Volume 3, Entry 30: Poolside
The love neither curse nor time diminishes
It’s 3:48am on Wednesday and I’m taking my brother to the A’s game this morning in about six hours. The timing is random but this is the last A’s game he can see while a resident of California.
This will be our eighth A’s game together. One of them was the 2012 playoff game in which we heard Coco Crisp’s walkoff hit from the freeway. Another was the extra innings debacle in which the game ran so long that they announced BART would stop running forcing us to leave early…only to discover the land bridge to the station blocked by fireworks that would never be used.
Our first game together there came on Sunday, August 15, 1993. The A’s were hosting the Minnesota Twins and so we trekked to Oakland in the Walles’ white station wagon for our first professional baseball game.
The six of us sat in the front row of the upper deck. Staring down at the tiny players below as a second grader, I was two years away from developing acrophobia, so I happily watched without feeling vertigo. I also happily raced up and down the steep concrete stairs with Tom, Julia, and Kathryn because I was seven and a year away from my first innings of actual baseball. I remember watching my original favorite player, Dave Winfield, hit a towering pop up on the infield in the first inning…but also almost no other baseball. (I’m always amazed to look up this game and see that a dude named Bernardo Brito I’ve never heard of slugged two home runs in a Twins romp.)
What I do remember is how normal that day felt with the dads and the girls. This was the sort of thing we did then—not the baseball, per se, but regular excursions with the Walles or the Stevensons or the Boggs. Of course there were regular Friday nights at Papa’s Pizzeria that I’ve written about before but there were bigger things that never actually struck me as bigger. There was the trip to Haskell Creek in first grade, hiking and exploring in Yosemite, an aquarium weekend in Monterey. In between were zoo days and jaunts to Tower Theater or Arden for movies or afternoons and evenings at the State Fair after school got out.
These were the defining adventures of my childhood and they were always alongside the same families. Our parents were friends so us kids became friends, but really it was more like our parents became friends and we became family. We played tee ball together; we did campfire or cub scouts together. Our family holidays were always with the Walles and the Boggs; my birthdays were usually celebrated with the Stevensons.
I watched the Amazon Prime series The Summer I Turned Pretty this past week and, while there were many things I loved about it—confession: I teared up at least once over every one of Belly’s relationships plus the moms’ stuff multiple times, although some of that owes to the persistent but effective needle drops the series employed—among my favorite was the way it depicted the dynamics between the Conklins and the Fishers, two families tethered together by their mothers’ friendship. The shared experience of two sets of siblings spending summers together and having these deep relationships and traditions together felt warmly familiar.
At one point late in the first season, Belly’s olden brother Steven warns her about dating Jeremiah, Susannah’s son. Steven struggles often to subdue a condescending patriarchal attitude toward his sister but here there’s something bigger afoot because the Fishers aren’t just people. A soured relationship with Jere affects more than just the two of them. The implication is clear: Steven and Belly expect to be connected with Jere, Conrad, and Susannah forever. They are more than just friends even before Belly’s love quadrilateral fully plays out. They are not family…but they are family too.
Bombarding my brain with a show focused around this kind of family stirred up thoughts about Julia, Kathryn, Matt, Danelle, and Josh. (Also about curses; we’ll get to that.) We never vacationed in the Hamptons, competed in charity volleyball tournaments, or indulged in debutante ball-based romantic dramatics, but the show evoked the many times we spent together all the same. The implication throughout those moments for a young me matched Steven’s warning to Belly: these were people I would be connected to forever.
That feeling, though, was a tad abstract for me as a child; “forever” lands differently for seven-year-olds and thirty-seven-year-olds. My conception for the feeling came from Matt’s mom, who once said that she could picture us as adults relaxing by the pool while our kids splashed around in the water. Whether she first said that at a water park or public pool I don’t remember—she might have; I’m pretty sure we all were at the grand opening of the water slide in Elk Grove Park—but I could picture that image. I could see the cool, artificial blue water and the gray concrete browned with puddles. I could see the long lounge chairs and smell the industrial-strength chlorine and sunscreen wafting through the air with the sounds of laughing, splashing children. That future made sense to me. That was how being in one another’s lives for good would manifest itself.
Matt and I will have been friends for thirty years next month, coinciding with our first day of first grade. I met Danelle and Josh before that at a block party; Julia and Kathryn we crossed paths with at one of Danelle’s dance recitals. I don’t think I appreciated how long ago that was until having lunch with Megan and Elena this month and hearing their friendship origin story. That they met in kindergarten means their story beats mine and Matt’s initiation point…but we also have eighteen years—a full graduated senior!—on them simultaneously.
Three decades is a long time, and a lot of things change across three decades. We are now all collectively about the same age our parents were when they, and thus we, met. Naturally, then, things have changed, not the least of which being that Danelle, Julia, and Matt are the parents of five beautiful children between them. This is that future Matt’s mom described and that, I have less than zero doubt, our parents all talked about while we played so many times. That vision for “friends for good” should be happening any day now.
Except it’s not. It can’t.
Because of me.
Matt’s daughter will be splashing around alone because I have chosen not to have kids or get married.
It’s strange for me to claim those as choices. I’m not sure I’ve said them fully out loud—at least not many times or to more than a few people. For a very long time, I wanted nothing more. For the majority of those three decades, I’d say that having a family was probably my defining goal.
But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been times where that thought wavered. Almost smack dab at the midpoint of those thirty years, I was cursed to never fulfill that vision. The part of my story about Mason that I didn’t write was about the machinations that coaching his all-star team led to, including being voted as coach over a father that ran a different team. He declined to coach with me when I extended an olive branch; his wife, ignoring that invitation, sent me a vitriolic email that cast a curse on me for taking that role and “stealing” that extra time between her husband and son. She outright and explicitly cursed me to be alone and childless.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say it chilled me then. This lady didn’t know me and could charitably be called histrionic, but she had somehow cast the precise curse that should have scared me into…I don’t know? I guess ceding the team over fully, since the invitation to work together was rebuffed? That’s unclear.
What she didn’t realize, though, was how low my self-esteem was. I already believed that the future I wanted most was hopelessly unattainable! A comedic retelling of that story would conclude with a smarmy “Tell your curse to get in line” response to her words rather than forwarding the vaguely threatening email to the league and sending a forthright message back before blocking her address.
To what would surely be her disappointment, though, I never blamed the curse when rejection happened or a close relationship didn’t turn in that direction. Not once. Her message is more a dim ghost that slips under the baseboards every once in awhile and barks at me; it’s never haunted my nightmares like it did that first week after I received it. As recently as 2020 I was still pursuing the future she had electronically cursed me to never achieve.
I no longer am. Not as some sort of Fuck you to her either, of course (thinking of the curse lady makes me really sad for her, honestly). But a lot can change in thirty years, right? And that change can crop up anywhere in those thirty years. Mine just happens to have been during the most recent 10%.
This isn’t a discussion of why I’ve arrived at my decision; such would suggest I want feedback about it when I don’t. I feel sound in my choice—as sound as I am capable of anyway. If this decision is the slow-onset implementation of a curse, then wow is it amazing that curse also aligns with so many other elements of who I am and how I am constructed.
What isn’t amazing is the effect of my decision: I will never watch my kids race Danelle’s along mounds of dirt up at her farm. I will never take my kids on a hike with Julia’s or give them quarters while we eat pizza. And, most powerfully, I will never sit by the pool with Matt while our kids splash around under our watchful, doting eyes.
This doesn’t wound me, but it does coax out deep but gentle melancholy. I still see those images as this powerful culmination of the gifts I had as a kid getting to grow up alongside these people who could have just been names in a cheap elementary school yearbook but instead fill my photo albums and coat my refrigerator and occupy stealth screenshots from FaceTime calls with them and their kids. These are the people I love unconditionally, the ones who fill these reservoirs in my heart such that seeing them just trips a wire and I feel this impossible feeling of calm because I’m tapped into that future that was grafted into my love for them, a love that I felt compelled to guard and prize because it wasn’t supposed to be unconditional but that I understood should be and what better way to honor it and guard it than pay it forward to our kids and give that magic of proximity and genetic friendship an opportunity to sprout from its own spores? There’s a nagging sadness to being the reason that can never happen. It’s not a curse but a sort of misplaced nostalgic regret. There’s no word for me to steal here, no term I can borrow from Vietnamese or Icelandic that conveys the soft emotional regret of being the intentional architect of your own unattained future. I can pretend that is a good thing that means fewer people carry it in their chests.
My face is covered with snot after typing that even though I already know the turn that I’m writing next. The original conception of those moments was surely built around preservation: little me didn’t want those people to ever be gone from my life. It was a biological imperative born from a platonic one: tethering mini-versions of us together will tether us together. As a small child, you are told that love endures but you never truly know. So you imagine ways to guarantee its survival and, naturally, those ways mimic the limited ones you know from experience.
But a lot can change in three decades and, although that preservation instinct hasn’t left me, I have thirty years of proof that I don’t need those moments to happen to remain tethered to those people. I wrote a gushing letter about this to Danelle after surgery and rediscovered our connection remained. I wrote the essay about Julia in March and rediscovered our connection remained. And I spend even an hour with Matt and I rediscover our connection remains. They live in three different states with their five collective kids and I see only Matt with any regularity and yet I think about them and write about them and I know they are still there in my heart and that I am still in theirs. I know this, despite being a person who can’t always even believe what he sees. When I rediscover the same feeling with friends now, I think of them (and Kathryn and Josh and Joey and Donny too). That lady’s curse had no hope of destroying me because I had already had love embedded into my DNA for them and by them.
There’s something different about found family. When people are obligated to love you, the stakes sink into the sand. But when people are not compelled to love or be loved but take up permanent residence in your heart anyway, that reservoir overflows with enough water to fill a
[[ The power in reflective writing is when you arrive at a profound destination without planning to arrive there. I wish every person could feel what I will feel typing these final five characters. ]]
pool.
Content Consumption
FILM
(Each link leads to my full review on www.filmsofsteele.com.)
A minimalist trippy horror-ish A-24 film I preferred discussing movie podcast lingo to deeply analyzing in my review, Lamb looked good and offered an intriguing premise but never got me on board. But please click anyway—every visit helps me get closer to the Rotten Tomatoes Critics List!
I enjoyed writing this. One of the first ideas I have for a newsletter was to talk about the “curse”, something I’ve never talked about ever before with anyone but the league president. That her curse led me to thinking about and feeling all of this is a silver lining sixteen years in the making.
Go figure.
Found family!! I love you man—that’s it nothing else needs to said!