Soccer. Sounds Like Sucker.

Can 90% of the world's population be completely wrong?  Yes.  I'll give you an example:  Soccer.

Soccer is universally regarded as vital to life on this planet.  I don't know what's up with the human race, but they are dead wrong about soccer.  Humankind evolves to the point where we have opposable thumbs and we invent a game where it's illegal to use your hands?

Soccer is proof positive that, in many parts of the world, there is just nothing to do.  But what about here?  What parental instinct convinces people to spend their Saturday sitting in the blazing sun hoping their child kicks a ball through a net? 

I used to hear parents talking about how they have games and practices every night, yada yada yada.  And I'd think, in the back of my mind, that someday I would be in that position, much the same way you hear about sleepless babies before you have kids and assume you'll go through that at some point in the future.  I thought we would someday enter the realm of the initiated, sports-wise, and I would develop an extension of my personality that would enable me to yell things like, "Way to hustle!" and "Get it in!"

Not yet.  When I go to Freestone's soccer games, I feel the same way I would if I stumbled into the wrong classroom in college.  Fitness 101 as opposed to Art History Through the Twentieth Century.  These are not my people!  Soccer people have athletic-looking yellow labs wearing collars equipped with dual water bottles.  They come to games with folding chairs, umbrellas and 25-gallon water coolers in wagons.  They set up tiny nets along the sidelines so that their toddlers can practice kicking balls. 

Me?  I'm sitting on a sweater.  I found a half-empty bottle of water for Freestone, who is so red, he looks like a fluid IV would be more appropriate, and Ptolemy and Xanthe are playing with an ingenious toy I came up with from the car:  a McDonald's cup full of bobby pins and hair nets.  At some point during each game, I look around and ask myself, "What am I doing here?"  Freestone has three signature soccer moves:  picking grass on the sidelines, running behind the other kids, and standing there in a trance while the ball hits him in the shins.  It occurs to me that I may never be that parent who says, "We're so busy with soccer practice every night and games all over the state and football hasn't even started yet!"  When Freestone runs, he doesn't even clench his fists.  His hands flop as he forges ahead, even when the other kids have changed direction with the ball.  Free's a dreamer.  Granted, he is the youngest second grader on a second-third grade team, and may yet develop into a jock.  But it doesn't matter.

After this last game, Freestone was all smiles.  He ran up to me with his post-game Twinkie (seriously?) and said, "It's so hot, what if there was a portal to the beach and we went through it and we were like ahhh, the ocean!  Let's go get in! And we didn't even have to drive and all of a sudden we were playing in the water..."  I said, "Free, that would be so cool.  I wish there were.  I'd make my portal end up right in the sand, with water up to my ankles, and I'd run into the waves and splash you."  He looked off into the clear sky and said wistfully, "Yeah..."

I don't need to fit in on the sidelines at a little league game.  Freestone doesn't need to kick the ball.  As long as I'm invited into a magic portal to the beach with my perfect little dreamer boy, I know where to find bliss.  And isn't that the goal?