You are currently browsing the daily archive for April 2nd, 2007.
A soccer coach writes, “It was extremely exciting to see the boys play a very nice game and come out on top! What was very good to see was not just that they won, but that they played very well for their first 8 vs. 8 match. I am very proud of their game. I am also very proud of our sideline behavior. If you looked across the field, you could see the ugly side of soccer parents. This doesn’t cloud the fact that our boys played well as a team and we even saw some good passing.”
My 8 year old comments on the same match, “We creamed them 4:1, and I scored one goal!”
Mr. Daredevil, my 7th grader who tends to wear t-shirts inscribed with ‘I do all my own stunts’ had a school dance. After carefully selecting his ‘cool’ gear, he let me chauffeur him to the school. The cars were lining up and dropping off their tween and teen cargo like limos in front of the hot New York clubs.
Although the dance was fun, I have to report that things didn’t go quite as planned. Around Valentine’s Day, Mr. Daredevil started showing some interest in Little Miss M. who sits next to him in the Spanish class. They talk a lot and have become quite good friends. Little Miss M.’s parents are divorced, so she could certainly feel the pain of what Mr. Daredevil is going through.
A few days before the dance, Little Miss M.’s best friend approached Mr. Daredevil to check if he intends to dance with her friend. In the best Sean Connery tradition, from watching every single James Bond movie ever made, he kept his response short, “Sure”.
The big day has arrived, and it seems that the confident and sure dude was a little less confident and sure. I only gather this from the fact that a group of Little Miss M.’s friends had decided to take things into their hands, and literally deliver the boy in front of Little Miss M. who then shied away. Can you blame her?
The second time when Mr. Daredevil gained the courage to ask her for a dance, he apparently faced an outright rejection. This sounded a little odd to me, so I tried to get the whole picture. He did ask, oh definitely he did, but there was a person right in front of him and the music was really loud as he uttered the words. I don’t think that I would be far off the mark to suggest that the girl did not hear him.
I remember when I was my son’s age, and fairly smitten by a cute guy in my class with a really beautiful name, Leonardo. It somehow never occurred to me that he may be all that into me. Nothing unusual, you may say. Except, at every school dance we ended up dancing at least one slow dance together. At birthday parties we played ‘Spin the Bottle’ game, which I understand is a much more innocent and subdued version of the American one and doesn’t involve any groping. We simply sat in the circle, spun the bottle, and each person would take turns asking one and only one personal question from the kid the bottle was pointing to. I always remember Leonardo’s eagerness to ask me if I fancied anyone. When I replied yes to his question, poor guy in his love agony whispered in his buddy’s ear (which I overheard and dutifully wrote in my diary), “Ask her, just ask her, if that person is at the moment in this very room.” Which his friend did, and to which I gave an honest and truthful reply.
By the 8th grade we figured things out a bit better, and during one of our slow dances we kissed for the very first time.
