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CHAPTER 1
The Fields of Winter
In the life of a young man, in the life of his father, there are many goals.
One is downstairs in our basement. A finished basement — small bedrooms for each kid, a windowless closet for the computer, a drafty half bath. In the course of a normal day, I might go down there three of four times total, but so far — on the kind of bitterly cold February morning these New Hampshire hills still know how to dish out — I've already been down a dozen times, making up errands to disguise a heavy case of nostalgia. Daughter Erin is away at college, which I've grudgingly gotten used to, but son Matthew is finishing off his junior year in high school with a semester in the Bahamas — and yesterday was his flight down. A long story — it's a nontraditional school emphasizing "real-world" learning, environmental stewardship, interaction with the local community — but the bottom line for me, on a morning like this one, is that I have an awful lot of alone time in a house that suddenly seems very empty.
The empty-nest syndrome: my older readers are probably nodding their heads in sympathy, having been through it themselves. Not the real thing yet, not with another year of high school to go through with Matt, but enough of a foretaste to let me know it's every bit as hard as they say it is.
(How hard? Celeste called from work while I was downstairs, and the first thing I asked her was, "Want to have another kid?")
I feel closer to Matt when I'm in the basement. On the left of the stairs hangs a poster showing the famous Manchester United midfielder Paul Scholes with his tongue plugged determinedly against his cheek, his cleats stepping over a soccer ball in a trademark shift of balance — a poster advertising his team's U.S. tour in 2003, when we saw them play at Giants Stadium. Just beyond is a poster fashioned by Matt himself — caricatures of his favorite players made by cutting out photos of their heads from soccer magazines and superimposing them atop crazy body parts cut out at random from other magazines.
The posters form a portal to the trophies in his room, over there in the corner on a wedge-shaped shelf. There's a first-place trophy from the Southington Invitational tournament of 2005: a square little pedestal atop which stands the gold-plated, leg-swinging soccer player with the resolutely blank expression who must adorn 98 percent of the world's soccer trophies. He's also on the first-place trophy from the RYSA Columbus Day tournament of 2001, and, being no snob, adorns the third-place trophy from the Londonderry United Labor Day tournament of 2003. Ribbons and medals from the low-budget tourneys hang on nearby nails. The two smallest of these are Matt's most precious: winners' medals from the New Hampshire state high school championships, one from his sophomore year, one from his junior.
On the walls above Matt's bed is tacked a line of twenty-two 5-by-7 photos — pictures of all the Bayern Munich teams of 2002, with players named Zvjezdan Misimovic and Bixente Lizarazu, as well as more famous ones, like the great goalie Oliver Kahn. Below it is a shelf with his soccer books, his collected issues of FourFourTwo (the glossy British soccer magazine), his soccer videos. On the table beside his bed are bobble heads of David Beckham and Rio Ferdinand, along with a Manchester United clock, which keeps the most accurate time in the house. FIFA 2207, the frighteningly realistic computer game, is also down here somewhere, but I'm so used to seeing it on his screen, I just imagine its e-players live there in a kind of electronic locker room, changing under the keyboard, showering in the hard drive, trotting onto the screen ever ready for another game.
This is the paraphernalia of any soccer-crazy kid, albeit one who is lucky enough to play on the best high school team in his state. But in his closet is a treasure, an album, that is uniquely Matthew's. When he was ten, wanting to surprise sister Erin for her birthday, he wrote letters to all the members of the U.S. women's soccer team, asking for their autographs. After a delay long enough to make us think they wouldn't answer, in came a flood — personal letters and signed pictures from almost everyone on the team, including stars like Kristine Lilly and Brandi Chastain.
Success with the women prompted Matt to try the men. Getting addresses of various teams is easy enough with the Internet, but what took him longer was writing carefully worded letters to each player, explaining that he was an American boy who loved soccer, admired their playing, and would love an autograph. The results were amazing — far beyond what he would have gotten from baseball or basketball stars. Player after player sent Matt his signature, including immortals like Franz Beckenbauer (aka "The Kaiser") and contemporary stars like David Beckham and our poster boy Paul Scholes. Even better, many included personalized notes. For Matthew, Beckenbauer took the time to print. The French star Emmanuel Petit wrote, To Matthew; I wish you all the best for the new year, take care! A signature on Howarth Timber stationery came from the legendary English goalie Gordon Banks.
The real prize has some poignancy attached. Many consider George Best to have been the most talented soccer player who ever laced up boots, but with a liking for birds and booze that cut his career short. ("If I had been born ugly," he once famously quipped, "no one would ever have heard of Pelé.") Matt read about him in his books, listened to my memories of him (playing out of shape in the old NSL), suffered my brief lecture about how talent can be both a blessing and a curse, then went out and found a black and white picture showing Best following through after a vicious shot on a foggy English field back in the sixties. He cut it out, stuck it in an envelope, figured out the return postage so George wouldn't have to be bothered, and then, only a month or two before Best died, back came the picture, not only signed, but with a note on the bottom in surprisingly elegant script.
Dear Matthew. Thank you very much for your lovely letter. Hope you are well. I have signed the photograph for you. All the best, George.
I carefully returned the autographs to their hiding place, but I wasn't quite finished with the nostalgia. A few paragraphs back I mentioned something about goals. Basement goals are what I was talking about, though only Matt and I know they're there. Once, when he was five or six, we both happened to be in the hall outside his bedroom at the same time. What's more, there turned out to be a ball at our feet, one of the innumerable plastic balls or NERF balls or beach balls that just appear from nowhere when you have kids that age. I looked down at it, had a sudden inspiration, stuck my foot out, shot it toward the door at the hall's far end, the door that led to the furnace room. It hit the door square in the middle. "Goal!" I yelled, throwing up my arms. Matt, instantly understanding, ran to the ball, turned, kicked it past me toward the door at my end of the hall, the door that led to the computer room. "Goal!" he yelled, in his croaky little kid voice. "One to one!"
That started it, our little indoor soccer game, the innumerable matches that decorated our winter nights for a good six or seven years, until the day when, with his fakes and fancy footwork, he would inevitably beat me eleven to zip. Great hours these, and what I realized, as I looked unsuccessfully around for a ball to shoot (tactical genius — shoot while he was in the Bahamas!), was that it was the physical contact of these games I missed most — the roughhouse kind of affection we shared as we tried forcing our way past the other in midhall, shoulder to shoulder, leg against leg ... the kind of contact that presses love in deep, without you ever thinking about it much, not at the time, not when you're laughing and grunting and yelling all at once.
I popped my head into Matt's room to check the time on his Man U clock: 8:15 — which meant fourteen hours of this beginner's empty nesting yet to go before Celeste came home and helped me cope.
Luckily, I had scheduled myself an errand. At 9:00, I was meeting a man in Vermont to talk about buying his vintage wood and canvas canoe. I went upstairs and cleaned up the breakfast dishes, grabbed my coat and boots, and ventured a little warily outside. It had been a windy night, and branches had blown down off the oldest of our trees — many had landed vertically in the snow, so our meadow looked impaled by javelins. While the car warmed up, I went around collecting these, adding them to the pile of brush we burn in the spring. This led me, inevitably, toward the second of our goals. Friends down in Hanover bought it for their son when it looked like he would be the high school's starting goalie, and because they're the kind who always buy the best, it's professional quality, with metal uprights I half suspect are genuine silver. Unfortunately, their son didn't get to play much, and, knowing Matthew loved the game, they took apart the goal, stacked it in their truck, drove to Lyme, and reassembled it on the house side of the birch-covered knoll we call Sunset Hill.
I walked over to it now, on snow that was hardened by the 6 inches of sleet that had fallen over the weekend. The sky was a dirty slate, there were already a few snowflakes wafting down, but that didn't stop the goalposts from shining as brilliantly as ever. I wasn't the only recent visitor here; behind the goal were the prints of a deer, and I wondered if, famished, he had been nuzzling the net. Last autumn's yellow grass was caught up in the twine, forming what looked like a collection of miniature beards hung out to dry. The twine had taken a beating over the years. There were cannonball-sized gaps top left and top right, and much of the twine had been repaired with plastic twist ties, duct tape, and sutures of old fly line.
The goal, with the snowy base, seemed smaller than it did in summer, and standing in the middle I had no difficulty touching the upper bar. We had long ago passed the point when I could parry any of Matt's shots, but I felt that if he were there now, I might have a chance, with a reduced target area. A chickadee flew down to perch on the side post, but either I frightened it or the metal was too cold, because it immediately flew off again.
Bradford, Vermont, is over on the other side of the Connecticut River, a twenty-minute drive past what remain of our local farms. When I got to the canoe man's garage, there was no sign of him, or rather, there was a sign, scrawled hastily over cardboard and propped against the bay door: emergency back later.
Bradford sits on two plains: the Upper Plain, supporting the shabby-genteel downtown, and the Lower Plain, with a cow-pasture golf course, a water treatment plant, and the historic old train station. It's a floodplain, this lower one, and now in midwinter it looked sunk so far below the rest of the town that it seemed to rest in a different century. At a loss, needing to kill some time until my man appeared, I walked down a winding road that soon turned to dirt, sent around a last curve, and came out into an open area of about 10 acres: the site — the lonely, all-but-forgotten site — of the town's fairgrounds.
This was vintage, out-of-season Vermont, all right. Vintage, out-of-season America. Behind me was a long open shed, with an undulating roof sheltering hay that still exuded a warm calf smell, even in winter. Out in front were piled concrete blocks for ox-pulling contests, twenty-four of them in a fortress-like pile. A baseball backstop was in the old style: chicken wire nailed between telephone posts, backing an infield of flint and gravel. Coke is it! read a faded red sign from an ad campaign that must have been new in 1949. On the flattest, driest patch of land sat a dilapidated bandstand, and I climbed the steps for the view. Look west, and you could see the town sitting on its 20-foot-high bluff — the church spires, the turrets of the town hall, were as sharp as dunce's caps, framed against a high wooded esker. Look east, and you could see a blue-white sliver of the Connecticut's choppy ice, cheese on a messy grater, and then rising clear of it the clean brown ridges of New Hampshire. The fairgrounds, the town, even New Hampshire: in the wintry gray of that lonely morning, they teetered on the tremulous edge that separates benign neglect from out-and-out abandonment.
So palpable was the temps perdu texture that it took me longer than it should have to remember Matthew had once played soccer here. This would have been third or fourth grade, playing for his elementary school team — nine years ago, nearly a decade. It probably represented the farthest north soccer had ever taken him — as the years went on, as his skills developed, the current of his game swept south. Curious, I took a little walk, following a snow fence's bulging pickets. first aid read a sign over a frozen mud puddle. Just beyond it, I found the soccer goals, two of them, dragged to the very edge of the woods. Dumped there — that's the effect it gave — and I wondered why whoever went through the effort of dragging them hadn't finished the job by tipping them over into the swamp. They were the normal, basic, no-frills rec-ball kind of goals, but even so, they seemed extraordinarily foreign and exotic — modern transplants that were the only thing visible belonging indisputably to the twenty-first century.
I ran my hand along the netting, plucking out some of the swamp grass caught up in the twine. A Natural Ice beer can lay on the ground in the center of the goal, and snowflakes were sticking to its metal before they were anything else. I wondered how many goals Matt had scored against this twine, where exactly he had made it bulge. "Watch out for the kid in goggles!" the Bradford players would call to each other — Matt, nearsighted, was already wearing sports goggles in third grade.
So. Soccer even here, in this frozen, forgotten slice of 1949. I pulled the collar of my coat up against the wind blowing in from the river, walked up the dirt road back to town. There was bad news and good news at the garage. Still no canoe man, but the emergency sign was gone.
I looked at my watch. 9:30. A long day yet to fill — I had absolutely no desire to return to an empty house. But standing by those forgotten fairgrounds goals, the germ of an idea had begun to form. Matt, when I stopped and thought about it, had in the course of twelve years played soccer across a good stretch of Vermont and nearly all of New Hampshire, games that I had mostly driven him to and almost all of which I had watched. Would it be possible, in the course of one short February day, to retrace my way to all of these fields or at least some of the most significant? To sneak up on the entire soccer experience while its passion was hibernating? To thaw out, at least a little, its fields of memory?
Ever the novelist, I thought immediately of John Cheever's famous short story, "The Swimmer," wherein suburbanite Neddy Merrill, drinking gin one night at a party, suddenly realizes he could swim from one backyard pool to another and make it all the way home entirely by water. "He seemed to see, with a cartographer's eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the country." Well, I could see with a cartographer's eye myself: a soccer cartographer, with many years of experience.
It's a long way from rural Vermont in the north to suburban New Hampshire in the south, hard by the Massachusetts border. Could I cover that distance before it got dark? It was snowing lightly, I was late getting started (well, not so late — counting the basement, our backyard goal, and Bradford's, I already had three fields under my belt), and I wasn't totally sure I could find my way around without the e-mailed maps, sent by parent "coordinators," that I had always navigated with before.
As it turned out, the next few fields were easy to find, but disappointing. Three towns form a line down the Vermont side of the Connecticut, from stubbornly working-class Fairlee to picture-postcard Thetford to affluent Norwich, the richest town in the state. Matt had played elementary school soccer against all three, but this was in the great-galloping-herd stage of soccer — twenty-two kids chasing a defenseless ball — and it was hard to separate any specific memories, particularly in light of feeling (as one does now when visiting elementary schools anywhere) that you are a suspect to be monitored and tracked. And there were no goals hibernating in the snow that I could find.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Soccer Dad"
by .
Copyright © 2008 W.D. Wetherell.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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