On Balls and Walls

Okay-- so, this story is sort of dependent on THIS STORY RIGHT HERE, in which the other soccer moms and I tortured Squish's coach with some innuendo involving white and blue balls.

Well, this this weekend was Squish's soccer banquet, and because Soccer Mom 2 is EXTREMELY brave and industrious and creative, it was a rousing success--at her house.

At the end, the coach got his coach gift, which is traditionally a framed picture of the coach and the team.

This time, Soccer Moms 1 & 2 went above and beyond-- they gave him a book of photo-illustrated "coachisms".  For example, one of his favorite coachisms this year was "Suck it up, Cupcake!"   So they took pictures of the girls pretending to eat a drawn cupcake-- and the page that said, "Suck it up, Cupcake!" had those pictures next to that coachism.

The idea was AWESOME, because, as I've said before, the coach has lots of energy and spends a lot of that energy making the kids love soccer.

So, one of the coachisms was "You can't eat fast food! I never eat fast food!" And that prompted the Soccer Moms and I to gather our fast food wrappers from our cars (there was an embarrassing amount of them, even though we'd all just cleaned our cars out) and stack them next to his truck, so it looked like they'd all fallen out of his door or had been thrown into the bed. He had a good laugh at that-- "Aw, you guys trashed my truck!!!"  -- and the only forgivable thing was that he hadn't known we'd done that so we'd cleaned up really good.

And another one of the coachisms was, "Where's my white ball?"

And of course the other soccer moms and I had a good laugh over that. And Soccer Mom 1 told me, "Oh yeah. It was pretty funny-- I told him why you'd be a ball expert and he was MORTIFIED. He turned bright red and changed the subject and he could barely speak. It was hilarious."

Heh heh heh...

I am so socially awkward. It really doesn't behoove me to have an in-joke because people, I will USE that shit.

I went to the coach and said, "So you know, I promise not to use you in my books. Ever."

At first he played along-- "Soccer Mom 1, she just told me I'm going to be in her book!"

"No I didn't!"

"She said she's going to put me in the book because you told me too!"

"No-no-no!!"

And he laughed his ass off, because I was so earnest and she play fights very well.  But after things quieted down a little, I said, seriously, "No-- I really don't make people I know into love interests-- it just gets weird, so you have no worries."  (Those of you who have asked for Darrin's story in Candy Man already know this.)

He said, "Uh... well, uh..."

And then I pulled up the cover of Winter Ball.  "And you should know that this book was written almost a year ago, a long time before I even knew you and your assistant coach, so this is not about you in the least."

"Oh God. Is that really a book about soccer?"

"Yeah. But I promise you're not in it."

"Good. Uh... that's great to know."

"And honestly, I've already used your name-- it was about four years ago, and he was a stock broker, and if it makes you feel better, he was very butch."

And at this point he turned to Soccer Mom 2's wall --which had once been an avocado green and was now in the process of being painted a nice granite gray.

And he said, "That's a really ugly wall. Why would you paint a wall that color? I mean... green. That's a horrible color. Gross."

And Mate (who had been cracking up the entire time) said, "Yeah-- that's the color of 70's appliances. That's horrible."

And Soccer Mom 2 and I met eyes and laughed and she said, "If you think the wall is bad, you should have seen the carpet."

And I was dying. I've never seen anybody change a subject that fast.

So I hope he gets to be Squish's coach next year. He was awesome, he had Squish running and feeling good about her improvement, and he noticed that she was really really smart--and that is always something wonderful.

And the girls love him.

And, at least once in the season, I'll get a chance to make a crack about balls.