The Constant Variety of Sport (part 1)

Posted by Ace on October 1st, 2009 filed in Tales of the Interregnum

baseball-scratch-image

[originally written in late July 2009]

Every Saturday afternoon it’s a slow train-wreck.

“I don’t see anybody from my team,” says Jack, as I help him on with his cleats.  He twists in the front seat of the station wagon to look out the windows, pulling his foot farther away from me, and halfway out of the shoe.  I grab his foot by the ankle and shove the shoe firmly onto it, double-tie the laces.

“It’s a huge field, son,”  I tell him, glancing out across the green and brown.  “They’ll be there.”  I fold the leather tongue down over the laces.  “Somewhere.”

On Saturday mornings, Jack goes to classes at the Gifted Society in Sewcrest. We drive up Route 33 to Bluelaw County, to the Sewcrest Elementary School, and for an hour or so he gets some instruction in whatever topic interested him enough to enroll in.  One semester it was “Simple Science”.  Another it was Egyptology.  This semestre it’s Lego Engineering, which thrills him no end;  he builds the Mindstorm kits, the ones with the sensors and the cpu, while I sit down the hall in the cavern-like All-Purpose Room drinking coffee and reading.  He’d rather I be in the class with him (so would I, actually), but it’s against the rules.

Saturday afternoons, by contrast, he has baseball practice.  We leave the Sewcrest Elementary School, get back in the car, drive the 20 minutes back down the road to Shadetree, where he lives, and park at a field.  Some field.  The website for the sports program, which has been recently “upgraded”, will tell you where the fields are, and how to get to them, but not which field you need to go to.  The bulletins and e-mails sent to his mother’s house by the coach will tell you which field you need to go to, but not where it is or how to get there.  It’s never the same field two weeks in a row.

Today’s field is an entire recreational complex:  vast expanses of mowed lawn with multiple diamonds, their outfields running into each other, cinderblock buildings and chain-link fences.  Black-box minivans and SUVs slide busily into lined parking spaces, glimmering in the sun, then crack open to disgorge leggy boys in colorful shirts with leather gloves and aluminum bats, who take off at a run.  The youngest of them is several years older than Jack, and half-again as tall–  but then, this isn’t the regular practice.  The scheduling of the meets changes too sometimes, and this morning’s session overlapped Lego Engineering, so we’ve already missed it.

Jack steps over the grass margin onto the sidewalk and begins to wander away up the path, craning his neck to see farther.  His hat and glove are still in the passenger seat of the car.  “Are you sure you don’t need your glove, son?” I ask him, grabbing the hat.

“I’m sure,” he replies, over his shoulder.  “They said it was batting.”

He doesn’t have a bat.  The coach gave him one, but he didn’t remember to bring it home with him after the last practice, nor did I, so it disappeared.  The other boys receding into the distance don’t all have bats either-  but they all have gloves.  “How ’bout we take it anyway?”  I tell him.  “Just in case.”  I pick it up with the same hand as the hat, switch both into my off-hand, then put my arm around his shoulders.  Together the two of us fall in with the others, follow the crowd.

Baseball is the fourth and latest sport in the series of athletic activities Jack has chosen to try his hand at.  The previous three were karate, soccer and tee-ball (a sort of small child’s introduction to baseball, so named because the ball sits on a tee rather than being pitched).  In each of those prior cases, Jack approached his mother and I and requested to be allowed to participate of his own volition, without any prompting on either of our parts.  In each of them, he embarked on participating with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm.  Then in each of them, he subsequently discovered that:

a)  he had no great talent or unusual natural ability that made him stand out above the other children,
b)  work and practice were required to understand the rules and acquire the skills,
c)  the rules involved were not open to his interpretation or input on how to make them better or more enjoyable,
d)  it was necessary to obey the dictates of an authority figure, often without a complete understanding as to why, while following the rules and practicing the skills, and,
e)  it was necessary to interact with and get along with other children while following the rules and practicing the skills.

And so in each of them, he slowly degenerated into apathy, interspersed with periodic bouts of intractable refusal to participate and/or histrionics.  And then quit.  (Or would have, had his mother and I allowed it;  in the cases of soccer and tee-ball, which were seasonal and team-based, we insisted that he complete the season, as a lesson in responsibility to one’s fellow team members and in finishing what one starts.)  And this despite the concerted efforts of various patient and concerned adults, myself included, to try to work with him, show him how to participate, help him acquire those skills.

Now there is baseball.  Strictly speaking, we are not far enough through the season yet to establish beyond all doubt that it is falling into this same pattern.  But it certainly isn’t falling outside it.  The pool of children in Jack’s age group is split into teams.  Each team is named after a corresponding major league team, and consists of 7-9 children, with two or three coaches:  enough kids that they can hold up their side of a game and feed off one another’s enthusiasm, plus enough coaches that one can pitch while the other catches, one can direct traffic while the other teaches, etcetera.  Jack’s team, the Angels, is somehow an exception to this:  it has five kids, only four of which are there at any given time, and one only coach.  Three of those kids are newcomers, comparable in skill level and understanding to Jack.  The fourth is the coach’s son:  he already knows everything they’re going to learn, and has mastered some of it, and thus alternates between being harshly judgmental of everyone else and mildly disobedient out of boredom.   The coach spends a certain amount of time yelling at him, and the rest of the time running the kids through catching exercises and batting exercises, helping each player individually to show him where he’s making mistakes.  None of this particularly seems to matter to Jack either way.  He stands where he’s told to stand, does what he’s told to do, then forgets it all as soon as the coach moves on to the next player.  At the practices I have seen him in thus far, I have watched him miss ground balls because he is staring up into the sky, facing the opposite direction from the pitcher’s mound and batting cage, seen him spin 360 degrees while batting, arms limp and eyes closed, play-acting at being dizzy, and had him come to me 45 minutes before the end of the practice, smiling, saying, “Coach said I could go home now if I want.”  I am reasonably sure that if I asked him how the game of baseball was played, and how you win, he would be unable to tell me.

All of this presents me with a parenting challenge.  I don’t view it as a great environment, either for him or in general.  I’m not convinced he really has any interest in baseball.  And I don’t particularly want to be there myself.  I have little patience for most team sports, have never been a member of a league or played any of them outside of public school phys-ed classes, and tend to have little in common with people who are enthusiastic about them.  When Jack says to me, “Can we go home now?” the answer I want to give him, with all my heart is, “Hell yeah.”  But on the other hand, I have responsibilities.  I have the responsibility to encourage him in pursuits he wants to try, whether I like them or not.  I have the responsibility to make sure that my prejudices aren’t causing him to reject experiences that might be good for him, and the responsibility not to have pre-conceptions about how he’s going to behave, or what he is and isn’t capable of.   And as mentioned above, I have the responsibility to try to impress upon him that it’s important to follow through on any commitments he makes, and that if he fails to do so, it can negatively affect other people besides himself.  So instead of answering “Hell yeah,” I answer, “Get out there and play.”  And I swallow my reservations, and I go with him, out to the field.

The boys are milling about in one great riotous mass on a muddy expanse between the innermost fences, slowly self-separating into pools of color, their parents and families ringed around them.  In the very center are a few small souls I recognize, children of the right age and with the right shirts to be in Jack’s league.  We stop and wait there with them, Jack clinging to my leg, and look around us.  The Angel coach’s son arrives, plowing headfirst into the other boys with a happy scream.  Jack runs over to greet him, then disengages, chases around a bit himself.  I watch him, and everyone.  Adults are smiling, laughing, greeting each other with waves and handshakes-  each other, but never me.  It reminds me afresh of what I learned long ago:  that town-based functions are always particularly wearisome when you’re a non-custodial parent.  At the Gifted Society, the parents are from all over West of the Rivers;  they don’t generally talk to one another, but when they do, they’re united by a inherent sense of their children being the odd-men-out, and by a desire for their enrichment (and perhaps also by an unfortunate tendency to freak out over the challenges involved in providing that enrichment.)  On the Shadetree baseball field, the parents already know each other from the school drop-offs and the PTA meetings and the coffee shops and the neighborhoods.  They may approve of the fact that you have a relationship with your child, and are not an absentee parent, but they will never accord you the same status as the custodial parent.  And they know you don’t give a rat’s ass about their concerns, about whether the property values in town are going down, or the taxes are high, or if they’re opening up a new Panera franchise in the strip mall, or how many holidays the schools have this year, because you live someplace else.  So they feel little need to talk to you.

“Look, Dad!” calls Jack from behind me, breaking my reverie.  I turn to see him standing up from a patch of grass, holding a tiny bit of green between his thumb and forefinger, smiling widely.  “I found a four-leaf clover!”

Son of a bitch, I think, leaning in close to look with him.  It’s a perfect example: four clean leaves, not two and a plus-sized mutant like you sometimes see.  “You sure did, son,” I tell him, cracking a broad grin myself.  “Nice job!”  Now where did he learn that? They’re actually not all that hard to find if you’re patient and thorough-  my first girlfriend and I found 13 of them in my parents’ backyard one summer afternoon-  but it’s not something that I ever taught him, and it makes me amused and proud to think that he’s cultivated the ability by himself.  The point that he’s doing it on a baseball field filled with his running, playing peers I choose to ignore for the moment.

The coach’s son emerges from the tumult again, runs by Jack and pauses.  “Look!” says Jack, holding it out to him to show him.  “I found a four-leaf clover!”

The boy stares down at it.  His brows and nose wrinkle up in a puzzled frown, and he tilts his head to one side;  he obviously has no idea what a four-leaf clover is, or what it signifies.  But he glances back up to Jack’s proud face, and realizes in a heartbeat that whatever it is, Jack finds it valuable.  “Gimmee that!” he yells.  He grabs Jack’s hand in one lightning-fast motion, pulling him off-balance, then pries open his clenched fingers, overpowering him, and takes the clover away from him.  Then he runs off into the crowd, taunting him.

“Hey!” cries Jack.  “Give that back!”  He takes off in pursuit, and I hang my head and sigh, awash in slow waves of sorrow and anger, for myself, for Jack, for all of us, for the feeling that nothing, no matter how I hope for it, ever changes.  I take one step forward, but stop, conflicted;  not just because I can see that it is already too late, that the coach’s son is rolling the clover between his two fingers as he runs and crushing it into pulp, but for another reason:  because inside I know, on some level, that it’s not my fight.  No matter how I defend him, Jack will one day have to learn to stand for himself against the forces of ignorance and aggression.

Today is not that day, though.  Today the coach’s son loses him in the crowd, dodges and weaves back and forth between the criss-crossing people until Jack, unable to keep up or see where he went, comes to a halt.  He throws a last look around the field, deciding it’s a lost cause, then sees another child he knows.  He wanders off to talk to that child instead, not visibly upset.

I am not escaped so easily.  I see the boy materialize out of the confusion, see him when he pauses and glances furtively over his shoulder in the direction that Jack has wandered off.  My resolve to forbearance disappears before I’m aware it’s eroding;  I am advancing upon him like gathering doom, growing in height, blotting out the sun, the avatar of Terrible Retribution…  but wonder stops me dead, a second time.  For there is a strange, quiet moment when he turns his attention back to his hard-won plunder, and I see that, too, am the only one who does.  He shields the clover against the crowd and frowns wistfully down at it, desperate to know what makes it so special-  and those actions save him, turn me back from an avenging angel into a parent.  He isn’t evil.  He’s a little boy.  He’s someone’s son.

His concentration is so intense that it startles him when he looks up to discover my outstretched hand hovering in front of him.

“May I have that back, please?”  Forbearance or not, the Angel is still there;  it comes out as an ashen monotone, and is not a request.

The boy places the clover into my hand wordlessly, without any hesitation, then stands there silently looking up at me, because I am still looking down at him.  The conflict between compassion and correction has me frozen.  I have come this far, and cannot leave, do not want to leave, without saying something.

Careful, says the Voice.

“I saw what you did,” I say finally, just loud enough that only he and I can hear.  The frown creeps back into his brows, and his eyes narrow, but he never looks away from me, nor I from him.  I lean in, ever-so-slightly.  “It wasn’t NICE,’ I tell him.

I don’t trust myself to say anything more.  I walk away, and leave him there to think about that.  He watches me go, still narrow-eyed, still frowning.

The clover, miraculously, is not pulped after all;  his efforts have only rolled its leaves into a tight ball.   They come loose with a bit of patience and some deft picking, and when they are spread back into their proper configuration, I return to where Jack is standing and hand it down to him.  “Rescued it for you,” I say.

“Cool!” he cries, taking it from me and looking at it again.

“Put it in your pocket,” I advise him.

For some reason, he takes this as a remonstrance.  “Yes, Daddy,” he says quietly.  He slips it away inside his denim shorts, out of sight, then hangs his head sadly and wanders off again, leaving me open mouthed and confused.  But… I stammer inside.  I was HELPING. My brows raise, helplessly.  What did I do wrong?

“TEAMS!” the coaches yell.  “GROUP UP!”

The speeches are going to begin.

[to continue to part 2, click HERE]


2 Responses to “The Constant Variety of Sport (part 1)”

  1. yoko Says:

    I can’t wait for the next installment.

  2. The Magic Pill (part 1) | Tales of the Interregnum Says:

    […] equally among everyone involved, or a need for collective action. The Wagnerian sagas of his attempts to participate in team sports have already been documented in this space. His experiences in public school have hewed to the same […]