The Threadless Narrative

Can't find a unifying principle for the weekend's news tonight, somehow. So here it goes anyway - a disjointed list of Things That Happened. Hopefully you'll find your own way through it, because as a guide, I'm pretty useless at the moment...

Friday night, we had pizza, as we usually do, but not at home in front of a family classic movie. No, we went down the street to the Cozy Corner, our local watering hole, and sat in a booth in the bar (roughly the size of our living room) and had one large and one small pizza between the four of us. ("Among", Ronadh. I know.) It felt like being at Cheers - Ronadh stopped in to pick up a pizza and stood at the half-door that leads out to the parking lot, where people who have called in their orders come to pick up - Janneke saw her over my shoulder, and then I trooped over with T, who insisted on getting a hug. And then Rafi the Gorgeous, our neighbor across the street, came in with his Mom Paige and her sister, and they stopped at our booth and chatted a bit with us. And then we ate the pizza. It was a great, affordable little adventure in a gloriously smokeless bar - same place where we had drinks before we were seated when my Dad and my sister came out for Christmas a couple of years ago. Anyway, upon completing our pizza, we split up - Janneke took T to go see The Cat's Pajamas, a kiddie-music group that had played here last year, and Q and I went to Paresky to play pool. Q wasn't into seeing the music, and he's gotten more and more into playing pool at the Youth Center. So he chose that over going out to see a movie or to bowl.

He beat me three times. I scratched on the 8-ball once, accidentally sank it another time, and the third time...well, he just won. BUT: I had agreed on a rule that I get one shot per turn, whether I make it or not, and was also allowing Q, if he made a particularly good slow, careful, accurate shot, and then scratched, to keep his turn going with the cue ball placed at the pocked where it had fallen. So there were some handicaps at work. But he did improve a lot over the course of the evening, sinking three in a row at one point. A techno band whose shows are accompanied by projections of avant-garde animation was setting up shop in the auditorium next to the pool table as we played, and we bailed just as their show was beginning. Probably best for us and them. Observation: Of the 60 or so students we saw troop down to see the show, it seemed that probably a majority were Chinese. As in, from China (or Taiwan or Singapore), speaking to each other in Chinese as they played ping-pong and waited for the show to start. Techno and animation in combination must be big in China.

After pool started to get old, we went home and watched Sports Center until the girls came home. And when they did, we got the whole story:

The band had been performing a story about "Don Gato", who had leapt to the top of a building to eat a snack, but had then fallen and hurt himself. The puppet they were using to illustrate the story had fallen to the stage with a whack, and T had fallen into a blubbering panic, thinking the pupped had "got dead". She locked eyes with one of the performers, who, after the song, interrupted the show for, Janneke says, probably five minutes so she could come down and show T the puppet and make sure she understood that Don Gato had survived his fall and come out wiser on the other side of it. They signed a poster for her at the end, and it's up now in T' room. I'd take a picture of the inscription, but T is in there sleeping. Bother.

Q had a game on Saturday in Lenox, and he was very timid again. He managed to get two shots in, but neither went in - because in both cases, he seemed to remember that he was allowed to kick it a couple of seconds after he probably could have, and the resulting kick was weak, and he didn't follow up his miss. It's amazing to watch this transformation from an eager go-getting playmaker, one of the team's few most effective and aggressive players, to a kid who's reluctant even to break into a jog and seems most concerned about avoiding getting hurt. He did fall the other day, and then caught a hard shot in the same part of his back where he'd been hurt, and toughed it out and didn't come off the field ("I didn't let my team down," he said in the car afterward, to which I responded with a grim nod and a high-five), but over all he was just this somnolent shadow of his former self, which is what he's been for three or four weeks now. Strange. Thats where he is now, I guess - no sense fighting it. But it's just so curious. I could believe a timid player gradually growing into aggressiveness and enjoying the success, and then continuing the upward spiral, but this is an aggressive and successful player who seems to be shrinking more and more into his shell. Not sure what to make of it. Hopefully next year his confidence will have grown to match his talents. Anyway, they lost, 5-2. I think I made less of an ass of myself on the sidelines than at previous games, but who knows. Am I the problem? Should I stop going...? Though I don't think so - when I saw him at practice the other day, he didn't know I was there, and the coach took him aside specifically because of this problem. Weird. And occcupying much more of my mind than it ought to.

Saturday night we had dinner at the house of Denise and Peter, parents of one of T' best friends, and it was lovely. Lots of good food and chatting. And then Sunday we tried to get all the housework done that we hadn't been able to do on Saturday before I had to drive to Lenox to be interviewed by the committee that's re-certifying our school, and Janneke went to the harvest contra dance to celebrate the end of the growing season at Caretaker Farm. T danced like a madwoman, independent of us, going from partner to partner, remembering each of the steps in the dance, grinning like mad the whole time. She had selected a special dance dress (no photos, sorry), and was the belle of the ball, followed everywhere by a troop of adoring pals.

After having hiked to the top of Pine Cobble this afternoon with her friend Hazel and Hazel's parents. During which time Q had his friend Colton over for some football, bike riding, ping pong, Yugi-Oh and video games.

Man, there's just too much to keep up with. I gotta get myself to bed - Monday morning has come around again. I'm going to start agitating for a four-day work week...