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.
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