Dylan Stafford

Yesterday, was a never-done-before: my first high school mountain bike tournament.

With my two sons, I drove 70 miles due east of Los Angeles out into the desert to Lake Perris, a man-made reservoir full of the water that makes life in southern California possible. Spread along the shore were tribes of high school families. We gathered around pop-up shade tents, brightly emblazoned with mascots and logos: Cubs and Toros and Knights. (Our tribe is Cubs, Loyola Cubs) Kids wore team jerseys and parents had supportive t-shirts. Ice chests abounded. Tables overflowed with snacks. Camping chairs unfolded. And everywhere–hanging, propped, being ridden, and lying on the ground–were mountain bikes.

Being a parent is always introducing me to something new.

We had no mountain biking when I was in high school. In east Texas, we had no mountains. Plus mountain bikes hadn’t been invented yet. So this is all new to me.

The scale of SoCal life still shocks me. This tournament included over 1,500 kids from 100 different schools. Coming out of Covid, registration is up. This was the first race of the season, the President’s Day weekend launch.

The atmosphere was family-friendly-festival fun. The public address system played music and periodically announced flights of activities, keeping the day on schedule. Blue ribbon tape with the Shimano logo lined the race course. Taco trucks and coffee stands provided extra food and caffeine. People walked dogs. Strollers were strolled. Kids were everywhere. Grandparents peered out quietly from shaded seats under the tents.

This was my son Jackson’s first race. He’s a freshman. The team formed in the fall semester and he’s been riding training rides on the weekends. This was his first experience. There were four races scheduled: JV 1, Freshmen, Girls, and JV 2. Each race had three sub-categories, northern, central and southern. Each race featured a rolling start, with the peloton following a volunteer parent until everyone was rolling.

Complexity. Organization. Details. Parents volunteering time and talent and energy. Running the event. Bringing all the tents and food and drink and bikes and kids. Volunteerism pulsing in the background to make this day for youth.

“We need marshals,” said the public address system early in the morning, in between songs. “To run the races today, we need twenty marshals along the race route. We cannot begin the races until we have marshals. Please come volunteer. We will have to delay all the races today by 15 minutes as we don’t currently have enough volunteers.”

That sounded serious so I went to volunteer, asking if there was a spot that was not too far away. As I also was responsible for my nine-year old younger son, and I’ve never done this before, could I be a marshal closer by so I could also keep an eye on him? An older volunteer heard my request and swapped locations with me. A marshal I became.

Yellow reflective vest. Bright orange flag on a stick. Cool walkie-talkie. All were given to me along with a ten-minute orientation into marshaling: prevent kids from “cutting” to shorten the race distance; watch for accidents and call them in quickly and provide basic first aid; offer mechanical support if bikes break down; and be eyes and ears out along the 5.2 mile race route.

My new location was “Marshal Point 18” and close to the main gathering area. Christian, my nine-year-old, could run around and enjoy the day and I could keep an eye on him while marshaling. (My wife Marisa wasn’t with me. She is Florida, attending the wedding of her nephew and godson. He and his bride have chosen “Tuesday 2/22/22” for their date.)

My “MP 18” spot was an intersection at a break in the blue tape that traced the race route. Here people could walk through when there were no bikers coming. My job was to stand on one side in my yellow vest with my orange flag and to hold people when the bikers were coming. We didn’t want any collisions.

The ground was sloping up to MP 18. Kids were naturally slowing down as they pedaled uphill. We were just behind the finish line so when the kids got to us, they’d already completed the first 5.2 mile loop. Freshmen rode two loops for a 10.4 mile race and older kids rode more loops.

I had a marshal-buddy across the lane from me. Her son is a senior. This was his first race since breaking his neck last May, not mountain biking exactly, but bike riding with friends and goofing around. He lost mobility for a scary period of time. He had neck surgery and two vertebrae fused together. He recovered mobility and healed and was on the race course again for the first time today. His healing was a miracle in their family. I got goose bumps listening to her, imagining what she’d been through as a parent.

Together, we gated traffic. When the uphill-pedaling kids crossed the finish line, we’d raise our orange flags and stop traffic. The kids came up the hill at varying speeds. Sometimes they were looking up. Sometimes they were head-down, panting and pedaling. We didn’t want crashes. No strollers or dog-walkers or grandparent or little-brother / little-sister collisions. No crashes was our goal and we were successful.

We had breaks and other parents jumped in to relieve us. I had a break and got to watch Jackson’s race. It was exciting and exhausting both. I was tired watching him pedal his best.

I was back on duty at MP 18 for the last race of the day, the JV 2, which included the varsity. The varsity launched first, and would ride four laps. The JV 2s came next, but raced three laps.

1500 kids. Only one of them is your own kid. In this last race, none were my Jackson. No one to cheer for, right?

I’m from Texas. I grew up in Friday night lights in Denison and Saturday afternoons at Kyle Field in Aggieland. I know how to cheer. I wasn’t big enough, nor strong or fast enough, to play football, but I could cheer.

So I started cheering the riders coming by.

“Good job!”

“Doing great!”

“Way to go rider!” (I cheated and copied ‘Way to go rider!’ from some of the seasoned parents. This was apparently a clued-in thing to say.)

“Whoop!”

A ‘Whoop’ is a loud noise we love to make at Aggieland. You find the sweet spot where you have maximum volume but you’re not blowing out your vocal chords. I can whoop all day long.

Because the kids do the rolling start, and because there are three waves, north, central and south, and because the varsity ride four laps while the JV 2 ride three laps, I had no idea who was “in the lead”. So I whooped and cheered for everyone.

The skinny-strong varsity kids in great shape, built and trained for this, came flashing up the hill, determined and looking like they were enjoying the pain. The majority of the kids wore faces marking the exertion, sweaty and serious, like the future adults that all their parents are dreaming they will become, able to shoulder their responsibilities and carry their weight in the world. And then there were the slowest kids. They got cheers too. Even with all the mixing of the north, central and south waves, you could tell some kids were going at a different pace.

A forgotten memory came back to me. I remembered the one time I ran cross-country, my junior year of high school, and I came in dead last at the district track meet, embarrassingly slow as I crossed the finish line. No one really noticed (most of the crowd had probably already left I was so slow) but I was harsh to myself, burying that memory just as soon as I could get off the cross-country team at the end of the semester and forgetting that low-light until decades later, until yesterday.

Yeah Dylan, you can cheer these kids. Maybe you can balance out the universe a tiny bit, pay it forward to a stranger. You got a voice so use it. Maybe it won’t matter. But maybe it will. Look at all the volunteer work that went into this day for these kids. Our head coach doesn’t even have high school kids any longer–they’ve graduated–but he’s still volunteering his time because he loves cycling, and what it can do for kids and adults. You got a yellow vest and an orange flag. Might as well yell! I thought all these thoughts and more. And I cheered and I whooped and I prevented accidents.

1500 kids. Lots of waves of riders, but still, maybe only 1 out of 100 would be a “winner” and stand atop a podium.

We love winners in America. We just finished the Olympics and we report the medal count, especially the gold medal count. We just had a Super Bowl last Sunday. We cheered the winning Los Angeles Rams, and they got a parade in downtown. Fine. Nothing wrong with that.

But parenting. Hum. When do we cheer when parenting? If we cheer too much, our kids don’t believe we mean it. If we hold back and don’t cheer enough, then they think they can never win with us. It’s maddening trying to get the cheering ratio “right” with our own kids.

But other people’s kids? Dressed in logo-laden spandex. Pedaling their best and pacing themselves and knowing they had one, or two, or three more laps left. Uphill. Sweat dripping. Hearts pumping. Hands slippery. Changing gears. Breathing in gulps of dusty-dry desert air.

I’ll cheer for these kids, even though I never met them and don’t know their high schools.

These little humans-in-the-making, every single one of them someone’s beloved, I’ll cheer for them.

What’s a dad’s job?

To give courage. To en-courage. To be there at the increments of growth in my kids’ lives, especially at the breakdowns, to en-courage.

That’s what education can do. It can guide. It can introduce. It can instruct. And it can give courage. It can offer each of us the chance to grow, a little bit more into who we could be, if we stuck with it. If we gave our best for ten of fifteen years and became an adult capable of adulting.

Maybe one of those kids yesterday heard me whooping and cheering. Probably not. Probably I was background noise.

But that’s ok. People cheered for me my entire life that I never heard. Teachers and friends and family in the foreground I heard. But principals and policemen and custodians and groundskeepers in the background, I probably didn’t hear their cheers. But they were all cheering anyway, for me and for all of us. That’s what being an adult means. That’s what we do for youth.

No one wants kids to fail. And all kids need someone cheering in their corner.

Want something fun to do, that will make you feel better?

Find a kid who’s not your own.

And cheer for them.

[It’s still Monday morning of President’s Day weekend. I’m off to do some projects with my sons. Thanks for reading. Please forgive the typos.]

Happy Superbowl-Sunday morning.

It’s 6:13am here in Los Angeles. I have 30 minutes before I take my older boy Jackson to his cycling practice. That’s 30 minutes to pen a prayer of gratitude for yesterday with our younger boy Christian.

It’s time to renew the passports for our two sons. Five years ago, we got them passports so that we could go to Mexico for a language immersion. To get their passports five years ago, we spent a frustrating eight-hour-day waiting in the walk-up line at the post office by the airport, with our then nine-year-old and four-year-old boys. It was a long day.

This time, we knew better, right?

This time, we got organized. Two months ago my wife scheduled an appointment for last Monday at 2:00pm. An appointment! No eight-hour wait for walk-up service. We learned our lesson.

We pulled each boy out of their respective schools early. My wife and I cleared our calendars that afternoon. With our printed appointment confirmation in hand, we walked up to the post office door.

“No Passport Service at This Location” signs greeted us, tattered and taped everywhere.

“Surely that doesn’t apply to us,” I naively thought, “since we have an appointment…”

My wife came back from the window, sober. “They don’t offer that service anymore. The website still schedules appointments, but because of COVID, no one knows how to turn the website off. Our appointment isn’t real. They gave us this other piece of paper with the address of the post office that takes walk-ups. And guess what? It’s the post office by the airport, where we went five years ago.”

Really?

Ok. Surrender to win. We got in the car and drove through afternoon Los Angeles traffic, to the airport post office.

Yes, they take walk ups, Tuesday through Saturday, but they are closed today, Monday.

Reset again. Surrender again.

Fast forward. Saturday morning, the post office opens at 9:00am, so I go early. I get there at 7:30am. Not early enough. That is already too late to get a good spot in the walk-up line.

My wife and sons arrive at 9:00am. We stand outside the post office in a long line next to a chain link fence. We are in the sun. There are no restrooms. No vending machines. We take turns leaving to go get water. And later, to take the boys to the restroom at “El Pollo Loco” down the street. The whole thing is loco!

Our over-scheduled Saturday gets thrown completely off as we realize this is going to talk hours longer than we planned. Jackson misses robotics. My wife Marisa misses her appointment to get a dress altered for a nephew’s wedding in two weeks. I’m in a foul mood, mad at myself for not having remembered the lesson learned five years ago. If I had come to the post office at 6:00am instead of 7:30, I could have been first in line for us, and kept the whole plan for the day in sync.

Nobody can beat me up as good as me.

About noon, we finally go into the building, after three hours standing in the sun. We leave about 1:30pm. Six hours total at the passport service at the post office by the airport. Two hours better than five years ago. Small victory.

Later that afternoon, we all four attended Christian’s YMCA basketball game together. This is the second game of the season. Without all the passport hassle, had things gone “according to plan” then either Marisa or I would have been driving to pick up Jackson from robotics. Had things gone “according to plan” then Christian would have only had one of the three of us to witness his game.

And Christian had a game for the ages.

The game was a 19-17 victory. There was a lead change in the final minute. Parents were going crazy in the middle school gym. Christian scored three baskets, made one free throw, and caused a turnover that kept the other team from tying the game.

In the second half, his coach never took Christian out of the rotation. He stayed on the court the whole second half.

“Everybody BUT Christian!” he yelled at the time outs.

The coach is young, super-animated, very strong and graceful–very charismatic. We are lucky the YMCA has his contributions on the basketball court with our children.

Christian didn’t hear coach correctly at first and started coming off the court.

“No! Everybody But you! Stay out there Christian!” Coach boomed.

Both our sons are miracles, for different reasons.

Jackson, our older son, was a fertility miracle. After all the fancy doctors told us we would never have biological children, my wife’s body conjured up one last egg and we are blessed with Jackson. Marisa’s pregnancy with him was a statistical miracle.

Five years after Jackson, we received Christian through another miracle, the miracle of adoption. He’s our son. 100%. And, he came to us through a different path than our own biology.

We get to be parents to two miracle boys.

Both our boys are gifts. Both our boys are gifts of prayer.

God, if it be Thy will, then thank you in advance for allowing us to be a family.

Yesterday, the plan for the passports was a bust. The schedule for the whole day got thrown off.

And, from that broken plan, came the gift of all of us cheering Christian and being there for him as he gave his best effort. He got to have us all witness his moment, his mom, his dad and his big brother. We all shared about it at dinner that night, each of us recalling different moments from the game. We each got to affirm Christian and share his joy.

We share our victories and they grow larger. We share our burdens and they become more manageable. It works in families. It works in life.

Thank you God. Thank you for the chance to be married. Thank you for the chance to be married happily. Thank you for the chance to be a father. Thank you for the miracle of it all. Thank you for the gift and for the guidance.

[OK. That’s it. 6:47am now. Gotta shower and get Jackson out of bed for cycling. Apologies for typos. Thank you for reading. Happy Superbowl Sunday. –Love, Dylan]

We took our boys for their first time snow skiing today. Two hours into the mountains. Seven hours of skiing. Two hours back to the house. Sitting here now to write. Tired.

Why write?

Because it was a beautiful day, created by my wife, full of magical moments with my boys.

Because I love the mountains and nature and weather.

Because I will forget. If I don’t take these moments to write, the majesty of today will fade. So this time at the keyboard, to say thank you for a day in my life like today.

The top 10 moments:

10. That today even happened at all.

My wife Marisa came up with this idea on Friday of skiing on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on Monday.

9. Getting to do this.

We’ve lived in California 20 years. Yet this is the first time we’ve taken advantage of the ability to ski, 91 miles from our driveway.

8. My son Jackson voting for “no lessons”.

This weekend, when Marisa told the boys about our plan to go ski, and suggested they take lessons, Jackson (14) was quick with a counter-offer: “We’ll watch YouTube videos and you all can teach us. And besides, I have physics on my side. I can calculate the coefficient of gravity…” [Jackson’s taking freshman physics, but his real major is Tik Tok. That’s his information channel.]

Christian (9) was more ambiguous, but when we learned the lessons were sold out, he went along with “mom and dad school”.

7. The energy of going on a trip.

We all woke with the excitement of going on a trip. We fed the dogs and loaded the car and were out the door by 8:22am.

6. No traffic.

5. The fun of getting the boots and the skis and the poles.

The clunky clompy walking and the swishy swishy sounds. Zippers everywhere and too many pockets. Seeing my boys experience it all for the first time.

4. The morning of “lessons” from mom and dad.

Over in the almost-flat practice area. Riding up the moving sidewalk. Gotta start somewhere. Falling. Frustrated. At one point, as I attempted to help Christian up, he ended up pulling me over. Really frustrated. “I don’t like skiing!” “That’s ok. Nobody likes skiing the first day. This is the hardest day you’ll ever have skiing.” How being a parent turns you into a coach.

3. Hamburgers for lunch.

2. The afternoon, the second go at the slopes.

After the hamburgers. The second wind. “Let’s go on the chairlift.” Sitting next to Christian on his first-ever chairlift ride, his body electric as he took it in. Then the quiet as the chair floats up and away. The views. The heights. Seeing it all through his eyes. Then looking behind me at the next chair with Jackson next to Marisa.

1. They skied!

They did it. Each in their capacity, a nine-year old and a fourteen-year old each threw their body down the mountain and into the arms of gravity. For the rest of their life, they may ski a lot, a little, or none at all, but they will never have another first day of skiing.

They were in nature. They were with their parents and each other. They were learning to use their bodies to do something totally new. They were challenged and they fell and they got up. It was raining lightly in the morning. We were all slightly wet in various places with cold spots in our clothes. It was foggy in the afternoon but we made it a day. We had a glorious day and we did it as a family.

Singing in the rain, I’m singing in the rain, What a glorious feeling, I’m happy again.

My good night prayer, Après-ski:

Thank You God for today. Thanks for the chance to be a husband. Thanks for the chance to be a father. Thanks for the snow, for the trees, for the highways that took us there and back again. Thanks for the deepness of my sleep that I anticipate tonight from my tired legs and thankful heart. Thanks for this day we remember Dr. King and his message to dream, to dream of the better world that we can make together.