It is August. The air has changed.
Gone are coconut scented beach days, heated wiffle ball games, and the shouting of marco polo during late night swims in the pool.
Football practice has begun
The equipment crowding our kitchen is massive. It slumps over chairs and stretches across the floor like a drunken bachelor. There are girdles, pads, jerseys, and water bottles—the first line of defense against an otherwise attractive kitchen.
If you’re a new parent to the league, you’ll manage such equipment with the patience of Mother Theresa, even when you forget to secure the belt prior to washing. You’ll lovingly hand-weave it through the waist opening and help dress your boy until he appears adorably Tom Brady.
If you’re a veteran parent, you might want to remind yourself to disinfect the mouthpiece sometime before the season ends.
But…whether you saunter onto Windle Field as a first-year parent or come to practice wizened; a few things shall remain constant.
• The concession stand will run impeccably, with a supersized grill that’s clean enough to eat off of. Here, you will be greeted with smiles and enthusiasm. If the energy on the field is too intense, grab a snack and feel better.
• In some capacity, you will worry about your son.
What if he gets pushed by someone twice his size? What if his coach doesn’t like him? What if he doesn’t play his favorite position? What if the other players are mean to him?
I can assure you that, during the season, he will get pushed, his coach may demand respect from him (nothing personal), he may not play his favorite position, and players may be mean.
Just remember that, amidst all of this, your son is learning valuable lessons about how to cope with life’s challenges. Emotional toughness, resilience, is not developed by how easy life it is. Rather, it is rooted in difficulty. Through football, your son will learn to muster up the strength and determination to fight back when life is not fair. He will learn how to get back up after being knocked down. He will run one more yard to persevere; and take one more hit for his team. His tenacity will surprise you and, better yet, he may surprise himself.
During game time, emotions will run high. Touchdowns will be scored, interceptions will be thrown, and mistakes will be made—all are valuable to your son’s growth. Be his biggest fan, even when he fails to execute a play, make a tackle, or complete a catch. He is putting himself out there—literally—and taking a risk during every single play. The safer he feels to plunge in and take a shot, despite the threat of failure looming above him, the more confident he will become.
There’s nothing quite like watching your son cross into the end-zone for a touchdown. You’ll share in his joy—in knowing that he has met his match.
Is it all about winning? Definitely. But, remember, there’s more to winning than a score.
Some things never change.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Chapter Fourteen
It’s easier to exorcise your demons when you’re alone, Serena thinks, unloading a full bag of groceries. She shelves boxes of cereal, crackers, and fruit snacks then proceeds with the refrigerator items, her least favorite part of the chore.
She pulls open the fridge door and the expired culprits greet her immediately—jars of salsa, cartons of cream, wilted lettuce, and blemished onions. Like a cluster of loitering teens, they stand uselessly on the shelves each week, daring someone to remove them.
A quart of dated cream is the first to go. Pouring the remaining half down the sink, she watches the bad cream glug from the spout, its acrid stench rising through the air like an omen.
Doug, dressed in a Black Dog sweatshirt from Martha’s Vineyard, enters the scene casually and—in line with his recent attitude—finds fault immediately.
“What are you doing? Don’t throw that away!” he chides with the fervor of a parent scolding his child for running into the street. “That costs money!” he adds, stating the obvious.
Respond don’t react. Respond don’t react. Hit the pause button, she tells herself, her bare hands squashing the empty cream carton against the sink’s corner while, less violently, she says, “Hello Serena. Would you like some help with the groceries? It seems that you have a lot going on around here?”
“I’m just saying, Serena. That stuff’s expensive. I don’t want to waste it.”
“Hmm…I know the feeling,” she answers, stomping the trash deep into the basket, “though I think we differ slightly on what counts as waste, Doug. You see…I prefer to waste a dollar’s worth of cream that’s gone sour in lieu of spending fifty dollars on a pro-athlete’s number jersey, not to mention the one on your back. But maybe that’s just me,” she finishes.
Defeated, Doug exits the kitchen and Serena is left alone with a recurrent thought: this has nothing to do with the expired cream. His pettiness is the symptom of a larger issue. There’s a catalyst behind the little things that go wrong in every relationship. But staying married, she thinks, is not only about acknowledging what’s behind your spouse’s temper—it’s about choosing how much you’re willing to tolerate.
She opens her refrigerator door and inadvertently rests her eyes on a bottle of Chardonnay. It is three quarters full, relaxed, and propped against a carton of juice. She removes it, pours herself a generous glass, and sits at the kitchen table, surrounded by groceries. The first sip is elegant and she closes her eyes to savor the taste, a careful blend of fruit and lime. It isn’t long before thoughts crowd her.
Sara Nadeau, the criminal psychologist hired by the DA to investigate Joshua’s ‘take’ on the crime will be at the house shortly. Children are the best witnesses to a crime, she had said, because they think in literal terms and tell us exactly how a crime took place, unlike adults, who tend to gage what they say according to the consequences implied by their confessions.
Already, Josh has met with McKenzie to report on the details of the crime, precisely as he had remembered them. The Chief had made a generous concession to allow her to stay in the room, given her promise to remain detached and quiet. She had kept up with her end of the bargain, listening casually, masking her terror, while her son described the incident to the police chief.
“Tell me the exact conversation you had with Mr. Roth, immediately following your father’s departure to tend to his injury.”
“I know this isn’t easy, buddy, but can you tell me how he confined you to the passenger seat, along with what he said to you while he was doing it.”
“Tell me one more time what he said about his ex-wife and son.”
“What were your specific thoughts when he tricked you into going with him? Did you fear that your life would be taken?”
To this question, her chest tightened.
“I was mostly afraid because he seemed so different. He changed himself.”
Changed himself. The words linger in her mind. She has a feeling that Sara Nadeau, too, will rake through the words. Josh will be home from Kim’s shortly to participate in the interview. Her wine glass half full by now, her mind begins to draw best-case scenarios for the interview.
She hasn’t yet met Sara Nadeau. Perhaps she will be perky and pretty and tell jokes at the table that put Josh at ease. Or she will tell him a story more horrific than the one he unfairly endured to make him feel better.
In her mind, she creates positive conclusions to the meeting while staring at Josh’s third-grade class picture on the refrigerator. Drawn to it, she gets up and involuntarily opens the fridge door. The overcrowding issue inside is probably the last thing she ought to be taking charge of.
Yet something tells her that—right now—it's in need of a purge. She ejects bottles of salad dressing, jars of olives, and cans of sauce, then drops them into the trash as though they carry a disease. The more food she removes, the more jars of unidentified items she finds, items that have been hiding like criminals in the back.
When the shelves are barren; she sprays them down with disinfectant and wipes them clean, bunches of paper towels falling to the floor like spilled popcorn.
Four bags of full groceries remain still on the counter when she exits the kitchen. Her mouth tastes of sour grapes. Doug, like the fridge, needs a polish.
In his office, he moves his computer mouse slowly, tracking the cursor with the concentration of a surgeon while staring into the screen. His eyes remind her of his past.
Before Doug became a teacher, he had been an advertising manager for a large company in Boston. The pay was incredible but, like all things that seem too good to be true, it was. Doug wasn’t fulfilled or happy. She had encouraged him to leave the company to pursue his passion for education and, shortly thereafter, he had designed a loving ad to say thank you. Who knows me better than I know myself? The question floated onto the screen in purple font, a preview to a picture slide-show that ended in the line, thank you for saving me.
The memory sweeps through her like a warm breeze. But her words, chilled in hurt and wine, betray her love for Doug.
“I’m extremely disappointed by your crude show of emotion in the kitchen,” she says.
“I’m really disappointed by your no-show of emotion in the bedroom, Serena,” he says back, still focused on the screen.
The comment crowds her like a bad smell. She moves herself away from him and says, “Please help me to make the connection, Douglas, between our sex life and your temper tantrum over saving bad cream.”
Doug, less passionately, says, “I’m just a guy with normal needs.”
“Does it occur to you—in your infinite wisdom to meet your needs—that the man who could have raped or killed our child is currently roaming free?”
“Could have, Serena. Those are the operative words. And he’s not exactly free, he’s in a secure rehabilitation center, handcuffed as I understand it.”
“And I suppose it doesn’t matter to you whether or not this creep will have a chance to put another child, or another family, through this hell.”
“What matters to me, Serena, is that we not dwell in what we cannot change.”
“It’s pretty clear to me what matters to you lately, Doug…and it doesn’t seem to be your family. Today the expired cream mattered. Tomorrow it will be the way I put the toothpaste cap on. In case you haven’t noticed, Doug, I have better causes to fight and one of them will be home in fifteen minutes.”
“Hmm…better causes,” he says numbly. “Is that kind of like the wine you’ve been sucking down lately?”
“No Doug, that would be a cause that you—”
“Go ahead, Serena…say it…that I caused. It’s my fault.” He squeezes the arms of his chair, lifts himself up, and proceeds to walk away.
Facing him, palming his chest to stop him, she says, “Sara Nadeau will be here in less than an hour. It would be helpful for you to be present.”
“I already told you I don’t agree with that shrink interrogating Josh. These people have enough information. How many times does the kid have to talk about what happened…”
“You’re actually going to leave me stranded with this woman.”
“I told you before I want no part of it.”
“So this is about what you want again,” she says, practically choking on her temper to keep it at bay. “We are a part of it, Doug, because the child we happen to share is the victim and we need to protect him. If the DA wants to collect more evidence to nail this dirt-bag and a simple interview is the way to do it, then we need to support our son.”
“I disagree. I don’t think having him rehash the scene every week is supporting him.”
“Oh…because god forbid the boy is actually given the opportunity to process and sort through his feelings. That would just be way too revolutionary in your world, wouldn’t it?”
The conversation ends by default of Josh’s ungraceful entrance through the front door, the Guinness Book of World Records flapped open in his arm.
“How many eggs do you think this man crushed with his head in only a minute?” His cheeks are pink with fresh air, his eyes lighting up to his own news.
“How many eggs?” Doug has already freed himself of the grey sentiment of moments ago. “Gosh, that is weird. Let me see...there are sixty seconds in a minute… so if he crushed three eggs per ten seconds that would amount to—”
“Let’s not make it a lesson, Dad,” Josh interrupts, weary of teachable moments. “Just estimate, Dad.”
“Alright…let me take a stab. How about twenty-six?”
“Try eighty,” Josh answers, brandishing the full-length picture as though showing off a trophy.
“Eighty eggs? Gosh, I think Mom and I are in the wrong profession,” he says, eyeing Serena as though to say eat it.
There is more to talk about, more to reconcile, she knows. Doug’s lack of respect is atrocious. It wraps around her heart like a tangled kite, carrying with it hidden hurts and mysteries unsolved. Her husband has become a different person.
She smiles and says, “I think these record breakers have too much time on their hands. And…speaking of time…that lady I was telling you about, the one that works for McKenzie, Sara is her name—”
“I have to tell what happened again?”
Doug slides a glance to her. I told you so.
“I know it’s a pain, honey, but remember what I told you before…in order for the legal system to bring fairness to the crime committed, you have to tell what happened to all of the different faces who collect the evidence.”
“Is Mr. Roth going to jail for taking me?”
“Mr. Roth,” she says, feeling the word stick in her mouth, “needs to pay a consequence for the crime he committed. Right now, he is considered innocent until proven guilty. In order for him to be rendered guilty, the jury will need to hear the truth about what happened.”
“Who is the chury?”
“The jury,” she corrects, “is made up of twelve people chosen to work together to decide on the verdict, on whether or not the person being tried for the crime actually did it.”
“But will they make him go to jail?”
“You don’t have to worry about him, buddy,” Doug says. “He’s being taken care of.”
“I think he asked whether or not he will go to jail,” she snaps back, before turning back to Josh. “He will go to jail if the truth is told, honey…and what do I always tell you about the truth?”
“The truth will never hurt?”
“The truth will never hurt you,” she repeats, “only lies get you into trouble.” Her thoughts shoot back in reverse: to Roth handing over the business card, to believing him, to the betrayal, then her disguise in the hospital room. Two lies, two wrongs.
“The truth will never hurt you,” she whispers again, hoping to convince her son and, moreover, herself.
She hears the slam of a car door. Sara Nadeau has arrived.
She pulls open the fridge door and the expired culprits greet her immediately—jars of salsa, cartons of cream, wilted lettuce, and blemished onions. Like a cluster of loitering teens, they stand uselessly on the shelves each week, daring someone to remove them.
A quart of dated cream is the first to go. Pouring the remaining half down the sink, she watches the bad cream glug from the spout, its acrid stench rising through the air like an omen.
Doug, dressed in a Black Dog sweatshirt from Martha’s Vineyard, enters the scene casually and—in line with his recent attitude—finds fault immediately.
“What are you doing? Don’t throw that away!” he chides with the fervor of a parent scolding his child for running into the street. “That costs money!” he adds, stating the obvious.
Respond don’t react. Respond don’t react. Hit the pause button, she tells herself, her bare hands squashing the empty cream carton against the sink’s corner while, less violently, she says, “Hello Serena. Would you like some help with the groceries? It seems that you have a lot going on around here?”
“I’m just saying, Serena. That stuff’s expensive. I don’t want to waste it.”
“Hmm…I know the feeling,” she answers, stomping the trash deep into the basket, “though I think we differ slightly on what counts as waste, Doug. You see…I prefer to waste a dollar’s worth of cream that’s gone sour in lieu of spending fifty dollars on a pro-athlete’s number jersey, not to mention the one on your back. But maybe that’s just me,” she finishes.
Defeated, Doug exits the kitchen and Serena is left alone with a recurrent thought: this has nothing to do with the expired cream. His pettiness is the symptom of a larger issue. There’s a catalyst behind the little things that go wrong in every relationship. But staying married, she thinks, is not only about acknowledging what’s behind your spouse’s temper—it’s about choosing how much you’re willing to tolerate.
She opens her refrigerator door and inadvertently rests her eyes on a bottle of Chardonnay. It is three quarters full, relaxed, and propped against a carton of juice. She removes it, pours herself a generous glass, and sits at the kitchen table, surrounded by groceries. The first sip is elegant and she closes her eyes to savor the taste, a careful blend of fruit and lime. It isn’t long before thoughts crowd her.
Sara Nadeau, the criminal psychologist hired by the DA to investigate Joshua’s ‘take’ on the crime will be at the house shortly. Children are the best witnesses to a crime, she had said, because they think in literal terms and tell us exactly how a crime took place, unlike adults, who tend to gage what they say according to the consequences implied by their confessions.
Already, Josh has met with McKenzie to report on the details of the crime, precisely as he had remembered them. The Chief had made a generous concession to allow her to stay in the room, given her promise to remain detached and quiet. She had kept up with her end of the bargain, listening casually, masking her terror, while her son described the incident to the police chief.
“Tell me the exact conversation you had with Mr. Roth, immediately following your father’s departure to tend to his injury.”
“I know this isn’t easy, buddy, but can you tell me how he confined you to the passenger seat, along with what he said to you while he was doing it.”
“Tell me one more time what he said about his ex-wife and son.”
“What were your specific thoughts when he tricked you into going with him? Did you fear that your life would be taken?”
To this question, her chest tightened.
“I was mostly afraid because he seemed so different. He changed himself.”
Changed himself. The words linger in her mind. She has a feeling that Sara Nadeau, too, will rake through the words. Josh will be home from Kim’s shortly to participate in the interview. Her wine glass half full by now, her mind begins to draw best-case scenarios for the interview.
She hasn’t yet met Sara Nadeau. Perhaps she will be perky and pretty and tell jokes at the table that put Josh at ease. Or she will tell him a story more horrific than the one he unfairly endured to make him feel better.
In her mind, she creates positive conclusions to the meeting while staring at Josh’s third-grade class picture on the refrigerator. Drawn to it, she gets up and involuntarily opens the fridge door. The overcrowding issue inside is probably the last thing she ought to be taking charge of.
Yet something tells her that—right now—it's in need of a purge. She ejects bottles of salad dressing, jars of olives, and cans of sauce, then drops them into the trash as though they carry a disease. The more food she removes, the more jars of unidentified items she finds, items that have been hiding like criminals in the back.
When the shelves are barren; she sprays them down with disinfectant and wipes them clean, bunches of paper towels falling to the floor like spilled popcorn.
Four bags of full groceries remain still on the counter when she exits the kitchen. Her mouth tastes of sour grapes. Doug, like the fridge, needs a polish.
In his office, he moves his computer mouse slowly, tracking the cursor with the concentration of a surgeon while staring into the screen. His eyes remind her of his past.
Before Doug became a teacher, he had been an advertising manager for a large company in Boston. The pay was incredible but, like all things that seem too good to be true, it was. Doug wasn’t fulfilled or happy. She had encouraged him to leave the company to pursue his passion for education and, shortly thereafter, he had designed a loving ad to say thank you. Who knows me better than I know myself? The question floated onto the screen in purple font, a preview to a picture slide-show that ended in the line, thank you for saving me.
The memory sweeps through her like a warm breeze. But her words, chilled in hurt and wine, betray her love for Doug.
“I’m extremely disappointed by your crude show of emotion in the kitchen,” she says.
“I’m really disappointed by your no-show of emotion in the bedroom, Serena,” he says back, still focused on the screen.
The comment crowds her like a bad smell. She moves herself away from him and says, “Please help me to make the connection, Douglas, between our sex life and your temper tantrum over saving bad cream.”
Doug, less passionately, says, “I’m just a guy with normal needs.”
“Does it occur to you—in your infinite wisdom to meet your needs—that the man who could have raped or killed our child is currently roaming free?”
“Could have, Serena. Those are the operative words. And he’s not exactly free, he’s in a secure rehabilitation center, handcuffed as I understand it.”
“And I suppose it doesn’t matter to you whether or not this creep will have a chance to put another child, or another family, through this hell.”
“What matters to me, Serena, is that we not dwell in what we cannot change.”
“It’s pretty clear to me what matters to you lately, Doug…and it doesn’t seem to be your family. Today the expired cream mattered. Tomorrow it will be the way I put the toothpaste cap on. In case you haven’t noticed, Doug, I have better causes to fight and one of them will be home in fifteen minutes.”
“Hmm…better causes,” he says numbly. “Is that kind of like the wine you’ve been sucking down lately?”
“No Doug, that would be a cause that you—”
“Go ahead, Serena…say it…that I caused. It’s my fault.” He squeezes the arms of his chair, lifts himself up, and proceeds to walk away.
Facing him, palming his chest to stop him, she says, “Sara Nadeau will be here in less than an hour. It would be helpful for you to be present.”
“I already told you I don’t agree with that shrink interrogating Josh. These people have enough information. How many times does the kid have to talk about what happened…”
“You’re actually going to leave me stranded with this woman.”
“I told you before I want no part of it.”
“So this is about what you want again,” she says, practically choking on her temper to keep it at bay. “We are a part of it, Doug, because the child we happen to share is the victim and we need to protect him. If the DA wants to collect more evidence to nail this dirt-bag and a simple interview is the way to do it, then we need to support our son.”
“I disagree. I don’t think having him rehash the scene every week is supporting him.”
“Oh…because god forbid the boy is actually given the opportunity to process and sort through his feelings. That would just be way too revolutionary in your world, wouldn’t it?”
The conversation ends by default of Josh’s ungraceful entrance through the front door, the Guinness Book of World Records flapped open in his arm.
“How many eggs do you think this man crushed with his head in only a minute?” His cheeks are pink with fresh air, his eyes lighting up to his own news.
“How many eggs?” Doug has already freed himself of the grey sentiment of moments ago. “Gosh, that is weird. Let me see...there are sixty seconds in a minute… so if he crushed three eggs per ten seconds that would amount to—”
“Let’s not make it a lesson, Dad,” Josh interrupts, weary of teachable moments. “Just estimate, Dad.”
“Alright…let me take a stab. How about twenty-six?”
“Try eighty,” Josh answers, brandishing the full-length picture as though showing off a trophy.
“Eighty eggs? Gosh, I think Mom and I are in the wrong profession,” he says, eyeing Serena as though to say eat it.
There is more to talk about, more to reconcile, she knows. Doug’s lack of respect is atrocious. It wraps around her heart like a tangled kite, carrying with it hidden hurts and mysteries unsolved. Her husband has become a different person.
She smiles and says, “I think these record breakers have too much time on their hands. And…speaking of time…that lady I was telling you about, the one that works for McKenzie, Sara is her name—”
“I have to tell what happened again?”
Doug slides a glance to her. I told you so.
“I know it’s a pain, honey, but remember what I told you before…in order for the legal system to bring fairness to the crime committed, you have to tell what happened to all of the different faces who collect the evidence.”
“Is Mr. Roth going to jail for taking me?”
“Mr. Roth,” she says, feeling the word stick in her mouth, “needs to pay a consequence for the crime he committed. Right now, he is considered innocent until proven guilty. In order for him to be rendered guilty, the jury will need to hear the truth about what happened.”
“Who is the chury?”
“The jury,” she corrects, “is made up of twelve people chosen to work together to decide on the verdict, on whether or not the person being tried for the crime actually did it.”
“But will they make him go to jail?”
“You don’t have to worry about him, buddy,” Doug says. “He’s being taken care of.”
“I think he asked whether or not he will go to jail,” she snaps back, before turning back to Josh. “He will go to jail if the truth is told, honey…and what do I always tell you about the truth?”
“The truth will never hurt?”
“The truth will never hurt you,” she repeats, “only lies get you into trouble.” Her thoughts shoot back in reverse: to Roth handing over the business card, to believing him, to the betrayal, then her disguise in the hospital room. Two lies, two wrongs.
“The truth will never hurt you,” she whispers again, hoping to convince her son and, moreover, herself.
She hears the slam of a car door. Sara Nadeau has arrived.
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