Sunday I officially became old. I still remember the day I witnessed my own dad's fall from immortality and I think he was the same age I am now. I'm not sure if girls share this phenomenon about their mothers, but with boys it often happens that there is a defining moment in their lives when they slay the father. I say boys, but it may not happen until midlife or ever in some cases.
For most boys, your dad is always bigger, faster, stronger, smarter than you and by the time you reach puberty it appears he always will be. It's not just physical prowess either; non-physical dads can be just as alpha through being revered, successful or powerful. In most cases you aren't even aware you're competing with him. But then one day you have a moment of crystal clarity and you realize the old gazelle has lost a step to the lions.
For me this happened when I was 14. Gym class at the cult school was frequently led by visiting parents and other virile male cult members and on this particular day my dad ran the recreational activities. Flag Football. I was in the slot and my dad was covering me on a simple out route and I picked up a step on him when I made the turn. I made the catch and ten yards before going out. That was it. A first down. But I beat him. Not two days before he had me in an unrecoverable headlock. For years I was wrestled into panic-stricken positions on the living room floor ("Get off!! I can't breathe!" "If you can't breathe, how are you shouting?"), regular footrace challenges left me gasping for air, he could make me kneel down by doing something to my pinkie. I was bested in dinner discussions, he could fix anything, he always knew when I was lying. But on this day, I beat him. I hadn't even known I'd been competing with him for ten years. But I realized it then and it was sweet.
By the way, if you're male and you haven't slain your father yet, I suggest you savor the moment when it happens. It doesn't last long. You immediately become emboldened by your new found chest-beating and begin to challenge him at every turn. Victory gets easier and easier. And before you know it you realize they are hollow victories. He's not fighting you anymore. It's like Obi-Wan turning off his lightsaber once he sees Luke safely aboard the Falcon. His job is done; he's shown you the basics, and yeah, his voice might pop into your head when you need him in a crisis, but it's you v. world now.
So Sunday, I was out in the yard showing SGK how to use a snow shovel for a sled (like the one George Bailey rides into the icy pond). It didn't work very well, so I got a cardboard box and flattened it out. We have just enough slope on the driveway to make it fun for little ones, but she still wasn't clear on the concept. So I did what we poor kids did in the winter, lay a box on the ground, get as much steam up as you can on the slippery surface, and dive head first on the box. It worked great when I was six. Sunday, I hit the ground and I was suddenly aware that I couldn't hear anything. I looked up at SGK and I saw her little cherubic visage begin to be encircled by a ring of bluish white squirmy things like flagellants under a microscope. I was really confused and then, still unable to make out any sounds around me, I heard a very small, clear voice calmly say, "Don't forget to breathe." I rolled over and sucked in as much air as I could get. The little blue things were still wiggling, but quickly fading. Whew, I thought, I'm not dying -- just got my bell wrung. Pretty sure I bruised my sternum and those little knobby things on the breastplate up where your neck starts. I know if I had a son who'd witnessed my buffoonery, that would've been his moments. For now, I assuming little girls don't want to slay their fathers.
Once I got my hearing back the first thing I heard was YHWH bleating, "I don't think that box is big enough! And that hill isn't steep enough, either!" At least she didn't laugh at me. I'll take henpecking over humiliation any day. I quickly picked myself up and carried myself into the house under false bravado. YHWH plaintively apologized as I walked through the garage begging me not to go inside and, closing the door, I heard SGK saying, "You made daddy mad, mom!" I paused to consider refuting the charge that I was going inside to pout but thought, what the hell, better to be thought of as a pouter than a mere mortal.
Showing posts with label football. Show all posts
Showing posts with label football. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Friday, December 01, 2006
Didn't We Almost Have It All?
Apparently I clicked "save as draft" instead of "publish" last week, so here's my Thanksgiving tale.
I have dubbed this year's Thanksgiving as Thanksgiving Inchoate. I knew that if I squawked enough before my inevitable and involuntary attendance at the Rebs' Thanksgiving dinner, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as I had imagined it to be. I had imagined being set upon by Harpies, picked at for being a male knitter, or forced into a small corner with some other exile, compelled to discuss the weather and the Sooners' chances. So I was actually chipper that morning when I awoke to find that YHWH was fully ill with a cold. Surely she would be unable to endure a full afternoon of the Extended Family Plan.
That morning I took a pre-emptive three-mile walk through the neighborhood at a brisk pace so that I would be in a good mood. I hate to admit that, because a) I loathe exercise; 2) I loathe sunshine; and d) I'm really uncomfortable being in a good mood. But I thought it might help because I was resigned to go to YHWH's family gathering and I didn't want her to feel like she had to choose me or them. Even so, just before leaving the house I reached into the top cabinet and sipped a shot of relaxing cognac.
There were about thirty people there, but I was only related by blood to one of them. I just sat on a couch and watched the football game and simply nodded and waved to everyone when they came in. I didn't even have to converse about the Dolphins' defense or the Sooners' chances. No one asked how work was going or what grade Killer is in now. I just sat there with a nice relaxing grin on my face.
When dinner came, it was a free-for-all seating arrangement spanning four rooms and I was somewhat taken aback by the number of people who made no effort to sit anywhere near their nuclear families. I immediately regretted not having eaten a hearty breakfast. Here it was 1:00 and I had only consumed a cup of coffee and a shot of 'yac and there was very nearly nothing I wanted to eat on the harvest smorgasbord before me. There were steamed whole green beans, not green bean casserole with fried onions on top; the dressing was not stuffing and looked like a large, full bedpan from a hospital influenza ward; there were thick cut roasted sweet potatoes rather than candied yams with melted marshmallows on top; the mashed potatoes were garlic-saged with the peels swirled in as opposed to the stiff white potatoes which can hold a reservoir for white gravy (of which there was none); and the Pillsbury crescent rolls simply paled in comparison to my sister's butterhorns. As I'd hoped, YHWH only held out through lunch and within a half-hour we were excusing ourselves to go over to her aunt's for dessert and then home to bed.
It all had the ethos of attending one of those dinners you get at a banquet or some other workplace function held at a hotel. No one wanted to be there. There was no enmity, no strife, but no affection or love or filial piety or desire to relate beyond the agreement to meet annually on the third Thursday in November. Definitely not Thanksgiving.
I have dubbed this year's Thanksgiving as Thanksgiving Inchoate. I knew that if I squawked enough before my inevitable and involuntary attendance at the Rebs' Thanksgiving dinner, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as I had imagined it to be. I had imagined being set upon by Harpies, picked at for being a male knitter, or forced into a small corner with some other exile, compelled to discuss the weather and the Sooners' chances. So I was actually chipper that morning when I awoke to find that YHWH was fully ill with a cold. Surely she would be unable to endure a full afternoon of the Extended Family Plan.
That morning I took a pre-emptive three-mile walk through the neighborhood at a brisk pace so that I would be in a good mood. I hate to admit that, because a) I loathe exercise; 2) I loathe sunshine; and d) I'm really uncomfortable being in a good mood. But I thought it might help because I was resigned to go to YHWH's family gathering and I didn't want her to feel like she had to choose me or them. Even so, just before leaving the house I reached into the top cabinet and sipped a shot of relaxing cognac.
There were about thirty people there, but I was only related by blood to one of them. I just sat on a couch and watched the football game and simply nodded and waved to everyone when they came in. I didn't even have to converse about the Dolphins' defense or the Sooners' chances. No one asked how work was going or what grade Killer is in now. I just sat there with a nice relaxing grin on my face.
When dinner came, it was a free-for-all seating arrangement spanning four rooms and I was somewhat taken aback by the number of people who made no effort to sit anywhere near their nuclear families. I immediately regretted not having eaten a hearty breakfast. Here it was 1:00 and I had only consumed a cup of coffee and a shot of 'yac and there was very nearly nothing I wanted to eat on the harvest smorgasbord before me. There were steamed whole green beans, not green bean casserole with fried onions on top; the dressing was not stuffing and looked like a large, full bedpan from a hospital influenza ward; there were thick cut roasted sweet potatoes rather than candied yams with melted marshmallows on top; the mashed potatoes were garlic-saged with the peels swirled in as opposed to the stiff white potatoes which can hold a reservoir for white gravy (of which there was none); and the Pillsbury crescent rolls simply paled in comparison to my sister's butterhorns. As I'd hoped, YHWH only held out through lunch and within a half-hour we were excusing ourselves to go over to her aunt's for dessert and then home to bed.
It all had the ethos of attending one of those dinners you get at a banquet or some other workplace function held at a hotel. No one wanted to be there. There was no enmity, no strife, but no affection or love or filial piety or desire to relate beyond the agreement to meet annually on the third Thursday in November. Definitely not Thanksgiving.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
I Want To Be A Football He-ro
Adjective Queen likes to joke that I am her son Sport's Football Dad. Actually what she says is he is my Football Son. This isn't usurpation of Sport's bio-dad or an attempt at compensating for my having only girls, but rather a simple meeting of minds - he and I are the only members of our circle of friends who like football and sports in general. In our respective nuclear familial units, football is a bane of the first order up there with Dubbya and evangelicals.
I have never fully understood the loathsome regard blue-staters have toward football. I can name several reasons why I believe it to be, but I always come away feeling like I've diagnosed the symptoms rather than the disease. I think they don't like it because athletes are ascendant in most American high schools and the most dominant, almost iconically so, are football players and their female counterparts, cheerleaders and by contrast blue-staters, as individualistic, geeky, brainy, and largely unathletic, tend to be quite a bit south of there hierarchically. They prefer baseball because it has a solid literary tradition. They prefer soccer because they can comfortably root for the snobby Europeans or the noble post-colonial indigenous peoples' teams.
Probably most telling is they don't like it because 'everyone else' likes it, especially unthinking red-staters. It's also violent and there are those pesky cheerleaders to remind women of their eons of subjugation.
I'm confused because I think they should like it. In both the way it is played and the way its league is structured, it embodies the very community ideals and socialist economics they often tout in their ideology. In baseball, individual contributions are toted up to arrive at the final result. In football, everyone moves down the field together or not at all. The teams are made up of players with diverse skills and abilities. The professional league is structured so that revenues are split evenly among all teams, parity is highly desired and achieved so that all the teams and their fans have fair chance at glory, and players have both a minimum wage and a salary cap to prevent any one player or team too great a share of that society's riches. These seem like a blue-state dream, but I rarely see it celebrated.
I really didn't mean to go off on that tangent. It just occured to me as a thought about this post. I mainly just wanted to report that I took Sport to several local small college football games this year and he seems to have enjoyed it, as did I. We talked about plays and strategies and had some dogs and stuff. I almost asked him about the cheerleaders, one of whom looked like a dead-ringer for Kirsten Dunst, but I stopped myself because I thought he was probably too young to have checked them out and my own particular living arrangements have drubbed out any habit I might have of making public comments about a female's appearance - unless I am telling my three how spectacular they look.
I mentioned that Queen calls me Football Dad and I have to admit it makes me feel weird because it makes wonder sometimes how I would do if I had also had a son. I always wanted to have girl children because I knew how hard it was to grow up as a boy. Of course now I have the perspective that they both have their own brand of hellishness. The main thing I figured would be hard about raising boys is that they never talk. Girls talk constantly, so I figure I will at least know what is going on most of the time.
So anyway I was reminded of this during halftime at Saturday's game. We were sitting back shootin' the breeze and I started asking him stuff:
"So have you thought about where you want to go to high school?"
"Nah."
A plane flies over.
"Hey, that could be Lego Guy someday."
"Yeah."
"Do you think he'll fly someday?"
"I dunno."
"So, does he have a girlfriend?"
"Nah."
"What about you?"
"Yeah."
"Oh, yeah. Do you talk to her and stuff?"
"Some times."
"Is she pretty?"
Shrug.
"What's her name?"
"I'm not tellin' you!"
"You're not? I thought we were friends!"
That pretty well sums up my history with my dad, too. We would drive for two hours and not say a word and he'd say, "Enjoyed being with you, son." So, I hope I did OK this season, Queen, in my limited capacity as Football Dad. Oh, and by the way, he hasn't ever heard of Jim Thorpe. What the hell kind of family are you running over there, anyway? Never heard of Jim Thorpe, sheesh.
I have never fully understood the loathsome regard blue-staters have toward football. I can name several reasons why I believe it to be, but I always come away feeling like I've diagnosed the symptoms rather than the disease. I think they don't like it because athletes are ascendant in most American high schools and the most dominant, almost iconically so, are football players and their female counterparts, cheerleaders and by contrast blue-staters, as individualistic, geeky, brainy, and largely unathletic, tend to be quite a bit south of there hierarchically. They prefer baseball because it has a solid literary tradition. They prefer soccer because they can comfortably root for the snobby Europeans or the noble post-colonial indigenous peoples' teams.
Probably most telling is they don't like it because 'everyone else' likes it, especially unthinking red-staters. It's also violent and there are those pesky cheerleaders to remind women of their eons of subjugation.
I'm confused because I think they should like it. In both the way it is played and the way its league is structured, it embodies the very community ideals and socialist economics they often tout in their ideology. In baseball, individual contributions are toted up to arrive at the final result. In football, everyone moves down the field together or not at all. The teams are made up of players with diverse skills and abilities. The professional league is structured so that revenues are split evenly among all teams, parity is highly desired and achieved so that all the teams and their fans have fair chance at glory, and players have both a minimum wage and a salary cap to prevent any one player or team too great a share of that society's riches. These seem like a blue-state dream, but I rarely see it celebrated.
I really didn't mean to go off on that tangent. It just occured to me as a thought about this post. I mainly just wanted to report that I took Sport to several local small college football games this year and he seems to have enjoyed it, as did I. We talked about plays and strategies and had some dogs and stuff. I almost asked him about the cheerleaders, one of whom looked like a dead-ringer for Kirsten Dunst, but I stopped myself because I thought he was probably too young to have checked them out and my own particular living arrangements have drubbed out any habit I might have of making public comments about a female's appearance - unless I am telling my three how spectacular they look.
I mentioned that Queen calls me Football Dad and I have to admit it makes me feel weird because it makes wonder sometimes how I would do if I had also had a son. I always wanted to have girl children because I knew how hard it was to grow up as a boy. Of course now I have the perspective that they both have their own brand of hellishness. The main thing I figured would be hard about raising boys is that they never talk. Girls talk constantly, so I figure I will at least know what is going on most of the time.
So anyway I was reminded of this during halftime at Saturday's game. We were sitting back shootin' the breeze and I started asking him stuff:
"So have you thought about where you want to go to high school?"
"Nah."
A plane flies over.
"Hey, that could be Lego Guy someday."
"Yeah."
"Do you think he'll fly someday?"
"I dunno."
"So, does he have a girlfriend?"
"Nah."
"What about you?"
"Yeah."
"Oh, yeah. Do you talk to her and stuff?"
"Some times."
"Is she pretty?"
Shrug.
"What's her name?"
"I'm not tellin' you!"
"You're not? I thought we were friends!"
That pretty well sums up my history with my dad, too. We would drive for two hours and not say a word and he'd say, "Enjoyed being with you, son." So, I hope I did OK this season, Queen, in my limited capacity as Football Dad. Oh, and by the way, he hasn't ever heard of Jim Thorpe. What the hell kind of family are you running over there, anyway? Never heard of Jim Thorpe, sheesh.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Jason and the Golden Fleece
I made another Jason White siting today. This time at City Bites. He had the usual small group of suits around him yammering boisterously like they're just kickin' it around the dorm room - only this time Jason is really here with us!
The hardest thing about seeing him around, and I see him alot, is the pathetic hangers-on he seems to attract. I actually met him once. I was peacefully eating my lunch when a glib securities huckster recognized me from the Last Public Place in America. I had once, as he would soon tell Jason, "saved his bacon" by getting a historical stock quote for him from back in that mystical time before the internet. So he starts yucking it up with me and before I can tell him he has nothing to gain by gladhanding me, he sees Jason stroll by and calls him over. Jace is apparently going to be a stockbroker. We're introduced and I nod and he nods, both of us hoping this is going to be short. And it is. They quickly go off together undoubtedly with Jace receiving the umpteenth free lunch of his lifetime.
So today I see him again with another group of under-30s in suits and I really fight the urge to lean in and say, "You know he's a loser, right? Not only that, but he lost famously, in grandiose fashion. Like Napoleon at Waterloo. Custer at Little Bighorn. Our children will try to convey to their children the sheer scale, the enormity of how big a loser he was." Unlike Patton's 'brave bunch of guys' he can say, "I shoveled shit in Louisiana." Because frankly, it really wouldn't inspire me to know that on the big day - when the market is shaky and it takes guts and fortitude to stay in there and make the good trades - that Jason White might be handing out my retirement savings to a bunch of defensive backs from Southern California. And yet here they are trying to identify with him. And the company that hired him - what are they thinking? You want a winner to represent you - Barry Switzer or Josh Heupel - not a big loser. The saddest thing is that the company that hired him actually says, "There's a lot of people in the state of Oklahoma who have money who like OU football." That's it. That's their rationale. That is so sad.
This isn't an attack on Jason White as a person, so don't anybody get upset. When I say loser, I mean that he quite literally lost every big game he played in at OU. I'm sure he's a fine person. This is more an indictment of those parasites. If I could, though, I would tell Jason if you want to be a winner, dust off your Sociology degree and get a job helping people. Use your name to open doors for the poor and the downtrodden who buy the OU hats and shirts, but can't afford a ticket to a game; let alone pay for college.
The hardest thing about seeing him around, and I see him alot, is the pathetic hangers-on he seems to attract. I actually met him once. I was peacefully eating my lunch when a glib securities huckster recognized me from the Last Public Place in America. I had once, as he would soon tell Jason, "saved his bacon" by getting a historical stock quote for him from back in that mystical time before the internet. So he starts yucking it up with me and before I can tell him he has nothing to gain by gladhanding me, he sees Jason stroll by and calls him over. Jace is apparently going to be a stockbroker. We're introduced and I nod and he nods, both of us hoping this is going to be short. And it is. They quickly go off together undoubtedly with Jace receiving the umpteenth free lunch of his lifetime.
So today I see him again with another group of under-30s in suits and I really fight the urge to lean in and say, "You know he's a loser, right? Not only that, but he lost famously, in grandiose fashion. Like Napoleon at Waterloo. Custer at Little Bighorn. Our children will try to convey to their children the sheer scale, the enormity of how big a loser he was." Unlike Patton's 'brave bunch of guys' he can say, "I shoveled shit in Louisiana." Because frankly, it really wouldn't inspire me to know that on the big day - when the market is shaky and it takes guts and fortitude to stay in there and make the good trades - that Jason White might be handing out my retirement savings to a bunch of defensive backs from Southern California. And yet here they are trying to identify with him. And the company that hired him - what are they thinking? You want a winner to represent you - Barry Switzer or Josh Heupel - not a big loser. The saddest thing is that the company that hired him actually says, "There's a lot of people in the state of Oklahoma who have money who like OU football." That's it. That's their rationale. That is so sad.
This isn't an attack on Jason White as a person, so don't anybody get upset. When I say loser, I mean that he quite literally lost every big game he played in at OU. I'm sure he's a fine person. This is more an indictment of those parasites. If I could, though, I would tell Jason if you want to be a winner, dust off your Sociology degree and get a job helping people. Use your name to open doors for the poor and the downtrodden who buy the OU hats and shirts, but can't afford a ticket to a game; let alone pay for college.
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