y son is a professional football player. This was his rookie year; he was paid. I remember my lover explaining to both of us when Danny was in high school: Amateur comes from the same word as amor. Amator is Latin for lover. The amateur plays for the love of it. I wonder now about professional. To profess. I ask my father about rookie. “ I have no idea,” he says, in a hint of his customary annoyance with my weird interests. So I look it up, read it to him, bent to his trailer hitch on the mid-Oregon coast. “An inexperienced recruit in the army, I exclaim, delighted. “Slang altered from recruit.” As you may detect, as my father and son have had to suffer, I am a lover of words. I am a poet. (Professional: 1978. Walking Mendocino streets, a cold foggy night. The ocean pounds the town. They say Danny has to be a football player. At six-five he's not tall enough to play basketball, the sport he’s best at, the sport he loves. I stop in front of a TV in the window of Mendoza’s Hardware Store. A football game. The Dallas Cowboys. And see it: Professional. Men. Not boys. Paid. No soul. No love. All armor, it seems. That is, no amor.) aniel Clark Doubiago was born September 25, 1960 in Escondido, California. I was nineteen and so large I had begun to expect him in July. The doctor, my husband’s Palomar College football team’s doctor, said August. By the third week of September, I gave up. I accepted the fact that I would always carry this football for a belly. The twenty fourth was a Saturday. George and I, living in my hometown of Ramona, a small desertmountain town in the back country of San Diego County, drove down the long, winding road to the city. We shopped. I bought and chewed Ex-lax. Everyone had said that would bring on labor. In the afternoon we drove up the coast to Oceanside where we fished until sunset with two friends from the Barona Indian reservation. One of them was my first boyfriend, Ramon. Then we drove the long road back up the mountain (the road we would come flying down to the hospital later that night), and went to a Ramona football game in the stadium where I had been, jus t a year before, a th in, bouncy cheerleader. My brother was the quarterback. Ramona, as always in those days, won. Someone in the stands gasped at me, “What are you doing here?” Fishing and football: the great forces of my son’s life. Long distance driving, birth and Indians, the great forces of mine. When he came, he came as an athlete. 34 Clinton St. Quarterly
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz