The last couple weeks of my life have been consumed with work, church, work, church, and a little snow in between. Not a lot of variety. But today I am very excited because I have a meeting with the Yankee Fan Club in a few hours (at Olive Garden no less!). I have been trying to become an official member of this club for years, so this is a big day! It’s actually our first meeting. The club used to be just two members, so they didn’t need official meetings, but now that there are three of us, we need meetings. The club consists of my best friend Julie, her brother Tom, and me.
But to really understand the significance of this event, I need to start the story many years ago, in a neighborhood far, far away (about five miles west of my current home):
In the early 80’s, in the prime of my childhood, I was living in a white stuccoed (I don’t think that is how you spell it) house in the Rainbow Lakes addition (the OLD one, if you are familiar with the newer additions) of west Wichita. My only sibling had already graduated from high school and was long gone from the family homestead. With no one at my house to play with, I ended up spending most of my time across the street at Julie’s house. These were the good old days, when all the parents in the neighborhood went to work full time and left us kids home alone every day in the summer. I spent most of days playing with Julie, her older sister Susy, and their younger brother Tommy. We had some great times! One of our favorite activites was to play school. Susy, Julie and I would be the teachers (we each had our own subject to teach) and Tom would be the student. We used to make him read sections out the encyclopedia and then we wrote quiz questions that he had to answer. Then sometimes we made him to do our old math home work. We saved our worksheets from the school year and would erase the answers and save them for him to do. It was super fun! Each day would begin with the negotiations. We (the girls) would announce that we were playing school and Tommy would try to negotiate. This is how negotiations typically went:
Tommy: I’ll only play school if we do recess first
The girls: No way. You always quit after recess!
Tommy: I promise I won’t quit (this is a lie)
The girls: No. We’re doing math, reading, spelling, then recess.
Tommy: How about recess, then math, reading, and spelling?
The girls: No. How about math, reading, recess, then spelling?
Tommy: No. I’ll do math, then recess. And I want macaroni for lunch. And I’ll only do it if we can play tennis ball at recess (explaining that game is a whole different story!)
We usually considered ourselves successful if we could get him to stick around for one subject. He always quit after recess, so the whole point of negotiations was to move recess back as far as we could. I guess he didn’t think school was as fun as we did. He didn’t really understand how lucky he was. Most 8 year old boys didn’t get to spend the summer playing with three 10 and 11 year old girls every day. Soon after that, he joined junior golf and started golfing every day. We missed him because school wasn’t nearly as fun with no students and just three teachers.
Another activity that we used to fill our time was trading baseball cards. None of us were really big baseball fans (Tommy might
have been if we had ever allowed him control of the TV, but fortunately that never happened. We had Days of Our Lives to watch). But we started collecting baseball cards from our babysitting adventures. We used to babysit some of the little boys in the neighborhood and they always wanted to trade baseball cards, but they were terrible traders. They only wanted lots of cards, regardless of the value of each card. So we started buying them too, just so we could trade with them and get some good cards. We would always explain what we were doing (“okay, you’re giving me this really great Reggie Jackson card and I’m giving you these 10 cards that are worthless, you understand that right?”), but they didn’t care. We were able to build up a nice collection very quickly off these kids. We also used to make up baseball card rules (we liked making up rules, particularly rules for Tommy), like there was a rule that everyone had to pick one favorite player to collect. Julie picked Dave Winfield (I forget why) and I picked Reggie Jackson, because his birthday was the same day as mine. So we sort of became Yankee fans by default, I guess. We continued collecting baseball cards into our high school years. I still have my collection.
So fast forward to the most recent decade. Julie started a tradition where she would purchase tickets to watch the Yankees play the Royals in Kansas City every summer and she and Tom and sometimes one of her kids or her husband would go. I complained that I was never invited and Julie reminded me that I hated baseball (sports in general). But I continued to complain and explained that I wanted to go just because it would be fun to hang out with her and her brother. So one year I finally was invited to go. It was not a very exciting game, and apparently I complained a lot and did not act like a true Yankee fan, so I was uninvited from any future trips. I was devastated. On one hand, I was totally bored at the game, but I always like to hang out with Julie and Tom so I wanted to keep being invited. (on a side note…..I don’t get to hang out with Tom much because I think he associates me with the torture he thinks he suffered as a child….it goes back to the whole playing school stuff I mentioned….and many monopoly games where he lost every time…..and the time Julie and I made him be our pimp for our Halloween…..)
Julie told me I had to earn my way back into the fan club, and prove that I was a true Yankees fan. So I bought a Yankee t-shirt. She thought that was a good first step, but wasn’t really convinced. So I thought about it and thought about it and finally figured out what I could do. I bought Yankee checks. I wrote Julie and Tom each a $1.00 check as membership into their club and mailed them to their homes. They still weren’t totally convinced, but decided that I was crazy enough that they might give me another chance. That was two years ago (and I’m still using Yankee checks). Last year I didn’t get invited to the game because they didn’t go because Tom had to watch a Married With Children marathon that day (we know that’s not the real story, but Tom won’t tell us the real reason…..it’s like he doesn’t trust us or something).
Now we get to 2007. This year Julie and her family have decided to take a family vacation to the east coast, including a stop in New York City to see a Yankee game. Tom and I are going to fly out there to meet them and attend the game. The whole vacation is revolving around the Yankee tickets, which go on sale next week. Julie is taking the day off work to purchase them first thing the morning they go on sale. So the meeting today is actually to figure which game we are going to try to get tickets to (as for me, I could really care less who they play, I just want to go to hang out with Julie and Tom). Julie and I have some great things planned for the lunch, but we can’t tell Tom or would skip it in a heartbeat. I’ll have to write more about that later.
On another, totally unrelated subject, last night I had a dream that I was late to church (like 45 minutes late) and when I got there Paul had already dismissed the kids (which is a problem because I am supposed to be teaching tonight). I went back to the room where the kids are and there were about 5 or 6 teenagers teaching them, only the teenagers were about 250 pounds, 6 feet tall, and were wearing garbage bags over the heads (as were all the kids). It was a little scary, so I’m gonna try to be on time for church tonight.
The photos: these are photos from marching band in highschool when Julie and I dressed up like hookers and we made Tom be our pimp. The top photo is Julie and I playing clarinets in our sweatshirts and mini skirts. The bottom photo is Tom playing the drums with his sunglasses on.
Last night we had a fire in our condos (watch the video for my live action coverage!). My next door neighbor, a elderly woman, called me around 11:00 pm because she thought she smelled something burning upstairs. I went over to check it out and sure enough, there was the slightest smell of smoke. I checked all over her condo and couldn't find anything and finally ventured out back to look and noticed that it was coming from the condo on the other side of her (we live in a 4 plex.....like a duplex but with four units). We went out front at the same time the neighbor came out saying her house was on fire. We called 911 and within minutes we had probably 8 or 10 fire trucks roaring down the street. I ran back inside my condo to get Abbey and grab my cat, which I quickly locked in my car to keep him from running away. My condo and my next door neighbors condo were not damaged, but we had to prop our doors open to clear the smoke out. My neighbor had bad enough smoke damage that she has to stay away fo
r a few days, but Abbey and I just have a lingering smoke smell and have been keeping the doors open as much as possible to clear it.
