Contributor: What I learned in the stands as an immigrant father of youth-baseball

I spent a recent Sunday in Norwalk, looking at 12 -year -old young people playing baseball on a nestled field between a juvenile prison and two series of railways. It was a hot and dry day. All traces of a breeze brought the smell of diesel smoke from the industrial area on the slopes. However, there was no place where I prefer to be.

My friends who do not have children or who have children who are not obsessed with sport, I wonder. For a large part of the year, I wake up early on the weekend to take my son from our house to Atwater Village to tournaments with his travel team. We led to Sylmar, West Covina, Jurupa Valley, Irvine, Ladera Ranch and San Diego. I refused invitations to make camping trips and weekends in Vegas and New Orleans. Although I have a novel that has just come out, I don't go on a book tour. All because I don't want to miss any action on the ground.

As the seasons run, I find myself filled with gratitude, instead of regretting. It is not only that I am proud of my son of having engaged in a sport he loves. Nor is it the consolation to look at him strengthening and more confident while my own body ages and decreases. I appreciate the hours that my son and me (and often my wife, and sometimes our teenage daughter), let's move on to and for tournaments – hours when we talk and listen to music and attend the extensive and varied life of this region. And I have other reasons even more personal.

As a growing boy in Hong Kong and west of Canada, I knew the United States of films and television and a handful of books (Twain, Steinbeck, “The autobiography of Malcolm X”)). I did not spend much time in this country before going to university in Montreal, where I was sprinter in the McGill track team. Each year, we went to meetings in New York and New England. I was looking forward to travel at the University of Syracuse, Dartmouth, Harvard. Even in the depths of a northeast winter, the interior tracks were hot and bright. I was attracted to the energy and optimism of young Americans to whom I competed. I liked the way they spoke. In a way, their language called me.

Back in Montreal, I decided from an adult in English but I spent less time with Shakespeare than with American novels. I read Faulkner and Hemingway after sessions on the track and in the weight room. I watched American films, listened to American music. Finally, I signed up for an American law faculty, I fell in love and that I married an American woman, who became a citizen in time.

Baseball, the most American game, the one I have never played as a child, gave me a wider perspective on American life. I spent so many nights and weekends with the same group of parents of the travel team that they have become a kind of extended family – a rare thing, in this atomized age, for a man in his forties. I can cry as hard as the next parent, but I also like to hold on the back of the stands or the net for lack and listen to others while they speak and applaud. When I hear one of their pet sentences – “Be a wall, boys!”; “Show me something, dad!”; “Everyone strikes, Bang Bang!” – A thrill crosses me. These men speak a unique and American language, so fresh and welcoming and funny – so perfect, in my ear – that I can't help but adopt extracts from it like mine.

Although games can ride up on high drama moments, there are also languages. When the action slows down, I speak with others. A stadium, like a bar, is not the place to discuss politics or religion. Except that when you spend so much time with the same group of men and women, when you see them more regularly than your sister or your parents or friends of several decades, you do it.

My own political opinions put me to the left, in the American context. I only lived in the blue cities of this country. Most of the people I met – lawyers first, after starting to write, other writers and artists – were liberals or leftists. Like attracts as. I had friends who identified themselves as socialists, anarchists and green, but during the 20 years since I graduated from the Faculty of Law, and before my son joined his travel team, I do not think that I have never been friends with a Republican. I am not alone. The data show that Americans separate with ideology like never before.

It has changed now for me. The parents of our team come from various horizons (Mexican, Korean, Armenian, Italian, Hondurian, Nicaraguan, Turkish, German, My own Punjabi) and occupy a range of jobs (accountant, seller, firefighter, mechanic, retail transplant, publicist, non -profit director, lawyer of the county). They have a range of political beliefs. But all, including those who told me that they had voted for President Trump, are generous, engaging, devoted to their families. They encourage my son as they encourage theirs. Although we have our differences, we are not foreigners. It's a simple lesson, even childish. It may be true that I learned it while watching the children play.

For people who share my policy, every day since the inauguration has brought bad news. Of course, I worry about the future. But for all our failures as a nation, I also saw that so many ordinary Americans always appreciate decency and openness. No one is inaccessible. I remember this truth, and I know that it is not yet time to despair.

The stories of Rav Grewal-Kök appeared in The Atlantic, Plowshares, New England Review and elsewhere. His first novel, “The Snares” was published on April 1. Ravgrewalkok.com