One for Hope

Our weekends have become busy and look to only get busier for the next handful of weeks.

Perhaps this is why images of Sisyphus trudged about my mind at my daughter’s soccer game this weekend. I sat there on the blanket, corralling the rest of the four-year-old members of the team that my wife was on the field coaching, and I thought about that king of old, schlepping that boulder up that underworld hill over and over again.

We work and work and work and work and work—five days a week of plodding. Then comes the weekend, and we spend the time hustling from one game none of us will remember to the next. In between we pay for mulch to put on top of the old mulch we paid for last year. We clean up only to make more messes to clean up. Then it is back to work, work, work, work, work again, five days a week of plodding. Stone up, stone down. Life in the overworld beginning to have some underworld tones.

And then things got worse. My daughter was being subbed out. She sprinted toward the blanket I was keeping, and it was actually the first time she had run all season. I played college soccer. My wife played college soccer. God saw fit to humble us by bequeathing to us a soccer-less child. For the season, my daughter has smiled and touched the ball the same amount.

And now to promised part where things got worse. Running off the field, as far from the madding crowd as she could get, she collided with a competitor, head to diminutive head. It was the boulder skittering downslope.

She cried as a lump developed on her forehead. I held her as a lump developed on my soul. I felt bad for her; I think, selfishly, I felt worse for me. I guess I just needed a win.

At the end of three minutes, my wife called on the subs again. I knew my daughter would not be among them. Her head was swollen, the rivulets of tears wound down her sweet face. I held her close, yet she began to squirm loose.

I didn’t even have time to ask what was happening—she was jogging, wiping tears, back on to the field.

The other team began to waddle the ball up the sideline. And my daughter—my daughter!—swooped in. She stole the ball—was she concussed? She began dribbling, right foot, then left foot, then right again. Headed the wrong way, she began to arc, turning the ball slowly, finding a lane, then darting the proper direction. Toward glorious goal, the ball, like a stone, pushed along by her dainty blue cleats.

She beat a defender, then another. Then the first one, again. She was loose!

She dashed along approaching the goal, one final defender at her heels, closing the sacred gap.

Then closing it all the way, the defender swung a last ditch foot like an arrow toward the heel of my little Achilles. And connected.

My daughter, so close to goal, sprawled forward.

But before the defeat of her descent, she was able to contort her right foot to the ball and send it bounding and rolling toward goal . . . to goal . . . in goal . . . to net. GOALLLLLLLL!

She crumbled to the ground, but the boulder stayed put. She had scored a goal. A beautiful and glorious goal.

Camus said, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

My daughter’s name is Hope. I can do no better.