peevish mama

I had to drive to St. Croix last night for Saint James’ final soccer game of the season, and oh sweet patron saint of traveling soccer players, it was FAR! I know I’m spoiled by the fact that I don’t typically have to drive more than five or ten minutes for anything, but getting to this soccer field felt like an odyssey. And like Odysseus, I saw many things in the waning glow of the mid-summer sun.

The wheels on my minivan turned so many times that I saw a billboard of Rush Limbaugh’s gigantic porcine face. I saw silos. I saw signs for towns that I know to be in another state. I saw truck stops with huge semis lined up like hulking, sighing beasts. I saw two motorcycle dealerships, side by side, one for Harleys one for Indians. I saw the soft green hills that mark the terrain where Minnesota and Wisconsin melt into one another, never ceasing to remind me of the first time I drove here in 1995 with my friend Dave K – clueless, nervous, about to start my first job in a law firm, ready or not.

I also saw a group of kids who didn’t know each other a few months ago, play like a team. Individually they have improved beyond measure; as a team they have gelled almost to the point of poetry.

They are eight and nine years old. Magically suspended in that blink-of-an-eye between little boy and big boy, their bodies are starting to respond to the commands of their ambitious minds. They have shed all traces of baby fat and with it, the clumsiness, the hesitation, the pudding-like confusion of those first years of sports. Their skinny legs and knobby knees bely their speed, their finesse, their sense of space, position, strategy and fair play. Yet every once in a while, the little boys bubble to the surface in tears, tumbles, inelegant hiccups in an otherwise smooth stride. 

I also saw boys who played their hearts out and still lost. But they lost like gentlemen, already absorbing one of the great unsung lessons of sports: you can’t win everything in life. It is the game itself, the boys seem to understand implicitly, that is so worth it.

And, so I drive.