September 17, 2020

Jaffa Oranges

When I was twelve I was chosen to represent our Montreal suburb, Dollard-des-Ormeaux, for its under-13 soccer team.

Which is why, up until very recently, whenever the subject of soccer came up, there was a very good chance I would say, “You know, I played on a select team when I was young.”

Select.

But this story is not about my soccer skills or about glory days.

It is about the lessons of history.

The biggest difference between playing in the house league and playing select soccer, outside of the quality of play, was that the house league was played at our local park, which was three blocks from our house, while the select games were played on soccer fields throughout Montreal and its suburbs. Places like Beaconsfield, Kirkland, Lake of Two Mountains, and Verdun.

It meant the fathers, it was always the fathers, of the players were responsible for carpooling the kids on Sunday mornings. They split up the shifts and it worked out to something like once every three weeks.

My father took his obligatory turn and loaded me and three of my teammates into his brown 1970 Chevy Impala. Once at the soccer field he would set up a small folding lawn chair under a shade tree and read his book, usually a volume of history, until the game ended. He would look up, bemused, if he heard a loud cheer and even once returned my wave when I ran by.

At the end of the game, he would respectfully, even a little solemnly shake coach McPherson’s hand, as if they had just reached an accord on an arms treaty, pile the same crew into the Chevy, and drop them off at their respective homes.

He would ask me if it was good - c'était bien? - never if we had won, and I would then give him a quick recap. He was a big believer in physical fitness and I think he was pleased to see me running outside in the fresh air, but the concept of winning and losing was not one he deemed worthy of his attention. I know he played basketball when he was young but I had never seen him watch or talk about sports. When the newspaper arrived, he handed me the sports section.

I found the entire ordeal more than a bit stressful. Besides the lawn chair, the book, the sometimes socks with sandals, my father drove painfully slow - the Chevy had never once visited the passing lane - and he insisted on playing classical music the entire time. I begged him to play pop music or no music at all but the conversation was a nonstarter. The best compromise I could come up with was he would not turn up the volume for the canons during the 1812 Overture. He did enjoy taking us to Dairy Queen though, he loved his ice cream, and that would usually help temper the embarrassment of the slow driving and the Tchaikovsky unless one of my teammates made the mistake of getting into the car with an unfinished cone still dripping in his hand. He wouldn’t say anything. Just slowly and sternly wag his finger no. My father was a tall man who had played basketball as a teen. Years later, NBA star Dikembe Mutombo had a trade mark ‘not in my house’ finger wag when swatting away balls headed for the basket. My friend Steve Kahansky, who had been on the receiving end of my father’s finger wags plenty of times, would always say that Dikembe stole it from Marco Zevy.

All in all I managed to survive carpooling and it had been a great summer, until the Sunday when it was our turn to be in charge of the other team obligation: providing the halftime oranges.

In theory, it should have been a very simple task. Fill a cooler with ice. Cut the oranges. Put the oranges in the cooler.

We had a cooler.

We had ice.

We had oranges.

Well, we did have oranges. But we didn’t have the oranges everyone else had. They had California navel oranges. It is the most eaten orange in North America. Readily available in any and every supermarket. But the Zevys didn’t have California navel oranges. No. We had Israeli Jaffa oranges.

Could we maybe get regular oranges I wondered out loud.

Jaffa oranges, my father proclaimed, are the best oranges in the entire world. Your team is in for a treat.

He was not wrong. Jaffa oranges were delicious. But I was just trying to fit in. And I would have argued a little bit more to get my way if I didn’t have to deal with another, more pressing, issue.

My father refused to leave the peels on.

From week one, all the oranges were cut in four, with the peels intact. At halftime, the players would grab a slice or two and suck on them. Then discard the peels, as the juice ran down their chins, into a big green garbage bag. That’s how we did it. Every week. Every single week. But now my father wanted to remove the peels of the oranges, the Jaffa oranges, and offer up peel-free slices.

I asked him why.

He shrugged his shoulders and then answered in English. It was a language he spoke fluently. One of the seven languages he spoke. But it was a language he never ever spoke with his children, fearing, presciently, they would forget how to speak French, their mother tongue.

He said “Because we are not animals.” He then handed me a knife and I stood next to him at the kitchen counter, removing peels, making slices, and putting them into plastic bags.

The score was 1-0 for our opponents at halftime when Coach McPherson asked me to go fetch my father. We had started eating the oranges and nobody had said a word about the type of oranges or the fact that they had no peels but my heart was still pounding as I went to get my father. He was reading a Churchill biography. I told him the coach wanted to speak with him. He placed a bookmark in the book, dog earing was for heathens, got up and followed me back to the team bench.

Coach McPherson said “Mr. Zeevy, I’ve got a wee bit of a family emergency. I wonder if you could coach the lads for the second half.”

I have no idea why Coach McPherson asked my father. He had never expressed an interest in soccer. Had never even watched more than a minute of a game. The other fathers knew the game. They knew the team. They knew the players. But maybe those solemn handshakes had made an impression. I was hoping, praying, he would just bow out and let one of the others take the helm, but my father had a strong sense of duty and always doing the right thing.

My father spoke English fluently. Still, it was always strange to hear him in English. Unlike my Uncle Henri, whose English sounded like the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, my father’s accent, although undeniable, was harder to place. Like a wine tasting, you could detect hints and bouquets of Cairo, of Jerusalem, of Paris, of remote and exotic towns and villages. He now addressed me and my teammates in that accented English. Using a stick he had picked up from the ground, he began to make scratchings in the dirt. If I had a stick I would have made a hole big enough to crawl into. He did not know anybody’s name so he just pointed and said “You”. As in “You go here.” “You go there.” It was a very offensive and aggressive 2-3-5 alignment. Completely different than the way we usually played. He didn’t speak again in the half other than to make substitutions. He made sure everyone played. We scored three goals and won easily.

We didn’t speak after the game. Together we carried the cooler, it had leftover oranges because we had brought too much, back to the car. We went back home. He drove as slowly as ever, played Mozart at a low volume, and we even stopped for our regular Dairy Queen.

My mother greeted us at the door and asked how the game was.

I said “We won 3-1!” Then, pointing at my father excitedly, said “He was our coach!”

She looked up at my father with a surprised look and asked what I had wanted to ask.

“What do you know about soccer?”

He shrugged his shoulders and, still speaking English, said:

“The 1956 Hungarian national team. The Magyar formation.”

Then he walked into the house wearing his socks and sandals and carrying his Churchill biography.

The end.