Despertar

go, al, go

One of life's most delicious treats, as anyone will tell you, is watching little kids play football. My little cousin, who just turned six, was on a YMCA team two summers ago. He was, at thirty-four inches tall, the biggest one on his team, and he didn't know a touchdown from Thomas the Tank Engine. Which, neither did I, I still don't, but this guy's mom signed him up to play competitively, and mine didn't.

I got to see two of his games. What I remember most vividly about them, besides not being able to stop laughing, was how, at the beginning of each game, the coach told the kids to "throw [themselves] on the ball! Just throw [themselves] on the ball! Don't let anyone else get it but you!"

That, and the extent to which they took it to heart. They literally threw themselves on the ball, spilling around all over the field as though they had weights in their tummies.

*

And that's AL in a nutshell. She plays this game with everything she's got, body and soul. While she's not, thank God, the most likely player to get embroiled in a stupid Rule Four-violative tiff with another player, she is the most likely to take the words of her fellow contestants to heart, and to throw herself headfirst into every entry she writes.

I've had the pleasure of reading dozens of entries by AL , and they are unpredictable streams of consciousness full of personality. So invested is she in her Follow the Leader journaling, it's routine to return to her journal to find three or four follow-up entries expanding on the themes she's addressed in Following entries. AL is superlatively sensitive about the way she is perceived among her readers, and that makes for thoughtful, self-aware writing that is always a pleasure to read. A delicious treat.

It must be something she learned in Sweden.

And that's why she should win.