Loyal readers of this weblog will no doubt recall the childhood episode detailed in Haggling at Schulman’s. Executive Summary: I pitched a fit with my mom in order to avoid the street-cred-degradation that would have resulted from wearing a pair of “irregular” Pro Keds for Seventh Grade hoops at McNelis Catholic. Not my proudest moment growing up, but sometimes, frankly, the ends do justify the means.
Roughly 30 years after this incident, I am hustling into the gym at Stanford Middle School in the fall of 2002, having left work in RTP a little later than I had planned. It’s the first game for the Seventh Grade Boy’s Basketball team that season. The Chargers are running their layup line and, while walking up the steps to my seat, I peripherally notice that one of our players doesn’t have the same model of sneakers as all the others. As the focus sharpens, I am hit with the sinking realization that youngest son Chris is indeed the outlier. Expletives deleted.
Back story: Chris must of reminded me at least three or four times over the weeks leading up to the first game that the team would be wearing the same shoes this year – that he really needed to get out and buy a pair. I guess eventually he got tired of reminding me with no subsequent parental action being taken. Just Chep being Chep.
I used to think that fear was the most powerful emotion known to man. So many of the major cluster-you-know-whats in human history were, at their root, brought about by fear. Fear of the unknown or not-well-understood. Fear of folks with different skin colors or cultures. Fear of those with different political systems or religious beliefs. When fear enters the arena, all too often, judgment and rational reasoning exit stage left.
While fear may be #1 when it comes to powerful emotions, let me tell you sports fans, parental guilt can’t be running that far behind. It is one thing to have to sleep in the proverbial bed that you make for yourself based on decisions and actions for which you are responsible. Tis a whole other quantity and magnitude of angst when your screw-ups land on top of your kids’ heads. One could develop a whole set of blog posts around that theme.
Because Chris (even at the age of 13) had more class and grace in his little finger than his father has in his whole body, I got off easy that evening. There was no fit pitched after the game (like the one I pulled at Schulman’s) and none of the dreaded “I told you so”s were levied. No emotional outbursts of the sort that are so common at those early teen years – that magical phase when your kids really don’t even want to be seen in public with you.
Looking back, if he wanted to, Chris could have negotiated some really favorable modifications to the Will/Living Trust with the leverage he had on me – most certainly could have gotten better than a one-third share. I would have signed just about anything after that screw-up. Needless to say, this shoe fiasco was addressed before the next game (hell, it might have even been addressed that evening with a trip to the mall). Who says I am a slow learner? You just need to tell me something five or six times.
So what dredged all of this back up? In preparation for putting together a collection of baby picture scans for my firstborn’s recent wedding, I was sorting and digitizing this large box of pictures when I came across the team photo from that year. This was odd, since Chris has in his possession almost all of those photographs from school ball in Middle and High School days. Looking at the picture, it again dawned on me. Not only had the poor kid had to suffer through that first game with different sneakers – but my snafu had been memorialized for all time in the team photo. I’ll have another big slice of that guilt pie, thank you very much.
I have to believe that Joan (Maloney) Nedimyer had a good chuckle that evening in 2002 at my expense.
