In Between

I’m on a team.

I’ve been on it my whole life.

My parents were on the team.

So were their parents.

And so on.

There wasn’t a day that I said,

“I want to be on the team.”

I just always was.

They even put the jersey on me

when I was a baby.

In front of everyone they said,

“Yeah, we’ll teach him the game.

You’ll see when he gets older.”

The team has a book.

There’s some pretty neat stuff in it.

There’s the stuff about how the team was formed.

You know, who The Big Founder was,

Where the park came from and how it got built,

What the rules are,

How the rivalries came to be,

Who some of the early captains were,

How some of the early teams messed up,

but then got another chance.

There are even some team songs.

We sing some of them after we win,

and some after we lose.

The book says that The Big Founder was really solid,

a visionary, a dreamer,

somebody who could make things happen.

Even made darkness and light

so we could have night games.

It was all pretty straightforward.

People would play in this great park

which had its own supply of refreshments.

There would only be a few necessary rules.

Other than that,

we’d be on our own.

Before long we had gotten into teams.

I think that the B.F. figured we’d get into teams.

That’s one place that the book isn’t too clear.

Maybe we were supposed to be in teams,

maybe we weren’t.

Maybe there was supposed to a team that always won.

Or maybe the book was written by the team that won.

Sometimes I worry about all that stuff,

but most of the time I just go ahead and play the game.

The way the story goes is that

the teams weren’t for helping each other.

They had that beautiful park

but they couldn’t just play.

They had to quarrel, and contend,

and they fought, and people even got killed.

They didn’t think that playing was enough.

Their games got rough,

games like “I’m good because you’re not”

or “I’m in because you’re out”

or “I’m the queen, so you must be a drone.”

Maybe there was nothing the B.F. could do about that.

Maybe the B.F. knew it was all or nothing;

free or determined.

Predictably, the teams all thought they were number one;

that the Big Founder had made the park for them.

There ought to be a way to make people feel special

without making them feel entitled.

You’d think somebody as smart as the B.F. would know that.

Stuff is still happening, even now.

One team says,

“You may think YOU are number one, but your time is up.

You had your moment.”

And then the first team says,

“It’s not like your moment is ever up.

Anyway, who told you YOU were number one?”

“The B.F.”

“We didn’t hear about that.”

“Well, we’re telling you. Time’s up.”

That’s the problem.

It’s a pissing contest.

And like most pissing contests, the math doesn’t work.

There can’t be two winners.

Somebody has to be wrong.

Or they have to be disappeared,

or ditched,

or discredited

or dead.

My team took over at some point.

They said, “The old team did some things right.

We actually like the old team.

They had some really good players.

They said some pretty ’out there’ stuff.

But time’s up.”

The thing that made my team distinctive was the Captain.

My team, the one my parents and grandparents belonged to,

said that the Captain

was top of the line.

He had it right.

He really knew the score.

There would never be another Captain like him.

The problem was that the ’Captain’

didn’t think of himself as a captain.

Only the team did.

They wanted to be Number One.

He just wanted them to be good.

Consistently good.

Radically good.

Childishly good.

He wanted them to be good.

They wanted him to be right.

And they wanted him to be everyone’s captain.

That’s tricky,

because being good takes one set of behaviors,

and being right takes another.

But teams have been good at confusing those things.

Forever.

I’m afraid my team has them confused.

Being good is not the same thing as being right.

Being good means you care about them.

Being right means you care about you.

Being good means they have things we need to hear.

Being right means we don’t need to hear them,

or don’t want to, more likely.

The problem is that being right is more fun.

And it takes less time.

And less energy.

It doesn’t even need facts.

It just needs conviction.

Team mates can really have fun being right.

They can remember the past the same way.

They can imagine a time when the other team still exists

but isn’t strong enough to do anything except put a team on the field.

They can imagine that the B.F. has always been on their side.

The team wasn’t always this way.

Or maybe it was,

but there were always players who wanted things to be different.

Yeah, that’s it.

Some of the team has always wanted to be good rather than right.

But what’s the fun of swimming upstream?

It stinks when the team is winning,

or thinks it is,

and you start complaining about how the team is winning.

“Just shut up,” they seem to say.

“We’re not perfect, but we’re better than them.”

And it hurts to hear them say such things,

except for the place in your heart

that secretly wants to be right too.

The sidelines.

Maybe that’s the place for me.

You can scream your head off

about what you think should happen on the field,

but they don’t have to listen to you.

So, you get to have your say,

and feel good about that,

and they go ahead with their thing.

So it’s not your fault if your team does some bad stuff,

because you weren’t on the field.

There’s no blaming you.

I don’t like what has happened to the team.

And that’s scary because I’m on it.

I could go to management

and make my case about what’s happened to the team,

but they’re too busy with the new logo.

I could go to my team mates

and say that we need to go back to the original park,

and play by the original rules,

but nobody agrees on what they are.

I could go off and look for people

who are also worried about the team,

and see if they want to form a new team.

But that feels disloyal.

I don’t hate the team.

I just don’t know what my place is right now.

I’m in between.

April 11, 2002

© 2002 John Thornburg