Daddy is a football Coach...

The thing about a town like Stratford is, if people know you, then well they know you and that's not to say they really truly know you, but they know your name. Sometimes its just your family name and other times its more than that but I'm not talking about friends here. This is about the village inside the town. The people that watch you when your parents aren't there, the people that taunt you when your siblings can't and the people that have your back even when you don't know it. As I get older I gain a respect for the village inside the town that I've been trying to escape since birth. At the same time it's that same village mentality, that hypocratic bullshit that in some ways fuels my desire to get the fuck out.

I grew up in a home where football was life and the rest was just details. As I get older I learn knew things about how this shaped me as a person. The reality i know now is that it was much more than football and much more than life. Growing up in my family we were told the kids my father coached were our brothers. Some of them we got to know and some of them not so much. They were our babysitters, our siblings, once in a while a friend and occasionally that dick that told us how tough our dad was. Honestly, as a kid I hated football and hated those kids. At the time they got more of my Dad than I did. As an adult I realize things weren't what they seemed and maybe, just maybe they needed him just as much as I did.

My father doesn't coach anymore and I'm over that teenage anger, but that village mentality still lives in some half assed way in this silly town where everything and nothing change all at once. As a kid I wanted nothing more than to have my Dad to myself. As this whole adulthood thing kicks in I want the village to step up. Not a month goes by where I don't run into one of my fathers football players somewhere in this town. Not once in recent years have they not told me how great my Dad is, or asked me how he's doin. The thing is talk is cheap, free in fact and it gets old. Generally,I have a stock answer for these conversations ~ Go see him, tell him yourself. I'm aware people grow up get lives and move on but if even half of everyone who gives me this "How's your mom and Dad, hows Coach?" Bullshit, took an hour, one day a year to go visit the man that honestly worried about your grades, your well being and your future, maybe I wouldn't be such a bitch everytime someone said it. The difference between the teachers, coaches and influences we remember and have love for as adults and the ones we don't is that the ones we remember and wonder about are the same ones that wonder and remember us 10, 20, 30 years later.

I'm no longer afraid these villagers, football players or otherwise are going to tell my family I was smokin a cigerette, out late partyin or anything else a kid might worry about. What scares me is that someday, the kids I may (or may not) have, won't have that village to look after them. Granted, the whole village isn't made up of football players. They're just the group that pissed me off today. Mostly my point is if someone influenced you, helped you, gave a fuck about you, don't just ask other people how they're doin, find out for yourself. Don't go telling everyone but them how they made a difference in your life, tell them. The losses of the last few years have taught me that much atleast...