Lynn Rankin-Esquer's Blog, page 4

Midday Moment of Joy

Dash paused his zooming ever so briefly for a picture

I live a forty five minute drive from the ocean and took my dog for a walk on the beach yesterday and he was so excited by the beach that he pranced around, he zoomed, he darted. He chased the waves and ran into the surf and looked back at me like he couldn’t believe I was allowing this. He sniffed odd long protuberances of seaweed, he nosed and jumped at other dogs. His tail didn’t stop wagging, as if he was trying to get the words out: ‘Wow! Look at this! Look at this! Look at that! Ohmygosh, look over here!’

It was like watching a child on Christmas morning and it was exactly how I feel every time I get that close to the ocean. During the day it is mostly just me and Dash and I talk out loud to him so as I watched him dance his way down the beach I told him, “Same thing bud, I feel the same thing.”

Despite the fact that I was way behind on my To Do list for the day (week, year), in that moment I couldn’t be anything but completely happy. I had a figure-ground reversal, the To Do’s faded into the background, the joy took front and center. I could kind of, for a second, remember that the To Do’s are in service to the joy not the other way around.

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A Back Door into Gratitude

Despite meditating every morning, I have a brain that pulls away from the present moment like a hundred pound lab on a leash who sees the dog park in the distance. Over there! That is where the action is! Let’s GO!

I’m currently reading a delightful book called Awakening Joy by James Baraz and he is reminding me, like so many others before him, that writing down things you are grateful for is a way to increase your joy, your ability to enjoy the moment, all the good stuff. I find the little abandoned notebook by my bed purchased for this very practice a year ago. I blow off the dust, open it and see that attempt lasted all of six days. I’m a better person now. I’m ready for this.

Almost two weeks later, remembering more days than not, I notice a certain predictability to my entries. One might even call it a rut. It is abundantly clear that I really love my bed and its smooth sheets. And my family of course. They make the list all the time. As does coffee and tea and cranberry biscotti and lemons. All good things but every so slightly repetitive.

Surely there is more.

And then in shower this morning I was thinking about how many things I take for granted. Which is a kind of back door entrance to finding gratitude.

The most obvious thing that I take for granted was literally hitting me in the head. I was in a warm shower! It made me think about people who lived in past centuries, before indoor plumbing and water heaters, before such a thing as a warm shower existed (or people who live in poverty now). What an absolute luxury that would be! Getting clean could not have been as much fun before someone figured out how to warm up water.

Here I am, in a safe, protected place taking a warm shower and I wonder what that would have felt like to say, Laura Ingalls Wilder (I was obsessed by her books growing up). I remember her describing a weekly bath, they had to heat the water in the fireplace and pour it into a big tin tub and then her dad went first, then her mom, then she and her sister. All in same water. Cooling quickly, no doubt. And here I am, every morning hopping in to the perfect temperature for as long as I want, fresh water, used by nobody else before me.

With good smelling soaps!  I wondered who came up with soap and then who thought to scent it?

I never even think about my warm water or my good smelling soap and shampoo. More typically I step into the shower and I think about the HVAC insurance paperwork I need to fill out and getting my son’s senior picture submitted in time and whether I need to take the dog to the vet because he’s been dragging his butt again. I think about whether I’m going to shave my legs (shorts? pants? time available?). Mundane things. Future things. Not even as fun as the dog park but dragging me towards them nonetheless.

But today, I pretended I was from a different century and someone had given me the opportunity to try out this new, only for the very wealthy, thing called a warm shower and I was in heaven. It seemed like a miracle, this warm water raining down on me, these delicious smells rubbing all over my body, the chance to feel clean and warm and safe all at the same time. I sent up a little thank you prayer to all the creatives who came up with the elements I was enjoying.

I thought about how people have probably always wanted a way to clean themselves. Maybe starting in rivers (Cold! Maybe dirty. Maybe full of snakes and other critters nipping at the tender parts.) And then maybe rudimentary tubs with river or lake or rain barrel water. And then whoever figured out aqueducts and sending water different places. And then someone said, ‘hey! This would be so much better if it was warm’ and figured that out. And someone noticed, hmm if I rub this stuff on my body the dirt comes off easier and soap was invented/discovered. And then someone thought to add a good smell to that substance.

I could go research all this, see how true my imagining is, but no matter how it happened, people came up with ideas that added together to create a shower, something that would have been an unimaginable luxury to so many who lived before this was all invented.

And I step in there every morning, not even paying attention.

So yes, gratitude can be accessed by noticing what we take for granted.

Which, once you really start thinking about it, is just about everything.

I look around and realize that almost everything in my life, as mundane as it seems sometimes, is built from the magic of other people’s ideas. People who didn’t chase the wispy floating what-if’s out of their head. People who dreamed and made things and when they didn’t work made something else. Harnessing electricity, coming up with red means stop green means go to keep us all from crashing into each other, combining ingredients into something that makes a pancake, launching a tin can into the air filled with people and bringing them back down safely in another state. Individuals came up with ideas and put their ideas together with other individuals’ ideas and here we are, talking to each other through our watches and eating Toblerone infused blondies.

I have walked around this whole day filled with the happiness of this morning’s shower. All day I have thought about how lucky I am to have that shower in my house, available whenever I want it. It took the sting out of the butt dragging dog and the hour long wait on hold to sort out a medical bill and the ever-deflating what to make for dinner decision.

Tonight’s gratitude list is already taken care of. Warm water on demand. Scented soap. Privacy and safety whenever I need it (it never occurred to me to be grateful to be able to get clean without worrying about snakes but now this is my favorite thing about my shower, it is snake free).

I have a feeling tomorrow’s list is going to come pretty easily too.

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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.

Visit me at my FB author page:  Lynn Rankin-Esquer Author
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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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