You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
14 year old boys.
I am on a soccer trip with sixteen 14 year old boys, their parents, and assorted siblings.
We’ve weathered 8 frosty hours of of competitive soccer and it’s time to relax for the evening.
The adults want to go to a steak house near the hotel. It’s called Coltons and it promises home cooking and steaks cooked to perfection. Yeah whatever. Truth in advertising, right?
I don’t care. All I know is Coltons is across the parking lot and we can walk.
Walk? You bet.
Many of us are sick of driving. We drove 3 hours from Nashville Friday night. We narrowly avoided a shut down of the interstate. We got up at 8 am and drove to fields far away. We drove to lunch then we drove back to the fields for more games. Now we have driven back to the hotel.
Drive Drive Drive. Being a soccer dad is like being a long haul truck driver.
Enough all ready. The short walk across the parking lot seems just right.
“Coltons sucks!” comes the fervent cry from a contingent of pimply faced confederates.
Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a small, vocal group of soccer kids turns the tables on rational, forcing a vote on dinner destinations.
Like Washington D.C. lobbyists, they make their case, fillibustering, supplying eye witness accounts and personal testimony. Their theorm: Even the steaks at Coltons are bad and it calls itself a Steak House.
Wow. heady arguement.
Cheddar Cheese they say is the place to be.
“An upscale Appleby’s,” they report.
Parents roll their eyes. An upscale Applebys? Like that’s making anyone’s mouth water.
But this group of 5 foot tall lawyers in the making will not be deterred. They have successfully argued their case. Suddenly grown ups are gathering keys and heading to cars.
WTF?
How did that happen. We all were so excited to just walk a hundred yards and sit down. Now we’re driving again.
“We just let a bunch of kids steam roll over us,” a fellow soccer dad laughs.
The teenagers we have in the back snicker.
Cheddar Cheese is in a strip mall in a rather pedestrian part of Elizabethton, Kentucky. It is cement accentuated by dieing landscaping.
The decor is a cross between Applebees and O’Charly’s.
We enter the lobby. There is a 30 minute wait as some parents are trying to reserve a table of 15.
Yeah good luck with that.
We reserve several four tops and head for the bar for an adult beverage.
We tell stories and laugh at the Cheddar Cheese decor which is a desultory array of coon skin caps and license plates.
Basketball is on every flat screen over the bar.
We rehash the days’ two games. We speak of how we destroyed the first team. We ruminate about literally fighting the 2nd team, a squad a year older and at least one socioeconomic class below us.
I fondly nick named one acerbic tongued mother of that crew “section 8 housing” for her ghetto rants about bad calls and the refs obvious favoritism toward our boys.
We talk about one red card and 2 yellow cards in that game. It was a constant shoving match littered with angry F bombs. That’s a first for me in boy’s soccer.
Finally our pagers buzz and four of us dads sit in a booth.
Right next to us, our sons pile into a 2nd booth. First 4 kids, then 4 more. It’s like shoving a second pair of high heels into a container it was not designed for. Suddenly it is a table full of hyjinx and hormones.
But like any compression chamber throttling on high, something has to blow.
And it soon does as the table begins rocking, and drinks spill on the surface. The noise is ferocious. Diners are looking from every direction.
I pretend not to know them. I care, but I sort of don’t. I have been a baby sitter for 24 straight hours and now, well now, I am enjoying my 16 ounce beer. I am going to let 14 year old boys be the responsibility of our pony tail wearing waiter with the neon colored tie.
The boys are good boys. They are full of energy and they are rambunctious and they like to shoot spit wads. They are boys.
This is not church and they are not quiet.
But they are also well mannered and full of yes sir and no sir. Pony tail waiter will later tell us that the boys were very polite. We snicker saying that he just wants a tip on top of his automatic tip, which I give him by the way.
All of a sudden, I see the big kid on the inside of the booth, push the kid next to him. Like dominoes, I see the next kid bump into the next kid. And suddenly the little guy on the end, explodes off the bench.
Like a champagne cork, he explodes out of the seat and onto the floor.
FLOP.
He is lying in the middle of the restaurant floor, spread eagle. The booth of boys erupts like an acne faced Mt Vesuvius.
The little guy on the floor is chortling, snorting, laughing so hard.
Waiters step around him as if kids explode out of booths all the time.
The tumultuous ruckus makes the million man march seem quiet.
Diners stare at the boy on the floor. Is he dead? Is he having a seizure? Who the hell knows.
None of us even respond. We don’t care. No harm no foul.
“What kind of parents let their children act this way.”
You can see it in the eyes of the other diners.
I sip my beer and take it all in.
It’s awesome. I know it will make a good story. It sure has made a great moment.
The boys are a team. They are cohesive on the pitch and friends off of it.
The little guy jumps up and sits back down on the bench. They snicker and say crazy stuff like 14 year old boys will do.
We dads drink our beers and smile. We know these are the best days, the days we will one day miss.
We secretly hope the boys will grow up one day and look back fondly on these days on the road, days when we won championships, days when we caused a ruckus at silly chain restaurants named Cheddar Cheese.
And that is crazy.™