unexpected blessings

This past May a mom came into my office with her 12-year-old son. He was a GATE student who had just done a pretty dumb thing on campus and his mom was looking for some answers so it wouldn't happen again. I began asking some basic questions, and while we were talking Ana (the mom) looked over at some pictures of my past tennis teams sitting on a table and said "Oh, my son plays tennis". "Really", I replied, "that's great". "No, I mean, Andrew's really good--he plays tournaments." I said something like I'd love to see him play sometime, we finished our meeting, mom left campus and I gave Andrew a pass back to class.

Within a few weeks, Ana had emailed me the tournament schedule for the summer. I printed it out, checked my calendar and determined I would make a trip out to Lakewood the weekend following the close of Andrew's 7th grade year. Mom was right--the kid was good. I spotted him playing on the first court next to the bleachers, and there was mom up at the top watching intently. He dismantled his opponent easily. By that time it was about 1:00, and he was scheduled to play his next match around 3:30. So, I decided I would stick around. They had brought a couple blankets to throw onto a nearby grass area, I offered to go out and bring back some lunch so we hung out for a couple hours until his next match, which he also won.

Andrew is now 13 and is in 8th grade at Golden Valley Middle School in San Bernardino, where I am the 8th grade counselor this year. Since that weekend in June, I have spent nearly every weekend with Ana and Drew traveling to tournaments all over Southern California. She is a single parent, he is an only child. As the year has progressed, our time has expanded beyond the tennis court to include birthday parties, trips to Santa Monica pier, Big Bear Lake, and plans in the works for a Clipper game, Santana concert in Vegas and a trip out to the desert in March for the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament at Indian Wells.

I am perhaps most excited about spending Christmas Eve at their house helping (learning as I go) to make tamales. I have decided that all blessings are good; but the unexpected kind--those are supreme . . . .