The soccer player
Paying the debt owed to me

October 4 , 2005
iranian.com

The summer's warm embrace will be no more. I have picked the last of the blooming baby cucumbers off the yellowing vine, to pickle. The cold damp air soon will turn the foliage into the color of fire. The falling leaves will cover the lawn and the night will fall ever so earlier than the evening before. I have been to this place and time many a time -- and in different worlds, too -- but this autumn in my town it will be like no other.

He plays on the school's soccer team. For the last few weeks, I have made a point of quitting work in the middle of the afternoon to see my little one run the length and breadth of my calendar of nostalgia -- sometimes moving faster than my memories can recall, sometimes striking the ball harder than my easily excitable and worn out heart can pound. I feel an indescribable surge within when I catch his eyes glancing in my direction, filled with pride for the goal that he has just scored -- for the first time this season.      

I try to suppress the lump in my throat, but fear to swallow myself with it. I marvel at his good fortune to have his dad there, watching him achieve. And I will feel sad for my own for having missed mine, year after year.

Soon I will make way to the field for the last game this season. The chalk that once delineated the sidelines will be practically washed away, blurring the bounds of memory. The battered and scarred ball will roll and skid off the wet and dying grass as one’s foot chases it into another’s. In the recess of a dimming day, a group of five girls will be marching resolutely into the light and head toward the bench. Each will pull open her parka and expose a tall cup of a steaming beverage, hot chocolate, and extended it to her tired warrior-boy.    

I will painfully close my eyes, not wishing to indulge in such sentimental voyeurism -- how so very genuinely and universally repetitive this scene is, though, transplanted across thousands of miles of space, from the water's edge at Versoix to the banks of the Massachusetts, thirty-four years later, guys in their uniforms, gals in their bell-bottoms, sharing cheers.

The ref’s whistle will blow cold. The ball will stop rolling. The exalted and the exhausted will move on in the direction of the locker room, to wash away the grime, and I slowly will walk away in the opposite direction, knowing, hoping, that by having been there I shall have paid him the debt owed to me.

About
Guive Mirfendereski is VP and GC at Virtual Telemetry Corporation since 2004 and is the artisan doing business as Guy vanDeresk (trapworks.com). Born in Tehran in 1952, he is a graduate of Georgetown University's College of Arts and Sciences (BA), Tufts University's Fletcher School (PhD, MALD, MA) and Boston College Law School (JD). He is the author of A Diplomatic History of the Caspian Sea (2001) >>> Features in iranian.com