EnCOURAGEment

All right, enough for a minute with the pandemic and people cutting the vaccine lines and the cratered economy and the arguments over school reopening and insurrections and disputed elections and unsolicited corrections.

Please take a minute to hear about something that will cheer you up, if you have any heart and soul at all (and I know you do or you would be reading the stock market page).

A young mom wrote on our neighborhood Facebook page the other day about her 8-year old son. They live near the Villa Cresta Elementary School and like to take walks down there.

The other day, her son saw some older guys, maybe 12-16 yoa, playing football on the field. So her boy asked if he could join the fun.

As the mom wrote, she talks to her son about finding age-appropriate friends and activities, but with the 'Rona keeping everyone housebound, it's not so easy to find, make, and keep new friends. Like 99% of us, he misses peer interaction.

So even though she was nervous that the older guys might ignore him or even make fun of him for being smaller and quiet and not all that experienced at football, she must have trusted the winds to which she threw caution, and let him go play.

I'll steal her description here, because no one but a proud, happy, and relieved mom could say it like this: 

At first he was lurking, not playing much, just darting around in the back of the group. After some time the boys split into 2 huddles and I saw one of them give my son the ball. The boys blocked (for) him and shouted: “let him take it” as my kid ran, still in an awkward darting motion, and made a touch down! 

He felt SO amazing, receiving high fives, and had no clue it was a set up. 

Happy little story for our neighbors tonight and if you had a kid out there today, job well done, thanks.

Is there anyone who can't put themselves in the shoes of that little guy right now, and remember how great it must have felt when the bigger kids let you shine?

Years ago, Bob Greene, a columnist in Chicago, wrote about a woman who had come to California as a college student from her native Japan. Getting used to an entirely new world and doing so in her second language was tough, and then she found herself in a coed exercise class, playing volleyball - a game she had never heard of. At first, she tried doing what volleyball takes - serving, returning, volleying, and found herself embarrassed by being so maladroit. She was about to quit and give up - give up the exercise class, her tuition at an American university, on living in America altogether.

And then a friendly guy in her class, whom she didn't know from a sack of laundry, took her aside and encouraged her with four words: "You can do this!"

In the Hallmark movie, she went back on that court, became an All-American in college volleyball, and proudly represented her homeland in the next Olympics. But life is not Hallmark, and probably shouldn't be. In real life, the woman went back on the court, did her best, and found she was good enough. 

She carried the same attitude with her in her other classes, and as I recall, finished her university courses with excellence and was working in her chosen field when she recounted to Greene the four words that changed her life.

And sometimes, like on the field at Villa Cresta the other afternoon, it wasn't so much someone coming out and telling that little fella "You can do it," as much as it was the guys letting him do it, so he could find out how good it felt.

I try to encourage younger people every chance I get, and that's quite easy, because pretty much everyone but Betty White and Dick Van Dyke is younger than I.

You can do it!