Wheels

I have an old friend from high school, M., who has made a complete success of his life but still likes to joke (well, half-joke maybe) about his one paramount regret: that he never went out for the high school football team. M. ran the high-hurdles in school and he was tall and fast, and one day the football coach saw him and, figuring he would make wide-receiver material, asked him to come out for the team. But M. declined. And 25 years later, we’re still talking about that moment as if it was the pivotal one in his life.

“Yeah, I could have been one of the great ones,” he’ll say in a mock-tragic tone borrowed from melodramas about dissipated ex-boxers. He’s joking, I know, but he’s been making the joke for a couple decades now, which makes me think there may be some substantial regret beneath the joke.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot now that A.J.’s flag football season, his first in organized football, is over. It was, for me, a strange, exhausting, often exasperating and ultimately wonderful experience. For A.J., I think, it was just wonderful.

Trying to teach a bunch of six-year-olds to play football—or even getting them to sit still and listen for a few seconds—was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done. It leaves me with a whole new level of respect for teachers who have to work with these kids every day. But I’m also very glad I volunteered to help coach because it gave me a chance to watch A.J. fall in love with football.

We had a little end-of-season pizza party for the kids a while back. J., the other coach, gave awards to all the kids; A.J. won the Most Valuable Player award. J. also had the kids present me with a football that they had all signed. It was one of the nicest presents I’ve ever received and I was completely taken by surprise. I loved that all the signatures were in their scrawly first-grade handwriting and they all wrote their jersey numbers next to their names, just like little pros who are used to working the trading-card show autograph circuit. So I’ve got this ball in my office now and it means an awful lot to me.

I got to know some of the dads a little (I’m convinced that the fact that A.J. turned out to be such a good player earned me some kind of social capital) and I was especially impressed with J., the coach, a former free safety at Michigan State who turned out to be a very sweet guy. A funny thing happened in the second week of the season. A.J. had two really impressive touchdown runs in that week’s game and all through the next practice J. kept calling him “Wheels.” I could tell A.J. loved it, too. Well, the next week, A.J. scored two touchdowns again, but J. just called him by his name at the next practice. So when we got home, A.J. says to me—not sadly, just matter-of-factly—“Coach didn’t call me Wheels this week.”

So the next time I saw J., I told him this story about what A.J. had said to me—just because I thought it was cute and funny—and for the rest of the season, he never once called my son anything but Wheels.

Wheels is absolutely football crazy now, by the way. We just got back from a week at his grandmother’s house, including a 16-hour drive, and he spent just about every spare minute asking me to toss him the football we brought with us. We played catch with that ball in Interstate rest stops in seven different states.

And already A.J. is asking about next season. He wants to play in the tackle league, with full pads and full contact. I’ve written before about my ambivalence about kindergarten kids playing competitive football: It just seems like too much too soon. (Let’s not even start the discussion of the way they turn the kindergarten girls into cheerleaders.) But first- and second-graders playing tackle football seems even more extreme somehow.

Why this mania for accelerating all the experiences of childhood? For guys like my friend M., not going out for high school football could seem like something approaching a life-altering decision. Maybe for A.J. and kids his age, the decision to go out or not go for 80-pound pee wee football in second grade will one day seem just as momentous. But I can't imagine a better season--one more full of gifts--than the one Wheels and I had this year.

Thanks, but No Thanks

Just in case you've not yet had your fill of Thanksgiving-related reading, my piece on arguments over the religious dimension of Thanksgiving is online at Slate. Or are you saving room for pie?

Fear of the Flush

Yesterday's New York Times had a piece by Tina Kelley on kids’ fear of automatic flush toilets. With their flashing lights, unpredictable flushes and loud whooshing, Kelley writes, the toilets are “the stuff of nightmares” for some toddlers.

There was a time when I would have dismissed such a story as the worst kind of lifestyle puffery, a topic not worthy of a serious paper. Is there no minor hurdle, I used to wonder, that these self-absorbed parents can’t somehow turn into a traumatic event?

But parenthood changes a person.

I look at such a story now and I see that it involves three topics—child behavior, irrational fear and bathroom fixture design—that absorb an inordinate amount of my attention on a daily basis.

And I remember that my own son went through a period when he, too, was terrified of automatic flush toilets, a fear that severely complicated at least one of our cross-country drives. I recall stopping at every interstate highway rest stop between Chicago and the Cumberland Gap so that my boy could take care of his business, only to have him refuse to go near the automatic flush toilets. For the sheer combination of frustration, social embarrassment and utter helplessness in the face of your child’s need, there is no experience quite like finding yourself in a crowded public bathroom in Kentucky, begging your son to please, please defecate, while the poor kid, pants around his ankles, screams in terror and holds his hands over his ears.

I never knew life was so complicated until I became a parent.

All the Rage

My essay on anger, "All the Rage," is back as the cover story in the current Utne Reader. It won a "Best Article of the Year" prize from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education after it appeared in Notre Dame magazine earlier this year. Read it here.

On the Train with Walter Kirn and GBV

Spent my 90-minute train ride into the city yesterday reading Walter Kirn’s sharp Atlantic essay, “The Autumn of the Multitaskers.” Multitasking, Kirn writes, stresses us out, dumbs us down, and, extrapolating from his personal experience, makes us drive off the highway and through barbed-wire fencing at high speeds somewhere in Wyoming.

So I sat there on the train nodding in agreement with Kirn’s arguments (“multitasking eats up time in the name of saving time”) and silently urging him on (“The First Law of Multitasking dictates, any two or eight or 16 processes that can overlap must overlap”) and pulling for Kirn to tell ‘em off good, and yet, the entire time I was reading and agreeing and urging on, I was also listening to Guided By Voices via iPod and earpiece.

And the problem with this kind of behavior—and there’s really no way to say this without sounding like a cranky Luddite coot—is that it ill-serves Walter Kirn and Guided By Voices and me, because an essay as fine as Kirn’s and a song as good as “Everywhere with Helicopter” both deserve to be appreciated on their own terms and not merely as strategies to distract me or insulate me from the noise of the guy in the next seat over braying into his cell phone.

I’m old enough to remember making that same train ride without cell phone or iPod and not really minding it. But it can’t be done today, or at least I can’t recommend it. There are too many other people multitasking, making their own noise, and you need some kind of barrier against all the bustle. So you plug in, dial up, pray for a signal and get through the ride. And the more media you can manage, the better your protection and the better we all get along. I guess that’s called mutually assured multitasking.

Standing Still

A.J.’s flag football team, the Browns, is heading into the playoffs with a three-game winning streak. There are times now when they look like an actual football team, which is an achievement for a bunch of six-year-olds. Still, I remain mostly convinced that football and first-graders really don’t mix. The biggest problem is just getting them to stand still. You know, in football, you’re supposed to get into your formation at the line of scrimmage, get set and stay set until the ball is snapped. That doesn’t happen a lot in our league. At yesterday’s practice, for example, M. kept trying to stand on his head while he was supposed to be lining up at right tackle. We tried to explain to him that this was against the rules of football, and when he kept at it, we even tried to threaten him with pushups. But that stuff doesn’t work. To most six-year-olds, push-ups seem like a lot more fun than having your coaches tell you to line up and stand still. There have been times this year when M. standing on his head, or C. whipping his mouth-guard at everyone in sight, or D. picking handfuls of grass and dumping them on N.’s head would have gotten to me. I know I’ve come home from some practices feeling like I was about to develop a nervous twitch like Inspector Dreyfus from the Pink Panther movies. But maybe I’m getting better at this coaching thing. I’ve learned a lot in the two and a half months I’ve spent helping to coach this team, and the most lasting lesson has to be this: If your right tackle wants to stand on his head at the line of scrimmage, and your right tackle is six years old, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

Go Browns.

Marred by Politeness

My work takes me inside a lot of college classrooms, where I’m supposed to observe and gain insight into the lively Socratic give-and-take of American higher ed. Problem is, that hardly ever happens. In most of the classes I’ve observed, the rule seems to be that kids keep their heads down and their mouths shut. They’re pretty unshakable about their reticence, too. It makes me a little uncomfortable, sometimes, to be sitting in the back row of a classroom while some earnest but not very inspired prof is trying to draw his students into a discussion, only to be met with dead silence. It’s like one of those socially awkward moments, embarrassing for everyone, that you can only ride out and hope will end soon. Except some of these classes last for an hour and a half. That’s a lot of awkward.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, who writes about rural life and other soft stuff on the New York Times editorial page (I was going to call him the house hayseed, but that’s too snotty) had a piece in yesterday’s paper about the hyper-polite students at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota.

He writes:

I sat in on four classes, which were marred only by politeness — the deep-keeled Minnesotan politeness that states, as a life proposition, that you should not put yourself forward, not even to the raising of a hand in class.

Things always warmed up, but those first lingering notes of hesitation were something to behold. I tried to think of it as modesty, consideration for others and reluctance in the presence of a guest — from New York nonetheless. And yet I kept wondering just how such bright, personable students had become acculturated to their own silence.

He notices this habit of “self-negating silence” even slipping into his students’ writing, particularly the work of female students. “I can hear them,” he writes, “questioning the very nature of their perceptions, doubting the evidence of their senses, distrusting the clarity of their thoughts.”

I’m not sure why Klinkenborg makes a distinction between his male and female students on this point, because, as he points out, the problem of claiming authority to observe and comment is a basic one for just about any writer. “It’s a delicate thing,” he writes, “coming to the moment when you realize that your perceptions do count.”

In some ways, professional writers have it easy, because if nothing else they can claim the authority conferred by the people who hire them, who accept their pitches, who pay them. If someone at The New York Times Book Review thinks my essay is good enough to buy, then who am I to argue? (Of course, I had to give myself permission to pitch the thing in the first place, but that’s a whole other story.) I’ve written about the most personal stuff in my essays, and it’s not always easy for me to set that stuff out for anyone to read. But what’s a little paradoxical is that the magazines that publish my highly personal work and spread it to newsstands and barbershops and library reading rooms for strangers to read, also provide me with a kind of institutional cover. A reader can think what he wants about me and my work, but he can’t change the fact that I was paid well for my writing and given the imprimatur of the Times or CondeNast or whoever.

Where it gets really hard for me to assert my authority to observe and comment is in less professional settings, like this blog. I suppose that’s another paradox. Because isn’t the Internet supposed to be empowering, isn’t it supposed to make citizen journalists or belle-letrists of us all? But I’ve had a hard time feeling at ease writing this blog, and part of the reason is that I have no template for how it’s supposed to read, and I have to operate without the cover of some publishing institution. So, even though this blog is read only by my friends and the people who love me and a few web-searching insomniacs mistakenly sent here by Google, and even though it’s just a speck in the great big ever-expanding blog universe, I end up feeling just as exposed writing here as I do writing for the largest-circulation newspapers and magazines.

In a way, that’s a problem of claiming authority, the same one Klinkenborg’s students face. Some of us are still “coming to the moment when you realize that your perceptions do count.”