By Eugene Curtin
Guest Columnist

Several years ago I endured a troubling, though fleeting, moment of maturity.
It came while watching the Fox Soccer Channel. Someone who had just scored a particularly important goal in a particularly important game was marking the occasion by running shirtless around the field while being mobbed by his ecstatic teammates.
And the absurdity of it hit me. This man had just pushed an inflated piece of leather across a white line and you would have thought Hamas had agreed to recognize Israel, or Sarpy County had ceased taxing Bellevue twice for its E-911 service.
My mother would have been proud. My father would have demanded a DNA test.
It was, I say, a fleeting moment of sanity, a brief encounter with cultural treason that could not long resist the hard wiring of my youth. It is not possible to be 9 years old and watch your tough-as-nails father fall to his knees as Germany tied England 2-2 in the dying moments of the 1966 World Cup Final and fail to realize that something significant was afoot.
And so, having been born and raised in Great Britain — specifically that special corner of the country known as Wales — the beautiful game ranks among my life’s passions and engages my attention every four years when the World Cup rolls around.
I have lived in the United States 27 years now and long ago raised my right hand and pledged allegiance before some judge in downtown Omaha. So I think I can relate to how odd this tournament must seem to Americans raised since birth on club sports.
Imagine that tomorrow a World Cup of American Football were to spring into existence and the Colts were told that Peyton Manning should report for national team duty this summer. His presence was particularly necessary since Team USA was facing, say, Bulgaria, in the opening round and the brutal Bulgars had a reputation for knocking down less nimble quarterbacks. Hopefully, ol’ Peyton would not get too beat up and would in all likelihood be available for club play come September.
Say what?
But this is the way it is in world soccer. National team duty is mandatory and club managers go cheerily along even as they hope and pray their star players will not get hurt.
No doubt the owners of Major League Soccer will feel the risk of it all as they bow next Saturday to world soccer’s mandate and watch the LA Galaxy’s brilliant Landon Donovan take the field for the United States against mighty England.
And to tell the truth I will feel some mixed emotions myself.
Wales has not qualified for the World Cup tournament since 1958 and 2010 kept that streak fully intact. So I have always bled English during the World Cup and have paid dearly for it over the years.
Next to Spain, England is the great under-achiever in World Cup soccer. They won it in 1966 (getting my dad off his knees by scoring two unanswered goals in overtime) but have repeatedly disappointed since. While Italy, Brazil, and, yes, Germany, have racked up multiple titles, there we stand in the corner clinging rather forlornly to a faded, dusty ribbon.
But this is the year we put all that right. We are apparently the favorites, our most serious challenge allegedly coming, ironically, from Spain, king of the under-achievers.
But I do love Team USA. On their day — and they have had great days — they are as brilliant as Brazil.
Personally, I think the England-USA game (1:30 p.m. Central next Saturday, people!) has draw written all over it.
So let us do battle despite a sea of troubles.
Even as Louisiana battles the oil slicks and the world keeps a wary eye on the mad mullahs of Iran, even as Kim Jong-Il ponders the cost of hurling his emaciated masses at Seoul while America’s economy gasps for breath, even so let’s turn on that TV over in the corner and raise a glass to Landon, Clint, Tim and the rest of the boys as they carry the red, white and blue onto a great global stage.
May we, the last remaining superpower, a nation manifestly destined for greatness, global defender of constitutional democracy, inventor of all things bright and beautiful, demonstrate conclusively that we have come of age and can, with the best of them, push an inflated piece of leather across a white line.

Eugene Curtin was a staff writer for the Bellevue Leader for 14 years.

Editor’s note: This is another installment of a monthly guest travel column written by Rebecca Fahrlander, a world traveler and professor of social psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

I remember sitting in my room on the Chile-Argentina border, reading Thomas Moore’s “Care of the Soul,” with the soft sounds of a waterfall, light rain and croaking frogs as a backdrop. The book’s theme of being in the moment and appreciating the small things in life perfectly matched the serene surroundings. It was spring in South America, the landscape transformed by sun and rain.
Before reaching the Argentine borderlands, we had been traveling about the countryside through rural enclaves of German immigrants who had recreated Alpine villages at the foot of the Andes. Walking into the small hotel we had stayed at in one town was like entering an old German home – antique lace curtains, clocks and furniture from the old country.
It was at my lodge on the Argentine border that I met a traveler from Germany, who upon hearing I was a native of Nebraska City, responded, “I have heard of it – they have apple orchards there.” It is rare enough to find an American who knows anything about Nebraska City, so I was intrigued that a European knew about the town. The German man told me the story of an old man he knew who had worked in the orchards during World War II as a POW. It is a small world indeed.
Yet while Chile is a relatively small country – described by writer Sara Wheeler in the title of her book as “a thin country” – it is far more than the Teutonic settlements at the foot of the Andes, or the waterfalls and secluded forests of the Argentine borderlands.
Santiago, the capital, is a megalopolis of historic Spanish city squares, quiet neighborhoods, modern office towers, cathedrals, crowds and traffic. Santiago sits splendidly in a “bowl” surrounded by the shimmering white-gray Andes.
Downtown, recent history surrounded us. Right out of the 1970s classic film “Missing” was the Moneda Palace, home of the president of Chile. The scars on its exterior walls were testament to that decade’s violent coup and assassination of President Allende.
The coup that brought the dictatorship of General Pinochet to power, and with it the “disappearance” of thousands of people, virtually closed off the country from travel from outside the continent for many years. It was eerie to stand there in the square where the historic event had been centered.
I recalled the scenes from “Missing” where the young American, along with the Chileans, “disappeared” from an elegant Santiago neighborhood, never to be seen again. I wondered what secrets of the disappeared were hidden in the surrounding offices and residences.
Farther south in Chile lays the fabled Patagonia region and one of the southernmost towns in the world, Punta Arenas. This town, with a population the size of Bellevue, is a charming, windswept place at the edge of the South American continent. The sunlight this far south is weak and ethereal. Buildings are brightly painted in mustard, cobalt and saffron. Evergreen trees are bent against the violent winds that blow across Drake’s Passage and the great Antarctic region.
Punta Arenas had been the disembarkation point for Antarctic explorers such as Shackleton. Indeed, we visited the private club in Punta Arenas where he planned his return voyages to Antarctica. In the center of the town, a small park came to life each morning with markets of Andean souvenirs and clothing. Dogs basked in the pale sun.
At land’s edge, penguin colonies look out across the turbulent waters of the Antarctic confluence and this thin country comes to an end.