Ryan's Word Riots

It’s a strange thing as you grow and father your own child, you suddenly find yourself face to face with the same rhythms, the same history of your own life reflected through new eyes, in a new body, with a different mind, a different soul, a different path, but the harmonies sometimes repeat.

There was a completion of the circle for me this last year, or maybe an intersection, yeah, that’s more appropriate, that instead of life being one circle it’s a series of circles drawn over and over by one hand, sometimes intersecting, sometimes growing larger and sometimes smaller, so that eventually you go to the ground represented by a large inked ball where the start and stop are no longer consequential. So has been my son’s emergence as a lacrosse player.

My relationship with my hometown, and in turn with its truest sport, can only be described as conflicted. I’ll stretch and bring in Faulkner, considered one of the greatest white southern writers, who couldn’t have “Light in August” without the rotten Christmas, who couldn’t talk about family first person without doing so through the eyes of a mentally disabled man or a dying woman, whose beloved Yoknapatawpha invoked the name of an incestuous prince. I’d left Baltimore burnt out and confused, with athletic potential squandered under the weight of frustration and excuses, and with a sense of otherness born of trying to change my own stubborn shape instead of finding a place for it among the melee.

Then I went to college in San Diego. My coach in Baltimore told me I should play attack since they didn’t know how to play there. And there I discovered that people back east just didn’t know that people out west knew how to play. Yet. I had a coach from my own alma mater who had a career most could only dream of, and I made lifelong friends, thanks to a sport I’d all but written off. I fell back in love with lacrosse. And like we do many time in our lives, put that love aside to move forward and thought rarely of it; only enough for the occasional men’s league cameo or alumni game. Then quiet.

Until I started coaching my son. And without any expectations or early indications, the boy found that passion, and from that followed ability, so after years of work and play and exaltation and heartbreak he found himself on the best team in the region, the Summit.

We went to San Diego for a tournament, where I met up with my old teammates, our top attackman, our top middie, on a team that had been maybe one of the few things tying me to the earth during those crazy college years. Sarah and I took Jackson, and Ethan too though he wasn’t playing, but we all went and after the lacrosse we roamed Mission and Pacific Beach and went surfing and ate cali burritos and skated to the roller coaster and a homeless man called out to me to do a kickflip and I landed one much to the shock of the universe.

And so I thought if Jackson was serious about something, he had to follow it to its source. He’s serious about skiing so he skis the Tetons. If he’s serious about lacrosse, he would have to practice it in Baltimore. I signed him up for a camp run by a man who I’d had endless respect for ever since the first time I tried to manage him in practice (I never could) and another who’d been a great lacrosse player but also a brother in pursuit of waves and even moved to Jackson Hole along with me when life took us there.

I wasn’t prepared for what we would unearth, some footlocker buried under the dirt of decades of life. We went to DC, where I took J and his buddy Croz and Sarah to all the museums we visited on school field trips and stared in awe at the two-man galactic orbiter I remembered staring at awe in at the Air and Space Museum. The reflecting pool was gated, and the lights didn’t work at the Lincoln Memorial but it was all there.

We toured Ft. McHenry and I didn’t care as a kid but now I understand how profound it is that the star-spangled banner was a poem about American resilience written just there, and I noticed the cannons at Federal Hill that held Baltimore hostage to the Union during the civil war. We drove past the rowhome where I grew up in Fells Point, that my parents had bought for 3 grand as a vacant, and the Thames Street Park where I learned to play lacrosse and soccer though the “field” smaller than my current backyard was littered with dog shit because people didn’t bag that up back then and I had to pick it from out of my cleats when we were done.

We snuck onto Homewood at Hopkins, where the goal-end stands are now an athletic center, and as the kids passed around and had a shoot on the turf I thought back to the times I walked those stands on game day, trying and failing horribly in the posturing and peacocking that came so naturally to everybody else back then. The lacrosse field was as powerful as Proust’s madeleine.

We went to a lacrosse store, no longer LAX World but still, a real lacrosse store, and as we waited for Crosby’s stick to be strung ate snowballs at Windy Valley. The fields and school house at St. Paul’s was so much grander through the kids’ eyes than when I’d stood there almost 30 years ago, wishing I was somewhere surfing or adventuring or anything but playing lacrosse in Baltimore. I’d had excuses for what happened between when I was Jackson’s age and when I was a junior or senior in high school: the coaches didn’t understand what I was doing, politics were at play, I didn’t fit in with the khaki pants polo shirt crowd. They weren’t invalid, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t excuses. I would later learn that those are a condition of life, and the secret is learning to push them aside, that the only thing you can control is yourself so you best get to controlling yourself in such a way that all of those eventually disappear.

We went to Gilman, another place with such conflict in my mind. Now that I’m a lacrosse coach that name invokes words of awe from my die-hard players, from parents that know. But at the time, I vowed that if I was ever rich enough, I’d donate a king’s ransom to put in a wave pool where one of the fields are.

We played catch at the lower fields. Frosh soph year. With the trees lusher than I’d remembered. “I thought you said the views from the lacrosse fields where you grew up weren’t good,” Sarah smirked. I chuckled and sent a long pass to the kids.

We dropped the boys off at camp and I remembered those countless sports camps as a kid. At Maryland, at Naval Academy, at Goucher. Remembered the meals. The drills. That hot turf at Loyola College, where they put ice towels on your neck; Loyola College, where in middle school I ballboyed for lacrosse (once took a shot from an attackman from Brown during warmups mid-thigh and my leg went numb) and soccer and basketball.

I saw kids for whom this was the absolute pinnacle of athleticism, bigger rockstars than the skiers at home throwing triple-backs (Baker and the fake backbreaker!). I watched as our kids saw and played at a whole new level.

They were in camp and Sarah and I stayed with my godmother and her husband, and ate RoFo fried chicken, and went to the National Aquarium (fun fact, I went to college at first to be a marine biologist almost exclusively because of that place) and toured the USS Torsk submarine (we all had to do community service to graduate high school and I did it there, using strip-eeze to peel paint off brass pipes and sitting on the top with a hammer and a chisel working to pop open a hatch). We also had to do a senior project working at our future career and I wrote a novella about how horrible the Baltimore Preps world was.

Stayed at a hotel that used to be the rec center around the corner from where I grew up. Went to the Walter’s Art Gallery, one of my first museums, across from the Washington Monument where I’d once joined my mom for a “Take Back the Night” march.

Sarah and I watched the kids’ camp scrimmages two of the evenings, much like my own parents had done when I was at Loyola or Goucher. We brought the kids Gatorades and crab chips. I ate a lot of crab myself. Hearty meals. Dinner at Philomena’s at Georgetown, where my family went on very special occasions. Lunch at the Northeast Market, where a man in a wheelchair threatened to fight with the paramedics helping another man suffering from heatstroke, claiming they’d put hands on him and get the BPD on down here! as the kids looked over on alert.

And then the circle, this one, crosses yet again. It was only after a flight across the country, and a drive from L.A. (where I’d had my Hollywood years) to Sunnyvale that I realized my own lacrosse career had ended with the WCLL Championship, up here in central cal against Santa Clara. I had flown completely across the country with my son in pursuit of his own dreams, only to find myself 9 miles away from the university where my career had ended in the greatest of all victories. I’d ended high school on the bench; I’d ended college in this very place as defender of the year for the WCLL champions (which would win the next two, inaugural, MCLA D2 nattys).

In supporting Jackson’s dreams and burgeoning career, I’d fully retraced my own without even realizing it. And I knew one thing, which I wish I coulda told that young me struggling in the 90s with expectations and the machine, that somehow this thing that he kinda hated would soon become the source of his greatest fulfillment. I’ve met up with my old teammates since Jackson’s travel team started, from San Diego to Salt Lake City (what up Skirt McGirt! and Coleman) to my college LSM and still closest friend at home in the Tetons, Josh. And it has brought me happiness.

As a father, I can only watch, and support, and if he asks for it (sometimes if he doesn’t)(more often than I’d like to admit if he doesn’t) give advice. Because, not to sound corny, and nobody from Gilman would expect to hear this from the Founder and President of the Gilman Surf Club who by senior year of high school was a player in name and number only, there’s something truly infinite in this great creator’s game, something that, if we are privileged enough, we get to share until time immemorial.