"You're playing what?" my father asked when I first told him what I was doing.  If he still held any illusions that his son would evolve into the reincarnation of Frank Meriwhether, this did them in.  Frisbee of all things.  Clearly a sport for long-hairs and druggies.

          But as well as laughing at Frisbee, my father would feel its' sting.  During my senior year he drove to Cambridge to tailgate at a football game.  The Ultimate team was playing in a tournament on a nearby field and so he decided to drop by to take a look at his son's eccentric preoccupation.  I can see him chortling with the friends he dragged along, amused that such a foolish game existed (as he waited to get into a stadium where he could watch a sport played with an oblong ball made from a pig), while concerned that the wayward son sounded a wee bit too passionate about his strange new obsession.  It was nice of my father to come watch, but he was standing too close to the field, sipping drinks with his friends, and not really paying attention.

          He should have been paying attention, if for no other reason than Nathan Salwen was roaming the field.  With Nathan around, there was always potential for danger.  Nate was a physics genius who dropped in and out of Harvard, taking a half-dozen years to get his degree.  But while Nate's mind could soar and play subtly among quasars and string theory, he played Ultimate like the classic wild man.  He had thick veined plowman's legs, a squat powerful torso, and wore his wild red hair long, with a frayed red beard and moustache.  When he tore around the field you could squint and imagine, without much of a stretch, that this was how Neanderthals looked chasing after deer.  Nathan was an "impact player"; he played passionate defense and dove at the slightest provocation and could run all day, but he also could make an impact in a less positive way.  His throws weren't quite as developed or accurate as he imagined they were.  And his first instinct was to make the most difficult and, if possible, longest throw.  This instinct to punt the disc deep, an instinct that apparently could not be controlled, would cause his teammates to sometimes cringe and mutter when Nathan got the disc.  "No, Nate, no..." they would plead.  But the answer was always yes.  Nathan saw things that were sometimes there, sometimes not, and then he wound up and let 'er rip.  As Simon liked to say, Nathan "had a notion."  

          Nathan's forehand flew like a dying quail.  Sometimes when he launched it Simon would look at me and say "duck full of buckshot" and then, after mimicking the motion of pumping a shotgun, would pretend to point his imaginary gun and shoot the wavering disc out of the air.  But Nate's backhand was raw power.  He would curl around the disc and then uncoil, launching it with a fury, sometimes heaving it right out of the endzone.  

          When he caught the disc around half-field, on the sideline where my father stood, his defender left Nate's ferocious backhand open.  Someone was streaking deep and Nate's eyes lit up and we all knew what would happen next.  Nate had a notion and if my father had been paying closer attention, and had noted Nathan's tendencies, he would have had a notion, too.  Something, some atavistic, primal instinct would have tingled and warned him that this was a dangerous man nearby, a hunter from another clan, a clan not like his own.  But at that moment my father, inebriated, oblivious, imagining himself safe watching a mere "Frisbee" game, foolishly ignored whatever subtle signals his brain or body was sending.  He stood there smiling, barely an arm's length away from this wild red-headed troglodyte, as Nathan wound up, virtually coiling around his backhand, and then, his eyes glinting with notions, unwound himself in a violent, powerful jerk.  

          The disc traveled barely two feet.  It caught my father on the side of the head and knocked him to the ground.  The game stopped.  My father instantly went from one of the spectators to the main attraction.  A crowd gathered round him.  "Are you all right, man?" Nathan asked.  There was a cut and some blood, but my father was just dazed.  An old athlete himself, he tried to make light of what had happened and, after gathering himself for a minute, gamely climbed to his feet.  

          My father and I would joke about it later.  As would my teammates.  And it was funny, a comic moment.  But there was something else there, too.  Looking back, my symbol-making imagination can't help but mold the incident into personal myth.  If I had more Robert Bly in me, I might be inclined to explore the idea of my father, authority figure and businessman, knocked to the ground by the team's wildman, Id flooring Superego.  Which, as it would play out over the next decade, was pretty much what Ultimate would do to any traditional career plans or hopes of financial success.  It would be easy to say and not entirely untrue, that the wildman in me, in coming years, would beat the stuffings out of the businessman within.