I found something

Posted 3 hours ago

I got a bit of a vague text from my dad a week ago.

Do you recall the National Soccer League All Star game in 1983 held in Charleston, South Carolina?

Of course my first thought is why is my dad asking me about something that happened over 40 years ago. I knew there had to be something behind the question.

As I was pondering his question, I dawned on me that the National Soccer League was a something I made up and played games by myself in the backyard when I was younger. “Why is he asking me about an All Star game from a made up soccer league? He must have found something that led to him asking me about it.

What?

The NSL was my made up league. So I am curious why you are asking.

Of course I didn’t hear back from him that night. My curiosity was growing. But I had to wait until the next day to get the story.

I found some old posters you had made for your games. They are about 12 inches by 18 inches. They were up against a wall behind some storage boxes (in the basement). Lot of work put into them.

Wow. Can you send me some pictures?

Right after I sent the text, I decided to call my dad to get a bit more of the story. He told me that he had found those posters while moving some things around and cleaning up in his basement. He thought that the poster was of one of my made up leagues but there was also a poster of the San Diego Padres logo (I am a Padres fan). So he was being intentionally vague in his text to see if I remembered what he was talking about. It was fun to reminiscence with him for a bit on the phone. And it was fun to take a journey back in time.

The ironic thing is that I had been thinking about that pretend league that I had created a couple of days before he called. I am not sure what set that off but there was something that triggered memories of playing in my backyard, creating logos, and making up different player names for the different rosters.

It is always fun for me to revisit those days in my memories. I see the seeds of imagination and creativity that have shaped my life and become a passion. I feel incredibly blessed that I have been able to make a career in the creative space the past 25 years.

I still love building web pages and using my CSS skills to style a page, give it layout, and manipulate the code to what I envision it to be. The same creative bent that drove me as a child to create those posters is still alive and well in me today. My canvas has changed and I have a lot more tools at my disposal. But the thrill of getting lost in the creative flow and wanting to make things the best that I can has followed me from those childhood days.

¹ Some of the teams in my made up soccer league were teams from the NASL. They were not part of my original teams but got folded in over the years that I played.