My Favorite Song

This is a song from way down in the bayou. I spent the formative years of my youth out back in the jungle on tropical nights in a state much like the writer of this song. So you might say, this is familiar.

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A Young Warrior

He started the week with a tender ankle, tweaked during a tough game Sunday night.

Monday after being hit in the face at close-range by a kicked ball, he had a nosebleed, not uncommon in our family and hardly of concern to him. But since he was at a college prospect camp, the trainer came out to assist him.

No big deal.

Last night, when I picked him up after 12 more hours at this camp, he had a pulled groin muscle and was limping. After a bath, a quesadilla, and The Daily Show, he felt better.

This morning, he slept all the way across the bridge as he returned to yet another 12-hour day exhibiting his physical and soccer skills for a panel of college coaches. As I waited for him to emerge tonight, I saw a number of kids with hurt legs and arms, sporting bandages and ice packs, limping or being helped away from the field.

In case you are not a parent, this is not a fun sight when you are waiting, waiting, waiting for your own kid to emerge. Naturally, you start imagining the worst. A large SUV pulls up to the arena, backing into place, presumably to carry away even more badly injured athletes, after what clearly was a breakdown day -- the third straight -- in searing heat.

Just then, your tall young defender emerges smiling from the door at the top of the stairs and hustles down to your car.

"Hi, Dad."

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Budding Ideas and Talent

It's rare that it can be said to be sweltering here, but it is now. The flowers open at an exaggerated pace; fruits ripen on bush and tree.

Yesterday along the greenway, we picked blackberries in the East Bay. Today, under the watchful eyes of college coaches, my soccer prospect competed in the heat. Fortunately, he is in such superb condition that he played well despite the thick, heavy air.

During most weekdays, I meet with or chat over the phone with entrepreneurs. Their dreams are contagious; just talking with them helps you remember how much creativity lives in business, not only in art. Having worked in so many environments over the decades, seeing so many different approaches to work, from large corporations to unionized shops to non-profits to tiny startups, I can tell you that on balance I prefer the startups.

Things rarely go smoothly in a startup; ups and downs are frequent, and you never know how long you've got to try and make your idea work. It's not for everybody.

But I react to startups the way fruit and flowers react to the sun. They open me up and make me want to shine.

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The Hearts of Our Fathers

A very tall 16-year-old uncle and his nearly 3-year-old nephew masquerading as a motorcyclist helped make my day yesterday. But so did my five other children and three other grandchildren, all of whom were very present, at least by phone from various places around California, for their father and grandfather on a sunny, bright Sunday in June.

It was a two-game weekend set for my soccer player. Soccer is the only reason he's not with his Mom and younger siblings in the mountains on an annual camping trip. It's way more than the games; he's enrolled in a soccer identity camp at U-C, Berkeley this coming week -- an event where college coaches from many schools evaluate young prospects as they advance through high school toward their college years.

For that reason, this is a big moment in my son's soccer life. For the first time, he and I will get some sort of indication of whether he is a candidate for playing soccer at the collegiate level, or I should say levels, since there are three -- Division One (D-1), followed by D-2 and D-3.

The host school for this camp is of course a D-1 university, as well as the alma mater of his three older siblings, as well as the place where I taught journalism for 14 years, ending in 2003.

When you speak the word "father" to any man or boy, or to any woman or girl, many mixed images come to mind. Particularly for males, the relationships we forge with our fathers are complicated by layers upon layers of feelings, positive and negative.

Hopefully, through whatever other messy baggage that may be there, we can locate a sense of respect for our Dads. That's not always easy, and it's hardly exclusively the older male's fault that this is true.

In my case, I was not an easy son for my father. In many ways, I got to live out dreams he never even allowed himself to have. He grew up in a tiny farmhouse on a tenant farm. When I saw the house, the summer my first child was born and a few weeks after my mother almost died from a brain aneurysm, I was shocked at how small it was.

I believe that visit (which was due to the fact that we moved my mother from a hospital in Michigan to one in London, Ontario, for her brain operation), was the only time my dad ever went back to his childhood home, even though it was not a long drive from where we lived across the border in America.

He'd immigrated at age ten, held working-class jobs after high school, served in the Air Force in the war, and worked his way up through sales to office manager for milk companies in the Detroit area and then further north in Michigan as I was growing up.

He never loved his work. He loved to fish, to play golf, to root for the Detroit Tigers. He also loved his wife and his children. He had a great smile and a big heart.

I was not an easy son.

On Father's Day, it's important to remember things like that.

One of my sons spent yesterday with me all day. We had morning coffee at the nearby Atlas Cafe, lunch at a mall in El Cerrito, and dinner back home after his soccer game. We watched another old movie together last night. My oldest son called me from Pasadena, where he's about to move from to Seattle. My youngest called me from an ancient phone booth still marked Pacific Bell in a campground deep in the Sierra.

My youngest daughter, who made me a heart for Father's Day (above) talked to me from that same phone booth. My middle daughter called me from Sacramento last night. My oldest daughter hosted our visit to El Cerrito yesterday, where that very tall young uncle and his excited little nephew navigated that "motorcycle" to a park in the sun.

That was my day, a very good day. But I am acutely aware that for none of them have I been an easy father. First there are the two divorces from their mothers, both terrific mothers. Second has been my chaotic career as an entrepreneurial journalist, which ought to be an oxymoron, but there you have it -- my choices, which have not been easy for them.

And there's so much more, but we'll save that for the memoir that I should, but probably never will, write. Which means that we'll save that for them to tell, not me. If they are the story-tellers I think they are, the image of their father they collectively agree on will be far more accurate that anything this old journalist could ever tell you about himself.

I know my memory will be in good hands, because the truth is always far better than fiction; journalistic documentation superior to PR or marketing BS. And I have not raised any bullshitters.

Trust me, or better yet, meet my kids!

What did you do for Father's Day, who did you honor, and who did you remember? What kind of heart do you have and what kind of heart did you remember to have for your father? See, I figure on a day like Father's Day, it's not so much about what your father did for you, but what did you do for your father.

There's a question very much worth asking. It's what I asked myself today, as I remembered mine, may he rest in peace!

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