Ultimate Frisbee

We spent the day on a green field watching the high school tournament for Ultimate Frisbee. That's where they play frisbee similar to soccer with the team moving the disc down the field to score in the end zone.

Tucker played last year, and the team only won two games all season. This year, the team was undefeated in their season. They played three games in the tournament and win all three. They won their first game this morning then lost the second. They play one last game to see if they make it to states next weekend. 

The sun has been intermittent and the wind has been strong, sending the disc sailing into the air and gathering salty granules at the corners if my eyes. 

We had to leave before the third game to go to a graduation party then make it to dance class. 

The rules for ultimate frisbee are hilarious. They seem to be created by some laid-back California-type dudes. The game is supposed to go til someone scores 15 points. But during the tournament that changes to 13 points and if the game is long, maybe 12 or 10 points. It's fluid. 

The coach calls out , "Chill." He doesn't yell at them to "Hustle."
There are no refs. No team members call their own fouls against the other team. They also call the scores.
Tucker caught a throw, jumping into the air and landing on his back over the goal line. The other team started to argue about whether he had scored.
"Look I can't tell you whether you scored," our coach said to Tucker. "You have to look inside yourself."
It cracks us up, but also helped us realize why the kids maybe didn't want parents there throughout the season. The parents get more competitive. They yell out, "Foul." The set their clocks to see when the time will expire.
The coach says, "Easy, easy."
One mother says she was at a game when someone showed up with a bucket of fried chicken. It was an automatic time out while everyone ate chicken.
We'eve only made it to a couple of games at the end of the season, but we can see why Tucker loves this game. In addition to running up and down the field and making leaps into the air to catch the Frisbee, they all work together as a team. They're mellow.
Too bad we didn't have four whole years of watching. The other parents and I are pretty sure we might be partaking of things to make us more mellow while on the sidelines. 

Funny Grace Stories

A lot of joy in my life comes from my kids; of course, a lot of the worry in my life comes from them too. Since I tend to write about the worry more than the joy, I thought I'd share a couple of stories about Grace that actually made my friend Najah stop in the middle of our run to laugh.
Grace was home for part of the weekend. On Saturday evening, she was getting ready to shower for her evening out. She went into the bathroom and said she was going to put on a facial mask that I'd picked up at the store. I explained that she'd need to let it dry, so she might as well come out of the bathroom and wait.

She came into the kitchen where I was fixing dinner -- black beans, rice and chicken. As we stood talking in the kitchen, her face a pale purple with the mask on, we heard the water in the other bathroom turn on. Tucker, just back from a day of Ultimate Frisbee, had hopped in the shower before her.
"Guess you'll have to wait," I said as I cut the chicken into pieces and dumped it into the frying pan with olive oil.
"Fine," she said. "I guess I'll just go watch football until he finishes." She turned around and walked toward the living room.
The television was on with the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
I laughed.
"Grace, it isn't football season anymore," I called.
"Well, baseball or whatever," she said.
I just shook my head. Even growing up with two brothers, a father and a sports-crazed mother, Grace had no interest in sports and seasons. Maybe some day if she has sons of her own, she'll be able to keep it straight.
Another story she shared this weekend had to do with her part in the play, The Graduate. Grace is playing the part of Elaine, Mrs. Robinson's daughter. She's the one who Benjamin, the main character, falls for after his affair with her mother.
The play had been in rehearsals for nearly a week when Grace informed us that the main character had quit. He was just uncomfortable with the sex scenes with Mrs. Robinson, Grace said. He and Grace had already practiced the kissing scenes too. The young man pulled Grace aside after announcing his decision to let her know that his choice had nothing to do with Grace. I'd seen his picture and he's a cutie with bright blue eyes and strawberry blond hair cut short.
"Bummer," I said.
The next day were new auditions for the part of Benjamin. Another guy who Grace knew tried out, and it looked like he had the part. Then the director asked him to make orgasm sounds.

Here's the ending shot of the movie The Graduate. Grace
 gets to wear a wedding dress for this scene. 

"We just want to make sure you're comfortable with the sex scenes," the director told the young man.
"He tried," Grace said, but she confided that he didn't really have much sexual experience either. So he felt really awkward with the scenes too.
The rest of the cast were stumped. What would they do?
Then a student from OSU came in. He was tall enough to play Grace's leading man, but when he began to speak, the cast all exchanged glances. He sounded blatantly gay when he spoke. They couldn't see him in the role.
But when he started acting, he took on the characteristics of the very-straight Benjamin.
One hurdle gotten over.
Then the director asked him to make orgasm sounds. Without skipping a beat, he launched into the orgasm sounds. He had no problem.
They had their new Benjamin.
Later, as they rehearsed, the new Benjamin asked the rest of the cast why the other guys couldn't play the role. The cast hemmed and hawed, wanting to be polite, but admitted that it was about making sex noises.
The new Benjamin seemed a little surprised.
There's something sweet about young men being too shy or too sexually inexperienced to take on the role of Benjamin, but it's not really optimal when they're playing the character on stage.

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.

Boy to Man

My oldest son, my second child, turns 17.
I snapped a picture of him, still bleary-eyed, straight out of bed this morning, before I left for work.

I figure that someday when he's my age, he might want to look back at that picture and be amazed at the outline of each muscle.
He works out every day, playing basketball, lifting weights, running around the track. Then he comes home and drinks milk sprinkled with protein powder and two peanut butter sandwiches. He is trying to put on weight, to add more bulk to the figure that crouches under the basket ready to rebound.
Some people say they hate to see their boys changing into men. I'm amazed.
How could that chubby, curious boy in velcro tennis shoes turn into this muscled man?

And I wonder what he will become.
I wonder if he'll be obsessed with exercise like my older brother, continuing to work out and eat protein-rich foods.
I wonder if he'll be obsessed with sports, like my dad who plays golf five days a week and watches every other sport on TV.
I wonder if he'll find a career he loves that answers his philosophical questions and gives him the chance to explore things with his hands.
I wonder if he'll find a wife who appreciates how fiercely he loves.
For now though, I fetched Long John donuts and chocolate milk for a sugar laden breakfast. I let him open a present that he might want to wear to school. He can never have too many Ohio State shirts.

We'll meet him and Tucker at the local burger joint for hamburgers and shakes before Earl rushes off to work. And this evening he'll head to the gym again for basketball practice, hoping each jump stretches him out just a little taller, each lope with his long legs adds a bit more muscle.
Happy Birthday, Spencer.