Big Weekend Fun

Of the exhausting sort. Here's the rundown:

I hunted, watched Q play basketball, ate meals and did dishes. Very, very little else.

Janneke's been very generous about taking charge of the kids while I walk around in the woods, pretending that there is such a thing as an adult male deer. I've seen deer - Friday afternoon, I went out to stand through the sunset (when they are most active), and two does bounced across my path. I'd have had a fine shot at either, had I thought to acquire a doe permit back in June. But no, I had to hold my fire.

I'm hunting in the Mount Anthony preserve up in Bennington. I have seen one other hunter in the woods so far, so already it's an improvement over Ragged Mountain, where I had been hunting the past few years. And the two does I saw there, plus the two I saw several weeks ago, together quadruple the number of deer I ever saw while hunting in Massachusetts. Plus, you can use an actual 20th-century weapon in VT. Not that I've had much chance to use it.

Actually, opening day I did take a crack at a buck, but I missed, and it's just as well, because I turned out to be on land that did not actually belong to the people I (and they) thought it belonged to. I was somewhat grumpily told to leave. And I did.

Saturday morning I hunted 'til 9:00, then came home to take Q up to the high school for a 3-on-3 tournament. His friend Sean is an unbelievable basketball player, and his other friend Colton is very nearly as good. And they have Q and another kid named Eli, who are find athletes but aren't born to hoop it up like those other two. Their team was "The Baconators", and their first game was at 10:15.

They won two games, against people they knew from Williamstown (I think - they blur together). 20-minute games with a continuous clock; coaches (Colton's Dad in Q's case) get one time-out per game. The Baconators looked to be cruising - Q scored a few in each of their first two games, and on the strength of the Colton-Sean Big Two, looked to be headed for the championship.

Then they ran into a team from another town, wearing Celtics uniforms.

These kids had been coached, you see. They were all four quite good players - none as good as Sean, but two (or even three) were about as good as Colton. They had outside shots, ball-handling skills, and some tactics that were very effective.

Like constant fouling. If the person driving to the basket isn't actually shooting, the only consequence of a foul in this format is that the team fouled gets the ball out at the top of the key (half-court games), so it's to one's advantage to just foul and stop anyone who starts moving netward. The fouling was too consistent, in my mind, not to have been on purpose. Their coach called out "Don't reach in" whenever they did it and were called, but the tone of it, and the kids' reaction, seemed to me to have been arranged ahead of time. As in, "I'll tell you not to foul, but keep doing it." Who knows, I can't read minds. But they were a-foulin' like mad.

And since you have to check the ball in to start a possession, another thing they were all doing was returning the ball to the Baconator player with a low bounce pass, followed immediately by a charge, putting them right in the face of the player trying to in-bound the ball. Again, too consistent not to have been coached. And a little bush-league, in my opinion.

All that was one thing. But these kids were trash-talking, too. Staring our boys in the face, making hip-hop-style "You want some of this?" gestures...They had a very bad attitude, I thought. But the last straw came as the endgame approached: Up by two, their coach called a time-out.

With one minute to go.

Clock kept running.

And they won.

Bush-league.

Q walked out of the gym with me, dejected, past the trophy table. He jerked a thumb toward them. "We're not going to win one of those," he said. He was pretty upset, as were the rest of his team. Tough moment. But they had to bounce back - More basketball yet to be played.

Double-elimination tournament, you see, so the Baconators went to the losers' bracket, where they won out handily, putting them back into a rematch with the undefeated "Celtics" team. they'd cruised through the rest of their schedule and were feeling their oats. (As I have on very good information from the mother of one of Q's friends, who stood near them as they watched the Baconators clear out the last opposition in the losers' bracket and overheard them dirisively mocking everything they could about them.) So they had a rematch - If the "Celtics" team wins, it's over; if the Baconators win, they get to play that team again, in a final game, for all the marbles.

Q didn't score a point in that game, but he became a defensive monster, sealing off his man constantly and making a number of big steals, causing a number of turnovers. It see-sawed until the end, when Colton just took over, having discovered that they just had no answer for him coming in along the baseline and laying it in. As they reached the minute mark, the Baconators suddenly had a three-point lead.

And called timeout. Game over.

Turnabout, and all that.

Setting up the final matchup, where, and frankly, I'm just too tired to make it dramatic, so I'll let you know early: The exact same thing happened. The "Celtics" looked defeated - they weren't fouling anymore like they had been, and weren't doing their bush-league inbounding anymore - their coach may have seen me somewhat exhuberantly miming their antics to anyone who would listen, and may have decided to knock it off. Who knows, though - a lot of the games leading up to this one had started getting very physical, and the ref did talk to both teams before the final game. He may have said "Clean it up, I'm going to be whistle-happy". So it came down to skill again (and height - Sean is a big boy), and the Baconators were just too much. They won, 12-8, and shouted their victory to the rafters.

It was intensely karmically satisfying.

OK, that's all I have the steam for. T's fine, Janneke's fine, Skittles is fine, I'm fine...Still deerless, but fine. I'll write more when I become a better person.

So don't hold your breath.

Overcompensation

Holy cow! I feel like I do in that dream I have where I've suddenly realized that I'm taking a math class in college, and I haven't been to it for weeks, and the final exam is being handed out RIGHT NOW! Man - I have a blog?! I have readers that number in the double digits, and I have neglected them for HOW long...? I should be horsewhipped. "Fifty lashes with a wet noodle", as someone used to say. I think it was my fifth grade teacher. He used to say a lot of things. He was known for it. "Remember him?", we reminisce, as we stand at the rail in the saloon and smooth our mustaches after every swig. "Remember how he used to say things? Oh!, by Nelson! The things he would say!" And we laugh and throw back another round and turn to send a stream of tobacky juice to the spitoon.

What to bring you up to date on...! Well, first of all, we have not been taking many pictures. The upload program just told me there are a total of 59 in the camera, and that the first one dates all the way back from when Janneke and T went to Switzerland. Which was - well, what's today, Monday? So it was a coon's age ago. So there isn't going to be a whole lot of photographic evidence to be had in this post. It's going to be narrative-heavy. Which fits with the title I have chosen for this particular episode.

And most of the narrative is going to be of the "summation" type, because most things that have recently been going on have come to an end. T's Saturday-morning soccer just had its last meeting of the year. It was run by a very nice man. T loves him, and loves the practices, though she's definitely still on the "observe and report" plan for soccer playing. She remarked to me one day after a practice, "I try to run as fast as I can, but I just can't." And I think that means either that (A) she's not emotionally involved enough to sprint, even though she feels like she ought to be, just to go along; or (B) she's not anatomically cooked up enough yet to break into a true sprint. Q was that way for the first few years, I remember - he was among the later kids in his age group to full-on, fist-pumpin' sprint. It takes a while for that to develop. But she jogs along and cheers and follows the action. The boys are very dominant in kiddie-soccer - so much so that it's a little less than completely safe sometimes. There can be some collisions between super-motivated, churning boys and kids who don't pay much attention.

Another danger is the odd sociopath who's made it all the way to kindergarten undetected. There was some kid there I didn't know whom I observed walking up to another boy and unloading a kick into his shin guard. There were three adults on the field at the time, keeping order, so I didn't feel right about charging out and setting things straight, but I did see it. He wasn't an especially big kid, and the other kid seemed amused. No real harm done. Of course, what should happen but that five minutes later, I'm chatting with someone and I hear the breathless, high-pitched wail that can only be T. And I look up to find her looking at me in complete shock, wide-eyed, mouth agape, being escorted off the field - and in her other hand, the adult in question has clasped the jersey of the same little boy I'd observed doing the kicking. "He just kicked her," the woman explained. (I know her, she's one of the doctors our kids have seen in the past and also the mother of a teammate of Q's.) "Just plain-ol' kicked her, right in the knee." I asked if they'd seen him doing it to anyone else; she said no, and I told her that that made at least twice. So he was asked where his mother was, and was marched off to her. She took him aside and spoke to him for a couple of minutes, and eventually she made him come up and apologize. Although, to my mind, this woman seemed like a "hug-them-all-the-harder-the-more-they-misbehave" type. And I don't have the most patience with that, frankly.

So T isn't completely developmentally ready for competitive sports, but she enjoys being around them, so we'll keep this up. Q's soccer season, meanwhile, was very memorable. He had another year where he's either completely on, or completely off, and there's nothing anyone can do to alter it. That's just where he is, and while he's getting to be a (very, very slightly) more consistently "on" player, he's also going into periods of prolonged deafness where things shouted to him from the sidelines (by the coaches, I'll have you know) simply do not sink in. He roams very widely out of position, which really hurts his team, particularly when he's meant to be a defender. But when he's on, and when he's a forward, look out.

Another parent - whose son is, as the parent admits freely and happily, not one of the top-tier soccer players on the squad - remarked to me during a game, "To my mind, Sammy D and Q are just on another level from the rest of these guys." I was tickled, and spooked, to hear that. Tickled for the obvious reasons, and spooked, because maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe I'm not totally biased in assessing Q's skill level - Maybe he really is as graceful and savvy as he seems to me to be. He can think two, three steps past where things are and has been sending some passes - through-balls, no-looks, chips over defenders - that make one's jaw drop. And scoring a lot, too.

Some of the thrill of the goal has gone out of it for him. Not for any reasons to do with boredom or listlessness, but because he recognizes that sometimes the quality of the opponent cheapens the goal, and he'd rather spend his energy trying to set up someone else who doesn't score as often. Their last game was yesterday, and they played Adams, a team that a Willaimstown all-star team had absolutely massacred a few weeks before. Q's regular team isn't that team, but it has Q, and Colton, and Alex B...Some very solid players. And Q knew this was going to be, as they say in Spanish, "un genocidio". So he played the whole time with a smile on his face, and could be seen a couple of times doing what I'd seen him do in one other game, and fallen all the more in love with him for it:

A player on the other team (which was very young, and not at all skilled, and was slowly getting pulverized), a long-haired boy named Harry, had been looking ill and frightened and withdrawn the whole game. He had very little skill and, apparently, very little confidence. But at one point, Harry got the ball on the opposite side of the field, deep in his own end, and started a run up the line. Q ran with him, but couldn't quite get ahead of him, and Harry went on and on, keeping control of the ball, going deeper and deeper into Williamstown territory. At the end of his run he managed to stop the ball, turned back, and fired a centering pass to the middle. No one picked it up, but the crowd went wild - a lot of us Willaimstowners, who had figured out his name, joined in and cheered him like mad. "What a run, Harry! Super job!"

And in the car, Q, doing his usual post-game breakdown, said this: "Yeah... I felt bad for him. I could have taken the ball away, or gotten in front of him, but I didn't want to. And I didn't want to just stop and let him go, because then he would feel like I wasn't trying, and it didn't matter."

It was a great game to end on, this one from yesterday, because they showcased their talented kids - every one of them scored a couple - but then started manufacturing goals for the kids who don't score a lot. And Q wore a smile the entire time, fairly effortlessly working around defenders and then looking up to see which of his teammates he could pass to. "No, Theo - You're offsides! Come back!", he said, laughing, as the defender circled him helplessly. And when Theo was back onsides, Q pushed a roller into space ahead of him. Theo watched it go, and threw up his arms at Q. "No, Theo," Q said, laughing again and approaching him: "You're supposed to run to where I'm passing. It's OK, I'll do it again."

And he did.

There is other news, of course. Much of it aquatic. T has been taking swimming lessons at the college, but it's Janneke who takes her there, and so I have little to report, other than what we knew going in, which is this: She is daring, coachable, game for anything, and absolutely in love with water. She does the crawl now, and the backstroke, and the dead man's float. Janneke feels so confident that she just gave away the arm floaties T has been using up to now. And that's saying something. I'm protective, but Janneke's clothes are continually filthy from having thrown herself in front of one child or another to protect them from something. Breezes, mostly. And moths.

And I have joined the YMCA in Pittsfield, which lies on my route home, almost exactly halfway. I stop there after a workday and check in and hit the pool for between 20 and 30 laps, depending on the manhood count for the day. And I can rarely resist a stop afterward in the weight room, where I bench a bit before heading home. It's a wonderful facility, costs $41 a month, and provides me all the exercise I need without injury. The place is rarely even close to filled - today was the busiest I've seen the weight room, and there were six guys in it. (I've never seen a woman in the weight room.) Downtown Pittsfield is in recovery mode, so you see a lot of art galleries and other hipster start-ups, but the main clientelle is still the neighborhood, so a lot of urban-neighborhood-types. Lots of neck tattoos and oversized basketball shorts. There's a trio I see in there a lot, who apparently work out and then go to the pool afterward to relax. All big, all fairly muscular. Two are white, and one is black. I see them together or I don't see any of them. And one of the white guys has "WHITE PRIDE" tattooed down his spine. They fascinate me - their interaction seems genuinely intimate, as if they're all good friends. And I just can't make sense of it. Does the tattooed fellow now regret it? Has he learned and grown, with the tattoo just a scar from the growth? Or does he somehow see and feel no antagonism against other races in being proud of his own? And does his friend accept that somehow? I don't know.

The three of them were in the pool the other day. Two were near my end as I readied myself to get in. One of them looked up at the other, who was treading water nearby.

"How far can you go underwater?"

"All the way."

"For real?"

"Yeah. Here, watch." And he took a breath and swam to the bottom.

The floating one chuckled as he disappeared. "No, no - Not..." He waited for him to come up. "Not 'how far down.' I meant 'How far across.'"

They both laughed, and I did too. They heard me and looked up, and we all laughed together.

I like Pittsfield.

Recent daguerrotypes:



T in the mouse ears I made her for "Words are Wonderful", a week-long festival of reading. She went as Chrysanthemum the Mouse.



T and Q in their official "Words are Wonderful" get-ups. T as Chrysanthemum, of course, and Q as Ordinary Boy from "The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy". A book so good that when it's not my turn to read with him at night, I grab it off his bedstand and read what he and Janneke have read, so I'll be up to speed in the morning. They have a character called "The Red Menace", a super-villain, who is a very effectively painted cartoon metaphor for the evils of socialism. (Don't worry - much of the rest of the series is a critique of capitalism.) So effective is this representation of the basic tenets of the ideology that I re-told much of it to my Spanish 5 class, where the year-long theme is "Left versus Right in Latin America". Ordinary Boy is the only person in Superopolis who doesn't have a superpower. His friends all wear superhero outfits, but he just wears a T-shirt and jeans. With no letter on it - but Q had to do SOMETHING to make his outfit not just be a T-shirt and jeans. Though honestly, I think that was much of the appeal of it for him.



T as "Frankenstein Princess". She loved the costume, as did we. Her idea all the way.



T and Q in their costumes. Q did the same one as last year, since he hadn't wanted to put too much effort into it and had been very willing to go along with my idea: Mummy, wrapped in toilet paper. Which was a terrible idea. Didn't work at all, so he scrounged up last year's mask and set out for what was by far his longest jaunt yet. He was out with everyone else (our two, plus Q's friend Owen) for just about the entire legally allowed period - an hour and a half.