Soccer & Basketball

For going ahead to the next round, the World Cup group of death discussion this morning makes even less sense than Australian Rules football, which 30-odd years ago I watched endless evenings on television. My Oz associates seemed to take satisfaction in my never, ever “getting it.” So with World Cup soccer.

As for Suarez, whom along with the rest of the world I watched bite another child and was astonished not to immediately see a red card, I am reminded of two key rules in our HNES kindergarten classes: no biting, and don’t throw sand. How can Liverpool abide the boy? After the second incident you send him to the office and call his mom to come get him.

If he's to continue playing, he needs to go to the dentist and have all his teeth extracted. Is there a rule against gumming your opponent? How about sucking your thumb and pouting?

Thinking to dodge machine gun fire from the sprinkler nests, instead of walking down the front steps, I went out the back door and walked down Calhoun Avenue to W. Beach Drive to get the PCNH this morning. Lovely, peaceful though for the rest of my life I will be watching for bears anymore. Flashing navigation lights on the Bay, green stirring it all up and messing with me, pick up the paper, turn to return only to be blinded by a sudden flash of lightning. What? More lightning, claps of thunder, and pouring rain just as I walk inside and close the door. I haven’t checked the weather map to discover whether it’s a monstrosity or a small, angry cloud moving through.

Tuesday morning, Robert and I heard the thunder to the east and south of us, watched the cloud moving west, so instead of strolling through some part of our childhood, we walked around Cove School three times. Seems to me that Amy once told me three laps is a mile, so brisk thirty minutes walk followed by breakfast that overrides the benefits of the walk. We’ll see how the skies fare for today’s walk. Two late-septuagenarians trying to stay alive by remembering how it was. It all starts from the Center of the Universe at 205 Hamilton Avenue.

One of these mornings I’ll bring my keys so we can get in the P.E. office to borrow a basketball, and I’ll get some pics of Robert shooting baskets where he was our class athlete seventy years ago. Only Robert loved basketball so much that the teacher had to yell at him to leave the court and come in out of the rain. He was a star. I was a klutz. It’s still so. A tall, lanky kid, light on his feet, Robert played varsity basketball our years at Bay High. If I choose one mental picture of Robert in the 2014 - 1942 = 72 years we’ve been classmates, he’s leaping, a basketball just leaving his hands on the way to the hoop.

In our eighth grade class picture that now hangs in the entry hall of the Bill Lloyd Building, near the post over on the right, I’m the kid with the thick black hair. That’s Robert standing in front of me, the tall boy.