The Big Thing--remembering my father

 When I was in junior high school, a Big Thing happened in the high school across the street. Really Big. The football team, the Ramona Bulldogs, won the California State Championship. At the time, I didn’t know anything about leagues or levels or any such official classifications. I realize now that we had to have been in a league of small high schools. The smallest. All I knew then was that we were #1 in the state. The best! The winners!

Ramona was definitely a football town with the Friday night games the biggest event of the week. Even for away games, people filled buses and cars to get there and yell.

The thing is—my dad was the coach. He was actually famous. His picture graced the front page of the Ramona Sentinel more than that of the president of the United States, whose name I don’t even remember.

The night the mighty Bulldogs growled, clawed, and scrabbled their way to the championship went down in history. At the noisy conclusion of the game, the team carried my dad off the field on their shoulders. Everyone was yelling and stomping and throwing their hats in the air. Pretty impressive for an adolescent daughter. I just sat in the bleachers, feeling warm and happy. I knew Dad was pleased.

The thing is—I never liked football all that much. I thought it silly how all those big boys in their stupid outfits ran around bumping into each other, then throwing other big boys on the ground and jumping on top of them. The rules didn’t make sense and sometimes people really did get hurt.

The thing is—my dad knew I thought this way, but he never seemed to hold it against me. 

He was also the Senior class English teacher. He was a writer and he liked literature even more than he liked football. He admired classical Greek culture and he told me once his job in the high school was a good Greek job. He loved the old Greeks plays and epics and he admired the Greeks for beginning the Olympic Games. He said the motto of the Greeks during their Golden Age was “a sound mind in a healthy body.” He reasoned that when he combined sports with literature, he was like the Greeks. A real Renaissance Man.

As was required of high school teachers in California, he took classes during the summer for professional enhancement. Instead of coaching or sports classes, he studied literature. He favored the University of Arizona as his sister lived in Phoenix. One summer he drove across the country to Massachusetts to study Shakespeare at Harvard.

I took Senior English from my dad. I remember as a class we read through “Romeo and Julliet” out loud. He made it come alive. Even the football players in the class became lovers of Shakespeare.

Actually, he was mostly like himself. And he let me be like myself, even though I was not Greek-like, nor did I enjoy football. For my 16^th birthday, he gifted me with a poetry book and wrote on the flyleaf, “To Nancy, for being Nancy. Love, Dad.”

So, I felt OK about the football team carrying him off the field. I would have liked it better if a bunch of writers could have carried him on their shoulders for writing the Great American Novel (a phrase he sometimes used). That never happened.

On Father’s Day I have no problem celebrating my memories of Dad. I recognize that many of my friends and colleagues have to work hard at forgiveness, at facing and bringing peace to their memories of fathers that were not so loving or appreciative. I feel privileged and blessed.

I’m grateful.