Dear Santa,

The countdown is on. Only a week left until you kiss the wife and board the sleigh. Do you feel harried, like we do?

My guess is no. 

All my teams got the iceberg talk.  We had a paper handout -- clearly before digitization – that we passed out for our players to put in their notebooks on Day One. An enormous floating glacier shelf provided palpable fodder for an important conversation with our team about what the outside world sees and what it doesn’t. The players the media doesn’t feature, the traits that must support the skill sets, the stuff most would call mundane—we had to understand how much it mattered, regardless of the attention it did or did not garner. Though we marvel at the shiny, frozen chunks that proudly poke out above the water, ninety percent of an iceberg’s mass lies below the surface.

“Once-shattered confidence re-breaks easily in familiar places.”  I just entered that in my phone. I said it to a friend this morning while discussing his team’s painful plight in a contest that reflected the worst of them. The sentence, sitting on the shards of a lopsided loss, has a story I can touch. It illuminates and helps us both to find a why-now-how that grounds us. Roots stretch out in all directions around the words. Maybe they still will in a month. Maybe they still will in a year. But then again, maybe they won’t. Most likely when I return to find this sentence under a random “Thoughts” heading on my iPhone, I won’t see the thinking that came before and after. The sentence will float as an alien object disconnected from the shaky ground that bore it. The tenderness will be gone.

A friend of mine once drove from Los Angeles to Yonkers in a flight of panic. Straight through. No pause to see a landmark. No stop to collect two hundred dollars.  No foray to a diner he’d heard about in the news. He just jumped in his car and drove.

We had a robust Japanese Maple just out and to the left of our back door. The breathtaking cultivar started out small but grew crazy over the years, eventually peeking above the roofline and reaching all the way across the flagstone sidewalk it lived beside. I could never bring myself to cut it back. Its branches stretched up and out in haphazard fashion but its foliage, even on the low branches that hovered inches above the ground, turned so brilliant in autumn my heart wouldn’t let me give it a trim. Its leaves would morph from their everyday green (a color you can grow numb to if not careful) to arresting glow-in-the-dark orange when the temperatures started to drop. In the days when dark begins to descend early, the specimen stood like a lantern marking the spot where the pathway turned.

Reposting a thought line that seems fitting for such a time as this . . .

My dad once ran for school board in the small rural town where I grew up. There was some fuss about our superintendent-- best I remember-- though specific fuss about what I’m no longer sure. (If indeed I ever was.) I just remember people being wound up. Almost everyone in the 14 square miles of our oil-field community had pledged allegiance to an opinion and thus had chosen a side. Our tiny town was as fractured as an oil-and-gas pay zone after the drilling is done.

And my dad--of all people--was vying for a chance to enter the fray.

I’m a trier. If you peeled away the flesh and dug inside my bones, you’d find a never-resting, fluttering chaotic mess of WANT-TOs, HAVE-TOs, and NEED-TOs balled up around themselves. For all the things I’m not (and there are many), and all the things I am (though there are several that I wish I weren’t), this one thing they could carve upon my tombstone: “A striver is resting here.” It would be, at once, both gloriously and painfully true.

“Get off the stage, Cash, get off the stage,” Johnny used to say. The country-music legend, known for his growly delivery of born-from-real-life lyrics, found the line between “fairly average” and “truly one-of-a-kind” a razor thin tripwire. In the early 1990s, music producer Rick Rubin began recording Cash singing and strumming in Rubin’s living room. As he asked the musical storyteller to play the songs of his life, Rubin found himself mesmerized by the intimate connectivity of the lyrics pulsing through the man. After a while, the two decided that the informal sessions of self-expression would make an enduring album, so they set up to record. As soon as the light turned red, however, Rubin noticed a change in Cash. The iconic balladeer began performing instead of musically telling his truth.

Part of his heart was missing. 

Aspen trees bow at the base. Almost every single trunk, whether small enough to make a fist around or way too big to encircle even with two fully outstretched hands, has a curve in its trunk that reveals its try. It’s hard to find one of these iconic white main stems that is chopstick straight from the ground to the clouds. And yet, when looked at from a distance, Aspens appear as if a plumb line has been used to plot their path.

Most of us leave an ant trail. We take the same route to work and then back home again...  day after day after day. We have a spot where we grab a coffee, a market where we shop for food, a pew we sit on at church. We have a handful of restaurants where we like to eat, a place where we prefer to get gas, a corner where we buy ice cream. You could jab the spike of a compass at our home address and stretch the pencil arm to trace an arc that delineates the territory where we roam. Occasionally we venture out, but mostly this is where we “live.”  In cities of 100,000... 500,000... 2.5 million, we hang out in our own zones. Most of the houses we pass by look a lot like ours. Most of the cars in the drive-thru where we order our burgers and fries look a lot like ours. It’s like the weather in San Diego: every season is the same.

Sometimes things have to get worse before they can have a chance to get better. Ask anyone going through a home remodel, or chemotherapy, or the reinvention of a golf swing. What’s not great goes to awful enroute to pretty good. And mostly, we accept the detour the same way we accept flying from Oklahoma City to Dallas to get to Minnesota. We do what we need to do to get to where we want to be. Even though it usually takes much longer than we think it should.

We had a reverse sleepover last week, my granddaughter and me. Reverse as in, I pack my toothbrush and go to her turf. We play on her swing, with her toys, in her room with the purple wall (“GG, I love purple, do you love purple?”) and the trundle bed with dinosaur sheets that slides out for sleeping two. 

Despite all that’s crooked and upside-down across the landscape of collegiate sports, Saturdays in the fall are still for football. I love the precision and near perfection of  teams that line up on Sunday, but there’s something about the next-in-lines who take the field the day before that I’m drawn to even more.

Every woman wants to know. Many men, maybe, too. But we don’t hear them asking nearly as much. Not all urgent, anyway, like we do. We pose the question to one another, to the “gurus,” to the Universe at large, our honest yearning squirting out unselfconsciously because we need to know:  How do you balance it all? 

My granddaughter tells me hot and cold are opposites. “Large and small are opposites,” she says, popping the Ps so that each of the three syllables of the word pack an equal punch. “Light and dark are opposites. Fast and slow are opposites. . . .” She can go for days. Her three-year-old brain is creating buckets for where to put things, most of which are cut and dried.

My husband was born in Kansas, but he moved to Wyoming a couple of years before he started school. He was the middle child of schoolteacher parents, so he began kindergarten with one foot already on third base.  What he hadn’t been taught, he’d overheard, and what he hadn’t actually done, he’d watched.  So, no one really should have been surprised at his response when early into semester one of organized schooling, his teacher asked the class to name the four seasons.  A simple question to which he supplied an obvious answer: “Duck, Quail, Pheasant, and Deer.”  One really ought to be more specific if wanting to talk to Dane Coale about temperature and trees. 

Sitting on a park bench in Sausalito looking out into the bay, I couldn’t help but overhear. About ten yards to my left, a lady dressed in Lululemon, white Asics sneakers with arcing pink stripes on the sides, and a ball cap with her ponytail poking through the hole in the back had claimed a seat like mine with a view. She was feverishly talking on her phone.

"Actually, nobody owes you crap." That's what the bumper sticker on the otherwise nondescript Geo Prism at the stoplight in front of me said. I laughed out loud when I read it. Then I started chasing rabbits while waiting for the light to turn to green.

We’re on the bumpy asphalt behind the school building and I am in third grade. Some kids are swinging, some are climbing on the monkey bars, the broody ones are sitting next to the red brick building scowling because they have to be outside in the heat. My friends and I are jumping rope.

“What’s the best piece of coaching advice,” a young wanna-be recently asked me, “you received early in your career?”

“Stand and clap - no matter what - during the play-offs.”

I don’t know if that’s the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given or if it’s simply the one that elbowed its way to the front of my mind, into my throat and past my lips, but it’s been living in my head for over 30 years.