Phthursday Musings: Thank God We Have Limes

Over the last two months we’ve run through the spring soccer and baseball seasons, with a very strange four weeks in the middle where I seemed to keep getting sick. At times the schedule has been really intense, and at other times it’s been quite the opposite, as there were a couple of days I didn’t really much get out of bed.

I’ve been wanting to write more about these seasons, but I’ve felt like I didn’t have enough to say week over week, and now I feel like I might have too much to say. But I haven’t written much of anything lately so maybe I need to catch up?

Before I get too deep into things, I want you all to rest assured that your pleas have been heard:

Our U10 soccer team was the same as in the fall, the Cheeto Puffs, named after the outrageously bright orange jerseys. This was a really good team where every kid could play. It was a privilege to be able to coach them, and on game Saturdays it could be a real joy, and I thought I did pretty well with it. On practice Wednesdays, though, I often felt like a chump, not having well-thought-out drills ready to go. Intellectually I know this is the wrong way to think, but I felt exposed, like someone who shouldn’t have been coaching a soccer team.

In our penultimate game two Sundays ago, we didn’t have an experienced referee, and the dad or whomever it was from the other team who filled in wasn’t super up on the rules and my guys were frustrated over calls he missed. The way I think about it though, this is good for them as growing soccer players, because refs are going to miss calls and balls are going to hit crossbars and you can thoroughly outplay another team and still only come away with a draw.

After it was done and we shook hands, the ref came up to me and complimented me on the instructions I was giving from the sideline. He said he hadn’t heard anyone all year guide their team like that. And I have to say, I felt vindicated… if indeed one can feel vindicated relative to the criticism one lobbies at oneself!

This was my fifth year of coaching, my third year as head coach, and over that time, I have a deeper appreciation for the volunteer aspect of the whole thing. I didn’t really feel like I was living vicariously through these kids. I feel like people like me were putting real time and effort into facilitating this crazy sport for these crazy kids.

The flipside is that I haven’t coached baseball the last two years, and this year in particular… I really wish I had.

Our baseball team this year was the Tanks, I guess because that was the only tough darker green thing that anyone could think of. The previous year had been rough, but I had hopes that goofball’s age 10 year would go a lot better. And it did - he figured out the bat almost right away, and very rarely seemed overmatched by the pitcher.

I had to decide early on in the year though to be as chill as possible about the baseball games, because, right or wrong, I really wished I’d have been coaching that team instead. A lot of what has left me feeling exposed as a soccer coach, I feel quite the opposite about baseball. I constantly found myself wanting to give advice to the kids this spring, about their batting stance, about how to cover the bases, how to back up, to know not to take a called third strike, etc.

This may seem like a ridiculous claim but: Aside from a couple of software engineers who work for me, I don’t really know anybody between the ages of 20 and 28. I hardly know anybody between the ages of 15 and 35. My softball team, almost all north of 35. My co-workers, mostly north of 35. My various nephews and nieces, none of them north of 20. We’ve had almost no occasion to know any high school students any time recently. Generation Z is a black box to me. The only time I ever feel like I’m in the presence of Gen Z is if I pick the right time of day to go to the gym.

And so I think there’s this sense in my mind, not one I think of too actively but I think it’s there, that while maybe I’m irrelevant to Gen Z, I can have some sort of relevance to my kid’s generation, by coaching, by being an active parent, blah blah blah. I feel thoroughly isolated today from progressive politics, from most music being made by people in their 20s… it’s a weird way to put it, but soccer and baseball feel like the main ways I can stay connected with younger people.

Of course, there’s a particular younger person that this all applies to most. It’s been a strange experience being dad-as-coach, while also being dad-not-as-coach. I constantly want to teach and instruct and lecture and I constantly have to check myself. If they only knew that I only say about one-fifth of what I’m thinking…

I’ve been watching a lot more baseball lately, thanks largely to the MLB Network being added to Hulu, and there always being at least one random game on the MLB Network. This has been cool.

Meanwhile though I’m even more dissociated from politics. And so are you! And how could it be otherwise? It’s June of a presidential election year and wow it really doesn’t feel like it, does it?

Contrary to how we keep hearing about how polarized the country is, I think the reality is that the vast majority of adults are actually in broad agreement about the disconnect they feel from what’s going on. They might in turn have very different opinions about what that disconnect signifies, but there seems to be a strange unity in our shared resignation.

This, I think, pushes people toward finding other things to keep them engaged, and maybe that’s TikTok and maybe that’s meth and maybe that’s something else entirely. For me, I suppose it’s been more baseball, with some soccer thrown in.

I’ve been thinking about this lately and I don’t think it’s destined to last. I don’t think that six years from now I’m going to be taking my kid to five or six MLB games and seven or eight pro soccer matches a year. And this is okay, things can be cyclical. You’re only young twice, right?

One thing I’ve thought might fill that gap is food. I think about what I’ve been eating lately and it’s like the same four things over and over again. It’s like I’m my grandfather.

I keep having this notion that we’ll get back to regularly attending farmers markets, throwing garlic scapes in a stir fry, growing our own oregano… things that feel unlikely because we’ve fallen out of the habit, but which would be super logical things to do together. We used to regularly make stir fries with bell pepper, onion, garlic, frozen pierogies, spices, and… peaches. I insist that this was excellent and I am told I am outside my mind. (We can both be right.)

It’s nice to feel content, but I don’t like the thought that I’m overly set in my ways when it comes to something like food. Probably this is a thought I should just get over! But I have a sort of romantic notion of being more engaged with more interesting food selections. I think it’s the sort of thing that can easily get lost when kids get older, when work often runs later, when newer priorities like getting daily gym time emerge, and when it gets lost, it can get really lost.

I’m hoping though to at least get back in the farmers market swing this year. Last year we didn’t go to our village’s Saturday morning market at all. That’s silly!

The late great Karl Hendricks came up in conversation this week, prompting me to listen to the 2003 classic The Jerks Win Again. On the A/B scale, where A is how great someone is, and B is how well-known they are, it’s hard to imagine many others having a higher A/B score.

I actually copied in the video for “Thank God We Have Limes” many a Phthursday ago but that title has been emblazoned in my head for the last two days so I felt compelled to use it here. I’ll offer a different song from the album though and keep with the baseball theme:

You might find the lyrics a little jarring at first, but… they’re accurate. The song is about Bill “Spaceman” Lee, one of the most amazing characters in baseball history.

The picture of Karl above, he seems to be wearing a shirt which says OCHS. I don’t know why, but this led to the following confusing discovery:

In 2005, the Portland band Kind of Like Spitting released Learn: The Songs of Phil Ochs, which I kind of remember existing.

In 2020, the same band released Learn 2: The Songs of the Karl Hendricks Trio. I own this (digitally) as I bought it from Bandcamp a while ago.

Until tonight I had no idea about how all this comes together.

Anyway! Karl was both a great songwriter and a great guitarist and when at his best, his sound was about as perfect to my ears as it gets.

For numerous sensible reasons I don’t usually take photos while in public bathrooms, but last week the thought occurred to me:

Somebody actually thought it important to do this… WOW.

So here is a picture of the wall in the men’s room at the Mozart Park Fieldhouse:

Good night, ladies and germs.