The Love of the Game

My daughter Georgia is like Brett Favre when it comes to sports. That is, Georgia will continue to play the game until you physically strip the ball from her dead lifeless hand. She played seven softball games in a tournament this past weekend in Watertown. Then, in the sweltering 90 degrees sunshine this afternoon, she agreed to fill in for two of the other teams who were short of players for tonight. That will make at least 17 games of ball in ten days. She doesn’t quit.

Georgia came into softball relatively late. She didn’t start playing until she was ten. She played tackle football with the boys for three years, and then came to the sad realization that she was never going to be big enough to continue in the sport. It is a boys sport by design, unless she wanted to be a place kicker, which she did not.

The transition into softball has been interesting. She loves the team quality and she has no fear on the field. Her first summer playing 10 and under, a lot of girls got struck with the ball. The pitchers were all young and inexperienced. A lot of the kids developed a fear of the ball, and had to overcome the instinct to jump out of the batters box. After a game, another parent asked Georgia why she was never afraid of the ball .

“It’s smaller than a linebacker,” she answered with a sly smile. My kid is cool.

Because Georgia came into the sport later, she’s had to struggle to catch up. She plays both recreation league ball and competitive travel ball. In rec ball, she shines. The amount of time and practicing and coaching involved in travel ball assures that she’s going to continue to get better, because she spends so much more time playing.

In travel ball, Georgia pines for time in the infield. I am astounded at times at her resolve. She’s remarkably stubborn, she always has been. There are downsides to the self assured, strong willed child, though. Like toddler hood. That was a daily battle. But now, those same qualities that made me pull my hair out are the ones that have made her the kid who sings solo in front of a room of 300 people at her school talent show. The kid who tries for Secretary of the student council as a new sixth grader and beats out the eighth grade cheerleader, becoming the first sixth grade officer at the school. And the kid who spent nearly nine months trying to learn a cartwheel, when her kid sister got it on the second try. The first six months, the cartwheels were so ugly that even I wanted her to stop trying, but she didn’t give up. She spent years working and finally learned the back flip her sister Holly had learned at age six. Georgia wasn’t going to let that go, she was going to learn to do a backhand spring if it killed her. It took her over three years before she did one on her own. Even at age twelve, I think Georgia is one of the best examples I know of someone truly cultivating their own life.

When Georgia filled in at rec ball tonight, she only had her orange Storm t-shirt from her own team, and the other teams didn’t have any extra shirts, so she stood out on third base like a sore thumb among all the blue shirts of her temporary teammates. She didn’t seem to notice, and eventually, I don’t think anyone else did either. She caught a line drive down the third base line to end an inning with bases loaded and the crowd cheered. She got two tag outs, and was dead on with all her throws to first base.

I watched her from the stands, this strange mixing of team colors each game, and I realized that she reminded me of Brett Favre again. Not for the changing of teams, but for the way she played the game, no matter where she was playing. Because she was playing first for the love of the game. Anything else was extra.

Obsessive Wilson Disorder

I’m about to give Somewhere a rawhide bone. Not because she’s a good dog and deserves one, but because she’s driving me crazy and I want her still.

She’s a crazy puppy right now because I didn’t take her to her beloved new dog park today. I didn’t take her anywhere, in fact. Not even Kwik Trip.

Instead, I took her out of the kennel for a while in the morning while we got ready for our day. Then I put her back in the box and went on Holly’s field trip to the Milwaukee Public Museum, where parking costs are outrageous. Paying for it is my own fault, as I refuse to ride on a school bus. It breaks too many of my rules regarding space and noise. I gladly paid the eleven dollars for parking to not have to ride on that bus.

I let Somewhere out as soon as we got home at three, but I didn’t take her anywhere because we had to leave right away for gymnastics. I left her with Georgia, who was unhappily but dutifully cleaning out whatever died in her room.

Somewhere is not always a spaz. She has days, weeks even where she is so ridiculously well behaved that I can’t believe how lucky I am. Then a day or two goes by where I don’t take her to exercise and she eats a whole bag of bathroom garbage. She spends the night throwing it up all over my bed, my hallway, my stairs and my house. She even has the decency to look up at me with extra wide brown eyes, as if she’s sorry for the inconvenience.

As long as I chuck a tennis ball for her for a half an hour nearly every day, she’s a reasonable puppy. She still tears up Kleenex and occasionally harasses Football the cat, but she’s more than tolerable. The Kleenex doesn’t bother me as much as her chasing Football, as I am completely convinced that he is one of the nicest guys on the planet, cat or not.

I’ve heard of the term “ball obsessed” before, but I guess I never understood it or gave it much thought until now. At first, I thought that she was just especially attached to her ball. She treated it more like a friend than an inanimate object. If we lost one in the ditch or the lake, she’d whimper as we drove away. Obviously Somewhere is of the leave-no-man-behind philosophy, and so we started calling the ball “Wilson.” The name stuck, and now, at the dog park, we yell “Where’s Wilson?” every time she loses the ball. It’s a good conversation starter. And since we’re in the business of naming things around here, we’ve named Somewhere’s ball issues: Obsessive Wilson Disorder

I thought that once we started going to a park with other dogs, she’d want to play with them and not just Wilson. But so far the only interest she has in the other dogs is to give them the ball a time or two, and then give up and bring it back to me. I think she assumes that they can throw it for her, but won’t.

Somewhere loves to swim, but will only swim with Wilson. If he doesn’t go in, she sits in the water up to her neck just off shore with only her head sticking out of the water. She resembles a little Loch Ness monster with a long pink tongue hanging out the side of its mouth.

I’m lying in bed with Holly, rubbing her back like I’d promised, and Somewhere repeatedly takes Wilson and places him on my back, where he rolls down my body leaving a long damp trail, and then falls to the floor with a dull wet thud. She isn’t going to give up.

I suppose that I could go around the house and collect all the Wilsons, but then she’ll just sit and pant at the spot where I’ve hidden them, or the empty spot where they used to be. She’s stubborn with a one track mind.

So now, in the name of sanity, Somewhere is eating a rawhide bone on my bed. It reminds me of my position on television for the girls when they were small. There were moments when it was necessary to just turn it on as an electronic babysitter in the interest of peace and quiet, and the possibility for me to get something done.

Basically, I caved.

Fishing in April

If the men in my family don’t catch many fish, my guess would be that it’s because they don’t stay in one place long enough to catch anything. I never knew that there was so much commuting involved in fishing. Each and every time that we change spots, we have to load everything back in and out of the vehicles, although mostly we use my cousin Joey’s truck, because it is the most convenient and already smells like dead minnows.

The reasoning behind moving is that there is always something wrong with where we are, and there is always someplace better to be fishing. The other problem is that when we switch locations, everyone scatters briefly from the caravan of vehicles, to swing home, or to Kwik Trip to pick up whatever they’ve forgotten. Inevitably someone reaches the next location faster than the others. They set up not knowing what the others who haven’t arrived yet are going to find wrong with the spot. Common protests are that it’s too windy, it’s too dark, and it’s too crowded. Being the first day that actually feels like spring after a snowy cold winter doesn’t help either. Everyone and their cousins are out fishing.

My cousins all start fishing in Fox Lake, seven miles down the road from Beaver Dam. I don’t know Fox Lake very well, or the park they mentioned, so I circle around the town a few times, which takes exactly 76 seconds and leads exactly to the park eventually. Joey’s big green truck and Al and Chrissy’s silver car are waiting there.

My cousin David is fishing from the pier, a baseball cap over his long hair, a beard growing again on his face. He has a round sweet face and the style of his facial hair make me think “Amish” without meaning to. David is nearly twenty one, and one of the sweetest people I know. He takes care of my pets and my garden when I leave town, fixes my computer regularly, and moves furniture for me. The summer he was born, I came up to help my cousin Chrissy and her husband Al with the shock of babyhood. I slept in David’s room, a small sleeping porch with a roll away cot beside his crib. I fed him bottles in the middle of the night and walked the floor with him when he cried. I turned fourteen that summer and didn’t know that I could love anyone as much as I loved him. Whatever bond we made that summer, we still have. I feel proud and happy and safe with David. When I arrive, he shuffles toward me with his arms spread wide, waiting for a hug.

The wind is coming in gusts, so as soon as I arrive it’s my job to sit in the collapsible lawn chairs whenever anyone gets up to pee by the side of the truck, or check their fishing line. Two chairs have blown into the lake already and have been rendered temporarily unusable.

Al burps loudly from his fishing spot on the shore, a low guttural sound that always surprises me, despite hearing it thousands of times by now.

“Jesus, Al. Did you just burp up a baby?” Al is quieter than most of the members in our family, and only turns to smile at my comment. It starts a conversation about how Al does have unusual burps, but Joey feels the best part is the long sigh that inevitably follows.

“Al has the most satisfying burps in our family,” Joey proclaims knowingly as he casts his line out into the wind. “They even make me feel better.”

Small swallows darted around the waters surface as dusk creeps in, making me realize there must be mosquitoes or some other bugs out for them to frenzy over. Unless the birds were just practicing, which seems unlikely, but so do mosquitoes when I have yet to put my winter coat away for the season.

We pack up all the gear as it grows dark and drive to Frankie’s Point, though that’s not the parks official name. We call it this because Joey’s brother, and my cousin, Frank, used to like to fish there before he died suddenly a few years ago. I’ve never been to Frankie’s Point before, and I stand facing the lake, thinking about the past. I wonder if everyone in my family wishes Frankie were still here when they come to this place. It’s dark now, and the lights from the houses glitter across the lake. I can see why Frankie liked it here. I want to stay, but the consensus is that it’s too busy. I don’t fish, so I don’t get to vote. We don’t even set up. Joey heads out to give on of his kids a ride home, and the rest of us caravan through town looking for a new spot to fish.

When we stop at Waterworks Park, I call Joey to tell him that we’ve left Water Street because the spot was taken, and he asks me about the wind.

“I don’t know. It’s not bad here. Let’s just fish here.” I tell him. Mostly, I just want them to settle in. We’ve been to a bunch of parks, and they all seem fine to me.

“Is it more of less windy than the first place we were at?” he asks me.

“The place in Fox Lake? Less, I think. But I think that it was windier in general then. I think that the wind has died down some now,” I tell him.

“Hmm...” he says, not sounding like he believes me. He isn’t going to want to stay here. He’s going to make us move again, I realize.

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after" according to Thoreau. I think of this as I wait for Joey and watch everyone else set up, except for Al. He says he’s not setting up again until we’re staying somewhere for sure. I’m starting to wonder if that actually happens. And I wonder what it is that my cousins are after, because there is a lot less communing-with-nature-time when you break it up with all this driving around.

When Joey arrives, he unpacks his fishing gear as if we’re staying. He struggles with the poles and the flashlight, so I come to help him. “Hold this,” he tells me as he hands me the flashlight. I take it from him and shine it in his direction, then realize that it’s all wet. I can’t figure out why it would be wet, and then I know.

“Ugh. Joey, seriously, was this in your mouth?” I pull it closer to my face and see that the tip of the flashlight is wet. So is my hand.

He laughs, “You’re the one who took it.” He tells me nonchalantly.

We stay long enough for everyone to get set up, for Rob to get his line tangled with the guys on the next pier, and for Joey to catch a bullhead. Joey tells me that bullheads don’t count as catching fish. I watch him struggle with the fish and the hook, and I think that it probably matters to the bullhead, but I don’t say it out loud. I get enough crap just for asking them not to throw cigarette butts in the river and explaining how dangerously low the planet is on clean groundwater. When the fish is free of the hook, Joey throws him in the water behind him without looking back.

I don’t actually fish anymore, though I was raised with the sport as the highlight of most of my family activities. By my teens, I would mostly just lie in the boat and read my book. I have nothing against fishing, although I do try to follow the policy of “do no harm,” as a general life principle. Still, in all fairness, people do need to eat. If it was necessary, I think that I could hunt and fish to provide for my children. But for now, I have a Piggly Wiggly less than half a mile from my house that sells everything that I need.

Joey decides that this time we should go out to try Sunset Park, but plans change mid-route and we end up at the dam. There are no open spots by the parking lot, so we carry all of things over the bridge and dam itself into Cotton Mill Park. I realize that we could’ve parked on Haskell Street, where my cousin Frankie lived before he died, and that we wouldn’t have had so far to walk. I don’t voice this to them, because it makes me worry that they’ll pack everything back up just to park closer, and I just want to sit down and relax.

I watch the men in my family once again unpack their gear and get set up to fish. The rushing water of the dam is soothing, and downtown Beaver Dam can be seen down river. Al puts a small stick in the ground to prop up his fishing pole, and settles into his chair to smoke a cigarette. This is classic Al, he goes with the flow.

Joey has brought his son, Willy, for the second half of the fishing expeditions. Willy is the child that Joey’s father cursed on him years before. “If you ever have a son, I hope that you have one exactly like you…” he warned, and it came true. By two years old, Willy had learned to run full speed into the baby gate to the kitchen like a line backer, slamming the gate and himself into the ground to break into the kitchen. He did this dozens of times a day. He’s rambunctious and funny and loveable, like Joey. He and my daughter Georgia are in the same class at the middle school. They played pee wee tackle football together for years, and share band concerts and friends. Their names list one after the other on the high honor roll in the local newspaper every semester, and both Joey and I swell with pride. I grew up with Joey, and I think of it as an everyday miracle to watch our children do the same thing.

Willy gets his line stuck on his first three casts into the dark water. Joey gets less amused each time, despite my laughing. He talks to Willy with the flashlight in his mouth again, asking him how he can get snagged on each of his first three casts. The words come out in jumbled bursts, the flashlight getting wetter as he talks. Somehow, we can all understand every word, and I think that it actually seems like a talent. Willy brings his pole over for another hook and minnow, and sets his chair right on top Joeys fishing poles. When Willy reaches down to save the poles, he trips Rob who nearly gets his own hook in his back. Joey is done dealing with Willy, and sends him upstream to fish.

“I knew that I should’ve pulled out,” Joey mutters through his flashlight once Willy is out of ear shot. I laugh so hard my stomach hurts, and Al tells me that I’m scaring the fish. Once I catch my breath, I look at the happy faces of the men in my family, and think that this is why we’re here. That it doesn’t matter which park we go to, or how many.

We all settle into our seats and Joey says “Now don’t laugh, but I was thinking that the Waste Water Treatment Plant would be an awesome place to fish…”

dysfunctional nicknames

The girls and I have decided that we all need nicknames. Its not that we don’t have perfectly good nicknames, like Shelly and Geory and H. But we decided to take it one step further and make up dysfunctional nicknames. It was Georgia who came up with the idea, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has spent any time at all with my twelve year old. She’s not a real linear thinker.

It happened because Georgia was doing laundry for me to work off the money I had to shell out to buy her a new cell phone. She forgot to charge hers, the battery died and she lost it at her cousin’s house. Three months after she first got one. Georgia was doing laundry for a while.

I had just gone running, and I left my running clothes in the hallway when I went to take a shower, asking Georgia to take them down with the rest of the wash. When I got out of the shower, I asked Georgia if she’d put my clothes in the laundry, and she said “Yeah, but mom, Holy Boob Sweat!”

I couldn’t help but laugh at her, and when I did, I left an opening for her to excitedly exclaim “That’s your new nickname!” which only made me laugh more. For whatever reason, I agreed to the handle. I did warn her that payback isn’t always nice and she was going to get a name from me of at least equal value. She told me to bring it on.

A few weeks later, I put Georgia on house arrest until her room was clean, and as the bags of trash and St. Vinnie’s clothes came out, so did this smell. I knew right then what Georgia’s name was going to be. “Armpit Room.” She took it on almost proudly.

We had a harder time getting a name for Holly. She’s graceful and cute and ridiculously tidy. Sometimes she cleans things without my asking. But this afternoon, while getting ready to go grocery shopping, she was showing us some trick and we noticed how incredibly disproportionate her arms are to the rest of her body. I said “Holy Monkey Arms Holly!” and we knew she had her name. We think she got off pretty easy with Monkey Arms, which she was perfectly fine with.

On the way to grocery shopping, we considered our nicknames initials. Holly’s is MA, which is just plain fun to say. Mine is BS, which all three of us thought was hysterical. Georgia’s initials seemed kind of boring as only AR, until we thought of saying it like a pirate might. That made all the difference.

The kids were being enchanting as an attempt to avoid bed. They sat on my bed, telling silly stories. Georgia was throwing a tennis ball for Somewhere. It bounced off the dogs’ teeth and landed between my bed and the wall. Holly reached down to get it, and came up with a smile and the ball. “That’s why they call me MA,” she said.

“Why? Cause your good at finding things?” I asked.

“No. Cause I have Monkey Arms!” she told me, raising them above her head, giggling. We all cracked up, and bedtime got delayed ten more minutes.

When we were all finally in our rooms, we called out our new nicknames to each other with goodnights, like the Walton’s.

“Night, Maaaaaaa.”

“Night, Arrrrrrrr.”

Then in unison, the girls call out to me with giggles in their voices “Night BS.”

It made me realize how much of our days we fill with silliness. And that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Be Good, Get Good, or Quit

Nights like tonight inevitably make me feel like I am a bad mother. It’s 10:30 when I climb the steep wooden stairs to our bedrooms with my always present orange backpack on my back. I haven’t been home since five, when we head out to Watertown for gymnastics.

I hear Holly before I see her, as I round the corner at the top of the stairs. Her tiny muscular body is upside down in a handstand, her toes pointed perfectly, her core holding her still. She still has her Olympic replica leotard just like Shawn Johnson’s on, her blond hair still held up in clips. Beside her on the floor is the wrapper from a Fiber One pop tart that was her dinner, or snack, since she ate a bowl of cereal before we left. She releases the handstand into a bridge, her feet echoing through the hard wood floors. She flips back out of the bridge and looks at me, her hands poised above her head gracefully.

“I know. Go to bed.” She tells me before I have the chance to say it.

“Yes. Go to bed. And pick up your wrapper,” I tell her, pointing to the flimsy silver material on the floor. “Somewhere is going to eat it.”

Somewhere, our ten-month-old puppy, is at my heels. She’s nearly always at my heels. She’s especially rambunctious because I didn’t let her run at the park today. I needed to run three miles, and it was my turn. She has a stuffed animal, a small cat, in her mouth. She’s chewed off only the little face, but the rest of the toy remains intact, including its ears. She’s bumping its soggy body against the back of my knees to play. We’ve named it, just like we do with all her toys. This one is Kitten Without A Face. The three legged pink dog is named Tripod, obviously.

I head toward my room and Georgia comes out of hers, her radio blaring. She sings as she dances by me, as if it’s four in the afternoon and not ridiculously late. I tell her to put on her pajamas and put some Aquaphor on her sunburn, which is now peeling. Despite lathering my fair skinned child in sunscreen at her first softball tournament of the season over the weekend, she burned. Georgia concedes about the Aquaphor without much complaint tonight, and comes out of the bathroom looking like a melting wax figure. I kiss her hair instead of her face and shoe her into her room. I will be shocked if she doesn’t come back out at least once. She doesn’t give up.

They have school tomorrow, so why don’t they want to go to bed? I want to go to bed. I will lose my mind if I don’t have at least one quiet hour without hearing the word “Momma.” I love them dearly, but I need them to be silent now.

These days are long, and as the girls grow older, there are more and more of them. Band concerts, chorus concerts, talent shows, gymnastics competitions, softball practices, student council and safety patrol trips fill our waking moments. I silently wonder at times if this is right. They grow so fast. These things they do, these places that I spend countless hours driving them to, they pull my children farther into the world. Farther from me.

At gymnastics practice, one of the hard core coaches calls Holly out on a low back tuck. She’s concerned about Holly hurting herself and she doesn’t mince words. “Holly! That was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. Go back and do it again, but it better be higher.”

I can see from across the room that Holly is angry. She walks slowly and deliberately across the floor, an invisible cloud of steam coming from her ears. Holly is harder on herself than anyone else ever could be. I momentarily think of protecting her, knowing that she can do far better than what she just did. I excuse her in my head because she had a track meet at school and I think she must be tired.

By the time she crosses the floor to try again, every one of the members of her team is watching her. She takes a breath and takes off across the room. She commits to it this time, and flips six feet off of the blue floor, her backward somersault setting in the air, as if she’s momentarily suspended upside down. She lands it perfectly, and finishes with her hands posed. A grin flashes across her face, but it isn’t me she looks at with pride. It’s the coach who pushed her, who called her out. They are grinning at each other, as if they share a secret. I feel almost bad for even thinking about defending her. This woman knew how to deal with Holly. It was between them, and I had no place in it. I watch the concentric circles that my children orbit in my life inch a little farther outward. And I remember why I’m here.

I drag my children all over the state for sports because I think that it gives them something they would be missing otherwise. Throughout history, children had jobs of one sort or another that helped with the family’s survival. As humans have evolved as a species, we’ve made childhood a jobless existence. Maybe a chore or three, but childhood became for playing. There’s nothing wrong with playing, but its lack of structure fails to provide our children the true lessons of working with others, and the value of actual hard work.

I see parents trying to make the world fair and perfect for their children, and I feel that it’s a disservice in a way. The world isn’t like that, and it never will be. As parents, we should not merely provide an illusion of what they world “should” be, but also show them what it really is.

When I take my child to the gym, or the ball field, I let others mold and shape them. They learn their place, and learn that if they don’t like it, they have to change it. Our motto for this, and most things in life, is that there are three ways to do things: Be good, get good, or quit.

So far, no quitting for any of us.