Phthursday Musings: Try Anything

Name a kind of place or event you went to as a kid, but that your kid hasn’t been to.

Now name the reverse: a place or event you’ve taken your kid, but that you didn’t go to when you were a kid.

This evening, I took the charming young lad to something I’d never been to before: a water polo match. Our local high school is hosting a mini-tournament, and I thought, this is a sport which is kind of like soccer in the pool, why wouldn’t he love this?

So we saw LT beat St. Rita 15-8:

Now, did he love it? I don’t know. I think he was intrigued, but it was requiring him to sit still and pay attention to something for longer than 82 seconds, and that was a pretty big ask.

But he went. And now when I mention water polo he’s seen it with his own eyes. When the 2024 Olympics roll around and we watch a random 17 minutes of action between Malta and Montenegro, he’ll have context. Maybe a seed has been planted. (Malta and Montenegro, you scoff… but I’ll have you know that Montenegro is ranked 2nd in the world, and Malta is in a tie for 19th, according to the FINA rankings.)

I want to experience a whole lot of different things, and I want him to experience a whole lot of different things, and maybe some of those things aren’t world-changing, but… you just never know what might resonate with a 9 year old. Or a 46 year old.

It was on the way to water polo that I thought to ask my mom the question at the top of Musings here: What did I do / Where did I go as a kid that he hasn’t done / gone?

She immediately answered, he hasn’t been to a women’s softball game. This is true. I was at a huge number, but he hasn’t been to any.

And then I thought, he hasn’t been to a dance recital. My sisters danced, I went to their annual recitals, he’s never been to one of those, or really anything quite like that.

When we got home and I asked my wife the question, the answer she came up with was a drive-in movie theater.

I’ve got an even crazier answer coming up below though.

In the spirit of trying things, immediately after the water polo match, we were at the grocery store, and he noticed the dragonfruit, but I pointed out it was expensive, and then we noticed something less expensive which we weren’t even really sure what it was, so we got it.

It is a pepino melon, from Ecuador:

Now, maybe, it wasn’t quite ripe enough, because this is the feedback the pepino got:

WIFE: [sniffs] Smells like potato. [chews] Tastes like tap water.

To be clear, she emphasized it tastes like city water, not just some other random water.

CHILD: [chews] I don’t taste anything.

But, eventually, he came around to declaring it to be like “non-flavored apples”, which is pretty close to my conclusion of a very, very mild pear flavor.

So again, maybe it just wasn’t ripe enough. One way or another though, we’ve tried a pepino. Something new! And hey, now you can go try a tap water tasting fruit for yourself.

When I was a kid, maybe around his age, and no I don’t think I’ve written about this before, and I’m not sure anyone besides my parents know this, and I’m not sure they remember or realize to what extent this was all true:

I had my own quasi-newspaper, written in spiral notebooks. I called it Rockford Jr. Journal, which was a play on the Rockford Journal, which was a weird local paper, maybe weekly, which I never saw anywhere at all, except that somehow it showed up at my grandparents’ laundromat, kind of like how random literature from the Jehovah’s Witnesses might show up today. It was a real newspaper though! I think.

And the main content of the Rockford Jr. Journal was sports, and to that end, I created my own leagues complete with standings like they might have appeared in a real newspaper. Now I get a little lost here because I think I may have done this multiple times and I may have had different sports in mind at different times, but what I remember is that the local team was called the Rockford Racines (why? I don’t know) and, I don’t know why, and I don’t know why I remember this, but one of the other teams was the St. Louis Pepinos, and apparently in 1985, the Racines and Pepinos met in the NLCS, but the Racines had a star cleanup hitter, so the Pepinos were doomed:

Now, there’s a whole lot we could potentially unpack here, just on this one page. I don’t think I’m going to try to get into all that tonight though. I’ll just say that it seems I’ve been writing periodicals for a privileged few for about 40 years…

Thinking through things I’d done but my kid hadn’t, I came up with the county fair. Now he’s been to carnivals, and that’s pretty close, but he’s never been to anything quite like a 4-H fair complete with prize-winning pigs and the like.

Then it hit me:

He’s never been to a farm.

Not that I ever spent a lot of time hanging out at farms, mind you. But I remember at least one school field trip to a working farm, I remember having occasion to be on small farms at other points in time, and then I moved out to Winnebago where there was literally a cornfield behind the house and a lot of people I went to school with lived on farms.

But he’s never so much as been on a single farm. I think an apple orchard with some farm animals on hand is the closest thing he’s experienced. He’s seen cows and horses in passing but hasn’t actually set foot anywhere near any such animal except at a zoo.

And so it occurs to me: what an unbelievable abstraction a farm must be to so many kids, even to so many adults, who have spent their entire lives in large cities. A children’s book with drawings of donkeys and chickens and barns must be as coherent as a children’s book with drawings of octopi and starfish claiming, hey, this is what the ocean is like!

And all this might seem blatantly obvious to some of you, but this really was an a-ha moment for me. I want him to have a well-rounded perspective on what the world is truly like and want him to encounter different people and different places and have all sorts of different experiences, and here he is having driven back and forth between Chicago and Rockford or Chicago and Peoria so many times, and he’s never actually set foot on a farm.

So this year, we’re going to have to do something about that one.

The theme here was intended to be some sort of exposition on how it’s good to have a lot of experiences. I think it may have trailed off somewhere along the line, probably when I discovered box scores I invented in the mid ‘80s.

I am curious though about how you all might answer the two questions I pose at the top. What’s different about the experiences you had versus what your kids have had - and does it challenge / encourage / inspire you to do more / different for your kids?