Soccer

Jack's playing soccer; today was his second Saturday of it. The game was better than last week, in that today Jack actually ran after the ball some of the time. I'm thinking next week might be when he actually kicks the thing.

I'm an assistant coach, which basically means I need to try and act like my son isn't the only and the most important kid on the field. Obviously that's not completely possible. I swear that I have an actual memory of little league baseball in which my Dad was, for one game, the umpire at home plate. And I was slid home on a close play and he called me safe. And I'm pretty sure that I was safe, but that must have been a tough moment for him. Should he call me safe if I'm out so as not to devastate his young son? Should he call me out if I'm safe so as not to appear to have any favoritism? And by the way, I never swung at the ball in I think two years of little league, so if Jack doesn't kick the ball next week, I'm not going to give him too much grief.

Anyway, I'm not an umpire, I'm an assistant coach, and we don't actually keep score (although I guarantee every adult in attendance knew it was 4-4 when it ended, and would have been 8-4, us, if Teddy ever kicked the ball with his left foot). But the difficult part of the games, as I anticipated, was Jack tends to follow me around, because I'm his Dad, rather than run after the ball, and only listen to me as The Coach. And it was pretty bad the first week and pretty bad at times this week. And then at one point he was actually into it and in the vicinity of the ball near the goal, and somebody on his own team tripped him, presumably by accident but it's hard to be sure, and there were tears and all that. And I wanted to give him this line that Alfred gives Bruce Wayne from Batman Begins, saying "Why do we fall, Master Bruce?" And then: "So we learn to pick ourselves up." But I don't think it would have got through the tears, and plus Jack would have asked some completely unrelated question about Batman: "How does Batman FLY? Does he have wings? Is he a bad guy?"

The important thing is that I had no idea what it would be like to be standing on a soccer field surrounded by a group of swarming, yelling kids, some of them trying to get the ball, some of them trying to get away from the ball, some of them running off in search of their parents, some clinging to their parents on the sideline. I didn't know what it would be like to be angry at a little kid who tripped my son, or to be secretly pleased when he got tripped up later, even as I was over there trying to cheer him up (not, I might add, by discussing karma with him). It's just weird, as Emily just reminds me even as I write this, how quickly you can go from one life where you're just aimlessly walking through it to standing on a soccer field at 9:45 on a Saturday morning wearing a bright green shirt with a whistle around your neck. Watching your son and hoping to God he runs in the vicinity of the ball again (There he goes!) and doesn't end up doing a faceplant into the grass this time.

Jack actually does quite well with the ball in our yard, or in the pre-game practices. He runs up and kicks it, then kicks it again. He actually dribbles it. And, he's into it. He does it like it's the most natural thing in the world. I'm laughing and clapping and saying Wow, Jack, and he's just like, sure, Dad, whatever.

I can't say for sure if it will ever happen in a game, next week or a month from now. But I guess I'll keep going back to find out.