I read in this morning's sports page that the three UCLA basketball players arrested for shoplifting will remain behind in Hangzhou while the rest of the team returns to America to start their season.
"That serves them right, the idiots," my wife says. I say, "Isn't shoplifting some kind of rite of passage for boys?" "Yeah, but most do it when they're twelve, not eighteen and in college," my wife says, adding, "they stole Louis Vuitton sunglasses, not Playboy Magazines."
One of the young men is DiAngelo Ball, the brother of Lonzo Ball, the NBA Lakers' first round draft choice heralded to be the next Magic Johnson (never happen) and son of the kookiest sports dad since the father of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. What motivates fathers (and mothers) to insert themselves so strongly and negatively into the lives of their children? The easy answer is ego and a desire for fame that they, otherwise, believed they deserved in their own lives. The hard answer runs something like this: mental illness.
In the summer before my son Matthew, who was on his eighth grade basketball team, entered high school, he came to me and said,"Dad, in high school, the band and the basketball team practises at the same time, would you be terribly disappointed?" Matt went on to play music and for a while after college had a Hip Hop band named OPM that toured Europe and for six weeks was Top of the Pops in England. Although he no longer has the band, Matt still writes and publishes songs. I wonder if the Ball kids ever had a chance to make their own choices. And what does that do to their personalities, that their lives were determined for them?
Meschery's Trump Watch: Since Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20, 2017 at 9 AM, it is 295 days, 23 hrs, 49 min,and 33 sec and counting. On today's Internet, there was a quote by the North Korean dictator calling Trump an old man. Trump replied by Twitter (of course)."I wouldn't call him short and fat." For 25 years I was a high school teacher, and I recognize two adolescents bad mouthing each other in the hall as their classmates egg them on. Aren't we lucky to have a president who at 71 acts like a sixteen year old?
As our adolescent president threatens nuclear war, here is one of the greatest anti-war poems I've ever read.
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio by James Wright
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like stared pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.
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