Sidelined

With his eight stitches and a jagged scar above his left eye, my son had to watch tonight's game from the sidelines with the rest of us non-players, except when he stood with his team before, after and at halftime in the contest. It ended in a 1-1 tie in the bitter cold; the peculiar kind of cold only San Franciscans know.

If sports like soccer serve as a metaphor and an educational opportunity, they also can be intense personal experiences for everyone involved. As Aidan prepares for applying to colleges this fall, he is drafting his personal essays.

The main topics?

Soccer, and diversity.

I read his first draft of the main essay for the U-C system the other day, and I felt proud of him. He writes in a clear, distinctive voice -- very much his own voice. One measure I always use as an editor when evaluating writers is how much they sound like themselves.

That may seem to be an odd comment to make, for those who don't write and edit professionally, but there are many, many writers who don't sound like themselves at all, and I don't necessarily here mean a merging of their spoken and written word choices.

Plenty of folks write badly, in stilted, over-the-top language, or mangling English so badly one has little idea what they may be trying to say.

So a young man of eighteen who can write about himself and his life with clarity and purpose is a relatively rare creature, in my experience.

If his grades improve, and his test scores, he may get into some colleges on the strength of his writing voice.

That would be gratifying.

I could never have been the athlete he is; but he could easily become the writer I've tried to be.

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