A father, a son, and a team neither of them has any claim to.
We left the stadium with the crowd in Monterrey, Mexico. It was the World Cup (soccer), and the Dutch had just lost on a penalty shootout, the kind of loss that turns on a coin flip.
My son Steve and I ran through the what-ifs as we walked back through the June evening heat: the late equalizer, a substitution that came ten minutes too late. Block by block, the crowd thinned, fans peeling off toward their own hotels, until it was just the two of us on an empty, quiet street. We'd run out of words because defeat had had the last word, so we walked in silence, sharing the specific, deflated quiet of watching something end.
It was our fourth city in two weeks, after Dallas, Houston, and Kansas City, following the Oranje: the Dutch national team, named for the orange of the House of Orange-Nassau. We're fanatics: four tournaments across half a dozen countries over the past four years. It's a team, though, that neither of us has much claim to.
I've lived in nine countries over the course of my life, but none of them has really been home. Steve, who is 20, was born in Ireland and grew up across four other countries; his claim is even thinner than mine. (I'm named for Kipling's Kim, a homeless orphan belonging to two worlds and neither, a name my parents chose without knowing how well it would fit.)
None of those thin claims to the Netherlands has ever mattered inside a fanwalk or a stadium, though. During this year's World Cup, Steve and I fell in with a few thousand strangers trailing an orange double-decker bus, blasting fight songs, dancing and singing along; inside the stadium, we hugged whoever was sitting next to us and high-fived strangers up and down the row every time the Oranje scored. You're wearing orange, you're a fan, and how you got there doesn't count.
Somewhere as we were walking down those dark blocks in Monterrey, though, I realized I was happy, not despite the loss, but because I was there with my son. That was where I belonged.
Maybe Steve is looking for the same thing I've spent a lifetime looking for, without either of us saying so out loud. If I'm lucky, he'll keep looking with me.
I didn't fully understand why that happiness made sense until I talked about it with my father. He's 86 and has been an outsider everywhere he's ever lived, never really home, not where he was born, not in the places he settled afterward, and not in Arizona, where he lives now. He's told me about a recurring nightmare of being buried in Spain, where he lived for years: some argument playing out, cell by cell, between his body and the Spanish soil, over whether he belonged there. He'd always reached for the term tierra to describe what he was missing, the Spanish word for something closer to homeland than dirt.
Recently, though, he'd landed on a better term: emotionally invested. That's what explains why Steve and I care so much about a team that isn't, by blood, ours. It was never about the land. It's about who you've thrown your lot in with.
We'd found our tierra, that night in Monterrey: not a place, but each other, and, for a few hours at a time, everyone else wearing orange. Steve and I will be back on the road, following the Oranje, in search of it again.
Kim Iskyan is a Nomadic Spirit reader who may have found his tierra near Charlottesville, Virginia.
