Columbus Day

It's Columbus Day, or Indigenous People's Day in San Francisco. Either way, as the kids say, "Yay! A day off school."

There's nothing much for them to celebrate beyond that, but that's one of the best things they ever get to celebrate -- a long weekend.

I took them to lunch at our favorite local burrito place.

At lunch and afterward, as their banter turned to some serious issues some of them are facing, we all devolved into hysterical laughter.

There really is nothing quite like being around teenagers to realize just how absurd life is. They are often scheming about how to get out of this or that commitment, or into this or that party or concert.

Things that we adults would consider serious issues, like which high school or college they will go to, they see as more like a Picasso painting, i.e., distortions of reality.

When we try to tell them they may regret some of the decisions they make now later, they say things like, "That makes no sense. If I came back from the future to now I'd make the same decision again, for the same reason."

In many ways, teens are living in the moment much more than us elders ever can do. Burdened by our past, and fears about our future, we fear them making mistakes. Mistakes they may regret.

At some point, we have to just let it be. Let it be. Let them go.

There's no other way for it all to play out, according to nature's plan.

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Applying for College

There's nothing quite like helping your kid fill out college applications to remind you just how little a series of numbers or checked boxes can tell you about a person's true nature.

These are institutions that want him (i.e., you) to go into debt at the rate of $30,000-50,000 a year, just for him to earn a four-year degree.

As we check off his race, ethnicity, SAT scores, classes he's taken, grades, family income, and on and on, it occurs to me that none of this in any tangible way tells his story.

We are just being reduced to comparatives. And if there is one thing I have learned as a journalist the past 45+ years, never reduce another person to a formula.

(Except, of course, if all you want is to sell that person something.)

I do not know what some admission officer somewhere might think about my son by scanning his application. I'm quite sure he will simply be sorted into one pile or another.

Unless they read his writing, where he reveals a bit of himself and his values, none of this other crap really matters at all.

Testing is broken and always has been. Character matters and always will.

I hope for him that someone in the chain of deciders understands character when it presents itself.

And that the match is a good one for him.

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Back in the Game

It was great to see my son back on the pitch Tuesday. He had three assists off of long passes in the space of a couple minutes early on in a 5-0 win. He only played about half the game, as the other team could mount no attack and his coach did not want to run up the score.

His stitches are out and he feels fine. He likes his scar. Whereas Tuesday's game was played in scorching heat, around 95 degrees, today's will be in fog and wind. San Francisco's weather seems, if anything, even more unstable these days.

Sports.

The Giants made the playoffs; so did the Tigers and the A's. But sad that after being in first place almost all season, my fantasy team let the championship slip away in the last few days and lost by a few points. We did accumulate over 5,000 points, which usually wins the league title.

Not this time.

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The Competitor: Tale of Two Days

Before yesterday's game in the Golden Gate Invitational Tournament, I knew my daughter wasn't feeling very good, but I had no idea what was wrong.

By the end of the first game, it was apparent she was sick or hurt. She said her tailbone hurt (she calls it her 'butt bone'), which is not the kind of injury I've ever had to deal with before.

She couldn't sit down properly and the pain also seemed to migrate around to her sides at times. As we scrambled to find some Ibuprofen, she fell asleep on a blanket during the team's between game picnic.

When a teammate woke her up, as the time came to prepare for the second game, she limped out onto the field but couldn't take part in the warmups. Her coach talked to her and advised me to take her home. Something was wrong.

Given that she was sleeping outside the past week, she mentioned hantavirus, a very scary thought; or the start of her period, a non-scary idea; or maybe just a sore lower back from sleeping on the lumpy ground all week.

She cried almost all the way home. I knew she was bitterly disappointed to miss her team's second game, and also either sick or tired or injured in some mysterious way that confused both her and me.

Back home, she got into her PJs, ate some comfort food, and watched TV with her brothers. By night she was still in a lot of pain but looking much better. I dropped her at her Mom's and later in the evening got a text that she would be ready to play today.

As she and her friend approached the tunnel to the Polo Fields today she was in a good mood. Her 'butt bone' still hurt and it took her a long time to be able to get out of the car (she refused my help) but once she was upright, she was most definitely game-ready.

Her coach started her, and as the game progressed, it was amazing to see her transformation, from a limping girl with a hurt back into a competitive soccer player using her size and strength to take care of business.

At one point she did something every defender has to be able to do. Her keeper was down, the ball was loose in front of the net, two opposing strikers were ready to score, and Julia got the ball, knocked them aside, and cleared it from the zone.

In my memory, this was the single best play I have ever seen her make.

A few moments later, as a striker tried to get around her,(and I know this is going to sound bad to those of you who don't know soccer) she knocked the girl to the ground, took the ball, and moved it upfield, starting a counter attack.

The referee did not blow his whistle and signaled it was a clean tackle -- in fact a brilliant defensive play.

Julia doesn't show it openly, but her competitive instincts are as impressive as any athlete I have ever known.

You could say I'm just a little bit proud of my youngest child!

The

Bookish Times

On the plane to New York last week, all the way across the country, I read a new novel, Dying Words, by K. Patrick Conner.

The book traces the final days in the career of a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, Graydon Hubbell, who, after a heart attack some years back, has been writing only obituaries and sits in a corner of the newsroom called Section Eight, which is populated by the final few elderly journalists not yet remaindered during the endless series of layoffs and buyouts that have virtually destroyed the newspaper over the past decade.

Early in the story, Hubbell learns he is dying of cancer and has very little time left. He continues to work and encounters a series of disasters that journalists know all too well can happen, even to the best of us. One name accidentally substituted for another in an article, embarrassing his boss who was a friend of the departed; a complaint from the paper's diversity committee that most of those whose deaths he covered were white men; and finally the worst calamity that can visit any obit writer...a premature obituary.

If this sounds like a depressing novel it isn't. I was riveted as I read page after page. I didn't want it to end. Ken Conner writes with a droll humor and insight of one who knows that his character is the perfect metaphor for a dying industry, with all of his (and its) frailties and principles, habits and courage.

The novel's strong sense of place captures San Francisco perfectly. Those of us who have lived here for decades know that it is a maddeningly special place, with many of its historic corruptions now replaced by a relentless technological determinism that is sweeping many of the Graydon Hubbells among us aside.

They feel, as my father once described himself to me, like "dinosaurs."

What is unusual about this book is Conner's ability to slow life down, even in its final weeks and months to all it ever is anyway -- a series of moments. After all, until you are dead you are still alive. Even in diminished circumstances, with mind and body no longer in anything resembling good working order, most humans choose to persist.

In the case of the fictional Hubbell, a wonderful mind continues to appreciate life's fine ironies, even those that bring him his greatest pain. Somewhere along the way, he still discovers love, pleasure, and how to give whatever he has left to others who might benefit by the exchange.

This is a book about kindness, and the generosity of spirit, an appreciation of tradition even after traditions no longer seem relevant. In that way, it is spiritually satisfying, and a reminder that no matter how bad things may seem to be in your life, you still have the power to set an example and make someone else's life better in the process.

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How the Games are Played (Inside)

Back to School Night for my high school senior, the last one of his four years at Balboa High School. All the principal, assistant principal and other parents wanted to talk about was my son's horrific head-to-head collision on the soccer pitch a week ago tonight.

"You could hear it from the stands," the principal told me, "the sound of their heads crashing together."

As it turns out, the other boy was knocked out by the force of their collision, and required 15 stitches; Aidan required eight. As far as we know no one suffered a concussion or other brain trauma, but it had to have been at the least a very jarring hit for both of them.

Aidan got his stitches out yesterday and is cleared to resume playing soccer next week.

"We need him," the principal told me.

The team is 1-3-1 with 7 games to go. I guaranteed the principal the team will still make the playoffs this year, even though the odds seem extremely remote.

That's because I expect Aidan, as a captain of this team and a senior, to emerge as a leader. It's his time. I know what he's made of. I believe in him.

I know that the odds are long. They have to win at least 6 of the last 7.

***

Sitting in the chairs he sits in, day after day, listening to the teachers he listens to, I experienced a sort of replica of my son 's school days tonight. It is an odd feeling -- being as if you are your child.

And, to a certain extent, the teachers treat you as if you are your child.

Which is fine.

I can see that his ambitious plan to take two AP courses this fall has created a serious strain on him. These are college level courses, in Statistics and English Composition that require a level of critical thinking he has not encountered up until now, but that he will of course need to develop by the time he is in college.

It's at times like these that you feel the vulnerability of your child.

No one prepared him for this!

Of course, no one prepared any of us for the realities of life.

His academic preparations are what they are, the result of these times, this place, the budget cuts, his presence in a nearly bankrupt school system, our family's lack of resources.

Then again, he is a star athlete, and by that, I mean a natural competitor. Maybe in the end soccer will be his ally not only on the field, under the sun, but in the classroom, where he needs to learn to work just as hard to be great.

I hope so.

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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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