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My father laughs when I tell him
how in Santa Cruz Verapaz
men quit work at noon, and after lunch,
play soccer until dusk.

My father is a reporter,
follows senators around,
sits in the White House press room;
the president calls him by name.
In thirty years, he has written thousands of stories,
small testaments to the lives of other men.
Before he divorced my mother,
before computers,
he would go afternoons into the den,
sit at his desk
and type deep into the night.
I would fall asleep to the rhythmic thwack of keys,
a bedtime song.
From time to time he complained about working too hard,
spoke of wanting an alternative to twelve-hour days.
In the months after the divorce, when all our lives
seemed to have been sliced open like fruits,
spilling our secret juices,
he saw 'Gandhi' and thought of giving everything,
house and car and savings, to my mother.
And one night, he turned to me
as we sat at a stoplight,
listening to the radio,
and said, 'This is about us, isn't it?'
It was the song about the cat, the cradle, the silver spoon,
the man on the moon.
The car behind us had to honk
before he noticed the light was green.

When I tell my father about soccer,
he follows his laugh with a stern look,
as if to ask me whether I think
kicking off work after half a day
and chasing a ball around a field
is any way a man should spend his life.
I donÕt argue; I never have.
Instead, I remember how I followed Pablo
and his father one afternoon to the stadium,
sat in the concrete stands as the men huddled, picked sides.
I could have played; IÕd been invited.
But soccer had never been my game,
so I watched as the men ran up and down the field,
their shirts off,
their backs lit up by the sun,
and listened to them curse and shout
as I would to a piece of exotic music,
strange sounds from another world.