Playing Ball

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Today we met Stella for lunch at her local park. While my version of a picnic lunch tends to be cold Happy Meals and a melted soda, she surpassed all expectations with a cooler full of chicken, grapes, cheese, orange juice, sunchips, Ritz crackers, sliced carrots and those mini cigarette bread sticks with spreadable Cheesewise.

Let's not forget the 1976 thermos with coffee for me, replete with lowfat milk (much appreciated for the car ride home.)

Before ya'll are ready to bestow the "Great Grandma of the Year Award", let me state that she loses out due to the Twinkie infraction. As in she introduced those to Stink somewhere between the final bites of chicken and the merry go round.

Did he like them? Does a rabbit like carrots? He ate...inhaled... two spongey confections, totaling 876 calories.

Luckily we burned some energy by running around the track afterwards.

It was fun to see my kids dashing down the path, hand in hand. Who knew there was so much to see on a dirt road: birds tweeting ("Where is their Mama? Someone call Diego!")... Exercize bars ("These are slides! Let's ride them!")... Flowers to be picked (translation: old dandelions and weeds)

Stink wore a brand new Mets baseball shirt from one of my thrift store days. I'm sorry... I don't know Mets from Dodgers, but the bright orange and purple lettering gave my little dude such a varsity feel. He must have had a premonition, because the track let up on a shiny baseball field.

If the freshly mowed dirt lines weren't enough to say, "Run around and leave your foot prints!" the crisp ball in the catcher's pen sealed the deal. (Catcher's pen? Is that a word? Um, I'm married to a computer geek... can I use that for an excuse? I'm too tired to look up the right word... can I use "lazy ass" for an excuse?)

Even though Stink and Pip used the ball to play soccer, the whole scene brought to mind much of what I've been experiencing lately. Call it lack of Zoloft, or just plain getting older, but I've been hit with personal insight lately. For example, like these photos:

* Sometimes, similar to this huge field, you go through this daunting world alone - running aimlessly, kicking up dust
* Other times you have someone to play with
* Sometimes someone coaches you
* Sometimes you let someone take care of you (such as lunch today)
* But in the end, like my little Pip, despite falls and bruises, you just have to laugh

With this in mind, like my goal to get a magazine gig by this past September (which happened!) I'm planning on narrowing in on my non-mothering life purpose (which will fill both my spiritual and financial need) by June. My kids will both be in summer school, and with 6 hours/week to myself, I can go full steam ahead.

Meanwhile, somewhere between my proposed life advice column on Ebay, thrift store shopping, regular Ebaying, magazine querying and tv script writing there's a perfect gig for me. Which I, no one else, will execute.

Because, going back to the baseball analogy, it's fun to play the game, but rather than wait for a coach to ask you to be part of the team, isn't it better to be the owner? Then, even if you're old, a terrible hitter, and have a Shrek sized ass that has to be greased (perhaps by Twinkie filling) into the team uniform, no one is going to fault you for getting out there and having fun. After all, you're paying their bills, not the other way around.

People, what are your dreams? Let's think outside the ball box, shall we?