Jackie

Jackie raises her hand and asks if she could say something. I’m the coach of my daughter’s middle school basketball team and this year has been somewhat challenging. It’s the first time most of the girls have experienced “real” competition. Jackie in particular has had trouble adjusting. She has questioned my coaching, cooperated indifferently at practices, and generally displayed the sort of behaviour that should have gotten her kicked off the team.

But I can’t kick her off. We are a fledgling church team with barely enough players to make us competitive. And we are sponsored by the church. My mission is to not only compete but help develop these young people as people. Sometimes at the expense of winning.

This does not come naturally to me and I have to dial down my competitive instincts to enable me to see the bigger picture. Mind you, I am ultimately committed to building a competitive, winning program. I believe such a goal can co-exist with developing character and this is my first year to begin to prove that assumption right…or wrong.

So here we are, a few minutes before a game, and who knows what’s going to come out of Jackie’s mouth. But I’m relaxed; I sense she has something good to say.

“Sure, Jackie, what would you like to say.”

She shuffles from foot to foot and looks around at her teammates. “I just want to say that I know I’ve been hard to get along with and I’m sorry for my bad attitude and I’d like to ask you guys to forgive me.” She doesn’t mumble it as if she had been coached into saying it; she doesn’t rush through it like some unpleasant duty. She just says it: cleanly, sweetly, in measured tones.

I’m stunned. I expected good but not life-changing. There is a pause while we all try to reckon with what we just heard. This kind of confession is hard for anyone, but the internal hurdles a 12-year old girl who feels like an outsider has to overcome to speak this uncoerced confession are daunting.

“Thank you, Jackie,” I say, “thank you very much.” Several girls give her a hug and words of encouragement. I don’t know if we will win this game and frankly I don’t care. This season has already been worth it.

False Alarm

I was seated in church on a Friday night when Andrea urgently tapped my shoulder and motioned for me to take a phone call that had just come in.
“Hello” I whispered as I made my way out into the lobby.
“Daddy, this is M.” [my oldest daughter] “There are seven fire engines in front of our house and I’m not sure what is happening. The firemen are talking with Jordan and Andrew.” Jordan and Andrew are sons of friends of mine. More on this later.
“Are you OK?” This seemed like a reasonable question in light of seven fire engines at our house.
“Yes, I’m fine, but I just talked with one of the main fire guys and I think we are going to get a big fine or ticket or something. I think you better come home.”
A conclusion I had already come to. “Wait for me. Tell the chief that I am on my way.”
Jordan and Andrew are helping my wife clear away a lot of brush and timber and the remains of an old boathouse that were on the property.
Before I had left for church Jordan had asked me: “Mr. Wallis, would it be OK if we had a bonfire to burn up some of this stuff?”
“No problem,” I said. We’ve had many fires on the property this last year. We’ve burned brush and deadwood, and fairly regularly we have friends over to sit around some cheery logs blazing in a large clearing on the property, toast our friendship and talk long into the night. Although technically open fires are frowned upon in the city limits, our neighborhood is the home to several firemen, policemen, and state troopers, and there has always been a fairly lenient policy toward us residents as long as we keep it under control.
Jordan and Andrew have sat around these fires with us and their families numerous times, so of course it was no big deal for them to have a similar fire, invite some friends, and hang out till late into the night. Or so I thought. As I drove away from our home the vision of the sons of my friends enjoying fireside camaraderie warmed my heart.
When I got home there was only one fire engine remaining and it was in the process of leaving. Jordan and Andrew saw me pull into our driveway and bounded up to me.
“It’s O.K., Mr. Wallis! We talked to the fire chief and no one is getting a ticket or summons or anything!”
“Do I need to talk to him? Is he still here?”
“Nope. We talked to him and everything is O.K.” They were clearly pleased (and relieved) with the way things had turned out. “Do you want to see the fire we built?” They knew their audience. They know me well enough to know that I, too, was quite a knucklehead as a youth and not unfamiliar with getting into trouble.
“Sure,” I said, “Let me see it!”
The warm little cozy campfire I had envisioned turned out to be a teepee of timber some 10 feet tall and 15 feet in diameter. It was blackened now but I saw the picture of it in all its glory on their cell phone camera. The conflagration was at least 25 feet high. No wonder about 10 people called 911 thinking our house was burning down.
“Wow,” I said, “I’m impressed.” I was.
“Yea,” said Jordan, "the firemen stood around while I put it out. They asked me what I used and said it was a pretty good fire.” Turns out the boys had used a lot of wood and three gallons of diesel.
“Well, guys, maybe next time you can just keep it to a campfire.”

Glory

My senior year in high school. Our soccer team files off the school travel bus and walks past the opposing team and their fans. I can feel their fear; we are BAD, as the saying would be today. And I am the baddest of the bad—top of my game, all-star forward, walking confidently on to the field where we would eventually win another game.

I shake my head to dispel this reminiscence and focus on the task at hand, which is swimming awkwardly down the “slow” lane at the rec center pool while the 80-year old ladies step sideways to avoid me. I can’t swim in the “medium” or “fast” lanes because I don’t know how to swim very well. I’m still trying to make it a full lap, up and back, using a normal overhead stroke. I sometimes feel like I could drown as I gasp for air and try to push myself to the wall.

I pause at the end of the pool and stretch and snort the chlorine water out of my nose. It doesn’t seem so long ago that my body easily did what I told it to do, but I’m pushing fifty now and it is largely telling me what to do (or most definitely what not to do). This getting up at 5:30a.m. and pushing my reluctant self through the motions of exercise is my quiet rebellion against the tyranny of aching age. It feels good to be able to exercise again without my joints protesting too much. Running regularly had to come to an end; I can’t take the pounding anymore.

But I can swim—at least after a fashion, and I think often of Paul’s admonition to “pummel my body and make it a slave.” There is no obvious glory at the end of this pummeling, as there was in my youth. But then I’m thinking of glory in very different terms than I did in earlier years.

Forty was a warning; a small black cloud on the horizon the size of a man’s hand. Fifty looms a couple of years away and the need to prepare for the inevitable decline can not be avoided. Or maybe it could, but the consequences of avoidance seem surely worse than this present discomfort. The present does not seem glorious, certainly not the concrete gloriousness of athletic achievement, but oddly enough I like this new challenge, even as I realize its ultimate physical futility.