phase of being raised by a Pagan - activist - therapist - artist - mom to be over. I imagined that by junior year he might find theater, art or the chess club more his style. But no, here he still is, more dedicated than ever, now on the varsity team.

My son is easy going and perfectly happy to not attend to homework, garbage removal, or room cleaning without maternal threat. Focused, driven, disciplined, and hardworking are not attributes I’d assign to him. And yet, this sport I abhor has brought these traits to light. Is this world not full of mystery?

Last year, on the junior varsity team, he was the quarterback. It took me awhile to get that this position was akin to high priestess, the center of the circle, the Grand Poobah of the game. For awhile, I just understood it to be the position where everyone tries to knock you down. This should have clued me in. This year, on varsity, he was in a different position, and given that he broke his elbow the first week of school, he didn’t play for most of the season, and when he was healed, he was demoted to second string. This means not playing much, if at all, during the games.

Nevertheless, even with the broken elbow, he went faithfully to every practice and to every game. Standing on the sidelines, he’d watch and cheer on his teammates. He stayed home during Thanksgiving, knowing that odds were good that he might not play that Saturday, the game that would decide if they would be in the final championship. He ended up being in the game for about five minutes, and thankfully, they won.

Last weekend was the final championship. Again, he was in the game for mere minutes, and again, they won. He is now part of a championship team, the first time his school has held this position.

And I, his mother, am amazed at the way things can unfold. My son, the football player, turns out to hold at sixteen a whole slew of values, and to practice them, in a way that I have spent a lifetime aspiring to. He is the quintessential team player, not doing it for the glory or the ego, but the experience of being part of the whole. He got up early in the mornings, practiced late into the afternoons, and forfeited all kinds of fun, making peace with being primarily on the sidelines.

Soon, he will receive a championship ring, something I hope he wears proudly for a lifetime. He is a champion of a season that he primarily could not play, and when he could, he didn’t play much. Not being the star or the Grand Poobah, he nevertheless, kept showing up. Throughout his life, my wish is that his ring reminds him of this mighty accomplishment.

His smile, upon his team winning, is the one every parent hopes to see on their child’s face.

A few nights ago, we went to see one of his friends perform the lead role in the school’s production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. All during the performance I relished my contentment. Things are just as they should be, although in a different form than I could ever imagine. And isn’t that just how it should be?

American Dream

The arc of the moral universe is long,
But it bends toward justice.
-Abolitionist Theodore Parker, c. 1850's

I slept away the holiday visit to my spouse's family in Philadelphia. I managed to stay awake for Thanksgiving and the day afterward, but then I surrendered to the fierce cold I'd been battling and took to my bed. My hotel room bed, that is.

It would have been surreal in the best of health, this visit to new "in-laws" who clearly aren't anywhere close to accepting this as true. Homophobia is as potent in its silences as it in its taunts.

Spending two of the four days sleeping tipped it over into pure dream time. There was genius in the timing of the cold, as it excused me from half of the family get-togethers. I arose from my fever dreams just in time to participate in packing up and going home.

My dreams in Philadelphia were full of phantoms of two United States of America. One is a place of doublespeak and lies, a nightmare in a house of mirrors. It’s place where promises of independence, freedom and equality are made by a privileged few and meant only for the privileged few. The other is the America where the documents created in Independence Hall are mighty spells, cast out over centuries, a place where consciousness unfolds as the spell of the words take hold, eventually holding every one of us…all the people. The times I awoke amidst my clammy sheets, I always felt a wave of relief to see Obama still on the cover of the tossed newspaper on a chair.

On Friday, in a junk shop in south Philly I bought an American flag pin. I was feeling good that day, in the company of an old friend, and my spouse was giving us her version of a city tour. Philadelphia was the epicenter of the American Revolution. It was here where both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were forged and signed, and it was here that Betsy Ross sewed the first flag. Buying the little flag in a store in South Philly, run by an Italian-American who left his family's business selling fish to follow his dream of running a junk store, felt as right as it did strange and dreamlike.

For all the years that I can remember, anyone wearing an American flag was sure to be against anything that I was for. Growing up in the 1960's, the flag symbolized the sentiment of "love it or leave it". As a teenager I perceived our founding fathers as hypocrites; slaveholders who fought for their own rights, leaving women and all people of color behind. As a young feminist even the term “founding fathers” set my teeth on edge.

And yet, here in Philadelphia, I found myself buying a flag and pinning it on. Could it be this small act contributed to two days spent in fevered dreamtime?

Symbols are magical things. They stir the imagination and shift consciousness. I notice how I want to add some other symbol to my little flag, like maybe put it in the middle of a bigger peace sign, how I fear wearing it I will be perceived as a right-wing bigot or simply stupid. The American flag waved through my dreams in Philadelphia, in both shadow and light. The ghosts of those old rebels whispered to me, giving me some idea of what Betsy’s sewing meant to them, familiar colors stitched into a revolution. "Mistakes were made", I dreamt Ben Franklin saying, and we laughed together. This is something I know about. Like those founding fathers, we all have blinders on due to our own cultural contexts, and I trust that future generations will have plenty to take us to task for. Consciousness unfurls itself over time.

I’m back in San Francisco and I haven’t worn my little pin yet. But I’m getting more comfortable with it. You might even say I’m reclaiming it as my own.

Anything can happen in a lifetime.