May You Get Lost Each Day in Our Slightly Wicked Website 

AND — May You Find Your Touchdown Dance

WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS THING I’VE DONE?

All this time, energy, the specter that this will be yet another  one of my failed Amos ‘n’ Andy scheme, a multimedia biplane, piloted by Sylvester the Cat, tail-spinning toward the sly, welcoming arms of Earth’s gravity, smoke billowing from the engine?

What have I done?

Dare I say — “Again?”

And then, it hit me. All’s well, and then some. This website? This is my touchdown dance.

Eons ago, my dear pal Curtis Stone and I were shamed by a guy named Randy, the local Parks & Rec director in our sleepy ranch hometown of Newhall, California. He begged that I take over coaching a youth flag football team. Nine poster children for hypochondria, each a stubbed toe or sniffle from wheelchairs. Skinny. Slow. Corpulent. Nerd-esque. There was an identical trio whose bodies resided in town, but, their spirits, and attention spans, floated light years beyond Uranus.

I LOVE typing that word — Uranus.

Perhaps we need a corporate board meeting to discuss making, “Uranus” the official planet of John Loves America.

Uranus. If you can’t say it without snickering, you
have to buy something from our Gift Store.

Dot-Com.

Football? These guys couldn’t beat the Peanuts gang from a Christmas special. Remember? Peanuts? Each child two inches tall, each but four fingers, anchored by a 2-ounce mute beagle. Upon first seeing my team, I don’t think we could have beaten Charlie Brown and his complicated friends.

Our afterschool gridiron squad were such a lovable, adorable collection of misfits, with not a drop of confidence amongst them. So long ago, I can’t recall our team’s name. The first practice started on a dour note. No one wanted these kids on their team for they were — well. Misshapen. We all end up getting emotionally wounded, but it shouldn’t happen in the 5th grade.

Eons before that flag football stint, I was lucky to attend a basketball clinic hosted by the legendary UCLA genius, John Wooden, without argument, the greatest coach in college basketball history. One of the guest clinicians was another legend, Abe Lemons. Abe supposedly didn’t have a name on his birth certificate, just the initials, A.E. Lemons was the Mark Twain of coaches, one of the funniest people to walk the earth. I’ll never forget a line he shared about teaching untalented people: “You can teach a mule to run the Kentucky Derby but that doesn’t mean he’s going to win it.”

To sum up my life, I’m a hopeless romantic doomed to unrequited love. I firmly believe that yes, a mule CAN win the Kentucky Derby. You just have to enter him each year.

On a cool autumn day, on the grassy field of Newhall Park, the heavens above opened and sent inspiration. These poor kids? Lovable albeit as far away from football prowess as Walter Payton from a crayfish. La vie sportive horrible, as the French say.

The Sports Life Wretched.

I blew a whistle, had the kids line up. I introduced myself and The Foonman (Grammy-winning bass player, Curtis Stone’s nickname).

“For our very first drill, I want to see all of you do your very best touchdown dance,” I said.

There was this sort of group dim-witted expression, as if to ask, both, “What’s a touchdown?” and “What’s a dance?”

The first few receivers managed to find the endzone (ours). A few caught the softly thrown spirals and did a half-hearted celebration, more like landing awkwardly on a fence post vs. Michael “Eeee-heeee!!” Jackson. Footballs hit concave chests, knocked off inch-thick glasses or resulted in our gridiron stars shrieking and covering up in the rarely used awkward defensive yoga position, Standing Feral Frightened Stork.

Curtis is a lovable, heck of a great guy. There was no yelling from the coaches. Just encouragement. And laughter. And good-natured kidding. After a few minutes, the unexpected visited.

Joy.

Soon, that terribly heavy wet blanket of self-consciousness vanished. Foonman and I snuck in actual techniques on how to catch a pass and, in a couple of near-fatal cases of uncoordination, how to run.

Imagine. Living in a world where you have to teach a 5th-grade boy how to run.

We broke it down in slow motion.

Decades later, I can still hear the laughter, and, more importantly, the freedom from believing the lies a cruel life can whisper about ourselves.

Pretty much, the poet, E.E. Cummings summed it up nicely: “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”

Just simple existence can be such an erosionary process. We lose our way, forget that magical axiom that dreams exist, and, with a little elbow grease, dreams can come true. It’s such a profound sadness, how we can forget this wonderful how-to of Life.

No football coach in my little backwater hometown of Newhall wanted those beautifully bent little boys, several of whom spent life pushing thick horned-rimmed glasses back onto noses.

We won our first game. And most after that, losing just once to the league’s only unbeaten team, who, to this day, with their beards, muscles and Coast Guard tattoos, I still suspect of being ringers. These darn guys — MY darn guys, CURTIS’S darn guys — were supposed to be cannon fodder. It was unimaginable they’d score a touchdown. We ended up taking second in the league and even won a game in the Los Angeles County playoffs against some scowling youths with no discernible dance skills from Rancho Cucamonga.

This website? John-Loves-America-Big-Fat-Dot-Com?

It’s my touchdown dance.

For years, I’ve been blessed to hear a song. It’s America singing. It’s a song of mischief and heroism. It’s nostalgia and — different skin colors, genders, occupations, geography, weight, age, ability, background — that common bond we all share: the Love and Divine Twinkle in God’s eye.

I hope that each day, this website can lighten a heart, share some gee-whiz trivia. As my life’s experience, we’ll probably tick off some people. We’ll try to inspire, tickle, touch a heart, make the reader ponder, remind them that yes, they too can make a splendiferous noise. All of us have a glorious, can-do touchdown dance within. We shouldn’t be afraid to share it with this wonderful world.

And, yay for Capitalism? We’re building the most unique gift store this side of the Santa’s Workshop.

Happy reading and good adventures,
John Boston