BLITHERING, BUMBLING, AND RAMBLING #22
A Victory to Savor
When I graduated from UOP, they had a football team. The old fashioned bowl stadium that was built on the south end of the campus had been around since 1950. I went to a bunch of games at the stadium, and my freshman year there, we had an All American player on the team, who was drafted into the NFL. 17 years after I graduated, UOP made the painful decision to end the football program. The stadium became used for the women’s soccer team until it fell into disrepair and was closed in 2012. In 2014, they started tearing it down.
It was slightly soul crushing to lose your old college football team. There is a yearning each fall season for those days, when everybody wore their college T shirt, when the marching band headed out playing across the grass (yes, real grass, the kind that required a lawnmower), when the Orange and Black colors of UOP Tigers stormed out onto the field. Gone. During football season, you pick a team to root for, and life goes on. At UOP, football season is quiet time.
Now, two of my brothers went to USC. A football powerhouse, a bowl game regular in the late season, with a H-U-G-E stadium to play in( built way before UOP ‘s, and still standing) It’s an NFL draft pick playground down there in Southern Cal. The players can be spotted from blocks away due to their enormous size. Their historical roster is legendary, and they don’t just win games, they crush opposition.
And that relates back to my football-less college because……
UOP BEAT USC!!!! Yes!! Take a breath and ponder that for a moment, because as of last week UOP, that’s right, the University of the Pacific, in lowly Stockton, California, BEAT USC!!! How you ask? How is that possible when UOP doesn’t even have a football team? Well, because it was…..the water polo team. Uh huh.
To be honest, up until now, I had never even known they have a water polo team. And I don’t know anything about water polo. In researching back, I found out this isn’t the first time the waterboys (water polo-ers?) have beaten SC. So, hey, it seems USC’S polo-ists/ waterguys/ whatever have been sunk (tee-hee) by UOP in years past. Who knew?
But now? Well I just have to work it into the conversation every time I talk to anyone from Southern California. Hey, I’ve been waiting since 1978 to say “UOP just beat USC, yeah again”. I’m seriously thinking of buying the T-shirt. Go Tigers! F-I-N-A-L-L-Y!
Because of UOP’s recent thrashing of the USC behemoths, there is a rumor circulating around that they are thinking about bringing back football. OK, yeah, it was me that started the rumor.
Red Letter Days
Remember the Letter Sweater? Ok, then, you’re a baby boomer generation and you remember when that was a thing. East Nicolaus High School had dark red for the guys. They were thick, and heavy. You wore them mostly on game days, or school events, because they weren’t practical for much else. If the temperature was over 50, you sweated, and when it rained, the things soaked up water like a wet rag and stuck to you. Mostly, when you were heading home you were probably carrying it, because you’d already been seen in it, which was the whole point.
Now, for some strange reason, on East Nicolaus sweaters, your first name was displayed on the right upper arm. In cursive. Non baby boomers have heard stories about cursive, but still wonder when confronting it. Here’s a good example why.
Since the name bands were attached around the upper arm, instead of lengthwise, the full lettering was not always fully visible to the person reading it, especially if you had a long name. Some people stuck with the long version and made the viewers guess. Others shortened it- Robert/Bob, William/ Bill, etc. I was ok with leaving my full name the way it was. But I got talked into shortening it by my mom and the guy at the store where we ordered it. Sooooo…….
When the sweater finally arrived my name had been reduced to Stu, in cursive. The letters were stitched in, and, as luck would have it, the seamstress made the last part after the u, curve up, so that it looked like Stw, unless you looked close. Really close. I got questions. Like, how do you pronounce that? Is that a symbol for something? What,uh, country are you from? For those who knew my name- Hey man, they left out the “e”. Nah.
Oddly enough, it didn’t bother me. The novelty wore off after a while, though it was a real conversation starter at times. Did I hang on to that letter sweater? Noooooooo. After high school, it went the way of the pet rock. Fondly remembered, but not coming back. Kind of like cursive. Both are still out there somewhere, just ask anybody from the Class of 74. How will you know if the person is Class of 74? Well, it’s on their sweater.
The Best Laid Plans
Many was the time when criminal conspiracies fell apart because of small overlooked details. Early in my career I went to a late night call of an auto theft. Two teenage guys who had been out at 4 a.m. in their parents car reported to me that their car was stolen. They went on to explain that they had run out of gas less than a mile from reaching home, and they had walked to a gas station to get some gas, rather than walk home, and when they returned it was gone. “Oh, really?” I asked.
They insisted that was what happened. How, I inquired , could the car be moved if it had no gas? Dunno, they answered, we were trying to figure that out, too. Uh huh. So I took the report, and drove them home to their parents. The parents also were skeptical. Especially since the kids hadn’t purchased any gas, but said the gas station was closed. Right.
A couple hours later, a theft was reported a block down from where the car theft had taken place. Some golf clubs and tools had been taken. Daylight arrived, which resulted in one of the neighbors awakening and looking outside his bedroom window. The bedroom window where a creek runs through. The neighbor was quite surprised to see the stolen car in the creek, it’s engine submerged in the water.
He called the police. It was about a hundred yards from where it had been reported stolen, but about 30 yards in from the street. There was an empty dirt lot between the creek and where the car had last been seen. Hmmmm. The neighbor who reported it said he hadn’t heard a noise all night and couldn’t understand how it got there so quietly.
Just as I was nearing the end of shift, one door down from where the car was in the creek, the guy who lived there walked out and found the stolen property from the golf club/tools theft. Almost as if someone returning from a theft had arrived at the scene and found their getaway car was missing, so they stashed the ill gotten goods and came up with a lame story. Not accusing, just saying.
Back to the homes of the two teenagers, whose bleary-eyed parents were getting to wonder just how deep a hole the kids were in. It was after explaining to the parents what we knew (somebody forgot to set the brake and the car rolled in the creek because it was a down hill incline, and the gas tank was half full) and what we suspected (the thieves were one door down from the car, and stashed the property because….ahhh, dude, where’s my car!), that both sets of parents glared at their kids with looks that generated enough heat to scorch the earth.
Both kids blurted out full confessions, each claiming it was the other’s idea to steal, each claiming that the other was supposed to set the brake on the car. ‘’Oh, really?” I said.
Apron Strings the Size of Ropes-
When my first daughter was born I was the most overprotective father on the block. I was raised in a family of all boys, bringing up a girl seemed like something that required a drastically different approach because I wanted her to be the sweet little angelic darling that me and my brothers weren’t.
Worse, if anyone wanted to hold her when she was in my arms, they had to be family, or a doctor, because nobody else was gonna get me to let go. So when people asked, or offered to hold her, if they didn’t meet my criteria, the answer was always no.
I was home during the day, when my wife was working. So Kari was with me all day on my days off. We had a routine, and it started with a stop at JD’s coffee shop. Since I had been a regular for years, a new routine was starting. I knew the owners, John and Diane, and all the employees. They crowded around the first time I brought Kari in.
Each time after that, if they weren’t with a customer, they’d scurry to open the front door for me. They offered, but never pressured, to hold her for me. I held strong, not allowing it, as they doted on her, spoke to her, smiled and gave her things to hold and touch to pass the time. They had kids of their own, and fondly reminisced about theirs.
One day, nearly six months later, as I was walking in, holding Kari in my arms, John and Diane came around the counter and spoke to her. Kari reached out with both arms and leaned towards them, smiling and making soft sounds. They asked if they could hold her. I gave in. They were thrilled, Kari stared into their eyes as they talked softly beside her. This went on for several minutes because there were only a couple of customers at the time, so the one of the employees came around to be with her too.
After that, it was pretty straight forward. When we went in, they opened the door for us when they could. And yeah, they held Kari, took her behind the counter to show her the baked goods, and showed me how a sourdough roll made a great pacifier. Whenever I drove by JD’s when Kari was in the car, she would point at it and make sounds. Word spread fast to my co-workers that I had finally lowered my guard a little.
A few days later a couple of my co-workers asked if now, maybe I could let them hold Kari, since she was almost walking and they had heard the rumors I was softening.
“Sometime, maybe”, I said. “Well, when ?” they asked. So I replied “When you open the door to the coffee shop for us, and she’s excited to see you”. They seemed perplexed by the requirements.