Tag Archives: baseball

Good Manners, the FDA, and Bright Lights

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From the time he was little, CF and I have tried to impress upon NF that boys and men don’t wear hats indoors, no matter what all the sports heroes, rap stars, and his own uncles and grandfathers do.

It hasn’t been easy. And it gets even harder when he see girls and women wearing hats indoors, even if it’s in church. Explaining why this is considered acceptable just plunks us down into a good old-fashioned gender role discussion, one that we find we are surprised to find ourselves defending.

But this really has nothing to do with what I want to discuss, but as always I will digress. What it all comes down to is our old-fashioned insistence on NF displaying old-fashioned good manners. I don’t mean knowing his salad fork from his fish fork; I mean speaking nicely to relatives and friends, and observing common human courtesies. This includes dressing decently and speaking non-obscenely.

Our efforts to de-hat him indoors have been pretty successful, although now that he has gotten all of the hair shaved off his head, I’d just as soon he kept it covered. He had unruly hair until a few years ago, when his entire baseball team decided to shave themselves bald for good luck, and he’s kept the look, despite his rather lopsided head, ever since.

On the other hand, I’ve taken to wearing hats myself more often than not, no matter the status of the roof over my head.

The hats that women are allowed to wear inside are the fluffy-duffy Easter bonnet kind, the ones covered in feathers or flowers that you store in boxes covered in feathers or flowers and stack neatly in a closet, the kind of box that Audrey Hepburn swings from her arm as she saunters down Fifth Avenue.

The hat that I wear inside is a baseball cap. Not the perky kind that you might see the chirpy 25-year-old moms wearing at toddler t-ball practice, the kind where you can stick your pony tail out through the opening in the back so it bounces around all perky, the kind that says something cute on the front, like, “All Kids Finish FIRST!!”

No, my baseball cap is the real thing, smashed down low over my eyes and tilted to the right, the better to block out the light from the lamp on the table next to me. I want the lamp on so I can see, but I cannot bear the peripheral glare. The lamp has a normal light bulb in it, and I know it does not really make any noise, but to me it gives off a perpetual buzz-light, a constant whine-light, one of those fluorescent nicks of a scraping dental drill on the tops of your teeth.

And that sets off those headaches I’ve been moaning about for a while. Jamming a baseball cap over your eyes has not been endorsed by the FDA as an approved method of headache remedy, but it does give me something to do while I wait for the extra Topimax to kick in. Just last week my neurologist prescribed an additional drug to try to really kick the headaches out of me, so we’ll see how that helps.

I’ve always been a bit sensitive to light, I admit, but it has gotten significantly worse in the last year. I didn’t think much of it when I started jamming caps over my eyes shortly after The Blitz because, after all, I’d just had a stroke, and it kind of made sense that my eyes would be sensitive.

Everything was sensitive. Bed sheets were sandpaper, water was bullets, music a screech, sun light a pulsing torch—so a baseball cap seemed like a small concession. A couple of earplugs and sunglasses and a walker and several layers of polar fleece, not to mention round-the-clock seizure medication, and I was completely normal, right?

All of those efforts to block my senses have waxed and waned over the past year, but I’m wearing the baseball cap more and more. When pressed, I substitute a cheap, slightly Australian-looking crusher hat (emphasis on the words cheap and slightly), mostly because I figure it’s better to wear an extremely neutral, colorless beige pseudo Aussie hat than a definitely maroon baseball cap with a red polo shirt. My brain damage has not affected my inner color wheel. It exists in exquisite sharp detail and in fact hurts my eyes very often.

The Aussie-ish hat is for outdoor use mostly, and CF, being a good sport, pretends she is not embarrassed by it. For NF’s baseball games, I have an orange and black baseball cap from his team, and he dare not complain about that.

There is a trend among the adults associated with youth athletic teams these days called fanwear, which can add significantly to the cost of youth athletics. Adults are more or less expected to purchase tee shirts, sweat shirts, sweat pants, caps, and other paraphernalia emblazoned with the team name and perhaps their athlete’s name and/or number, along with their athlete’s uniform and wear this so-called fanwear to games and/or practices. It’s pricey stuff, especially once you start adding in grandparents and siblings, not to mention practice gear for the athlete.

Digression alert: skip this paragraph if you are not interested in a vitally interesting digression. This is your word history lesson for the day. Paraphernalia has an interesting etymology. In law, it is considered the property owned by a married woman that is not part of her dowry; that is, that is not owned by her husband.
End digression.

At baseball games, with my fanwear hat, I can wear my fanwear sweatshirt and my fanwear sweatpants and be fanwear fantastically fantastic. Also fanatically identical to nearly every other fan next to me, the only difference being those who have chosen base black or base gray for their outfits. In either case, our senses are properly dulled against the cold, should there be any, as there often is, especially if we huddle together in front of our trusty propane stoves and layer the fleece blankets across our legs.

If it is hot, off come the sweatshirts and sweatpants to reveal, in my case, a modest fanwear tee shirt and shorts one can only purchase from L.L. Bean. The other mothers have on fanwear tank tops and shorts that allow for a tan. I keep my regulation baseball cap jammed down to keep out the sun.

NF is lucky in that he is allowed to wear his regulation baseball cap in the dugout and in any restaurant his team might go to afterwards to celebrate an especially important victory, although should the  parents be there, we tend to glare at them until someone rolls his eyes in that particular way all parents purse their lips at, and someone finally removes his hat, which causes all the other players to look sheepish, and they too remove theirs, and then pizza is consumed in relative good graces.

 

That Was The Week That Wasn’t

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The calendar tells me that last week happened, but I remember little of it. CF and I dragged ourselves home from California late Monday night and the next thing I knew, we were at a Friday barbeque with her co-workers (note the correct hyphenation). What happened?

Fatigue. Bone-stealing, mind-crushing, life-squashing fatigue.

But before I go any further, I must make it absolutely clear that although this fatigue is the worst part of all the M.S. and post-stroke garbage, it was worth it this time. And for once, CF agrees with me.

It was worth flying to southern California, sitting in the hot, unshaded bleachers of a ball field, cheering my lungs raw, watching my son get the BEST HIT (one of only three his team got) against a far superior team from Hawaii (it SAILED over 2nd base, dropped in neatly for a solid single). It was worth it to see his smile as he stood on first base grinning at himself about it. It was worth it to see him trot onto the field in the next game, against another superior team, to hear the announcer call his name as he modestly scooped up the warm-up balls. It was worth it to see him completely at ease with all of his friends, horsing around in the pool at the hotel, eager to explore the gaudiness of SoCal now that they were out of the tournament of 13-year-old Pony baseball teams.

And now that they were out of the tournament, CF and I could return home with clear consciences. She had to return to work (big deadline) and I had to return home (couldn’t continue without her help). Believe me, we wanted them to win, but we knew, no matter what, we wouldn’t be there to see it if they played past Sunday.

And then came Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and most of Friday, all of which passed without me knowing about them, with me not asleep so much as sprawled across the bed or the floor or some air conditioned horizontal surface relatively close to plumbing (both intake and outgoing) that CF could find and crack open my jaw on a regular basis and pour in a protein source every so often.

I know we drove up to Seattle to pick up NF from the airport on Thursday, but consciousness doesn’t really return until the barbeque on Friday, when we were entertained by a future Olympian named Tom-Tom, toddler son of a co-worker, who will win a medal of some sort in a sport TBA in 2032, as long as it involves kicking, catching, falling on your butt, and making adorable faces, especially if it uses a ball that comes up to your knees.

NF specialized in badminton at the barbeque, which is unfortunately not his sport, which I lament, since I used to be a pretty fair badminton player. Don’t laugh. Badminton is a very aggressive sport, and I have the friends to prove it, one a state champion in college, and she will happily stuff a shuttle down your throat. It’s the second-most popular sport in the world, and that pathetic little plastic thing you use in your backyard is made of ballistic cork and bristling feathers in the real world, and travels at 200 mph on the real courts and makes big, ugly bruises. Backyard badminton is to real badminton as t-ball is to major league baseball.

After the barbeque, I fell back onto the floor or the bed or the bathtub until Sunday morning, when we celebrated our nephew’s 19th birthday, something I very much wanted to do, since I care very much for him, and I think I managed to stay awake for all of the time I was there, but you would have to check with him. I know I haven’t even looked at the Sunday papers yet, normally my preferred form of worship, and it is going on Tuesday evening as I write this.

And it being Tuesday evening, it is over a week since we arrived home and I still want to do nothing but lie on a horizontal surface and close my eyes and will the world away. But I have too much to do, including a major assignment for the college from which I graduated, one that occurs thrice a year, one that I enjoy, although you will probably think I am a bit odd for doing so.

And it being Tuesday evening, it is over a week since I posted my last blog entry, and for that I apologize, but when one cannot move, one cannot write. In fact, one cannot even talk. One cannot even mumble. One can indicate one’s preference for protein source (yogurt vs. cheese, for instance), and one can indicate one’s preference for television source (MSNBC vs. PBS, for instance), with, perhaps, a wobbly wiggle of a finger before lapsing back into another period of fetterless narcolepsy.

One can indicate one’s appreciation for the care one’s partner administers, by casting a wan smile in the appropriate direction at what one hopes is the appropriate time, and one can indicate one’s joy at one’s son’s skill at baseball by casting a weak thumbs-up in the general direction of the blur of one son’s shadow when she hears his voice, and one can indicate one’s anticipation of tomorrow perhaps being the day when at last one can stand on her own two feet and walk about the out-of-doors and perhaps fetch the mail on her own and maybe drive to the store and buy a new basketball net for her son since the rain rotted away the old one (quel surprendre!).

Such is the world of M.S./post-stroke fatigue, which I normally do everything I can to avoid. I usually avoid the sun, and I usually don’t get overheated, and I usually don’t get overtired, and I usually don’t “do too much,” and I usually “take care of myself,” and I usually blah blah blah blah boring boring boring.

But sometimes you just have to say, “Who cares about my health? This is my child.”

I’m Going to California

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When I Come Back I’ll Be Tired

I’m going to California
When I come back, we’ll be married
What do you want me to bring you?
She answered:
A hat with a crooked crown,
A pair of high-heeled shoes…

Those are the opening lines to Kaleponi Hula by Bina Mossman, one of the great hula writers of the early 20th century, words which were forever imprinted into my memory by my junior high school gym teacher, Miss Karp, many years ago.

For reasons unknown to me and I am sure unknown to the dozens of other half-formed girls clad in white bloomers more befitting the 1930s, right down to the names we were forced to embroider over the breast pockets, we were required to learn this hula down to the last hand gesture in the confines of the basement gymnasium of Grover Cleveland Junior High School in Caldwell, N.J. To achieve the proper island spirit, we removed our regulation footwear and performed in our regulation athletic socks. The effect was dramatic, I am sure. I do not recall the Board of Education supplying grass skirts.

I do have a point, and I will get to it, but I intend to make you suffer through my story first.

Once we had sashayed through the hula for a few weeks, rather than moving on to basketball (which in those days was restricted to three dribbles before we were forced to pass the ball, and no crossing the center line—really!) we switched over to a unit on square dancing, all of which I have forgotten, except for one horrible day where we practiced a gigantic round of galloping around the gym with a partner, linked arm-in-arm in some sort of two-step pattern. I don’t recall who my partner was, but let’s call her Barbara, mostly because I had a very nice friend named Barbara who very well could be reading this, and why not bring a slight blush to her cheeks right now.

In this gymnasium there was some sort of semi-permanent metal contraption for doing chin-ups attached to the floor smack-dab at 90 degrees along one of the side walls, which they probably removed for the boys’ basketball games, but not for the silly girls’ gym classes, and we had to gallop/square dance around it at full speed in a long column. Miss Karp carefully blasted her whistle at us full throttle every time before we started to remind us about it, but once you got galloping and thumping, caution was thrown to the wind and I just plumb forgot about those guy wires holding up the contraption and cracked into it, spilling Barbara and me to the floor in a rather artless way, causing many full-throttled whistles and a large pile-up behind us. If the light is just right, I can still find the scar on my shin from the incident, and I believe I had “an excuse” from gym class for three days because of it.

Grover Cleveland Junior High School still stands in Caldwell, N.J., renamed today Grover Cleveland Middle School, its third name. It started out as Grover Cleveland High School, three-quarters of a mile from where the former president was born.

I’ve always been amused that I studied more about the hula than I did Grover Cleveland when I was in junior high, and that’s why I can recite those opening lines to Kaleponi Hula, while CF, who was born in Hawaii and graduated from high school in Hawaii, has never heard of it. (In her defense, she didn’t live there very much in between those two events.)

But the words came crashing back to me—and congratulations, you’ve read far enough to reach my point—because I’m going to California, and when I come back, I’ll be tired. (I’m already married.)

My whole family is going to California because (cue trumpets) (gee, we had snare drum and cymbals not too long ago. what’s going on?) (anyway, cue trumpets) NF’s baseball team WON THE STATE CHAMPIONSHIP!!!! Yes, they are the BEST 13-year-old Pony baseball team in Washington state! The way Pony Baseball works is you compete locally, then at district, regional, zone, and national levels. So his team has worked its way through local, district, and regional (undefeated!) levels, Washington being its own region. Thirteen western states make up the western zone, based in California. So it’s off to California for the Western Zone Championship starting July 21, with Washington vs. Hawaii, of all states, in Game #1 at 9 AM.

Pony BaseballHe is very excited, as you might imagine, because not only does he get to play baseball in a very cool way, he gets to go to California with a dozen of his best friends AND stay in a hotel WITH a pool AND get room service AND ignore his parents AND spend all of his money AND go to a major league ball game AND go to Disneyland where he knows his parents will never take him AND buy crappy food from vending machines AND tell the chaperones that we allow him to drink all the caffeine soda he wants AND generally have a great time. Without us. As he should.

CF and I, on the other hand, will find the cheapest flights we can, the cheapest hotel we can, the cheapest meals we can. Not from vending machines. We want NF to know that we are in the stands cheering for him, but we are spending all the dollars on him, not on us.

And that’s just fine. No matter how fancy or plain the hotel, no matter how quick or slow the trip, no matter how long we linger here or there, when we come back, I’ll be tired. Fact o’ life. Anytime I step out of my usual routine, I end up tired beyond belief.

I know I’ve written about this before, and you are probably, well, tired of hearing about it. But you are going to have to read another version of metaphors. Or you can quit here.

Here goes: Your plane leaves in 10 minutes. You’re at the bottom of a long, crowded escalator with a heavy suitcase, wearing a winter coat. It’s a “down” escalator. You need to go “up.” There’s no “up” escalator in sight. No staircase, no elevator, either. You have no choice except to plow into the people on the “down” escalator and fight your way to the top. Did I mention the pulsing lights and the Caroline Karp/Bina Mossman arrangement of Hawaiian favorite melodies playing on the loudspeaker system?

This is what the fatigue is like. It is without a doubt the worst part of this whole stroke/M.S. afterlife. But if you get to watch your son win a state championship, it’s worth it.

And this has been one long blog entry mostly about nothing to do with strokes or M.S. or anything but my old gym experiences and NF’s baseball experiences but we’ll get back to normalcy next week or thereabouts and I thank you for your indulgence this week. As you might imagine it has been a bit fuddling around here, what with winning a state championship and Peggy going home and everything.

P.S. Any of my junior high classmates are encouraged to join me in dancing the hula at 9 A.M. Pacific time to urge on NF’s team. He will be properly mortified.

Grover Cleveland Junior High School

Grover Cleveland Junior High School

Three strikes or winning run?

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Every summer, my partner’s sister, Peggy, comes to visit. She’s the one sister who still lives on the East Coast, despite concerted, whining efforts to get her to move out here to the West Coast where the other four daughters live, three in Washington and one in California.

Peggy is the one closest in age to CF, and they have been best friends their entire lives. When I had the seizures last August, even before we knew I had also had a stroke, Peggy and her younger daughter Sharon flew out here to help CF, because that’s what kind of people they are, always sticking their noses into everything.

No, not really. They just wanted to help. They kept CF going. And they kept our son, NF, going too. (Not to shortchange my friend, Amy, or my mom and sister, who also raced out here to help, or all our local family and friends, but right now I’m writing about Peggy.)

Here it is, summer again, although last night at the baseball game we sat swaddled in blankets and sweatshirts in 40 degree weather while NF’s team WON THE CHAMPIONSHIP, beating a team that had beaten them all season long, even though that other team was all 14-year-olds and they are all 13-year-olds no I am not bragging just stating facts now we move on to Pony-13 Regionals woo hoo oops back to what was I saying oh yeah.

Here it is, summer again, which means that it’s time for Peggy to visit. Normally, this is a time of great anticipation and excitement as we joyfully plan activities and prepare accommodations and race around desperately cleaning the house for her arrival. We especially need to fumigate NF’s room to remove all traces of dead and dying baseball socks, historical remnants of Hot Pockets, and gnarled bits of pizza crusts.

But I find that I am preoccupied with what Peggy will think of me.

The last time she saw me, I was essentially unable to walk more than 10 feet, and I was using a walker, the one with tennis ball feet. I had barely made it home from the dreaded rehab unit, the place where they kept me locked in my bed, the place where they made me wear the burqa-sized diaper, the place with Fox News All. The. Time.

The last time she saw me, I was a wreck. I could barely get out a sentence. I couldn’t remember what was going on, what had happened to me, what had happened the day before, what had happened an hour before. She’d come half-expecting to attend my funeral.

So what will she think of me now?

How scrutinizing will her scrutiny be? Does she expect me to be the model of health, a perfect physical specimen, ready to climb Mt. Rainier, the local vertical challenge, or swim Hood Canal, the local horizontal challenge? Does she expect me to conquer the television game shows, her mother’s daily challenge?

Or does she expect me to be the same semi-comprehensible semi-drooling semi-smiling semi-clothed semi-conscious dragabout that I was last September? I’m not sure I can go back there. For one thing, I’d have to load myself up with an awful lot of Vicodin to drool like that again. Not to mention to smile like that again. Not to mention clothe myself like that again.

Not to mention feed myself like that again. Back then, I was eating mostly cottage cheese and mandarin oranges. I’m not sure I can look at mandarin oranges again for another year or two. Or three. Or even at Mandarins. Or at oranges. Or at navels. Or navies. Or at the navels of naval officers. The Mandarin Navy was eating mandarin oranges as their navels were inspected by midriff-baring naval officers munching navel oranges. Or some such modern nightmare.

But back to Peggy and that fast-approaching day-mare. Why aren’t there day-mares? I mean, you can look up the word and find a definition, but not much else, not a full and juicy tradition like you can for nightmare. Guess the sunlight kind of ruins things. Oh, yeah, back to Peggy.

Peggy will be my first repeat visitor, so to speak. Most friends and relatives have been around me all the time. I see them every day, or every week, so they have seen me morph back to where I am, more or less. Peggy will see me all at once to where I’ve gotten, less or more, in one gigantic plop. Will she think, “OH!!” or “ohh…”?

She’s talked to me on the phone, so I suppose part of what she thinks of me depends on how well my voice carries on the phone, which I fear is not too well. I know the croak doesn’t work well on Ma Bell. Even CF has to ask all the time if I’m OK when we talk. Strike one?

And it also depends on what CF has told Peggy about how I’m doing. I think she paints a pretty positive picture, except I know that they like to play a woe-is-me game with each other about how much they each have to do. (“I made 45 meatballs today.” “So what, I made 55 meatballs.”) That might work against me, if CF moans about taking care of me. Strike two?

And it also depends on what time of day Peggy’s plane arrives. If she gets in late at night when I am frozen stiff with exhaustion from M.S. anyway, all of the progress from the last year will be hidden anyway. Strike three?

But I’m going for the long ball here, and I think Peggy will score the winning run. I think Peggy will take one look at me, throw down her carry-on bag, fling her arms around me and say, “You look great.”

A note about a previous blog: The truly obsessive among you might recall my obsessiveness over the word “co-worker” a few blogs ago, and how the managing editor at a newspaper where I worked insisted that we always use a hyphen in the word, so that it never be read as “cow orker” by mistake. Wouldn’t you know it: in our local rag, The Olympian, just this past week, its printed edition ran an obituary with the hyphenated word “cow-orker.” I was so happy! Yes, I saved it.

 

 

Fried Brain To Go

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“Can we stop at Panda Express?”

What a sweet, innocent voice. He dredges it up from the very bottom of his soul when he really wants something, something he is certain our tired bodies, exhausted by hours of work, or our tired wallets, exhausted by piles of bills, cannot handle.

It replaces his usual full-grown teenager I-know-everything why-are-you-so-stupid voice that every parent learns to love and interpret as evidence that their child is still alive and actively mocking them to all their friends.

We are headed home after yet another baseball game. CF is driving. She is more tired than usual, because her arm is still completely encased in bandages from her second surgery, making everything more difficult, not to mention painful, not to mention awkward, but she won’t let me drive, not to mention I can’t drive this car anyway, because it doesn’t have hand controls. She tells NF, our son, that we can’t stop at Panda Express because she is too tired to go in.

The injured paw

She’s the one who usually goes in to get food for him. She doesn’t like Chinese food, and I never get anything there, because they only have about eight selections, all with beef or chicken, neither of which I eat, so we only ever stop for something for NF, and he is either too shy or too lazy to go in by himself, I’m not sure which, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

And I feel sorry for him because he pulled a muscle and couldn’t play tonight, so CF and I engage in some secret hand gestures that resolve into me agreeing to run into Panda Express. This brings about a moment of tension in the car.

“Do you know what I want?” The sweet, innocent voice is gone. The slightly challenging, nearly bickering voice is back. It’s not a challenge to my knowledge of his culinary taste buds, but his snide acknowledgement that my mental capacity to remember anything as complicated as a take-out order from the car to the counter is a bit insulting these days.

“Should we write it down?” CF offers.

“No, no,” I insist, “I’ve got it, chow mein, with a double entrée of orange chicken. And a root beer.”

“Not the rice,” says NF. “The chow mein.”

“Yes,” I say, “the chow mein.”

“Two orange chicken,” he says.

“I know. Two orange chicken.” You’d think I was the child.

There’s a rather large party pandering the express, so I start to review the order in my mind. Chow mein, double orange chicken. Chowder mein, double chicken. Chowder chain, chowder chicken. Chicken chow chain double main trouble chicken.

No, wait. Oh, look, they have those rangoons tonight. Chow mein. Not rice. Chow mein. Ciao, Maine. A small town outside Bangor. That’s Bann-gore, not Bang-err, like they say in Washington. Washing-toon. Ran-goon. Chow moon.

O.K. Chow mein. Double truckle chuckle muckle tricking. No. Chuck mein. No. Chopped brain. No. Chow chain with double chicken orange brain. Close!

The pandering party is partly past posting its porder. The non-Asian server catches my eye and gives me one of those non-sympathetic sympathetic server “I’m sorry for the delay” looks that tells me she is late for her break and really has to go to the bathroom and plans to sprint away as soon as the pandering party lets her. Time for me to re-review the order I have completely forgotten and wish I had written down. I would go back to the car to ask, but the line behind me has snaked out the door like a Chinese New Year parade.

Crow train? Root blain?

Root beer! With a burst of triumph I remember the root beer, about which I had completely forgotten.

Chow mein. And root beer. Good.

A wave of my former self washes over me. I remember my own advice: when in doubt, read the documentation. What brilliance I once possessed! How often did I grouse about people who had all the information they needed to use their own equipment, their own software, at their own fingertips, but had to make phone calls, to call technical services in some far off land, hang on hold forever, just to be told to press this key or type this sequence. It drove me nuts.

And so I read the documentation. Panda Express very nicely posts step-by-step ordering instructions overhead in its restaurants: Step 1: choose your plate. Step 2: choose your entrée. Aha! Step 1: chow mein! Step 2: chick…chick…chick…all this chicken…chick…orange chicken—that’s it—two servings of it, I’m sure! And look! It’s my turn! And yes, there she goes! Off to her break!

Another server, soon to become my best friend, slips into her place, and I confidently rattle off, “Chow mein—”

“Is that for here or to go?”

I stare at her, dumbfounded, lost, mind completely blank, Timmy without Lassie, Dorothy without Toto.

“To go,” I finally croak in my post-stroke gargle of a voice.

She scoops a massive blob of brownish noodles into a Styrofoam container and smiles at me expectantly.

“And the entrée?”

Lassie come home, I think. What was that chicken again? I cast my eyes down the steam table.

“Chicken—orange.” Again the strangled voice. “Two.”

She gives me a weird little smile as if she deals with fried brain people all day long.

“And a root beer.” She hands me a cup at the register.

Having now been inside this express restaurant for a non-express amount of time, I step over to the soda dispenser and fill the cup with root beer, which, since this is me we’re talking about, is not root beer. It is slightly fizzy slightly flavored water. It is approximately the same shade as the chow mein. I return to my new best friend and croak that there is something wrong with the root beer.

“Oh, yes, I knew that,” she says. And off she goes to fix it, belatedly. I prevent some potential root beer lovers from facing disappointment before she returns; I don’t know if it’s my croaky voice that scares them away, the putrid mess in my cup, or what I tell them that does it, but they are saved from failure.

Back in the car, I hand the bag and cup to my son.

“Chow mein, double orange chicken,” I croak triumphantly, smirking ever so slightly.

“Where’s the straw? Where’s the fork?” he snarls ever so lovingly.

That sound you hear? Me deflating.

Ciao!

Ciao!

Take me out to a whole new ball game

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Sometime in January we managed to pry our son’s baseball uniform off of him so we could wash it in time for the games that began again last week. Actually, he outgrew the uniform, which was helpful, because it was really starting to stink.

He does have one non-uniform shirt. He got it from his baseball team. It reads, “There’s no off-season in baseball.” They mean it. But they do take the month of December off.

But now that the purportedly nice weather is here again in Olywa (which means that we are moving towards the 10 days of relatively light sprinkling rain before we hit the three months of dry scorching drought before we hit the nine months of daily downpour) (and people LOVE it here!), it’s time for all of us parents to get our baseball gear in gear too.

My son’s gear has been in his baseball bag since time began, well, since he joined this baseball club, which was four years ago. We dump it out from time to time, extract the empty bottled water bottles, gum wrappers, unidentifiable icky matter, unspeakably petrified sock remnants, hot dog fragments, and a Continue reading →