letter to editor of Jackson County star

I get it that it's far too common in America to romanticize athletes. We get nuts about our balls. For the love of everything inspirational, can we come up with something that isn't a sports metaphor? In 1994 North Park won the state Knowledge Bowl tournament. But I wasn't there so cannot douse you with memories. I'd do music but I gave up the trumpet in sixth grade. So I'm left with the never-ending spiral of sports. But trust me. This one's awesome. Plus, I bring you the lesser known perspective in the team game: the bench. I had the best seat in the house for one of the greatest stories the high desert plains ever blew into town: the scrappy Wildcats of North Park going in as the lowest seed of the state tournament, and coming away with the title.

Before I get too preachy, I need to thank Chad Carlstrom. He put together the September 30th event to celebrate the 1992 Class 2A Basketball State Title. He had no reason to except he knows something we all should remember. That's at least according to me, a romantic sap who’d give a stranger his last ten bucks just for the rainbow tingles of a special connection. I’m not saying Chad will fork over cash. I'm just saying he gets the moment. He gets right now. The dude was as smooth getting us together and hosting the evening as I remember him on the court.

I’ll pause here to thank the bowling alley. Danny, Kathy, Sequoia, and that entire crew are so good at juggling beer, burgers, bowling and, in this case, a firehose of basketball nostalgia. Matt & Michele should be thanked. Or mostly Michele. Jodi. Joie. And all those families who tolerated aching older men trying to figure out what happened to the 90s, 2000s and their car keys.

I’ll get there; more about the evening and the moment. But I struggle with stolen valor. I didn’t play a lick at the state tournament but I didn’t expect to. I was ready at a moment’s notice to shoot a three from anywhere in the gym, but I was way too insecure to be out there in that uniform. The person who had it before me was much smaller. And I’m a drinker. I drink things in. Lights, sound, thoughts. I’m not saying I remember everything, but just like that distant three I was ready to huck, I am prepared to serve up an emotional casserole. And now, dear reader, I’ve prepared a meal. If it leaves you hungry, you’ll know what to do: go devour the day

I look back on the tourney and that season and I feel warmth. I feel this community waking up in late winter. Headlights flickering on. A Conga line of cars winding itself over mountain passes to Colorado Springs. You'd walk into the Air Force Academy gym and it was big. Small by arena standards but downright swole by our NPHS gymnasium upbringing. We wandered agog among chiseled cadets. Men and women carved out of their background. They were just a couple years older than us but light years away in discipline and wisdom. That hardened adult that you get when the kid is ripped out of you to make room for something bigger. I think that perspective may have helped what you're about to hear.

At first there was some tottering. Like maybe we were out there in our underwear. But we were emboldened by every break. By every pause. Pregame. Halftime. Timeouts. Whenever you'd pop your head out from the huddle and look around and think, Holy Sheep. This is happening. This is me. Wear it. Own it. Live it. Every time you took that in, you realized what was possible. Because, quite simply, you were there. Now not to be too romantic because this is just a few high school basketball games—rural boys on some wood planks dangled above new depths. All new risks with every step. Hearts and minds and spines and spleens. Organs merging with dreams. Pale whiteness taking the ball down the court. Playground games all grown up with real-world consequences. A loss seemed as plausible as it was impossible. We were propelled to this point with head-high parenting of years gone by. Mom and dad waking up every day to insurmountable to-dos. It wasn't a rock n' roll Great Wide Open but more like a we-got-stuff-to-do alleyway squeezing out this opportunity to take a shot at something big.

Hang onto this image, if you will, about life and how it operates in general: you're winning with every step towards something. Each little line: oblivious gym stripes for various games and sadistic coaches to dissect their conditioning. Once you cross each one, that's progress. Little launch pads sending you stratospheric. One line at. a. time. New opportunity. New confidence. In life it might be a career goal. Maybe some kind of personal best. And in this Air Force arena, one that seemed like the only place in the universe, a shiny floor sent back a muraled message of what seemed like optimism.

The coach composed himself in a shirt and tie that might have held him together like a cinch sack. Could he even believe it? Is this even real life? I don't want to obliterate other possibilities. I don't want to make people think the winning it all has got to be the end result. The thought has to be that you can. The takeaway has to be that you prepared in such a way that it was always in the cards, no matter how they were dealt. And if you do that, then you're lined up for the shot. A knife-like jab at a keyhole that only shows up every so often. And dang you'll be mad if you didn't think you could do it.

There we were with the combination. The wrist. The backspin. The glass. The rebound. The hustle. The realization rising. We lost our lead to Caliche. There were overtimes. I had one job. Well, two. First, to go in when we were at least twenty points ahead with twenty seconds left and, secondly, break any close game tension with jokes for our traveling fans. When asked by, I think, Jim Murinko during that semifinal overtime game what I had for them for laughs, I simply replied, "I got nothing unless you think soiled shorts is funny." It wasn't.

Spoiler alert: we'd win. And then we'd win again. I didn't even know there was a town called Springfield in Colorado, but there is and in their gym they have a 1992 runners up banner. Nothing like that shiny new championship flag at NPHS.

But I'm not sure how many of us on the team or in the stands have ever been that vested in a spectacle. That steeped in the right now.

There's never gonna be a better right now than right now. I say that thirty years removed. There's never gonna be a better right now than right now. I learned that watching the needle get threaded by a bunch of kids from, of all places, North Park, CO. Because why the Hell not.

Game day

Fragile mornings. It's crisp. Not refreshing but breakable. A crunchy leaf underfoot. I'm at the fridge getting creamer when I see my silhouette. Larger. "Christ, Jared," I bless myself with a critique. Something hurts. It's a lot of things. Election stress. Climate change. Home school. Work is sideways. But there's something else. Coffee isn't going to help with that. The fridge light goes out over unused dairy and I get outside to try and pull some of me in.

Yeah, OK. This is that. Still. Something unrequited between old me and young me. I never dealt with it well; didn't have the tools. We never do. "Working on it," I'd say to myself. An exhale before I'd step back into my day. A little promise to professional me, family me, any version of me other than the one that wants to walk a hundred miles in any direction while I get a hold of October 1991.

Back then, a mere stumble backwards in time, I felt small. I was playing football to grieve, or playing football instead of grieving. Or whatever it was that had me running down a football field in uniform. I remember the pads. They were the only the thing that held me up. A scaffolding. The whole damn thing was a scaffolding. I looked out across the plains and felt the wind blow through me, and I wondered for how long everything else had mattered so very little.

There are small things that I still think about. So stupid, but when that reporter from the Fort Collins newspaper finished her interview with me, she wouldn't shake my hand. I'd wiped my nose but it was the tip and purely out of not knowing what to do or say. I still want to find her and explain that. She'd have no idea who I am or why a wide-eyed bald dude was lecturing her on tics and gestures, but it would really fix some holes in my life. Because on the day that our friend didn't make it home, every motion and sniff and chortle went slow motion. Like when that kid picked off the pass and ran it in for six. I could have dove and knocked him more clearly out of bounds, which would have saved a lot of trouble. I wouldn't have had to stop my father from traumatizing that referee. I still remember that face. That petite football official looking over my shoulder and his game-day decorum turning to horror. I could not imagine that what was rolling down the grassy hill behind me was my dad coming to kill him. I turned and detained my father. It’s on video somewhere and probably the best block I threw all season.

My dad was mad because the kid had stepped out of bounds. The half would have been over and we would have been in striking distance of the #2 team in the state. Instead, we were down another score. Another bunch of pointless points. And that's what I was thinking when I chased that kid. I couldn't hear anything but my movement. The smallness of my being in this plastic exoskeleton. It banged around like loose shudders in a storm. I was a liability. An excess projected into the world. One day, I keep telling myself, I'll launch this vessel of mine, this fleshy mass of seeing and hearing and doing, and I'll breeze across the western slope of Colorado and catch that speedy bastard.

At halftime I'd kind of fell to pieces. Comfort came from the other kids and this tradition of playing football on Saturday. We didn't have lights so the games were in the daytime. And you can feel Homecoming. You can feel the change in the weather, but it's gentle. It's a kiss of cold on the sunny face of an infant October. There are smells; chili, hot chocolate, carnations. People smile and the light is clearer. You can see things that you won't pay attention to for another six months. You can see a translucence in the intentions. A glow of those who know it's special. This time. This game. This weekend before we get serious about winter. The field will be frozen soon. Those final games were always cold and lonely. The hot chocolate was less festive and more medical.

The night before they'd asked us if we should still play the game. The school counselor, some concerned parents and Coach. We were in this huddle somewhere and they thought enough to ask me and my senior class peers. They thought of us because they were us. We were all the same in the kind of cluelessness that spreads a sheet over dead cold. We would say 'yes'. I don't even know if the alternative was an alternative. It was an empty option. A paper ballot with a puncture to nothing. No, we didn't have to play the game or shake chili powder on hot beef and beans served up in styrofoam bowls. We didn't have to take a moment at the top of our youth and wonder why those older people in the bleachers were looking at us like that. Small smiles mostly with their eyes. We didn't have to but there really was no other choice.

The fear was that it would be too emotional. It would tax us. Break us. Maybe we'd trip into something, some portal, that'd suck us into the swampy gray areas between life and death.

The clarity would be short. It was as perplexing as it was painful. But I'd heard he was still alive and was going to make it. I burst into my friend's home, one that had availed itself for slumber parties and Bronco games before circumstance introduced us to tragedy. I announced that he was going to be OK. His girlfriend might not make it but the guy we knew, the things we understood, would remain intact. They would maintain us. Because that's what the little conventions that scurry from day to day do: they let us take them for granted. They keep us upright and in motion. And when that broke. The breaking of the tethers. That freefall to nowhere. I fell too. My friend's mom saw me filled with all that hope and she had to stop me. Shatter the delusion. She told me about the brain and the swelling and how in real life there's only so much room for it to go.

I dropped face down into the couch. I didn't know if I was crying or not. I couldn't tell what I was feeling. I just couldn't be up anymore. The strings snipped. Highway 14 had done something terrible to that Pontiac. To those college kids coming back home. Free will was broken. At least I could keep falling. You grow up knowing the brain can go anywhere. It soars and takes you with it. It turns clouds into dinosaurs and toy trucks into vehicles of industry. You hum little engine noises and you build a world around you. There it is. Sand castles. Dirt berms in the mountains of Colorado. Little homes built out of firewood. It's all gonna get washed away but it's never actually gone, until reality blasts across your innocence and your face down in your friend's couch. I didn't want to get up. I didn't want to deal with whatever was actually happening. So I stared at the stitches of the cushions. I made my vision as micro as possible. I followed one thread over the other and through the next loop and kept following it. And hoped it would take me back to when it was made. Ten years ago. Twenty. Some factory in Cleveland. I didn't know. I wanted to be anywhere else.

There's no better time to play football than when nothing matters. And that's the point. That's the point of great sports. Get out there and make nothing else matter. It's your gift. Not your throw or your catch or your speed. It's that you've found this place where it's only you and the game. It's the only thing I could figure out as to why we were all there. We walked into the gymnasium and kind of, I don't know, gusted around like lost shopping bags. And for the life of me, I don't know why, but I had an actual sack of bloody clothes. I have no idea how I ended up with this from the accident. But I did and I felt dumb. Especially when I asked his brother if he wanted it. What in the hell was that? I've spoken to 17-year-old Jared a lot. And the conclusion that arises from these comfort sessions around regretful and stupid errors like haunting the bereaved with emergency room laundry is that I had no idea. I had none. Nothing. Calendar days scraped off a cutting board and into the past. Everything prior to the present was suspect. Today, I’m more clueless than ever.

The emptiness I felt while chasing that speedy son of a bitch in a purple Mustangs uniform was the hollowing out of whatever I thought I knew. Life was making room for a new understanding. It was a terrible time, yes. I should have caught that scrappy lad. But there it went, combing across the clunky landscape of a dumb boy and leaving a smooth landing for epiphany. You know, the gut-ripping reality of cluster bombs devastating otherwise virgin territory. I've also chatted with him. The lost son, brother and friend.

In college you were making it. The Colorado School of Mines let us in for free after our world became too small for you. The football team was so cool to us high school kids. They did a tribute for you and your friends at halftime. For a moment we joined the autumn sky in the infinity of your youth.

I'd been waiting on that terrible day in 1991. You were supposed to show up as I stood with the homecoming queen and do that thing where you passed the crown to the new guy. You couldn't because, well, by then we were all wilted leaves. You'd just taught us about death or, more likely, life and we'd all blown into the gym on the decision to follow through. Coach was doing his best. Christ, no one knew. My role? I don't know. But I kept looking back and seeing your brothers. These two boys torn from their inseparable trio. Just twelve sleepless hours from everything they knew. Somewhere in there the coach was asking us if anyone wanted to speak to the team. For years I've held true the belief that if I'd gotten up and said something that we would have won. I would have caught up with that kid. We all would have domesticated the knowledge of newly-acquired demons. We all would have risen past the snot of uncontrollable tears.

I didn't say anything. I didn't feel qualified. I felt empty and helpless. But that's OK, I tell myself. I'm still here. And as far as I can tell, on this perfect fall day, you are too.