“They also serve who only stand and wait.” – John Milton, “Oh His Blindness,” 1673

The most difficult sport – the most dangerous sport – I ever did not play was college football. Preceded by high school football. Preceded by football played surreptitiously (in untended overgrown fields, after dark, out of parental sight-range) by still-child-size uncoached boys without helmets, mouthguards, pads, cleats, or fear of anything beyond wimping-out. Or being discovered by a mother. Not only one’s own mother – but any mother who might spread the alarm to the vast adult sorority of mothers.

I did not play … because, of course, as a girl I could not play. But I watched closely.

There was a real ball covered in what felt like a cross between plastic and boyskin when, once, I picked it up after play. There was an inventively utilitarian sense of yardlines and endzones. Boys bickered briefly over inches and minor faux pas, but – lacking coach, referee, or an excuse to miss dinner – and beset, eventually, by darkening skies, they developed unique scrambles of new/old “rules” that varied by time of day, state of play, and the biggest kids’ pronouncements.

Don’t misunderstand: I was relieved to be a girl. And anyway, I was the last kid chosen for any game, let alone any sport. I could swim – a little – after my father rented a 3-room lake cottage one summer, tied a rope around my waist, and dangled me from the rickety dock while I flailed my short limbs in desperate emulation of the “dog-paddle.” But no school or local playground had a pool.

I learned to actually paddle one summer, when my friend Judy’s parents rented a pier-space with canoe. There was no lake in my city backyard, of course, and canoeing seemed eerily foreign at first. “Indians” did it, and my friends and I knew no Indians. (I thought they lived in India, where there must be a lot of water.) But I did finally paddle awkwardly, obstructed by the huge orange puff-jacket that my mother made me wear lest the canoe capsize – though she never explained what I should then do next. Evidently, there was no plan.

Years passed, I became a parent myself, and each of my two sons – so tiny and helpless in memory – so cute, tousle-haired, and dependent in album snapshots – grew to what struck my motherly eyes as enormous dimensions. Everyone admired them, and men I knew assured me that they would grow into “monster” football players on real teams in college, and maybe even the NFL. Men seemed to think that would be good.

In time, I would think so too. I cannot touch the exact moment when this revelation struck, but it may have been when one son’s high school team was sinking fast – short passes, fumbled catches, adolescent bursts of temper. I gulped, foreseeing the sweaty silent sulk in the back seat while I drove home. What does a mother say? “Nice try”? I was considering this when suddenly there was a bellow from far up in the stands: “Bring on the MEAT! Coach, BRING ON THE MEAT!”

Burgers? I wondered. NOW? I wondered? Puzzling until, moments later, a very big, very fierce, very fast image of terror – unrecognizable in pads and helmet – rushed onto the field. The MEAT. And everything changed. Every player on our team burst into action – became faster, surer, angrier, tougher – and ultimately, together, won the game. But the real win had come earlier, when they determined – unanimously it seemed, though without signals I could detect – to win together or risk death trying.

And yes – the leader, the hero – who saved the game, the day, and the kids’ beliefs in themselves and one another, indeed in the concept of team – was my son. The meat.

But, of course, he was not “meat,” but a boy who would grow into a man. On tougher “teams,” with higher stakes – and me, alone, waiting in the shadows of a place without bleachers, coaches, shouting, youth … a serious place without second chances.

Vaguely, I knew that – or perhaps only sensed it as I rose with the crowd, brandished both fists, and shouted a phrase as meaningful in the Moment as it would be meaningless in the Everyday Future. And below me, on the field, boys still bursting with youth which belonged to neither yesterday nor a far tomorrow.

But for now it was over: Victory seized in a moment exploding outside of time – a moment soon to be buried (but not entirely forgotten, after all) in piles of limp sandwiches, melting Milky Ways, cellophane chip-bags rattling under the rough invasion of sweaty hands. But now – now – they were kids, eternal boys suffused with glory which belonged to neither yesterday nor tomorrow. And – leaping, exploding, right along with them were their parents, grandparents, godparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings via memory and younger siblings with dreams of glory.

Tousled, tearful and tired, but still mom-conditioned, I began shifting around to retrieve programs, snack-wrappers, wadded papers, and other detritus that victory leaves in its wake. Where were the trash barrels? I was wondering when my glance grazed a person I almost knew. No … did know. It was a mother and son – at least, I assumed so – who had moved that fall, as we had, onto a block of row-houses rented by the college to new-college-staff-families still in search of living space. We had never spoken.

As I began to form a smile, she pushed forward, the boy following in her wake alone head-down, and they were gone – their exit obscured by everyone else’s chatter, laughter, elation.

That her son had begged to attend the game, that she had agreed on condition that she accompany him, that they would sit side-by-side in the most remote bleacher section, away from the uncouth rough motherless boys – was the only imaginable explanation of their presence that day.

Did they ever return, mother and son? I never missed a game, yet I never saw them again.

But did he perhaps declare himself one day? Don a blue-and-white mock-team-shirt, stuff its shoulders with rolled hand-towels – and blend/absorb/at last disappear into a sweaty simulacrum of The Jock? Was it suddenly all too much for him – the acquiescence, the denial of yearning? And if it was, would we have known him – or would we have turned in puzzlement to one another: caps reversed, brows knit, greasy junk food bulging our cheeks, to deface our trite team-colored unity?

Did he ever – on one afternoon, just one time – find the courage to break into authentic boyness?

If he did … we missed it.

***

Mary Biggs is a retired English professor, and has published numerous short stories, essays and articles, and a book on contemporary American poetry. Mary has also served as an editor and consultant on several literary magazines and a legendary small press, The Spirit That Moves Us, for which she co-edited two collections of new fiction and poetry.