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By Root 254 0

and I didn’t like getting hit. I was a wide receiver and I caught one pass the whole season (a screen play). I preferred the backyard style of game played with the neighborhood kids or, later on, with Matt and his friends, who were all older and much bigger than me. I’d tag along each Saturday to Underwood Park. One of Matt’s friends was the older brother of a short, stocky girl named Jane who was trying to get permission to play on the high school football team. She’d play with us sometimes and she was really good, not afraid to hit and be hit (we played tackle). But one week she ran into the pole that marked the back of one of the end zones. It knocked her out and she stopped coming around after that.

My size worked to my advantage with these guys. I was speedy and elusive, the guy you’d have to watch out for on the “long bomb” route. Or I’d catch short passes and run out of bounds before I could get clobbered.

Hostages

One morning in early 1981, I was at my friend Brian’s house, where I had spent the night. His family had lived just down the street from mine but was now in a much bigger house in an area where a lot of new houses were being built. Brian was a year younger than me but he always played football with Matt and me and the other neighborhood kids. He had a good arm and I always thought he’d be a star quarterback.

We were in his front yard, playing catch, when his mom came out and excitedly told us that the American hostages in Iran were going to be set free. Although I didn’t understand the situations behind the hostage crisis, it was something that I thought about for a lot of that year when it was happening. As in: What would I do if I were held hostage for 444 days? It was a hypothetical source of worry and paranoia for me. I was starting to doubt America’s power.

Brian must have been asking himself those same hypothetical questions, because we looked at each other and I could tell he was as relieved as me. We started jumping around and whooping it up. We dashed into the wide new streets of the housing development and ran along them, up and down the paved hills, shouting, “The hostages are free! The hostages are free! The hostages are free!”

CCD

From sixth to eigth grade, Dad made me go to a Wednesday-night Catholic Bible study thing called CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine). It was held in a building behind the church. I have very little recollection of it, because I constantly skipped it. Instead, I would hang out at the bowling alley next door for an hour, playing video games. I was obsessed with these new machines, my favorites being Space Invaders, Battlezone, and Pac-Man. I even bought the books that showed you different play patterns to use. I prided myself on making up my own strategies though, and I was really good, topping the high score and creating calluses on my thumb at the same time.

Dad never found out that I was skipping so much. I did go to the class just enough to earn a certificate. It said I was a confirmed Catholic.

Protestant

I went to a friend’s church with him when I was sixteen. It was much more exciting than the dull Catholic church that Dad and I went to. I told Dad I was thinking about switching churches, not realizing it would be a big deal.

He was not happy about this. Mark had gone to Mass with him before, when I was a baby, but somehow was able to get out of it eventually. I was the only family member who went to Mass with him. I used to wonder why Mom didn’t go either, but Dad explained to me once, with a dismissive wave of his hand, that she wasn’t religious. He thought I was having a spiritual crisis and made an appointment for me to see the priest, to have a talk with him at the church offices.

Dad explained to me that the church I wanted to go to was a Protestant church and that the word Protestant came from protest. “The Protestant Church is for people who protest the Catholic Church,” he explained. “The Catholic Church is the original faith and Protestants were the people who left the Church.”

The priest chided me lightly with