fun in threes, sometimes fours
the girl
L wanted new furniture in her room. Truth be told, she’d outgrown a lot of what she already had, so it was a need rather than a want — surprising, I know.
So Saturday, the Girl and the Boy hopped into the van (we still haven’t sold it) one last time and headed to their favorite Sweedish store.
L's club coach sent an email to everyone this afternoon before the evening's practice. One passage really stood out:
Quite a few of our fellow Excell coaches sang the praises of your girls at the tournament this past weekend mentioning how far they have come already, how much better they are getting in skill, game knowledge, teamwork, and in some of the ‘intangibles’ they as athletes have to develop on their own. This is a direct result of how hard they have worked so far and how much they have wanted to learn.
That outsiders (so to speak -- they coach for the same club but different teams and often only see our girls playing at tournaments) see the change in our girls' team is very encouraging.
Today was a story told in two scores:
Our first match was against a team from our own club. They were the premier team -- the best, in theory, of our club's players.
We lost the first set 18-25. We'd been up by about five but lost the momentum and the set. We started out the same in the second set, and we managed to hold them off to the end.
The girls were completely ecstatic. Such joy. Third set -- the momentum was, theoretically, theirs. And then they decided not to play but instead to go out on the street, pick ten random girls, throw some jerseys on them, and ask them to play. That's what it seemed like, anyway, for the other team won trounced them in final set 15-2.
That's okay -- we were still in it. We headed over to play a second match of the day against another team who'd also lost their first match. It should have been a match. It was, instead, more of the same:
They lost the first two sets by ridiculous amounts. Eye-popping differences in the score. It was if they'd reverted to their very first time batting the ball around.
The coach's view: "We've got to get you girls to where you can play two days!"
The Girl has been fighting a sinus and ear infection for some time now; K has now come down with something as well. As such, they’ve amassed quite a little medicine collection: antibiotics, probiotics, decongestants, cough suppressants from the pharmacological side of things; oils, teas, syrups, and nose irrigators from the holistic side of things.
It’s all covered, literally and figuratively.
The Boy has grown crazy about Pokemon lately. He decided he wanted to buy a deck for himself and another for L using his final Christmas gift money.
“She’s going to teach me how to battle for real!” he declared. The way he’s been playing has been, shall we say, improvisational. The Girl knows how to play; she promised to teach him.
At $20 a deck, it’s quite the investment. I was hesitant to let him go through with it, but two things stopped me: first, it is, after all, his money. He needs to learn how to spend it wisely, so I gave advice, made suggestions, but in the end left it up to him. Second, I thought that if this gave them something to do together, just the two of them, it would be worth more than that $40 for the two decks. So we bought them while we were out today.
At first, he was terribly upset because we couldn’t find the decks. When we found them, there was only one. “But we checked on the computer and they said they had them!” he wailed, about to have a little panic attack there in the toy section. “They lied!” I tried to explain to him that just because they found them on the Walmart site doesn’t mean they have them in that particular store. I pulled up the site on my phone and showed him. In the end, though, he took the disappointment rather well.
As we were checking out, though, he decided to look in the checkout aisles. “They have them there, sometimes.” Sure enough, after we’d checked out, he found some, so we grabbed them and went to the nearest checkout, which was a self-checkout. Which I don’t like. Why should the store get free labor from me? Still, if the other checkouts all have long lines, I’ll go ahead to the self-checkout.
The gentleman in front of us was a prime illustration of the slow South. He picked up each item, turned it about in his hand to confirm where the bar code was, scanned it, placed it in a bag, took the individual bag with one item to his buggy, placed it carefully in the buggy, moving other bags as necessary to get everything just so, then repeated it. He looked to be in his mid-fifties so I couldn’t salve my impatience thinking, “Well, here’s this sweet old man, still clinging to his independence…” Of course, I really don’t know the guy’s story — there are any number of reasons why he moved so very slowly and deliberately. But it’s symptomatic of what I see as a slow Southern mentality. Don’t rush. For anything.
When the light turns green at an intersection, for example, most drivers don’t respond immediately. They wait, even to take their foot off the brake. Sometimes two or three seconds. Sometimes five. Sometimes ten. They creep into the intersection and take what seems like an eternity to get up to the speed limit, and there’s no guarantee they’ll even get to the speed limit: they often drive five, even ten miles an hour below it.
Anyway…
After dinner, the instruction began. And the first game didn’t go so well.
“Go easy on him!” I mouthed to L when she wasn’t looking.
“I did!” she mouthed in reply.
I spent about four hours working on end-of-the-quarter grades today. When lunch rolled around, I didn’t even have 1,000 steps. By the time shopping and dinner was over, I had just over 5,000.
“After I put the Boy to bed,” I said to Clover, “we’re going on a long walk.”
And then the rain started again.
The call came in at 3:30, when I had fifteen minutes left of my day. Kids were milling about, waiting for their parents to pick them up or to head off to after-school. I looked at my phone to see that it was from Nowy Sacz. I thought perhaps it could be Babcia, perhaps Wojek D. It was, however, neither of them. Instead, it was Pani M, my former landlady in Lipnica and the closest I'd had to a Polish mother until I actually got one (-in-law).
She'd called to thank us for the Christmas card we'd sent, which the family had received only this week. We got to talking for a while, and she asked about the family.
"L looks like she's getting very tall," she said.
"She's taller than her mother now," I said. We'd learned that when she went to the doctor this week. Five feet eight inches -- one inch taller than K.
"How tall?" she asked. Knowing imperial measurements would be meaningless to Pani M, I Googled it quickly.
"172," I replied.
"Oh, that is tall."
In the evening, I was standing across from L as K helped her prepare her nightly medicine regimen, and I realized I was looking straight ahead as I looked right into her eyes. Straight ahead. We were only about five feet apart. And it hit me: we're almost there physically. That little bundle of pink that we could hold in a single arm thirteen years ago is now almost fully physically grown.
I reworked a few photos from our Grand Canyon trip. This is one of my favorites.
The girls had been putzing around. Sure, they'd won a couple of matches, and they'd lost one to a team that seemed to them, I'm sure, unbeatable. Still, even on the games they'd won, they'd made a bunch of silly mistakes. It just so happened that the other team made more. They played like beginners.
Not today.
This morning, they played their first game of the day, and it was business as usual. A few balls fell in the middle of two or three players because of a lack of communication and initiative. They flubbed a number of serves. They knocked some received serves off at angles that would have left Euclid scratching his head. They played like beginners. Still.
Then came time for their second match, and from the moment the other team began warming up, I began worrying. They were hitting very well, and digging those hits effectively. Their serves were sharp.
"Starting match 2," I texted K. "Gonna be a tough one."
They came out and transformed into a group of girls who knew what they were doing, who could dig hits like never before, hit like never before, block like never before -- in short, play like never before.
"They have never played this well," I texted.
They took the first game 25-21; they lost the second game 21-25. The third game (to 15 only) they were up 11-8 and then slipped up and let the other team tie it. The coach called a time out. Immediately afterward, the opponents scored two more. They only had two more points to score; our girls had to score double that. Coach called another timeout.
L went up to serve. One down. Two down. Three. Four -- they'd won!
I can't remember I've seen nine girls (one girl, unfortunately, went home sick earlier in the day) so very happy.
That win put them in the semifinals, where they faced a team of roughly the same strength as the one they'd just defeated. I thought, "We can do this -- we can make it to the finals." But unfortunately, the girls had just run out of gas by that time. They started making some of their old silly mistakes again. They were just worn out, and L, who's been battling a cold all week, confided in me on the way home, "I felt like I was going to throw up that whole last game."
"And yet you stuck it out, for the team."
"Yeah, I guess." A typical L reply.
So what did they learn this weekend? I think the coach put it best: "You girls learned how to win." That's easier said than done: it takes a lot of confidence to face a team you think will beat you and stare them down, then beat them down. And when things are falling apart, it takes a lot to keep pushing, even when the loss starts to look inevitable.
L, for her weekend of effort, got to sleep the whole way home, got freshly made rosół for dinner, and a 7:15 self-imposed bedtime.
In two weeks, we do it again...
The Girl had her first tournament today in Rock Hill. They struggled in the certification tournament (which wasn't really a tournament but a chance for the girls to practice their officiating skills as they are line judges, scorekeepers, libero trackers, and down refs for other teams' games), but they showed they'd learned something in the meantime. They finished second in their age bracket and will pick up tomorrow from there.
The tournament's location was just across from the cemetery where Papa's parents and brothers are buried. The last time we went there, a little over seven years ago, I walked over to the fence and took some photos of the abandoned textile mills across the street. Most of that was torn down for the facility that hosted today's tournament, but a little remained.
https://matchingtracksuits.com/2012/08/03/downtown-rock-hill-part-2
This is the backseat of our van. The backseat that held our children during trips here and there: to school, Nana’s and Papa’s, to Florida, to the beach, to the mountains, to soccer, to dance, to gymnastics, to basketball, to parties, to funerals, to church, to friends’ homes, to parks, to my school, to K’s office, to the airport, and always back home.
I’ll bet there was a time I would have been sentimental about the thought of selling this thing, but not now. Let it haul someone else’s kids somewhere else.
"I for one will be glad to see 2019 behind us." That seems like a common sentiment, and it's one a number of people hold every year: I'm sure millions said a year ago, "I for one will be glad to see 2018 behind us."
I don't see the logic in that thinking. It's not as if a given year has some kind of sentience and will, bestowing wonderful gifts on those it loves and extracting horrific costs from those it doesn't. A year is a year -- a completely arbitrary thing.
Still, 2019 was a tough year for our family in a lot of ways.
It began with the passing of our loved Bida -- the old, ornery rescue cat that chose to stay with us for over a decade. She put up with two kids whose love, when they were little, was more like an assault than affection. She stood up to our silly dog and made Clover realize that among the pets, she was the boss. In the end, it was I, the one who said he hated her, to stayed with her to the end. It was late, and everyone else went to bed.
A couple of days later, a dear friend died from cancer. We were fortunate enough to be able to visit with him just about two or three days before he passed. "You've always been such a fighter," K assured him. "Well, this fight's over," he said, and I could tell that his wife took that hard, though she knew it well enough herself and had probably heard it multiple times. He seemed to realize that his time was very near: he'd been calling old friends for what turned out to be one last conversation, and we were very touched that he specifically wanted us to come by for a visit.
But these two events, tragic though they were, both occurred within the context of an even more personally brutal loss: the year began with Nana in rehab and ends with her out of our daily lives altogether. If someone asked me at the start of the year what I foresaw in 2019, I would have talked about the long process of rehabilitation that awaited Nana, about the stress all that would put on the family, about how it would undoubtedly bring us closer, about my hope for a return to some semblance of normalcy with perhaps Nana in a wheelchair or still largely confined to bed but still with us. I wouldn't have thought we would leave the decade without her.
Yet there were bright moments throughout the year. The renovation of our carport completed, Nana and Papa moved in, and Papa remains here still. It's good to know he's in a safe place, that he's near, that we can take care of him. Nana was here with us only a week: perhaps that assurance that Papa was safe was the last thing holding her back.
The Girl blossomed as a volleyball player. She was a starter on her school team, which went undefeated for the season and won the final championship tournament as well. It's a passion that's lasted several years now, longer than dance or gymnastics ever did.
A mixed year overall.
