Not Really About Soccer

Yes it was another good day for a certain high school in the Excelsior, which now is 5-0 so far this season.

Next, they face a renewal of their arch-rivalry from last year's championship game Thursday with another 5-0 team.

Anticipating that game for the next two days will be sweet. Watching my son compete in these high school games is, as I am well aware, as good as it gets...and as good as it will ever get.

***

Yesterday, a talented young woman showed up at my front door, as expected, to film an interview with me about events that happened over 30 years ago. Twice last week, I spoke to students in local colleges about journalism past and present.

Later this week, I'll go on a local radio station to talk about the same topic.

These days, there are a regular stream of requests for me to talk about what has been a very long life indeed in the world of journalism. This is what it means to be an elder, of course, and I understand and accept that role.

But even though my body is old, there are few moments when I, my spirit, feels old.

When it comes to watching kids play soccer, or interviewing entrepreneurs, or (on the occasional lucky day) hanging out with a much younger, beautiful woman, I somehow don't feel like the old man I most certainly am.

So what's up with that?

***

Yesterday I also hung out for a while with two young men out front who were friends, perhaps relatives, of my murdered neighbor. They were both struggling to make sense of this awful crime.

One of the young men would be called black in this society, the other would be called Latino. To my eyes, they are both beautiful young people, somebody's sons, and somebody else's future fathers.

The dark-skinned man felt like talking. "I wonder where he is now?" he said about our fallen friend. "He got too big a heart to just be dead. He got to be somewhere. Where he is?"

The lighter-skinned man's eyes were filled with tears and he had no words to offer.

I tried my best to answer the first man's question. "Nobody knows what happens when we die," I offered. "People believe all sorts of things, but I think we just don't know."

Then I said this: "No matter where he is, he's still alive for you, right? You don't have to let go of somebody you love just because they are gone. And he was one of those people who always had so much to say to all of us, maybe all we should just do is remember that, and keep talking to each other, also."

Just keep talking to one another. Maybe that is a lesson for all of us. Because sooner or later, our voices will be stilled, too, and wouldn't it be a pity if we stopped talking too soon?

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Ten Years Ago

(Note: This post is part of a series of articles by various writers organized by my friend Tyge O'Donnell. I urge anyone interested to read them all at his site, The Neon Lounge.)

Ten years ago, my wife and I owned a house in Noe Valley, our kids were 7, 5 and 3; and I had a great job as founding editor of a new city magazine. There were dark clouds on the horizon, however, with the dot-com implosion, and stress lines in our marriage.

Still, when I woke up that morning of September 11, 2001, I had plenty of reasons to be hopeful about the future. The city where we chose to live, San Francisco, has endured a endless series of booms and busts since the Gold Rush Era, and people here know nothing if not how to be resilient.

I was getting ready to head downtown when my wife heard the report of a plane hitting the World Trade Center on NPR. She called out to me to turn on our TV, which was located in my basement office to prevent the kids from exposure to its presumed evils.

Rushing into my office, I left the door open while I snapped on the TV. Our seven-year-old son quietly entered behind me, just as the second plane smashed into the second tower.

I heard his gasp, turned and swept him out of the room. He went upstairs, got a piece of construction paper and drew the image that appears at the top of this post.

***

It took weeks for life to resume any sort of normal rhythm. Barry Bonds was having the greatest home-run hitting season in baseball history, but all sports contests were suspended for a while.

Tourism came to an end, and with that development, the city slowed to a crawl. There was no one in the restaurants that normally would be packed, and the hotels were empty.

City magazines exist by selling ad space to local businesses. Ours, which had launched literally a week before 9/11, now looked to be dead on arrival. After a series of crisis meetings, the small group of us who had launched it decided we would cut back production to every other month, defer our salaries, and accept trade as opposed to cash for ad space in the book.

That fall and winter and the next spring were extremely difficult, both for the magazine, for the city, and for me. I had to take out a huge equity loan to keep paying the house payments, and all of the strains evident before 9/11 worsened in its wake.

While many dot-com companies had survived the stock market bubble that had started popping in April 2000, now the entire first wave of web-based startups started failing left and right, and it turned into an economic disaster for this region.

Tourists stayed away in droves, and it was deep into 2002 before the core element of the city's economy began a fitful recovery. By then, I had been forced to leave the magazine for a position as a visiting professor at Stanford, where the plan was for me to write a book.

***

By remembering all of this, I do not wish to imply any causal relationship between 9/11 and the chaos that visited my world, because it's all much more complicated than that. Besides, others suffered far worse pains than I did, including a friend and former colleague whose sister was killed when the plane hit the Pentagon.

But through a series of setbacks, I eventually found myself without that house, without that marriage, and without what until then had been an extremely successful career as a journalist.

Over the years since, in most ways, life has proved to be a much more difficult challenge than it had previously been. In most ways, it continues to prove more difficult year by year.

I won't chronicle the losses, disappointments, or the many crushed dreams. Many, many people have been struggling mightily in this historical adjustment of the U.S. national economy as it integrates into a global economy where "we" have far less leverage over our economic fate than when U.S. hegemony was clearer, and less under assault from aggressive centers of growth overseas.

But there are many bright spots around here and I post about them week after week. San Francisco is the center of another tech boom, bringing waves of entrepreneurial innovation to the rest of the world, like we always do when on top.

I'm chronicling that boom for the very magazine that I helped launch a decade ago.

The little boy who drew that sad picture on 9/11 is now a junior in high school, and all-city soccer star, and coach of a younger girls' team that yesterday won their opening game, 1-0.

There are flowers blooming in the garden out back, and somewhere way up in an apple tree, I can hear the sweet sound of a pair of birds singing...

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Victory!

Coaching his first game today, this was a 17-year-old with a plan. His players had only one practice under their belts -- and that was late yesterday -- and they were neither in game shape yet, nor used to winning soccer games.

But, as they say, you could throw away the history books today. This didn't look like the same team that had won only six of its previous 43 games. The defense was terrific, and the midfielders and strikers kept getting to the ball first and punching the ball into the other team's zone.

When he saw they were bunching up too much during the scoreless first half, he told them to spread the field in the second. A few other adjustments and about fifteen minutes into the second half his team scored the first goal of the season.

That was all it would take.

After their 1-0 victory, the girls all high-fived their new coach, whom some of them have taken to calling Mister Coach Sir, with a smile.

It's just one game, of course, but this might be a pretty good story beginning here...

One other detail -- the player at right defense, his little sister, played with a sore ankle and a bad cold. And, she played her best game ever.

-30-

Game Day

Watching your young sons grow into men and your your young daughters grow into women is part of the deal, of course, with parenting, and it's easy to detect the combination of lament at lost childhood and pride at emerging adulthood in any parent's voice.

This is a very quiet and hot Saturday morning in the city. The fan's on overhead; the back door is open, and I can hear a few birds in the back garden. A lazy, slow-moving haze lightens what would otherwise be our bright blue Northern California sky.

Neighbors rush around, getting ready for their weekend routines. I remember back in the years when I was employed the stark difference between weekday and weekend -- a difference for me that has largely evaporated.

Now every day has a great deal of sameness to it. Every night as well, which is not a good thing.

But today is one I've been anticipating for a while. My 17-year-old starts his formal coaching career. His U13 girls' team held their first practice last night and they were energetic but definitely rusty. He had them running and passing and receiving and defending for an hour and a half.

They listen to him, which is a good thing. But afterward, he said to me, "The thing about girls is they talk so much. And not about soccer. It's hard to keep their attention on the game."

Nevertheless that is his job, to keep their attention on the game. He's not taking over a winning franchise, since in previous seasons these girls have won six, lost thirty-five and tied two games. So that's a .163 winning percentage.

But he seems up to the challenge, which includes coaching his little sister, who plays defense on the team.

A few hours from now, I'll be standing on the sidelines with many other parents out at the Polo Fields, all rooting for our kids. But I'll probably be the only Dad with both a player and a coach in the game.

-30-

Spiders, Webs, and Striking Back

One of the main topics of conversation on the street out front lately has been spiders. You might think that a group of neighbors hanging around, drinking beer, mourning the brutal death of a man we all knew to varying degrees and liked, would talk only about that, about him, but that's not how this works.

In the end, there is nothing much to say about him. He is gone; most of us don't have much of a clue why, and those that do aren't talking. Who knows how many other secrets may reside in the hearts of those who visit this shrine. And who knows how many more may die before this latest wave of gang violence subsides.

But one thing we can all agree on is that we don't like spiders. Oh, there is the occasional one among us who will defend them, either a romantic (a fan of Charlotte's Web), or a pragmatist ("they kill flies.")

The problem for us humans is that they bite us. One of my neighbor's 3-year-old sons is allergic to spider bites. He had a huge red welt on his arm the other night as he ran around out front.

His dad said the doctor said not to worry unless he develops a fever.

Quite a few of us have noticed the invasion of a breed of strange yellow spiders that have proliferated around here in recent years.

***

Yesterday, as I was standing in my bathroom, peeing, at the back of my building, I noticed something weird. First, it was just one, then another, than a countless number of tiny yellow spiders spiraling down from the top of the back window to the bottom below.

It was a mesmerizing scene, as if I were witnessing an invasion, a military action.

That got me to wondering where military leaders first got the idea of parachuting soldiers behind enemy lines, because this sure looked like something like that.

My job, I decided on the spot, was to protect my kids from these invaders. But to learn about that counter-action, you'll have to tune in another time, because that's another story altogether.

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Alone and Together Again

How to ever capture the emotions of a day? So many ups and so many downs. So many lonely moments and so many warm, intimate moments?

The most important thing about today, and this date, is it is one of my kids' birthdays. I remember the day he was born. It had been 13 years since I'd had a child, and when he arrived, he became my second son.

But he wasn't my youngest for long. Within a few short years, he was the oldest of three. A middle son, with two older sisters and one younger sister.

This weekend, he will become the head coach of his younger sister's soccer team, even though it will be another year before he will no longer be classified as a "minor" himself.

Tonight, at our little family birthday party, his oldest sister and her two young children came to celebrate at his Mom's house. We decided it would not be safe to gather at my house, where tensions on the street out front remain high, amidst a string of retaliatory gang-related murders that took the life of one of my neighbors last week.

While playing with his nephew and niece, the birthday boy also received an energetic call via Skype from his other two nephews in Sacramento, the children of my middle daughter.

This all gets confusing sometimes, this family story. Yes there are a lot of us, which is ironic, given my status as paternal head of the family tree. After all, I live alone, am single, and am a writer -- the epitome of a lone wolf.

Check out my career as an investigative reporter, and the improbability of all of this becomes clear.

Yet nothing I've ever done, or no label ever applied to me has ever felt real to me. I'm none of the things others ascribe to me. I am, have always been, and always will be a complete outsider, except in one very special sense.

And that is when it comes to my family.

But this is not about me. This is about my son's birthday. I picked him up from a friend's house after school and drove him to the Haight. We bought a few items of clothing from the stores he likes best there. As we walked back to my car, I showed him the flat where his older three siblings grew up, just half a block from the corner of Haight and Ashbury.

Back at Bernal, we ordered pizzas. His Mom brought cupcakes, like she did when he was small. We lit candles and sang the song. He smiled and played happily with his three-year-old nephew, who was in a rambunctious mood.

When it was time for the little guy to leave, with his Mom and baby sister, he looked out of the window and saw the strange night sky of lights twinkling through the fog of Twin Peaks.

His eyes got huge and he started to feel scared.

His uncle gave him a big hug and told him he would be fine. His Grandpa scooped him up in his arms and carried him out into that dark night, to secure him in his seatbelt.

"We have to be careful in our car," he told his Mom.

His uncle jogged back up the stairs, as his Mom drove him off into the night. After one more round of hugs, I did so as well.

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Comfort for the Afflicted

The mourning goes on out front day after day. The police drive by. Kids play. people light candles and burn sage. Guys drink beer. Neighbors stop by while walking their dogs or carrying home laundry, groceries.

As the light fades, and the chill of night starts driving us inside, people trade stories of the little things in life -- spider bites, the Giants' disappointing collapse, kids' soccer, people moving in, people moving away.

The crowd out front is so mixed -- black, white, Asian, Latino -- that it well represents our community. All different kinds of people; all concerned with the same kinds of things.

In the aftermath of this tragedy, the best we can do is connect with one another, share thoughts, and try to act more like a community than isolated groups of individuals hiding in fear behind closed doors.

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