One Bag, Twenty-two Years

One Bag, Twenty-Two Years

The ruck sack is smaller than it should be for twenty-four hours of travel and fourteen days on the other side of it. I have packed for jungle floors and gallery openings and a Nebraska winter with no forgiveness in it, and somehow a bag for São Paulo is the one giving me trouble. Not because I don't know what goes in it. It isn't four in the morning yet and I'm still standing in front of it doing math on layovers instead of folding shirts.

My son Josh plays wheelchair rugby for Team USA. Twenty-two years now, ever since a car accident at sixteen left him a quadriplegic and a hospital gym in Denver put a rugby chair in front of him during the worst months of our lives. In a few days he plays his first match of this rotation of the World Championships, and I am somewhere in the middle of the long process of getting myself to Brazil to watch it happen.

Three flights. Two layovers long enough to lose a whole afternoon inside airports that aren't mine. By the time I land I will have been moving for a full day, and Josh will already be somewhere in that city getting his competition chair fitted with new tires for the court, going through whatever ritual twenty-two years of this sport has taught him to trust. He does not need luck. He needs sleep and good wheels and for the refs to call it straight. I am the one who needs the flight to just be a flight, uneventful, forgettable, the kind of travel day nobody writes home about.

The hallway light is the only one on when I carry the bag past the painting. Grandma Rocks has hung in that spot long enough that I mostly walk by it the way you walk by anything that has become part of the architecture of your house. This morning I don't. I stop for a second with the ruck strap already digging into my shoulder and look at the old rocker, the newborn, the woman who isn't here anymore holding my youngest, Elise, who is about to start her first week of teaching. I don't have time to think about all of that right now. I have a flight to catch. But I let myself have the second anyway.

Grandma Rocks. Mixed Media 2004. Tim ONeill

Allison is doing the thing she does before every trip, which is pretending she isn't worried while double checking that I've got the travel pillow and the little pouch that keeps my passport and enough cash flat against my body instead of loose in a pocket. Twenty-four hours in economy at sixty-six isn't a joke, and she's right to make sure I have both. I'll forget I'm wearing the pouch until I catch myself patting it through my shirt in some security line, an old nervous habit forming before the trip has even started. Marriage is mostly this. Someone loving you accurately enough to override your bad decisions in advance.

I keep thinking about the version of this trip that used to be unthinkable. Sixteen years old, a broken neck, a hospital room in Denver where the only measure of progress was whether he could move his fingers that day, or, in the beginning, whether he would survive. I am not going to tell that whole story this morning, it has been told, it will be told again in its own place. What I will say is that somewhere in that building, in the middle of the worst months of our lives, somebody wheeled a group of grown men through the gym doing something with a ball and a wheelchair that looked half like war and half like joy, and Josh watched it and something in him leaned forward. Twenty-two years later I am packing a bag to go watch him do it on a world stage.

There is a particular kind of quiet that comes over a house before a trip like this. Not sad. Just full. The dog knows something is happening and has installed herself beside the rucksack, snuggled up against it, which is either sabotage or solidarity, hard to say with a dog. I use rucks rather than suitcases; it works better for me. I keep returning to the itinerary printout to check the layover times again even though I already have them memorized, the way you check a lock you know is locked. Some part of me wants the paper in my hand instead of just the screen. Old habit. I've always trusted what I can hold more than what's on a screen.

I did not sleep much last night, not really, the way you never really sleep the night before an early flight even when there's no reason not to. I lay there running the trip in my head, the drive to the airport, the first gate, the long stretch over water where there will be nothing to do but read or stare at the seatback and think. I already know that somewhere over that ocean I will end up thinking about a hospital corridor instead of a rugby court, about a version of Josh who couldn't lift a cup, and I will let that thought sit there for exactly as long as it needs to and then let it go, because the man I'm flying to watch is not that version anymore, hasn't been for a long time, and holding both of them in my head at once is just what a father does before a flight like this.

The court in São Paulo doesn't care about any of that history. It only cares about what happens over four eight-minute quarters once the whistle blows. That's the gift of sport, honestly, the same gift I spent fourteen years trying to teach kids on a cross-country course. The past matters enormously and it matters not at all, both at once, and the only place that paradox resolves is out on the field or the court or the track, in the actual doing of the thing.

I zip the ruck. The dog relocates, offended. Allison checks the pouch is zipped a second time, just to be sure, then hands me the travel pillow so it's the last thing in instead of buried under three days of clothes.

Team USA plays their first match of this rotation in a few days. I will be in the stands, jet lagged and grateful, watching a sport most people have never heard of played by athletes most people will never know existed, and my son will be out there in the middle of it, twenty-two years into something that started in a hospital gym as a way to survive the unsurvivable and became a whole life.
Long flight ahead. Worth every hour of it.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.
Tio

Santiago 2023 was the Parapan Am Games, and wheelchair rugby's gold medal match there doubled as the Paralympic qualifier for Paris 2024, which Team USA won. Josh ONeill pictured.