Gunnerson Holiday Letter 2011
The year of the Okapi
Welcome to the letter. There are still some good seats down front, so don’t be shy.
In addition to the letter that you are reading, there is an online supplement at http://www.thegunnersons.com with additional information, including a surprising connection between Madonna and Bavaria.
As is true of many high-school seniors, Samantha has spent
a fair amount of time plotting her escape
from her parents holding down the couch shopping for colleges. From
the mound of informational booklets delivered to our house, she came up with the
following regions to consider:
1. Seas of Tranquility and Serenity (the moon)
2. Olde England
3. New England
4. Colorado
The first was eliminated because of a slight propensity for motion sickness, and the second because of the obvious language difficulties (her foreign language is, alas, French). Which left the remaining two. We have visited Colorado, but because my knowledge of New England is limited to fall colors, maple syrup, and random facts about the revolutionary war (the battle of Bunker Hill was actually fought on Breed’s hill, but a pathological inability to correctly use apostrophes led commander William Prescott to instead use “Bunker Hill” in his reports), a fall trip was planned to visit 4 universities:
· Brown, Rhode Island (“Seriously, dude, it’s not an island”)
· Bowdoin, Maine (“The Pine Tree state. Oh, and lobster…”)
· Dartmouth, New Hampshire (“Live free or come view the beautiful foliage”)
· Hamilton, New York (“We’re a City *and* a State!”)
The days were remarkably similar; get up, go to University, sit through an admission presentation, take a tour, get lunch, then drive to the next town. Except for the first day, when we made a quick stop at Lowes to sleep in the parking lot. Not our finest accommodations on the trip (though surprisingly competitive with our hotel in Syracuse), but far better than finding yourself in the emergency room because you fell asleep and drove your rental car off the Massachusetts turnpike.
College visits are a bit perplexing until you determine that they (the colleges, not the tours) have two conflicting goals; they are trying to convince the parents that Spork University is a safe, comfortable, orderly place where their children will spend the vast majority of their time pursing academic excellence, thereby being able to support themselves and allowing their mother to convert their room into a surprisingly accurate recreation of Molly Ringwald’s room in “Pretty in Pink”. While simultaneously convincing the prospective student of the polar opposite; that pursing academic excellence will not get in the way of making lots of friends and having a really, really good time.
Every campus tour includes a trip through the library, during which there is a recitation of the number of volumes in the library and their ability to get “almost any book” on interlibrary loan. It seems like a strange bit of information to focus on (especially in the internet age), but if they spend the time, it must be important to some parents; apparently they’re desperately hoping to avoid having to tell their friends that Suzy was doing great in her pre-med program until her school’s inability to procure a copy of “History of the Conquest of Peru, with a Preliminary View of the Civilizations of the Incas” (Prescott, Harper & Brothers, 1847) resulted in a disappointing grade in her “History of Central America” class, academic probation, and her eventual departure to work as a waitress in Vegas.
The visits were exceedingly useful; we were able to get a feel for the educational philosophy of each of the universities, what student life would be like, what majors they had, and after careful consideration, Samantha’s top choice is the one where the tour was conducted by a super-cute male lacrosse player. Which she claims is purely a coincidence.
We are firm believers in the importance of athletics in helping to shape the lives of young people – not only do they get the benefits of being active adults, they have many opportunities to learn “life lessons” when things don’t go as well as they had hoped. As parents, we try to be content with showing up and watching our offspring participate, cheering any success that they have, and consoling them during times of disappointment.
But sometimes, the unexpected happens, something that our years of rec-league spectatoring had not prepared us for. In this case, a team gets a new coach and starts to play a much better brand of lacrosse than they had in the past. After a successful season, they win their first playoff game easily, and, in a nail-biting triple-overtime contest (honestly, if anybody had the sedation concession at that game, they would have made a killing), win their second game as well, putting them in the finals. And, after two halves of lacrosse and another overtime, Samantha’s team emerged as the Washington State Division II Girl’s Lacrosse Champions for 2011.
Samantha is number 24. See online for more lacrosse pictures.
Mom had a problem. My soccer games were on Sundays.
The year was 1976, and I was a 12-year-old playing club soccer with my friends in Everett, and our games were on Sundays at 1PM. This wasn’t any different than the past four seasons, but it was causing a very specific problem for my mother.
Mom was a football fan. A big football fan. She played fullback on a successful women’s team while she was in college. A couple of bad ankle injuries during that time period meant that she couldn’t do activities that put much load on her ankles, but she could still throw a mean forward pass. If it was a Saturday afternoon in the fall, you could guarantee that the radio would be on, tuned in to the weekly game of her beloved Huskies, or sitting down to watch them on the rare televised game.
Soccer was a bit of a mystery for her, though with her understanding of sports, not as much of a mystery as it was to most of the parents, who hadn’t even heard of the game until 4 years earlier. But she had always supported her kids in sports, and at least it was better than getting up at o-god-thirty in the morning to drive her daughter to swim practice.
1976 brought a problem, in the form of the Seattle Seahawks. They were not a good team; in fact the 1976 Huskies team could likely have beaten them, but they were *football*, and that was enough for her.
And that was the problem. The Seahawks play on Sundays, and my games were also on Sundays. Consumer VCRs didn’t even exist then, not that we could have afforded one if they did exist. And so now I have the iconic picture of the fall soccer games of my youth; me out on the field playing fullback (or perhaps by then we had switched from the football-oriented “fullback” terminology to the more correct “defender”), and my mother on the sideline, watching the game intently while holding a small radio up to her ear, listening to the Seahawks. It was lucky that I was only competing against the Seahawks; if it was my game versus the Huskies on TV, I’m not sure who would have won out.
When she had grandchildren, she attended lots of their games as well, even when her health made it a long slow trip from the car out to the field, though by that time I had bought her a TiVo and she no longer had to try to pay attention to two games at once.
So I’d like to say, “Thanks, mom”, for getting me involved in sports at a young age, and for teaching me enough about sports so that they became interesting. For standing out in rainy weather watching me play countless games of soccer.
And for teaching me to throw a mean forward pass.
Joanne Gunnerson
1933-2011