Here he is on the slopes at Alpine Meadows in Tahoe in April 2007. It was warm, the snow was melting almost visibly throughout the day, and he was having a good time, even with the parents!
(The photos on this page are from 1997 to 2007: later photos of Alban are under “Children” or in the themes 2008 Journal or 2009 Journal, all on the right).
Alban was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris not far from where his mother and father, Pierre Brun, lived in Paris’s 17th Arrondissement.
Here he is in the middle of the picture, running after the ball, as ever, and wearing number 3.
From day one, he was a born athlete. He was the most skilled on our trampoline (see below), and for a while raced mountain bikes.
Arriving for the first time in the USA in June 1997, Alban took to Santa Cruz like a duck to water. He took to water the same way! He didn’t speak a word of English at first, but made friends in no time at Happy Valley School.
His High School senior portrait, from Harbor High in the fall of 2006.
He has always had a gift for non-verbal communication. Whether that gift preceded his time unable to communicate verbally with his little friends at school or on the soccer team, or resulted from it is a chicken and egg question that I find difficult to answer looking back. Either way, it has stuck and is one of his biggest assets.
He wrote an essay at his local elementary school, Happy Valley School, reporting on our summer holiday in 2000. It’s worth a look, to see how quickly he had mastered the English language!
He is also very careful with what he says. He doesn’t want to hurt anybody, and has a habit of controlling his own emotions so that he runs no risk of doing so. That can create its own downside. A couple of times as he was growing up, I would find out from one of his siblings that this or that had happened to Alban, and these were not good this or thats, years after it actually happened. In each case, we parents might have been able to help if we had been informed at the time the thing happened, but years later I felt impotent, and was.
Taken in the office at home in Santa Cruz in 2005.
Why did he say nothing at the time? I think that he was afraid that in reacting to what had happened to him, we parents may have become upset with friends of his. That, he didn’t want. So he essentially sacrificed himself for his friends in each of these cases. There were only a couple that I heard about, but I would have much preferred to have had the opportunity to fix each when it happened. On the other hand, looking back I’m full of admiration for Alban’s being able to put his friends first even when he suffered adverse consequences of doing so.
Girls, don’t panic! It’s his sister! It was Daphné’s high school graduation, and Alban cheered his sister on, but without removing his hood (there are limits to what even a kind boy can do for the sake of appearances!), a few months before his 16th birthday. They look pretty good together, don’t they?
As a parent, there are moments which stick in your memory, and you don’t really know why. Alban used to skateboard down the driveway, and one day doing so disturbed a wasp’s nest that we didn’t even know was there. The wasps were buzzing all around him, and he was screaming for help.
I got to him first, and told him that he would need to stay calm to avoid getting stung. He did it! I was amazed. He calmed right down as I brushed a few straggler wasps out of his then long curly hair. He was so calm and collected that he did not get stung once! I still think that calming himself down like that with dozens of wasps buzzing around his head was a most impressive display of courage, almost superhuman for a young boy.
Here he is in September 2000 at the Natural Bridges Skate Park in Santa Cruz, looking pretty cool on his board (which was already so important to him that he spent his own savings buying it). In 2007, he still used his own money to buy skateboards.
Back to his arrival in the US during the summer of 1997. He quickly became a star at soccer on the Happy Valley School rec team. He had of course played in playgrounds in France before moving over here, but never in the trained and organized manner of youth soccer in Santa Cruz.
Although he and Santa Cruz Woody, his first coach, could not at first understand a word the other spoke, Alban put all his heart and effort into his game and won over coach and teammates alike.
The only problem is that he gave soccer a rest beginning in early 2004, and never picked it up again. Fall 2003 was his last season of youth soccer. That hurts.
I worry a lot about why he gave up soccer, which had given him so much pleasure and which he was so good at, and ultimately don’t really understand the decision. Parts of it are clear.
This was Alban’s eighth birthday present during our first year in Santa Cruz. It was a success! I was a bit of a flop at keeping it up and running, but it sure was fun while it lasted.
We parents felt that we had too many commitments with four children at home (Nick and Tom were in Paris from 1997 to 1999) to give up the extra time needed for Alban to play on a competitive level when that subject was first broached in 1998 or ’99.
Its coaches always insist that competitive youth soccer take up a lot more time both for the youth and for his parents, and it does. There are more practices, more games at a distance from home, and more tournaments further away from home. All add up to a significant parental commitment on top of the recreational soccer commitment.
With a newborn Alex on our hands, Charlie only occasionally at pre-school, and a very demanding job for me (at Wilson Sonsini during the internet bubble years), it all seemed a bit too much.
Here he is doing a flip, front or back we don’t know, at a swimming lake near La Grée during the summer of 2004. He has a natural knack for diving.
In retrospect, that was a mistake, a mistake which we may have compounded in later years when we did find the time to enroll both Charlie and Alex in competitive teams at an early age. In Santa Cruz County, competitive youth soccer basically started with an under-9’s developmental team, and each of Charlie and Alex played on such a team.
By 2003, Alban too had started playing comp. He was getting bored with rec. soccer and needed more of a challenge on the field. By then, we parents had settled into our new world in Santa Cruz and had figured out how to fit more into their schedules. Alex had started kindergarden and I was working in-house at a corporation rather than for a law firm. We each had more time.
But here Alban ran into a couple of the peculiarities of youth soccer, particularly in America. The US tends to confuse athleticism with bulk. It’s an equation which makes sense if a child wants to play American football or basketball. Both sports appear to have been designed with the strongest, biggest and tallest in mind. Very American!
Alban is our master of the trampoline, and worked at it. He has a video that he took of himself trying to do some sort of double somersault on the trampoline. He filmed several attempts, almost making it again and again. Watching the video I remember thinking, “he’s never going to do it.” Then finally, he spiked it, on camera, perfectly. And then he stopped filming!
But soccer is called the beautiful game in part because it is designed for everyone. Of course, it favors skills, like balance and speed, and talent. But the skills it favors can be developed at any size.
Many of the best soccer players in the world are not particularly big. To give just three examples which are topical in 2010, Lionel Messi is the best current player in the world. He is 5′ 7″ tall, and suffered in his youth from a growth hormone deficiency.
Combing his hair by watching his reflection in the door handle, in March 2001. Gel is KEY!! Looking again at this photo in 2010, we just realized that there is a little guy, I think Alex, visible in the tub behind him.
Messi plies his trade at FC Barcelona, I think the best team in the world at the moment. He plays alongside the likes of Andrés Iniesta Luján, popularly referred to Iniesta, who scored the winning goal in extra time in the FIFA 2010 World Cup final in South Africa. Iniesta too is 5′ 7” tall. He shares the Barcelona midfield with Xavier Hernández i Creus, popularly known as Xavi and universally thought of as one of the best midfielders in the world. Xavi too is 5′ 7” tall! The list goes on. Remember, these are the players winning every trophy on the highest levels of the game in the entire world.
Great soccer players come in all shapes and sizes.
Alban didn’t know that when he decided to move out of what had been for years his favorite sport. All he knew was that he was not as big as many. There is a period for a boy as a player, and I speak here from experience, when small size feels like an insurmountable problem. It feels as if every time you are on the ball, some lout legally barges you off it: shoulder to shoulder charges are perfectly within soccer rules, for example. It feels as if there is nothing that you can do about it, that your own body has let you down.
Again with younger children, this time with Maeve, Faby and Jean’s daughter, and Alex during the summer of 2005. They are sitting on the porch at the house Nick moved into when he first moved out of the family home, down by the Santa Cruz wharf.
But that period only lasts for a while. Over time, puberty brings hormones which do not appreciate being knocked around, and which teach you how to defend yourself and even do your own knocking.
Small size really is not a disadvantage when rugby or American football-style tackling is against the rules, and continuing to play on helps you learn how to use your size to your advantage. And natural athletes grow a kind of wiry strength however tall they are. More importantly, as you learn how to withstand bigger boys, and trick them because they can rarely weave and dodge as fast as you can, your confidence grows too.
In short, Alban stopped playing before he had the time to learn to surmount those obstacles, before his confidence had the time to renew itself. I still regret that I couldn’t keep him playing back then.
* * *
On to other topics. Alban still spends a lot of time with the little guys. That is as true in 2010 as it has ever been. They adore him. Apart from a spell of several months sleeping on friends’ couches, he has constantly lived at home with them.
Not to forget his inimitable room. Here it is in 2001. If you look carefully, you can see a desk!! Check it out! Mostly, you can see surf and skates. And don’t forget the red Ferrari!
And you don’t need to be told again that Alban is on a surf- and skateboard kick. He got his first real surfboard for his 11th birthday (and at that price we wanted it to last him through the next decade!). Christmas 2007 brought him yet another skateboard (for those of you who have not been introduced to this dangerous pastime, the boards break more frequently than their riders’ bones).
Check out the children surfing at surfing USA, and a local Santa Cruz surf spot, Steamer Lane, here.
Alban spends a lot of time fooling around. And he particularly enjoys vacations, whether at La Grée, in Florida, or at Disneyland, as well as all of the fêtes.
*. *. *.
Reviewing this page in 2021, I’m sorry to say that Alban and I have lost touch. He wasn’t as hostile as Daphné, his sister, during adolescence, but we drifted apart after I moved out in 2010. Unlike his sister, he did talk about returning to France for more than a vacation, but nothing seemed to work out.
I found out much later that at some point between 2011 and 2013 he had had acute appendicitis, which had caused him great financial problems. Why was I not told at the time? My guess is that his mother did not want me to know that she had neglected health insurance for her children when I was already paying her about $7,500 per month. Who knows what is going on in post-separation politics?
Alban and I did share a few fun times together, including one trip to Disneyland in 2011 with the family and friends for him and his then girlfriend, and Nick’s 30th birthday party in 2016. But contact reduced over time, and finally in about 2019 he blocked me on FaceBook, closing our last occasional line of communication. I don’t really know why.
Good luck, kiddo.