Memory doesn’t always arrive through photographs. Sometimes it comes through sound.
A song. A voice. A laugh. The creak of a door. The radio playing in another room.
My father loved tango.
Every morning he would hide in the bathroom with a small radio while he shaved because none of my brothers nor I, could stand that music. I couldn’t understand what he found in those old songs drifting through the steam and the smell of shaving cream. To me, they sounded old before I even knew what old meant.
Now, at sixty-one, I would give anything to hear that radio again.
Soccer had its own soundtrack.
Every Sunday, after a day spent rowing and playing tennis at our club in Tigre, we drove back to Buenos Aires. I climbed into our Chevy sunburned, exhausted, and happy. Then my father turned on the radio.
The announcer took over.
“Gooooooal…”
The word seemed to last forever.
Sometimes there wasn’t even a goal. Just the possibility of one. A rising voice. An explosion that never happened. I remember covering my ears, wishing the game, and the weekend, would simply end.
I thought I hated soccer.
Maybe what I really hated was that it meant Sunday was over.
I never imagined that voice would survive inside me longer than almost anything else from my childhood.
Today, when I hear a soccer commentator, I don’t think about the match.
I see my father behind the wheel.
My mother looking out the window.
My brothers half asleep.
The five of us enclosed inside a green Chevy crossing Buenos Aires at dusk.
Memory edits differently from the way we do.
It erases conversations but preserves the cadence of a familiar voice.
It forgets what was said and remembers exactly how it sounded.
Soccer also carried another lesson.
Girls didn’t play. We didn’t go to the stadium. It belonged to men. We were told it was too rough for us, while we helped prepare Sunday lunch and learned that the emotional weather inside the house could depend on the final score.
I resisted all of it.
Perhaps that resistance was one of the many small currents that eventually carried me away from Buenos Aires and brought me to Lexington.
Life enjoys irony.
I learned to dance tango only after leaving the country, embracing the very music I had rejected as a child.
And now I find myself missing those soccer broadcasts I once couldn’t wait to escape.
Not because I miss soccer.
Because I miss the people who were listening.
This summer’s World Cup reminded me that soccer is never only about soccer. For a few weeks, entire countries breathe in unison. Families gather around televisions. Strangers become teammates for ninety minutes. Watching it unfold from Lexington, I found myself thinking less about the matches than about the voices that once filled the inside of my father’s car.
Today I watch girls play soccer at the Center Field and Lincoln Park. Fathers drive their daughters to practice. Mothers coach teams. I watch professional players cry in front of millions without shame, embracing teammates with tenderness instead of pretending to be invincible.
The game changed.
So did the people playing it.
So did I.
Now, when an announcer stretches the word “Goal!” across the air, I hear something entirely different.
Not victory.
Not defeat.
I hear time.
And I wonder whether growing older is simply this: discovering that the sounds we spent our youth trying to silence become, in the end, the ones we miss the most.