Take my ball, go home

by Anton Zuiker on November 1, 2025

Toward the end of my talk session this week, right about the time it came clear to me that growing up the oldest of five sons had primed me to feel a constant call to be mature and responsible, I heard my therapist use the expression “I’m going to take my ball and go home” to ask a question about how I respond to my brothers in various situations.

I chuckled at that.

I happen to talk a lot about soccer in my therapy sessions (and in my professional coaching chats). Soccer has been a constant part of my life for nearly 50 years, and in the last few I’ve found parallels in what I’m learning about myself through mindfulness and how mindfulness can help me play on the pitch better.

Each Sunday, when I show up early for the pick-up game, I come prepared: I bring a set of pop-up nets, orange cones, a hand pump, and a soccer ball. One morning I even had clean socks to lend a buddy when he needed a pair. I tell myself I need to bring all of this gear because I’d hate to show up and there not to be any way for us to play a game. Therapy is helping me see that, even deeper, I feel responsible even when I may not need to be the responsible one.

“Take my ball and go home” was spot on and timely.

I buy a few soccer balls each year, trying to get better models when they are on sale, and back in January I purchased a yellow Select ball designed for use on artificial turf, which is what we play on in the Sunday game in Chapel Hill and Durham (the ball is made with a slicker, thicker material to withstand the friction). I took it to the game for a few weeks, but I noticed that the ball had a tendency when kicked to pop up toward head level, and I don’t like a ball coming at my head. So, I stuck it in the back of the garage for the summer. On a rainy day last month, though, I brought the ball along and the other guys seemed to prefer it to the other balls.

The next week, the guys again selected this Select ball and got the game going. An hour into the play, I’d already used my body twice to block hard shots. Then, a third block, and my right thigh was burning from the impact. I’d fallen down. I smacked the ground.

“I hate that fucking ball!” I yelled.

“Why?” someone asked. “It’s a good one.”

“It’s okay, It’s my ball, and it’s dangerous,” I said.

“I’ve got a machete in my truck if you want to stab it,” another guy offered.

“That’s okay,” I answered. “I’ve learned my lesson about frustration and knives.”

Exhale

Long ago in Vanuatu, Noel had come in from fishing and given us a beautiful fresh red snapper. I only had a dull knife and had a tough time preparing it to cook. In frustration, I stabbed the knife into the cutting board but my hand was wet with fish flesh and slipped down the knife, which sliced open my palm. I bandaged my hand, but not well enough, and a week later it was swollen twice its size, a clear case of cellulitis that required me to get antibiotics sent from the Peace Corps nurse in Port Vila and then for Elizabeth, the nurse in the Liro Clinic, to administer the shot.

Still, it’s taken me 25 years to learn better skills to manage my frustrations—to slow down, to learn to breathe, to be aware, to choose how to react.

Back on the soccer pitch, I swapped balls (I’d actually brought two that day, and others had brought balls) and play continued. Later, at home, I calmly deflated this dangerous ball and put it on a shelf in the garage. I have another new ball ready to go. This one is a Brine Phantom X, a model we’ve used before. The guys liked it, I didn’t get hurt, and the football was fun.

But tomorrow I’m going to try something new. I’m going to show up with just my boots, my water bottle, a white shirt and a black shirt. I’ll let others bring the goals and the ball. I’ll take a deep breath, and play.

Huck and Jim

by Anton Zuiker on October 29, 2025

Last week, Erin and I went to Duke to hear the author Percival Everett speak in Page Auditorium for the Weaver Memorial Lecture. Duke had sent a copy of Everett’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James to each of the 1,700 incoming first-year students for the Common Experience Reading.

James is a retelling of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the classic by Mark Twain, but from Jim’s perspective. Erin read the book in two days prior to the event; I’ll get to it soon (I’m reading The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen, and will certainly blog about that soon.)

I was curious what I previously had blogged about Mark Twain, but I didn’t find anything in my 25-year archive. That’s funny, because I have two key memories related to Twain.

In 2009, we had been near Ithaca, New York, for a friend’s wedding in a state park under a tent (it poured buckets!) and before out flight out of Elmira next day (I remember sun), we visited Woodlawn Cemetery and the gravesite of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). That year was a momentous year jobs, new projects, travel, a baby on the way), so I neglected to note the visit.

Even further back, when I was 10 years old, I spent many hours sifting through the stacks of used books my parents had collected for eventual donation to a prison. I mentioned those books in an early blog post, Bugs in the night:

To this day, I feel guilty about killing a spider in the basement of my family’s Idaho home—when the spider crawled toward me, I grabbed the first book from the pile before me and I squashed the creature. I turned the book over to see the title: Be Nice to Spiders.

Among the books and spiders was an anthology of Twain stories—Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn—and a young-reader version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I distinctly remember reading the Yankee book a couple of times and enjoying the cleverness of the solar eclipse scene. I recall the other stories but I know I did not quite fully understanding them.

“The most subversive thing you can do is reading,” said Everett to the audience. “The second is being part of a book club.”

I’m in a science writers book club and I doubt we’ll be reading Twain anytime soon. But once I do read Jim, I’ll sit down with Erin to discuss the book.

More than just food

by Anton Zuiker on September 26, 2025

My friend Kelly Alexander, between her food-and-culture classes and writing routines and preparing to make a presentation about a competitive seed grant she and a colleague had won, agreed to meet me for coffee this morning at Carrboro’s Gray Squirrel cafe. We sat at the window bar, next to the front door, and got to talking.

When Kelly uttered the words ‘food porn’ (one of the many themes she explores with her students), I opened up my backpack and retrieved my blogging archive, the printed collection of my online writing since 2000. The other day, I told Kelly, Anna and I had been reading through the posts from when we first moved to North Carolina, in Anna’s first year of life, and I had been reminded of the day that the cable guy had come to the apartment and how excited I was to be able to watch the Food Network.

I’ve kept a printed version of my blog writing for many years, mostly from the Zuiker Chronicles and mistersugar sites, but this summer I put extra effort to digging up posts from all the other places I’ve written in these 25 years. At the moment, the 400 pages are kept together with a large alligator clip; eventually, I may make this into a book with a spiral binding and a fancy cover, if only as a keepsake for me and my family.

Kelly picked up the bundle and opened it randomly, just happening to find a 2017 post titled So long, Saveur, where I questioned saving my collected issues of that amazing food magazine. The busy, noisy cafe masked Kelly’s surprise, but I heard it. Kelly had been an editor at Saveur, and had continued to contribute her writing even after she had moved to Chapel Hill. I became aware of Kelly in 2006, heard her speak at a literary event in 2009, and even included her in an idea for a food blogging event; I didn’t get a chance to really meet her until she and Michael Ruhlman were on the radio together in 2011. Saveur helped me learn a lot about food around the world. That publication was an even more important part of Kelly’s career, which has continued to blossom, and Kelly is a big deal.

Meanwhile, Hicham Elbetri walked into Gray Squirrel.

Hich was formerly a chef. He had a catering business, then a restaurant on Franklin Street called Sandwhich, for which I had helped set up a website. That foodblogging idea had happened, albeit without Kelly; I organized a foodblogging dinner in 2007 featuring Ruhlman, and later I pulled off the inaugural Long Table dinner in 2009. Hich and his mother and sister made a delicious meal for that. All that is in my blogging archive.

I look up as one of my DCRI colleagues sets up at a table outside, and a Hollywood actor/director who recently moved to Chapel Hill sits inside at a table behind me and Kelly, who is giving me a great idea for what to do with this archive and how I might find a way to write about it.

Then I see Henry Copeland come to the cafe. Henry and I met for coffee in Chapel Hill in 2004 to talk blogging and BlogAds and more, and he was an early supporter of my BlogTogether activities and even inspired the Triangle Bloggers Bash at WUNC’s studio where I would meet Kelly 5 years later.

By now, the Gray Squirrel barista was propping open the door because the air conditioning was clearly not working, explaining why I was dripping in sweat. Sweating in street clothes makes me very uncomfortable, but I was so distracted by all the eddies of memories and connections that I didn’t mind.

“Food is always about more than food,” Kelly reminds me. There’s a lot of food in my blog archive, she said, and what might it all mean?

One hour at a Carrboro cafe on a warm Friday and I was spinning with curiosity.

Smooth pages

by Anton Zuiker on August 24, 2025

The Aug. 25, 2025 issue of the New Yorker was delivered to the mailbox yesterday, but I only retrieved it this afternoon, just before Erin and I were to go to an early dinner at próximo, a newish tapas restaurant on Franklin Street. I had an hour before we were to leave for our impromptu date, so I sat on the side porch under the fan, and started to read the magazine.

Looking at the table of contents, I thought I’d first read the Takes piece by Adam Gopnik, about Joseph Mitchell’s classic observances of the eccentric Joe Gould. Instead, I turned deeper in the pages to read the feature, by Paige Williams, about the new UNC football coach, Bill Belichick. Mitchell was from North Carolina, and I smiled at the cleverness of the New Yorker editors for putting the pieces in the same issue. I only realize now that the cleverness really comes from the parallelism of Gould and Belichick, two “characters” profiled in the magazine’s pages.

Williams piece about Belichick, college athletics and N.I.L., and the UNC environment is quite good.

… Franklin Street, the backbone of Chapel Hill’s historic core, where one need only step over a low stone wall to be on campus. U.N.C., the oldest public university in the United States, opened in 1795, predating the town that grew up around it. Chapel Hill, which is closer to Virginia than to South Carolina, sits midway between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, in forests so dense that, this time of year, one can lose sight of the horizon amid a disorienting spectrum of sun-soaked green.

Having spent a few hours today clearing piles of dead branches beneath the tall oaks and pines around our house, I appreciated this description of the dense forest. And after a delicious meal at próximo, Erin and I walked to our car parked on Franklin Street next to the low stone wall Williams describes. We had parked just a few feet past the historical marker explaining the 1795 founding of the university.

In the car, Erin said she wanted to stop in to talk with her sister, who lives down the gravel road. (They have less trees on their property, and so can have a proper garden for vegetables and flowers.) I needed to get back to my desk, to write this post, because I wanted to describe the sensation in my fingertips as I held the magazine in that first hour of reading. The paper had felt so clean, so smooth, so silky. Opening a new issue of any magazine, but especially the New Yorker, is always a joy for me. Partly this is because my first jobs were for magazines, so my body remembers the writing, the late-night story designs and proofreading, the press checks and the boxes of each issue delivered to the office.

As I read about Belichick, I was aware of the narrative flow of the article and how I was responding, emotionally and curiously, to this subject so close by, and at the same time I was observing the sensation of touching the pages. I know that in the days ahead, as I read more of this issue, some of the facts and the stories inside will stick in my brain (see my own take on a classic New Yorker piece, in my post A return to El Mozote) even as the pages get sticky, creased, and dirty as I take the issue from my backpack to the lunch table or outside bench. Now I’m holding the Aug. 11, 2025 issue, it’s cover curling in one corner and loose from one of the staples, the piece inside about perfectionism one that helped me see how self-oriented perfectionism often contributed to my procrastinating on finishing my magazine assignments.

First goal

by Anton Zuiker on August 23, 2025

Recently, I joined a pick-up soccer game in Cary, my first time with this group for their Friday mid-day game. I arrived early so I could introduce myself to the players before they got started, so I chatted up the first guy, wanting to show that I was a friendly bloke. I asked him when he got started in the game, and he said he’d been playing since his youth, and I told him I first kicked a soccer ball in Idaho, when I was 11 or 12.

The game that day in Cary was fast, fun, and hot. I returned home, showered and dressed, and got back to work.

The next time I played, at the regular Wednesday night pick-up game in Chatham County, I took a ball to the face, my glasses smashed against the side of my head. I took myself off the field, cleared my head, drove home. In the mirror, I saw a bright bruise at my temple. Later, my ophthalmologist checked my right eye for damage, gave me an ‘all clear’ but suggested I take a break for a month. It’s going to be hard to stay off the pitch.

Today, while I was digging into the bins that hold the papers and books and mementoes of my life, I came across the photo at top, me with my first soccer team, in Caldwell, Idaho most likely in summer 1982. I’m in the top row, second from left, with the long blonde hair. I can still remember the first goal I scored in that uniform, a clumsy breakaway on a dusty field.

Suspended in the world

by Anton Zuiker on August 23, 2025

Pleasant weather this past week allowed me to take my morning coffee onto the porch, where I positioned an Adirondack chair to look out through the wire railing into the forest behind the house. Inside, I’ve been reorganizing my desk space to address the clutter, and I’d uncovered a small book with a blue cover, Think Little, by Wendell Berry. I first encountered the farmer-novelist-poet Berry in the pages of Modern Farmer magazine in 2016 (a quote about the joy of “people who talk for pleasure, as opposed to people who talk to communicate”), and I’ve had this book for a few years, so it felt right to spend a few minutes each morning reading the two essays in lieu of of my normal meditation.

The second essay, A Native Hill, was the more interesting of the two. Berry wrote that in 1968, two years before I was born, but the essay felt fresh, as if Berry was telling me in real time about his walk along the creek near his home in Kentucky.

I began more seriously than ever to learn the names of things – the wild plants and animals, the natural processes, the local places – and to articulate my observations and memories.

That reminded me of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s instruction: “It’s your business to know the names of things, to recover them if necessary and use them.” I blogged here about how Klinkenborg’s book “Several short sentences about writing” inspired me to look closer at the trees and plants and animals around our house.

What I noticed this week while reading from the porch was that our forest is currently inhabited by many American robins (Turdus migratorius), which hunt along the ground and then hurriedly return to mid-level branches in the tall oak trees (many different varieties of white oak).

I also noticed how different I felt by the end of the week, having finished the book, spent time outside, and realized I had had the space, both physical and mental, to be suspended in the physical world. On page 88, Berry writes about humankind’s conceit that we can make and mold the earth to our violent wishes.

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us.

I enjoyed my morning seated reading meditation this week. The woods beyond kept calling me to walk, so that’s what I plan to do next week, with early-morning tour of the forest as the robins begin to stir.

Teeth talk

by Anton Zuiker on August 21, 2025

After two and a half years, I’m finally done with the Invisalign orthodontia that aligned my teeth. The buttons and clips came off today, the doctor said my bite looked great, and I walked out satisfied.

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