I am, if anything, the aftermath of a police offering running the red light of a four-way intersection in Brighton, Massachusetts, 1983. The unused, not yet required seatbelts hung stiff, saluting the broken glass and launching the passenger. The wheel blocked my dad. My mom broke her jaw, neck, arm, leg, skin. She’d be getting regular photoshoots of her bones instead of taking x-rays of others. No midnight hospital shifts for quite some time for her.  

They said they hadn’t wanted to “slow down” until after the accident. Why would they?

While not doctors, two young medical professionals living and working in Boston during the 80s, two incomes with no kids sounds like a golden era to me. They wanted three kids, stopped at two. I was told my older sister and I proved more than enough.

I see them in the mirror. Every morning, night, throughout the day. My dad’s forehead,

my mom’s eyes, his upper lip, her smile and chin. Dad’s short, stubby legs, and crackly football -

field ankles. I have a rosy complexion, like mom’s. 

No one knows where my nose came from. My sibling and I think maybe one of the grandparents we didn’t meet. No one knows where my red hair came from. Mom colored hers to look like mine when hers started to go gray. 

The first space they ever shared was a football field. They didn’t know. At Foxboro

Stadium, where the Patriots used to play. The Beach Boys and Chicago playing. Love, literally in the air as my parents breathed the same oxygen in between brassy sets of love songs. 

I wish I knew what songs were played when, and if their paths crossed on the way to the bathroom or something. I want to reach through time, pick them up like action figures, and set them beside each other. Maybe this could give them more time.

They first met at a party hosted by a mutual friend. Mom answered the door for him. 

Dad was a perfusionist. No one knows what that is until they need one. Even then it’s an

unsung role, operating a heart-lung machine. It circulates blood and beats like a heart  for patients undergoing heart surgery. I envision him feet away from a huddle of scrubs around an open ribcage, Grim Reaper waiting close by, watching my dad as he fiddles with knobs and dials.

He took care of mom after the accident. They recovered in his parents’ breezeway. It only took for stairs to get inside, one stair to a bathroom. Dad worked doubles and gave her sponge baths. While she recovered, his parents became hers.Mom would mirror this devotion decades later. A rare cancer in dad’s throat, lungs. Aftera few years came the stoma, an electrolarynx; radiation, chemo, feeding tube; more chemo, morelong drives to the specialist. Love, to me, is always rooted in action.

Their paths first crossed on a football field. The Patriots lost so many games there.

For as long as I can remember, people told me to play football because my dad played football.

They said I should play because I was big. It didn’t matter. Thanks to my genetic makeup, American football felt like destiny. It was also the only space that embraced me– a big, inflexible kid with a weird voice who didn’t talk much.  

Football can be sad to think about. There’s the meritocratic promise that rivals The American Dream, engrained itself in it. Pain, inflicting and inflicted, on and off the field. How men treat other men's sons like action figures on a chessboard. How young men treat each other when winter comes and the games end.

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Devote yourself to this pugnacious game, a precursor to war, and you will be rewarded. It will feel like an act of love.

When I spiral, my mind drifts to Junior Seau, Aaron Hernandez, David Kopay. Other

blockheads. Dad would call me and my teammates blockheads, especially other offensive linemen, but we were all blockheads. Always jokingly, with love, a love I didn’t know until I became one. 

Apart from winning, I had the most fun on the field—and in love, for that matter—when I

was holding. Guys playing my position, they latch onto their interior opponent’s chestplate while

blocking him, forming three points with their head and hands, a genuflecting trinity. You’re

bound to get in a little holding time somewhere. Like when a defensive lineman desperately yell,

“Hey! Ref! Watch the holding!” Or when they finally smack your hands off and keep hitting, but

it feels like taps because the running back you’re blocking for is twenty yards downfield already.

It took a car wreck to shift my parents’ focus from careers to family. That particular pain,

in close proximity to love-in-action, lives at our core. Dad took up fishing and golf as a means of

finding peace amid cracking sternums and raising a family. My parents attended every game day

they could, racking up thousands of miles so I can hear them cheering for me.

On the field, I wore gloves with half the fingers cut off so I could retain more control of my grip. It helps me hold better. I felt more in-control, grabbing someone else’s sweaty cloth and the warm, wet skin underneath, their chestplate my steering wheel. Getting your hand stepped on by heavy players with spikey shoes hurts less even without full fingers.

The penalty for offensive lineman is a few yards, but you get to repeat the down unless

the opposition decides not to forgo the penalty and move forward. How many yards would you

be willing to give up for a second chance? What would you risk to keep your people safe?  A team would never regret getting called out for holding if it meant saving a teammate from a career-ending injury.

Good things grew in the shadow of my shoulder-padded silhouette. I stopped getting bullied, at least by people who didn’t play—life-changing for the “sensitive” soul overweight since Kindergarten. I also grew closer to my father, something I thought impossible before I joined the team. Like a gang or cult, I’d do anything to nestle in the safety of that space. 

It’s exhausting, holding on. Everyone has limits. Are love and pain things that can exist as separate entities? I grab cloth, wet skin, and hold on, to see if this life can accept my penalty.

Holding on to as much as I can is, if nothing else, the painful joints where past, present, and future intersect, making a cracking noise not unlike my (and my dad’s) ankles. Letting go means losing; your quarterback, your family. Memories. That mushy thing in your head. Or it’s losing the jersey of the defender in front of you. In that moment, it’s more than just sweaty fabric, cold plastic and hot flesh in my grip. Hold on for one giant leap for mankind. 

Grasping as much as possible, becoming a shield that separates an offensive and defensive force, it’s unclear what slips through. We can’t hold on forever, but holding on is all there is, at least until you realize that someone can hold you, too. And better yet, you drop the cloth for a hand, glove on or off, and allow yourself to be held.