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Sept. 11, 2001 What do you say to a kid whose whole life is play?
I'm lucky enough to make a living watching people play kids' games. Baseball. Football. Basketball. Name it. I tell stories of athletes and teams and their place in our society. Once in a while, I'll try to describe the beauty in our sports, the wondrous and sometimes limitless capabilities of the human mind and body and spirit. Today, though, there are no games. There is no wonder to see, no beauty. All over America, all over the world, there is only horror and sorrow and a gnawing feeling in our stomachs. Something indescribable. Something untouchable. I look to my boy. My beautiful son. He is 3 ½ years old. Or, as he says it with pride, "free an'-a-haf." He does not understand any of this sadness, of course. He asks. I have no answers. He doesn't understand because his world is LEGOs and pre-school, putting voices to his Rescue Heroes, going places with his Mom and Dad. He knows only Play-Doh and his dog and his cousin Max and spiders and how to run across the living room at supersonic speed, only to smash head-first into the couch laughing like a little wild man. He knows play. His plastic golf clubs are in the trunk of my car. He throws a ball with his elbow up by his ear. He can sing all the words to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." He recognizes Tiger on my cereal box. He knows Junior plays for the Reds and wears No. 30. "Firty," he says. He loves his Nonno and Nonna and his Grandma and his Aunt Pam and all his aunts and uncles and cousins and he gets a kick out of Arthur (yeah … "Ar-fur") and Arthur's kid sister, D.W. He says his prayers every night. Maybe you have a child, too, or a niece or a nephew or a younger brother or sister. How do you explain to them that some people are filled with a hate you cannot know, an evil you cannot comprehend? How do you explain to them Sept. 11, 2001? We all look into ourselves in times like these, into our families, into our communities and to our friends. But what is it we're looking for? Comfort? Reassurance? Answers? There are no answers for something like this. There is no comfort in that. So we pull our loved ones as close as we can. It is the only way to survive when the world gets too real. I will do my best to keep this most-recent horror from my boy. He is still way too young. He will always be too young, in my mind. If I can do it -- if I can protect him from this -- he will not ask about people fleeing the streets of New York or fires or planes or hate. He will not have to know about death just yet. Instead, he will play. He will make up words and sing silly songs and try to stand on his head and we will laugh a lot, he and his mom and I. We will hug a lot. He'll look at us -- probably more than once in these next few days -- with that look every kid gets when his parents get too protective and too touchy: "Yeah, great, guys. Uh, thanks a lot. That's enough, already. Now, who wants to play?" Maybe, soon after that, the games will return. Barry Bonds will renew his quest for the single-season home run record. Terrell Davis will run again. The Sooners, with an entire state of screaming red supporters behind them, will kick off on a beautiful fall Saturday. Tiger will swing again. Maybe, soon, my boy and I will go out to kick around a soccer ball. Or, maybe, we'll watch a baseball game on TV. He'll sit on my lap, holding the remote. I'll try to explain to him what's happening. He'll want to go play. Maybe that will happen. Maybe soon. John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.
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