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First off, I know the general public doesn’t have a great appreciation for the movie nacho libre, and they have valid points, but lemme, say this, the nun is… well as Larry Millers father would say, God bless her she’s a healthy kid. But more importantly, when Jack is speaking in a bad Spanish accent and the only Spanish word he uses is Neno’s, it kills me. Moving on.

I’m still in the middle east. It looks like my team has been eliminated from the tournament, now all that is left to do is to get home. Riyadh Dubai, Dubai Washington, Washington Denver, Denver Calgary. Should only take 3 or 4 days. It was 32 degrees here today in Riyadh…its -23 degrees right now in Red Deer. So that’s something.

I believe I’ve spoken about my father on here before, he’s a great guy and I thought I’d share a story about him that he told me once years ago, I think it still bothers him, and he turned 70 in October. But here’s how it came about.

I was sitting around my room trying to remember what it felt like to play high level vball so what I decided to do is see if I had any game tape of games I thought did well in. turns out I had some stuff from this past summer and I can say, I think I’m my worst critic, because watching the game tape, I didn’t do as terrible as I remembered. So that was nice, (but I do think to reach a certain level in anything you do you have to be very critical of yourself), and I got to thinking, I wonder if I’ll show these games to my kids someday? Are my kids even gonna give a what about sports…Jeez am I even gonna have kids? (side note: I’m certain that if I have a daughter she will be a complete flusey, and it’ll make my life… ache and I’ll go through numerous years of melancholy. This isn’t going to be a reflection on the girls mother, I just know there’s some sort of karmic effect that says this is whats gonna happen.)

Anyways, because I was thinking about this, I started thinking about my own Father. For anyone who’s met him, you knows he’s a very undisturbed man. The only thing he likes better than playing himself some bluegrass licks on his guitar is heading down to Tim’s to have a chin wag with the regulars and to tease the ladies behind the counter. But as I mentioned before, he’s 70, and about 50 years ago, this man was a force who could muster inertia like a locomotive, (you get that sorta strength living on a reservation farm) and apparently this did him well when he went to school. Residential school sucked, and he doesn’t talk about it much, but what I was able to get out of him was that his high school won the provincial football championship his senior year. He even showed me the team picture, in which he had to point himself out because I didn’t recognize the big Indian in the front row.

Anways, what I wanted to tell you about is that he had to go to school away from the rez where his family was. I’m not exactly sure how far it was but he rarely got to see his parents, maybe once or twice a year, BUT on one special occasion that senior year my grandparents were able to make the trip to my fathers school to watch him play football. Now my grandparents had never seen my father play sports before, so this was a large deal for him. I’m sure he couldn’t wait to show his parents what he could do on the field. At any rate on the day of the game, with my grandparents in the crowd, my father was so overwhelmed with the magnitude of the situation that on one of the first plays of the game, he got overzealous and jumped the snap or something like that and drew the attention of the referee. I think what happened is Dad vocally disagreed, then turned his back on the ref. Keep in mind this is back in the day, this was basically weeks after dudes dueled after slapping each other with leather gloves so what my dad did was rude, but most of all, it was out of character for him. Anyways the result of this was my father got kicked out of the game. Like 3 plays into it.

So lets recap, my grandparents got to see their son maybe a couple times a year, they left the farm to be tended to by others for days which couldn’t have been cheap or easy for them, and when they get there to see their son play, he gets kicked out. Man that’s got to throb. My father tells me that was the only game he ever got kicked out of, and I think it still eats at him.

So I’m not really sure why I felt the need to share that story. Maybe I’m attempting to take on some of the things he’s been carrying for a while so he can have a lighter load to manage. I think I just love my father and was thinking about him.