You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Football on a pontoon boat!
“Hey dad, can we bring the football?”
Those are words I never thought I would hear on this Saturday morning.
“Football?”
I look at my 15-year-old son and his 3 friends.
They are adolescent powder kegs, full of snark and sarcasm.
“We’re going to the lake?,” I remind them.
“Yeah, so…”
I stare at them. They stare at me.
We are only 8 feet apart, but we are a Grand Canyon of common sense from each other.
“Can we?” His foot is patting the floor like an expectant father.
I am not sure if I am mad or just bewildered. It’s such an odd question, I have to ponder it.
The moment is uncomfortable as I prepare an answer.
I see each boy’s face in slow motion. An eye twitch from the tall one. A wipe of the nose from the pimple faced kid on the periphery. A hair toss for no reason from the 3rd teenager.
They are all staring at me as if this question at 8am will somehow make or break the next 10 hours on the lake.
As I stare at this motley crew of pimples and testosterone, I hear the whistling banditos in a graveyard of a Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western.
“Who brings a football to the lake?” I say buying time, gauging the moment and the relative importance of this moment to the over all construct of the day.
“Everyone,” he replies his eyes sharp, his snark focused like a teenage mutant assassin.
The boys are 15. There are four of them. There is only one of me.
I am out gunned.
Four 15 year olds have a slight edge when it comes to one old guy wearing flower print board shorts and Jesus sandals.
I stare at the teenage banditos.
They know I don’t know how to snap chat. They know I can’t recite Emminem lyrics. They know that I sometimes feel the urge to wear my socks up around my knees.
“You know that we are going to be on a pontoon boat, right? We are going to be on a pontoon boat on a lake!”
“Of course. That’s why we need the football,” comes the reply.
The answer is returned so fast, with so much sarcasm, I feel like I have just been slapped in the face with a white hanky and challenged to a duel.
“Who doesn’t play football on a boat,” comes a chirp from behind my son.
“We can play tackle, push each other into the water,” comes another outburst from a partially hidden sniper.
The boys are fast, stupid, bantering without thought or direction. They are laying down a verbal array of suppressing fire, keeping me off-balance, forcing me to take cover.
I realize this is a game of wits, a test of nerves, a parenting show down.
Kids vs Dad. Step in the cage. 5 men enter. One parent leaves.
“It’s a pontoon boat,” I say yet again, trying to paint a picture to these mutton chops of infantile existence. They listen to my words as if this is a verbal Rubic’s Cube. They look perplexed or disinterested, perhaps both.
“The boat is about 16 feet long, maybe 6 feet wide. It has a roof over half of it. You realize it’s not an aircraft carrier, right?”
I’m proud of myself. The aircraft carrier line is gold. That should shut the little snarky bastards up.
Nope, I’m wrong.
“Yeah, we know that,” my son says tossing the ball up in the air. “That’s what’s going to make this lake day so challenging. 2 hand touch, on a pontoon boat packed with coolers and old people. That’s how we roll.”
I want to laugh. The image of a football game on a boat with 14 people intrigues me.
The engine is one goal line. The slide the other. Knock an old woman into the bannister and get extra points.
I can see why their undeveloped minds are so intent on this mission.
It’s impossible, the moon landing of stupid.
Suddenly I hear John F. Kennedy in my living room espousing the impossible dream. “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”
I shake my head. I don’t have time for a 1960’s moon speech right now.
I stare at the boys. They are a shapeless form of arms and legs and boy sandals.
It’s a Mexican Hat Dance of blink / don’t blink.
They stare at me. I stare at them.
It’s a blinking contest.
It’s a moment that Ennio Morricone who composed the famous film score for the Good, the Bad, the Ugly would salivate over.
My two old eyes are wobbling, all ready feeling the pressure. It’s my 2 peepers against their 8 powerful x-ray vision eyes free of cataracts and spots.
The boys are a band of brothers who plan to “out-see” me and kick me in the ass with a 20/20 boot.
I am suddenly nervous. My eyes are creaky and old. They are the tin man in the wizard of Oz crying “Oil Can.”
My eyes are cob webs of dryness. I feel a Sahara desert of sand and wind wash over my vision.
I might as well plant a sign on my cornea that says “no camel spitting allowed.”
I stare at the boys. They stare at me. They are cool and feel no pain. They are 15, they can go all day without blinking.
I immediately realize I am out out-eye-balled.
I feel the moisture evaporating off my pupils like Apollo 13 re-entering the Earth’s Atmosphere. Tear ducts are thawing out after a 3 day trip around the moon.
I am losing, faltering, fighting to keep my stare on.
I hear the gun shot of old age whistle past my ear and I blink.
I have lost.
I keep my eyes closed, sealed tight.
The blink becomes a lock down of moisture regeneration. My eyeballs are applauding, thanking me, asking me what the hell I was thinking.
“You can’t out stare 8 eye balls all at once,” they say.
They’re right. What was I thinking. With eyes closed, I feel the luxurious rehydration. I listen to teenage snickering.
I have lost.
Why open my eyes now. I have been out-snarked by adolescent punks with good eyes and no life experience.
With my eyes closed, I feel like rolling over and going to sleep.
Would they even notice the old guy with the flowered shorts and sandals sleeping standing up?
I finally open my eyes, and focus on the Wild Bunch before me.
Sam Peckinpah couldn’t have crafted a more cantankerous crew.
The boys are not so much laughing as smirking.
It’s a 15-year-old smirk that just makes you wanna knock em in the heads.
Before I can respond, the boys bounce out the door and begin throwing the ball in the yard.
The door slams shut.
I am alone. It’s quiet.
I am a loser.
“Yes. Sure. Bring the ball, I say to an empty foyer.
I walk into the kitchen and admire my cooler.
Lose a battle of teenage eye blinking and go admire your cooler. How lame is that?
But here I am admiring a canister of stuff.
“It is a layered thing of beauty,” I muse to myself.
I put the bottled water on the bottom. I put the Gatorade on top of the bottled waters. I put hamburger patties on top of the Gatorade. I put the Beers on top of the Hamburger patties. I poured ice into the cooler, allowing the tiny cubes to fall between the cracks, filling every nook, every crannie.
It’s packed like an archaeological dig in Antarctica I think to myself.
I imagine finding a wooly mammoth tusk at the end of the day in the cooler.
I smile, knowing that I am smarter than 4 persnickety teenage rat bastards with no heart.
“We”ll see who throws a football on a pontoon boat,” I say to no one.
“we’ll just see.”
I close the cooler lid.
Wouldn’t want the ice to melt or the Wooly Mammoth to wake from his prehistoric slumber.
Life’s Crazy™