Last Senior Game

Last night was Spencer's final high school basketball game. Unlike a lot of sports that go on to districts or states, the basketball season ends with a loss for almost every team as they get knocked out of the tournament.
Here's a picture of Spencer in the grips of his coach. I'm not sure if it is right after he fouled out with a minute left or as he was going back in to get his last foul.

He's had a love-hate relationship with this coach who left Spencer in for almost the whole game last night to see him score 16 points and pull in 6 rebounds. Nevertheless, the team lost by 6 and is finished for the season.
People stopped me on the way out, exclaiming over Spencer's amazing game.
"He left everything on the court," they said.
"It was obvious he wasn't ready to be finished with the season," another one said.
"Awesome game."
And I felt sad at the end of an era.
At the end of Grace's high school swimming, she still had YMCA swimming to finish that winter and again in the summer before she went to swim in college.
Spencer says he will not play basketball in college. He's finished with coaches and refs who call more fouls on the big guys.
"Basketball will always be part of my life," he said.
And I know he's right because I've watched my brothers compete against each other on the basketball court into their 40s and my dad played basketball into his 70s before a should injury forced him to the sidelines.
So basketball will always be there for Spencer and he has some pretty good high school games that he can point to when he reminisces.

Mixing It Up

Maybe it's because I'm always looking at Spencer from below, since he is a foot taller than I am, but his face looks like it's all angles to me. Knobby cheekbones and sharp jawbones. His chin square, like mine and my dad's.
On Saturday, during a basketball game, he went down in a pile of guys scrambling for the ball and managed to wrap his arms around it while signaling time out. The ref blew his whistle and Spencer unfolded to his feet rubbing his cheekbone, which bloomed a bright red. He shook his head a few times, and I worried that he might have hit his head.
"Darn, I should have had that baseline concussion test," I said to my friend Jane.
But after the timeout, Spencer was back in the game.
He told me later that he took a knee to his cheekbone. I took a picture, but it doesn't really capture the skin stretched tight over the bump that formed on his cheek, or the purple that spread under his eye.
His beaten up, angular face was such a contrast to the pictures I looked at last night while searching for shots of him for senior night. As a young boy, he had a round face and giant blue eyes.

Who knows if that round-faced little boy will make an appearance in his face as he ages into his 20s.

Hectic and Hoarse

This morning, I'm a bit hoarse from all the cheering I did yesterday. It was one of those hectic, yet satisfying days spent supporting our boys in their athletic endeavors. And though the boys weren't always victorious, I'm proud of their achievements.
The day started when I dropped Tucker at the high school at 7 a.m. to catch the bus to the swim meet. I had dashed into Panera to get him bagels and we pulled up right at 7. He climbed on the bus, the swim coach stepped off, and the bus drove away at 7:02 a.m. I sat in the car for a minute, then turned it off and walked over to the rubberized track to run a few miles.
The swim meet, the league championship, started at 9:30 and we got home around 3. So it was a long day. But our boys team came in 3rd, the highest they've ever placed. Tucker swam in two free relays. You know the freestyle stroke: that's the one people sometimes call the crawl. In the final relay, our boys were four points behind the second place team. If they won the relay, they could pull into second place. Two senior boys, along with Tucker and his best friend Josh, who are sophomores, swam the relay. Tucker went last because Josh said he couldn't stand the pressure. Usually, the fastest swimmer goes last, and Tucker and Josh trade places as to who is fastest. I wish I could tell you that when Tucker dived in, a great arcing dive as Josh touched the end of the lane, that he pulled them into first place. He didn't, but he swam an amazing race and came in 3rd by hundredths of a second. All the boys had good times.
As an exhausted Tucker pulled himself out of the pool and walked around the corner toward the coach, he stopped in front of the stands where Earl and I sat. He looked up to the balcony and held up his hand with a 5, then a 2, then a closed fist and a 1. His time swimming the 100 free. 52.1 seconds. That's his fastest time ever. But the real thrill was that he wanted to take the time to share it with us, his parents.
He was exhausted, of course, and so were we. After a brief rest at home, plus some paper grading, we went out into the cold night to watch Spencer play a basketball game.
They played a team that had beaten them by 20 points last game and our team was tied with them for 1st place in the league. At the half, our team was ahead by two. The second half, Spencer started with no fouls, which is unheard of for him. In the third quarter he got four fouls -- many of them questionable. In the fourth quarter, his nemesis on the other team gave him his fifth foul by jumping into the air and landing on his back. What? All the parents screamed. How could that be a foul on Spencer? But it worked twice as the same guy gave our other big guy his fifth foul by landing on his back.
We lost by 4 in the end, but the team played hard and Spencer scored 11 points.
We returned home at 10. I had two more papers to get graded by midnight and with a scratchy throat I fell into bed at 11:30 after a hectic day.

And So It Begins...

Sports practices started officially last week and on Saturday I had my first full day of sporting events.
Spencer had a basketball scrimmage at 10:30

It felt good to be sitting in the gym again, even if only four of us parents showed up to watch our boys. In this photo, Spencer is in the navy shirt with the guy in red pushing him.
Then at 1:30, Tucker had a swim meet.

I sacrificed my afternoon of college football to watch Tucker swim.
But, I need to remember that this is my last year of basketball since Spencer is a senior. And I'll only have two more years of traipsing to swim meets since Tucker is a sophomore.
I vow to not complain, but to enjoy every minute of watching my boys play sports this year.

College Search

Spencer will be a senior next year, which means it's past time for us to start looking for a college. We've made only one college visit and he was underwhelmed with the small college where I graduated. "Didn't seem very fun" was his observation. Okay, now we've established the parameters. College must be fun. Is that all we're looking for?
The thing is, even though I've sent one kid off to college, I don't know how to search for colleges. The summer between Grace's junior and senior year, she began to get letters from swim coaches. We looked at the colleges that tried to recruit her and that's how we chose. Maybe it wasn't our smartest move since she ended up dropping swim team, but she got into a great college and the swim coach probably helped coax the school to accept her.
Spencer is obsessed with basketball. He plays basketball every day or lifts weights. He is "the big guy" on the team at 6-foot, 4, 190 pounds. I had asked him before if he thought he would play basketball in college.
"Nah," he said. I couldn't tell if he felt afraid that he might not be good enough or if he genuinely didn't want to play. When we went on the college visit, he didn't want to meet the basketball coach.
Basketball must be harder to get into in college, since they only need five guys at a time, unlike swimming, which has teams of 20 or 30.If basketball is out, what do we look for, I wondered. He doesn't know what he wants to major in, so our only criteria is "fun."
Although it is June, high school basketball is going strong. On Friday the team had a tournament at a college outside of Columbus. Spencer took the bus with the rest of the team and reported when they got home that the team won 3 games, lost 1.
"Great," I said.
Later, as we sat together, continuing the two-week long grounding, he said, "Oh, the --- college coach asked about me."
He threw it out like no big deal.
The college coach approached Spencer's high school coach to ask whether Spencer was interested in playing college ball. The coach said yes.
"Even though we've never talked about," Spencer told me.
Of course the coach said yes. He knows Spencer is a gym rat. He can't imagine that a diploma will wipe out that passion.
I felt a relief, a joy, rush through me. Now our college search could be guided to certain universities that wanted Spencer to play ball.
Little details, rules, started to infiltrate my brain. That's right, college coaches can't approach high school students until after July of their junior year. They can talk to the high school coaches though.
Then I started wondering why my children are so competitive about sports, good enough to draw the attention of college coaches. Neither Earl nor I are particularly good at sports, but I was really good at school. I graduated from college magna cum laude. My kids seem to be fairly uninterested in grades. I'm sure they are just as smart as I am (was), but they aren't spurred to work hard for grades.
Let's face it, that can only be my fault. I homeschooled them through their formative years. Because I got good grades, I never pushed the kids, telling them they must get an A in class. And they seem to feel that a B for a little bit of work is better than an A for a lot of work.
At least they're motivated to work hard in sports and maybe that will transfer to their lives if they can find careers they are passionate about.

Big Feet

Every weekend Spencer spends the night with guys from the basketball team, or they come here and spend the night. On Sunday morning, after the time change, when I got up to go for a run, big shoes were blocking the back door so I couldn't get out.
I lined them up and Earl snapped a few pictures.
Even though Spencer is the tallest of the boys, he doesn't have the biggest feet. That really bothers him. But his own father, a whopping 6-foot, 4-inches, wears size 10.5 shoes, so genetically he isn't engineered to have big feet.
The shoes don't look so giant on their own, but I put my shoe into the middle of the pile for comparison. Can you see it?
What is up with kids and big feet today? Is it just the way the shoes look or are kids' feet getting bigger. And why? They certainly don't use them that much since they need rides everywhere.
Here's a one-on-one comparison of my shoe next to one of the boys' shoes.
Even though they're small, my feet have not let me down yet. I get everywhere I need to go and have even run a marathon on these tiny feet.
Bigger feet equal stinkier shoes, which fill my kitchen with the aroma of teenage boy, even when they are all asleep in the basment.

Updates

To follow up on a couple of blogs from the past few weeks:
Bald Tucker did very well at his swim meet. He missed making states but he dropped a lot of time in his events, including more than three seconds in the 100 butterfly. That's Tucker out in front. He won his heat. I know the times don't mean anything to non-swimmers, but suffice it to say that when I texted his YMCA swim coach the time that he swam, she responded: "Holy Sh**". She has asked him to go to Florida in April to swim at Nationals. Tucker is deciding whether he wants to commit that much time and effort to swimming over the next month. I know he is worn out from the season.
Spencer's last regular season basketball game was Friday. Spence played well and the teams went into overtime. With 20 seconds left, down by two, he was fouled. Spence moved his big high-top shoes to the line. Bounce, bounce, bounce. Swish. Now the team was down by one with another free throw left to go.
Time out.
No, not the opposing team's coach. Our team's coach called time out. He iced his own guy! He iced my son.
The other team's coach will sometimes call time out to make the player think about his free throws and increase the chance he will miss it. The other team's coach didn't have to because our own coach did.
Spencer missed the free throw and we ended up losing the game by three, so the blame didn't rest solely on Spencer.
And, finally, my best friend called again this week. She even commented on my blog post about unions! She said she didn't speak to anyone, even her sisters, last week while she tries to figure out her future. I can understand that. I'm here for her if/when she needs me.

Blueberry Syrup and Coffee Kind of Day

Saturday was one of those Mom days. I got up early to make blueberry syrup -- tripled the recipe and poured it into the Crock Pot so it would stay warm for the basketball players' breakfast. We went to the school cafeteria at 9 to set up the waffle makers. We had six waffle makers and my friend Jane mixed up the batter with Bisquick. I know, I've never used a waffle mix. I just use flour, milk, eggs. She wanted to buy the mix so I acquiesced.
About 9:40, we started plugging in waffle makers to do test waffles before the boys got there at 10. I plugged three waffle makers into one outlet, three in another. Then I noticed the light on the power strip had gone out. We tried some other outlets but saw that the breaker had knocked them out too. We moved to another corner of the room, moving tables again. This time, we blew the circuit and the pop machines there gave a gurgle before they stopped working, the lights flickering out.
A shelf held two microwaves. We lugged those away and plugged the waffle makers into the dedicated circuit, after blowing one more outlet.
Finally, we were able to operate three waffle makers and fed the 25 boys who were very polite and claimed we had the best breakfast spread yet.
After cleaning up, I returned home long enough to eat a waffle before driving an hour away to a swim meet. The swim meet lasted six hours.
I drove the hour back, dropped Grace off at home, picked Tucker up from the bus, dropped him at home and went to a basketball game to watch Spencer.
See, a totally Mom day. Nothing was about me.
While I was at the swim meet for six hours, I started reading a new book -- one of those I keep in the car for just such occasions. The book is called The Various Flavors of Coffee by Anthony Capella.
The title was appropriate because Grace had purchased white mochas for both of us on the way to the swim meet. The mochas tasted sweet and thick with a hint of bitter espresso.
I started the book, wedged into a corner of the pool area, my eyes burning from the chlorine and my straight hair beginning to frizz in the humidity.
"Oh, I don't like this kind of narration," I commented to Grace as I read the first page. It begins with an Dickens-esque narration as "we" watch the character traipsing down the street.
The narration changed to first person in the next chapter and I began to find things that made me chuckle, so I read them to Grace.
Then I came to a section that made me fold down the page so I could find it again.
The main character, a foppish man who lives in London after flunking out of Oxford in the late 1800s, considers himself a poet. He meets a coffee merchant who wants the poet to help determine the language for describing coffee so he can standardize it.
In the coffee merchant's office, they have a discussion because the merchant has been unable to find any of the poet's work in the bookstores. The coffee trader explains:

"...A merchant is someone who trades. Ergo, if I do not trade, I am not a merchant."
"But a writer, by the same token, must therefore be someone who writes," I pointed out. "It is not strictly necessary to be read as well. Only desirable."

"What?" I squawked.
I read it to Grace and we cracked up.
That means I'm a writer. I don't have to be read to be a writer, but it is "only desirable."
So, the next time I question whether I'm a writer, remind me, all it takes to be a writer is writing.

Family Sports Outing

One of my laments in the past has been "not enough family at holidays." This year, they made up for it. Mom and Dad came up from Florida and my brother Craig came from Texas with his 21-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter. They stayed with my other brother, Kevin, in Dayton, but last night everyone came to Columbus to watch one of Spencer's basketball games.
My family is very competitive. They always have been. Both my brothers play tennis so that is their main competition, but they don't limit it. They'll compete with my 74-year-old dad in ping pong, cards, and even who can eat spicier food. Neither of my brothers' sons got into high school sports. I wasn't sure how it would go when they came to watch Spencer play. I was also a little nervous that Spencer might not do well on the one night they were there.

We sat, all 10 of us, in the bleachers watching Spencer give chest bumps to the starters. Spencer didn't start and didn't play for most of the first quarter. I was getting nervous. He usually gets into the game pretty quickly. The coach moves all the Varsity players in and out.
Finally Spencer got a chance to play.
I sat next to my brothers and they talked about offenses and zone defenses that were over my head. When Spencer blocked a shot, sending the ball back to the court, they whooped with glee. Craig kept track of Spencer's stats and typed them into his phone. He yelled loudly to disrupt the other team when they were shooting free throws. My brothers were proud of their nephew, and so was I.
I liked sharing that experience with my family, and realize now that the nerves before hand all have to do with living up to expectations. When it comes to sports, it's pretty much all enjoyable to my brothers and Dad. But it sure would have been worse if Spencer hadn't played well.
He scored 8, blocked 4 and rebounded 6.
I keep picturing my brothers' delight at the game. It's a picture that I replay in my head -- one that will pop to mind when I think about my brothers.

Highs and Lows

Saturday was full of ups and downs. It started with a crisp 7.5 mile run with my friends in the 25-degree weather. (I'll have a Dream Girl update tomorrow).
My day was scheduled to be full of sporting events. Not the usual college football that I watch, but a swim meet an hour and a half away, and the first regular season basketball game. Of course, the snow started to fall before I left.
I have no practical shoes for snow. I have clogs and crocs and high-heeled boots. I ended up wearing my hiking boots with jeans, which just makes me feel a little too manly. But I drove through the pelting snow and made it to Wright State University before the first race began. This was Tucker's first high school swim meet invitational.
The swim coach put him in the "B" relays at first. Then, after he swam on Tuesday, she moved him up to the "A" relays.
"She thinks I'm bad," he said.
"You'll just have to prove it to her," I said. And he did.
He came in first in the 50 back stroke and broke the old meet record. Then, as his team and another team seesawed back and forth in first place, they lined up to swim the final event. A 200-free relay.
I was nervous. I shook my leg, I screamed, I smacked my hand against my jeans in place of clapping. "Go! Go!" I yelled as the boys each dived in and swam. They were slightly behind the other team throughout. The final swimmer drew even and out touched the other team, winning the race by two hundredths of a second.
"Whoooo!" I yelled loud so the swimmers would hear. All of the parents had erupted into cheers and celebrations. Our boys' team won the meet against the 12 other teams there.
Then I slogged out into the parking lot. I was going to be late for the basketball game which was taking place an hour away. I turned on the windshield wipers to try to scrape the snow off and I searched futilely for a scraper. I used a CD case -- the Blues Brothers. It worked fairly well.
I had to slow down for a few accidents and one tow truck pulling a car out of a ditch. I made it to the basketball game at the start of the second quarter.
One of the dads explained that Spencer had been in the game but was called for traveling because one of the big guys on the other team was pushing him hard enough to scooch him along the court. Any time Spencer went into the game, the fat guys were put back in by the other team. Spencer's added muscle was no match for these 200 plus pounders. At one point, one of the moms pointed out the fat guy had carried Spencer about six feet.

Things did not go well for Spence or his team. He missed four free throws. His rebounding was done, not with sticky hands, but like a volleyball game as the ball was hit and flew into the air. The coach stopped yelling and sat on the bench. They ended up losing by about 17 points.
I parked Spencer's car at the gym and walked the mile home in the quiet night around 10 p.m. The sidewalk shone with ice and I windmilled my arms a few times to keep my balance.
When Spencer arrived home, he said, "It's just embarrassing to try that hard and be that bad."
"Everybody has a bad night," I told him. "You can't quit trying. Then you'd hate it."
"I did quit trying at the end," he said. I nodded.
That's when the coach finally took him out. The coach could tell.
Someday, maybe both my boys will have great sport days or great academic days or great days in love. For now though, as volatile teenagers, they have up and down days, usually all within 24 hours.
I'm glad I can be there for them, whether to celebrate their wins or mourn their losses.

Legacies

At the basketball scrimmage on Saturday, two parents asked who "that number 18" was. That was Spencer. They asked because they didn't recognize him, even though they'd sat beside me at games last year and invited Spencer into their homes for meals. Since basketball season ended in April, Spence has put on about 30 pounds of muscle.
"He was so skinny last year," one of the mothers said, explaining why she hadn't recognized him.
It's true. When I saw him around the house, I thought he was normal sized. Tall, but normal weight. When I saw him on the basketball court, I realized he was a stick figure.
Not this year though.
Adding to the confusion of his appearance is a recent haircut.
A senior on the team, short with a bald spot, told Spencer that he has an athletic body but a pretty boy haircut. Spencer trotted off to the barber for a "high and tight" cut to go with his athletic body. I'm not sure who made this senior boy fashion arbiter.
Spencer does have pretty boy hair. It's thick and smooth. And he still has a baby face.
The short haircut took care of that. Now he looks like a man.
Something about the haircut reminded me of my dad in his high school days, so Mom sent me some pictures.
People have always said that Spencer and my dad look alike because of the blue eyes and the square chin. I thought the haircut might add to the similarities, but now that I compare. I'm not sure. What do you think?
Here's Dad's senior picture and one from when he was Spencer's age.
The other thing about Dad and Spencer is they are both basketball fanatics. Dad didn't even hold a basketball until 8th grade but then excelled. He was offered a basketball scholarship to a college in Kentucky but turned it down to start working after graduation.
He has continued to play though, in a senior league and teaching his grandsons his hook shot until a shoulder injury a few years ago.
"You can just tell Gran was good at basketball," Spencer said when he looked at the picture my mom had sent.
As he flipped through the pictures, he looked at the one of my mom and dad together in high school. "People don't really marry people from high school, do they?" he asked.
But, of course, they do and they did more frequently in the past, like his grandparents who met when they were in high school, when they were both still baby faced and had no idea that their future would lead to four children and seven grandchildren.
Maybe the story of high school sweethearts is a different story though, one that I'll have to tell about Tucker someday as he tries to reconcile now with the on-again, off-again girlfriend

He Dunked It!

When I write about my children, most of the time it is Grace. She's the oldest and experiences new things first. These days, the boys act in unison as surly teenagers. They don't have a lot to say other than "I'm going..." or "Everyone else gets $20 a week for lunches..."
Yesterday when Spencer walked in the door after school and after basketball practice, he announced, "I dunked it!"
He was obviously proud of his accomplishment and he proceeded to give us a play by play.
He had been working on dunking the basketball for awhile. In June he came home and said he had dunked a softball. Softballs are a lot smaller than basketballs so easier to grasp and get above the rim.
One of Spencer's main complaints about the genetics he received is his small hands. His hands aren't really large enough to make palming the basketball easy. I mean, they aren't tiny like that guy on the Burger King commercial who won't eat the big burger because they make his tiny hands look tinier, but proportionately, he doesn't have extra large hands or extra large feet to go with his 6-foot, 4-inch body.
Last month he came home and said he had cut his finger on the rim trying to dunk the basketball, so he was progressing.
At practice yesterday, one of the other guys bet him $5 that he couldn't dunk it. Spencer was allowed three tries to win the bet.
The football team had finished practicing and they filed into the gym to watch the competition.
He missed on his first two tries, running, leaping and slamming the ball into the rim. On the third try, he succeeded, his one hand grasping the basketball and raising high enough to jam the ball through the hoop.
He landed to applause and happily received the $5 pay off.
After dinner and a shower, he dragged his backpack to the couch and sat down, ready to begin studying for a math test.
"I dunked it," he said again. No one new was there to hear him, he just wanted to say it again to make it real.

Expectations

On Friday morning, I debated whether I should whisper in my daughter's ear, whether I should warn her not to get her hopes up too high. It was the District competition for swim. She'd easily made it past sectionals and she had high goals for Districts. 30 swimmers move on to districts, but only the top four move onto states.
I stopped myself though after giving myself a talking to about my Midwestern values. It is so typically Midwestern to caution against high hopes. But it doesn't make the fall any easier even if we guard against high hopes. We still have them.
So I don't warn her. And that afternoon, her friends came searching for me at the swim meet and said, "You have to come. Grace is crying inconsolably in the shower."
I lied to the gatekeeper whose job is to keep parents away from the pool.
"My daughter's injured," I told him.
And I found her, her face flushed red. She lay her face on my shoulder and sobbed some more. At Districts, she finished 10th in her 50 freestyle and she didn't swim as fast as the previous year. In her eyes, she had failed, although she finished higher than anyone else on her high school team.
She went on to swim the relays which finished well and made it to the podium for the top eight places. She also swam the 100 back with a decent time.
When the day ended, she wasn't miserable, but she wasn't happy. This isn't the end, I reassured her. She moves back to the YMCA swimming and then onto college swimming.
Today I drove my son home from basketball, a game they won by nearly 30 points.
"Did you see me miss those layups?" he asked. "And the foul shots?"
I wonder why my children and I all focus on the things we didn't accomplish. I think we have high expectations, but maybe we need a contingency plan, a back up for when things don't go the best possible route.
Because, even when my son doesn't make all the baskets he attempts, or my daughter doesn't swim as fast as she had hoped, or I'm not the best possible wife, mother or teacher, maybe we should all cut ourselves some slack. Maybe we can think that whatever our best is on this day is good enough.