On this day in 2015…

Today my son graduates high school at two in the afternoon. It’s the culmination of a week of pretty much non-stop activity–parties, baccalaureate, pictures, marching practice, scholarship award night, tuba practice (he’s playing part of his state solo in the graduation ceremony), his own personal graduation party, the arrival of friends and family, and far too little sleep. In a larger sense, though, this is the culmination of a chapter in our life that started in September, 2002, on the day that I dropped him off for Kindergarten, and then went home and wept because my child was growing up.

A lot has happened since then. The tuba. Allergies. Mold. Moves. Love. Loss. Books, art, music.  Most of all, friends have happened. They happened a lot this week. Megan, Marty, Morris, Dakota, Donnie, Mike, Leatrice, Adam, Jakob, Zack, Colin, Whitney, Olivia, my sisters Sandy and Shirley (because one of the things the years have taught me is that sisters can be friends, too). My mom.

We’re ready for graduation. We’re ready because we worked hard for it, and because we had friends who helped. And because they helped (and because my sister Sandy just emailed me her pictures from the party) I had a minute to see something I otherwise would have missed.

I looked at the pictures. I saw the faces I’ve seen in my living room and my yard, and in some cases my classrooms for the past nine years. And what struck me was what survivors our children are. In all the romanticizing of the teenage years and prom and homecoming and graduation (and in the case of our town, the Noize Parade) and football and soccer and baseball it’s easy to lose sight of how very, very hard it is to turn from a child to an adult. Our children have done it–and mostly they’ve managed to hold onto the best parts of themselves–the parts we saw in the baby hugs, the kisses good night, the wonder of Christmas, the first trips to the zoo, the stories at night, the ball games in the yard, the conversations on the porch while the stars came out, and the conversations in the car–the hard ones, where we could talk about the things that we needed to without having to look at each other. Cars are good places for that. They force us to listen, rather than look, or run away when we don’t like what we’re hearing.

I look at those pictures, and for every person there I see a challenge met, a win, a loss, a change. And so for The Boy, and for his friends, and for his classmates I had the privilege of knowing in my classrooms, let me just say, “I’m immensely proud of all of you. And while you may not know it, I love you all. You’re good people. You’ve enriched my life, and brought out the best in me.” You’ve let me feed you. You’ve listened to my stories. Sometimes you’ve told me yours.  You’ve sat in our living room, and sometimes slept on the floor. Thank you for that. Thank you for sharing your lives with us.

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The Football Team

…and we’ve made it as easy as possible to do so. Presenting The Mac-Hi Pioneers 2013 Football Team Roster and Cookbook (with Cheerleaders!) Buy one for yourself. Buy a couple for the grandparents. Don’t forget the aunts and uncles. The neighbors. The nice people at your church. This is your chance to score a great keepsake and support the football and cheerleading programs at McLoughlin High School, all in one easy step. Jam-packed with stunning photos of the Pioneers and cheerleaders in action as well as tasty recipes donated by the team, this beautiful, fun little book makes a perfect keepsake for your very own Pioneer—and anyone who loves him (or her). 

This is probably one of the less expected fundraising ideas you’ll see for a football team.  And yet it should really be a no-brainer. Anyone who has ever watched a football player power through a meal after a hard practice will understand exactly how the idea for this book happened. Football players:  Food. They just go together.

So that’s one part of the reason behind this book. Here’s the second: Helmets. Football players wear helmets, which is where those big numbers come in that you’ll find on each player’s page. Those numbers allow us proud parents in the stands to know when our precious child, the child who (as I frequently remind my own precious child) we mothers labored for hours to bring into the world, is being Badly Done By by boys who are far, far too large to be playing against our sons. Opposing teams are, by definition, Too Big. Always. Helmets make it both easier and harder because while we depend on the numbers to tell us which boys are ours, we all know that the boys on the field are far more than numbers. They are our sons. And they have faces.

Which is why, for each player for whom it was humanly possible, we included a close-up as well as an action image based on as one of Sharon Herndon Harwood’s fabulous game photographs. These are our sons. Here are their faces. These are the foods they like. And these are their friends, the boys with whom they train, and then, on game days, walk onto the field, and then, win or lose, the boys with whom they walk off the field.

By now you’re probably wondering why a mother who has such very mixed feelings about football would go to the trouble of putting together a book like this, particularly since my son isn’t even playing football this year (he’s in band, where the competitions take place in music halls rather than on muddy fields). I’ll be honest: when my son came home in middle school and said he was going to go out for football I came very, very close to telling him ‘no.’ But I didn’t, and now I’m glad.

Over the years, I’ve come to see that football is about a lot more than just what happens on game days. It’s about learning to adopt and keep a regimen. It’s about training, training, training. It’s about honing a skill, about pushing yourself beyond where you think you can go. It’s about learning to lose–and win–with grace, honor, dignity, and honesty. Not that it always happens that way; football is a discipline, and football players are works in progress. But when I watch the games I see that that’s the key: they do progress. They get better.

But football is more than just a regimen; it’s also a brotherhood (our team is all boys, so I can use that term without fear of political incorrectness). And that brotherhood survives. Though my son doesn’t play this year, he wanted to keep the annual Birthday Pizza Party we’ve had each October because though he’s not playing, football is still an important part of his life.

And that right there is why this book happened–because though my son isn’t on the field this year, boys he has played beside for the last few years are. Football is important–sports in general are important. They’re worth supporting. Because those are our children out there.

And so this book, to give us parents a chance to gloat over our beautiful children, to marvel at the pageantry of a game–and it is a pageant–and to try out a whole teamful of recipes. Books are available from CreateSpace now, and will be available locally after October 16 (Lord willing and the creek don’t rise), and on Amazon. This makes a great gift for grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends–and since the book can be purchased online delivery is simple. Christmas is coming, folks–get a book…feed the team…

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Noize

So there I am, at my by-now-well-worn post on the corner next to the Post Office and the In-And-Out Minit Mart, waiting for the parade to pass by. It’s the “Noize Parade” this time, but you’d never know it from the deserted street. The street is deserted, except for a couple loiterers behind the Minit Mart and me.

I learned about this parade, and that The Boy was in it, after football practice tonight–half an hour before he was supposed to be at the skate park, next to the Congregational Church. I know there’s a parade because when I dropped him off at the skate park the street was full of screaming, waving kids dressed in blue, green, orange, or purple, many painted and dyed to match. The Boy tells me the colors are class-linked; he is to wear purple. He wore the only purple shirt he has to football practice, and there’s no time to go home and change, anyway. I resign myself to fact that he will be in the parade just as he finished the last tackling exercise at football practice. I drop him off, ease my way through the peacock-bright, howling kids and take back streets to my Parade Post.

I take back streets, but it’s really not necessary–the putative parade route is still deserted, its sidewalks empty, nary a barricade or sign in the gathering autumn dark. The Boy has told me that the parade will end at Shockman Field, where our town football teams play home games. I have no idea how they will get from the skate park to Shockman Field, but my Parade Post is on the corner where Freewater’s Main Street turns onto Broadway for a block before becoming Milton’s Main Street. I figure no matter what route they take they’ll have to pass by here. But I am not certain, so the dark deserted, unbarricaded street is a little troubling.

I get out of my car and lean against the fender, wrapping my arms around me against the evening chill. The street lights are off. I can hardly see the loiterers anymore. A couple comes out of their house and sits on the stone wall across the street from me. A Suburban comes squealing into the Minit Mart parking lot and pulls up behind my parked car. The engine cuts abruptly and the silence rushes in to fill the void it leaves.

Its doors open and people spill out. Somebody lifts a baby out and stands, bouncing it gently, while somebody else opens an umbrella stroller. The baby holder fishes in the Suburban again and comes out with a fluffy pink blanket. He wraps the baby in the blanket, leans down, and buckles it into the umbrella stroller. They take up the Parade Post next to mine, right on the corner, and stand, laughing and talking, in the gloom.

And that’s the signal. Passing cars begin to honk. More people straggle out of their houses. A few have painted their faces. We each stand, little islands on the dark sidewalk. I abandon my car for a rock wall a little further up the street. I have just gotten myself nicely settled when I hear it, a distant roar, punctuated with screams. I listen to the noise, and think of The Boy, and smile. The street stretches dark and silent before me, but in the distance I can hear the noise.

Cars still pass and I realize that this parade is apparently on that happens without closing the street. I settle more comfortably on my rock wall, and look at the dim figures down the sidewalk and listen to the noise building out of sight beyond the curve in the dark street. About the time I start to be able to pick out football cheers in the random screaming the trees at the corner of the street develop strobing red and blue haloes, and then the lights come on, and the police car leading the parade rounds the corner, lights flashing.

A flatbed field truck (I know it’s a field truck because its exhaust pipes and manifolds have been re-routed to run up the side of the truck, rather than under it–a fire precaution) follows. The rancher has added a few straw bales for seating and I see shadowy silhouettes of what seem to be women. They are not screaming to any great degree, but it hardly matters, because by now more farm trucks and pickups with RV trailers have rounded the corner, and each is loaded with screaming, waving, jumping kids. The first “float” is the freshman class. If the farmer provided them straw seating it was a futile gesture, because the freshmen are jammed so tightly behind their safety ropes that there would be no room to sit. And they are screaming. Boy, are they screaming, and right in the middle of the mob I see The Boy, a head taller than everybody else, waving his arms, head back, screaming along with everybody else.

And then the freshmen are gone, and the juniors pass, and the sophomores, and then the seniors, and then another police car, lights flashing, and the parade is over. We on the stone walls stand up. The people across the street go back into their house. The people on the corner pick up the baby, collapse the umbrella stroller, jump into their Suburban, and roar off.

I pull out of the now-empty parking lot and drive through deserted back streets while one street over the parade screams on, lights flashing, arms waving, football cheers punctuating the raw, joyful howls.

When Shockman Field comes into view I realize there is a complication–the Central Middle School football team is playing the Baker City team. The stands are nearly empty, but I think of the students, undoubtedly hopped up on Code Red Mountain Dew and school spirit, screaming their way inexorably toward the field.

But it’s too late to change things. I find another parking spot where the road turns to go down the sidestreet to the field’s parking lot. And then it happens again, the strobing lights, the screaming classes, The Boy, waving his arms like the inflated figure our local taco stand had on its roof for a while, screaming, making noise, part of his class and his world in a way I never have been. It occurs to me that, though I have always seen myself as an observer, I have raised a participant.

The trucks pull into the parking lot. The students pour off and pound into the bleachers, still screaming and waving. We in the parking lot follow them more sedately and take our places on the track between the bleachers and the field, where the middle school football game rages on. Our team is winning, and the high school kids take this as yet another reason to shout and jump and roar football cheers. The middle school team, accustomed to playing to nearly empty bleachers, looks confused. I can’t imagine what the Baker team, faced with this enormous outpouring of support for the home team, must feel.

Somebody gets hold of a microphone and things are said, but I am not listening. I am looking at the mass of teenagers from our town, crammed into the bleachers, screaming and waving. I am looking at The Boy, making a joyful noise along with everybody else. I am looking at those of us who are standing on the track, bearing witness to another generation, and and I realize what a gift it is to live in a town where traditions like this survive, where people know each other, where a parade can be nothing more than high school kids on flatbed trucks, making noise, and where the spectators watch not only because these are our children, but because, for some of us, not so very long ago that was us. Mostly I am marveling that, somehow, without meaning to, we have stumbled into a life where we can be part of traditions like this–and where The Boy will simply take them as a matter of course. And I realize how very lucky we are.

But under the gratitude and the pleasure of watching my son becoming a part of the town and its traditions, giving himself over to the sheer joy of being young, and alive, and proud of his school, his class, and his team, there is a wistful little part of me that wonders what it might be like to ride through town on a truck, screaming into the autumn night. I will never know. But now The Boy does, and the sadness fades in the sure knowledge that I am giving him the opportunity to become more than I am, to build memories that I will never fully understand. Because in the end, much as I might wish it were different, my life has made me a spectator–and a good one. His life is making him a participant. And I have helped it happen.

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