“We’ll miss this yard, when we move,” the brewer tells me, checking the mash’s temperature. “We’ll have something, but nothing like this.”

The grass is a little downtrodden, but the space, filled by tables and chairs, dirt, a small tree, and the abandoned brickwork of a previous tenant’s patio improvement project, is a luxury. The constant cycle of movement, children to city, families to suburbs, is born of afternoons like this, sitting around in a yard with friends, brewing beer. In earlier stages of this churn we would examine each other’s TV’s, computers, liquor cabinets, bookshelves. We still do, for those items remain the touchstones of an apartment, easy ways to understand whose house we are in, what kind of person resides where we now stand.

The back yard survey though is new. Our initial duck indoors for introductions is perfunctory, and after a moment of silence is followed by our real purpose.

“So, do you want to see what I’ve been working on?”

Of course we do, and are soon standing in the sun discussing barley mills and temperatures, worts and the value of an art wholly encompassed by single syllable words. Brewing’s language is proof of its early invention, we surmise, back when simpler terms were still available for claiming, before our language had become stratified and new tasks had to be called time-sharing and bookkeeping. In the backyard we see his private passion flare, that same widening of eyes and pride in discovery we have found before with friends in places like Level 4 and a club called Yellow.

The shift in focus from late nights clubs and basements to back yards and sunny afternoons isn’t new, nor as sudden as it seems in Berkeley. For as long as I can remember my uncle has spent most of his free hours in the garage, in his shop, making one thing after another, sometimes for his own house and sometimes for others. Phone calls holidays and visitors pull him out, into the living room or yard, but his passion, the place where he teaches himself things, sits well known behind the parked cars.

This habit then, of self-education, has not changed, but our targets have, from virtual bosses conquered with friends and dance moves learned beneath strobe lights to things made with tools of our own, in spaces of our own. There is no better, or worse, in these shifts, merely the variance of age, and opportunity. The peak, in all cases, is getting to demonstrate what we have learned to our friends.

If that can be done in a sunny back yard, so much the better.

At seven am on a Saturday there is a man running the streets of North Beach. He is clad primarily in the English flag, St. George’s Cross, and a hat of the same colors. He leaps and yells, sprints and screams, and pauses occasionally to say “Hello” to passing strangers. He poses for pictures, or at least pretends to, before dashing away. He is mad, or happy, or madly happy, and he elevates the entire neighborhood. It is seven am on a Saturday morning, and they were sleeping. The England v. USA game begins, in this time zone, at eleven, by which time he will be sweaty and flushed, and ready for the throng that greets his triumphant entrance into the pub.

“That’s not a flag he’s wearing, it’s a proper cape!” says one of the onlookers, having caught quite a glimpse on the sidewalk. Indeed it is a cape, perhaps custom-made, and the construction earns him street cred from those wearing store-bought jerseys.

Inside the bar, waiting for pints and waiting for the match, their jerseys do draw comment, a display of camaraderie and knowledge.

“Altidore, nice,” we say on seeing Jozy’s 17, or “Dempsey, looking for a goal from him today.” The US white jersey dominates, this being San Francisco and the US blue featuring a hideous bandolier-style white diagonal. The English supporters wear hats and homemade gear, though Rooney’s top-selling shirt floats around, worn by men who will be strangely quiet once the game begins. Yet in some way they will win this meeting, their language and descriptions dominating, their accents percolating through announcers to the mouths of the American fans. In the United States football may be the rest of the world’s sport, a minor thing, but the language of football is not global, it is English, in the same sense of the word as the man’s cape as he streaks by the window shouting unintelligible enthusiasm.

This is a funny time to be American, to be at home in America, for the oft-repeated notion that “Americans are starting to pay attention to football.” By “this is a funny time” I mean not this month bridging June and July in the northern hemisphere’s summer, but the World Cup. Similar statements were made in 2006, in 2002, in 1998, and in 1994, which is as far back as my memories stretch with accuracy. It is World Cup season, and we Americans are suddenly awake to the globe’s furor.

Yet we are not. In Berlin a friend tells me how as he sat watching the game last Saturday in an outdoor cafe every passer-by would stop to check the score, to ask who’d scored, or to comment on the quality of play. Grandparents, children, women with babies, people on bicycles, young friends, all wanted to know what was happening at that moment in South Africa where Australia was playing Ghana.

“It’s amazing,” he says, of being in Europe for the World Cup, “everyone cares.”

In Japan in 2002 I lived less than five miles from the stadium in Saitama, and remember most the feeling of being *there*. Matches were not just things to watch, but events, and the easiest way to understand was to go outside, to find a huge display, to find a crowd of cheering supporters. The streets of Tokyo were filled with crowds of cheering people sporting colors of nations they may or may not have been born in, a rare combination of accepted nationalism that fit so perfectly into the first dual-hosted World Cup.

Four years later, awake at odd hours to watch matches in Germany, a friend and I lamented our lack of foresight in being so distant. We should move every four years, even if only for the summer. It was absurd talk and a wonderful notion, forgotten in our planning after the tournament’s end.

Yet here we are, four years later, amid the greatest sporting event on the planet, he in Germany and I in San Francisco, only one of us in the proper time zone and neither of us in the correct country. With internet broadcasting, with bars that open early and fans that flash their colors regardless of their current city, we can still be caught up though, and run the streets in our flag. The crazed energy that comes from being on the streets outside the stadium, let alone at the matches themselves, can remain a goal for the future, about four years from now.

I did too, on green couches whose supporting structure would poke at our ribs as we dozed. Those couches are long gone, and the apartment, with it’s drawbridge and fence, now houses people I do not know. Watching The West Wing again, four or five years later, the opening chords of the theme bring that scene back to me instantly. Those two boys were exhausted as they lay down, eyes closing almost before the DVD player could spin up. They had been working long days, from early light to well past dark. They had gone out too, with the exuberance of friends whose lives were usually separated by the Pacific. They were given only those scant hours between work and sleep to enjoy a decade’s worth of camaraderie, and the bar tab often showed their dedication, before the couches claimed their tired bodies as the TV panned over the White House.

This past week, the DVDs freshly arrived from Los Angeles, we’ve spent hours inside that world, appreciating the acting and laughing at jokes written most of a decade ago. Yet the love for Charlie and Josh, the rueful awareness of my own personal Toby-esque nature, the support for CJ and Donna, these are not the first emotions that opening sequence calls forth. And that is strange, because the emotions that returns immediately, the deep hope and desire so strongly intertwined with those couches and long days in Los Angeles, no longer exist.

In two thousand five, two thousand six, those boys did not fall asleep to The West Wing simply because of exhaustion. Each morning those two boys would rise, perhaps having moved from couch to bed, perhaps still in their clothes, and head to work again. They would get coffee at Groundwork on Rose and discuss a television show neither of them had truly seen. Instead of the episode’s plot they would discus how pleasant it was, just for a moment as they woke in the morning, to believe Martin Sheen the President of the United States.

Habits are our ways of making peace with the world. By repeating small actions, by safeguarding our hopes with nightly support, we build structures capable of carrying us through disheartening turbulence. Between two thousand and two thousand eight I built a life on the other side of the planet to protect my hopes for this country. In Los Angeles for business I learned how my friend had handled the same challenge. He’d fallen asleep to The West Wing every night instead of the news.

In San Francisco now, we have a President who expects me to understand his arguments, if not Latin, and I still appreciate the show. The writing is deft and the characters nuanced despite the tiny snatches that an ensemble drama demands. But the magic that made its theme a daily habit is gone, and it is good, mired in new challenges and striving to protect different hopes, to remember how far we’ve come and how impossible such progress once looked.

When the run ends we resume work, we clean up, fix things, compare notes, and drive each other home. Some of us sleep in the theater, or don’t, working instead through the dark hours.

It is a tricky task, to be where we are. Often in life we are distracted by far away people and problems, disasters and politics. The challenge of remaining relentlessly focused and completely aware of our surroundings is too great, hence the element of mysticism associated with those who have mastered it. Sometimes though a constraint, a limited number of people and hours, a limited amount of space, can focus the mind and make magic. At sixteen and twenty that magic was my greatest love.

Wonderful, here at thirty, to have the feeling back again, if only this week.

In fourth grade, at Waldorf school, the tetherball rankings went down into the thirties, with a complex system for challenging those above at morning break and recess, or before the busses after school. By sixth grade the scene had shifted and wall ball, played with a racquet ball against the school’s yellow rear, was the kingmaker.

In two thousand ten the children yell and run and I try to understand their games. Outside of the Shaoxing train station they play a strange version of freeze tag while I cart my suitcase up the low concrete stairs. The frozen child counts down and, if not re-touched, becomes the “it”, the chaser. In San Francisco they streak down the sidewalk, an aunt or family friend repeating one line over and over without using either of their names. “Do you see the sign,” she says of the red man blinking as they approach the intersection with eyes only on their race. Around the lamp post they spin and back again. I step aside, laughing. I am certain they do not see the sign. As they sprint back past her still warning form I wonder how long it would take them to join the Shaoxing game? Mere moments, probably. Children do not have the restraint that we do. And having it, we call it fear.

Could that be what we’re wanting, remembering youth so fondly? Not the game itself, but the lack of fear in challenging the eighth best tetherballer in school, a seventh grader, to a lunchtime battle? The lack of fear of injury, or humiliation. Indeed it’s opposite, eager acceptance, or perhaps total blindness to risk. Yet that is not true, and the humiliation of not scoring a point against an older student was well known. But the rewards for bravery were so tangible in the oral rankings every student knew.

This weekend I saw my cousin, six, on video chat. It was the first time she’d seen herself projected, or me. The first time she’d seen me at all in a year, more. Around her the adults watched, impressed by the technology.

“I found a bunny in an egg this morning,” she told me.

“Really?”

“It’s orange and fuzzy.”

“What’s it’s name?” I asked her as she raced off to find it.

Last year while he was bored at a reception I handed another boy my iPhone, which he’d never seen, a baseball game on the display. He grabbed it and sat down, experimenting with the tilt and tap controls. The timing took him several tries, but the understanding of what he needed to do barely a second. The context of my conversation with my cousin, or of the baseball game, mattered not at all. Were it in my power to place either of them amidst those Shaoxing children, or vice versa, would they be too stunned by context to absorb the games?

As I wandered Changsha’s back alleys last week, exploring half-abandoned railways, two girls playing some game of balance and chatter shouted at me, testing English words and my ability to respond. When I did so, in both English and Chinese, they turned away, back to their game. Their lack of surprise at my ability to speak Chinese, their entire manner of easy comprehension and acceptance shocked me because it seems globally so lacking in their elders. I think they would fit in well, those two girls in matching uniforms, at this street race in the Sunset. Indeed it is this comfort, this ease of exploration, pleasure at strange games, and quick acceptance of facts that I am often searching for with travel.

Perhaps it is not something that needs discovering, but remembering.

Title  from an Alphanumeric hoodie I once owned in Japan, whose tagline was “For adults with childlike eyes,” a classification I aspire to.