Soccer in the South

~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

I hate to claim trailblazer status, but I think it’s only appropriate that youth of today learn about the sacrifices I made growing up as a young soccer player in the South. Recently, I took my three-year-old son to a new park, one that has a battery of swingsets, a half dozen sliding boards, and all the latest in juvenile climbing scaffolding, when I realized the most impressive thing about this park were the ball fields–green, flat, irrigated fields, meticulously lined and delineated for one singular sport, soccer. 

This would have been unthinkable in a rural county decades ago, so I’d like to think that all those hours I spent picking sandspurs out of shoelaces and scraping cow manure out of soccer cleats played a small part in the progress we’ve made. And it’s not because our county was dirt poor and had little discretionary funding to spend that we lacked soccer facilities. We were the second poorest county in the state, but by golly that didn’t stop us from emptying out the government coffers on what mattered most. I think it was codified somewhere in the constitution of our county that two percent of our GDP had to be spent on the defensive line. Defense wins state championships. 

At that time, the head football coach was the highest paid government employee in the whole county, and the defensive line coach was the second highest–of course, this was just base salary before all the kick-backs from the booster club. Our county was built around football, the American version with thousands of adults cheering on adolescent males on Friday nights (we only had one high school in the whole county, likely, many conjectured, so we could have the biggest possible talent pool for the football team). I have nothing against this version of football, and always enjoyed playing backyard football growing up, when my bones were pliable, but eventually after a dislocated elbow and broken collarbone, I was forced to take my talents to another supposedly safer sport.

But playing soccer in the South in those days was anything but safe; in fact, our rural Junior High Soccer League, with a meager four teams, was likely the final frontier for the worldwide game of soccer. 

The Mill Hill Team was by far the most primitive and had resorted to face paint, bandanas, and war chants as their main defensive strategy. They had one player who had failed the eighth grade twice who never could grasp the rules of the game. He seemed to think you scored points by how many opposing players you bowled over. Beating the Mill Hill Team was never in question, but surviving them was. 

The Peach Orchard Team was by far the best team in the league and made up mostly of children of hispanic farm workers. They were led by two outstanding players named Carlos and Paco, whose wizardry with the ball was wasted on most of the spectators watching our games, by which I mean bovines watching from the fenceline–The Peach Orchard Team’s home field was a rough and tumble hayfield bordered by a cow pasture. I sometimes wonder what happened to Carlos and Paco and hope they made it to bigger leagues, where human spectators were more appreciative of their considerable talents. 

The main rivalry in the league was between the Small Town Team (population 7,000) and Big City Team (population 9,000). As Captain of the Small Town Team, I can undoubtedly say that we weren’t very good. But that didn’t stop us from thinking otherwise. When our two teams collided (and I mean that more literally than figuratively) it felt as if the whole world was watching, even if the only people in the stands were our blood relations, most of whom would have rather been watching the other football. 

“Kick the ball hard,” was the general exhortation from the parental cheering section in those days, back before ritzy soccer parks full of millennial parents who could Google the rules of soccer and give more advanced encouragement. 

My soccer career peaked when I was recruited, as a high schooler, to referee local parks and rec games, which meant I was given a white T-shirt that said REFEREE on the back, a whistle, and ten dollars in cash after the games. Apparently, in those days, finding adults in a rural county who actually knew the rules of soccer was not easy–not that you needed to know the rules to referee three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Mostly, you just tied their shoes and pointed them in the right direction and tried to keep their parents from fist fighting in the stands. 

And that, in my opinion, is when the game of soccer peaked. Now the primitive innocence is gone. The three- and four-year-olds I see playing at the local park would run circles around my junior high team. Meanwhile, the parents are no longer invested in fist fighting in support of their offspring because they’re too busy tracking biometric data about their three-year-old’s performance. And the referees, well–they are full grown men, decked out in official referee attire, who take themselves too seriously and act as if they’re about to officiate a World Cup Game. Someone probably ought to knock them down a peg and tell them if they tried giving a red card to one of those bandana-wearing mill hill boys from my youth, they likely wouldn’t have made it out of the mill hill alive. 

But those were simpler times, back when Soccer in the South was basically the Wild West. 

sky sunset field sunrise

My Hill for the First Week of December

~ sanebishop ~ 8 Comments

I try to live and let live, but I draw the line on people who put sugar in grits. Just last week I learned that our new county 4-H agent practices that heretical approach to grit cooking, which makes me wonder how effective new-hire drug screenings are if they can’t detect someone who uses such a simple illicit substance as granular glucose in grits. Just think of all the farmers who worked hard to plant, tend, and defend that corn from earworms, all so she could later defile it by sweetening something that should always remain salty. A good helping of salt (enough to raise your blood pressure about twenty points) is the only other granular substance allowed in grits. The fact that a 4-H agent, who is entrusted with teaching our next generation of children practical life skills, doesn’t know how to cook a proper pot of grits is an alarming sign of just how far our country has fallen. In  her defense, she was raised above the Mason-Dixon line, where people have to doctor their inferior corn product, known as hominy, with sugar. 

Plus, I reckon I can’t be too hard on the new 4-H agent because I married into a family who puts milk in grits, which goes to show you that sometimes you have to make sacrifices in life. From what I’ve been able to piece together, at some point in the mid-1900s my in-laws succumbed to the teaching of that mid-century cult leader, Betty Crocker, who led many southern women astray with her heretical recipe for “creamy” grits. Indeed, the whole point of grits is that they’re gritty. That southerners could be so easily convinced that grits ought to be creamy likely goes a long way to explaining the modern-day phenomenon of our former president, a man who convinced a large number of Constitution-thumping southerners to defy the Constitution. The whole point of the Constitution is that we don’t attack the Capitol to try to hang the Vice-President, but I digress. 

The final thing I want to mention is that the hydrangeas in front of our house are breaking bud, and last week when we were returning from my parents’ house in South Carolina for Thanksgiving, I noticed some cherry trees were blooming, which brings me to my final flank of this blog post–trees shouldn’t be blooming in November and December. As the old saying goes, if you don’t stand for anything, you’ll fall for everything, so here is the hill I will stand on this week: Grits ought to be gritty (and salty), the Constitution ought to be protected (not attacked), and Christmas ought to be in winter (not spring). 

Thank you. I’ll get off of my soapbox now.

A Well-Built House

~ sanebishop ~ 8 Comments

If Energizer ever decides to rebrand, my three-year-old son should be in the running for the new mascot. His battery never depletes. It’s like the boy has a built-in alternator. The more he runs, climbs, and flips the more energy he generates. Eventually, once he finally figures out how to do a backflip off of the top of the couch, I reckon our house will implode. The fact that it is still standing is a testament to how well-built houses were back in 1897. 

Sometimes, when I see the slipshod McMansions that the developers are throwing up all around us, I wonder how many generations of children those houses could possibly withstand. My wife, who is up on family genealogy, tells me that twenty-one children have been raised in our old farmhouse in its 127 years of existence. That’s counting, Claude, who in 1898 died at age thirteen in our house from something called “flying rheumatism.” His mother had little time to grieve because the next day she was giving birth, also in our house, to another child, Burl. As tragic as Claude’s death was, I like to think that he got in some good running and jumping and effectively broke-in the floorboards for all the future pitter-patter. 

Back before we had Thomas, I used to take comfort in the fact our house has existed so long, especially whenever bad storms approached. The house had likely weathered worse storms and was still standing. Now that I’m a parent, the fact that it is still standing after twenty-one children is a more reassuring thought. Surely, at least one of those twenty-one children was wilder than Thomas. 

I’m not exactly sure where three-year-olds get their energy. It seems like Thomas is forever hungry and yet never stops long enough to eat. Mostly, he just plunders the cabinets for a good time, which makes me wonder what children did for fun back before they added on the kitchen to our house. It was added on in the early 1900s, so maybe they just scaled the walls of the outhouse for fun. Our house has had a lot of upgrades over the years, with each generation chipping in to make the floor plan more confusing. For our part, it seems like we’ve been re-siding the outside of the house for four years because, well, we have (part of the reasons old houses are so strong is because they’re armored in twelve layers of lead paint).

All I know is any house worthy of a mortgage at current interest rates ought to be well built, meaning it ought to be able to withstand a three-year-old, ideally generations of them. 

Pre-Painting

Musings on Market Day

~ sanebishop ~ 8 Comments

Market day is a downer. Sure, there are a few pigs I was glad to see go, but I don’t think I’ve ever been closer to disavowing bacon than on market day–well, maybe I have, there was that one time I checked my blood pressure after eating a half pack of bacon. 

Sometimes when I think about God, the best analogy I can think of is a farmer and a pig. A pig is a smart animal, but most farmers, current writer excluded, are exponentially smarter and somewhat omniscient (at least in terms of the pig’s day of reckoning) and generally benevolent (at least in terms of providing for the pig’s welfare). I suppose the analogy would branch from here, depending on your beliefs: If you’re a pantheist, the pig would dissolve into the ether of livermush–and so would the farmer. If you’re a Christian, in the end times, the farmer would return and call all the pigs home, which is basically a heavenly version of a pig pickin’. If you’re an atheist, then the farmer is just a figment of the pig’s imagination. 

I’m not sure which branch is more ludicrous. But the thing is, life itself is ludicrous. As far as we know, in the vastness of the vast universe, we are it. Somehow, on a rock floating in space, an amoeba sprang up to form a man capable of creating livermush and then using it in analogy about an abstract concept, called God, which may be a figment of his imagination. Sure, there is a lot of chatter about UFOs these days, but if aliens turn out to be pale, anemic-looking bipeds then something fishy is going on. Aliens that look anything similar to us just wouldn’t make sense. Given a completely different set of evolutionary conditions on some other planet, I would think if we did find a crashed flying saucer that was extraterrestrial in origin, it would be more likely to be piloted by a talking sponge than little gray men. 

I’m not sure how I went from pigs, to God, to aliens, but your mind goes to strange places on market day. All I know is I’m thankful for pigs and bacon and life itself, even if it is ridiculous. And I’m thankful that we live in a country where we can have ridiculous discussions and write ridiculous blog posts and think freely and eat bacon. And I’m thankful we live in a country where people can disavow bacon and join PETA if they so choose. And I’m thankful we live in a country where people can vote, whether it’s for a talking sponge or a little gray man. And I’m thankful I can live on a little farm and keep bees, the premise of which–a soft-bodied mammal keeping thousands of stinging insects–is ridiculous in and of itself. All said, I have a lot to be thankful for as I float along in this particular place on this particular rock in a vast universe of ridiculousness.

The Hot Wheels Industrial Complex

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

Many people these days are raising the alarm about Artificial Intelligence, but they are too late, as evidenced by the fact that Hot Wheels are now self-replicating. Everywhere I step is a new Hot Wheel that seems intent on my downfall. I can’t even get up in the middle of the night without fear that a Hot Wheel will ambush me en route to pee. As a fringe benefit, my employer offers an Accident Plan, a type of insurance that compensates you for fractures, dislocations, concussions, and lacerations. I used to wonder who would feel the need to purchase such a plan, on top of their regular health insurance, and then Thomas turned three and smuggled a Hot Wheel home from daycare. Ever since, Hot Wheels have been multiplying exponentially in our house, and I signed up for the High Option for the Accident Plan. 

For a three-year-old boy, Hot Wheels is a way of life. Thomas wakes up on Saturday mornings at 6:30, climbs into our bed, and pummels us back into wakefullness. “Can I watch Hot Wheels City?” he asks every Saturday. By this point in his short life, Thomas has probably seen Draven, the evil genius in Hot Wheels City, thwarted a thousand times by Chase and Elliot, the two claymation heroes who drive Hot Wheels to save the day, all while engaging in witty banter.

As a parent, I place blame squarely on the grandparents–as much as I try to prevent more contraband from entering the house, I think my mom sneaks in Hot Wheels inside her scratch-made five layer chocolate cake. It’s too good to resist, even if it does contain a metallic layer. These days, good ole-fashioned Hot Wheels are now a gateway to more expensive Hot Wheels Monster Trucks. It’s as if the whole Hot Wheels Industrial Complex is merely meant to dislocate grandparents from their money and parents from their shoulders. One of Thomas’s favorite Hot Wheels Monster Trucks is named Bone Shaker, an apt name if you happen to step on it in the middle of the night.

Thomas and his Monster Trucks