Picking A Team: Why Nomads Can’t Be Sports Fans

Throw a dart, pick a team?

It’s hard to be a fan.

Hey, it’s easy, you say. Pick the team your family loves.

But what if they don’t? What if they don’t really care?

Go back to where you’re from, you say.

I was born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Should I support the Packers or the Lions? I’ve lived for a substantial amount of time in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Washington and Kentucky. Timberwolves? Seahawks? Bengals? Twins? The formerly Minnesotan Dallas Stars?

You build up love for a team over time, you say.

Yet I never really cared about basketball. Baseball is another story. I remember staying awake, listening to the Minnesota Twins Radio Network on a radio in bed in 1991 as the Twins push through to the World Series. I got the family to watch it on TV and suddenly the players in my head were real on the screen.

Less than a year later I convinced my parents (for the low, low price of no commercials) to let me watch the 1992 Super Bowl between the Washington Redskins and the Buffalo Bills. I knew nothing about football or NFL teams, but it felt like it was something I needed to do.

I was a Vikings fan, for a time. I married one in 1999, and it seemed like the right thing to do. After we got divorced in 2003, I didn’t want to be a Vikings fan anymore.

I fell in love with the Boston Red Sox in the 2004 World Series — the year of Yankees defeat, pine tar helmets, Boston anthems and Curt Schilling’s bloody sock. It felt natural to hate the Yankees. Then all the players I loved left the team, and the Red Sox cap I bought seemed false. I have it still, and it’s been to a dozen countries, but does that make me a Red Sox fan?

Just pick one, you say.

I finally just picked the Green Bay Packers. where I was born in Michigan’s UP is a solid sector of Packers Nation, and I liked their out-in-the-woods, cold weather quality. There’s something about the Northwoods that feels home to me, whether it’s in Minnesota, Michigan or Wisconsin. I’ve been a fan for four years.

By that thinking, I also picked the Minnesota Twins as my baseball team, right? They’re from Minnesota, I listened to them as a boy, and I like their workmanlike attitude. I’ve  been a fan for less than a year.

But what kind of fan does that make me?

Kentucky, For a Moment

Keeneland . . . around the bend, on to the end.

Last year I planned to do Kentucky right. I knew I was going to be in the state for a year-and-a-half (a whole year-and-a-half!), and I planned to see all the sites, to smell the smells and visit the restaurants and hit up all the cultural events. I had until next December, right? I had plenty of time.

Now, here I am, two months from the day I’ll leave Kentucky. Have a I done it right?

I’ve hiked Red River Gorge, wandered around Henry Clay’s estate of Ashland, gone to the Keeneland racing track/social event, wandered around downtown during the equestrian games, cheered myself hoarse at a Wildcat basketball game, bought Mad Mushroom pizza and ate it while I walked down Broadway to my home.

So much, yet so little.

Just one more stop on the whistlestop tour that is my life, destination: unknown.

Egypt taught me to not say goodbye or act as if I would never be back. Instead, I’ve learned to touch and remember, to smell and remember, to hear and see and tuck those memories away.

I could still tell you how that handmade vase in Yemen felt, I could still describe the smell of the narrow street just to the west of Cairo’s Bab al Louk market. I could tell you how the Dead Sea tastes and describe the flap of pigeon wings in front of a statute of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan.

Soon I must take my sensory memories of this place and tuck them away for later, when its time to tell stories of the past.

But for now, I prepare for the next stop.

Let’s Talk About The Water Slide

Slide. Start as a kid, speed up, splash down as an adult.

We scampered into the swimming area, covered by glass ceilings and fronds stretching away from concrete pillar palm trees.  Both in our swimming suits, we eyed the jacuzzis and looked at each other.

“Let’s try that first,” I said, with my usual lazy-father approach to water parks.

Surprisingly, she thought it was a good idea, this daughter of mine. We sank into the bubbly, blue water and talked about school, friends, funny things, and the big water slide coiled above us.

We talked about the three plates of rules on the wall by the steps leading up to the slide. We talked about the people walking by, dripping wet, stepping up the stairs for another trip to the bottom. Could we throw a ball from there? What kind of shenanigans should we try?

This was nice, I thought, nice to talk. But odd. Usually she’s the first up the water slide steps and the first to make us go again and again. Usually she’s the first to demand we invade the kiddie section and float among the fake bullfrogs and lily pads.

But here we were, just talking. She was bigger then when I last saw her three months ago. Taller and leaner but the same intelligent eyes and fast smile. The same curly hair. I would die for this girl, kill for her, fight slashing tigers and marauding hoodlums. Maybe slaughter a wannabe boyfriend or two.

I would even try the kiddie section, with its fake pirate gear and the ankle-deep water level. Yet she didn’t want to. She wanted to talk while playing water basketball. She wanted to go on the slide, but wasn’t fascinated with it like in the past.

She’s getting older.

“Let’s go to the pirate ship,” she said. “In the little kid part.”

She’s getting older, but she’s still a baby. My baby. For now.

Idioms? You Betcha

These are weapons of understanding. Do not underestimate them.

The old lady at the Fargo, North Dakota, thrift store counter looked like a grandma. She wore her glasses with a chain like a grandma, and tucked in her nice white blouse into her tan pants like a grandma.

She quietly folded the shirts I was buying and started to tuck them into a plastic bag, only for it to slide away from her on the counter.

No big deal, right?

Then I realized: I speak her language, fluently.

To me, words are the notes of music in three dimensions. They’re shapes that waver and morph and clinch together again in arcs that dip and soar with the flow of a sentence.

This is why I hate to learn languages. Mind you, I love to use languages. I just hate to learn them, to be a linguistic cripple, to use basic words to ask for inexact things.

I’ve spent more than two-thirds of my life in the north-central US. I was raised on the quirks and twitches of the English used here. I know the accents and phrases and word usages — the flourishes of language that show you’re not a stranger, the little things that speak to hearts and makes locals react almost instinctively.

I didn’t realize how much I missed that knowledge.

Now I’m back. No, really, I’m BACK. I’m swinging idioms left and right, breaking out the clichés and laying down the accent — flattening down consonants, squelching final syllables, and rounding vowels.

The thrift store grandma grabbed for the plastic bag before it fell over the counter’s edge.

Go time.

“We’ll, that’s sure being squirrelly, isn’t it,” I said.

She laughed.

“It sure is,” she said, with a smile.

Squirrelly.

It felt good.

Dutch, Americans, and a Familiar Taxi Driver

The full-body scanner. Yes, it feels about as ridiculous as it looks. (Source: AP)

“Interesting,” said the Dutch security man, fingering my passport and flipping through the papers I had handed him moments before.

“Interesting,” he muttered again as he looked at the receipt for my stay at the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. I thought perhaps the American part of the name would balance out the Yemeni part. I guessed wrong. Apparently the Dutch use the word “interesting” like the rest of us use the words “highly suspicious.”

The Dutch man and I had been talking for about five minutes about who I was, what I was doing in Yemen, and who paid for it.

“Please wait here a moment,” he said, and stepped away to confirm with a more senior security man.

As they conferred, I tried to figure out what to do with my eyes, and finally just watched the passport scanner screen as passenger after passenger was checked in.

The scan of one man’s passport brought up a blinking display on the screen: “This person may be a selectee!” It said, as if he had just won an award.

Then I noticed both security men looking at me looking at the screen, and I looked away. The more senior man stepped up and round 2 of questions began.

How did I pay for the place I stayed? “By getting my own money out of the ATM?” I answered helplessly. His mouth twitched and I’m not sure if he was smiling or frowning.

Did I have anything in my bags that ran on batteries. Um, sure, laptop, camera, cell phone. Wow, I’m an idiot, I thought. They’ll detain me just because of my stupid answers.

Stupid answers, but good enough for him to finally wish me a nice flight and usher me into the full-body scanner prior to boarding the plane.

I was sure I was going to get detained upon arrival in the US. Everyone said so. I watched as the “selectee” from the Amsterdam boarding got a keen eye from the chubby US customs official, who called over the intercom — an invitation for a beefy uniformed man to stride over and ask the “selectee to follow him, sir.

I’m screwed, I thought.

The official looks at my passport, looks at me, then picks up the stamp and drives it home against the customs document.

“Welcome back,” he said.

Leave-leave-walk-now-before-you-say-something-stupid, my brain rattled.

In Fargo, North Dakota, USA, I stumbled off the plane, jet lag blurry, into the arms of family members who had waited an extra hour due to my plane being delayed. They had smiles, and hugs, and welcome home signs.

On the way out of the airport, at the bottom of the last escalator, stood one of my brothers-in-law, holding a sign with my name misspelled.

“Taxi? You need taxi?”

Yeah, I did.

Home, please, and step on it.