Thanksgiving Part One 2011

Ghosty's Story

Some eleven years ago, we were at a school picnic in Golden Gate Park, having just moved back to the city from an ill-conceived attempt to relocate to the Washington, D.C. area.

Oh, the area was great, and I liked it there, but my wife was unhappy and insisted that we move back to San Francisco.

So we did, and the minute I stepped off that plane and smelled our sweet fresh air here on the west coast, I knew it was no mistake.

We would be raising our three young kids in the best city on the continent, which was fine by me, although it also meant, of course, that my career as a writer would be much further from New York than a convenient Amtrak commute.

In the park on that day, my six-year-old son heard a kitten cry.

Following his lead, he and I crawled through some dense brush to discover a small gaggle of kittens, hungry and sad, abandoned and left to die.

He carefully lifted them, one by one, out of the bushes to me.

Other families adopted some of them but we kept the one he loved the most. He named her Ghosty.

Three years later, his Mom and I broke up. She moved to a house on Bernal; I moved to a flat in the Mission.

During the relocation process, she took the kids back east, and left the cat with me. By this point, I had a girlfriend, and she loved Ghosty.

One night, Ghosty, who has always been an inside and an outside cat, went missing. As the kids were still back east, I dreaded having to tell them that Ghosty was gone, so my friend and I went out back, night after night, calling to Ghosty, hoping she would show back up.

Cats, after all, are notoriously unfaithful, much like human beings.

The kids came back learned the awful truth, and we papered our neighborhood with signs like you've often seen: "Missing Cat."

Still, she didn't come back.

Then, one night, my friend and I were out back calling to her when we heard a faint meow. "I think that's her," my friend said.

We called some more and the cat called back. Over and over we continued this call and response until, gloriously, Ghosty herself lept over my back fence straight in to my arms.

***

Recently, Ghosty was attacked by another animal on Bernal. Maybe a cat or maybe a raccoon. The tear in her skin was huge. Today, when I picked her up from the vet, she said she will be fine.

I first brought her back here, to my place, but she obviously felt disoriented, perhaps even remembering those traumatic events so long ago here, and staying in her carrier and just peaking her head out, as in the photo above.

But when I took her back to her real home, in Bernal, she started wriggling with delight.

Home. Such an enormous concept, such a concrete reality, so elusive when you are not there, and so natural when you are.

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On a rainy weekend...

...and with all us suffering from colds, yesterday was that time-honored season-ending event in kids' soccer, the pizza party. This one, for me, was like none other, if only because I had not only one child among the players on the team, but another as its head coach.

How would he handle the traditional coach's speech, where he would be expected to praise the players and make some inspirational comments about their season?

As it turned out, the girls had their own plan for how the day would unfold. They asked all of the adults, including "Mister Coach, Sir" to stay in another room while they got organized.

When we entered the room, they had it set up as if it were a British talk show, with one of the girls adopting a perfect accent seated at the top of the room with an empty chair next to her.

She then announced that her first guest would be the team's head coach, where she asked him directly what he felt about the team's play this season. He smiled and launched into what he could remember of the speech he had been planning to give.

He said lots of nice things -- complementing them all on how much they had improved, how hard they had competed, and how they had applied the things he taught them at practice into games.

When the "host" asked him another pointed question, he temporarily lost his train of thought and smiled. "I'm not really a public speaker," he apologized.

Then, he recovered his place and urged the girls to stay in shape over the winter, by playing futsol or basketball, by running or training or going to the gym every day.

He told them he thinks they are all talented enough to play at the next level, which for many of the girls will be high school or club soccer, but only if they are committed to staying in peak physical condition.

His comments here are against the backdrop that many of the kids complained early in the season that he was a "hard" coach, in that he made them run laps and perform a lot of drills at practice that required running, including sometimes "suicides," the sprints that are the consequence for the losing side of an intra-squad scrimmage.

Funny thing is that over the course of the season they stopped complaining, kept running and were no longer coming out of games struggling for breath or too exhausted to keep going.

He also told them he was "honored" to be their coach and to be part of their team. All in all, it was an exceptional performance, sincere, low-key, and effective. And I'm not saying that only because I am his Dad. If he had had a bad day, I'd say that as well. The girls listened carefully to him; their respect was obvious in their expressions.

Afterward, he spoke with the parents for a long time, answering their questions and elaborating on his coaching philosophy, which is remarkably nuanced for a 17-year-old, I believe.

When we finally left, and I asked him what he thought, he just said, "That went well."

Indeed.

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