It was a sunny and very cool Saturday morning in central New Jersey in late March, 1995. My twelve-year-old son Jordan and I were heading to Chamberlain Park for his first ever lacrosse practice.  While enroute Jordan asked me again, for what seemed like the 100th time, "Dad, why will I like playing Lacrosse?" 

 

Immediately my thoughts flashed back thirty years to Massapequa, a small town on the south shore of Long Island, and to the first time I held that old wood and gut stick in my hand — and it seemed that time had stood still.   

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Soon, snow will be gently falling outside, and the campus of this private high school nestled in the confines of a sleepy hamlet in central Jersey will begin to look like a Norman Rockwell painting. It's well after dusk on a Sunday night, and the athletic building, now barely visible, will be more obscured by the mist and ice.

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Editor's note: This is a story for the more "culturally elite" - grin. Robert emails:

In June of 2004 our family took a trip to the United Kingdom. We were visiting my older son, who just finished up at Oxford University. We had secured a country villa in the county of Cornwall on the southwestern corner of the big island. Cornwall is semi-tropical because the Gulf Stream brings warm Caribbean waters to the area.

 

Gardens full of flowers and shrubbery of all types flourish there, and some grow to surreal sizes, nurtured as they are by the healthful climate. To walk and hobnob in those gardens is special and, in many ways, reminds me of walking onto the field to officiate a youth lacrosse game. Carl, I plan to write about that. Ok by you?

Ok by me.