We had just sat down after singing a rousing round of the national anthem in church. Doré, leaned past Novalie to tell me something.

“I like baths and burning witches.”

To be fair, I have a problem which makes it difficult to understand speech which is whispered or mumbled, and Doré is a soft-spoken person.  I began to doubt what I heard.  I figured I had better ask for a repeat, or spend the rest of my life wondering if she’s thinking about hunting witches every time she’s sitting  in the hot tub at the Best Western.

“What?”

“I like Japs and starry ridges,” she clarified.

I was still hoping I might have it wrong.  I had to wait for the closing prayer to get clarification.  I leaned in even closer.

“I felt like saying ‘gentlemen, start your engines,’” she repeated.

So she’s not a witch hunter who enjoys a warm bath and starry nights and happens to have a strange affection for the people of Japan. It was a NASCAR reference all along.  First comes prayer, then comes The Star Spangled Banner, and then comes the traditional shout of “Gentlemen!  Start your engines!”  by some celebrity or other honorary figure.

Matthew McConaughey gave the best start your engines! shout in NASCAR history for the Daytona 500 in 2005, followed closely by Magic Johnson at the Los Angeles race.  At the 2004 Daytona 500, President Bush was disappointingly average.  It might seem insensitive for me to say this, but old ladies in wheelchairs do a terrible job.

Hey, don’t look at me like that.  You know where to go if you need a softer, politically correct take on things.  I tell it like it is.  I don’t follow anyone’s rules.  Not even my own.

Yes, World Cup 2010 South Africa began today, and so did the stress upon me, the lone ambassador of soccer to the Jolley and Vernier families, as well as to the staff of ProFormance Physical Therapy, the surrounding community, and most of the region of Eastern Washington. I’m not complaining, but it isn’t an easy job.

I laughed pretty hard during the 1989 movie Uncle Buck when John Candy, as Buck, asks “Does my hat bother you?  Because some people get angry at the sight of it.”

Don’t think I’ll be able to tie that old movie quote to the current topic?  You obviously don’t know how ADHD works.  Watch.

In my family are several who don’t simply ignore soccer, not caring about the teams or leagues, but actually hate soccer, and become angry at the very sight of it being played. See how I did that?  I pity you people with your totally predictable brains.  Maybe there’s a pill you can take to give you ADHD so you’ll suddenly see the connections between all things.

Returning to the topic, when the World Cup begins, I feel the lonely and confused stares of friends and family upon me.  It’s time for me to step up again and explain to them the frightening sporting spectacle to which their televisions are now beholden.

If I could introduce an average soccer-ignoring American to soccer with my choice of any soccer league, tournament or competition, I certainly would not choose the World Cup! My favorite team, The Royal Arsenal of London, began last season by out-scoring their opponents 22-8 in the first five games.  Did you hear that?  That’s an average of six goals total per game! Then comes the World Cup.  The only time most Americans can be bothered to watch a soccer match.  There aren’t nearly as many goals even though these are the same players scoring every week professionally.  The logic is painfully simple:  if you can win seven games in a row, you’re the world champion.  If you screw up even once, your World Cup dreams will burst like the fragile soap bubbles floating in the summer air.

Then comes “They never score, there’s no real action.  All the injuries are fake.  I don’t get the offside rule. Didn’t 96 fans die in 1989 during the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in England?”

Lately, I’ve changed my approach.  During all the years that I’ve been an American soccer fan, I’ve had to analyze and understand sports, what makes a sport interesting, even addicting to its fans, and why it is Americans don’t “get” soccer.  I’ve suffered this because, for some reason, the people around me feel that somehow I owe them an explanation for liking the world’s most popular sport.

Here’s my new approach, America:  you already understand soccer! Do you understand offense and defense in basketball?  If so, you can coach a soccer team, because they are identical! Do you understand the hook or slice, as in golf or baseball?  Then you already know the different ways that a ball can be kicked to get the pass or shot on target! Did you know that football, baseball, and soccer are all addictive to their fans for the very same reason?  First semester psychology: the random reward! A first down, touchdown, base hit, home run, or goal doesn’t happen during most plays.  Most attempts at scoring in all these sports end in failure.  But sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes they come from nowhere.  Sometimes it all clicks and the scores start pouring in.  It could happen at any moment, and that’s the addiction.  Like slot machines in Vegas.  So don’t peer down your horn-rimmed spectacles at me, Mr. Football or Baseball Fan.  You suffer the same addiction as I.  There is no distance between us.

Earlier today, in typical fashion, Uruguay put all eleven players in defense against the high-scoring and very talented France team.  I was at ProFormance Physical Therapy in Pullman, exercising, balancing, stretching, and breaking scar tissue while the match played on their wall-mounted HDTV.  I had heard a few comments from the staff about all the diving and fake injuries they expected to see.  I had something to say about that, but I held my tongue.  The game soon provided all the evidence I needed.

Doing reps on the hip sled, I looked up at the screen to see the referee show a red card and eject one of the Uruguayans, as a French player lay still in the grass, in apparent pain.  Troy, my brilliant and handsome knee therapist, said in somewhat cynical tone “Ha.  You just watch, he’ll be up and doing back flips in two minutes.”

“He darn well better be!” I said aloud, sitting up as I finished my last set of leg presses.  The downed French player?  Bacary Sagna, right fullback for Arsenal.

The staff stood to watch the replay, ready to laugh at an obvious flop.  What they saw had them gasping and covering their mouths.  ”My God!  Is it broken?”

They say when you take a hit like that, and both bones of your lower leg are broken, the snap can be heard for two blocks.  Sagna was in a lot of pain, but his leg was intact, likely he was able to lift his foot from being locked in the turf at the last second, or maybe the tackler pulled back at the last moment to minimize impact.

“Divers” deserve the match suspensions and bad reputations they get, but I’ll take a fake injury any day.

Today on this Friday morning, between 7 and 8 o’ clock, Novalie came to join me watching “Totally 80′s” on VH1 Classic.  Novalie is not easily amused by non-animated television programming, but the wild and energetic imagery of the music videos of the 1980′s coupled with the rapid, ADHD-inducing scene changes were enough to keep her interest.  For a few minutes.

“People wore different clothes back then, Novalie.”  I explained.  ”People had longer hair.  This is music from back when Mommy and Daddy were little kids, just like you.”

“This is from olden times?”  She wanted to know.

“Yes, I guess it is,”  I answered, surprised momentarily by the sense of time passage.

“Did they have colors on the houses and in the sky?”  She asked.

“Yes, Novalie.  When I was a kid, the houses all had colors, and the sky was bright blue.”

Then suddenly I understood the root of her question.

“Mommy and Daddy’s olden times are not as old as Grandma and Grandpa’s olden times.  They had colors then, too.  Just not in their movies.”

“I know that, Dad.”

Nobody was expecting this blog post, least of all me.  I saw it in the list of un-published blogs, and had to laugh.  I’m pretty sure I was going to write something about the names that the ping pong, soccer, and bouncy balls have all been given by Novalie.

My Adidas F-50 soccer ball is named “Fivey,” mostly because “Fifty-ey” doesn’t work and “Effy” was out of the question.

Novalie’s pink Adidas size 4 soccer ball is named “Pink Bubble Gum.”

When you consider that there are (really) almost 300 ping pong balls in our home, it might surprise you to know that some of them have names.  One in particular.  In among the two boxes of 144 identical Killerspin® 2-star practice balls is a very naughty ping pong ball.  He’s indistinguishable from the others, but we always know which one he is.

His name is Strudel, and he’s the one ping pong ball that always rolls away from the rest, usually behind shelves or under furniture.  Strudel is by far the naughtiest of all ping pong balls.  Whenever he rolls away out of reach, we all roll our eyes and shake our heads.  ”Strudel!” we shout, as if to scold the little plastic ball.  But he never obeys.

It was nearly dark as I left work today.  Heading home, I turned the truck west on the Albion highway and drove into the sunset.  As the rippling fire of red, orange, and purple stretched across the clouds, I was immediately relieved as I reminded myself that such things are no longer my responsibility.

When I was a poet, an artist, and even musician, it would have been up to me to capture that sudden moment of beauty when the setting sun lit the clouds over the dark and frozen hills.  Not anymore.  I don’t have to think about how to describe the clouds, the colors, or even how I would explain the patches of bright yellow sunlight breaking through in spots where there were no clouds.  Someone else can do it.

One night during the summer of 2000, I was leaving the Staples store in Logan, Utah where I worked.  The manager unlocked the front door to let the employees out, then stepped out and locked the door behind him.  We usually waited for him, so we could all walk to our cars together.  As I stood on the sidewalk in front of the store, I looked up across the dark valley at the top of the mountains on the east.  There, a full moon was just beginning to rise above the peaks.  As I looked closely, I could see the distant silhouette of the pine trees against the rising moon.  “Wow,” the manager said when I pointed it out to him.  “It’s true.  You really can see them.  I’ve never noticed before.”

That’s when I got the idea that I am very different from the people who “never noticed before.”  For some reason, the people who couldn’t be bothered to notice a full moon rising over a mountain peak were the same people who seemed to be accomplishing things and progressing in their lives.  My life, it seemed, had become a vicious circle of failure.  I couldn’t seem to advance in either school or work.  I had to place the blame somewhere.

I soon decided that I wouldn’t look up anymore.   Every stretch of moonlight across snow, every sunrise across the river, and every light breeze on a green summer day became a problem for someone else.  My new strategy was to experience each moment as deeply as possible, but not capture it in any way.

In the summer of 2004, when Novalie was only a year old, we were having one of our daddy-daughter days at the Willow Park Zoo in Logan.  Having visited the bobcats, we made our way back to the grassy area of the small zoo, and I held Novalie up against me so that her head was above mine.   I looked up at her as the wind moved the sunlight through her wispy baby hair.  She looked down at me and spoke softly in her baby voice as she held my head tightly.  I suddenly became aware that I was living an important moment that I would remember for the rest of my life.  A moment I would want back almost as soon as it was over.  Immediately I knew that there was nothing I could do to capture or save that moment in time.  I had to let it happen.  I had to let it pass.  I couldn’t hold it.

I was thankful not to have the responsibility of capturing that moment, because I didn’t know how.

Like a snowflake melting in my hand, I could only give it all my attention until it was gone.

The following is based on an instant messenger chat I had with Ben Walden, a big Alaskan soccer player who works in Engineering programming the interface and buttons for our instruments at Decagon Devices, Inc. in Pullman, Washington.

I could kick a ball a quarter mile back in 1983.  I think it was a Mitre size 4.   Still my favourite ball of all time. My father recently found it – old, tattered, and faded – under the deck behind the house.

All I could do was hold it in my hands and remember back to when my youth soccer team used to joke with me and say “hey, Kevin, just tap it.”

I don’t remember where it started, but that became their way of telling me to boot it all the way down the field.

I had a strong right leg back then, owing to my blue collar work as a morning paper boy with the Tri-City Herald. Wednesdays and Sundays were the heavy days, and my quadriceps and calves grew as a result of hauling those paper bags up some of the steeper driveways on Wright Street in Richland, Washington.

By my second season, my coach only wanted one thing from me: “Stay behind the forwards, and if you get the ball anywhere inside the halfway line, shoot!”

My playing style is still largely the same now as it was then.

Hi everybody! We just finished our Thanksgiving dinner (a bit late, I know, but we Albion Jolleys have always done things our own way). We had roast and sweet potatoes and shrimp cocktail and rolled-up rolls (that you can unroll, put butter inside, and then re-roll) and mashed potatoes and gravy and deviled eggs and I made an open-face roast sandwich with gravy and potatoes and roast on wheat bread toast.

We all went around and said what we were thankful for, which is much less stressful and embarrassing when it’s just the three of us!  Novalie is thankful for mommy and daddy and cousins and grandmas and grandpas and the ocean and paper and tape.  Doré is thankful for games, all kinds of games, (but I bet she’s especially thankful for Mahjong that comes with Windows 7 because she plays a lot and last night we stayed up late playing Mahjong and she won four games in a row and I won one and lost one and I’m so glad Windows 7 runs good on our seven-year-old computer because we would use it no matter what because of Mahjong) and then she said she’s thankful for Novalie and Kevin.  I’m so stoked because I’m one of the two people she named. She is also thankful that she is done cooking.

Then I said I was thankful for . . . and then Novalie started whispering and so I just repeated what she said . . . Apple Strawberry and Simon.  But really that’s just Novalie because Apple is fun to play with sometimes with her cute little furry rodent face, but she gets dirty over time and nobody likes to change her cage bedding so I have to and I end up putting it off forever because the longer I wait the worse she smells and the worse she smells the longer I wait and I’ve been putting it off since right before we went to Seattle in August.  So anyway I continued with my things I’m thankful for and I said I was thankful that Novalie completed her first level of Super Mario Brothers™ for Nintendo®, and earlier this week she bagged her first few Nazis as an American WWII spy in Germany in Return to Castle Wolfenstein for the PC.  I told her not to feel bad that Himmler barely escaped down the mountain gondola because he always barely escapes and that’s how the game keeps you going.

Planet 51's Neera

For our Thanksgiving movie we saw Planet 51 which was totally awesome because it’s on another planet and it’s the human that’s the alien which is totally backwards because humans are not aliens, we are humans.  Anyway it was hilarious because there was a little rover robot sent to the planet ahead of time and it thought it was just looking for rocks so it only sent back pictures of rocks so that’s why it was a complete surprise to the American astronaut to arrive and find himself in someone’s 1950′s style backyard.  Plus Rover is cute and energetic and looks like an eager puppy when he wags his antenna and he always goes crazy when he sees a rock and he tries to pick up all the rocks he can and we said “Novalie, he loves rocks, just like you.”  And I totally had a crush on one of the aliens named Neera but that’s not weird because she’s a cartoon alien and besides Doré had a crush on Wall•E and he’s a cartoon robot and that’s way weirder and so there’s no reason to judge me.

Now it’s almost time to go because it’s getting late and Novalie and Doré are playing chess and Novalie is tired and she thinks if you capture one of her pieces that her other pieces can send a rescue party and go get it back if you forget to say “click” because that means you didn’t lock the door.

So I just want to say to everybody “Happy Thanksgiving in 2009!” and also ask if anyone knows what you’re supposed to do if you find a dead squirrel in your front yard like if there’s a number I call or do I have to do something about it myself.

Estranged by Guns N’ Roses is an epic, nine minute rock ballad in two parts, separated by a gorgeously flowing piano and bass solo in the middle.  Since first hearing it in 1991, I’ve been uplifted by it time and time again.  There is however, one particular verse that has always perplexed me.

Well I jumped into the river too many times to make it home
I’m out here on my own and drifting all alone . . .

I’m just trying to picture how I, in my own life, could have used that excuse for any time I didn’t make it home, or was at least late in arriving home.  I picture myself as a teenager, walking in late on a Saturday night after a dance.

Dad: Kevin, it’s nearly 1 AM.  What kept you out so late?
Me: I’m sorry, Dad.  I would have made it by midnight, it’s just that . . . I jumped into the river.
Dad: You what?  What were you doing jumping in the river?  One jump in the river isn’t . . .
Me: It wasn’t just once.  That’s the whole problem.
Dad: So you jumped in a couple of times?  Your mother and I were worried sick . . .
Me: No, Dad.  I jumped in a bunch of times.  Too many times to make it home.
Dad: Okay, well I guess that can happen to anyone.  Just try not to do it again.

If you just knew me and my Dad back when I was a teenager, you’d understand just how common these kinds of conversations were.

Q: You mean you actually did jump in the river late at night after a dance?
A: Yes.  The famous Columbia.

Q: In the middle of summer, I hope!
A: Not quite.  Early March.

Q: That must have been freezing!  What were you wearing?
A: This interview is over.

Q: At least tell me if there were any good lyrics in Estranged.
A: Most of it is quite good.

When I find out all the reasons maybe I’ll find another way
find another day
with all the changing seasons of my life
maybe I’ll get it right
next time
. . .
I see the storm is getting closer
and the waves they get so high
Seems everything we’ve ever known’s here
why must it drift away and die?

It wasn’t easy for Novalie to wait to ride her new bike.  She received it as a gift from “Old Grandma” (Celia Vernier) on Saturday night, and had to wait all the way until Sunday afternoon to take it out for the first real drive.

Albion doesn’t have terrain suitable to biking (dirt roads and hills), and I didn’t want Novalie to be restricted to the small cement basketball court down at the park.  We loaded up the new bike, all the safety gear, and Bolt, her stuffed-animal mascot.  We drove out near where I work.  I went up the hill a little to a large, empty, and mostly flat parking lot.  After Novalie geared-up and Bolt took his spot in the front basket, she took her seat behind the handlebars.  She was nervous.  I don’t know if it was the larger bike, or that she worried about going too fast in all this open space, but she was very uncertain.

“Don’t let go of me, Dad!” she said.  “It’s okay, Novalie, you know how to do this.  Just ride.”  Like parents do, I let go without Novalie ever realizing it, and she was free.

I watched as she rode away against the blinding light of the blue and white sky.  She rode in wide circles, talking and singing to herself, lost in another world of bicycle and imagination, the way a little child should be.  She has many important bike rides ahead of her.

We drove the Albion highway toward home under the pale sun of the frigid Palouse hills as Novalie sat strapped to her booster seat in the back of the Taurus and “Fix You” by Coldplay played on the speakers.

You may have heard “Fix You” by accident if you watched the “Arsenal: The Beautiful Game” Youtube video from the April 17 post The Beautiful Game.

Anyway, the song winds down to the line “Lights will guide you home . . . ” which seemed to bother Novalie.

“No, lights won’t guide you home, Dad.  Jesus will.”