A simpler rivalry in a world ‘gone off ’
Earlier this month, my sons, Didi and Gege, raced around on their scooters at Stanford University, shouting with glee as they careened on the smooth walkways around the Quad. It was about a week before the choking haze of the Camp Fire would descend. On that perfect autumn day, the golden hour highlighted the Ultimate Frisbee players cavorting on the grassy Oval, the tile and sandstone arches, and the mural on Memorial Church, where my husband and I married.
The boys zoomed by the entrance to the church and kept going, while we continued on our walk down memory lane, marveling at what remained exactly the same and what had changed: the bike traffic circles; the stunning Anderson Collection of contemporary art; and dumpy Meyer Library, demolished in 2015 and transformed into a park.
We sounded just like the alumni who used to poke their heads into my dorm room for a look at where they’d once lived.
The boys also climbed, parkour-style, all over Andy Goldsworthy’s “Stone River”— a 320-foot-long, 128-ton sculpture made of salvaged sandstone from buildings leveled in the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes. Gege and Didi are fans of the show “American Ninja Warrior” and its new “junior” spin-off — with contestants ages 9 to 14 — and have been taking classes in the art of running, leaping and clambering that they could practice on this serpentine outdoor art.
The sculpture is “about the flow,” Goldsworthy told a campus publication. “There’s a sense of movement in the material, through the individual stones, so you just see this line ... to try and understand time fully, I also have to try and deal with the future. Not to control it, but to make works that will have a life in the future. If you had to describe my work in one word, it would be ‘time.’ ”
Raising kids also makes you think about the passage of time and of the future. A children’s book illustrator told me that not a day goes by when she’s not having a conversation about the end of the world, especially as wildfires rage and mass shootings happen with devastating regularity. Other friends who are considering whether to start a family wonder if they should, given the environmental destruction the planet appears to be sliding into within the next two decades.
“What’s the apocalypse?” Didi asked, after overhearing a conversation with my husband.
I hesitated. “The ... end of the world,” I said, and he didn’t probe further. And yet, though I want the concept to remain abstract for a while longer, already Gege and Didi are sensing everything’s gone off, when they are forced to stay inside at recess and walk from the parking lot with their shirts pulled over their noses because of the smoky air.
Still, they’re looking forward to Saturday, Nov. 17, the 121st Big Game. Over the years, we’ve joked about being a House Divided, and outfitted the boys in T-shirts with team logos. And yet, despite their evident enjoyment on our visit to Stanford, they are turning into die-hard Cal fans, like their father, and recently, their trash-talking has reached new levels. I’m not a fervent fan— I can count the number of football games I’ve attended on two hands — but I’ve done my best to defend the Cardinal.
“Why do you always vote for Stanford?” Gege asked this week, the midterm elections still fresh in his mind. “Daddy went to Stanford, too,” I said. I’d been a senior and he’d been in a master’s program, but our paths wouldn’t cross until later.
“Then why does he vote for Cal?” Gege asked.
I talked about the difference between undergraduate and graduate studies, and how you’re often more aligned with your undergraduate team, but I didn’t explain that those can be among your most formative years, when you come into your own and make lifelong friends and decisions that shape your career. And how fond and firm your allegiances remain long after: At our wedding, my husband and his groomsmen wore Cal lapel pins, an act of silent resistance while in “enemy” territory.
“What kind of mascot is a tree?” Gege said derisively. Smack talk he’d probably picked up from his classmates. “It’s not alive. It doesn’t have eyes.”
“People make fun of me when I wear my shirt,” Didi said, referring to his Stanford gear.
“The tree is cool!” I said. “It dances around.”
I wasn’t convincing him. Stanford has been on a winning streak since 2010 — their lifetime and more — I could have said, but didn’t.
There’s time enough for that Saturday. Go Cardinal!