Boarding school 2, Football practice

The business of moving Son 1 onto campus -- I'll be frivolous and call the school "Hogwarts" -- actually began in early August.

Wife had been reading the materials that Hogwarts sent out to families of new students, and misunderstood them.  Somewhere in the middle of all this information she found a description of the athletic program.  The school offers three interscholastic sports in the fall (football and two others), plus a variety of other activities for students who aren't interested in any of those three.  Wife totally missed the second part, and jumped to the conclusion that each entering student was required to sign up for one of those three sports.  She telephoned the Director of Athletics to verify this, but he somehow failed to set her straight.  (I try to explain this below.)  All he told her was that football practice began the week before classes started.

Wife asked Son 1 which sport he wanted to play, and he decided that football was the one he disliked the least.  (His real athletic interests lie in other directions.)  So Wife became a woman-on-a-mission, possessed by the idea that Son 1 must join football practice the week before school started.  Now as it happens, my parents live very near Hogwarts.  Wife called them and arranged that Son 1 could stay there for the week while going to practice.  She then offered to come along, in order to drive him to and from practice.  (It's only about a twenty minute walk, but my suggestion that he walk it was hooted down by everybody involved.)  After much discussion -- way too much discussion -- the plan was settled.

Now, football practice was scheduled to take place twice a day: from 6:00 to 8:00 in the morning, and again from 4:00 to 6:00 in the afternoon.  That first installment meant getting Son 1 up no later than 5:15, so he could get there on time, and Wife is not very good these days about getting up early.  Here is how the first morning played out, as described later by my father:

"Like you, I seem to be able to wake up at a pre-set time. I woke up this morning at 5:05 am -- about ten minutes before my alarm was set to go off. I got up and started puttering about the kitchen, setting out the stuff Son 1 had requested for breakfast: peanut butter and jelly and bread to make a sandwich or two, along with milk and Ovaltine, and some coffee for Wife. At 5:15 I tiptoed into the living room and woke Son 1 just a second before his alarm beeped. He said he might have turned it off and gone back to sleep if I hadn't been there. As he ate breakfast I figured it would be quicker for me to get dressed and take him up to Hogwarts than wake up Wife. Good thing I did. The directions given me on the phone last week by the Athletic Director were incorrect. [Long time readers will recall that Wife panics when directions don't work out quite right, or when there is a chance of her getting lost.]  Driving in the main entrance led only to a locked gate. We had to go in the back way up a service road. We made every possible wrong turn before we finally arrived just a minute before 6:00 at the upper field where they have football and a running track. Son 1 had looked at a campus map earlier and, like you, was able to remember where things were and ended up being my guide as I drove up the mountain. The foot tour that he had taken during his summer visit also helped.

"When I went back to get him at 8:00 I took both Wife and your mom so that each would know how to get there in the future. When we found Son 1, he looked like he'd been in a battle: exhausted, sweat soaked, and covered with mud. He said he didn't realize how out of shape he had become. I just think he has never been in Football Shape. That is a whole different level of physical conditioning beyond anything else -- except, possibly, classical ballet! As soon as he got home he hit the shower and soaked in the tub to soothe sore muscles, and then ate ten sausages and six English muffins for a second breakfast. An hour or two later he boiled up two packages of Ramen noodles and ate them. He is now [mid-morning] sleeping on the living room sofa. Later some of us are taking him shopping for a pair of cleats and going to the grocery store for more food. He hasn't given us all that much detail of the workouts themselves, but to remark on the size of some of the seniors, and how far they can kick the ball. He clearly has a path marked out for himself as to where he has to go to succeed."

That night, I got a second installment from my father, describing the afternoon practice:

"Son 1 returned from his afternoon workout exhausted (again). This time they ended their workout in the weight room doing every kind of exercise designed to use muscles that their owners had never known they had. As soon as he walked in the door, he retired to a hot bath with three pints of Gatorade to restore his hydrolysis and electrolytes as he soaked his tired body. He finally emerged to eat a supper of spaghetti with my famous tomato sauce and a broiled sausage (only one) and then retired to the orange sofa where he is now asleep. (It's about 8:30 pm.) Wife, meanwhile fixed herself a couple of gin & tonics (half gin, half tonic) after she brought Son 1 back from Hogwarts, watched Jeopardy with your mom and me while Son 1 soaked, and zoned out after (almost during) a light supper (only half a sausage) at the same time as Son 1. Your mom and I are exiled to my study or hers so as not to disturb either of our guests. We might sit up and talk awhile, but I think I'd better get up at 5:05 once again just to make sure all goes as planned."

And so it went.  Occasionally I got phone calls filling me in on the details.  Tuesday's practice was worse than Monday's.  By Wednesday. Son 1 said that he thought he was getting his feet under him.  Then Thursday morning he hit a wall.  He came back from the morning practice, and couldn't go back.  He called me at work to tell me this, ... and, I think, to get my approval for dropping football.  I told him that it was too bad not to be able to finish the week; but if he couldn't, he couldn't.  I reminded him that all along he had had other options as well, so it wasn't going to be any big long-term tragedy if football didn't work out for him.  I insisted on only one thing: call the coach to let him know, before the time for afternoon practice to start -- don't just no-show.  Son 1 said he was fine with that.

So Son 1 and Wife had Thursday evening and Friday free.  I took Friday off of work, so that Son 2 and I could drive out there and meet up with the others.  We got a late start, because I had some odds and ends to tie up.  Then we had a long, hot drive through Friday traffic.  (The air conditioning in my car is out.) We finally got to town about 2:30 to find that my parents had held lunch for us (although I had called ahead to let them know we were going to be there well after lunchtime). When it turned out that neither Son 2 nor I was at all hungry, my father was rather put out. So the rest of them ate lunch.

After lunch, my father asked me to explain what I meant, when I said that Son 1 had always had lots of other options. I explained that it was very simple: there were three available interscholastic sports (football and the other two) but also lots of other after-school activities that one might pursue instead. The thing is that those other activities weren't specifically itemized in the printed materials, because they change from year to year and so nobody ever knows in advance what they are going to be. They can only be selected after school starts. But the printed material is very clear that they exist if only you read it attentively.

What appears to have happened, I told him, is that Wife wanted to make damned sure that every possible variable related to Son 1's school year was defined and nailed down unmoveably before school started … probably because she is so terrified of any indeterminacy or uncertainty. So her eyes must have glossed over the part about the other activities, because they weren't so clear-cut. Yes, she telephoned the Athletic Director, and came away with her (mis-)understanding confirmed that Son 1 had to choose one of the three interscholastic sports. I have no idea how this happened, except that she frequently misunderstands what people tell her. To be charitable, I invented a Just-So-Story that the Athletic Director must have assumed she was restricting her questions to the interscholastic program from the outset, because naturally he would have assumed that she had read the printed material on the website and therefore already knew that he couldn't speak to the other activities until after school started.

Why does all this matter? Well, it really doesn't except that my father started to get riled and say (with Wife in the room) "Do you mean that all this getting up at 5:00 in the morning was totally unnecessary and just came from misreading the damned catalog??" I interposed at this point a suggestion that it wasn't really a tragedy. I explained that I had tried to tell both Son 1 and Wife at the time that there were, after all, other choices: this part is true, although my voice was small in that conversation and Wife's was large (amplified by the righteous self-confidence that stemmed from her having just now gotten off the phone with the Athletic Director). Anyway, when I pointed this out Son 1 had said, "No, it's OK, I think I want to give football a try." Maybe he meant it. Maybe he meant he wanted to humor Wife. I have no idea. In any event, I let it drop; and what I told my father and Wife on Friday afternoon was that I figured if Son 1 wanted to try out football, then we should let him. Now that he had tried it and concluded it wasn't for him, he could go do something else. I hoped that this would add up to a certain amount of oil on the waters.

The boys spent all Friday afternoon splashing in my parents' pool in the most vigorous possible way … a few times it looked like it narrowly avoided outright violence, but never quite made it. Somehow they got into a water balloon fight with the people next door.  There was a bit of joking about how they must have missed each other, although they both denied it. (But later, Son 2 admitted that he did miss having Son 1 to talk to as they both fell asleep at night.)  I stayed away from most conversation. My father had planned a huge dinner, but nobody was all that interested so we had bits and bobs instead, left over from lunch.  And we all went to bed early.