Shoelaces for Josie

As people living the lives we’re given, change is something that becomes our close walking companion. We get new jobs, we pursue new careers, we date, we marry, we have families, we move across town, across the state, across the country, we exchange vehicles, we buy new clothes, more stuff, an extra grill and a refurbished lawnmower to replace the old one that didn’t have any brakes.

Even for those of us who don’t make big outwardly changes – those who stay in the same job and the same house for 50 years – the insides of ourselves are constantly changing. Our thoughts, our views, our emotions, our opinions – they are always changing, even when we don’t notice it.

And often we don’t notice it, not these inside changes. Not until we wake up one day, and we realize we aren’t the same person as we were yesterday. It seems sudden to us. It seems like an orange tossed across the plate after a thousand pitches made with a regular baseball. We watch the orange whoosh by, and we’re called for a strike because we were too busy being baffled by the presence of an orange in the game of baseball to think about swinging the bat.

But in reality, inside changes have been going on the whole time. Gradually shaping us and morphing us into the person who wakes up and wonders where the orange came from. Even if we can see the orange coming, it still takes time to adjust, because really, how do you deal with an orange in baseball?

Inside changes are difficult, because we can’t see them. We can’t run numbers or take a picture of inside changes the way we can of a new house or a reinstalled toilet seat. But we can feel them. We can feel it when something pops up inside that wasn’t there before, and we can feel it when something withers away and dies. A new way of being, all from something we can’t see.

“You can’t blame football,” he told his son.

And you can’t. It’s tempting to question and wonder how things might have been different had this fellow not played football, if he’d been one step faster or played a different position. It’s tempting to wish he’d been into the clarinet or the cribbage club instead of playing a high-contact sport like football. But he could have just as easily been hit by a car in the crosswalk on his way home from his weekly musical jam session.

You can’t blame football. You just can’t.

And we can’t “blame football” for everything else that goes on in our days, weeks, months, years. The truth is, life happens. We have little control over some of the biggest things, and I can hardly fathom how the world looks from the point of view of a person who doesn’t believe in God. It can get pretty scary-looking from this side; I can’t imagine what it would look like if I didn’t believe in God.

What’s the alternative if we do start “blaming football” for all the bad things that happen? Murders and wars, diseases and death, rape and assault. The alternative is that you become afraid. You become afraid to live, to feel, to be the person you’re supposed to be. Life is full of risk, but sitting on the couch isn’t any way to approach it.

Because of the significant increase in the number of miles I’m covering, I’ve decided it’s time to upgrade the running shoes. They’ve put in five years of good service, and it’s time to retire them to the stinky shoe bin. So I was doing some research online about how to choose the correct running shoe as I start The.Perfect.Shoe hunt. *I’ve decided The.Perfect.Shoe is necessary for three reasons: 1) My legs are pissed off at me for the severe beatings I gave them for six years. They are now demanding I take care of them. The nerve. 2) Every day I get older, I realize I’m not younger. It would be so cool to still have knees at 60. 3) I am a woman.*

And my research online said it’s important to know if you have flat feet, normal feet or high-arched feet. The best way to tell? Yep, a wet foot test. You take your wet foot, slap it on a piece of paper and then look at the imprint. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

It took me 10 minutes to find a piece of paper that wasn’t a Victoria’s Secret catalog or my eight bank statements I haven’t opened. Actually I looked for five minutes and got frustrated. Then, with my brilliant brain, thought that substituting a shirt would be the same difference as a piece of paper. Wrong. The imprint looked like I had hobbit feet. I wasn’t willing to accept that, so I looked another five minutes before I finally found yellow tablet paper.

So I brought my yellow paper down the hall to the bathroom, and as I leaned over to set my pieces of paper on the floor, my just-washed hair dripped all over them. I flipped my head back to keep my precious pieces of paper as dry as possible, lost my balance, tripped over my mud boots and nearly fell to me bum.

The bottom of the shower was still wet, but since I’d never taken a wet foot test before, I wasn’t sure just how wet my foot needed to be. I had one shot; I didn’t have any more paper. So I thought I’d best make sure my foot was wet all over. Just in case that’s what it needed to be. I flipped the shower on to a trickle, poised on one leg and stuck my right foot into the stream before promptly losing my balance. Balance that I regained by lunging for the shower faucet that I happened to be hanging onto, effectively turning the trickle of water into a wooshing torrent that drenched my whole leg.

With a foot that most certainly was adequately moisturized, I hopped and dripped my way across the bathroom floor to the paper and plopped it down square. I lifted my foot, hopped back to the shower and poked my left foot in for the same treatment. After picking it up from the second sheet of yellow paper, I peered sharply down. I shifted around. I squatted next to my imprints and finally picked them up and held the papers up to the light.

For crap’s sake. You couldn’t tell where the wet imprint stopped and the dry part began! It kind of – well – maybe…there? Like, a little, just at that part, possibly down around here…

As I was snapping photos of the teams rolling through, one team got significantly more chatty than the rest. Whether that was the beer (the only good part about golf) or my sparkling personality bringing the aforementioned chattiness to the surface, I’m not entirely sure.

There were three guys – one of them did not have a first name and it was later suggested he steal a first name from one of the other members who had two. (You know the type: Steve Paul or Dan John…donate one of your names, man. Kind of like donating your liver only completely not.) And the other two were obviously friends, because one of them came up to me to talk and the other says, “Holy wow, I think her legs might actually be whiter than yours.”

We argue about it for awhile, and then stick our legs out side by side for judging.

And on that list was, of course, the movie Field of Dreams. Nothing like a good ole Iowa corn farmer who hears voices, builds an expensive baseball field in the middle of nowhere and then waits for the ghosts of an old World Series baseball team to show up.

I’ve seen it. I am from Iowa after all, give me a little bit of credit. But tonight I concluded that Field of Dreams is a farce. It lies. It gives an incorrect picture. I’m suing Universal for false advertisement.

So this guy builds his baseball field because he’s heard voices tell him “to build it and they will come”. And then he sits there and he waits. And then his baseball ghosts show up, and everything is happy and pretty and fuzzy. That is not how life works.

In life, you may hear some voice telling you to build it and they will come. Dreams, goals, careers, relationships – could be related to anything this figurative building and they will come business. And let’s say you do decide to go ahead and build it. This is where the false advertisement comes in.

How long does Ray wait in the Field of Dreams? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Let me tell ya honey, it’s not 30 minutes in real life. Try 30 days, 30 weeks, 30 years and then we might be getting closer to the truth. And at the end of the wait, it’s not always necessarily what you thought it was going to be. Building it might bring you a different ending than you expected. It’s not automatically going to be happy and pretty and fuzzy.

Yes, I know it’s a movie. Yes, I’m making an analogy. Basically I’m just using Field of Dreams to say in a roundabout way that life sometimes sucks. But you know what? It’s better than the alternative, and sometimes you just gotta let things go and live in the moment.

And since I started this with Nick, I’ll end it with him too. This was something he often said. I see it every day I go to work, and it’s about time I start living it every minute of every day. I may be building figurative baseball fields the rest of my life and maybe I’ll never see them fulfilled like I’d like them to be, but I think the building and the waiting and the journeying – that’s where the best of life happens anyway.

So I could talk about the Super Bowl, but I’d rather not because everything happened just like I said it would. The Steelers won, but I rooted for the Cardinals because a) they were the underdogs but even more importantly b) I had an ex who loved the Steelers. He was a real dick so I hate them on principle now. But even so, I still had to watch in amazement as that big dude lumbered the length of the field for a touchdown before passing out in the endzone. Some people aren’t built for sprinting – he’s one of them.

Or maybe I could talk about this morning when I finally watched Catch Me if You Can. I surprised myself. I actually liked the movie. A lot. I’d never seen it, because the opportunity never arose and I always thought it looked stupid – even though I’d never actually read a review or the back of the case. I think it was because it had what’s-his-nuts in it…Titanic Man. I don’t like Titanic Man. He’s just not my favorite actor of all-time. He’s not even my favorite actor of short-time. But the moral of the story is that I liked this movie despite Titanic Man.

What else can I say? Today was a Sunday, and Sundays…Sundays are a day that have a little less sun to them than I’d like. I’ve tried ordering up an extra-heavy dollop of sun on Sundays, even going so far as to order a side of sun on my Sundays, but the waiter is still busting his buns in the back trying to put that order together.

In fact, I’m watching UCLA right now. The hype around Kevin Love isn’t complete bunk. The kid is good.

But not even my great love for sports has helped me get over something I really don’t like: mascots. Mascots make me nervous, and I really don’t like them. Something about humans dressed in a suit with an overly large head just sets me on edge.

Example: while on the sidelines of a football game, the mascot came up behind me. I knew he was there. I just tried to ignore the tall, big-headed beast, but apparently the mascot thought I hadn’t seen him so he was following me and waiting for me to turn around so he could scare me.

You know, they say that sometimes when you’re immersed in your fear, it helps you get over it. Not the case with me and my odd mascot complex. Having him two inches from me for an extended period of time did nothing but increase my uneasiness. I plan on doing as much as possible to put the largest amount of space between me and people dressed in costumes with creepy large heads.