Sports I've Tried

This week's Long and Short Reviews topic is "Sports I've tried, and what I thought of them."

The phrase can be read in different ways, typical of different countries.

Considering it first as an American, which I am: Yes, our public school curriculum forces all children to "try" playing all the "sports" we're supposed to be wavching so enthusiastically on television. Teaching anything in a no-choice public school system used to be a good way to turn kids against even things they enjoy doing for fun at home. 

I was a little undiagnosed celiac. The nature name I chose was Weepy Weed. I was short for my age, skinny for my height, not fast, not strong, and not able to see a ball being thrown to me. I invariably lost focus and ducked at the moment when I should have reached out to catch the ball. So naturally when "sports" games were being played I was about as popular as chickenpox. Even people who had claimed me as a friend before some sort of "sports" activity took place, and who claim me as a dear old friend now, said things I resented if some teacher insisted that, yes, I had to be in the game and so I had to be on their team. This was of course an incentive for me to be even more of a liability tot he team than nature intended. 

I coped, emotionally, by invoking the ideal of "ladyship" that was already disintegrating but that still existed in contemporary culture.  Sports? Ew, ick. Who wanted to run around and get sweaty, like a boy, chasing a silly little ball? Only boys and dogs could possibly be interested in anything so infantile. 

And in fact there were a lot of days when I didn't even enjoy walking in the woods I loved. Lying in bed all morning, mopping my runny nose, was cozy and pleasant. Getting up and feeling my arches fall was not pleasant. One of the tidbits I liked in Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies, which I read in grade two, was the poem the author said she wrote as a child: "Dearer to me than the evening star, a Packard car, a Hershey Bar, or a bride in her rich adorning, dearer than any of these by far, is to lie in bed in the morning" A few years later I also memorized A.E. Housman's "Yonder See the Morning Blink": "Often have I washed and dressed, and what's to show for all my pain? Let me lie in bed and rest. Ten thousand times I've done my best, and all's to do again." How can a child be so lazy? I was the Weepy Weed.

A large part of my parents' food budget was spent on vitamin pills. We raised our own fruits and vegetables, which wasn't bad, except for winter afternoons when Mother opened a jar of home-canned unsalted corn or beans and reheated them, still without salt, and plopped bowls of them in front of us as food. My brother and I used to disagree on which was nastier. While we ate the overcooked, flavorless husks of veg I'd maintain that the corn was more disgusting and he'd insist that the beans were. We weren't keen on potatoes either. But anyway we had those, and other fruit and vegetables, all organically grown at very little expense, so the money that was saved could be spent on these vitamin pills. Little suacers of pills were set on the table beside our bowls of fresh milk and wholegrain, unsweetened cereals with wheat germ on top. Later I learned for a medical fact that I would hae got more nutrition from the fruits and vegetables if  I'd been spared from eating both the vitamins and the cereal.

The year we had the junk store, and the parents wanted to pay only one electric bill and live in the store all winter, we used to watch neighbor children trudging to the grocery store at the corner to buy their "breakfasts" of pastries, chips, candy and soda pop. "That's why they're so much slower learners than you are," Mother would say. Another undiagnosed celiac, she was at this stage so medication-dependent that it would have been cruel to point out that, slower learners or not, they certainly didn't have as many colds as we had, and the ones in my classes were bigger and stronger and more athletic than I was. That was the year the "Physical Education" teachers required us to memorize the rules for various "sports," at all of which, I had a reputation to maintain, I totally stank. (My generation would be known for using another slang word to express the same concept, later, but at the time we still said "stank.") Football, soccer, hockey, official "track and field" running events, volleyball, basketball, shuffleboard, ping-pong, weight lifting, baseball, softball, kickball, dodgeball. I actually liked weight lifting but we didn't get to do much of it; the weight room was for people who'd been picked for official teams. There was a section of the curriculum on folk dancing, which I don't think my class actually did.There was a section for calisthenics, which also seemed ladylike enough for my image and sort of fun, and which didn't last long either; the main goal seemed to be to teach us a set of names for exercises that nobody uses any more. People now call those exercises by different names. 

During the final marking period we studied tennis and badminton. I was now in grade nine; we had tennis courts, and were allowed to bring rackets to school, though the school provided decent ones. To the surprise of the teachers and most of the class, I was competent at tennis. In youth, at least, I could see where the ball was in time to swing a racket at it. I'd been playing tennis in summer for years and actually did better at it than most of the class. 

My "attitude toward sports" hadn't changed. At one point in grade nine I was sent to talk to the guidance counsellor about the fact that I didn't run toward (a) moving objects or (b) other kids. 

"Don't you want your team to win?"

We had been told that we were going to be playing on the same teams all year--a plan I think the teachers reconsidered that week, when I simply didn't run forward. "My team is A, B, C, D, and E," I said. "I don't like any of those people," which was temporarily true, though D was the only one I'd actively disliked before "teams" had been assigned and the others had rolled their eyes. "If I can cause them to lose, all to the good. I hate these stupid games anyway."

"Don't you ever like playing games, at all?" the guidance counsellor asked.

"Maybe with a three-year-old, when I baby-sit. Because it's just something a little kid can do, and nobody's keeping score."

"Oh, because you can play better than a three-year-old?" the guidance counsellor said, scoring a point.

In fact I did not play ball games much better than a three-year-old. I only didn't mind that so much because the three-year-old was too young to notice. I knew what would happen to my proper position of seniority and leadership if I'd ever played basketball with my own brother. I let the guidance counsellor have her point.

It was part of my identity, in high school and college: I had never hit a ball with a bat. I had never shot a ball through a basket. Eventually I dated a fellow who enjoyed being an uncle and, in the name of entertaining his nieces and nephews and foster siblings, I ruined that record, but I was still the duffer whose scores any reasonably determined ten-year-old could beat. 

My school didn't have a swimming pool, which was fortunate for me because, obviously, Weepy Weeds don't swim. Polio survivors' children were taught, in the 1960s and 1970s, to stay the bleep away from pools because "swimming pools are where people get POOLio." One summer my brother, the neighbor child who grew up to be the Young Grouch, and I dammed the branch creek and built a pool big enough to swim two or three strokes in, three feet deep. We were allowed that much swimming--the three of us, and our baby sister--until some kids from the other side of the ridge saw us swimming. Much later I learned that, in our grandparents' time, that family had lost several lives to the epidemic diseases that were thinning the local population. They weren't bad kids, nobody ever said they were, and we were allowed to play with them sometimes, but the day they saw that our pool was swimmable, the adults in both families insisted that we break down the dam "to clear out the water." Nobody would say, but they must have been thinking, that those neighbor kids might be carrying Disease Germs. I know how to swim, in theory, but in practice I remember being encouraged to focus on the back stroke, the back float, cooling off and splashing about but not getting my face in the water.

I did, of course, have more energetic moods. Crazy teenaged energy, even. I remember putting one or two adolescent energy surges into tennis, but when you live on a real farm you don't waste much energy on silly little boys' games.

Which brings us to what the British often refer to as"sport," which has sometimes included all recreation (including gambling; cf. Gershwin's "Sportin' Life" character) or at least all recreation that involves physical activity.  From that sense of "sport" I felt less excluded, growing up. Sometimes, even as a Weepy Weed, I liked walking in the woods, gardening, bicycling. 

Running was a big fad in the 1980s. I never really got into it; by the time my celiac gene had flipped into a superpower, the fad had passed. When I was growing up, I think the critical rule was that it was unladylike to jiggle in public. Movement might cause a visible reaction of a kind people learned to accept in the cities, in the 1980s, but when I came back home the nicer sort of female relatives would hiss about with a horrified air, while others, apparently, just judged me. But socialization away from running started long before a girl had anything to jiggle, as I recall. By age ten I was aware of feeling an urge to run around the playground but, if I wasn't playing some sort of obvious game with other children, being aware that people were sure to wonder what was wrong, because big girls didn't just run without a good reason, so what was I afraid of? Who was chasing me? So when the fad for running came along, I remember girls and women who felt very liberated about running or jogging on city streets. Some of them were friends of mine. Personally, I still had weak arches. And C-cups. The objects labelled "sports bras" in the stores are actually compression bands, which a few of my generation used for purposes like playing male parts on the stage, and they totally do not work for C-cups. Supporting, rather than crushing and damaging, C-cups is a feat of wardrobe engineering few manufacturers seem willing to attempt these days. I still do move briskly on a job, sometimes briskly enough that people my age or older still say "Oh, you don't have to RUN!", but that battle was over by the time I gained the strength to enjoy walking thirty miles. I'll walk thirty miles whenever there's a reason to do that, but I don't run.

I've never been really horsey. This surprised everyone, including me, because adults wanted me to be horsey. Due to her own premature disability and falsely reported death, the rodeo queen known as Texas Ruby had managed to rear one daughter who wasn't horsey, who had married a man who failed to provide Texas Ruby's grandchildren a farm or ranch with horses. Mother tried to compensate. Most toys and storybooks bought for me involved horses. I was taken to visit horses, encouraged to hang out with them. Mother even had a friend who trusted her horse and her teenaged daughter enough to put me on a saddle, more or less on the teenager's lap, and let us ride. I grew up knowing that horses are lovable animals, and liking the horses I knew well, even riding and driving some of them. I also grew up knowing that horses' size makes them very expensive and somewhat dangerous animals to keep, and not loving them with enough passionate intensity ever to have made the commitment to keep one. 

I do enjoy walking, though, and any kind of job where I can get paid to exercise. I liked working at a hand car wash, in my twenties, and in the university furniture factory. I have really loved working on home renovation projects with any friends who have scraped up the money to invest; that was what one long-term friendship was all about, and where my relationship with the man known to cyberspace as my Significant Other started. I've built up some job skills that ought to be marketable, if anyone hired old ladies to do things like painting, replacing windows, replacing floors, installing tile, removing carpets, updating bathrooms, or partitioning rooms--which they don't. And most people in my part of the world are ridiculously ashamed of hiring the help they need when they need it, before situations get out of hand...I really like preventing little leaks, shaky floors, or animal messes from expanding into big ugly health hazards, as they will do. Routine dusting and scrubbing bores me--doesn't it everyone?--although I've been caught, and scolded for, cleaning up other people's messes just because I don't like leaving spilled coffee on a floor; but tearing into a real mess, pulling up carpet and pulling down wallpaper and replacing a whole room, is a fun job. (And, on my wretched Internet writer's income, readers may imagine how much fun I've been anticipating, for how many years, making my own home what it ought to be.) 

And, as an aunt...by the time Associated Content sold out to Yahoo, I was prepared to write the :family fun" pieces for Yahoo Sports, if Yahoo had been prepared to pay honestly. I wanted to be "a good sport" in the sense of the sort of aunt who's willing to go along with any reasonable idea The Nephews proposed for having fun--walking, bicycling, playing at playgrounds, swimming, even those games I hated in "physical education" classes at school. Most things are more fun in real life than they are at school. The younger generation dragged me to batting cages where, for a few coins, you can get a machine to pitch balls at you. I have, by now, hit a few balls. And sunk a few baskets. And even shot bullets into the rings on the target, as distinct from, say, a nearby tree. My astigmatism has not improved with age and I still dread having to buy specially ground glasses, but when nobody's worrying about which team wins the game, and people can appreciate the duffer who makes their scores look good, I now enjoy even those "sports" people who like television watch on television.