Dreams...

The clock on my compter says its just a little past 11 at night and in the quiet of my hotel room I see an unvarnished image of myself, lit only by its screen, in the mirror over the desk. My wife is alseep and so I try to type quietly. It may be one of those nights when you get to sleep early in the hopes of rest only to wake up in the small hours of the night with no chance to get back to sleep. We'll see.

I suspect I would still be sleeping if not for the football dream. I have them once in a while and the basic theme revolves around having an opportunity to play once again for my high school football team or wanting to and getting close but somehow something gets in the way. Its like the dream some people have when they're waiting for something or have to get somewhere and find they just can't catch the bus.

The root of it is in my own high school football career and perhaps in high school as a whole kind of archetype for frustration. Football was the sport of my childhood, the sport of my passion. In the weeding out process that comes when kids go from playground to organized ball I was probably destined to be somewhere in the middle of the pack had our family stayed in Wausau and I went to the very large Wausau West High School. But we moved to the small suburb of Mahtomedi, Minnesota in the middle of my eighth grade and I went from small fish in big pond to larger fish in a smaller one. By my sophomore year I was already on the varsity and slated for a back up role and the steady climb through the next two years to something better.

In a scrimmage in the summer of that year I came through the line on a very successful stunt, a play for the defense, and pressuring the quarterback tackled him just as he let go of the ball.In the twist to the ground my left ankle gave way. At first everyone thought it was a sprain and I walked on it for several days but when the pain finally became too much and I had to crawl up the stairs at home I was taken to the doctor and the break became apparent. I remember sitting in the stands the next week with my crutches and cast and crying while the game went on below.

Nothing was the same after that. I did make it back that year but by then the tide had already turned. It wasn't like it is now in high school with doctors and trainers and all kinds of people to help rehabilitate things.Back then when you were out of sight you became out of mind and only a miracle could change anything. By next year I had been relegated to a kind of nowhere hell that was the lot of those who came out for football and truly had no chance but were allowed by the coach to suit up anyway. We called it the "burger squad" the place where teenage boys first learned what it was like to be a human tackling dummy for their superiors on the starting team. I couldn't run fast enough, hit hard enough, or do anything to get noticed and escape. In the middle of my junior year there was a dance, there was Southern Comfort and nothing to lose so football ended and for all extents and purpose so did high school.

The next years were things to be endured, a perpetual sense of being dislocated from everything, of never fitting in, with the only the band room piano to help me through the most terrifying hour of all, the lunch hour when you have no one with which to sit. And everyone once in a while those times reach out over the years and touch me when I sleep, a dream where I realize I still have eligibility to play but something, a shoe that can't be tied, the absence of a helmet, or like tonight the discovery that practice was already well underway and I was stuck watching from the fence outside the field, always got in the way.

Perhaps somewhere in the recesses of my life there is still a sadness for those lost days that has never been completely mourned. Perhaps it is only in dreams that this long ago pain is able to emerge and seek release as I sleep and my guard is down. Or maybe there is something in my life at this very time which is incomplete and the best way my soul can tell me is by drawing on the images of the time in my life when I felt the most unrealized.

Its now almost midnight here in LaCrosse and in less time than I think the sun will have emerged and the day will begin. Duty calls, the things I must do. How strange it is that a grown man, a man whos tired eyes and emerging wrinkles stare back from the mirror over the hotel room desk with the eerie glow of computer light, would be touched again by the ghost of those years. Stranger yet is the continuing mystery of what it all means, the secret codex in my soul that calls these things back from some deep part of me in the hope that one day the cause will be discovered and the dream will need return no more.