This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

Fulham v Birmingham City. Saturday 03-May-2008 3:00 pm.

Riverside Stand. Block X Row 2 Seat 11.

I’m a little lost for words. But not tears. It was unexpected. But taking my seat in the second row 20 yards up the sideline, the crowd singing and smacking their Clap Banners, I kind of lost it, a boy welcomed to the bosom of the mother he never met.

I’ve had the feeling before. A publicity event for Steinway and Sons’ newest piece de resistance, a one-of-a-kind instrument they’re calling the Grand Concert Piano, designed by Dakota Jackson, was held at Paula Cooper Gallery in far west Chelsea in New York city. It’s one of those amazing spaces you’d never think exists behind the warehouse exterior: soaring beamed ceilings and skylights, as if a Vermont barn had been dropped behind an industrial, Hollywood set façade. Now, I like pianos as much as the next guy, probably even a little bit more, though in my hands its little more than a toy for Tom Hanks to dance upon, but the wooden wenge wonder was not why I decided to attend.

Jazz pianist Jason Moran was there to play a few songs on the modern musical apex of engineering and art which held the blank gallery canvas as the sole installation, except for the understated picnic chairs for the fifty or so guests. A few glasses of Veuve Clicquot continued what was a beautiful spring day in Manhattan. Jason came over to say hello while my head was buried in a text message. We chatted about the piano, the European tour he would return to the next day, and the Thelonious Monk project, In My Mind, that he was working on. We talked about the passing of pianist Andrew Hill, who was one of Jason’s teachers. He passed away some weeks before the event. We shared some memories of Hill’s playing, some of his recent, and now last, performances that we had the pleasure to witness. I’ve come to be an acquaintance with Jason over the last year, attending most of his performances long before I received a personal introduction through his publicist at Blue Note Records, whom I have a working relationship with. No bets being taken on who was the initiator there.

Jason means a lot to me, as all of my favorites artists… no, favorite friends have, be it Gil Scott-Heron or Barry Lopez or some of you reading this. Jason holds a special place not only because of what he offers, but what that gift represents, subjectively, to me, in regards to all that I can’t understand, not the least of which is how Jason plays the piano or how any of you put up with me. As with so many things in life, there is no real getting at why certain people, places, or things affect you.

There’s no satisfactory vocal explanation for that feeling I got in a U-haul truck, driving the New Jersey Turnpike for the first time in my life en route to my freshman year in college in a faraway place with one of my high school friends as Paul Simon sang from a cassette tape amplified by a battery-powered boom box - (the truck was only equipped with FM radio) - a line I’ve heard him sing more than a million times before then:

They’ve all gone to look for America

I broke down. I am breaking down. And there is nothing to do but talk around it.

I can’t explain how I felt the first time I entered Yosemite Valley no matter my knowledge of glaciers. I can’t tell you how good it felt, those countless games of dominoes on my friend Odiaka’s front stoop in North Oakland as we happily drowned away a fine day - the kind that only occur in the Bay Area - with Tequila, Outkast, and War’s All Day Music. I can not explain, not the instant after it happened, how I felt in an auditorium at the University of Georgia in 1998 as author Barry Lopez told a story about his home in Oregon.

A bear, Lopez recounted from behind his own grizzled beard, had a habit of inspecting his trash and recycling bins. Day after day the bear would come, fail to open the containers, lose interest and be on his peaceful way. Leaving, the bear always headed in the same direction. Home, Lopez assumed. The lighthearted story about the illustrious nature writer and his battle of wits with the neighborhood bear seemed enough for the academic crowd which on that occasion probably had a few more sandals in the room. But Lopez continued, getting to his point. The bear always went the same way home, away from the nearby road and up a hillside. Lopez paused as if considering the moment when he initially made up his mind. Stretching the anecdote into metaphor but without removing reality, Lopez proposed that should the bear choose to go the other way, down the road, toward town, essentially giving up, giving in to the encroaching mass of sealed containers, he too, Lopez, would follow.

I broke down. I am breaking down. And there is nothing to do but talk around it.

I could try. I would fail. I could do what I did in my teen years: quote a song to tell a girl how I feel instead of just saying it. How lame is that? But sometimes you can’t. I think we all understand that sometimes, though we react in different ways. Some of us need candle-lit vigils or monuments to put an intangible into some sort of earthly context. That’s where I might quote James Taylor to replace my inadequacies:

There’s a song that they sing when they take to the highway / A song that they sing when they take to the sea / A song that they sing of their home in the sky / Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep / But singing works just fine for me

Writing works just fine for me.

Jason and I were interrupted as often is the case when mingling is the unspoken rule, and we took to different conversations with different people. Soon Dakota Jackson introduced his work of art and how pleased he was to have Jason be the first to use it to communicate his own. Jason played my favorite song of his, maybe my favorite song ever. It’s climbing the charts, ‘gentle shifts south’ from his album Modernistic of solo work. It’s an eerie ballad that evokes a feeling within me that allows whatever transpired before it to move away, like a lazy river meandering out of sight to the East, the rising sun taking its place.

Jason opened the short set with another song before moving silently into ‘gentle shifts south,’ after which he spoke momentarily about what the song meant to him. It’s something I’m surprised I’ve never asked him, maybe partly because I didn’t want his truths to spoil what may have been my misplaced understanding. He said something to the effect that the song was about moving, going somewhere, generations. He said he chose to play the song tonight because in the last few weeks he had lost two close friends, one of which was Andrew Hill. He told the crowd that Dakota Jackson had just lost his mother.

I broke down. I am breaking down. And there is nothing to do but talk around it.

That’s how I felt at Fulham v Birmingham City. Saturday 03-May-2008 3:00 pm. Riverside Stand. Block X Row 2 Seat 11.

I will never forget it.

This is what it looked like…

walking across the Putney Bridge and along the Thames to Craven Cottage

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

halftime

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

—-

that’s one striker and one left midfielder tracking the opponent back to the endline corner. just saying.

—-

—-

—-