I’ve known Bayu for almost as long as I can remember. We met in kindergarten, went through elementary school together, went our separate ways in junior high, and somehow found our way back to the same high school. Then college took us in different directions again. He went to Australia, I stayed in Jakarta. But somehow, through all those years and all those distances, Bayu was never really someone who disappeared from my life. He was just always there.

When we were kids, almost every day after school, Bayu would come over to my house. And it wasn’t just to hang out with me. He would hang out with my little brother too, to the point that he became almost part of the family. My family knew him because he was there for so many birthdays, so many afternoons, and so many completely ordinary days that, looking back now, turned out to be some of the best ones. We took soccer lessons together, guitar lessons together, and, as was usually the case with pretty much every activity we ever did together, he was better at it than I was. After school we would rollerblade, play Tamiya, collect Pokémon cards, and get ourselves into whatever little adventure seemed important to us at the time. One of the more ridiculous ones involved an ant named Milten. My little brother and I had just gotten a microscope, so naturally we decided that the next logical thing to do was to make an ant our scientific experiment. Milten was our subject. I’m sure we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, but back then it felt like serious science.

Junior high came and we went to different schools, so we didn’t see each other as much. Then high school brought us back together. We ended up in the same class again, and that was when we started making music together. I had a band with Bayu, Babon and Ryan called As Seen on TV. We wrote songs, rehearsed, played gigs, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of band we were supposed to be. I remember being constantly annoyed by Bayu’s Hawaiian shirts, which he seemed to wear all the time, and that ridiculously orange Music Man Bongo bass of his. Bayu was actually a really good bass player, which made his choice of basses even more confusing. He had this strange ability to be genuinely good at something and then choose the weirdest possible version of it. That was Bayu.

He also had this pose that became almost part of his identity. In practically every photo, from high school until the last years of his life, he would put his hand over his mouth and go, “Ssssttttt.” Nobody really knows why. It just became Bayu. And somehow that stupid pose survived for decades. We were close in high school. We played rugby together, made music together, made completely nonsensical videos together, and generally spent our teenage years doing things that seemed much funnier than they probably were. There was one video where I did a terrible Mickey Mouse impersonation because one of our friends was obsessed with Disney. I mean terrible. Somehow Bayu thought it was funny enough to put it in our prom night video. That’s the kind of thing Bayu did. He collected stupid moments and made them part of the story.

One of my favorite As Seen on TV memories was a gig in front of a bunch of parents. Bayu grabbed the microphone and said, “What’s up, mother father!” For a second, everyone thought he had said something else. The room exploded. That was Bayu too. He could turn almost anything into a story. And he was always there. Years later, when we were already adults and our lives had become much more complicated, that part of him never really changed. I remember DJing on New Year’s Eve about three years ago. I wasn’t expecting him to come, but he texted me, “Bro, I’m coming. I’ll hang with you.” And he did. He didn’t need a special reason. Sometimes just knowing that a friend was doing something was enough reason for him to show up. There was also the rave. I invited him that morning. Neither of us had tickets, but somehow we decided to go anyway. I lost my phone that night. What a night.

By the time we were in our late twenties, supposedly grown-ups with jobs and responsibilities and lives of our own, somehow we were still the same two kids underneath it all. That was when I started calling him Batman. Both of his parents were gone, so in my completely ridiculous logic, that made him Batman. He called me Spidey because my dad was gone too, and in his logic Spider-Man was the kid who only had his mom, Aunt May. It made absolutely no sense. Two grown men, talking about Batman and Spider-Man because we had both lost our fathers and he had lost both of his parents. But we completely committed to it. That was the thing about Bayu. We could grow older, our lives could change, and we could carry heavier things, but whenever we were together, somehow we found our way back to being kids again.

We also had our own way of dealing with grief. When my dad had been gone for ten years, Bayu sent me a bottle of gold champagne with a message congratulating me on ten years without a father. It was ridiculous. It was also one of the most thoughtful things anyone had ever done for me. I laughed when I received it because that was how we handled things. Sometimes you had to make something absurd out of something painful just so you could breathe. And he understood that kind of loss better than most people. This December would have marked ten years since his mom passed away. I had promised him that I would send him a bottle of champagne, just like he had done for me. December still felt far away. I thought I had time.

Bayu also somehow became part of my own family in another way. One day, my son came home crying because he didn’t have a best friend at his class. I told him about Uncle Bayu. I told him that his dad had been friends with Bayu since we were kids, even though we had actually only been classmates twice in our entire lives — once in third grade and once in tenth grade. It sounded strange when I said it out loud. How could someone be your best friend for most of your life when you had only shared the same classroom twice? But that was Bayu. When I told him the story, he laughed. “Wow,” he said. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

And then there was Arsenal. Bayu was Arsenal through and through. I’m a Manchester United guy, so naturally this gave us another endless source of ammunition. I still remember that maroon O2 Arsenal shirt with Thierry Henry’s name on the back. To me, that shirt was basically Bayu in physical form. And somehow, after twenty-two years, Arsenal finally won the Premier League this year. They were confirmed champions in May, months before Bayu passed away. I’m actually glad he got to see it. After all those years of supporting Arsenal, after all the waiting, he finally got his title. And as a Manchester United fan, I know I should have been annoyed about it, but honestly, I just wish I could hear the shit he would have given me about it.

The last time we chatted, I told him about a dream I had: that my son would become an Arsenal fan because Bayu was the one who taught him to love the club. It wasn’t some profound final conversation. We just laughed. That was the last chat we ever had.

A few months before he died, Bayu got seriously sick. It happened so suddenly that it was difficult to understand. At one point he couldn’t walk anymore. I went to the hospital to see him, and we talked for hours. We laughed a lot. I already knew things were serious. I had spoken to Babon, who had seen Bayu’s condition and some of the test results. And honestly, I wasn’t in the best place myself either. We were both somewhere near the bottom, each dealing with our own things. At some point I told him about our friend Dito. “Remember Dito? He disappeared in Tibet, in the Himalayas. They found him. He’s still alive.” We both laughed. It probably wasn’t the most appropriate thing to say to someone who was seriously ill, but that was us. When things became too heavy, we made stupid jokes. We knew when something was serious, but somehow we could still find a way to laugh inside it.

Bayu looked at me and said, “Our lives have so many plot twists, huh?” “Yeah,” I said. And I told him that whatever plot twist came next, I was still going to be laughing with him, just like we did when we were kids. I remember watching Kenan & Kel with him too. We watched it all the time. There was something about sitting together and laughing at the same stupid things that never really changed, even as everything else did. We grew up. We went to different places. We lost our parents. We built our own lives. We became completely different people from the kids we once were. But whenever we were together, somehow we could still become those two kids again. I told him that day, “Things change, but at least our laugh doesn’t.” I was already trying not to cry when I said it.

He eventually got out of the hospital, and I visited him at home once. Then life continued moving, as it always does. My son had a baseball tournament in Bandung, so I went there. Before I left, Bayu told Babon he was going back to the hospital because he was having trouble breathing. The night before my son’s game, while I was in Bandung, I found out that Bayu was gone. There are moments when you receive news like that and you simply don’t know what to do with it. I was in Bandung. My son had a game the next day. And one of my oldest friends was suddenly no longer here. I couldn’t do anything except stay in touch with our group of friends, reading messages as everyone tried to support each other and make sense of what had happened.

My friends sent me pictures of them doing Bayu’s famous pose, hands over their mouths, the same “Ssssttttt” he had been doing since high school. I was still in Bandung at the time. I couldn’t make it to his funeral. So when I got back from Bandung, I went to his grave with my wife, our friend, and her husband. Bayu was buried in the same place as his mom and dad. There was something about seeing his name there, next to theirs, that made everything feel strangely complete and impossibly sad at the same time. He had spent so much of his life carrying the absence of his parents, and now he was there with them again.

At his grave, we took a picture. There was no pose this time. Just a picture. Before the photo, I did something very simple. I poured water over his grave and cleaned it a little. I said, “So you smell good and you’re clean.” It was such a small thing to say, but somehow it felt like the most natural thing in the world to say to Bayu. Even there, even then, I was still talking to him the way I always had. Not giving a speech. Not saying goodbye. Just talking to my friend.

And then we took the picture. When I looked at it afterwards, something hit me harder than I expected. My eyes looked really sad. So did hers. I guess underneath all the stories and all the laughter, we finally understood that he was really gone.

And maybe that’s what I want to remember most.

Not the hospital. Not the last few months. Not even the night I found out.

I want to remember that, somehow, through all the years, Bayu was always there. Sometimes right beside me, sometimes on the other side of the world, sometimes just showing up because he saw that I was DJing on New Year’s Eve and decided, “Bro, I’m coming. I’ll hang with you.”

That was him.

I keep thinking about that bottle of champagne now. I wish I could have kept my promise. I wish December would come and I could send it to his house, just like he once sent one to mine. I wish I could text him and say, “Ten years, bro.”

But December will come anyway.

So I guess I’ll drink that one for you instead.

Maybe I’ll laugh. Maybe I’ll cry. Probably both.

And somewhere in between, I’ll remember two kids with a microscope, an ant named Milten, and absolutely no idea what they were doing.

I’ll remember all the years that came after. The music, the stupid jokes, the arguments, the ridiculous stories, the people we became, and all the versions of ourselves we somehow carried along the way.

I’ll remember that even when life got heavy, we could still make each other laugh.

You once said our lives had so many plot twists.

You were right.

I just didn’t know this was going to be the one where you weren’t there for the next chapter.

Things change. They always do.

But at least our laugh doesn’t.

Rest easy, big guy.

I’ll always miss you.

The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” started playing. One by one, the kids were called to the front, their names, numbers, and positions announced as they walked onto the ballpark like they were about to play the biggest game of their lives. I was standing, watching my son, and for a moment, I thought, how did we get here?

Over the last two months, he played two youth baseball tournaments. Two finals. Two silver medals. Maybe this was his last tournament in U10, and I think that realization made me watch everything a little differently.

The numbers were good. Across both tournaments, my son went 8-for-17, with four runs, five RBIs, and three strikeouts. He played second base, third base, left field, and right field. In the second tournament, he went 4-for-9, drove in three runs, scored twice, and didn’t strike out once.

I’m proud of those numbers, but they’re not the ones I keep thinking about.

When I look back at the photos from these two tournaments, I notice something: my son was always in the frame. Not always because he was doing something spectacular, but often because someone else was. When his teammate hit a home run, he was one of the first kids running toward him. When someone made the catch for the third out, he was there to congratulate him.

For a boy who can be awkward, shy, and sometimes unsure of himself, those little moments meant more to me than I expected. He didn’t have to be the center of the picture. He just wanted to be part of it.

One moment from the final keeps coming back to me. The score was 5 — 5. My son came up to bat, hit the ball, but not far enough. He was out, but a runner on third base, and that runner made it home.

I was coaching first base, right there when he came back toward the dugout. He took off his helmet and immediately asked me, “Did he make it?” I told him yes. He ran off celebrating. He was out, but his team had scored. 5 — 6.

There was another moment when a teammate hit a home run, and my son cried. I thought he was upset, but he wasn’t. “I’m really proud of him,” he told me. “That’s why these are happy tears.”

I don’t know if there’s a stat for that. Maybe there should be.

Then came the final of the last tournament, the one our team lost 21-20. That morning, my son woke up with his neck hurting badly. He came to me and asked if he could sit out defense because he was worried that if he made it worse, he wouldn’t be able to play anymore. He told the coach the same thing, and the coach put him in at designated hitter instead. Later, my son told me it would’ve been okay if the coach had taken him off the roster entirely.

I was proud of that decision, too. Not because it was brave, but because it was honest. He was hurt. He was scared of making it worse, and he still wanted to keep playing baseball. Sometimes being part of a team means knowing when to step onto the field. Sometimes it means knowing when not to.

Everything outside the ballpark mattered just as much. This was an out-of-town tournament, which meant four kids crammed into my car, hotel to ballpark and back, with the entire ride somehow filled with Pokémon trivia. We even had our own chant, something we made up that wasn’t particularly clever but somehow lit up the car every time.

Before the games, they’d pray together. The same simple ask every time: for a good game and no injuries. No complicated requests. Just a bunch of ten-year-olds hoping for a good game and for everyone to go home healthy. I loved that.

These kids came from different clubs and different baseball backgrounds, but for a few days they wore the same badge and played for the same school. I always tell my son, “Don’t play just for yourself. Play for your teammates, your coach, and the badge you’re wearing.”

Because baseball can’t be played alone. Someone has to be on base. Someone has to move them. Someone has to cover the bag. Someone has to make the catch, and someone has to cheer from the dugout. The game is bigger than the individual, and somewhere along the way, I started seeing my son understand that.

During one of the preliminary games, our shortstop caught a ball for the third out. Nothing unusual, just a good play. Then his senior teammates started chanting his name from the stands, a chant they’d made just for him.

Suddenly that little out felt much bigger. Not because it changed the score, but because I could see what it meant to him. He wasn’t just a shortstop making an out. He was someone’s teammate, someone’s junior, someone worth cheering for.

After one game, I asked my son if he was ready for next year.

“If there are tryouts, I’m ready,” he said. Then he paused. “But I might not make the team. My friends are really good.”

And then, before I could say anything, he asked, “But if I don’t make it, we’re still going on the weekend, right? To watch?”

That one got me.

He knew he wasn’t the best player on the team. He just wanted to be there.

Later in the tournament, one of the strongest players on the roster, a kid who would eventually make the All-Star team, watched my son field a ball in left field and throw it clean to first for the out. I saw him pointing across the field before I understood what was happening.

Then I heard him yell, “THAT’S MY BOY! THAT’S MY BOOOOY! LET’S GOOO!”

My son may not have been the best player on the roster, but one of the best players on the team was genuinely proud of him. Maybe that’s what belonging looks like: not being the best, not being guaranteed a spot, but knowing somebody is happy when you make the play.

Somewhere along the way, my hotel room became the unofficial headquarters. Kids kept drifting in and out, parents came by, and someone was always around.

I’d always joked, “No food in my room. Except Wagyu A5.” Apparently, the kids took that very seriously. The youngest kid on the roster eventually appointed herself as the room’s bouncer and would announce, “NO FOOD IN THIS ROOM UNLESS IT’S WAGYU A5!”

She was very serious about enforcing the rule. It was ridiculous. It was also one of my favorite parts of the tournament.

After the final, my son sent the club’s head coach a voice note. Not a short “we lost,” but a full recap: what happened, how the game went, and how it ended. Then, with real excitement in his voice, he told him that we’d finished second.

We’d lost 21–20.

But you wouldn’t have known it from how he sounded. He sounded excited. He sounded proud. He just wanted to tell his coach what happened.

Maybe that’s what these two tournaments were really about. Not the silver medals, not the final scores, and not even the stats. Those will eventually just become numbers in an old spreadsheet.

What I hope he remembers are the things that don’t fit into one: the car rides, the Pokémon trivia, the ridiculous chant, the prayers, the senior kids chanting from the stands, the hotel room that somehow became headquarters, the teammates running toward each other, and the feeling of being part of something.

Next season, he moves up to U12. The kids get bigger, the throws get harder, the game gets faster, and he’ll keep growing. That’s the part I’m not ready for.

Because being ten is temporary.

So when he looks back at these tournaments years from now, I hope he doesn’t remember the silver medals first. I hope he remembers being ten: his friends, the noise from the stands, running toward someone else’s home run, crying because he was proud of a teammate, and asking if his teammate made it home. I hope he remembers the Pokémon trivia, the ridiculous car chant, the prayers, the hotel room, and the Wagyu A5 rule.

Maybe he’ll remember that he didn’t always have to be the one in the spotlight. Sometimes, he could be the kid running toward the guy who was.

Because baseball can’t be played alone.

The last time I wrote about a season like this, his team was ranked tenth out of ten. Dead last. This time, they finished second. Twice. But that’s not really the score I’d give it either.

He finished the season happy for someone else’s home run, honest about his own limits, proud of his teammates, and still asking to come back to the ballpark even if he didn’t make the team.

He finished second.

But he was ten.

And for me?

10 out of 10.

Thanks for reading my story.

Marginalia

Written from the sideline by No. 37’s biggest fan. Literally the biggest person in the house. First-base coach. Carpool driver. Prof Oak trusted sidekick. Keeper of the Wagyu A5 rule.

The Last Season of Being Ten was originally published in Beyond the Scoreboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I didn’t watch the Netherlands get knocked out by Morocco in the round of 32 at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

I read about it instead.

Penalty shootout. Exit. Done.

No broadcast. No noise. Just a headline on a screen. Not because I didn’t care. But because I didn’t need to see it happen live. Some matches stopped belonging to live moments a long time ago.

Two people taught me how to love football. Neither of them lived long enough to see the strange new chapter in the relationship between Indonesia and the Netherlands.

Simon Tahamata. Now involved in Indonesian football. And Patrick Kluivert, who was part of it in ways my father would have had a lot to say about. Names that once lived on European screens… now appearing closer to home.

I keep thinking about what they would have said. My grandmother would have smiled. My father would have had a lot to say. The same background runs deeper than football.

My grandmother chose to stay in Indonesia and become a citizen when her brothers and sisters moved to the Netherlands.

Years later, I started noticing something I didn’t expect. Familiar football stories returning in the opposite direction. People shaped by Dutch football end up in red and white instead of orange.

I didn’t understand her choice when I was younger. I only understand now that decisions like that don’t end with the person who makes them — they echo through generations in ways you don’t notice at first.

The orange jersey in my closet doesn’t say Cruyff or Van Persie. It says Vroegop. My grandmother’s Dutch family name. Back then, it didn’t feel unusual. It just felt like ours.

We wore it every World Cup without thinking too much about what it meant.

The year 1998 is my earliest memory of the Netherlands. Not the football, but the living room. My grandmother watched Oranje as if the room shifted when it played. Brazil at its peak. The Netherlands falling short. But what stayed wasn’t the result. It was her attention.

The year 2006 changed how I saw football. Portugal versus the Netherlands. The Battle of Nuremberg chaos, cards, a match that stopped trying to be beautiful.

Around that time, Nike was still telling us football was something else with their “Joga Bonito” campaign. Eric Cantona speaking into a version of the game that still believed in elegance.

I believed both.

And I never really stopped carrying that contradiction. By 2010, football had become something else. Something social.

Every Netherlands match started the same way.

“Have you booked De Hooi?” — a Dutch bar in Jakarta where we always watched the games.

“Who’s coming?”

My father handled the ritual.

I handled my friends. Somewhere along the way, they stopped being just my friends. They became part of those nights, too. Not because of football. But because of my father.

That same year, the Netherlands beat Brazil. For one night, belief felt possible. It didn’t last. But what stayed wasn’t disappointment.

It was the table, the noise, the gathering, the ritual.

My father died in 2013. There’s no match I remember from the year after. The 2014 World Cup passed somewhere in the background of a house that was still learning how to be quiet.

In 2018, the Netherlands didn’t qualify. Somehow that felt appropriate.

In 2022, the World Cup was in Qatar, a tournament that never quite found its footing with me either. Wrong season, wrong feeling, orange jerseys in December instead of June.

In Indonesia, supporting the Netherlands has never been simple. It sits inside a history that is still present in quiet ways. And yet, every four years, orange returns. Living rooms fill. Bars get crowded. People who have never been to the Netherlands suddenly share the same chant. History doesn’t disappear. It just becomes background noise for ninety minutes.

Over time, I started noticing something I didn’t expect. Familiar football stories in a different color. The same lineage of football is now appearing in red and white instead of orange.

Players shaped by Dutch football pathways choosing Indonesia. My father once said it from a bar stool at De Hooi, “Wouldn’t it be something if Giovanni van Bronckhorst played for Indonesia?”

At the time, it was just a joke tossed out between rounds, the kind you forget by the next match. Now, with Dutch-born players actually filling out the national team roster, it doesn’t sound like a joke anymore. It sounds like something he predicted.

I can almost hear what he would have said about Kluivert, too, now that Kluivert coaches Indonesia instead of playing for the Netherlands. Kluivert was one of my father’s idols — a name he said with the kind of reverence reserved for very few players.

But loving someone as a player never stopped my father from being furious at them as a coach. I can hear the exact tone he’d use watching Kluivert struggle to get results out of Timnas. Not disappointment. Betrayal, dressed up as sports commentary.

I didn’t inherit a football team. I inherited people. A grandmother who made football feel like a presence. A father who turned matches into gatherings and who never once ran out of opinions.

And a jersey with a family name on it instead of a player’s.

I didn’t watch the Morocco match. I read it. Because some things feel heavier when witnessed in real time. Especially when the people who taught you how to care are no longer here to share it with you.

I don’t think I stopped caring about the Oranje. I just stopped having people to care with. The next World Cup will come. The Netherlands will return. Maybe I’ll watch. Maybe I won’t. But in my closet, there is still an orange jersey. It doesn’t say Cruyff. It doesn’t say, Van Persie.

It still says Vroegop.

And somehow, that has always been enough.

Marginalia

Some jerseys don’t carry a player’s name because the people who taught you to wear them mattered more than who was on the pitch.

Thanks for reading my story.

I Don’t Watch the Netherlands the Same Way Anymore was originally published in Beyond the Scoreboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I didn’t grow up knowing my grandfather. What I knew fit in a sentence: strict Catholic, worked at the Indonesian embassy in Rome, very proper. My grandmother I knew well — her house full of crosses, choir practice in the living room, rosaries on every surface. But Papi was a photograph. A story told in past tense by people who missed him.

Then I graduated university, sold my soul to a Big 4 accounting firm — the accounting kind, not the thrash metal kind — and found myself one afternoon at my grandmother’s house, holding a cloth, staring at a crate of vinyl. Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Cliff Richard, America, ELP, Steppenwolf, Elvis and The Beatles.

I want to be clear: this is not the record collection of a devout Catholic diplomat. This is the record collection of someone with taste and, apparently, very understanding children.

My father was there, and we started talking — the way you talk when your hands are busy and the room is quiet. He’d pick up a sleeve, wipe it down, and a memory would surface.

Oh, this one. Papi bought this in Rome.

The Zeppelin — Papi got that one too.

Slowly, across an afternoon of dust and sleeves, I started to meet him. Not through photographs. Not through the official version. Through what he chose to bring home.

Piece by piece, more details emerged. He drove a DeSoto. He had a particular way of smoking. Once, in Cambodia, someone mistook him for Norodom Sihanouk — and from what I can tell, he handled it with exactly the kind of dignity you’d expect from a man who drove a DeSoto and listened to Steppenwolf. He bought my father guitars. He let music into the house that the house wasn’t supposed to have.

The Cliff Richard records were the road trip ones. The whole family, somewhere between cities — I don’t know which car, I don’t know which roads. But I know there was Cliff Richard. “We’re Going on a Summer Holiday.” You can probably guess the era from that alone.

My uncles said my father was his kid through and through — same taste, same instincts, same talent for smuggling joy into serious situations.

It also explained something about my father that I’d never really questioned. Before the restaurants, before the hotels, before becoming the person everyone else remembered — he’d wanted music first.

He wrote a song called “Jelaga,” performed by Achmad Albar, entered into Lomba Cipta Lagu Remaja ’79. Another one, “Kurnia Illahi,” was recorded by Black Brothers. I now own both records.

I find myself checking the bins at every used record store I visit. The LCLR ’79 compilation has a cover that looks like a red Marlboro pack — you’d know it if you saw it. When I find one, I buy it. Not for me. For my son. So that one day he can hear his grandfather’s name in the liner notes and understand that Kai didn’t just love music.

He left some behind.

I never got to meet Papi properly. I graduated in 2012. My father died in 2013. In 2017, we moved Papi’s grave to a new site. Until then, he’d mostly existed as stories. My first real encounter with him was skeletal.

Bones.

That was my introduction. That was the closest I got.

What I have instead is a crate of records, an afternoon of my father’s voice, and a secondhand portrait of two men I would have liked very much.

Now I have a son. And my son has no grandfather.

So I’ve been doing what my father did for me, without ever planning to. I put on the records. I tell the stories. My son calls his grandfather Kai — that was his name for him, the one that stuck, the way kids name things and suddenly it becomes true — and sometimes, out of nowhere, he asks questions.

What did Kai like to eat?

What was his job like?

Did he like baseball?

That last one I had to improvise. I said probably yes. I have no evidence. It felt like the right dad move.

The questions land differently than I expected. Not like loss. More like presence. Like someone knocking on a door from the other side, just to check if anyone’s listening.

Because that’s the thing about vinyl — it insists on being physical. You have to touch it. You have to be in the room with it. You can’t skip to the next track without making a decision. And when a kid asks why you’re being so careful with a piece of black plastic, you have to explain. And when you explain, the person who owned it becomes real.

My grandfather bought these records in Rome. My father wrote some of his own. I carried all of it further. My son will carry them somewhere I can’t imagine yet — probably while asking if Kai also liked whatever music his generation invents that will make me feel very old and very uncool.

The records still sit in their crate. Every now and then I pull one out, brush away a little dust, and another story comes with it.

Maybe that’s all inheritance really is.

Marginalia — Some inheritances skip the formal handover. They just sit in a crate, waiting for a quiet afternoon and someone with a cloth.

Spring season, they call it. Back home in Jakarta, Indonesia, it’s 32°C — there’s nothing “spring” about it. Just heat, noise, and kids chasing a game that’s harder than it looks.

He had just come off a championship run the previous fall. Same club, same game — so naturally, we thought this would be a continuation of that story.

It wasn’t.

This season, the club sent three teams. He didn’t make the elite one. He was placed in the development team instead.

One of the oldest on the roster, surrounded by kids who had just moved up from the Under-8 division. And somehow, he was the one struggling the most.

If I’m being honest, as a parent, I had my doubts too. He’s one of the oldest.

Why does he look like he’s falling behind?

Because I’ve seen him in practice.

He’s okay. Comfortable, confident.

But games are different.

In games, something breaks. He used to bat near the end of the lineup. Now they’ve moved him up front. More pressure, more exposure.

Fewer places to hide.

The first two games were hard.
Four at-bats.
Four strikeouts.

He cried after the second game. Not quietly. My wife had to walk into the dugout to calm him down.

Later, he told us it wasn’t just about missing the ball. It was about feeling like he was supposed to carry the team. As one of the oldest, he thought that was his job.

But he couldn’t.

What happened next surprised me. It wasn’t a coach. It wasn’t us. It was his teammates. Kids younger than him, smaller than him — the ones who had just moved up this season. Before one of his at-bats, he shook hands with a teammate.

“Good luck, buddy,” one of his friends said to my son. Such a small moment. But it stayed.

Game three, something changed. He got on base. Safe at first. Out at second. Nothing spectacular on paper. But I still remember it clearly — he took off his helmet and smiled. Not relief. Not luck. Just… joy. And suddenly, all the parents started shouting his name. Cheering him. For a moment, that wouldn’t show up anywhere except in memory.

By game four, he made contact again. Still not perfect. Still not enough. But different. And before disappointment could settle in, one of his teammates ran up to him, put an arm around his shoulder, and said, “Good hit. Next time, run faster, we can train together.”

No blame.
No pressure.
Just support.

They are currently ranked last. tenth out of ten teams. And somehow, it doesn’t feel like a losing season. Because somewhere between the strikeouts, the tears, and the quiet encouragement from kids who had no reason to carry him — but did — he’s learning something bigger than baseball.

He’s learning that being the oldest doesn’t mean having all the answers. That struggling doesn’t make you less of a teammate. That progress doesn’t always show up on the scoreboard.

And maybe I am too. Learning to let go of expectations. Learning that practice isn’t the same as pressure. Learning that growth doesn’t always look impressive from the outside.

After one of the games, a giant backdrop was set up near the field with the header “Future Stars.” Rows and rows of names. He didn’t just stand there. He looked for his name.

And when he found it, he pointed at it, stood next to it, and asked for a photo. Same kid who cried in the dugout just days ago. Same kid who struck out four times in a row. Now smiling, thumbs up, standing next to his own name — like it meant something. Like he meant something.

Maybe this season isn’t about winning. Maybe it’s about learning how to show up… for your team, for yourself, and for the moments that don’t look like much but somehow mean everything.

Maybe he’s not the best player on the field.

But that day, standing next to his name, smiling for a photo he asked for, he looked like a future star to me.

Thanks for reading my story.

Marginalia

Written from the sidelines of a youth baseball season in Jakarta

The 10/10 Season was originally published in Beyond the Scoreboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re counting days to Ramadan. Not in a grand, ceremonial way.

More like quietly realizing the calendar is shifting again, and somehow, certain smells start returning to the house before the month even begins.

Every family seems to have that one dish. My Grandma used to make oxtail soup every time someone had a birthday. No negotiations. Birthdays meant soup.

At my mom’s house, Eid is inseparable from soto Banjar. My uncle insists on lasagna every Christmas. For a long time, I thought I wouldn’t have one of those. No inherited recipe. No dish passed down with instructions measured by instinct instead of grams.

No food that people would say, “Oh, this reminds me of home.” I was wrong.

Before it became ours, kapsalon was just a word I didn’t fully understand. I first ate it near my campus in Rotterdam. Everyone talked about it like folklore:

Best hangover food. Perfect after a long night out. Heavy, messy, life-saving.

The name confused me. Kapsalon literally means hair salon in Dutch.

The myth goes like this: a hairdresser near Rotterdam Central asked a nearby shawarma place to combine all his favorite items into one box — fries, meat, cheese, sauce. The place was next to his salon. The name stuck.

A dish born from convenience, hunger, and zero intention of becoming anything meaningful. Yet somehow, it did.

For context: kapsalon is shawarma meat, fries, melted cheese, garlic sauce, and sambal (Indonesian hot sauce). This matters because my wife and I are not a sambal person.

We don’t add sambal casually like most of Indonesian.

In our food philosophy, sambal isn’t a topping — it’s either essential or unnecessary. In kapsalon, sambal is essential.

Food became comfort, not concept long before kapsalon entered our kitchen. Whenever I miss home, I don’t look for regional Indonesian food. I go to KFC. Not because it’s Indonesian, but because the smell takes me straight back to Pondok Indah Mall. Going home from campus with friends. My dad and My Grandma The unspoken agreement that if no one wanted to cook, we’d just order KFC and call it a night.

In Rotterdam winters — grey, quiet, relentless — those smells were medicine. Familiar aromas cutting through foreign air. That’s probably why kapsalon stayed with us.

We started making it after moving back to Jakarta. Not because we planned to build a tradition, but because we were tired. And nostalgic. And didn’t feel like cooking properly. Most of our sahoor meals ended up being kapsalon.

Again and again. Maybe we missed the taste.

Maybe we missed who we were when we first ate it. Newly married. Living in a small studio apartment. Walking everywhere. My wife pregnant. Sitting close to the heater. Watching Game of Thrones. Ordering food through Thuisbezorgd, waiting for it like it was a small event. What we missed wasn’t just the food. It was wandering around Museumplein. The smell of Blaak metro station. Walking aimlessly along Oude Binnenweg.

So we recreated it. Poorly at first. The fries got soggy. The cheese didn’t melt right. The sambal overwhelmed everything. We kept going. Eight years later, we have eight versions of kapsalon.

Failures layered into muscle memory.

Adjustments that only make sense if you’ve ruined the dish before What once was hangover food, eaten to recover from excess, slowly became a meal we associate with restraint, waiting, and intention. Not as a contradiction.

But as a transformation. That was the moment it clicked. Traditions do not start as traditions. They start as small steps. They start as ordinary decisions repeated quietly. As things we do without realizing we are doing them. Until one day, someone notices they are missing when they are gone.

Maybe one day, my child will wait for Ramadan not just because of the calendar, but because of this dish. Maybe my grandchildren will remember it the way I remember my grandmother’s oxtail soup —not questioning why it was always there, only knowing that it was.

What began as hangover food after long nights in Rotterdam has become something we look forward to in a sacred month. Not in spite of its origin, but because meaning is allowed to change. And maybe that is how traditions are formed. Not through grand intentions. But through care, repetition, and time.

Happy Ramadan, from our family to yours.

Marginalia

In the end, kapsalon became that thing for us. The way KFC still pulls me back to home, this dish does the same

For a long time, communication didn’t come easily to him.

He has Sensory Processing Disorder. His brain takes in information differently — sounds, textures, sensations arrive louder, faster, sometimes all at once. It showed up most clearly in his speech. Not because he didn’t have thoughts, but because organizing them outward took more time. Therapy became part of our routine — not to fix him, but to help him translate what was already happening inside.

So when we started scrolling through baseball bats on Amazon, I wasn’t expecting a lesson.

The bat he uses now — 27” — has officially become too small. We do have a 28” at home, a hand-me-down from my brother-in-law. From before USA stamps and BBCOR labels mattered. It still works, technically — but not under today’s rules, and it can’t be used in most major tournaments.

We were just looking. The prices were high enough to keep the conversation honest.

He stopped on a red composite bat — bright, expensive, and tempting. The price alone made me speak up. I reminded him to be careful using a composite bat in the batting cage. Composite barrels don’t respond well to hard plastic or rubber balls.

He paused.

Then he asked what the difference was between a two-piece bat and the one-piece bat he uses now.

I explained. One-piece bats vibrate more. They’re less forgiving. Miss the sweet spot, and you feel it. Hybrid and composite bats help you out a bit more. The ball travels farther. The mistakes hurt less.

That’s usually where these conversations end.

This time, he kept thinking.

If the bat can’t hit dimple balls, then he can’t practice at the cage.

If he can’t practice at the cage, then he can’t train often.

If he can’t train often, then how is he supposed to get better?

Distance, he said, we can work on later. We can just practice more.

If I practice a lot, I’ll get better anyway.

Then he looked at the price again and added, almost as an afterthought:

• If we buy a one-piece bat, it makes more sense.
• We don’t need to buy a bucket of leather balls.
• We can keep using the training balls we already have.
• That way, we can practice more.

That was his conclusion.

I should admit something here. I was leaning toward a two-piece bat. A hybrid. Something more forgiving. Something that would help him a little. His friends were getting them. Everyone was upgrading.

So after he finished laying out his pros and cons, I asked him — half joking, half stunned — how he even thought of all that.

He looked at me, genuinely confused.

“Isn’t that just how you’re supposed to think?”

I didn’t have an answer ready.

As a high-handicap golfer, my entire worldview is built on forgiveness. Bigger sweet spots. Higher launch. Clubs are designed to hide my flaws. Equipment that makes me feel better than I actually am.

His logic went the other way.
He wasn’t optimizing for results.
He was optimizing for repetition.

He wasn’t choosing what helps him most when he misses.

He was choosing what allows him to show up every day.

What made it heavier — what I didn’t say out loud — is that for years, we measured his progress differently. We counted attempts, not outcomes. We waited for words the way other parents wait for trophies. Therapy wasn’t a phase; it was a rhythm.

When people hear “speech delay,” they imagine silence.

What they don’t imagine is thinking.

Standing there, comparing baseball bats, I realized something quietly unsettling and deeply relieving at the same time: I had underestimated the complexity of his internal conversations.

He wasn’t behind.

He was busy.

Busy choosing process over performance. Busy understanding constraints instead of wishing them away. Busy accepting that mastery is repetitive, unglamorous, and slow.

He didn’t make a speech.
He didn’t try to convince me.
He just picked the bat.

I nodded. Told him that made sense.

Marginalia

Later that night, I kept thinking — not about how far he can hit, but about how far ahead he’s already thinking.

Thanks for reading my story.

On Choosing Reps over Distance was originally published in Beyond the Scoreboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We moved into our current house in a suburb just outside Jakarta. It’s an inheritance from my in-laws, in a gated community where most of the neighbors are grandparents.

It’s very quiet here. The kind of quiet where the biggest daily conflict involves plants slowly invading other people’s fences.

One afternoon, while I was working from home and my wife was out with our son, the doorbell rang. I opened the door and found a kid standing there dressed as a pirate.

Full costume. Zero irony. A full pirate situation.

“Is your son home?” he asked. “We’re going to play.”

No greeting. No context. No parents in sight.

And for a second, I just stood there — confused not by the pirate, but by how strangely familiar it was. I realized how long it had been since I’d seen something like this.

Not a scheduled playdate.

No parents coordinating.

No messages exchanged beforehand.

Just a kid ringing a doorbell, asking if a friend could come out and play.

Of all the things I want to give my child — safety, education, opportunities, experiences — the one thing I don’t know how to manufacture is friendship.

Not acquaintances.

Not classmates.

The kind of friendship that sticks — without supervision, without structure, and without anyone keeping score. The kind that shows up at your door unannounced, asks if you’re home, and disappears with you for the rest of the afternoon.

My child is an only child. Every now and then, he asks why he doesn’t have siblings. Sometimes he cries. Sometimes he just says he feels lonely, very matter-of-factly, like loneliness is a practical problem that should come with a solution.

That question tends to stay with me longer than it probably should.

The truth is, I don’t really know what that loneliness feels like. I grew up with a sibling, surrounded by cousins, always in a house that felt a little too full. Being alone was never really part of my childhood. Which makes it harder to know how to respond when he asks.

But lately, something has shifted.

Since he started playing with the neighborhood kids — real playing, outside, no gadgets — he’s been different. Riding bikes until it gets dark. Roaming without a destination. Coming home sweaty, tired, and oddly calm. The kind of tired that feels earned.

He has friends who lives just a few houses away. The kind of friends who shows up every afternoon, rings the doorbell, and asks if he can come out to play. Sometimes they ride bikes. Sometimes they do nothing in particular. Then they disappear for hours and return just before sunset — dusty, hungry, and somehow lighter. In my book, that still counts as a productive day.

Watching him disappear down the street on his bike, I couldn’t help thinking about my own childhood friendships. The ones that formed without intention, without labels, and without anyone calling them “important” at the time. We grew up side by side. We did deeply questionable things together. Underage drinking. Bad concerts and worse gigs. Car accidents that felt catastrophic back then. Long nights that ended too early and mornings that started too late.

At the time, none of it felt like it was building anything. It just felt like life happening. Years later, some of those friends became business partners. Some reappeared through work projects. One of them eventually introduced me to my wife.

None of that was planned either.

When my father passed away, I went through his vinyl collection. On the covers, I found handwritten names — his name, his friends’ names, the name of their group. Names I’d heard my entire life. Names that had survived distance, time, and whatever adulthood eventually turned them into.

I realized then that he had his own version of this too. His own unplanned friendships. His own people. Which made me wonder if this kind of bond isn’t something you design or pass down deliberately — but something life hands out occasionally, when the conditions are right and adults don’t interfere too much.

I don’t know if my son will get the same kind of friendships I did. Life doesn’t always repeat itself on schedule, and it doesn’t owe us symmetry.

But lately, it feels like it’s trying.

A friend who rings the doorbell.

An afternoon that disappears on bicycles.

A pirate asking permission to play.

I’m grateful that he feels a little less alone. Grateful that he belongs to something that doesn’t need a login or a plan. Grateful that friendship, somehow, found its way to our front door.

I hope he gets to keep it.

Not because I figured it out.

But because life, unexpectedly, decided to show up.

Marginalia:

I didn’t plan to write about friendship. It just showed up unannounced

The Things I Never Planned to Give My Child was originally published in True Nuance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I collect vinyl. I DJ. I collect toys. I golf badly. I once played tennis seriously for about three months.

These hobbies made sense to me. They had rules, aesthetics, and the illusion of control.

Somehow, without ever signing up for it, I now spend my weekends deep in youth sports logistics (thanks to @brokedadjordan on Instagram for giving this chaos a name) — tracking schedules, managing jerseys, counting water bottles, and emotionally investing in games I don’t even play.

Now, my wife and I fall asleep talking about our son’s team statistics, predicting batting orders, debating fielding positions, and quietly pretending this is normal adult pillow talk.

This was not on the vision board.

I knew almost nothing about baseball when this started. I didn’t grow up with it. I couldn’t tell you the difference between a force out and a tag play without Googling it first. I learned the rules slowly, usually from the stands, usually five seconds too late.

Weekends disappeared quietly.

Not in dramatic ways — just a slow, steady migration from brunch plans and lazy mornings to dusty fields, folding chairs, and bad coffee. Saturday and Sunday became synonyms for “the field.”

Somewhere along the way, we started sacrificing more than time. Club fees. Training fees. Jerseys. Extra jerseys. Tournaments outside the city.

Fuel. Snacks. Ice packs. Repeat.

At one point, out of curiosity and mild financial panic, we did the math. The number wasn’t outrageous. But it also wasn’t nothing.

Before baseball, there were therapies.

Many of them.
Speech therapy.
Occupational therapy.
Sensory therapy.

Our calendar is filled with appointments, progress notes, and carefully measured milestones. We spoke to psychologists about delayed speech, delayed writing, and about everything that felt slightly behind, mostly in comparison to other children.

Then we met Dr. Dono.

He listened. He observed. And then he said something that felt both radical and strangely simple.

Stop everything.

No more therapy sessions.

Just throw and catch.

No worksheets. No flashcards. No forced repetition. Just movement. Coordination. Interaction. A ball going back and forth between two people.

Around the same time, something else happened. Our son started talking about baseball — a lot.

It turned out one of his friends on the school bus wouldn’t stop telling him stories about practices, games, and hits. Every ride home came with a new recap.

So when we heard throw and catch as a replacement for therapy, and our son was already asking to try baseball, it felt less like a leap and more like a shortcut.

A practical one.

Baseball, objectively, isn’t cheap.

But when we compared the numbers, one month of therapy cost roughly the same as four or five months of baseball, training, and tournaments. At that point, the decision quietly shifted from philosophical to financial.

For the sake of finance, we went with baseball.

So we joined.

Somewhere along the way, we found our village. My son was happy. He made new friends. He learned how to support his teammates, how to wait his turn, and how to lead chants from the dugout.

He’s not in the elite team — not yet, maybe not ever — but he belongs.

He interacts with his coaches. He understands the game enough to care. He scored runs. He won a few medals. Nothing extraordinary by competitive standards — but enough to make him proud.

Then came the moments that don’t show up on scoreboards. We went back to see Dr. Dono, this time carrying stories instead of worries.

My son explained the rules of baseball to him.

Slowly yet Confident. He talked about his favourite players — the same child who once struggled to speak now organising thoughts around innings, positions, and plays.

Dr. Dono listened.

So did we.

Life adjusted quietly around this new centre of gravity.

We lost a lot of brunches. Padel sessions disappeared. Golf became theoretical. Weekends were no longer ours in the way they used to be.

But I gained a new hobby.

Youth sports logistics.

And, unexpectedly, I enjoy it.

I enjoy watching my son strike out and cry.

I enjoy watching him jog home dancing.

I enjoy being there for both.

Not to analyse it. Not to label it. Just to show up.

Maybe one day this will become a core memory for him — not about winning or losing, but about knowing someone was always there on the sideline.

And for now, that feels like enough.

Marginalia

Parenthood quietly rearranges your priorities. You lose a few hobbies. You lose some weekends. But in return, you gain front-row seats to growth, courage, and small victories that don’t show up on any scoreboard.

Thanks for reading my story

My Unexpected Hobby: Youth Sports Logistics, Apparently was originally published in Beyond the Scoreboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was born in Jakarta, 1990 — back when Slank had just existed, and Ahmad Dhani was probably still bouncing between Surabaya and Jakarta, carrying nothing but a keyboard and unreasonable confidence. People love calling Millennials soft. Gen Z even softer.

And honestly? I get why they think that but they’re wrong. Because when the generation before us came home from work, the world went silent. When they closed their front door, their jobs stopped existing.

For us? The office follows us everywhere like a clingy ex with unlimited data.

By the time we hit our mid-20s, our lives were already flooded with WhatsApp group deadlines, Slack pings at 11:48 PM, email reminders, KPI dashboards, and the soft threat of “Seen at 10:02 PM.” We clock out, but the world doesn’t. They say we’re fragile. But the truth is: we’re just constantly reachable, and being reachable is the heaviest tax of modern life.

No, we didn’t grow up in war but don’t mistake that for peace.

We weren’t drafted into World War II.

We didn’t hide from Cold War missiles.

But Millennials and early Gen Z lived through our own highlight reel of chaos:

• The 1998 Indonesian Reformasi riots (some of us watched cities burn on TV)
• The Asian Financial Crisis
• 9/11, broadcasted live into our childhood
• Bush, Trump, and the political fever dream in between
• A global recession
• A global pandemic
• A job market that treats stability like a myth
• Housing prices that make you question math, economics, and God

We weren’t raised in trenches

but we were raised in transition, in turbulence, in a world that kept rewriting itself every two years.

The world in our hands was never a gift — it was a burden.

They told us “the world is in your hands” like it was a blessing.

Reality: it was the beginning of the 24/7 panic era.

Access to everything means exposure to everything:

• Hoaxes from your uncles
• Financial advice from a crypto bro with a ringlight
• TikTok trends telling women they’re “high value” only if picked up in a BMW
• Insecurity on sale, repackaged every week
• News headlines that feel like boss levels in a video game

We grew up overstimulated, overnotified, and overexposed.

So yes, sometimes we break down.

Not because we’re weak.

Because everything is everywhere all at once, and we’re expected to function like machines.

And let’s talk about music our emotional blueprint.

We were mostly raised by nu-metal, the genre that taught us anger before we even had vocabulary for it. Linkin Park screaming from cheap speakers. Limp Bizkit blasting in internet cafés. Slipknot teaching us that chaos could be cathartic.

Then came the emo wave, the era that allowed us to admit things:

My Chemical Romance.

Fall Out Boy.

The Used.

Suddenly emotions weren’t a malfunction — they were an anthem. They were mascara-stained honesty. And that’s why it’s funny when older generations call us soft.

We were literally raised by music that screamed about pain, alienation, and survival. We’re the ones who grew up chanting:

I’m Not Okay (I Promise).

We weren’t pretending.

We meant it.

We’re the OG emos not because we wore eyeliner, but because we were the first to look at chaos and say, Yeah, this hurts.

We are not soft we are overstimulated. And there’s a difference.

We’re the generation that grew up between two worlds : analog childhoods, digital adulthoods. We carry the emotional workload of three generations.

We’re tired, not weak.

Bruised, not broken.

We’re not surrendering.

We’re just trying to survive a world that hasn’t stopped yelling since 2001.

MARGINALIA

Fragility is not failure — it’s the natural reaction of a generation asked to stay strong while absorbing every shockwave of the modern world. We’re not soft. We’re simply tired from battles no one trained us for.