Surviving Widowhood with Writing, Reading, Soccer and Bilingualism

2010-10-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

I am thrilled to report that We Visit Colombia, by book about Colombia for upper elementary school children, has been published.
I lived in Colombia with my two sons for the 2007-2008 school year and although it is a country with a lot of problems, I really loved it there.
The book covers Colombia's history, economy and political system, as well as other aspects of Colombia, such as the amazing wildlife and the wonderful festivals.
It is part of a series called Your Land and My Land.

2010-10-14T05:08:00.000-07:00

Oh the joy of books sales during a recession! Our library's annual book sale ended this week. And on the last few days, you could fill a big shopping bag with books and pay only $10. I picked up some Frank McCourt books I've always wanted to read, as well as one of the few Dick Francis books I haven't read. Now I just need to go and buy another book shelf.

2010-10-13T09:10:00.000-07:00

I just finished a very depressing but very necessary book, The Buying of Congress: How Special Interests Have Stolen Your Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, by Charles Lewis.
It's really sad to think that this book was written in the 1990s, BEFORE the floodgates of cash were opened by the Supreme Court's ridiculous decision that limits on political contributions abridged corporation's free speech rights.
I'm trying to figure out how to write a book on the Congress for children. I want it to be accurate and and yet clear about the fact that we are far away from the Founders' vision.

2010-09-17T07:26:00.001-07:00

Bilingual Books!
When my sons were little, I spent hours in the bilingual and Spanish sections of libraries and book stores. Sometimes it was delightful, like when I discovered Bobbie Salinas' hugely-entertaining classic Three Little Pigs: Nacho, Tito y Miguel and other times it was disappointing. Sometimes the translations were awkward or error prone. Now that my first two bilingual books are coming out, I'm excited to see how they look and read. They are What Is It Like to Be Marta and What Is It Like to Be Shakira. Both books are in English and Spanish, and designed and written for pre-schoolers and kindergarteners. The Marta book was fun to write. I loved watching videos of her dribbling around defenders, although unfortunately sometimes those defenders were U.S. players. Shakira is amazing, and also had a strong connection to soccer this summer with her Waka Waka World Cup song. Unfortunately that all happened after the book went to press. Maybe I can include the phenomenon that was Waka Waka in a sequel.
Here's where you can find out more about one of my all time favorite bilingual books:

I'll add the links for my two new books, too:

2010-04-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

Red Hot Patriot starring Kathleen Turner
I'm so glad I made it to the world premiere of Red Hot Patriot, a great play starring Kathleen Turner as the late Texas writer, Molly Ivins. The playwrights are two sisters, Margaret and Allison Engel. Ivins, who died of breast cancer at 72 in 2007, certainly gave them plenty to work with. She was forever whipping off one liners and jokes about George W. Bush and other Republicans who earned her ire. I don't know how I got through it without crying. It really did not seem as though Turner was acting in the role of Molly Ivins. For me, she was Molly Ivins, in all her rowdiness, wit and great liberal spirit.

2009-11-19T10:30:00.000-08:00

More Terrible Than Death: Drugs, Violence and America's War in Colombia
By Robin Kirk
I picked up Robin Kirk's book with a little trepidation. I lived in Colombia for a year and read the newspaper every day, so I felt as though I had a pretty good understanding of the violence. But Kirk, who worked for Human Rights Watch in Colombia for four years, does an amazing job of describing Colombia's history, the reasons for the violence, the victims, and the United States' involvement. If every cocaine user in the United States, Canada and Europe had to read this book before they "enjoyed" their white powder, things might actually change. It is long past time that North American drug users took responsibility for the mayhem in Colombia.

2009-09-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

In Memory of Sheila Lukins
The second oldest cookbook I own is The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, circa 1985. Although I can’t say that I’ve made many recipes from it, the ones that I have made have been great. And some of the recipes, like the coffee blonde brownies and the grilled curried chicken, are classics that I have made over and over again. I’m so sorry to hear that co-author Sheila Lukin died after being diagnosed just recently with cancer.
Her cookbook really is wonderful. It’s not only a collection of great recipes. The authors added menu ideas, musings about the seasons, and funny quotes like Jimmy Walker’s: “I’d rather be a lamp post in New York than the mayor of Chicago.”
Soon after graduating from college in 1986, I made the seafood gazpacho for guests. I scribbled “rave reviews” in the margins and always remembered what a delicious recipe it was. The other day – about 23 years later -- when my friends who own Scarecrow Hill Community farm gave me a box of vegetables I pulled out the recipe, noticed the old scribble, and made myself yet another delicious batch of gazpacho. Thank you Sheila Lukins and rest in peace.

2009-05-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

W.D. Wetherell's Soccer Dad
Maybe you have to be a soccer fanatic to love this book. But I don't think so. Wetherell is a beautiful, eloquent, writer. I think I would be willing to read his book about grass growing. But in Soccer Dad: A father, a son, and a magic season, Weatherall has a wonderful topic: That bittersweet senior year in which a son winds up his youth and gets ready to become a man. Weatherell begins by visiting some of his son's old soccer fields and remembering some of the highlights (and lowlights) of his son's soccer career. He follows his son's high school soccer team through a fantastic, and yet turbulent season, and writes about it all with lyricism and honesty. Soccer Dad is a must read for the soccer fans out there. Even the non soccer fans might be entranced by this story of a boy growing up and angst and delight of a father.

2009-03-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

Guernica by Dave Boling
All I really knew about the Basque people when I picked up this book was that they speak a language with mysterious origins and live on either side of the Pyrenees in Spain and France. Boling's beautiful novel tells the story of a Basque family before, during and after the bombing of the historic Basque town of Guernica. The book also brings in the role of Picasso's Guernica painting and English people who took in the orphans of Guernica. Although much of the book is harrowing, there's a great surprise at the end. It's a haunting, beautifully written novel that I found very hard to put down.
If you would like to learn more about this book or buy it at Amazon.com, you can click here:

Amazon.com Widgets

2009-03-01T03:55:00.000-08:00

Cathryn Clinton's The Eyes of Van Gogh
My new friend Cathryn Clinton has an impressive list of novels for young readers. The Eyes of Van Gogh is a moving, highly-descriptive story about a young woman's struggles after she and her mother move yet again -- this time to a fictitious Lancaster County town. Clinton's youthful protagonist finds herself flourishing for the first time in her life, but danger lurks among the green farm fields of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Even though I rarely read young adult novels, I found Clinton's nuanced and yet gut-wrenching tale hard to put down.

2008-12-08T08:51:00.000-08:00

Praise for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
I know I'm late to the bandwagon here but Barbara Kingsolver's latest book is absolutely fantastic. I loved the way her whole family united around the idea of showing to the world that it is possible to live in a way that is more ecologically conscious. It was the first time I've ever read an environmentalist defending the consumption of meat. Of course it was meat that had been raised humanely. Her family avoids factory-farmed meat at all costs. I'm inspired to order seeds and starting planning my garden for 2009!

2008-08-25T08:07:00.000-07:00

Mexican High
I took an excellent writing class with Liza Monroy so I was especially excited to read her first novel, Mexican High. She has done a fantastic job with this novel, which describes the senior year of an American girl at an upper class high school in Mexico City. I loved the way she described the joys and horrors of Mexico and created characters who were so rich and complex.

2008-05-20T19:01:00.000-07:00

Fidel's Classmates
Patrick Symmes has a gift for looking at old stories in new ways. Chasing Che, the book he wrote after he followed Che Guevara's motorcycle route around South America, was brilliant. And now he has outdone himself with The Boys from Dolores, Fidel Castro's Classmates from Revolution to Exile. This book is really a retelling of the well-known recent history of Cuba, but told in such an up close and personal way, through interviews with Castro's classmates, that it is fascinating. Symmes is a deft interviewer and reporter. Sometimes I wish he would let his own personality come through a little more. At one point in the book he expresses dispair over how Latin America will ever show real progress. The Cuban model obviously does not work, but the more raw capitalism of the nearby Dominican Republican has also had awful consequences. That small criticism notwithstanding, I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in reading about Latin America, or to anyone who simply likes good nonfiction.

2008-03-31T11:00:00.000-07:00

Peter Thomson's Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal
I wondered how interesting a book about the deepest lake in the world could be. I got my answer. VERY! Thomson manages to make the science behind the lake and the crisis it is facing fascinating and easy to understand.
He also bared his soul about his disappointment over his failed marriage and his love for his much younger brother.

2008-03-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

Even Colombians are Freaked Out
This is a country that is somewhat inured to violence, what with a 50 or 60 year old guerilla war, death squads and paramilitaries, not to mention the everyday violence of the country's streets and highways.
But just a few days after several Latin American countries condemned the Colombian military for a strike in Ecuadorian territory that killed guerrilla leader Raul Reyes, Pablo Montoya, who was supposed to be guarding another guerilla leader, Ivan Rios, killed Rios with a shot to the forehead in cold blood. He severed the guerilla leader’s hand from his body, and brought the fetid object to a local military base, hoping to receive the five billion peso (about $2,500,000) reward the Colombian government has promised for guerilla leaders “dead or alive.”
Colombians are sick of the guerilla war that has dragged on for decades, but they are also full of anguish over the depths their government will go to in order to defeat the rebels. “The message, ‘kill for money,’ is terrible,’” wrote Angel Maria Aguilar in a letter to the editor of El Tiempo, the leading national newspaper. “What would a child think of this? How do we explain that even though ‘Rios’ was a criminal, another criminal gained something by killing him? The consequences of this war will last for years.”

2008-02-28T13:36:00.000-08:00

The Triumph of Firestar
Mario and I finished reading The Darkest Hour, the last book in the six-book Warriors series. What a great ending to a great series. I've enjoyed these books because of the great adventures the characters have. But I was struck by the spirituality in the ending of this last book. Firestar, the leader of his group of forest cats called Thunderclan, cannot understand why his ancestor Gods have allowed his clan to get into such terrible trouble. He has a dream in which he talks to his former clan leader, who is now one of the ancestor Gods, seeking an explanation for the bad times the clan is in. Bluestar answers that the Starclan Gods cannot control what happens; they can only watch and try to help out here and there. "We watch, but we do not interfere. If we did, would you be truly free? ... You are not the playthings of Starclan."
The discussion goes on and is one of the best allegorical descriptions of God I've ever read.

2007-12-26T14:04:00.000-08:00

Yeh Yeh's House
I haven't finished Evelina Chao's memoir of her late Chinese intellectual grandfather and her trip with her mother to China. But so far I'm fascinated. Chao, a professional viola player in Minnesota, spins a tail of family intrigue, immigrant machinations and political repression that, like all good memoirs, reads like a novel. I woke up early on Christmas morning at my in-law's farm in rural Colombia. As a contemplated the strangeness of my year-long trip to my late husband's country, I dipped into Chao's similar sojourn. To put it simply, I could really relate.

2007-11-21T13:19:00.000-08:00

A Historic Victory
Saul's cousins's wife, Pilar, got us tickets the day before the all-important game between Colombia and Argentina. Pilar refused to say how she got them, despite that day's newspaper saying tickets were sold out. All she would say is "very carefully."
We got in line at the 42,000-seat Bogota stadium at 10 p.m., to make sure we were able to get seats. The outer fences around the stadium were opened at 3 p.m., and we ran along with the crowds to the gates. We chose seats that were high up in the first section, underneath the second level over hang, in case of rain.
One the game finally started, the Colombians were being outplayed by Argentina, most of whose players have million-dollar contracts in Europe.
Lionel Messi beat two Colombian defenders and scored a beautiful goal right in front of us. It was great to see one of the best players in the world, but disappointing that Colombia was losing 0 to 1.
In the second half, Colombia came out with spark and organization, almost scoring in the first minute. My heart was in my throat as they kept pressing. Finally Ruben Bustos tied the game with a beautiful free kick and Dairo Moreno won it with a brilliant combination with Wason Renteria.
The underdogs, who probably don't earn as a team what Messi earns individually playing for Barcelona, took three points away from Argentina in the all-important World Cup qualifying tournament.
Colombians, whose national team has not gone to the World Cup since 1998, were thrilled. We went along for the wild ride, though we refrained from screaming "H.... de P...." at the Argentina goalkeeper everytime he took a free kick.
We sang and we clapped and we stood and then we finally went home, exhausted but happy.

2007-09-19T14:51:00.000-07:00

Latin American Youth Soccer Has a Dark Side

The scene looks innocent enough: Five boys, including my ten-year-old son, Mario, sitting on the bench next to the street soccer court in a barrio west of Bogotá, Colombia, sharing a bottle of soda from plastic cups. But the seemingly innocuous soda bottle was actually the ill-gotten gains of a bet placed on the previous night's game, in which my younger son's team, led by the highly-skilled and speedy 14-year-old Javier, had beaten my older son's team.
A few minutes before the amiable sharing of the soda, my sweet, Mennonite, 12-year-old son, Gabriel, had run down the a member of his team as he was leaving for the capital city in his father's taxi cab and persuaded him to hand over the 700 pesos (about 40 cents) that he owed toward the losing team's debt. Yes, my nice American kid has been in Colombia for three weeks and he is already adept at enforcing gambling debts. I'm a little horrified.
I had noticed the night before that the game, however, was played with a slightly elevated level of tenacity and enthusiasm. Since Gabriel, the other captain, is only 12, he had been allowed to pick first. He chose an 11-year-old named Juan with a rocket launcher for a foot. The rest of the players on both of the teams were fairly ordinary nine and ten year olds. Both teams were struggling for possession for the first few minutes.
Javier sent one really nice pass up his right side line to Christian, but the hard pass found Christian flat-footed and the ball went by him. Then Javier, who appeared to be a little frustrated by the previous play, tried to dribble out of the back in front of the goal. Javier has great foot skills and when playing with younger kids he can usually get away with doing things like dribbling right in front of his own goal. His goalkeeper, utterly confident in Javier's skills, was not even paying close attention. Gabriel miraculously stuck out a foot and not only swept the ball away from Javier but passed it cleanly into the right corner of the net.
The underdogs were up 1 to 0.
But Javier was only inspired by the deficit and he began dribbling past the ten-year-olds on Gabriel's team like they were soccer cones, and blasting balls into the goal that the goalkeeper could only watch in admiration. Soon Javier's team was winning, 6 to 2. Gabriel's team started marking Javier with more determination, passing better and making better runs off the ball, and they miraculously made up much of the deficit. But even though they were marking Javier better, he managed to beat Gabriel's defenders and play a beautiful pass to Mario's feet. Mario then scored the lone goal that Javier did not shoot in his team's 8 to 6 victory.
For years I've been hearing at soccer coaching conferences and classes that the way kids play pickup soccer in Latin America is fantastic. The authorities have told me over and over that the kids organize the games themselves. They pick even teams, set the rules, and teach each other. This model is always held up as one of the "missing links" in American youth soccer development. "
American young soccer is too top down, too structured by adults," teacher after teacher has told me. "The kids need to learn the creativity and spontaneity that comes naturally when they are playing on their own." After three weeks of living directly in front of one of the basketball court-sized cement soccer fields that dot neighborhoods all over Latin America, I can see the wisdom in these authorities' statements.
The kids, many of whom have never been on an official youth soccer team, have excellent ball control and field vision. Any one of them would probably be one of the top players on a typical American Under-10 travel team. Like ten-year-old everywhere, they tend to bunch around the ball and forget to mark players on defense. But they play with lots of nice moves, speed and they make accurate passes under pressure. They insist that everybody take a turn playing goalkeeper, so they all have decent goalkeeping skills.
But all these experts who have been extolling the importance of youth-organized pickup games never mention the evil of gambling. They never mention kids wasting their lunch money to buy soda for the game winners. They never mention the pressure on kids without money to come up with something to help the team pay its debt.
The morning after Mario's team enjoyed its ill-gotten soda, Mario said at breakfast that he had not known about the bet, otherwise he would have refused to play. Mario, who is a little conservative by nature, likes to save his money, not waste it on bets. "When money is involved, I refuse to play," he said as he forked his scrambled eggs into his mouth. I agree with Mario.
On principle, I don't think kids should be playing even low-stakes street soccer. But the authorities who heap so much praise on Latin American street soccer always compare it to the way basketball players have historically developed in American cities. And anybody who knows anything about that scene will admit that gambling has always been part of the territory. I consulted a Canadian psychologist who has studied adolescent problem gambling extensively, and he agreed that kids should not be allowed to bet on their games.
"Children do not have the maturity to set and maintain limits," said Jeffrey Derevensky, a psychology professor at McGill University in Montreal. But I'm happy to report that the betting issue has not come up again recently. It could be because Javier – one of the dominant players in the neighborhood – seems to be focusing on homework. The other day there were fewer kids playing.
When this is the case the kids often play a free kick game that is a great example of what the experts like about Latin American pickup soccer. It can be played 1 v. 1, 2 v. 2 or 3 v.3 For most of the game, each team has to stay on their half of the court and take turns shooting free kicks from their end, about 20 yards. The team being shot on can use their hands to prevent a goal. They tend to form a wall about ten feet in front of the goal, giving the shooter lots of practice at trying to bend balls around walls. If the shot hits the post, the players yell, "Chuteas," and a small-sided game is played until someone scores a goal. After the goal is scored, it's back to the free kick game.
Another popular soccer-related game is "Elimination." It is a fairly simple game, which nonetheless can sometimes take a long time, in which everybody shoots from the penalty spot on everybody else and whoever allows the most goals is eliminated. Then there's another round of everybody shooting on everybody else, until finally a winner is crowned. The move to Colombia has definitely involved some sacrifices and frustrations. Personally I really miss the luxury of hot running water. But the soccer mom in me could not be more pleased. From the first day, when our 10-year-old neighbor, Carlitos, came to our door and stuttered in his best English, "You want play soccer?" the game has been a sort of universal language that transcends barriers. The local kids easily accepted my sons, partly, I think, because of their soccer skills. Of course the fact that they brought a beautiful blue and red Nike ball, the likes of which had never before been seen in the neighborhood, probably also helped. Though we came here so my children could connect with their father's heritage, I can't help but imagine their soccer-crazy father up in heaven, smiling down as they learn to play the game much the way he learned as a boy going to school in Colombia in the 1960s.

2007-09-10T06:15:00.000-07:00

Hola Desde Colombia!
We moved here on August 14, with plans to stay for almost a year. It's been a whirlwind of getting the kids enrolled in schools, getting the house set up, and trying to get internet access -- a big priority -- as Gabo kept saying.
Last night one of the 16-year-old guys who was going to play in the usual men's game under the lights in the concrete soccer field in front of my house actually invited me to play! I was thrilled, but I told him I couldn't come until I got the kids to bed. By 8:30, when I went outside, the game was in full swing and being played with lots of intensity, the occasional foul, and some words that I'm pretty sure were vulgarities.
I watched in case anyone needed a sub. When it ended, there was talk about how much money the losers owed the winners. I didn't get the exact amount, but I was relieved, then that I wasn't playing. I'm afraid my skills are not good enough to keep up in a game where young men are playing for pesos!
This morning at breakfast Gabo and Mario and I were talking about this issue. And Gabo said I could just offer to cover everyone's losses. It's an idea, and with my American dollars I can buy lots of pesos, but I think Mario's wisdom might be better.
"When money is involved, I just don't play," he told me.
Spoken like a jaded Colombian school kid!

2007-07-11T03:24:00.000-07:00

Soccer Satisfaction
For the first few minutes of my over-30 game last night, I was annoyed at how badly I was playing. I had a fantastic opportunity directly in front of the goal and shot directly at the goalkeeper, who caught the ball easily. I completely missed the ball a few other times. My teammates were passing really nicely and I felt bad about not capitalizing on the chances. Then somebody else took a shot, I ran toward the goalkeeper to see if she would catch the ball. Just as she was grabbing it, I kicked it out of her hands onto the turf. Two defenders converged, I touched the ball softly away from one of them and then poked it into the goal past the other! GOOOAAAL! I laughed to myself that I couldn't seem to score an easy goal but the then I some how managed to beat three people. After that the game just got better and better. We won 9 to 4.

2007-06-04T19:43:00.000-07:00

Shakira! Shakira! Shakira!
I felt like singing "Shakira! Shakira! Shakira" just like Wyclef Jean does in "Hips Don't Lie" last week as I received the proof pages of my new biography of the Colombian singer and songwriter. The designer did a beautiful job finding pictures and it was just thrilling to see the whole package almost ready to go.

2007-04-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

Vanessa Redgrave and Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking"

On Saturday I met about 20 widows and widowers in New York City to see "The Year of Magical Thinking," a spectacular one-woman show performed by Vanessa Redgrave and written by Joan Didion.
There were two things in particular I especially liked about the play. One was the way Redgrave/Didion talked about how she requested reports and found out exactly how long the ambulance took and how long paramedics worked on her husband. I have not done that, but I've wanted to and hearing that JOAN DIDION did it made me feel better. I also thought the whole thing with the magical thinking was great. It STILL bothers me that my husband's body was buried in a coffin inside a vault. What if he comes back to life? He'll be stuck there. And finally, I think (I don't have Vanessa Redgrave's awesome memory skills) Didion pointed out that she didn't really grieve her loss until she stopped engaging in the magical thinking. I think there's truth to that and it helps explain why the second year of widowhood can be harder than the first in some ways.

2007-04-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

More Good Books
This morning before school Mario and I finished reading Book 2 in the new series "Warriors: The New Prophecy." This child, who used to have to be talked into listening to a book, ran upstairs and brought down Book 3, looked at the clock and said, "At least we can read the prologue." These are fantastic books in which cats (yes, cats!) struggle for the survival of their highly-organized, faithful and complex society during a siege by people and machines on their forest. Author Erin Hunter does a brilliant job creating an imaginary -- and yet somehow very realistic -- world in which cats organize, talk and solve problems. They also succumb to pointless ancient hatreds and xenophobia -- just like people. We are on the edge of ours seats wondering how the leading characters in the book will survive the trying times in which they live.

2007-03-14T19:06:00.000-07:00

Middle School Woes
My 11-year-old is having a terrible time with the organizational challenges of middle school. Today he brought me progress report with four zeros in it! He's an intelligent kid who has never had a trouble with the academics in school, but has always had trouble being organized. Now it's catching up with him. I also sense a little bit of apathy creeping in. My only comfort is that people keep telling me it's normal, but I'm going to clamp down with consequences and try to keep better track of what is going on.

2007-02-21T13:55:00.000-08:00

Carl Sandburg!
Yesterday I finally held Carl Sandburg in my hands, more than a year after I first agreed to write a long biography of the well-loved poet. Leafing through the 112-pages filled me with wonder at the fact that that the book was finished. Reading the poetry, articles, letters and speeches of Carl Sandburg for this in-depthy biography was one of the most interesting projects I've done. He was so eloquent and funny and such a patriot. And with each chapter I had to write a detailed article about some historic, cultural or scientific phenomenon that was related to the time. For example, after the chapter in which two of Sandburg's brothers died of diphtheria, I wrote a sidebar about the disease. I think the side articles are an interesting way to provide insight and background into the time's of the subject.

2007-02-01T10:44:00.000-08:00

Soccer Success in the South
Reviewed for Topdrawersoccer.com by Rebecca Thatcher Murcia

At Home on the Field
By Paul Caudros
HarperCollins, 2006 $22.95

Soccer fans love good stories, full of ironic details and surprising comebacks. Paul Cuadros has written a great soccer story in At Home on the Field, an uplifting tale of how three years after he fought tooth and nail to be allowed to start a boys’ high school in Siler City, North Carolina, the players, the majority of whom were undocumented Latino immigrants, won the state championship.
Cuadros, who was born in Michigan to Peruvian parents, went to North Carolina in 1999 to write about the changes underway in the state because of an influx of immigrants who work long hours for low pay in the poultry industry. He was surprised to find out that Jordan-Matthews, the high school in the small city of Siler, did not have a boys’ soccer team. Cuadros got involved in the local club soccer scene, and began the slow process of convincing the high school officials to allow him to coach a high school team. As soon as he started coaching, he worked hard to convert a group of kids who have mostly played street soccer into an organized, disciplined group that plays an attractive, possession-oriented style of soccer. But he is not just coach to these boys. He is also their tutor, their advocate, their chauffer and their taskmaster.
Cuadros reveals telling details, like the time he cut the best player on the team because the boy hit another player on the bus. We learn a lot about how these kids, whose parents often have little education and little English, struggle to remain eligible to play soccer. Cuadros is an advocate for immigrants and believes strongly in their rights, but he pulls no punches about how hard it is to teach kids whose very existence in this country is sometimes unlawful, that no cheating will be allowed when it comes to the strict eligibility rules of high school sports.
From the beginning, the boys are successful and venture deep into the post season, surprising everyone. But Cuadros is not content just to be regional champions. He keeps working hard to develop the players. He changes from the 4-3-3 formation with which they started and teaches them a 4-4-2. His fantastic starting goalkeeper goes to Mexico to visit his ailing grandmother, and Cuadros gives up on the young man making it back. But the young man manages to survive a long trek through the Arizona desert and shows up just in time to be eligible.
After three years of hard work, thrilling victories and agonizing defeats, the team finds itself in the final of the state championship against the high school team from Camp Lejeune, one of the biggest Marine Corps bases in the country. The opponents were strong and tall and strong and a perennial Eastern Division soccer power. The night before the game, one player, Indio, stays after practice to work a little extra, one-on-one with the coach. Cuadros wants Indio, one of the best players on the team, to try to get his shots off while the defender is still screening the keeper. This was one of my favorite parts of the book. After Indio finishes the extra practice, Cuadros philosophizes on the sad irony of the players’ illegal status. “On the field he was a gifted athlete, one who inspired adoration because of his talents, and he had a promising future,” Cuadros writes. “But once he stepped off the field, beyond its blue lines, he became illegal—an animal to be hunted down and deported. This is the way the country saw him.”
The next day Indio scores a beautiful goal, from 25 yards out, to help his team defeat Lejeune, 2 to 1. With the Lejeune star goalkeeper near post, Indio rips a fantastic cannon ball of a shot that goes over the goalkeeper’s head and inside the right post. “It is a professional shot, a killer of teams, the kind of shot that makes the highlight reels and is paused, rewound, and played over and over for its sheer energy, its boldness, its strength and fury,” he wrote.
This book is similar to some other well-written, entertaining books about soccer teams, such as The Beautiful Game: Sixteen Girls and the Soccer Season that Changed Everything and The Miracle of Castel de Sangro. But both of those excellent books were written by close observers of the teams. As the coach, Cuadros tells his compelling story in the first person, which brings a certain immediacy to the writing. The story is also not just about soccer. It is also a heart-warming story about how a community’s attitude toward newcomers changed in the course of three years. At the beginning, residents are fuming about the immigrants and attending an anti-immigrant rally sponsored by the KKK. Three years later, Hispanics in the area have gained some degree of acceptance and respect, perhaps in part due to the excellence of a ragtag bunch of boys and their determined coach.

2007-01-30T06:23:00.000-08:00

Jan. 30, 2007
Anna Quindlen's Rise and Shine
I stayed up all night reading Anna Quindlen's latest novel about a social worker and her famous anchorwoman sister and how they survive two terrible crises. For some reason that I don't quite understand, I found this tale very healing -- even as I cried my way through the whole second half of the book. I think Anna Quindlen understands in a very profound way how important and yet how utterly painful and difficult families can be.

2006-12-18T09:44:00.000-08:00

Dec. 18, 2006
Treasured Moments of Laughter and Peace -- AKA squirrel hunting
We took our little rat terrier, Crystal, to the park this weekend and let her chase squirrels. We had never done it before and she loved it and we all were able to wallow in her ecstatic joy. At one point I said, "I think she's treed about five squirrels." Gabo, who listens very closely to my words, even if he doesn't always do what I'm telling him, said, "But Mom, I thought you hated it when people turned nouns into verbs." I just laughed at the tiime, but I was a little worrried. Had I turned into one of those people who says things like "the project impacted"? But when we got home, the dictionary confirmed what I had thought, that "treed" is an acceptable past particle and past tense of "to tree" which can mean to chase up a tree or to cover and area with trees.

2006-12-05T08:27:00.000-08:00

Dec. 5, 2006
Three Cheers for Elizabeth Kay, author of the Divide series
My nine-year-old son, Mario, and I have been having a fantastic time reading the Divide and now Back to the Divide. These books tell the adventures of and English boy named Felix in an alternate world where unicorns, pixies, griffins and elves are real and people are mythical. The books are entertaining for children but also very literate and funny for adults. I just finished a very funny section in Back to the Divide, where a female griffin, Thornbeak, is reading an English newspaper and is discovering with horror how low-brow it is. "The front page is all about the results of a game of something called football. The second page is about some singers in short skirts. It's only as we get further in that there's a report about an earthquake and a scientific breakthrough. Am I missing something? Is football a way of settling international disputes, perhaps?" she asks. Thornbeak continues to consider the paper in shock and asks if perhaps television is directed toward people of higher intelligence. Felix explains about soaps and reality shows, getting more and more embarrassed. Thornbeak asks, "Is this what mass communications lead to, Felix? Worldwide brain death?" I'm not sure Mario got the joke, but I loved it. However, the stories do not usually focus on such matters. They are usually about Felix's death-defying adventures in this alternate universe, in which he flies on dragon's backs and struggles against evil elves.

2006-12-01T06:48:00.000-08:00

Dec. 1, 2006
Shakira! Shakira!
When I agreed to write a biography of Shakira all I knew about her was that she was a popular singer and that she was Colombian, like my late husband. I have so much enjoyed delving into her life story, her music, her humor and her politics. In her print interviews, she usually seems pretty earnest and serious. But lately I've been watching interviews of her on Youtube.com and she can be really funny on television. One interviewer asked her (when she was about 20) if she still lives with her parents. She said, "Oh yes, I live with them. I travel with them. I even sleep with them when I get scared at night." What's difficult is trying to figure out what to include and what to leave out when the book is only suspposed to be 3,500 words.

2006-11-22T08:03:00.000-08:00

Nov. 22, 2006
Soccer Overload
What a weekend! Gabo, my 11-year-old played at the Hempfield tournament at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday. At 4 p.m. we had a game between the parents and the players for my son Mario's Under-10 team and then went to one of the player's homes for a season-ending awards ceremony and pizza. The next morning it was back to the Hempfield tournment for another game, and then the final at 3:30 p.m., which Gabo's Lanco United Under-12 boys game won, taking home their first championship. We stopped quickly at McDonald's for dinner and then headed to my 6 p.m. indoor game. The next day as I found myself too exhausted to sleep, I realized it was a little too much. But I enjoyed every minute of it.

2006-11-15T19:14:00.000-08:00

Nov. 15, 2006
Indoor Soccer Thrills
After taking four months off because I was too busy with my kids' outdoor soccer schedules, I returned to my beloved indoor soccer team this week. It felt absolutely fantastic to be back on the field. Last night we were playing a really good team with an excellent goalkeeper. Whenever her team was on the attack, she would walk up almost to the midline, confident that she could help on the attack and run back quickly if we got the ball. All through the game we noticed that she was doing this, and we told each other we should knock a ball over her head, but she was pretty good at reading the game and getting back whenever we threatened. Then, with a few minutes to play, a slow ball rolled out to her and she yelled, "keeper." I sprinted to it as fast as I could, kicked it away just as she was reaching for it, and turned and dribbled as fast as I could to the goal. A few more touches and I was able to casually knock it home for the 4 to 1 victory. What a blast!

2006-11-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

Nov. 6, 2006
The Crucible
I've always loved the theater, but my husband was not especially crazy about it. He would probably have rather gone to a latin music concert if he had to go out. But his preference was to just stay home. For years I've heard about what a fantastic work of art Arthur Miller's play, "The Crucible," is. Our local acting company was presenting it, so I decided to go with my children, who are 9 and 11. I told them that they might not like it, and that they could close their eyes and go to sleep if it was too boring. But they were not allowed to misbehave at all. I had a little bit of trepidation when I walked into the theater and saw that there were no other children there. But the play was so good. My older son, Gabriel, understood a lot and was sort of interested. Poor Mario, who is nine, could not really follow the speedy, high-level dialogue. But he sat quietly and tried to figure out what was happening. I was just thrilled that we all got to see such an American treasure. As we walked out, I said, "Wasn't it interesting the way, little, by little, all the characters saw how wrong hanging the women for witchcraft was, except for the chief judge? Can you think of any current political situations that are similar?"

2006-10-31T09:39:00.000-08:00

Oct. 31, 2006
Soccer Boys! or the Cruelty of Children
I really enjoy about 85 percent of the time I spend with my Under-10 soccer team. They are enthusiastic and competitive. They learn new skills quickly and usually treat each other well. But the moments of bad behaviour depress me and wear me down. Every once in a while somebody will blast a ball at the head of somebody who is drinking water or something. And I hate it when they accuse each other rashly ("Johnny never passes") or, as the lawyer in me thinks, impune motives not in evidence ("You went to that line because you hate Kyle!") I want to focus on teaching these kids soccer skills. But all my work on skills will be pointless if the chemistry is bad. And comments like this hurt chemistry. So I need to teach soccer skills and people skills. Well I guess that's what it's all about anyway.

2006-10-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

Oct. 23, 2006
Last Day of Over-30 Women's Outdoor Soccer
The wind was cold, the sun went down. We only had about eight players on each side, but we played the full 60 minutes to a 0 to 0 tie. It was hard to get offense going with the short sided teams. But we ran and yelled and kicked the ball hard. Sometimes I think that's all we need to do. I was really tired afterward. We followed the usual tradition of going to Friendly's for dinner. The boys and I talked and relaxed over dinner and ice cream. I will miss the routine, but indoor soccer starts soon!

2006-10-11T07:18:00.000-07:00

10/11/06
The Kite Runner
Last night I finished Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. My mind is filled with questions I don't have time to research right now. The book, which tells the moving story of two half-brothers across the last four decades of turbulent Afghan history, is somewhat autobiographical. Hosseini says in the introduction that the father character in the book is based on his own father. But the rest? Did he adopt his half-brother's son after the father was murdered by the Taliban? Did he also almost die at the hands of a sociopathic Taliban official? I doubt it, and I think the important truth in the book is that the outlines are true -- Afghanistan really has been suffered horribly under rule by different outside groups that had their own murderous agenda. What a beautifully told nightmare!

The Kite Runner was published in 2003 by Penguin and is available at www.amazon.com.

2006-10-10T15:08:00.000-07:00

10/10/06
Publishing Excitement!
Today I received an e-mail containing the 112 proof pages for my upcoming biography of Carl Sandburg. What excitement! It was strange seeing something I wrote so long ago (last winter) all type-set and almost ready to be published. Returning to Carl Sandburg's world of biography, politics, poetry and music for a day -- even if it was just to write a two-page index, was a pleasure. And writing the nice comments from by editor, "Your sidebars are really terrific," was also a nice boost. The amazing part was that I did manage to write the whole index despite Gabo (11) being home sick. He was just nauseas most of the day. It wasn't until the late afternoon that I sat on the floor of the bathroom with him as he painfully vomited. He seems to be better now.

2006-10-02T07:59:00.000-07:00

Heroscape
Oct. 2, 2006
Mario (9) came home from a sleepover on Saturday talking about how much he liked a board game he had played. I was surprised, because it seems as though Mario, "a man of action," usually finds board games way too cerebral. We did some internet research and found some positive reviews for Heroscape, the fairly new game from Milton Bradley. At $39.99, the "Heroscape Game System Master Set" was really expensive for a board game. But I figured if it was as fun as Mario said it was, then it would be worth it.
At first it was a big disappointment, because Gabriel (11) and Mario started playing while I cooked. Mario had learned a sort of quick version of the game, in which most of the pieces weren't used, and rules were improvised. Gabriel tends to be legalistic and very competitive. He kept noticing that Mario's improvised rules were not very consistent. Pretty soon the tears were flowing. I couldn't believe I had paid $40 for tears! I suggested we try reading the rule book, which is about 20 pages long.
We started after church on Sunday at about 12:30 p.m. It was really slow going at first. For about an hour Mario complained that he was bored and that he wanted to go back to his quick system. But we built the "Migol's Tomb" battleground, drafted fighters, and started figuring the game out. It turned out to be really fun. It's a combination of chess and Risk. Every character has special powers and it's necessary to plan strategy. Four hours into the game we were still learning about special rules and possible tactics, but we were having a blast. Finally, at 7 p.m., I said we had to stop. This morning the game is still laid out in the living room, and both teams are vastly diminished, but fighting to the bitter end. I can sincerely thank Milton Bradley for a great Sunday afternoon at home with my kids, something that is all too rare.

2006-09-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

Sept. 28, 2006
Finding Grace in Odd Places
Last night we invited our Under-10 soccer team to practice on the indoor soccer field we built in our basement. When some of them didn't show up, Mario wanted to call them. I discouraged the idea, thinking it would be better to not bother people about their decisions. But it turned out that one player and his two brothers and their friend were free. They ended up coming over at 7:30 and staying until about 9 p.m. for an impromptu soccer and pingpong party. Gabriel was thrilled when he got home.

2006-09-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

Sept. 25, 2006
Victory at last!
The Under-10 soccer team I coach had their first win of the season on Saturday, overcoming Penn Manor 2 to 1. They are starting to play much better, but sometimes there's this nervousness or lethargy or something that I don't quite understand. They seem to play harder against each other practice than they do against the other team on Saturdays. I told them to do a slow jogging cool down after the game on Saturday and they sprinted at full speed across the field. The ref said, "I didn't see them run that fast in the whole game!" I laughed ruefully because it was true. I'm going to try to think of ways to teach them to run hard to the ball and off the ball. I had fun in my game, but I didn't score and we lost 3 to 0. Oh well. It was a beautiful fall weekend.

2006-09-21T06:45:00.000-07:00

Sept. 21, 2006
I wrote the following article about a trip I took with my mother, my husband and my two children about two weeks before my husband's death with cancer.
A Dying Colombian Soccer Fan's Last Hurrah
By Rebecca Thatcher Murcia
The weirdness of the initial phone call turned out to be an accurate omen for what would become our horrible but wonderful trip to Giants Stadium. Saúl, my Colombian husband had incurable cancer -- metastatic Chondrosarcoma. The disease was in his spinal column and gradually taking away his mobility. In March 2005 I was reading sports news on the internet in the bedroom of our house in Akron, Pennsylvania. I saw that the Colombian national soccer team was playing a friendly game against England at the Giants Stadium on May 31.
I called my husband at his office – he was co-director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Mennonite Central Committee -- and asked if he wanted to go. He said yes, and I went on line to order tickets, but I found out that handicapped visitors cannot order tickets online. I called Giants stadium and a ticket seller told me she could sell me the tickets, but not send them to me. I told her that sounded like discrimination against people with disabilities. She told me she could send me a letter explaining how the policy of forcing wheel chair users to pick their tickets up at the stadium was not a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. By that time, I was annoyed. “What good would you sending me that letter do?” I asked. I went ahead and paid for the tickets anyway.
For the next few weeks, the symptoms of Saúl’s advanced cancer grew worse. His legs became weaker and weaker. Swelling in his hands and legs was painful and further limited his mobility. But as his body failed him, Saul’s spirit and will to live grew. We were constantly cooking big meals and entertaining visitors. On April 28, Saúl’s 50th birthday, we bought an electric wheel chair and celebrated with a big party at the office and another big party at a friend’s farm. Saul had grown up playing soccer in Colombia, and he always loved to watch and play the game. When writing about his childhood, he said soccer gave him a “primordial reason to exist.” He discovered the game while attending a Mennonite boarding school. “That was where I fell completely and permanently in love with this sport that all by itself gave me the structure of running with a purpose, to compare the game with my life and to be part of a team,” he wrote.
In recent years he had been so busy working, however, that he had had not had very much time to play or go to games. But that spring, as weak and sick as he was, he went to his son’s outdoor games and tournaments. He even went to watch my over-30 women’s team play.
During the first few weeks of May, Saul’s swelling, or edema, became so bad that he could no longer operate the joy stick on his electric wheelchair. I hunted around for a solution and found out that a nearby occupational therapist could show us how to bring the swelling down with compression bandages. We went to her and she wrapped Saul’s arm up in layers of cotton and non-elastic compression bandages. He was thrilled when a day or two later he could “drive” again. But the therapist could do nothing about the advancing disease and she despaired as she helped me heave Saúl in and out of our mini-van. His legs were getting so weak that it was beginning to take all my strength to lift him from the wheelchair to the car back and to the wheel chair.
The weekend of the game, my mother, who works as an occupational therapist in Sullivan County, New York, came to help out and go with us. By then we were all excited about the trip. Our children, Mario, 8, and Gabriel, 9, made a sign calling for peace in Colombia. They planned to wave it at any television cameras they saw pointing at them. Friends at the Mennonite Central Committee’s office in Bogotá had alerted a staff person for the Colombian national team and efforts were underway to organize a meeting with Saul at the Sheraton, the team’s hotel. We made reservations at the hotel and asked the reservation person if a recliner could be provided for Saul, because his pain and paralysis made it impossible for him to sleep in a bed. The person on the phone said that would be no problem and we took his word for it. The day before the game, Saul’s right leg was swollen as usual, but it was also hot and red. My mother thought that maybe we should cancel the trip. Michelle, our dear hospice nurse, sat on the floor in front of Saul and diagnosed an infection that would have to be treated with antibiotics. She called a doctor, told him about our travel plans, and persuaded him to let Saúl go on the trip. The next morning we loaded up the car with our bags and then wondered how to get Saúl inside. His feet no longer fit into his old shoes, and we had bought him some large sneakers that had made the transfers even more difficult. His feet would not pivot on their own any more, leaving his legs to twist painfully as we lifted and turned him into the car. My mother improvised a transfer disk – a device that allows paralyzed people’s feet to turn when they are being lifted -- out of cardboard. It did not work as well as a real transfer disk but it made it possible to get Saul into the car. I’m a fairly strong woman but by then Saúl probably weighed 200 pounds and could not help very much.
Once Saúl was in the car, I asked my mother if she had stowed her improvised transfer disk in the back. “Yes, if we lose it we’d have to stop at a dumpster and find some more cardboard to make another one,” she cracked back to me. I turned the car toward Reading with my mother driving behind us. Twenty five minutes later, Saul was in pain. We stopped and turned him outward so he could stretch his legs. We drove on, and did the same thing 20 minutes later. We continued like that all through the 143-mile drive to the hotel. It took about five hours. Finally we arrived at the hotel. We got Saul back into his wheel chair and went inside. Almost immediately, Saúl came up Yulian Anchico, a young member of the Colombian national team. Saul remembered when Anchico scored a penalty kick against Uruguay to help the Colombian national Under-20 team qualify for the World Cup in 2003. Anchico was obviously pleased that Saul remembered his moment of glory in Uruguay. We took pictures. We met more players. Many of them took time to talk to Saul. They signed his jersey and a soccer ball we had brought. Saul was thrilled.
We got back in the car to drive to the stadium. There the nonsensical treatment of the handicapped, which had begun with the staff’s refusal to mail us our tickets, continued. We had to pick up our tickets at Gate C, with no nearby handicapped parking. But we could not enter the stadium at Gate C. No, handicapped people had to enter at Gate A, a long walk around the stadium from Gate C. My mother, the occupational therapist, was aghast. She noted that Saúl was not too bad off with his electric wheel chair, but that many handicapped people use canes or manual wheel chairs and that the stadium’s treatment of handicapped people was really mind bogglingly shabby. Finally, we made it to our seats. At least they were good seats. We were behind one of the goals, but we could see fairly well and the upper deck shaded us from the sun. The atmosphere in the stadium was electric, with about 50,000 soccer fans, many of them hard-drinking, vocal, English soccer fans. “Oh inaccessible glory! Good germinates in the furrows of pain!” Saúl whispered the lines of the martial-sounding Colombian national anthem, a few tears brimming from his eyes. The game was great, with one of the players we had met at the hotel, Mario Yepes, scoring on of Colombia’s two goals. David Beckham bent in a ball from the right corner that teammate Michael Owen volleyed in, leading to England’s 3 to 2 victory over Colombia. Saul was a little disappointed that Colombia lost, but not surprised. “They played like they never have and lost like they always do,” he said with a laugh.
We drove back to the hotel, which according to the website, had the latest in handicapped accommodations, exceeding the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. When we got to the room Saul needed to use the toilet. My mother took the children for a swim in the hotel pool. I looked in dismay at the low toilet seat. I knew I could get Saul onto it, but how would I ever get him off? We called the hotel operator and asked if they had an attachment for the seat, or a higher toilet anywhere in the building. The response was negative. Praying that there would be no disasters, I lifted Saul out of the wheel chair and onto the toilet without a problem. A few minutes later, I used every last ounce of strength to lift him back into the wheelchair. I wheeled him out into the room and we started talking about where and how Saul would sleep. At home he slept in a electric recliner which we could move and adjust during the night to keep him comfortable. The Sheraton and promised us some kind of recliner, but all they had given us was a sort of couch chair and a foot rest. As we brainstormed about what to do I burst into tears of exhaustion and desperation. Then Saúl wept a little. We dried our tears, ordered room service and welcomed my mother and the children back to the room. They were thrilled because the Colombian national team had also gone swimming.
We improvised a recliner-type set up with pillows on the coach chair and the leg rest. Somehow, perhaps with the help of the beer Saúl uncustomarily drank with dinner, we got through the night with just occasional adjustments. We had a wonderful breakfast, with lots of cheerful talk with the waiter about the game. Almost the entire Colombian team had left at something like 3 a.m. that morning. But one player, Fabián Vargas, who plays for Boca Juniors in Argentina, was scheduled to fly to Mexico later in the day. We met him while we were checking out and congratulated him for his performance the day before. We wished him good luck in his club’s upcoming game in Mexico.
We drove home, thrilled with our trip and talking about the future. Maybe we could rent a handicapped van and take a longer trip when the children finished school, Saul wondered aloud. A handicapped van or a wheel-chair accessible mobile home, I thought. We were all happy with the trip and hopeful that we could do something similar again. The euphoria perhaps blinded us a little about the reality of Saul’s health. The children finished school 10 days later on a Thursday. They came home at noon. Saul had been mostly unconscious for about 24 hours. The children went upstairs to play some computer games. Saúl took a deep breath at about 5:30 p.m. and then stopped. A day or so later, I was sitting at a table with family members and our pastor. We were brainstorming about Saul’s memorial service. At our church, we always have a time in which the children are called to the front of the church for a story or activity designed especially for them. I’ve often thought that the children’s stories are so good and creative that they upstage the main sermon. I thought of our trip to Giants Stadium and wondered if I could write a children’s story about it that would – in the Pilgrim’s tradition – be the best part of the service.
I decided to try. I found pictures of us with the Colombian players and newspaper pictures of the game. I retold the story in a simple, straightforward fashion, treading lightly or skipping entirely over some of the darker moments. Then I concluded: The family is very sad. They miss this dear, dear man very much. But they are happy that almost until the day he died, he did what he wanted to do, even if it seemed a little crazy or impossible.”

2006-09-20T05:51:00.000-07:00

Sept. 20, 2006
Despair
I've been feeling so despondent lately; small or even beautiful things can turn my thoughts to death. Yesterday at the supermarket there was a big display on bulbs and I almost burst into tears. While Saul was sick with cancer, I read E.B. White's account of his wife's illness. He admired the way that she planned her tulip patches in the fall, even though she was profoundly ill. He called it, "planning her resurrection."

2006-09-18T19:11:00.000-07:00

Sept. 18
Too Long a Break!
We had a wonderful weekend at Ocean City, New Jersey. We rode bikes on the board walk, played in the arcades, and drove the go-carts. Oh, yeah, we also swam in the ocean a little. But we neglected the Spanish, as seems to be our custom. When we got back to El Sobrino del Mago tonight, I asked Mario a question about the book and he said, "Yo no sabe," which is a terrible mistake to make, sort of like, "I is" in English. But we kept at it for about 30 minutes and Mario started to loosen up and speak a little more and a little better. But there is a lot to do!
Once the boys were asleep, I wrote a review of two new books published by ediciones iamique in Argentina, Los libros no fueron siempre asi and El cine no fue siempre asi. They were nicely written books, full of good graphics and details, but definitely too factual to be interesting to my children at this point.
I scored my first outdoor goal of the season in my game on Sunday, and then had to leave early to take Gabriel to the Olympic Development Program tryout. Once again there were abou 120 players there, and they all seemed incredibly skillful for 11- and 12-year-old boys.

2006-09-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

This article was published in Central PA (www.centralpa.org) magazine last February:

An Unexpected Widow
By Rebecca Thatcher Murcia

When I met Saúl in Brownsville, Texas, in 1999, I was a young, hard-charging investigative reporter. I fearlessly tracked down drug traffickers and murderers and wrote stories about them. My dentist told me he needed x-rays in case he had to identify my body.
Saúl was one of the first Colombians I had ever met. He had dark, sparkling eyes and a broad smile that left me completely enamored. He was a kind and gentle soul who had just graduated from Goshen College, a Mennonite school in Indiana, and joined Mennonite voluntary service. They had sent him to Brownsville to work in home repair. They say opposites attract, and in our case the attraction was fierce. We were inseparable almost from the day we met. We married a few months later.
Soon after we began living together, we realized that while opposites attract, they don’t always live together easily. His quietness drove me crazy at times. My need for communication sent him over the edge. But we survived those difficulties and flourished in the border city. His supervisors asked him to take over leadership of the Mennonite voluntary service programs in Texas and New Mexico. Later he earned the job of national coordinator. Editors at the Austin American-Statesman noticed my hard work and offered me a job there.
We loved Austin. Our first son, Gabriel, was born in 1995 and Mario came two years later. We agreed that our children should be bilingual and tried to speak to them mostly in Spanish. Every two years, we took them to his parent’s farm in Colombia and enjoyed visiting with relatives, playing in the river and exploring all the nooks and crannies of the little hillside property.
When Gabriel was a baby, we carried his car seat from the farm to the nearby road on the back of a mule. I wrote a funny story for the newspaper about how nervous I had been about that idea. The newspaper published the picture of Saul sitting on the mule, holding the car seat, with little Gabriel’s face just peaking out over the edge – the pacifier firmly between his lips. People loved the picture and the story.
Saúl’s talents as a leader and an administrator did not go unnoticed. When the Mennonite Central Committee, a relief and development agency of the Mennonite church, had an opening on their Latin America desk, they called Saúl and asked him to apply. In the summer of 2001, we moved from fun-loving, cosmopolitan Austin to tiny Akron in Lancaster County. Saul became the agency’s co-director for Latin America.
We bought a house just off Main Street in Akron and built a new life in a small town. I worked part-time as a free-lance writer and Saúl threw himself into the challenges of running development and aid projects in places like Bolivia, Paraguay, Colombia and Jamaica. The children made friends and joined soccer teams. Life was good.
Saul shocked me in the summer of 2003 when he said, “I think I’m going to die.” He showed me a lump on the left side of his chest about the size of half a tennis ball. A wise radiologist at the local hospital had already said he thought it was Chondrosarcoma, a rare kind of bone cancer.
I researched the implications of a large Chondrosarcoma tumor and the information was disheartening. The articles said the chances of a fatal metastasis following the discovery of a large tumor were high. In Saúl’s presence, I tried to be calm and reassuring. When I was alone or on the phone with my mother, I cried.
Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital removed the tumor in December 2003 and treated the area with radiation. Saul was in the hospital for a week and came home with a big scar and Gortex where he used to have ribs. He seemed fine and we hoped that we had dodged the bullet.
In the summer of 2004 his back started hurting. The cancer had spread to his spine and lungs. It’s easy to say that the last year was a nightmare – as we struggled with the paralysis, the surgery, the recuperation, and the return of the cancer. In many ways it was a nightmare. It’s awful to see some one you love decline to the point of total dependence. At a certain point, Saúl couldn’t even raise his hand to scratch his nose.
But there were many good times. We came together as a family and we relied on an incredible church family – Pilgrim’s Mennonite in Akron -- to help us with everything from cleaning bathrooms to sleeping on the floor next to Saúl’s bed and waking up to turn him every two hours. Saúl never lost his dry sense of humor nor his charming smile.
On Saturday, June 4, we were expecting three of Saúl’s old friends from Goshen College days. He sent me to a little Colombian market in Ephrata with a long list of his favorite Colombian foods. I bought it all and created a feast. The friends arrived and we managed to push Saúl’s wheel chair out onto the porch. We sat in the sun and ate and talked. The next day we all went to a soccer game. By then Saúl was very weak and it took two people to get him from his wheel chair back into the car.
The end was mercifully swift. Saúl was sleepy on Monday and delirious on Tuesday. On Wednesday he was mostly unconscious and breathing with difficulty. On Thursday afternoon, I sat at his bedside, unwilling to let him go so quickly. “Your cousin Tony is here,” I bellowed, hoping for at least another brief return to consciousness. Instead he closed his mouth and seemed to go in peace. I cried there at his side for a little while, then I went upstairs to say the two hardest words I’ve ever uttered to my children, “Pappy died.”
Mario, 8, threw himself on the floor of my bedroom in tears. Gabriel, 10, ran to his bed to cry. I went back and forth, wanting to console them but not dictate how and where they cried. The next few days were a blur of visitors, the burial, the memorial service – and lots of writing. I wrote an obituary, a eulogy and a children’s story for the memorial service.
Soon people began asking if we will stay in Akron. It’s as if they’re thinking, “Why would a Massachusetts-educated New Yorker who lived in Texas for 14 years stay in small-town Pennsylvania?”
It is a hard question to answer but at this point it feels right to stay here. People here cared for us in a time of trial. The children like their friends, their schools, their soccer teams and their church. And even if all those things weren’t the case, Akron has grown on me. This is where Saúl was laid to rest, on a beautiful hill just down the street from our house. No, it’s not Austin, but it’s home for now.

Rebecca Thatcher Murcia is an Akron writer.

2006-09-13T19:15:00.000-07:00

Laughing About Gestures and Politics
Sept. 13, 2006
Today at reading time I was gesturing wildly and using funny voices to help my children understand what was happening in El Sobrino del Mago. For example, the wicked queen was saying: "El nuestro es un destino superior pero solitario," which means something like: "Our destiny is higher but lonely." I raised my hand high to show the kids what the sentence meant, trying to be expressive and dramatic. Gabriel, 11, thought I should focus on one language at a time. "We don't know sign language, mom," he said. I tried to calm down a little and the rest of the time went well. The rest of the queen's speech sounds oddly like George Bush's rhetoric. We laughed about that.
The amazing thing was that Mario got home from bowling at 5:15 p.m. and we were eating dinner by 5:30 p.m. Even with the early start, we didn't have much time to read. Both children had too much homework, which they did too slowly!

2006-09-13T10:09:00.000-07:00

Sept. 13, 2006
Car Pool Day
Yesterday it was my turn to drive three boys to and from soccer practice in Lancaster. By the time practice was over and everybody was home, it was well after 8 p.m. I insisted on reading just a few pages from El Sobrino del Mago (A translation of The Magician's Nephew from Editorial Andres Bello). The fact that we had not been reading or talking in Spanish lately really showed. Mario had a hard time following the interesting description of the world in which Polly and Digory land in chapter 5. Today we have no soccer so we should have lots of time to get caught up on homework, house work and reading. We'll see how it goes.

2006-09-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

Sept. 12, 2006
Desperate Days
Forget raising good boys who speak English and Spanish fluently. Yesterday was just a matter of trying to survive. Mario, 9, came home with tons of homework he wanted help on. He worked on it while I made dinner and then we hustled off to soccer practice. When we returned, Gabriel, 11, said he needed to bring book socks for all his textbooks to school. We went to two stores -- staying out until 9 p.m. (!) looking for the stupid book socks, which apparently are in high demand this year. I put them to bed without reading in any language, but then I was too worked up when I got home to go to sleep.

2006-09-10T18:16:00.000-07:00

Sept. 10, 2006
Just Soccer -- No Spanish
It was not a good weekend for Spanish. We were way to busy with soccer. Gabriel's Under-12 Lanco United team opened their season with a 4 to 0 victory over a team from Concord, Delaware. Mario's Under-10 team, which I coach, lost 4 to 3 against Manheim Central. Almost as soon as Mario's game was over on Saturday, we made some sandwiches, dropped Mario at a friend's house, and headed to the Olympic Development Program tryouts in the Harrisburg area. I had never seen anything like it. There must have been 120 boys there, and a lot of them were really, really good soccer players. The tryout lasted for 90 minutes, but when we got home at about 9 p.m., Gabriel wanted to play tennis under the lights! I was tired and I had not played a game and done a tryout. We did it anyway and had a good game. I can usually beat Gabriel easily but he was beating me.
This afternoon, my over-30 women's team began its season by losing 6 to 0! It was probably the best team in our league. I had fun anyway.
Tomorrow it's back to working on Spanish!

2006-09-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

Sept. 9, 2006
Return to C.S. Lewis

After two nights of being too busy, I overruled the boys' strenuous objections and said we were going to read a lot and then go to bed early. (Usually on Friday nights we watch movies in English) We're on the sixth book of the Chronicles of Narnia, El Sobrino del Mago (the Magician's Nephew). It's not easy since even the English terminology in these books can be a little archaic. But the stories are good and the kids have been able to follow along even though there are lots of words we don't know.
I used to stop and ask questions that checked for comprehension. But I read somewhere that it's better to grapple with the story by asking what will come next, or what you would do in situations like that. So I try to do that and tonight when the boy and the girl protagonists released a queen from a spell and she immediately wanted to know who had done it, I asked my sons what they would say. I had to help Mario formulate the sentence from beginning to end, but he understood what was happening and knew what he wanted to say. That's good. I can't believe we've almost finished the series. It's taken about two years, but it's been worth it. Although Gabriel once said, "Reading the Chronicles of Narnia is supposed to be a wonderful experience for children, and you're ruining it by making us read them in Spanish." I hope he does not still feel that way.

2006-09-07T18:31:00.000-07:00

A Hectic Day -- Without Spanish
Today we did not practice Spanish at all! This happened because we had so little time together with Gabriel, 11, at his team's soccer practice and Mario, 9, and I had his team's scrimmage. After the scrimmage, Mario and I went to the Ephrata Middle School open house. Gabriel's teacher said he was doing a great job interpreting from English to Spanish for a child that just moved here from Ecuador. "I would love to be able to speak two languages fluently," she said. She asked Mario if he was also completely bilingual and he said, "sort of." The truth is that while Gabriel has an excellent foundation in Spanish from staying home with us and Spanish speaking baby sitters until he was four. Mario, on the other hand, went to an English-speaking preschool when he was two. His Spanish has never been very fluent. Tomorrow we will read and converse, Dios mediante!

2006-09-06T08:24:00.000-07:00

Haner Scores with Soccerhead

When I read Soccerhead, I felt an incredible kinship with Haner, who has basically gone through the same changes I've gone through in the last few years, gradually turning into a "soccerhead." The big difference is that Haner did not mention playing himself. I play all the time -- my over-40 team won the gold medal at the Keystone Games in July, 2006. I wrote this review for topdrawersoccer.com.

Soccerhead: An Accidental Journey into the Heart of the American Game
By Jim Haner
North Point Press $24 275 pages

If Jim Haner had only written about his personal transformation from soccer know-nothing to soccerhead, this book would have been fun and interesting. But Haner had an even better idea. Into an artful account of how he developed a love of soccer over three years of coaching his son’s team, he weaves the for-the-most-part-unknown history of American soccer. For good measure there’s lots of interesting – sometimes biting – analysis of why soccer can be so hard on the typical, offensive-loving, American sports mindset.
Haner, a long-time investigative reporter for The Baltimore Sun, begins the book with the story of how his wife pushed him out the door one night with instructions to attend a meeting for parents of six-year-olds who were going to play soccer. He was a diehard football fan who had never paid much attention to soccer and went reluctantly. Somewhat to his horror, he ends up volunteering to coach and leaves the meeting with a trunk full of cones, soccer balls and other paraphernalia .At first he didn’t have a clue what he was doing, but he began to get more and more interested and found wisdom in unlikely places. The Salvadoran grandfather of one of the children he coaches tutors him on game strategy. He attends classes, and reads books. His son uses a video game to explain rules that Haner does not quite understand.
Little by little, Haner realizes that all he ever talks about and thinks about is soccer. He goes on a quest, to old New Jersey soccer clubs that have been around for a hundred years, to the Soccer Hall of Fame in New York, to whoever can tell him the story of soccer in this country for the last hundred years. The stories he digs up, the old players he interviews, are fascinating and completely belie the conventional wisdom about there being no history of soccer in this country.
Toward the end of the book, Haner’s son is chosen for a travel team and the writer gets a chance to step back and take a broader look at the American youth soccer scene. Like the investigative reporter he is, he takes note of the ugly side of youth soccer, the horrible incidents of coaches abusing children and parents abusing referees. He packs a file full of such stories in his briefcase and heads off to the National Soccer Coaches Association convention in Charlotte, N.C. hoping to get some answers. He regales the reader with tales of convention craziness, and finds some answers to his questions.
Haner recalls how Anson Dorrance, the storied coach of the University of North Carolina soccer team, “sucked the air out of the room” when he told the attendant coaches of children under the age of high school juniors to “just let them play.” The next day Haner tracks down Freddy Adu and asks the young professional his opinion of the “drill versus play dilemma. Adu said, “Just play. I learned by kicking balls of paper around, you know? Anything round, it didn’t matter.”
As the book ends, Haner tries his luck with changing his coaching tactics. No more laps. No more drills. “We did nothing but play games – weird games, some with no nets and some with four, some with two balls and some with ten.” At games, it almost kills him, but Haner tries to stay quieter on the sidelines. He’s a changed coach, and a changed man, but no less of a soccer nut, and no less a patriot. He writes, “When the United States finally wins the World Cup, it will be with Italians and Nigerians in the goal’ Germans and Koreans in the backfield; Jordanians and Indians at the circle; and Brazilians and Latinos up front. For we are the only nation on earth that can possibly figure out how to meld it all together – and we will be attacking, ever advancing, in the name of all that is holy and good.”
Okay, so he goes off the deep end a little bit at the conclusion, but we can cut Haner a little slack. He has written a brilliant book that contains lots of good analysis, great story telling, and more than a little soccer wisdom.

Soccerhead is available at www.amazon.com.