I will confess: I can't watch live events. I can't watch them because there's no TV to tell me where to look, leaving me lost and on my own and always just a second or two behind the action because something else distracted me.
I don't know why people attend sporting events live. I don't like to, and never have. If you watch a game at home, you're warm. If you watch a game at home, you can have access to all your snacks and drinks anytime you want, instead of having to (like I did) pack a baggie full of wafer-cookies and "Cinnamon Roll" cereal and 3 Musketeer bars and stuff sodas into your jacket pocket. If you watch a game at home, nobody thinks you're rude or weird if you also kind of read "Entertainment Weekly" during the commercials and timeouts. If you watch a game at home, on TV, you can follow the game easily because the camera always follows the ball and the announcers tell you what's happening and if something important happens, they'll replay it for you so that you can see the important thing, too, the important thing that you missed because you were getting a snack or reading Entertainment Weekly or because you were me and you're really incapable of paying attention to pretty much anything.
I realized that, yet again, that I'm incapable of following events or paying attention, when Sweetie and I braved the absolute-zero-temperatures and watched The Boy's team play in round one of the state football playoffs. It wasn't the first time I've come face-to-face with this deeper understanding of myself -- this understanding that I can't pay attention to anything-- but it was the latest, and I think the coldest, time.
If you are one of those people who can follow things, who takes part in conversations and watches plays or football games or parades and can understand and view them without seeing them inside a screen on a box, I envy you and I envy the fact that you will never know what it's like to wonder if the person you're talking to or the thing you're watching makes sense.
I spend a lot of time in conversations, and at events, that don't makes sense. I talk to a lot of people who, frankly, don't make any sense to me. I will see them when I come into the office in the morning, while we get coffee or while they try to interrupt me from reading the 8 web comics and one celebrity gossip site I like to read to get prepared for my day, and they will say something like this:
"Can you believe it? I mean, seriously, David!"
Leaving me to wonder what David did, and whether what he did was good, or bad, and why this person won't tell me the whole story. So I say something noncommittal, something that could go either way, something that is usually a Homer Simpson quote or a reference to one of the comic strips I just read.4 years of college and three years of law school add up to: "Uh. Hmm. That's like the time Homer had that doughnut."
I always figured that it was other people who had the problem, because they were obviously forgetting that they hadn't told me what David had done, or whether he had done anything (because the comment, "I mean, seriously, David," could maybe mean they were astonished that David existed) and they were also forgetting all those other times when they tried to talk to me and I was not really interested in what they were saying. But I've had to over and over through the years deal with this so often that I figure maybe I'm partially to blame maybe just a little.
Especially when I attend live sporting events and realize that I'm just not able to watch them at all and really comprehend what's going on. Did you ever watch a sport from a foreign country, arriving midway through, and try to figure out what was happening and who was doing good? Imagine suddenly stumbling on, say, a cricket game that's in the fourth wicket or whatever they pretend is a segment of their game and people cheer and you're trying to figure out whether the people rooting for one side are cheering something that just happened that was good for their team, or something that was bad for the other team, or maybe you're just trying to figure out whether there are one or two or more teams playing.
That's how I am at any live event and last night's football game was no different, but it was colder. A lot colder.
The game started at 7:30, so Sweetie began getting ready to leave at 6:15, as she usually does. At 6:15, she was reminding me that we had to go to the game, whereas I at 6:15 was trying to figure out how many more cookies I had to give Mr Bunches to get him to quit standing up in his high chair so that I could finish eating my healthy dinner of pizza rolls, burritos, and Doritos. (Any good dinner will have a minimum of two courses from the "-ito" food group.) The answer to that turns out to be twelve cookies; six cookies will get Mr Bunches to sit back down, for a second, before he stands up again, but then I also have to give Mr F six cookies, too, because he'll get upset if you give Mr Bunches six cookies and leave him out of the equation, so in a way, Mr Bunches is kind of like a union negotiator; his standing up-protest gets benefits for the whole Brotherhood of Twins.
We finally left at 7:10, after about 10 more cookies and after baths and after a quick game of "Dr. Slider," which I had to play with Mr Bunches before we left because (a) he gets upset when he knows we're leaving, so we have to slide the grumpies away and (b) I really like playing "Dr. Slider" because I get to sing the theme song again.
We got to the game and paid for our tickets to get in and were confronted with the first of the social dilemmas that going out in public forces Sweetie and I to confront. We were going through the gates and saw our next-door-neighbor standing there, and Sweetie talked to her for a second while I focused on the fact that I was already freezing to death, and then we were through the gates and walking up the bleacher stairs to a seat high enough to get a good view of the field when Sweetie asked if we shouldn't wait for our neighbor, if it wasn't rude that we'd just walked away while she had gone back to get a ticket, which was the first moment I'd realized that we had, in fact, just walked away while she had gone back to just get a ticket. (I'd been buy trying to figure out if the game had already started. And also busy being cold.)
"Just look for her and tell her to come sit by us," I told her, figuring that would cure our rudeness by showing her that we actually did want to talk or sit by her, even though we actually didn't want to sit by her or talk to her, because Sweetie is a lot like me and we're both a lot like people who don't like other people hanging around us at public events, because (at least in my case) they get in the way of me trying to figure out what's going on, and they get in the way, also, of the other thing that I do when I'm forced to go out in public, which is watch people and secretly judge them to make myself feel superior to them.
We couldn't quite so easily just get our neighbor to see that we weren't trying to ignore her, though, because she didn't hear us hollering to her and waving, so I had to get up and go over by where she had opted to sit and invite her to come and sit by us, which she did, bringing her seat cushions and blankets and all and joining us.
What's the etiquette for that, really? What if we'd just chatted at the gate and then waved and walked away? Would we have had to invite her to sit by us, then? Or did we have to invite her, go the extra mile, to make up for having walked away from her instead of waiting while she bought a ticket? Was it our fault that she saw us and came and talked to us before going to buy her ticket? Didn't she violate some basic rule of civilization by breaking the code that requires people to go to the ticket line and then the entry line? Or should we ignore her doing that and instead get up and walk across the bleachers to invite her to sit by us and then offer to buy her hot chocolate, too, because I was going to buy some for us, and felt like I should buy some for her, too? Is that what the world's come to, now, where everytime I leave my house I have to buy hot chocolate for everybody around me? And stand in line behind a 12-year-old kid who's taking an infinite amount of time ordering his snacks, which I swear were:
A box of popcorn, a licorice rope, a coke, and twelve "Airhead" taffies. All blue. Twelve BLUE "Airhead" taffies, which made the concession stand guy have to pull all the "Airheads" out of the jar and begin sorting through them, picking out the blue ones, and they had only ten of them, so the kid then decided that he could live with a couple of green taffies, too, but only if they were dark green, so the guy and the kid were holding up the taffies to determine which was the darker green.All the while they were doing that, I was lowing feeling in the top of my head, which no longer had a hood on it because although I'd worn a sweatshirt with a hood underneath my winter coat, I'd had to take the sweatshirt off to allow me and Sweetie to sit on it instead of sitting directly on the metal bleacher benches, which not only did not warm up as we sat on them, they actually got colder until they began sucking the heat from my body; I could feel the heat draining from my torso into my butt and then into the bench and dissipating out into the world.
Eventually, the kid had a sufficient number of appropriately-colored "Airhead" taffies and I got my hot chocolate and I settled back down to watch what remained of what I learned was the first quarter, at which point I learned that not only am I no good at following live events, Sweetie is no good to get updates on the live events I can't follow.
"What'd I miss?" I asked her.
"They fumbled, or something. I don't know," she said.
"Who fumbled?" I asked.
"I don't know," she answered.
Then we busied ourselves laughing everytime we heard the announcer say the name of a player that sounded a little like the name of a character on "South Park," and also watching the kids walk by in their sweatshirts, without winter coats, and sometimes in short sleeves, and then looking at the guy who had his baby with him; the baby was dressed warmly but that did not stop us from discussing how it was too cold to have a baby at the game and how we were very good parents because we'd left the boys home to be babysat by Middle instead of bringing them into the cold. We got a lot of judging of people in by halftime, and also, by halftime, I realized that the part of the scoreboard where I was looking to see what the down and distance were was not the right part of the scoreboard.
Here's what happened: throughout the first and second quarters, I would watch the play and try to determine what was going on, and then I would look at the scoreboard to see how far the team that I thought had the ball needed to go for a first down. And every time I looked at the scoreboard, it said it was down "3" and there were "3" yards to go.
And every time I looked I got a little more smugly irritated at whoever was running the scoreboard because why couldn't he change the down and distance, and then, just before the half, I looked and it was down "2" with "3" yards to go and only then did I realize that I was looking at the part of the scoreboard that showed how many timeouts the teams had left.
I think it shows you that I'm actually a good person because after mentally insulting the scoreboard operator for most of the first half, I, on realizing my mistake, mentally apologized to him.
Also, it's really easy to make that mistake, if your eyeballs keep tearing up because you're watching a football game in conditions so cold that you may as well be sitting on Pluto's surface.
Shortly after realizing my private mistake, I then publicly cheered, very very briefly, for the wrong team because I saw a bunch of players running and tackling and falling and I thought it meant our team had done something good but we didn't, as it turned out, have the ball, the other side did, so I quickly stopped cheering and tried to act like it was no big deal.
At halftime, we tried to walk around to warm up a bit while we called to check on the Babies! Walking around to warm up a bit was futile; not only were we still, stupidly, outside, where it was cold, but we also were so cold by that point that our joints were stiffening up and walking seemed to make it worse by allowing the wind to suck away the little heat that we might have built up.
The third and fourth quarters were mostly lost in haze of teams being on the other end of the field so it was even harder to see, and also my discomfort at realizing that the cans of soda I'd brought to drink were getting colder as the night went on, even though they were in my jacket pocket, and that as they got colder the cold was seeping into me through the inner lining of my jacket, and as the cold seeped into me from the sodas I could feel it spreading to my internal organs, slowly cooling down my kidneys and my spleen. We were getting too cold to even judge people properly; there were people who weren't wearing hats or who were talking on cell phones or otherwise doing things that would ordinarily let me feel superior to them but I couldn't muster up the energy. Instead, I tried to keep track of the game and also tried to get my teeth to chatter, because that might help build up some body heat to help replace what kept escaping through my head and might possibly also unfreeze my pancreas.
It's at that point of the game, and that point, more or less every time we go watch a game or award ceremony or drama club or debate, that I begin to question the wisdom of my parenting, the wisdom of encouraging the kids to take part in things and have active social lives and hobbies and sports and things like that. All those nights when I sat around the dinner table telling them they needed to be more active and outgoing, all those days that I told them to shut off the TV and go do something with their friends or get a hobby, all those days that I told them they should try out for football or golf or the play or whatever it was they wanted to do, in all that encouraging them to chase their dreams, blah blah blah, I never stopped to consider that if they did chase their dreams, their dreams might well require me at some point to risk frostbite, or at least some mild discomfort, and if I'd thought of that before, I might have left the TV on.
I wonder if other parents ever kind of regret the encouragement they gave their kids, too. Did the parents of the Phillies and Rays players, sitting in the middle of that cold rain in the postponed-game-5 the other night, sit there publicly smiling and cheering and privately thinking I should've told him to be an accountant. Nobody ever has to sit in the rain to cheer on an accountant. I bet they did. I bet they did and they just won't admit it. They won't admit that they, like me, are privately practicing their next encouraging speech, which will go something like: You should do that. You can be anything you want to be! You're smart enough to do that. Just make sure that the thing that you're good and smart enough to do takes place in the summer, or indoors, and also that it isn't too long or boring and that it doesn't take place on a night when 'Battlestar Galactica' is also on, because while I could always tape it, I really like to watch it on Friday nights, so maybe instead of this activity, you could be all that you can be in some other activity that takes place on Tuesdays.
Which, rest assured, I would never actually say to them. Instead, while I might think that, I will tell them they should go for it, do their best, make the team, learn the lines, debate the... debaters... and then I might also warn them that maybe I might have to work late that night, whatever night it is.
By the middle of the fourth quarter, The Boy's team was up 42-7 and people began leaving the game, at which point The Boy got put in; being a junior, he plays a lot of second-string on the varsity, and we were excited to have our waiting pay off by seeing The Boy get in there and start pushing people around and knocking them down. Plus, clapping helps warm you up.
The Boy played well, aside from seeming to need to tighten the belt on his pants because after each play he had to hoist them up a bit. On one play, I saw him hoist them up during the play, blocking a guy, then pulling up his pants, then blocking another guy. And his team hung on to its lead and won the game; we stuck it out to the very end, when our side -- at least I'm pretty sure it was our side -- knelt down to run out the remainder of the clock. (I wasn't sure at first that they had knelt down; I thought maybe there
'd been a fumble.)Having done our duty, and lost feeling in the greater part of our bodies, we picked up our stuff and headed for the car, where I immediately turned the heat on full blast to try to get some relief. It's a sign of just how cold we were that the cold air that blows out of a cold car's vents when you first start it felt good -- it felt far warmer than I felt, myself, and I was grateful to have air that was only cold, instead of frigid, blasting on me.
The Boy's now got another game on Saturday, round two of the playoffs, and I'm preparing for it much the way Admiral Peary would prepare for an arctic expedition, or the way Admiral Peary would have prepared if Admiral Peary had thought more like me and less like Admiral Peary. Which is to say, I'm preparing for The Boy's next game by trying to figure out how I can get it televised.
Team Mom:
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