Lynn Rankin-Esquer's Blog, page 4

Unplanned Obsolescence (A Happiness Fable)

Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved playing outside. She delighted in the flowers, in the wet morning grass, in the warmth of the sun playing hide and seek through the trees. She compared rocks and arranged sticks and sniffed every plant in her path. The breeze and the birds and the toads and the squirrels were her playmates. She woke up every day filled with a bubbling anticipation, flinging back the blue and white checked covers on her little single bed tucked in the corner of the little room tucked into the corner of the little red house. She would sing as she pulled on her play clothes, skip down the short hall to the kitchen, make quick work of the breakfast her mother would have waiting for her, and fling open the front door ready for the adventure of the day to begin.

One day, as mothers do, her mother handed her a sentence, and she tucked it into the little basket in her brain. And then the TV handed her another sentence. And the friends in the neighborhood shared the sentences they were carrying around in their brains. And then school started piling her full of paragraphs and chapters and her head got so full it was hard to hold it up. The effort of holding up that head made the adventure of the day a challenge. It was so tiring to peer through all the words in her head, hard to see the shape of a dog in a passing wisp of cloud, for instance.

The world spun past her, for many years. The yellow in the center of a daisy bloomed and faded without her awareness. The hummingbird hovered and dipped and lived and died without her following his path for even a second. The green leaves turned yellow then brown and fell and were replaced by new green leaves which themselves turned yellow then brown and fell all without her knowing.

Well, that part isn’t exactly true. Some part of her knew. Some part of her felt the growing and the blooming and the fading. Some part of her sensed the seasons rise and fall. A faint song played from her heart, threading its way through the dense tangle of ‘shoulds’ and ‘must do’s’ filling her head, a muffled pulse in the background, reminding her of the world she so loved but had mostly forgotten.

And then came a day when some of the words in her head started to fall out. And then some more. And then a day when she noticed that it was easier to carry her head around without so much in it, so she started tossing words and then sentences and then paragraphs.

And the people around her stared in suspicion. Who was she to laugh so easily? Who was she to not answer her phone? Who was she to leave a bed unmade? Who was she to leave a party right after she got there?

Someone called her a witch and she cocked her head to the side, considering. “Maybe,” she said.

Someone called her selfish and she nodded. “Definitely,” she said.

Someone wondered if she might be losing her memory. “I hope so,” she said.

Someone called her a Buddhist. “Could be,” she said.

“You missed your appointment,” someone pointed out. “Whoops,” she said. “I had to see if the squirrels would get that bird feeder down.”

She waited for the obvious question but the person didn’t ask it.

She answered anyway. “Those rascals did it! Had a real feast.”

“There’s a way to prevent that,” the person said.

“Why would I prevent something so entertaining?” she said, wide eyed and laughing.

Someone commented that she might be obsolescent. “Big word,” she said. “I think I threw that one out.” She looked at the commenter, kindness and light shining from eyes as clear as a cloudless sky. “I must not have needed it anymore.”

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Tethered and Adrift: A Small Summer Memory

The house I grew up in had a large screened-in porch looking over the backyard. It was like an outdoor great room, on one side a long dining table, on the other side a white wicker couch and chairs with thick cushions covered in a white polka dotted kelly green fabric. It wasn’t the most comfortable piece of furniture in the house, not even in the top three, but it was my favorite. Ask me about summer growing up in western Pennsylvania and my first memory is not the tightness of chlorine dried skin or the one week at the beach or sunburns or running home when the last bit of light faded from the sky at night.

The first, the favorite, memory is that couch and the hours I lay on it reading, a book propped on my stomach, my head smushing the pale yellow accent pillows at one end, my feet propped against the wicker arm along the other end since it wasn’t long enough for a full stretch out. A bowl of fruit on the (also wicker) coffee table beside me.

The very best times on that couch were when it was pouring rain. Soothingly loud, drowning out any bickering from inside the house, background for whatever world I had disappeared into. The rain pulled nature around me like a quilt, an insulation, a cocoon. Like a companion, that rain, like a comforting grandmother humming, ‘I’m here, you’re loved, I’m here, you’re safe, go ahead and sail off to far away lands, for right now I’ll keep the world out, I’ll keep you both tethered and adrift.’

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Player in Paradise at the Area Code Games

A flock of scouts at the 2021 Area Code Games

I just came back from the baseball version of the Bachelor, or more accurately, Bachelor in Paradise (since there are multiple people on both sides trying to hook up). Granted, it was almost all men so there were no bikinis (thank God), and the setting was the University of San Diego baseball stadium instead of a beach, and the actual name of the show was the Area Code Games, a five day tournament organized by MLB scouts to showcase the best high school baseball players in the country. As the wife of a college baseball coach I’ve been scheduling our vacations around these games for years so when our son got invited to play for the A’s team this year I was excited to actually attend myself and see what all the hoopla is about.

Like Bachelor in Paradise (BIP), everyone there was looking for a connection. Players looking to be recruited or drafted, coaches looking to recruit players, scouts looking to draft players in next year’s MLB draft, agents looking to ‘advise’ players.

The physical attractiveness so crucial to BIP replaced by hard hit balls and 95 mph fastballs. The flirty personalities of BIP replaced by hustle and energy on the field.

Both are situations where the social rules are a little different. Where it is completely normal to walk up to someone you’ve never met and introduce yourself and say where you coach/work/play and get some information on what that person is looking for. It is expected even. It is disappointing if you don’t meet someone new.

The jockeying for the best players is like the competition for the prettiest woman or the studliest guy on BIP. The quieter ones are not completely invisible but maybe take a little longer to be noticed, college scouts knowing what player they could or couldn’t get.

The thing that struck me the most, walking around the event, is that the place was buzzing with wanting. Everyone goes to BIP wanting romance, wanting to find their person and likewise, everyone at the Area Code games wanted something. Wanted it a lot. Coaches and scouts and agents wanted players, players want to be drafted and/or recruited to college, parents want their sons’ dreams to be fulfilled.

Parents really want their sons’ dreams fulfilled.

First, because, you know, we love them.

Second, because we have invested a lot by this point in time. A lot of money on travel ball (the cost of the team, the flights, the hotels, the rental cars, the food on the road), on hitting lessons, on pitching coaches, on bats and gloves and elbow protectors and more bats. A lot of time driving to Lathrop or Glendale or Alpharetta, a lot of time sitting on stadium benches with no back support, a lot of time scrubbing that damn red dirt out of the pants in the hotel bathtub. All of that time and money is time and money not spent on other things. So yes, we are invested.

And this tournament is the big one, the place where the most coaches and scouts have converged at one time. Hard not to want something out of that. Hard not to want, at the very least, your son to show his abilities so that he isn’t disappointed. Every at bat, every ball coming his way in the field, breath held. At least that is how it was for me. I wanted him to enjoy the experience and I knew if he made mistakes that he doesn’t normally make, it would disappoint him.

In retrospect I think it was actually easier for him than me. He went into the weekend focused on appreciating the experience itself, not obsessed with what he could get out of it. He fairly successfully managed to ignore the fact that scouts and coaches were watching. He focused on enjoying playing on a team where every player had such a high level of skill. He reveled in it. He felt at home in it. He made friendships with his teammates and longs to play more with them. Every night he talked about how much fun he was having, how much he wanted to win with those guys not just show off his skills. So in the end, although he did make connections with coaches and scouts, the connection that fulfilled him in the moment, was being part of that team.

He is still uncommitted, still figuring out the best fit for college, and of course we all want that next step for him. It’s okay to want, but I am so happy to realize that the Area Code games were already a success for him because by ignoring the pressure to show well he played well and ended up just loving the actual playing of the game.

And I realize, that is what I actually want for him. Something he already has.

His love connection is with the game itself.

Player In Paradise.

Xavier Esquer class of 2022

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Omaha Observations: Daring Greatly in the College World Series

So here I am again, one of the luckiest people in the world, because I just got to go watch the team my husband coaches, Stanford, in the College World Series. It’s 2021, pandemic restrictions have mostly lifted, and I got an insider’s view. It did not disappoint. People, I am living the life.

There are so many things I could say about Omaha and the College World Series and here are five of them.

1. Omaha is a lot

Lots of brick

Lots of good outdoor eating places

Lots of places to drink and lots of people in the places doing just that.

Lots of steak. A steakhouse on every corner, which was a bonus for our very carnivorous family. Steak is one of the few things we all eat (our family has Keto, gluten and dairy free, anti-inflammatory, and muscle building among our dietary demands….steak fulfills us all). I read that cows outnumber people 4:1 in Nebraska but that statistic was from before the College World Series and I suspect, after the carnage I saw while there, that the number is now closer to 2:1. My family alone took out a couple of cows, at least.

2. Omaha is not enough.

Not enough mufflers – apparently mufflers are optional in Omaha. The traffic is always loud. I’d put it at maybe 70% of cars and trucks were missing their mufflers or straight piped and all of them went past our hotel during the day (no biggie) and most of the night (biggie).

Not enough places serving food after 11:30. Which normally is not something I would ever discover except that my daughter got in late and needed food (you should see her, she should not miss a meal, she’s slim and also part of the muscle building contingent). We walked into multiple bars and finally got directed to Eat The Worm which thankfully makes tacos ‘til the wee hours. While we waited I enjoyed seeing what the young ones are wearing these days to bars (not much, but what was there was creatively arranged).

Not enough time to see the Omaha zoo. That place is my favorite zoo ever. From the puffins and penguins to the desert dome to the monkey house, it was like visiting several continents in an afternoon. Next time I will make sure I visit at least twice. I’m going to skip all the snakes next time though. So. Many. Snakes.

The Omaha Zoo is extraordinary – leave plenty of time

Not enough coffee shops – I’m just kidding, possibly the only thing in Omaha that outnumbers steak houses is coffee shops.

If you are a baseball obsessed, coffee loving, steak eating, out-late-drinking kind of person, book your trip right now. Extra bonus, the airport is less than 4 miles from the city. Within an hour (at most) of landing you can be eating a steak and drinking your first beer.

3. Omaha is close enough to Mississippi that the famous Big E made an appearance.

Because Mississippi State was also in the CWS I got to see Everett Kennard, aka Big E (see Lessons from Starkville). Big E drove our team around Mississippi State when Stanford played them two years ago in a regional. He is an icon. He gets around. I get the feeling that once you are on his list, you are on his list. If you are in the area, he will find you to say hello. This is my second Big E sighting this summer (I saw his bus on Assembly Street in Columbia SC when I went to help my daughter move out of her dorm, I texted him, and we met up at a Gamecocks vs Bulldogs game). Here in Omaha he found me in our hotel lobby, his big ole bus parked out front. People lined up to say hello to him. At the Stanford hotel, in Omaha Nebraska, Big E from Starkville Mississippi was the one people wanted to say hello to. As it should be.

4. It is fun to be part of a tribe.

Most of the people I saw in Omaha were there for the College World Series and everyone there for the CWS wears their team colors. Every day. Like swarms of birds, red coming at you from this group, orange from another. It is very tribal.  Like a civilized tribal war where in the streets we are friendly, but in the arena we will be fiercely opposed to each other. It is so arbitrary, your son could have ended up at the orange school not the red one, and you’d be cheering just as intently for that team.

The woman at the car rental counter recommended we visit Hollywood Candy in the Old Market section of Omaha, and it was astonishing. Way more than candy (although more than enough candy to give every cow in the state a bucket full), Hollywood Candy is a fascinating meander through halls of troll collections, vinyl record collections, Pez dispenser collections, Hollywood memorabilia, and old cool fifties furniture, including an entire diner set up with authentic chrome edged tables and red shiny leather seats, a place where you can buy an ice cream.

Hollywood Candy (and so much more)

So I’m wandering through there, quite happily floating along on the incredible smell of candy being made right in that moment, and I keep seeing a guy in an NC State shirt. I went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Tarheels are not NC State fans (strike one).  NC State had already beaten Stanford at the CWS putting them into the elimination bracket (strike two). But we were not in the arena, and he seemed to be enjoying Hollywood Candy as much as me, so I overlook the NC State connection and say something like “This place is amazing, right?” and he nods enthusiastically and says “Check out the pinball machines back there!” and points behind him. “You can’t play them, but they are so cool.”

And just like that, we are not tribes, we are humans who can appreciate homemade candy and juke boxes with REO Speedwagon on them and pinball machines.

5. TD Ameritrade Park is our century’s version of the Colosseum.

TD Ameritrade Park

It is not actual gladiators fighting to the death in the stadium, but it feels that dramatic. We don’t admit it, but there is a bloodlust that we carry in there, along with our clear bag and our digital tickets. The tribal feeling takes back over, and our hearts beat just for our boys (I know they are young men, I just can’t help but call them our boys). I send my husband a lot of ‘step on their neck’ texts. Half embarrassed by that, half proud (okay more like 30% embarrassed, 70% proud).

Late in the Stanford versus Vanderbilt game on Wednesday, an elimination game (someone is going home), the intensity of the energy in that park got to ridiculous levels. I sat there wondering how these boys were handling that. How in the world did the players stay focused? How were they not bouncing up and down with all the adrenaline pouring through their bodies? High energy, high stakes, every pitch and swing seemingly meaningful, on a national broadcast, a bid at history.

I have lots of coping skills I’ve developed over the years. I’m a psychologist for crying out loud. I’ve got plenty of calming tricks up my sleeve. I’ve got decades of perspective on life, and yet I was vibrating so hard with the energy of the moment that I could barely stay in my skin. So I can’t even imagine how the players kept such poise. How Mathews got the team so far, and Palisch got them farther, and then how Beck’s precision of pitches made the batters look inept (on social media they said he was pitching like a ninja and he was). It was breathtaking to watch that team, out there in the bloodiest arena, focused and baseball ready, over and over.

Stanford had scratched out a 5-4 lead going into the ninth with Vanderbilt as the home team. Beck was striking batters out like he was facing a 12U B team. And then, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, with two strikes, with the guys in the dugout hanging one leg over the rail to jump over to celebrate – a walk. A couple of hits, the game tied. A runner ends up on third and a pitch over the catcher’s head, game over. He’s never done that. Never thrown a pitch like that. Hard to describe how unlikely this scenario was with him pitching. It was like something else took over the game, out of his control.

Just felt like this was not meant to be, but holy shit did it hurt.

It is so entertaining, watching sports, watching baseball, watching this particular baseball team. Our whole body feels it. Our mirror neurons light up and tell us we are experiencing all the drama, but our executive thinking is there too, reminding us that we are safe, we are at enough of a remove that we won’t get hurt. Like watching a scary movie. We get to have the experience and be safe from the experience at the same time. When you are a spectator you get to have your cake and eat it too (or have your beer and drink it too, pick your favorite). All of the fun, none of the risk.

These boys will replay the whole game in their minds many times in their lives, each asking if he could have done more. They will always feel that loss in their bones. That game is in their DNA now.

And maybe that makes them the lucky ones.

They will be more deeply moved by experiencing it directly. They are the ones who showed up and got knocked down and then got up from the ground. As their lives go on they will have a frame of reference for pain and they will see that you can come back from despair. It seems impossible and then it happens. When life hits them in the gut in the future, a divorce, a job loss, something even worse, they will know how to stand back up and find a way to keep living.

Did these players do their best in every moment of that game? Yes. There was no unmotivated player. No one half-hearted. No one not trying, with every ounce of his being, to do what he had been practicing for years.

Shame had no place on that field. If there was shame in that stadium it came from spectators. If there was any shame, it came from those who sit and take the pleasure in watching the drama and then criticize those who provided it. The shame is not in striking out. It’s not in leaving runners in scoring position. It’s not in hitting a batter or walking a batter or throwing a wild pitch.

Nope.

Brené Brown has written extensively about this and uses this Theodore Roosevelt quote:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again… who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

I saw Beck the next morning, sitting in the lobby reading the social media criticisms of himself out loud. Coaches and friends around him smiling with him. Laughing at the cowards who sit and snipe from their couch. The ones who have never dared greatly, who live lives of quiet (or not so quiet) desperation. I’m glad he can find the humor in people who have never been in the arena criticizing him. But I also hope he lets himself feel all of it, the searing disappointment, the triumph of his whole year, the immense amount of love pouring towards him.

That is a hero. Someone who lets himself feel it all and comes out the other side. Not hiding. Not ashamed. Someone who dared greatly. Someone who got in the arena.

Primacy and Recency are the ideas that we tend to remember things that happen first and things that happen last (e.g., if asked to remember presidents people come up with George Washington and the current president).  And in sports, Recency takes over, people often remembering only the very end.

Which is a mistake.

We have the whole thing to remember. The whole glorious, unexpected (by some) amazing season. Stanford was picked to finish ninth in the Pac-12 (with only 11 teams playing baseball, they were picked to finish 9th out of 11 teams….) and they ended up the last Pac-12 team standing, they ended up fifth in the CWS. In 2020 they started the year 5-11 before the pandemic closed it all down, they didn’t have fall practice this year, they got together as a team only in February, they were subject to the strictest COVID restrictions, and what did they do? They just kept winning. Series after series. Regional. Super-Regional. CWS.

That’s what I will remember. Not the ending. I will remember the season in every glorious up and down. The absolute awe I have at these young men, bloodied and dusty in the fucking arena.

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Not a Fair Weather Fan

Last night the Stanford vs UC Irvine baseball game started at 6:00 so it was light and warm-ish and breezy. Perfect Northern California weather for this Sunday game in the Regional of the NCAA tournament. The stadium was at its full allowed capacity of 25% which doesn’t sound like a lot of people but everyone there was cheering hard for their team so it was plenty loud. The crowd was mostly made up of family members, after all.  At some point the sun dropped behind Hoover tower, bringing a pleasantly shifting sky, pale blue to pinkish to lavender to darker lavender to darker blue to the blue that’s almost black and finally, black. With the blazing lights encircling the field the black looked deeply black, like we-are-the-only-people-in-the-world black, like the field was the world, nothing beyond its edges.

Stanford took the lead 4-2 in the 4th inning. A progression of Stanford pitchers fought to hold that lead, the Stanford batters fought to try to add to it. It was still 4-2 heading into the bottom of the 8th inning. When Irvine came up to bat (they were the home team in an arcane decision process of who gets to be home versus visitor) the field of dreams feel to the place started to fray.

The 8th inning turned into a time warp nightmare, when a third out feels ever out of reach. Walks, hits, bad hops, erratic umpiring, two balls bouncing off the pitcher into unplayable spots, it got bleak.

And it got quiet on the Stanford side of the stands.

In this double elimination tournament, Stanford was still undefeated, and had won their first two games of the weekend without a lot of drama (unless you count the good kind of drama, the kind where your catcher hits two grand slams in a single game). Winning this Sunday night game against UC Irvine meant a trip to a Super Regional. There was a cautious hopefulness to the crowd, a held excitement.

So when the Anteaters scored six runs in the 8th inning to take an 8-4 lead, hopefulness turned to despair. It sounds silly to even write that. A baseball game causing despair? But that is how it feels when the fickle baseball gods turn against you. You have let yourself care, you only realize how deeply you have let yourself care when the prize is all of a sudden not sitting in your lap but sitting in the laps of those obnoxious fans on the other side (obnoxious only because they are cheering against your boys. And have very shrill screams. Presumably they are all very nice people and want their team to win with as much desperation as you want your team to win. Which is a whole different blog post).

I could feel the collective pain of the Stanford fans as the inning unfolded. The deflation of knowing that one last at bat might not do the trick. The pain of watching an inning that seemed like it might never end.

One of the people with me said, ‘I can’t take this, I might leave.’ He didn’t but I understand. It is hard to watch hope get stolen by the other side.

I looked around and noticed other people weren’t as patient, they were leaving. In the middle of the 8th inning.

Leaving!

There were so few tickets available and so many people wanted them, and people were leaving. Before the game was over.

Right, the whole stolen hope thing. The disappointment was too much to bear for some. Watching it fall apart live, in front of your eyes, hard to not want to look away.

So I calmed myself, pulled my attention back to the place where I remember why I am there watching in the first place.

To see stories unfold, to see drama, to see one player after another come up to bat and go one on one with the pitcher. To see split second dives at balls, to see years of practice and training get used. To see young men willing to get in the arena, as Theodore Roosevelt would say. We wouldn’t watch a movie that had no ups and downs, we watch to see the characters go down and then come up. We wouldn’t watch a movie where characters just drive sedately across the country with nothing happening. We watch to see things happen.

So we better be ready to see bad things happen.  The downs that make the eventual ups so valuable.

Are we really only going to stay when the team is on the ups?

Is that how life works?

Baseball is a microcosm, between the white lines, of all that happens in life. All the ‘unfair’ stuff or the bad luck is how life works.

How do we deal with it? That is the question.

Do we let that keyhole strike zone take over our brain and fall apart or do we adjust and find a way to nibble around it?

Do we obsess about that bobbled grounder for the next four innings, causing yet another error or do we flush it and give laser attention to the next moment?

Do we stop parenting when our child is troubled? Do we leave our spouse at the first tough stretch of road? Do we leave the stands when our team is struggling?

How do we find a way to stay present, in the face of unraveling, in the face of giving up the lead, in the face of the end of the season?

Escape is of course a human reaction to suffering. We all escape, with scrolling or eating or drinking or spending or sleeping too much. And when you escape, you are rewarded in that moment because the stress/anxiety/tension goes down. But what you lose out on when you escape is even more valuable – you lose the chance to discover you can handle the stress/anxiety/tension. You lose the chance to grow, and know yourself as someone strong.

So I stayed until the end. And I let myself feel it all, the despair, the frustration, the questioning, can we get it back in time? What will tomorrow night bring? The road is much harder now. It would have been easier to win it all tonight.

Staying present pays longer dividends than escape. Because the win might not be on the field, but whenever you stay present, the whole way through something, the win is in your soul. You stayed the course. You stuck it out. You finished the game and walked out, still a human being with a beating heart and people to love tomorrow. You stay through the bitter end because you love these players unconditionally and you love the players unconditionally because you love the game unconditionally.

Because the game is life.

And the only way to get through this world with any sanity is to love life unconditionally.

The ups and the downs.

So now, as I write this, it’s Monday. The last game is tonight. And I’m feeling good about tonight, because tonight just brings more life.

I wouldn’t mind if Stanford won, though.

Visit me at my FB author page:  Lynn Rankin-Esquer Author
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Freshman Year of College: Lessons From the Trash Heap

If helping my daughter move into her freshman dorm last fall was like the scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy lands among the adorable munchkins, pretty flowers, and lovely Glenda the Good Witch, helping her move out was like being trapped in the forest with the Wicked Witch’s scary monkeys. The move in was full of anticipation, excitement, new packages of cute bedding and desk supplies. The move out was a scramble of ‘summer is here, finals are over, grab Toto and get me out of here.’

When parents buy so much ‘just in case,’ and students have to move every single item out of their dorm rooms and apartments, guess what happens?

Trash.

Lots and lots of trash.

My daughter’s university instructed students that they had twenty-four hours after their last final to move out of their dorm, which spread the move outs across four to five days. My daughter, due to a late exam schedule, ended up on the last of the move out days. I arrived early to help and so had the chance to witness, on a daily basis, huge amounts of trash in the parking lot trash area, every day for four days. In the morning the many bins would be empty, by nightfall they would overflow. The next morning, empty again, only to overflow again by night. Every day.

It reminded me how much we over accumulate, only to throw it out as we rush on to the next thing.

My daughter was impatient with me, exhausted by studying for finals, disinterested in what happened to 80% of the stuff in her room. And in dorms, it all has to go. Every last hook and towel.

We stuffed bags and piles in the car, recycled all the Hint empties, threw out trash like everyone else. Staring at the dumpsters, seeing the fans and shoe shelves and discarded mattress toppers I was disturbed by the waste.

Until I saw an older man with a pickup truck pull up beside the pile and start going through it. I went over and chatted with him. He goes through it all, takes out the stuff still usable, and sells it at flea markets. It made me so happy, that at least some of the stuff won’t go to waste, that a man willing to go through trash can make some money off of it. It seemed a good solution all around.

I did see a notice that some of the dorms were collecting the extras and donating them somewhere, good for them. But I also saw in the exit frenzy that people got to the point that they just wanted to be done so they tossed everything that didn’t fit in the car or truck and peeled rubber out of there.

Of course it is important to be able to move on.

Of course it is useful to clean out stuff you don’t need anymore.

But the contrast between the move in, full of building something new, and the move out, full of throwing things away, hit me. 

The move in was so emotional for me. Looking back at it I see that it felt like a final panicked rush to provide everything she might ever need. A pressured feeling that my parenting time clock was almost up and I better stuff everything she might ever need into those bags right now.

I realize that at move in she was focused on the mountain she was about to climb, I was focused on building her base camp. And I over-furnished it.

Looking at the piles of trash, I know I wasn’t the only one.

Maybe what was getting thrown out was all the stuff parents thought their students needed. Maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe that is what college is about anyway. A daughter figuring out on her own what she herself needs and doesn’t need.

Like every other aspect of sending your child to college it was costly, but wow, lesson learned.

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Imagine all the baseball….it’s easy if you try*

*Unless you are a SCVAL board member?

Imagine a boy who loved baseball from the moment his fingers could close around the handle of a little plastic bat.

Imagine him hitting balls over the backyard fence from the time he was two.

Imagine the boy growing up with great friends in a happy place. All they do is play sports together, all they dream of is continuing to play sports together.

Imagine that the boy’s dad coaches baseball and the boy loves learning from his dad.

Imagine this boy gets to watch college players, gets to go to the College World Series with his dad’s team, gets stars in his eyes at the thought of playing at that level. He’s seen it, he knows what is possible. He wants it.

Imagine this boy decides to work hard to get to that dream, and to do so with all his sports loving buddies.

Now imagine telling the boy, right after middle school, that he is moving and won’t get to play sports with his friends in high school. His biggest dream so far.

Imagine a summer of despair and resentment and slammed doors in your new house.

Imagine the boy joins the football team, makes some friends, begins to raise his head at the dinner table once in a while. A glimmer of possibility that life is not completely over.

Imagine the freshman boy’s excitement at baseball season coming, a sport that will give him a chance to shine at this new high school.

Imagine the boy breaking his ankle right before his first baseball season in this new high school.

Imagine the boy going to every single practice anyway, so he’d be ready if his ankle healed before the season was over. On a scooter, then crutches, then a boot, out there every day.

Imagine that this boy learns more in one year about resilience than he ever thought he’d have to. Not knowing that resilience would be tested even more the following year.

Imagine the boy is a sophomore and he has made the Varsity baseball team. And he’s made friends. He now has another group of friends who he loves playing sports with.

Now imagine this sophomore year of baseball starts out great, and then a few weeks in, gets cancelled because of a pandemic.

For the second year in a row, dreams dashed.

Imagine an extroverted teenager who only wants to be with friends and play sports, stuck at home with his parents, facing a screen all day long for classes.

He adapts.

He finds a way to keep his grades up. He finds a way to connect with friends online (hello gaming). He doesn’t complain.

Imagine that the boy is worried about keeping his baseball skills up with no games and no practice and not even allowed to go play catch with a friend.

He adapts.

He convinces his parents to buy a pull-up cage for the backyard, and then weights and a squat rack for the garage. He keeps building his strength.

He is not allowed in any baseball field to practice, so he goes to a nearby park and spends hours throwing a ball off a wall to hone his fielding skills. He goes to another park with his dad to play catch to work on his throwing skills. He hits off a tee into a net in the backyard to work on his hitting skills.

That is, he adapts. He is flexible, he continues to try.

The resilience he has had to grow is both heartbreaking and reassuring.

Imagine that the boy is a junior and finds out there will be a baseball season after all. His work is going to pay off! His following all the rules of lockdown is going to be worth something.

Imagine that season starts, he and his team, his friends, are in heaven. They are playing hard and well.

Because this is not only one boy’s story. Every boy on his team has a story. Every athlete at this high school has a story.

THEN, imagine that the administrators of the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League decide there will be no playoffs.

There will be no gold ring to grab at.

There will be no goal to this season.

Every spring athlete denied the chance to let his or her story unfold.

There is no doubt that this pandemic has hit every part of our lives, hard. There are so many things that have been cancelled or ruined. There are so many hard decisions, hard things to implement. Leadership at every level has struggled with how to adapt.

But do you know what is hard to imagine?

How these administrators have expected the students to show this adaptability, and yet do not seem to expect adaptability from themselves.

Because we get it. At the beginning of the year, decisions about sports had to be made. High school leagues had to make choices (stick with just spring sports? Fit in all three seasons in shortened form? Etc.). There were not easy answers. I’d like to think they made the best choices they could with the information they had at the time. I understand there are complicated issues here, issues of being fair to all sports perhaps? Is it fair to punish sports that have a chance to try to balance out sports that didn’t? But things have changed. CDC guidelines changed. Vaccinations arrived. More became possible. So when the board decided to stick with the plan of no Central Coast Section playoffs for Santa Clara Valley Athletic League this spring (and SCVAL only) parents and athletes were understandably outraged.

Imagine you were told that CCS district playoffs were going forward with a normal schedule but your league Principals voted to not allow teams in you league to participate when the other seven league Principals voted to allow their teams to participate.

The students adapted. Remarkably. Heroically.

The administrators did not.

Imagine if the administrators could look at the data in front of them now, look at the human beings in front of them now, and in a show of respect for all the adapting the student athletes have shown, adapt.

Imagine looking at this face, and telling this boy, ‘for no good reason, everything you will work for over the next fifteen years will be disregarded because the people charged with helping you develop will give up.’

I don’t want to imagine that.

I don’t think it is too late to imagine something better.

Visit me at my FB author page:  Lynn Rankin-Esquer Author
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What I Did For Love: Cringe Edition

Warning! There be gross stuff ahead…..

I was sitting on our back deck, enjoying a beautiful spring morning when my son came out and asked me to sew a button on his baseball jersey. This was obviously a great time to teach him how to sew a button on his baseball jersey and I dug out a needle and thread. I showed him how to thread the needle and make a knot. We realized we needed scissors and both went inside to look for them (scissors travel around our house, never landing in the same place twice). When we got back to the table the threaded needle was gone. Son and I looked around, mystified. It wasn’t on the ground, it wasn’t on the table where we’d left it. I happened to look over at Dash, our white lab, sitting there in his favorite sun spot, and he was licking his chops, like he was finishing a tasty treat.

Panic. He ate the needle. I was sure of it. He eats everything, never bothering to waste time differentiating the edible from the inedible.

I ran over to him, cursing, and pried open his mouth. I ran my hand around his mouth, nothing. I pushed my hand farther and farther still, and partway down his throat found the needle, sideways. Eased it out and commenced adrenaline rush weakness.

It sounds gross and potentially dangerous. It was gross, all wet and mushy and uncomfortable to have my hand so far inside my dog. It was not dangerous because I’ve had to pull things out of Dash’s mouth before and he’s never once tried to bite me. Sometimes I think he knows when he’s gotten himself into trouble and is relieved I am around to get him out of it. Other times, like today, I doubt he could be that smart. He just swallowed a needle, after all. Hardly a qualifier for Mensa.

And this is what pet ownership is. You go where you never thought you could go. And you don’t even hesitate.

This is also what parenting is, which it turns out was a good preparation for owning Dash.

Cringe warning, I’m about to give some graphic examples of how gross things can get when we have kids and pets. Or at least how gross things can get when I have kids and pets.

Story number one. 

Once when my son was maybe four years old we were sitting watching TV in that short sweet spot between bath time, and bed. He may have said something about not feeling well. And then he started throwing up. My immediate instinct was to protect the couch (there was no chance of getting him to the bathroom to finish the job, not without messing up lots of carpet on the way). So I stuck my hands out in a sort of cup and he threw up into them. Into my hands. My bare hands. Some of it got on my jeans. He finished, we made our way to the bathroom where I dumped the vomit in the toilet, washed my hands and helped him wash out his mouth. As I leaned towards him, I bumped against him. He looked down at my wet jeans and said, “what is that?”

I said, “you threw up on me, that is vomit.”

He said, “Eeww! Get that away from me!”

The gratitude can be astounding.

I stand by my instinct, though. This was my second child and I had parented long enough by then to know I’d rather wash my hands and jeans than the couch and the carpet. It’s an economy of time and effort, that’s all.

Story number two

Another time Husband and I were sitting on the couch (lot of couch sitting in this family, I’m not going to lie) watching TV and our son was playing with our dog Beau behind the couch. Son was probably two or three at the most. Son comes toddling around the couch, giggling. He thrusted his finger into Husband’s face and said “What’s this!?”

Son waves his finger so close Husband can barely see it. “Ask your mother,” Husband said, eyes fixed on a baseball game in the bottom of the ninth inning, tied up at 3-3.

Son waves finger at me, I notice it has something brown on it. Did he find some chocolate? Dip into the paints?

“What’s this?” Son repeats.

“I don’t know, where did you get it?” I ask.

“Beau’s hiney,” answers Son, whereby Husband leaps off the couch and runs to the bathroom screaming, “Oh my God, that touched my mouth!”

I fell on my side, spread out on the couch, almost unable to breathe I was laughing so hard. Maybe I had just the slightest bit of anger at Husband that night because I remember being so ridiculously pleased that Son had touched his mouth with a finger straight out of our dog’s butt. Eventually I helped Son clean his finger and delivered a lesson on not putting fingers into the dog’s hiney.

Story number three

When Daughter was a baby we got a call that some dear friends were on their way over to meet her. Husband and I both went upstairs to change her diaper and put on the adorable outfit said friends had bought her (I loved doing that, making sure people saw the baby in the thing they gave her, you can afford that kind of attention to detail when you only have one child). I had her on the changing table in her room, Husband beside me, chatting about how happy we were to see these friends. They were an older couple, in fact he lived with them for a couple of years and you couldn’t meet nicer people.

Daughter’s diaper was off, and with one hand I held both her feet up to expose her butt for a wipe when it happened. Anyone who has had a baby knows that at times the poop occurs with such explosive force that it shoots up and out of the diaper and along the back of their clothes. Like a volcano erupted within a onesie.

This time the explosion happened without the retaining effect of clothing. The stream of liquid poop shot out of her with such force it arced in the air and landed in the hall outside of her room. It was a rainbow of shit. It seemed completely improbable that a baby that little could produce such a force but there it was.

After a moment of stunned silence Husband and I both started laughing and the laughing grew to such a force of hysteria mixed with a weird pride at her launch angle that it filled the room. The laughter was so physical, my stomach tightening, my head becoming light that I was bent over, holding on to the changing table with one hand and my Daughter with the other so she wouldn’t roll off.  Husband had to prop himself against the wall, holding his stomach, tears running down his face. We could not stop laughing, despite knowing the clean up was going to be hideously involved, as the hall was carpeted in off white carpet (not my choice, it was there when we moved in).

Daughter was just lying there staring at us in bewilderment. Who were these hyenas? What was this noise that seemed never ending? We eventually settled down enough to finish the diaper change job, do a quick clean up on the carpet, throw on some carpet cleaner to soak, and greet our guests as if there wasn’t a hazmat situation upstairs during their visit.

Diapers and dogs, plunging toilets, killing snakes and rats, throwing out the mold covered mystery Tupperware in the back of the refrigerator, the opportunities for experiencing the grosser side of life endlessly present themselves. There are some that are so gross I can’t bring myself to write about them (but I did them). Suffice to say that the treatment for a dog’s leaky anal gland . . . . never mind. Some things are just too much to even talk about.

But we do them.

We do them because we love them and we can’t leave them hurting or dirty or sick.

I have been astounded at how much I have been willing to do for my loved ones and my pets. Way beyond what the young me would have ever believed.

But I have also found there is one line I don’t think I can cross.  

I told Husband that I will do almost anything for him as we age, but I will not change his diapers, if it gets to that point. We’ll have to hire someone. I told him start saving now for that person because I really won’t. I will trim your nose and ear hair, no problem. I will look at any mole on any spot of your body. I will sit beside you while you throw up if you want me to (he would never, so that’s an easy offer). But my poop clean up is now reserved for dogs only. Everyone else is on their own.

[Sigh]

That was supposed to be the end of the piece.

But it isn’t, because I know if it comes to that, I will do it.

Visit me at my FB author page:  Lynn Rankin-Esquer Author
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What Would You Stop For?

It was a sunny Saturday morning in Mitchell park, an expanse of grass and picnic areas and play structures and courts for pickleball and tennis and basketball. Tucked into a neighborhood in Palo Alto the park is green and spacious, dotted with sculptures, bordered by a beautiful newish library and a manicured little league field. Its span more than accommodates all the people doing what people do on days off, walking, playing, eating, swinging.

I was on a run, grooving to my music, in my head winning one argument after another with people I’ve never even talked to. I shuffled past a protest organized on a long section of grass, not really seeing what the protest was for.

I’ve been alive long enough to witness a lot of injustices. I’ve lived in Berkeley so I’ve encountered my share of protests. I’ve participated in a few. These days there are so many issues to care about, but our brains can only take so much anguish at one time. Our eyes learn to slide past protests when we have seen too many, when our brainpan can’t fit one more travesty.

My eyes slid past this one, until they didn’t.

I stopped, turned around, went back. What was it that pierced my insular trance?

Stillness.

There were maybe ten protesters standing in a carefully spaced grid of rows and columns, all facing the same direction.

Just standing, staring straight ahead.

Not speaking.

Not looking around.

Not making eye contact.

Not shifting around or fidgeting.

Unmoving.

Resolute. 

In a world of constant movement and stimulation it was the stillness that got my attention.

Without words they were speaking, using their motionless bodies to say this is the issue that we care about right now. In this moment, in this place, nothing means more. Getting closer I found a sign and a little table with a petition on it in protest of the Chinese Communist Party.

Like the sculptures scattered through the park they stood. A moment of immobility while all around them children played soccer and people danced in an outdoor hip hop class and couples held hands and dads chased toddlers and moms worked on their large Philz coffees.

A refusal to participate in life, for the moment, as a way to point to injustice on the other side of the world.

It turns out I had room in my brain for one more injustice. Maybe caring about injustice expands, like love expands. Like a parent with one child relieved to discover that there is more than enough love for the second child too. Plenty to go around. Love growing without limits.

I signed their petition.

I went back to my run but their stillness stuck with me. Several weeks later it still is with me. In a world of twenty-four hours a day ‘news’ cycles, of a fire hose of stimulation coming at us almost constantly, interrupted by phone and computer notifications all day long, I found myself almost jealous of their one-pointed attention. One issue. Standing still until people noticed.

It’s got me thinking. What is my one-point issue? What would I stop everything else for to stand still while the world continued its business around me?

What would you stop for?

Visit me at my FB author page:  Lynn Rankin-Esquer Author
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Remembering Mazi – 5 Years Later

Mazi -my son’s soccer coach, center in back. Copper Select tournament team win 2015

It has been five years since the world lost Mazi Maghsoodnia in a tragic car accident. I imagine that simultaneously feels like a moment and like a century to his family. I was thinking about this upcoming anniversary and by chance happened to watch an incredible movie that spoke to the grief of losing someone. It has been out for a while but for the first time I watched Coco, the Pixar/Disney movie about the Mexican holiday of Dia de Muertos, the day of the dead. In this tradition, once a year the living invite the souls of those who have passed to come back in hopes of feeling a sense of connection with them again. In Coco the main character, Miguel, learns that the only way there is a chance of the souls coming back is if the living keep the dead alive in their memories. In the movie the biggest heartbreak is not that someone has died, it is when the person who died is no longer remembered.

If you are one of the few, like me, who haven’t seen Coco yet I highly recommend it, but have some Kleenex handy because you’ll cry. You’ll also have this very odd sensation of feeling your heart slipping out of its protected vault in your chest to come sit beside you on the couch, and snuggle with the hearts of the people you are watching with because theirs slipped out too. Don’t be surprised if those hearts dance around the room together, remembering what it is like to be connected, remembering that this connecting of hearts is the thing in life that truly matters.

Mazi could never be one of the souls in the afterlife who is wasting away out of being forgotten. Right now, in this time of Mazi Remembrance, I am imagining the hearts of all those who loved him slipping out of chests and snuggling with each other and dancing together to celebrate him and the joy he brought. I imagine him right there in the middle of it all, still beloved, still dancing.

I’ve put all the stories I wrote about Mazi onto this one post for anyone who wants to spend a little time keeping his memory alive.

Remembering Mazi

(originally posted March 21, 2016)

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
– Lao Tzu

Sometimes breaking the law is the right thing to do.

Growing up, in my east coast town, angry teenagers looking for a way to express themselves would climb the water tower and paint something on it.  This weekend a band of suburban moms did the California version of a water tower, triumphing over barbed wire and steep hills to paint the big rock that looms over our town.

Six broken hearted angry middle aged women climbed a hill (several hills actually, it was like the Sound of Music out there.  If the Sound of Music was set in Northern California, at night, eerily lit by a bunch of PGE lights that surround our community sinkhole.)  We slogged through a mini river, prayed that the cows were off in another pasture, sopping the bottom of our yoga pants, climbing ferociously up STEEP grade hills, sliding uncontrollably down the back side of the hills, backpacks filled with spray paint and light beer.  We became goat-like despite wearing Nike Free runs that were a poor choice of tool for the task.  With head lamps borrowed from our boy scout sons we levered ourselves like lithe mountain climbers (which we are not but our mission made us into) to paint the town rock.  A rock that is normally commandeered by high school students and the occasional crazed swim dad pod (you know who you are, M).

Do you know why this set of suburban moms met at 10:15 pm (yes, I said pm, as in at night) to commit this mayhem?  A group of women who for the most part would have already been asleep, if not raging at their teens/tweens to be asleep?  A group of moms who, at least half of them would never consider breaking a rule (the other half long out of practice at breaking rules)?  They, we, were out there out of the desperate love for a man who changed all of our lives before leaving this earth too **** (insert your own swear word here) early.  MAZI.  Mazi Maghsoodnia.  The Man.  The Man who could get a bunch of law abiding moms (not a few of whom have anxiety issues) off their butts and out of their houses to climb what felt like a mountain to spray paint his name on a rock.  In the dark.

We scrambled around the bottom and sides and top of the rock, one of us even hung off the top of the rock, with two people desperately grasping the back of her sweatshirt, to write the name MAZI on this rock.

And to add a soccer ball and a heart because, well, Mazi.

We were so desperate to make this work we took advice from teenagers.

Yes, we asked our teenage children what they knew about making the rock message stand out and, yes, hold on here, we listened.

And we were told how to access the hills and trail to the rock.  And we were told to ‘make the letters BIG’ and we did.

After reconvening on the side street where we had parked our cars we drove into the gas station at the bottom of the hill to yell confirmations to each other like we were the Seals team that just took out Bin Laden. We yelled and gave each other thumbs up as we looked up at the dim hillside with a big rock on top that clearly, even in the dark night, said “MAZI.”  The man we all loved and admired and appreciated and missed.

Mazi. You are perhaps the only person who could get this group of women out past 8:00, and not only out of their houses but climbing steep wet hills, with paint!  At 12:30 we were all still texting each other in excitement, sharing pictures, imagining what you might have made of this.

You are gone but the powerful passion for life that you brought to everyone around you lives on in all the lives you touched.  It fueled us all that crazy hill-climbing night, made us greedy to live large in your name.   Thank you for inspiring that kind of fiery joy.

I know God has already blessed you, I know God has blessed us with knowing you, I only hope that God blesses those left behind with some ways to get along until they are with you again.  With you again to play your beloved soccer, watch you dance with your beloved family, to once again stand in the light that was so uniquely yours.  God bless and hold you for us all.

Mazi Belongs to the World

(originally posted March 28, 2016)

It turns out I have more to say about Mazi.  I thought I had done my bit with my first blog post trying to capture the experience of painting ‘Mazi’ on the town rock and then going on about the business of private grieving, but it isn’t over.  I can’t stop thinking about him and the fact that he is gone from this form of interaction (I suspect there are other forms, beyond this earthly existence, but not knowing for sure I feel sad right now).

I don’t what the exact definition of something online going ‘viral’ is, but I know that my blog post about Mazi has gotten way more traffic than I usually get.

It has been read over 1600 times.

It has been read in 32 countries.

I know this is not due to my writing skill because up until the Mazi post my readers were in the high single digits at most (I was so under the radar my own mother didn’t know I had a blog).

Mazi knew a lot of people.

The 14th Dalai Lama said, “One family can influence another, then another, then ten, one hundred, one thousand more, and the whole of society will benefit.”  It is as if he was talking about Mazi Maghsoodnia.  The family he and Lida created is the best way to understand what a great man he was.  They are his legacy, are loving and generous and full of life and fun and dancing, just like their dad.  Mazi greeted everyone with a hug and a smile that made you know the world was going to be okay and his family is doing the same thing.

In the midst of the most painful experience of their lives they are doing this.

This family influence, this love, is literally spread throughout the world – I know this when I look at the map of where the blog piece was read.  Everywhere from Iceland to Kenya to the Phillipines there are people who shine brighter from knowing Mazi.

I have had people contact me to ask where the rock is so they can go see it.  I got a message from one person who reported her family ate dinner at one of the restaurants below the hill so that they could look up at Mazi on the rock while they ate.

It is as if we all want to be close to him again and are using the rock as a proxy.

Eventually someone will paint their own message on that rock and I’m already angry at them.  Angry at those self-centered insensitive teenagers (see that?  They don’t even know who they are yet and I have already made them villains.  Excuse my reaction to teenagers.  I have one.  A new one.  And maybe like baby rattlesnakes the new ones have the most venom?).

I started planning another bit of midnight mischief to take up a little sign to post by the rock.  Something explaining who Mazi is and asking these future delinquents to paint the smaller rock to the left, the one we left alone (you can only carry so much paint up those hills).  I keep driving past the rock to make sure the bright white ‘Mazi’ on its red background is still there.

And then it hit me, even once it is painted over Mazi will still be there.

No one strips the paint off the rock before painting it, they just paint over it.  So he will be there, forever one of the layers of the history of this town. Just like he will be for the rest of our lives, there, inside us when we do something kind, feel God’s love shine through.  As Antoine Saint-Exupéry said in The Little Prince ‘what is essential is invisible to the eye.’  And the essential Mazi will never go away.

When I look at the map of people reading about and remembering him I know that just like his name is forever preserved on the rock, the name Mazi Maghsoodnia is forever written on the world.

Mazi and the Meaning of Team

(originally posted April 13, 2016)

Glennon Doyle wrote that “compassion is not your pain in my heart.  That’s pity.  Pity helps no one. No, compassion is your pain in my heart and back out through my hands.  Feelings are just energy.  Eventually we have to make something with them.” (If you haven’t checked out Glennon’s blog do it as soon as you are done reading this http://momastery.com/blog/).

I was sitting there feeling the pain in my heart of losing Mazi Maghsoodnia and I hadn’t done anything with that.  We so often don’t. We talk to each other and repeat, over and over, ‘I can’t believe it.’  Talking is helpful, and then, as Glennon said, you need to go beyond the pain in your heart.

So when Quinn S. called me one night and asked me if I wanted to go up to the town rock and ‘paint away the pain’ (so eloquently said, Quinn) it felt like the right thing.  And then more pain came back out through my hands when I wrote a couple blog posts about the experience.  But I wasn’t the only one making something with the pain and it feels like it is time to reveal the other Sisters of the Rock.

Amy, on the far right, came up with the idea to paint the town rock in Mazi’s honor. This wouldn’t have happened without her brilliant idea.

Quinn, second from right with the devilish grin, organized the entire op, including the 7-11 run for tall-boys. This wouldn’t have happened without her desire to do something with her pain.  

Christie, in the middle, outlined the letters (beautifully big!  You can see them from way far away) and created the soccer ball (repeatedly checking a picture on her phone, while we all worried the police would see the light).

Prab, second from left, filled every spot with paint, soldiered over the top and bottom making sure nothing was left uncovered.

Karen, on the far left is the one who had two people holding on to her sweatshirt as she hung over the top of the ‘M’ to get the top of the letter just right.

I’m the historian, taking the picture and struggling to put words to how the pain is coming back out through our hands. (Apologies for the blurry picture but it was late.  And dark.  And we are perhaps, like Barbara Walters, enhanced by a bit of a blur to a photo.  Plus we can deny participation if anyone tries to make trouble for us.)

Those of us with blond hair woke up to pink bangs, the red paint that stuck on our hands ending up somehow in our hair (I liked it, wished it had lasted longer).  We also woke up to blackened pillows because we used eye black to paint ‘mazi’ on one side of our faces and a heart on the other.

Each time I write a blog post about Mazi my husband reminds me that I haven’t actually mentioned how we know Mazi.  So, third time’s a charm,  Mazi was my son’s Eclipse soccer coach along with Miguel Camacho (aka ‘the Soccer Whisperer’).  Mazi and Miguel were a great team.  The whisperer and the vocal cheerleader.  The loud positive and the quiet positive.

This U12 soccer team was a team that took its time coming together.  When you put kids from different towns together it takes a while to gel, and this team was no exception.  When you play soccer for an organization that, gasp, values kids playing multiple sports, it takes even longer to get to know everyone, because they weren’t all always there at practices, or even games.

Mazi and Miguel worked their magic and the team started to play well together.  And they won a few games.  And lost a few games.

It was all fun but they had never won a tournament.

And then, in August of 2015, Eclipse played in the Copper Select tournament in San Ramon against the mighty Mt. Diablo Arsenal.  In retrospect I wish had been taking notes, wish I had a more fact based description of that tournament (but then again, it was never my goal to be a sports reporter).  What I know is that the Eclipse team that weekend somehow kept winning.  What I know is that Mazi’s whole family was there to watch Nader and Mazi.  What I know is that, against the odds, the Eclipse team ended up in the FINAL GAME!

I remember hearing the whispers up and down the sideline as that final game started, Arsenal usually creamed their opponents.  They always scored a bunch.  They were unbeatable.

The game was the most intense I had ever seen our team play.  Every kick, every pass was contested by both sides.  Our kids played with a fever we had never seen.  They played like the future of the world hung in the balance, like if they lost, nuclear bombs were going to start going off in the parking lot and continue going off all over the planet.  They played like they would lose their phones and video games forever if they lost.  They were sweating, they were running until they were breathless, they were sticking a foot in where they couldn’t make a steal.  They were dogging the other team, hanging close to their defender/offender and doing whatever came to mind to win that moment.

Mt. Diablo Arsenal shot many many times on our goal and somehow, the ball never went in.  We could hear the parents on the other team exclaiming in disbelief, like a spell had been put on our goal protecting it.  The ball hit off of the cross bar, the side bar, off the tip of our goalie’s finger, off the side of our other goalie’s toe.  And our defenders seem to literally be giving pieces of themselves to every ball and defense.  Everybody watching knew there was something special going on.  No one wanted to say that, no one wanted to jinx it, but it was special.

So often in these kinds of battles parents along the sidelines start to be snipey at the other team’s parents.  But this didn’t happen. There was a grudging respect because the game was that good. We were all yelling for our team but when the other team did something good there was an appreciation for that.

The game, improbably, unbelievably, against all odds, was tied at zero at the end of regulation.  It is hard to describe what a triumph even that was.  It shouldn’t have happened.  It had never happened before against this team (and never has again, and we’ve played them multiple times).  But there it was.

And with the waning daylight they went straight to penalty kicks.

My son was the goalie who would be receiving the penalty kicks in the biggest game of his life, the biggest game of his team’s career.  Knowing he was a reluctant goalie at best, I had to fight off the urge to run across the field and snag him and take off for the parking lot at a fast run, worried what a loss might feel like to him.   And then, I saw someone standing in front of him, hands on his shoulders, leaning in and talking.  I saw my son’s head nodding.  I saw him nod again.  Even from a distance I saw his shoulders relax. It wasn’t Miguel.  It wasn’t Mazi.  It was Kian.  Mazi’s older son, a guy who knew something about being a goalie.  I would later learn that Kian gave him calm instructions.  Told him to watch the hips of the the player as he kicked, know which way the ball was going to go, know which way to dive.  Made him believe he could do it.  Made him trust himself and his team.  Kian wasn’t a coach on this team but, like a Maghsoodnia, jumped in to do what he knew to do.  Quietly, calmly, he gave my son confidence.

Parents on both sides were yelling, grabbing each other, looking to the heavens for help.  Each kick and goal or save resulted in gasps and screams.  There was no heartbeat that was calm at that point.  No player, no coach, no parent.  Well, maybe Miguel, the Soccer Whisperer was calm, but the rest of us were shaking with adrenaline.

Back and forth it went until we were tied.

Each team had one last chance.  Eclipse kicked and scored to put us one ahead.  And then it was up to us to defend one last kick to win.

“Watch the hips,” Kian had said and he did.  He stuck his hands out as the ball shot toward him, and the ball flicked up and away from the goal.

Eclipse had won.

The first tournament win for this group.

The most exciting, ecstatic dancing (and we know Mazi can dance), the dog pile, the screaming, it was, in that fading twilight, a pure joy.

Who was to know that the fading twilight also described Mazi?

Maybe that intense joy spoke of an awareness, in some subconscious part of all of us, that this win meant something more.  Looking back it feels like maybe it was a gift, a perfect day for the Maghsoodnia’s to keep in their memory bank.  Because Lida was there to watch Nader, Auveen was there, Mazi was there, Kian was there and helped coach.  And one of the best pictures ever is this one:  Kian and Auveen with Nader on their shoulders, their parents there to share in the joy.

The feeling of team, it is so special.  We all desperately strive for winning, for great performances, for great stats for ourselves and then our kids.  But maybe what we are really looking for, with all this sports hoopla, is to feel like part of something.  Maybe this is the real trophy, to feel part of a team.

Isn’t this what family actually means, that you belong to something? Someone has your back, someone cares about you, someone is working with you to make life better.  My husband coaches for a living and it is the thing he strives for the most, to give his players this feeling of being a family.  Of a brotherhood that goes deeper than batting average or wins and losses.  When you feel that connection to others you realize how much more you can achieve than if you were just working on your own.

People may think that winning makes you feel like a team, but it more often works the other way around, when you are a team, a true team, that is when you start winning.  We all felt it at that tournament, this team that Mazi and Miguel created. Those boys were playing like they were brothers and their brothers’ lives were on the line.  It infected the sidelines, the parents all felt connected too. There’s nothing like a rush of adrenaline and a wild hug after a penalty kick goal to bring people together.  We weren’t just hugging the people we knew best, we were all hugging everyone. It was such a shared joy.  

This concept of shared joy, it is just so Mazi.

I am deeply grateful that my son got to be part of Mazi’s Eclipse team, and that  I got to be  part of the team that painted Mazi’s rock.  We called ourselves ‘Sisters of the Rock,’ and I’ll tell you this, you didn’t have to be one of the people up there that night to belong to this team.  There are many more Sisters out there, and Brothers too.  Which is another way of saying that Mazi left a worldwide family, and that family will take care of its own.

Beautiful Lida on the rock

Mazi’s Gang

(Originally posted March 20, 2017)

What kind of parents invite their 13 year old sons to join them in a little illegal spray painting? And encourage gang signs? Late. On a school night. Aren’t we supposed to be lecturing them against that type of behavior?

Mothers who miss Mazi Maghsoodnia, that’s who. Mothers who one year ago climbed this same damp, dark hill to let the world know that a great man was going to be missed.  And mothers who understand that the pain of missing Mazi has barely begun and his family still needs reminders of the community who love them and will not let Mazi be forgotten.  This time it seemed right to bring our sons, the boys from his soccer team, along.

We painted up our faces and commenced operation Mazi.

The moon was so bright, yet the trail still so dark.  Hiking single file along the narrow cow path left us fighting for who would bring up the rear, because even before stepping over the broken barbed wire fence we saw an animal we were sure was a mountain lion. This is how much we love Mazi, we went anyway. The last two of us in the line held hands the whole way, sure each rustle behind us signaled the launch of a pouncing wild animal.

We slipped and climbed and shushed the boys and finally made it to the top of the rock (did I mention how steep those hills are? Like, a foot slips and you hear pebbles go tumbling, tumbling, tumbling down towards the sinkhole).  Even though the moon was so bright the rock and surrounding hill seemed darker than last year, which of course it was.  The sinkhole below the hill is still there but the lights that blazed through the night last year are gone (maybe it just isn’t in the Moraga budget to illuminate a sinkhole for a whole year.  It clearly isn’t in the budget to fix it quickly).

The boys were ecstatic to be out late, on a school night, spray painting, for crying out loud.  The moms tried not to ruin the fun by pointing out that they were doing this cool delinquent-like thing with . . . their moms.

Excited to begin their tagging careers the boys quickly pulled the tops off of the spray paint cans only to find that at least half of them lost the nozzles upon opening.  Just try to find a 5 millimeter nozzle on a dark, grassy hillside (hint, can’t be done, you’d have better luck finding $10 front row seats to Hamilton).

We heard laughter float up the hill and looked down to see a couple of figures moving carefully up the path.  It was Lida, Auveen, Kian and Nader coming to join us, arriving full of smiles and jokes.  “Mom, are you talking in Farsi? While scaling the cliff?”

13 year old boys are at an interesting stage of life, simultaneously enjoying and rejecting the nurturing of their mothers. Some of the moms on this trip get at most 3 syllables at a time out of their sons these days, but this night was like stepping outside of time and stage of life.  We all worked together, we talked, we laughed, and traditions were passed down from moms to sons, like the cliff hanging.

The only way to get the top of the letters painted correctly is for someone to hang out over the top of the rock, and the only way to do that with any degree of safety is for one or more people to hold onto the cliff hanger.  Here is last year’s cliff hanger passing the tradition along to her son (with a mask for good measure, isn’t it just like a mom to take her son spray painting and yet insist he wear a mask?????).

The tradition of getting the soccer ball painted just right.

The tradition of an adult beverage toast was not passed along to the sons. We aren’t that depraved.  They will have to discover Fireball all on their own, hopefully far in the future, in their own dark field like the rest of us did.

A new tradition of initials added to the bottom.

A new tradition of including Lida, Auveen, Kian, and Nauder.  Last year we painted the rock for them, this year we painted it with them and that felt just right.

A new tradition of a prayer, right after the Fireball (or was it before?).

A new tradition of a gang sign in Mazi’s honor (hand pointed downward with an “M” of middle three fingers).

Perhaps the most important tradition to pass down. An ancient tradition of gathering around a family in grief.

I want to write about grief but am finding it hard.  I have not been struck with this level of loss, so my imagination fails me when I try to truly understand what Mazi’s family has gone through this past year.  I feel the urge to focus on how well they have coped (they have) to allow myself to step back from looking into that abyss of pain that they still face every single day.  My mind flinches when I try to think about what it must be like for Lida to wake up in the middle of the night alone. My mind rushes to reassure itself with images of her smiling and hugging us all up on the hill.  See? My mind says to itself.  She is okay, she must be, she’s hugging and smiling and laughing.

Even while part of me knows she must still have very dark moments.

Even while a part of me feels helpless to do anything about those moments.

It feels cowardly, like a failure of compassion, to hide from the pain, so I try again to put myself in their shoes.  I try to imagine what it must be like to wake up and face the knowledge all over again, every single day.  And again the sadness drives me towards trying to find something reassuring.  Perhaps there is a deeper richness to life once something like this happens?  Perhaps Mazi was needed on the angels soccer team?  Perhaps they are stronger people now? Surely there is some meaning to this.

We all want to know that the Maghsoodnias are doing okay because we care about them, but also because we would like to believe you can survive tragedy.  It is too hard to imagine the long days and nights of pain so we would like to cut to the end of the movie, the laughing, smiling family who have triumphed, who have remade their world into something good again.  And people do survive, but are altered so profoundly that it is a whole different world that they are now living in. A world where the presence of the one lost has to be created in new ways, ways that will, inevitably, sometimes heartbreakingly, fall short of what they used to have.

I read Kian’s exquisite FB post about meeting his dad in his dreams.  I look at the picture of Mazi’s headstone that Lida sent me, surrounded by flowers, bright sunlight shining off of it. I see a hint of the ways that they are remaking their world and it is, as Glennon Doyle would say, ‘brutiful’ (brutal and beautiful all at once).

The painful moments will exist no matter how much other love and joy comes to their lives. Those moments are part of the landscape now.  Part of our job as a community is to not pretend those moments out of existence.  To be ready with the happy hug but also with the courage to acknowledge the pain that will never completely go away. To hold hands and stand vigil in the dark night so that no one has to feel completely alone.

So the trip up the hill this time was a way to circle around the Maghsoodnias and allow all the messy feelings to coexist, joy in the presence of grief, beautiful memories in the face of great loss, connection alongside loneliness. To say we understand that joy and grief may stay forever intertwined for them. What we tried to offer is what the poet David Whyte calls solace.

“Solace is not an evasion, nor a cure for our suffering, nor a made up state of mind.  Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part.  Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.”

Mazi’s Gang did something hard and scary in the darkness of night, our only illumination the full and luminous moon.  Instead of the blazing warmth of the sun he used to be, maybe Mazi is now more like the moon, a steady, encircling presence, not always visible, but with luck, revealing himself as an incandescent glow in a dark night. And what we discovered was that the brightness of that moon was, in the end, more than enough light to get the job done.

The Maziar Cup

(originally posted June 26, 2017)

This past Sunday I got a chance to attend the second Maziar Cup, a soccer tournament created to remember Mazi Maghsoodnia, who was lost to the earth community March 13, 2016.  It was a gorgeous day, sunny but with a breeze and a hint of cool that made it just perfect for soccer.  It was on a hill, which, being closer to the sky, was just right, somehow feeling closer to Mazi to me (I don’t know why this image of heaven being above us lingers, but it does).  There were the occasional high floating clouds, which seemed almost like otherworldly observers.  Like soccer players on the other side were hanging out up there with Mazi, like he was elbowing them, ‘look!  That was Auveen who crossed it so perfectly!’

There were athletes of every age playing with such a fierce intensity that my knees cringed at every twist and fall.  Only the young bend and don’t break, and these competitors weren’t all young.  There were young men and a little bit older men and men a little bit older than that, and women and girls, and they were all having fun, and no one gave anyone an easy time of it.

I wonder if Mazi was there watching, moving among his friends, slipping around his family, smiling and adding his kick to make a ball go just a little harder. I wonder if the breeze that kept lifting Lida’s hair was Mazi’s touch. I wonder if he stood in awe looking at his family, all of them broken hearted and thriving. I wonder if he saw how Nader has grown, and how he and the other boys not quite big enough to join in the fierce competition on the field found an unused net and started up their own half field game, taking turns in the goal.  I wonder if he saw Ollie the diabetic dog hunt down any sliver of shade, standing in the shadows of spectators as his eyes kept track of Lida.  I wonder if he heard Auveen tease Kian for taking off on his trip too soon. Did he love the shirts with his name on the back?

Did he love the shirts with his name on the front?

Who knows why someone is gone too early?  Maybe it’s just random.  Maybe there is a reason. Maybe all we can do is hold each other’s hands and share the memories about the one that is gone.

In the end it was a gathering of people with a common interest in an uncommon man. A man who was, so clearly, so abundantly, loved.  And isn’t that what we’d all like, in the end, when we leave? To be loved and remembered.  Like the Raymond Carver words:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Looking around at the people gathered at the Cup, at the rich network of friends and family spending their day honoring him, I have no doubt Mazi would answer, “I did.”

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