My Struggle: Youth soccer and adult criticism

I walked into Chris’s office, which was really just a trailer, to test to see if I was smart enough to pass out of kindergarten. The trailer was hot and a low speed fan oscillated across the room, ruffling stacks of papers, though he had the setting low enough, or the stacks high enough that the breeze didn’t disturb anything. There was a rectangular window in the trailer that looked out over the parking lot and the greenbrown grass beyond. It was flat and through the window it looked like nothing so much as a grassland that would soon be a dessert plane. 

Chris and I met in the afternoons. A monitor would come to the classroom, and I’d be escorted off towards the trailer, which had no meaning to me. I didn’t understand, at five, why I was going to talk to someone in the afternoon. I accepted it as I’d accepted any number of things at that point in my life, the points of a pine cone, the pinkish hue of clouds at sunset. The clouds were pink because sometimes clouds or pink. 

Chris was a younger man, early thirties or so, and I’m not sure what his specific job title was. At first we talked, about school, about home, about books I’d read or cars I was playing with. I wasn’t really afraid of talking to people one on one. It was the group dynamics that frightened me that petrified me that caused me to appear stupid. Though truthfully, as I said, I was rather horrendous at cutting with scissors and drawing in the prescribed shapes of the alphabet with a pencil. 

We sat in his small office, he behind a desk in a large chair, me in the small chair and watched the fan oscillate, the papers rustle, felt the hot afternoon sun glaring in the window and proved that I wasn’t, at least according to him, all that stupid. Sometimes we read books, and I suppose that’s where the determination came from, from where it’s always come from. I knew how to read books. According to Chris, I was reading well above grade level, and if I was reading well above grade level than I probably didn’t need to repeat kindergarten. 

Chris was probably right because I ended up finishing at or near the top of my class for the remainder of grade school. And yet, just the other day I was trying to tie together some stakes around a blackberry bush, and I felt that old familiar feeling of ineptness that has plagued me since kindergarten. I’m not very good with my hands. Some of the things that we aren’t good at in life remain that way until the day we pass into dust. 

Mid-way through kindergarten I started playing soccer on Saturday mornings, orange slices and green fields with lines of white chalk, kids chasing the ball in the early morning cool, bits cut grass littering the side lines. In our town everyone started with soccer, the herd of children swarming around the ball in hopes of getting a kick in. We wore simple reversible jerseys, bright green or white. We were often confused about our positions, or ignored them, chasing the ball as if it were the soul reason for existence. 

Oh, those sunny mornings in the valley, the sun not yet a fiery ball in the sky. And the smell of the fresh mown grass, earthy and occasionally touched still by the water from the morning sprinklers, little diamonds collecting and refracting the sunlight. My mother was there, watching quietly, her auburn hair lit by that same sun. The coaches were the fathers of one player or another, though no one really played soccer past their youth back then, and they ran us through drills that basically involved kicking the ball, which was more than the majority of the kids could handle, sometimes missing it, or catching their foot on top of the ball in the backswing and falling ass backwards onto the grass, which is and was one of the funniest sights to behold because the distance between the intended meaning and the actual outcome was so great that the experience is one sheer and pure physical irony.

 Some of the other kids were, like me in school, still shy about playing soccer, and so would stand near the sidelines, holding their hands over their crotch, or just at their sides, until some frustrated father would start yelling at them, and they’d obediently approach the ball and then sheer off at the last moment like a plane who has called off a landing, terrified, and probably justifiably so by the sheer mass of children with shin guards, swinging their feet around wildly, doling out bruises and kicks in the manic joy of trying to kick the damn ball. These were good days. 

And still the other children who stood in the mass of children trying with all of their might to get their legs to cooperate with brains, and failing, but aggressively so, like an over enthusiastic puppies, all the while parents, fathers especially, watching with intensity to see if their child was doing well and had some natural talent. The best part of the game, without a doubt, was the bag of orange slices that we had at half-time, an obscure tradition not followed in any other children’s sport, but followed with rigor and sign up lists when I was a child, such that no half-time arrived without orange slices, which everyone could agree on and pretty much enjoy with the same level of skill, take, eat, spit aside the peel. 

If identify formation had been problematic up to that point then it became less troubling or confusing while playing soccer. I was good because I was faster than most of the other kids and could kick the ball fairly hard with my right foot and my legs and body generally cooperated with my mind, which doesn’t always happen at five and a half. There was another kid, Gabe, who was also good at soccer, and though we had a middling team he and I accounted for 30 goals over the space of those weekends, far outstripping the rest of the team combined. And just like that I had discovered, to some degree, where I fit in the social hierarchy. I may not have been able to cut with scissors or draw a proper stick figure, but I could kick a ball. 

Strangely, my most salient memory of that time is a goal that Gabe scored. It came off a free kick, and he sent the ball in a long looping angle, swinging out the right before bending back towards the goal. The soccer ball was spinning and catching bits of sunshine in flight, in the background were large pines that lined the perimeter of the play area, which the ball seemed to rise above on its way towards the goal. It was the highest I had seen anything kicked at that point in my life, and I watched it with the kind of wonder that adults reserve for high forms of art, or photos of the solar system. That the wonder was not of my own making did not strike me as particularly relevant at the time, nor do I wish that it did now. It was enough that day to have been witness to the beauty, to the majesty of creation, a ball, a foot, a row of pine trees. 

After the games, my mother would drive me to the corner 7-Eleven, and I’d clatter in with my cleats and get the cherry flavored slurpee, occasionally mixing in the Root Beer but then regretting the decision, though I’d forget again in a few weeks and try to swirl them again. The 7-Eleven was on the corner of a main Chico arterial, with a large street facing parking lot, like every 7-Eleven you’ve probably ever seen, a sort of middle finger at aesthetics or smart growth or anything beyond exactly what it was, a place to buy cheap hot dogs and cold drinks from someone who almost invariably had a mustache and was as disinterested as you as you were in the adult world of politics: this man, or sometimes woman, sitting behind a rack of magazines with silly and sensationalistic headlines, sitting behind the counter as a peripheral yet recurring person on the dream that is your childhood and who were, to someone else, a mother, a father, a husband, a lover, but such is the distance between any of us that to imagine them as anything other than a person who takes change would require the sort of empathy that would crush you. 

I quit soccer four years later after being required to play full back for a team called the All-Stars. We were a piss poor team who got lucky and won a couple of games in the final tournament, going so far as the semi-finals before bowing out because we weren’t all that good and had a fool for a coach. I had, up until that point, been someone who constantly played forward and was either the leader or second leading scorer on my team. In short, being faster and more aggressive than other kids, coupled with a strong right leg made me a natural fit at the front. And yet, from the very first game that year I was playing right full back like the kids who picked the grass and were disinterested in the game, kids whose parents wanted them to enjoy a game they didn’t. 

I played full back for almost the entire year. Somewhere around mid-season the coach put me in at right forward. I sprinted around, got a couple of shots on goal, including one that went just wide through some traffic. In short, in a nominal amount of time I was able to create as many chances as our team usually got in a full game. And yet, mid-way through the half, he pulled me out and put me back at fullback. 

Anyone who has played youth sports knows that most coaches have their offspring on the team, and though those kids are sometimes run into the ground, they are also almost invariably put forward as if they are stars. What this says about our own insignificance or our desire to see our children achieve is rather straight forward. Of course a coach puts his son in a position to succeed. It’s much easier to be a parent first and then a coach second. I don’t remember if this coach had a son on the team or not. I only remember the shame of being made to play full back. The next practice, we kicked the ball into a fence with our left foot. The coach, a man in his thirties, wearing a San Francisco Giants hat and sporting glasses with thick lenses came up behind me and said, 

“We all need to be better with our left foot. You would have had two goals if you could use your left foot.” 

The coach was an idiot yes, and yet his criticism stung deeply. He was right. If I could kick with my left foot I would have scored two goals and perhaps I’d have remained at right forward where I belonged, and so I kicked the ball across the grass and dried dirt into a chain link fence with my left foot and hated him. He wasn’t wrong on some level, if I could kick with my left foot I’d maybe have scored a goal. However, if I’d spent the whole season where I damn well belonged than I’d have probably of had plenty of chances to score goals and prove my worth. He’d been wrong to play me at full back, a cruelty that I couldn’t forgive, and so I quit soccer forever. 

To this day, I don’t take criticism well. I am so eager to please people that I work very hard, so hard that it’s exhausting to make myself into a pleasing facsimile of what they want. This means that I don’t receive criticism all that often because it turns out that if your whole self is devoted towards diagnosing how to make other people happy, you rarely displease them enough to receive overt criticism. This also means that I never learned to take it well, and though I am quiet at first, I tend to be internally raging within a few minutes, bursting at the seams with roughly seven to ten ways in which they are wrong about me or the situation, and I am smart and vitriolic and every bit as good at self-justifying as most human beings and as capable of self-deception.

 And though I have come to understand that it is not necessarily a good quality, it is not one that I am likely to change. It was Fitzgerald, in his essay, The Crack Up, who talked about the inability of things to move him in the same way after thirty. In that same way, I understand now that I largely have the personality, tics, and tendencies that will accompany me unto the grave. This is not a fatalistic account of follies or foibles but a realistic accounting of a life. It is unlikely that I will suddenly receive criticism, even constructive criticism with any sort of grace or charm. Rather, I’ll probably want to murder the person who is giving it to me, and, with good reason as I’ve no doubt been spending an inordinate amount of my time trying to please them. 

Of course, this is not to say that I don’t deserve criticism. Rather, I dole it out to myself and am as self-critical as most and as self-forgiving as most. We are destined, whatever our time brings us, to be moored inside these bodies and minds, so if we cannot learn to love them, the very least we can do is deceive them, pat them on the back when need be, and continue to endure.

My Struggle: Time and Gummi Bears

The dusty path where I’d walked as a child in a camp for children. The dusty path where my mother says I fell in love with a college aged camp counselor on my first day, though I was just scared. The dusty path that lead away from Caper Acres, the park where I’d been going since I was a child, with the slide so high that it was reminiscent of a high dive at the pool. The humpty dumpty who sits on the wall at Caper Acres, watching over the kid’s in the sand box, perched precariously as humpty always is. The row of interlocking tunnels where you’d crawl into strange kids, laughing, feeling claustrophobic, reaching and hoping to get back to the light, the tunnels which smelled musty and maybe of urine; the caverns where everyone in our city must have crawled as children.

Just off the dusty path, lined by live oaks, an understory of vines that stretch almost as high as the trees themselves. The light spills through the trees, flickering on the water like flecks of gold, like minnows, like dimes spun out across the water. Along the stream, where, as a child, I’d skipped rocks from the small sandy berms towards beer cans and soda cans, trapped in the underbrush across the water, near the water where my sister and I, or a friend and I, would run during baseball games, or after school, to skip stones, to slip our toes in the water, to peer at small fish, to pass the time of our childhood. Down beyond the rope swing hung from an old snag tree, where older kids would sometimes gather to fling themselves out across the water from the street level and drop into the creek. 

The light that dances on the leaves of the trees that confers on this alcove, on this small glade, on this patch of earth, a kind of transcendent beauty. 

She and I were in Bidwell Park, a 2,250 acre piece of land, deeded to the city in 1905, by amateur botanist and wife of the cities founder, Annie Bidwell. Like much of the useful and interesting public land in this country the decision to keep it as public use was made more than a century ago. The land has been carved up now, moved into private hands or as part of the Bureau of Land Management or settled by cattle ranchers in the west. It’s hard to imagine walking anywhere without encountering a sign that tells you where you should and shouldn’t be. It’s hard to imagine this country as it must have been before the native peoples were systematically disenfranchised and shipped off to reservations, but here we are. 

The summer heat in Chico is scorching and so we’ve come here down by the water and near the shade of the trees that thank God were left up in this strip of valley where the heat collects in summer like cans on a river bank, like flies on refuse, like anything. She and I have known each other for almost two years now. I met her one afternoon during my sophomore year while walking past the large, quasi-native American inspired structure, though inverted, with solid stone on the outside, and a long row of windows on both levels, such that you could look out over the campus, that was a central meeting place for students in Clark Hall, where I lived the first two years. The couches inside the lower level were a forest green, interspersed with white dots that line the buttons used to secure down the covers. 

There was a television on the lower level, the only place where you could watch things in the year 1998, before computers and Netflix and internet streaming or pirating had become a part of the college experience. In short, there was only one place you could go to watch a Michigan football game, and you had to stake out your place early, hope no one else was in there watching something inane, though watching anything during your college years is inane as it’s the one and only time you’ll be surrounded by your best friends with only a modicum of responsibility, academically, financially, and socially, which makes it a kind of utopia though most people don’t realize it at the time, worrying as they are about that next test or paper or quiz or speech that’s due, treating the time as if it were a slog. Though in that way it can’t be much different than an old folk’s home, or an office where everyone is going through a mid-life crisis and getting a divorce, you talk about the things you have in common and everyone is taking tests, writing papers, and passing the time in a way that is similar to yours. 

The lower level of the building was smaller than the top, which hung over top like a Japanese pagoda, which meant that not only were you exiling yourself to the television, you were also doing it in a perpetual kind of darkness that seems almost unattainable in a place like Santa Barbara, CA, a Mediterranean climate reminiscent of Paradise where the sun shines for roughly 11 months out of the year. A small college town, tucked between the mountains and the ocean. 

The gist of the thing was, or at least the gist for me was that while I was sitting in the lounge, watching a Michigan football game or some other sporting event I was also acutely aware of the life I was missing outside. A fact made more obvious by the long pane of windows that stretched around the entire structure, reminding you that out there people were probably surfing, or laughing, or going to play volleyball, while you were sitting on a couch in the dark by yourself watching a football game involving a bunch of people you didn’t know. But you could also look out the window, and see if the people passing by were the sort of people that you’d want to run out and catch, and by this I mean either my friends or some attractive girl. However, you couldn’t always see in the lower level of the lounge, which meant that you were walking in to the room blind. It was never fun to walk blind into the room and sometimes I’d try to peer in, to see who was sitting in there though it was almost always a vague shape rather than a person, which meant all that I could determine is that an amorphous blob had decided to watch television on the couch. 

I walked up the four stone steps and into the lounge. I walked into the lounge that Tuesday afternoon to see if anything was on. She was sitting on the couch opposite me, seven or so feet away. The television was hanging off the wall at a forty five degree angle, and the couches were positioned beneath it horizontally, which meant that you could never really get a proper look at the screen. Outside, insects were thrumming and the early morning fog had burned off into a glorious afternoon. Pine trees and spruce with interlocking limbs lined the dark paved paths that wound through the campus. 

She was, rather obscurely, watching Gummi Bears. I’d grown up watching Gummi Bears almost every afternoon of my childhood, which may have only been two to three years, since time is distended in childhood and summers can seem to last forever. Starting in fourth grade I attended a new school, often walking home by myself, retrieving the key from under the mat and spending the next hour or so waiting for one of my older siblings to get home. I almost always waited on the floor, pushing one of our large rectangular brown pillows in front of the television, lying down with my head resting comfortably against the pillow and watching television. 

The Disney afternoon was then at its zenith in 1990, starting with Gummi Bears and then leading straight in to Duck Tales. I remember an afternoon after I’d come home and eaten some graham crackers and poured cinnamon sugar onto my tongue, which was how I started every afternoon that I came home. The sun was shining in the triptych of windows in the kitchen, and I was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting to see if I needed anything else to eat, and I started wondering about adductions, about the people who might come in to the house and take me away. I didn’t get any further than the abduction itself, but I was starting to get worried about the front door, wondering if the sound I was hearing was someone trying to get into our house. Logically, it couldn’t be, but why was I hearing the slight sound of something tapping? 

I rushed towards the door with my heart beating in my chest. Though maybe the noise had been coming from the garage door, and where were the cats? Where had they gotten off to? Thank God for the cats. I went back into the living room and peered into my brother’s room around a corner, hoping that if I saw someone I’d have time to run out the front door. But the door was locked and while I was fumbling with the lock the person would have time to snatch me up. So after I’d checked the room from around the corner I quickly unlocked the front door hoping that they didn’t come around the other side of the hallway in the meantime, sprinting past the photographs that lined the wall, rounding the kitchen floor, skirting round on the linoleum and turning the corner into the living room. No one was there. 

I remembered then that my brother had a baseball bat, and so I went into his room, sneaked behind the treasure chest and grabbed the wooden bat. I was a very good pitcher and a passable hitter, largely because I was afraid that I’d be hit by the ball when I was hitting, and so I swung at everything late because my first determination was always whether I was going to get hit or not, followed by the second determination, which was supposed to be your first in baseball, which was a decision about whether the pitch was a strike and what exactly you were going to do about that. I had one very good year at the plate where I constantly laced things into right field, but it was short-lived, and I quit baseball soon thereafter. 

I moved into our living room and sat in one of the two large chairs, a sort of brownish black, covered in a faux leather, chairs in which the arms and back fused into one large piece with a slight curvature such that it was like being cupped in the hand of some very benevolent being. To my left was the hearth and the fire place. I’d thought about getting some of the tools from the fireplace to fend of the attackers. The television was sitting on a large black chest, with a tan covering lying on top of the chest and beneath the television. To my right was the couch, and beyond it the loom, which I never saw my mother use, but which was always strung out, looking vaguely reminiscent of a harp and which conjured a sort of aesthetic feeling that I can’t exactly place. In short, I liked the loom and felt that it conveyed something mysterious that made its presence worthwhile. Beyond that was a heavy wooden book shelf, with a record player set in the middle and a series of very small houses of the sort that you could get and paint, set upon it, and a few small wooden lambs, and the wooden hull and slight riggings of what was to be Noah’s ark. 

Often, when people recall childhood it is with a sense of wonder and nostalgia for something lost. What they forget, or at least what I remember, is the occasional terror, the strangeness of having boundaries that are circumscribed for you. Suddenly, you become a teenager, at what moment exactly, who knows? But the boundaries begin to dissolve one by one, but when you are a child imagining yourself beyond the boundaries is terrifying. And the imagination is so active because the boundaries presence means the rest of the world could be anything. Certainly one of the things we are saying as an adult when we reflect back on childhood is that so many things are new and exciting, that we had something to look forward to, a trip to the zoo, a baseball game, a candy at the end of the day, the long mornings of waiting until a friend came by our house. Our lives had a kind of meaning and happiness that begins to dissolve as we age, come to understand routines, responsibilities, the lines that demarcate the lives that we are living from the ones that we might have live or could possibly be living, lines that have always existed, but which only come into greater and greater detail, we can only have been exactly who we are. 

I sat in the chair with the front door open, convinced that if someone came in the house it was going to be from the back, and so I’d have time to run out the front door. The white enamel door was open, and I could see just outside, the warm afternoon sun, lying on bits of sun, shaded by the rhododendron in the corner, held off by the pillars and roof over the small and non-descript porch. The afternoon was filled with light, and I’d always been terrified of the dark, from a very young age. And yet there I was, trying to watch another episode of Gummi Bears, baseball bat held in hand, waiting for someone to come.

The Early Years

Every person develops an identity, a sense of self that pervades our thinking on either a conscious or sub-conscious level. Identity formation happens so gradually that it’s often nearly impossible to define precisely when and where we developed our identity. My identity though was and has been intimately linked to sports. It was on the soccer and football fields of my youth that I began to discover a part of my identity. Like most relatively healthy people, a portion of identity making took place around something I was good at. Eventually, as it does for most who identify themselves as “athletic”, this identity was fractured when I realized how many people identified themselves as “athletes” who were bigger, stronger, and faster. However, in kindergarten I didn’t have any sense of identity, no relationship to the buildings, the teachers, or the other students, nothing to tell me who I was or might be.

The kindergarten classroom was the nearest one to you after you exited the bus. A long semi-circle of dull grey pavement lead along the front of the school, mirrored by a small slice of medianal grass, browned by the scorching summer heat. I walked to school that year, deposited in the classroom, which felt, similar in height to a five year old as the cathedrals of Europe do to an adult. The ceilings felt vaulted, the rows of chairs and tables, cavernous, and the height of the windows, left light filtering through in a way that is reminiscent of those same cathedrals, places of holiness and silence.

Our class was run efficiently and quieter than many of the kindergarten classrooms that I’ve been in since. Mrs. Marks had this habit of speaking extremely close to the children in her classroom when she wanted you to do something. She had sharp features, close cropped blond hair, and blue eyes. At five, I was scared of her and the intensity of expectation implied by her face’s proximity to my own. Towards the back of the classroom was a semi-circular table, with room for an instructional aide or Mrs. Marks to attend to our tasks, which were generally structured around cutting out shapes or tracing letters. Much of this time was given over to properly holding scissors, a task which eluded me. 

Much of adult life whether we’d like to acknowledge it or not is given over to an acceptance of our limitations, our failures, our shortcomings. When you hold a child for the first time, you are filled with wonder, with the awesomeness of their fragility and I understand now, with the width and depth of their possibilities. When I first held scissors, thinly, inexpertly, when I first tried to cut in a straight line and wound up with a ragged edge, the possibility that I would be many things was disclosed. Whether I possess inferior fine motor skills because of a series of ear infections suffered as a child, or whether it was genetically inherent, it’s still true that I can’t cut in a straight line with scissors, nor can I paint or draw with anything but crudity. Back then, I sat at the back of the classroom, in that thin light trickling through the window, blue construction paper in front of me and the shape of a circle inscribed into the paper’s center. As I cut, with my right hand, I tried to shift the paper clockwise with my left hand, keeping the dull edge of the blade carefully on the black line, who’s shifting form remained impossible to define by the boundary of that dull blade. Sometimes, Mrs. Marks would stand next to me, the thick smell of coffee over my shoulder, my fingers growing sweaty at the effort, my mind experienced a kind leadenness as the shape refused to conform or emerge from the paper. In short, I was a failure. 

Recently, we received a small gift of Legos for the girl. The box said age’s seven to twelve and contained a fanciful picture of a pink winged fairy flying over a small kitchen set, ready to alight and begin making some complex French dish. Alas, the toys do not arrive fully formed but in boxes with elaborate instructions that are vaguely reminiscent of Ikea. The girl’s arms are flapping wildly as she looks at the instructions. 

“This is hard,” I say.

“You can do it, dad,” she says.

“These pieces are very small.”

“They’re not too small.” 

The first few steps are easy, but the Legos are so much smaller than they were when I was a child, difficult to assemble, nearly impossible to squeeze together for my fingers, which are still not nimble. We sat on the carpet for forty five minutes, towards the end, while trying to put a final piece into place, I broke off a chunk of one of the small towers that were part of the large central oven, leaving a scattering of pieces all over the floor. 

“I can’t do it,” I said, placing the rest of the Legos on the table and telling her to wait for her mother.

“I’m not good at things like this,” I tell her, and turn to the sink and begin washing hummus from a small yellow plate. 

The playground was no better. I had not yet constructed an identity around my ability to kick or throw a ball with the facility of an older child. Rather, I walked around in a daze, excluded from groups of kids who had navigated pre-K classrooms or who were full of boisterous energy, ready to wrestle and to ask other people to be their friends. And so I walked around on those heat blasted days, over the red dust beneath the trees, watching the swings sway back and forth after someone had left them, chains dangling. I watched as children jumped on the multi-colored jungle gym, and I watched as some kids stood far out in the field, trying to play soccer. It was in these first weeks and months that my mother swears Drew threw rocks at me, but it’s a memory that I cannot conjure. Having children of my own now, it is easy to imagine young boys hurling rocks at one another. There is a temptation to play the victim when recounting one’s own life, to make a list of wrongs, which seems to put the blame for any inadequacies elsewhere. I tell you that I could not cut with scissors, nor that I knew how to socialize. I was strange. 

But I was also eager to please, and still am, which means that I desperately wanted to bend the scissors and the paper to my will. 

The girl and I are negotiating the cleanup happening in the kitchen. She’s been wild of late, biting and pinching the rest of the family, throwing tantrums and telling one or the other of us that we’re the worst parents in the world. Behind locked doors, she slams her first into the door frame while I silently slam into the edges of my mind. “I can’t take this anymore,” I say, because I often can’t. Today though has gone relatively well. I’ve given her small structures, boundaries and rules about what she can and cannot play. These structures are triggering her two years of schooling in Montessori, which is based around describing work as play and giving each child space to create or work on an item. She likes these structures, and I think of our friends who have said that the people at their day care make better parents than they do. It is 2015, and I have stayed at home part-time with both of my children, reading them books, giving them baths, changing endless diapers, snuggling them when they fall downstairs, and yet, perhaps the people at school are better at giving my child the structures that she wants and desires. Certainly, I love her more, but when has love ever been enough? If love was enough then, in an intellectual short cut around free will, there would be no evil, for God’s love would be sufficient. But nothing is sufficient. Nothing is ever sufficient. 

After the first few ragged months in class I start taking a short walk to a trailer out at the edge of school. Behind the scenes there is some sort of war being waged between Mrs. Marks and my mother about whether I need to repeat kindergarten. I could not cut with scissors, struggled to trace the letters of the alphabet and was socially awkward. In fact, in retrospect, I can see many of the signs pointed to the fact that I was not ready for the next year in school. My mother, who knew me as an agreeable little chap who wanted to snuggle, disagreed. When I think of my mother, from the perspective of a child, it is hard not to think of a swan, extending its wing, and pulling her young close to keep them sheltered. She was gentle and kind and giving. And in this case, it’s hard to know, thirty years later, whether she was right.

The early years

We lived on a small cul-de-sac in Chico. Our neighbors, the Wycoffs, had a white camper with orange and brown stripes that ran horizontally along the large shell. It was nearly always parked in front of their house, its large wheels, seemed to me, at five, to have been the size of the Monster Truck wheels. I remember obscure things, sitting around in the afternoon, wondering if Big Foot or Grave Digger would be able to fly across the mound of cars faster. Grave Digger, who was, both by its name, and painting, black with a green skull and flames emblazoned on the side, was without a doubt the coolest monster truck. The announcers were always excited about Grave Digger and intoned the name with a gravelly kind of sound that you’d associate with a monster truck rally or a revved up auctioneer. The trucks made a small sem-circle as they approached the cars, while ESPN, ran a line of stats on the bottom screen showing how many times they’d won certain events. 

It’s interesting to think of when our understanding of cool or aesthetics begins. Why was I as a child of seven or so, so intrigued by Grave Digger? The announcers always intoned the name of Big Foot, the blue monster truck who won almost every time with the sort of reverence that one might intone for a Greek God. And yet, despite the feeling of awe that I got when I watched Big Foot roll around in that semi-circle, I knew he wasn’t cool. Grave Digger that piece of shit truck that was broken down as often as it was running was a more aesthetically pleasing vehicle. I understood, even then that aesthetics mattered. To paint your truck black and to give it a skull with green flames on it was to signify something in a way that a cobalt blue could never accomplish. 

And yes, Grave Digger was a piece of shit truck. It was constantly breaking down, missing main events while the mechanics or the owners worked on fixing the chassis, or the struts, or whatever combustible part of the engine was smoking because Grave Digger was almost always bellowing smoke from its engine, pulled off to the side, its driver, wearing a green helmet with a skull, skinny and pathetic beside the vehicle, standing with his hands on his hips as frustrated as the rest of us that Grave Digger was an inferior vehicle. 

The monster truck shows took place under bright lights, probably trucked in by ESPN for the occasion, lights that flickered and dazzled off the contours of Grave Digger like moonlight on water. Big Foot’s cab caught the light more subtly, muting it, taking the light into its deep blue and holding onto it. But to see the skull and cross bones of Grave Digger illuminated, the green flames dazzling by the lights, the brief moment when the driver hit the gas, and the blue exhaust pumped out, the truck accelerating across the dirt in some out of the way race ground on the outskirts of town, my heart pumped furiously. And then the truck, the monster truck of obscene size and weight, suddenly air borne over a row of cars, a ridiculous bird in flight, before it came crashing down, smashing the windows of every car on its way down, and my heart would stop beating so fast, and I’d wait for them to post a time, or for the driver to run out of Grave Digger to avoid catching fire. 

Are aesthetics learned or conferred? The answer to most questions with two supposed divergent poles is, almost uninterestingly, a bit of both. And yet, I cannot know if other children watched Grave Digger with the same degree of fascination, or whether they were enamored with Big Foot. Certainly, even at a young age I understood that life had something intimately tied to beauty. And though I’d have been unable to elucidate it then, what was exciting about Grave Digger is that its design was an attempt at beauty and that for me, even as a failure, the attempt was more meaningful than anything that Big Foot could have ever achieved. 

If the Bible or some geneticists are to be believed, we’re all related in one way or another. The Wycoff’s turned out to be distant cousins of my mother’s, related some generations back, a fact which was discovered at some point in my childhood, a feat made more impressive by the fact that ancestry.com and obsession with genealogies had been out of style for a few hundred years before there recent rise of discovering your past, which I don’t understand. There is only the present, brief and flickering as a candle’s flame. 

At the end of the cul-de sac was a large weeping willow tree, who’s long limbs stretched down over the street, draping that part of the street in shade and silence. The property also had a Norwegian Maple, large, or so it seemed to me then, as the sky itself, towering like Notre Dame in the small six house space that marked the boundaries of my universe. We never knew the people at the house with the willow tree and the shade. They kept to themselves, whoever lived there, in their own little universe apart from the rest of us, and who can blame them, who can blame anyone for anything?

The year before kindergarten my mother and I used to walk my older sister, Jill to and from school. The walk was less than a mile, and she’d hold my hand, stopping briefly, to explore the pine cones in front of the green house that was owned by the Voth’s. The pine cones were special, prickly and fresh smelling. They fell from a pine that was planted in a thin strip of landscaping that bounded the rectangular strip of grass in their front yard. The tree dropped a thick coating of pine needles, brittle and brown along the strip of landscape. I held up the pine cones like treasures, and my mother and I would talk about them, feel their prickly edges, she, marveling each time anew at the same damn pine cone. My mother was patient and kind. 

It is strange now, to be remembering those walks when I was three and four on the way to school, conscious as I am of my own four year old who will no doubt remember our own harried drives to and from school, blasting music on the good mornings to pass the time. I am not as patient as my mother. But that’s not really what I’m thinking of right now, what I’m thinking of is my mother’s hand, soft and white, clutching mine, and saying goodbye to my daughter, standing at the car door, and what I hear inside those moments is the soft tolling of a bell in the distance, death. 

The next year I started kindergarten at Sierra View elementary school. A collection of squat buildings close enough to walk from our rental house, with a large fierce looking eagle painted on the front in a dramatic blue circle. The parking lot was backed by a large square of grass, but the overall feeling of the school was heat. The low slung buildings, painted white and grey reminded you of the valley and the heat, of the sun radiating down in the valley, below the foothills painted brown, the live oaks a dusty green, and down into the valley where it would lie like a cat in a window sill, pressing down on us. 

The desks in kindergarten were set in five long rows, and we were seated alphabetically by last name. The windows were at least eight feet high and had to be opened and shut using a large dowel with a hook attached at the end. The panes were crisscrossed with black lines that formed a series of very small circles, perhaps designed to reduce the glare of sunlight. I sat in the second row, facing my teacher, Mrs. Marx, her hard features fixed, her breath smelt of coffee, which my mother never drank, and she was severe for a kindergarten teacher, intense. People often describe their kindergarten teachers to me, fresh faced girls just out of teaching college, their bubbly laughter floating through the room. This was not my experience at all. Of course, this was probably not everyone’s experience of Mrs. Marx either. I have to grant that some students probably thrived under that structure, prepared to sit in prescribed sheets, moving briefly to the art table to cut out prescribed shapes. 

The playground at Sierra View was large, typical of a small city in California, where space never seems to be in short supply. Every time I fly back now from the east, I am struck by the long low houses, with large stretches of grass or trees, or highway between them as if space was an infinite quantity. The playground had a large gravel sand box with standard issue black swings and a jungle gym, now probably defunct. Beyond the gravel playground was a large grass field, large enough to play a full game of football or soccer, and a smaller field beyond that, for another group of kids to play their own game. A small line of oak trees stood at the edge of the black top, and you walked beneath their dusty limbs on the way to the field. They were surrounded by red dirt, and they conveyed a feeling of both having always been there and of being very tired. The black top, which was on the opposite side of the gravel area, had tether ball poles, two of them, strung up high, where kids would gather in line to challenge one another, contesting the placement of feet and whether a ball had been completely tethered. It was, like most of kindergarten, large in a way that I was not ready to comprehend. It had more buildings and space than the six house block that had bounded my childhood, more kids than my brief stint in a pre-school and more structure than could have been imagined when I was peeing in the back yard, racing cars down the driveway or listening to the grasshoppers and drinking lemonade on our screen porch.