What, Me Worry?

The only thing worse than a worrier is a worrier with a vivid imagination, which would be me.  I have dealt with big and little worries, everyday and special occasion worries, realistic and off-the-wall crazy worries – my imagination enhances each and every one.  This post is nowhere close to all-inclusive but it will give you an idea of what I mean.

As a kid, my major worrying started when my mom drove to the post office or the delicatessen or the S & H Green Stamp store and left the three of us outside in the car.  Yes, in the 50’s, even good parents did that.  I visualized the emergency brake failing and the car rolling downhill, building up speed,  racing past stores, houses and pedestrians, and finally crashing into a bus or

a gigantic brick wall somewhere.  I always sat very still to avoid joggling the car’s brakes; but, naturally, the other brainless occupants of the car were oblivious to this dangerous situation and bounced around in the back seat, heedless of impending doom.  I did also have serious worrying attacks the two times I rode on the Wild Mouse roller coaster at Coney Island which obviously was ready to jump its tracks and plunge to the ground at any second, but a discussion of amusement park rides needs to wait for a future post. 

As an adult, I have had plenty to worry about on vacations because, when you travel with a person like Paul, most of your trips don’t involve relaxing in a beach chair, dozing by the fireside in a ski lodge or driving through the National Parks.  At the beach, I visualize either a sailboat cruise ending in a capsized boat and one or both of us getting conked on the head by the mast or a snorkel trip ending with my fin trapped in a coral reef, my snorkel tube bitten through by a moray eel and me disappearing in a cascade of bubbles like Lloyd Bridges on “Sea Hunt.”  On ski trips, I worry about riding on a chairlift whose cable would snap, hurling me into the middle of a double black diamond ski run or being sideswiped by a zoned out snowboarder or careening out of control into trees or off a cliff, even though David and John say they can ski backwards faster than I ski forward.  On our trips out

West I worried about falling off a horse, being swept away crossing a stream, or waking up during the night with a bear in the tree just outside our tent which, when it actually happened, didn’t cause me to lose any sleep at all.  Anyway, I'm not exactly in a rush for those vacations to end but I always sleep easier once the mask and snorkel are rinsed out for the last time, the rental skis are returned, and the hiking boots are packed up.

Of course, having kids opens up many vistas, including vast expanses of worry.   Many of these worries involve wondering if all your efforts at parenting will result in a well adjusted adult child who enjoys your company or if your efforts will make you the subject of a book, a movie and panel discussions on “Oprah” and “The View” about how not to raise children.  I think we are in the first category (or if we’re in the second category, I haven’t found out yet) but a lot of it is just plain good luck.

In addition to the ordinary kid worries, I also had some extraordinary ones. As 11-year-olds, David and John

each spent a month abroad with Children’s International Summer Village.  The experience gave them the opportunity to meet kids from many other countries, to learn about other cultures and to have an adventure without parents hovering in the background.  The experience gave me the opportunity for some pretty creative worrying.  I must say, I didn’t really worry that much about David when he went to Italy. After all, what was to worry about with your kid in the country that invented pizza, chianti and tiramisu.  His group leader, a fifth grade teacher, was a seasoned traveler and so thorough on details that she even asked our permission for the kids to have wine if their host families offered it.  Paul, the perfect laid-back parent, replied, “Sure, David can have wine. In fact, he can do anything except drugs and sex and if he has to choose one of those, I’d rather it be sex.”

When John was chosen to go to an exotic place like Honduras with a leader barely out of college, it was a different story.  My imagination went kind of crazy, fueled by the list of don’ts from the travel medicine doctor and the list of potential side effects on the malaria pills he prescribed for John.   We didn’t get any reassuring phone calls or letters (that was before e-mail, texting, and twittering were invented) so I worried for the entire month. My stomach was in such an uproar that I lost about 5 pounds which shows there is an up side to everything.

John loved his trip and brought home souvenirs like a Jordanian flag, a Mexican sombrero and a machete as long as his leg plus wonderful memories.   When I heard about all of his adventures, however, I did a lot of

post-trip worrying.  He ate most of the items on the “do not eat” list including fried fish, tails and all, from an outdoor stand.  (He didn’t eat the only truly safe thing, bananas, because he inherited the banana-haters gene on chromosome 14 from me.)  After he told me they had gone swimming in a river, I kept watching him for those little worms that skitter across your eyeballs until I remembered they’re from Africa.  When he spent the weekend with a local family, he was impressed by the armed guard at their gate and the brick wall topped with broken glass and wire that surrounded their property.  He talked a lot about those cool, crossed belts that hold bullets (bandilleros?), worn by the guards with machine guns in the luxury hotel lobbies.

Being over 50 brings a new set of worries about getting older.  Is this twinge in my knee the start of arthritis, a wake up call for a knee replacement or just an excuse to put off housework and major exercise for awhile? YES!!  Are there enough hours in the day for me to consume all the vitamins and anti oxidants and flavonoids and calcium and other healthy stuff  I’m supposed to need in order to live to be 400? Is the opthalmologist telling me the truth when he says I'm not going blind when I see those little floaters in my left eye? Am I losing it if I find the phone in the refrigerator and put on deodorant probably three or four times each morning because I keep forgetting if I’ve already done it?

My worrying isn’t totally over now that my kids are adults, although I am getting better.  I was a little concerned about the riots and airport closures in Thailand a few weeks before David and Megan were scheduled to travel there; but my mom took over worrying about that trip so I was off the hook.  I thought I

was going to have a sleepless June when John decided to spend most of the month traveling around Europe alone, but, after he left, I felt pretty calm and didn’t email him warnings about terrorists in Berlin, gypsy cabs in Barcelona or bedbugs everywhere.  (Well, maybe I gave one teensy weensy little warning about bedbugs.)  And as for worrying about Willem . . . I’ll leave that to David and Megan.

The Wide World of Sports

My mom was very athletic while she was growing up – she rode horses, played field hockey, swam competitively and did synchronized swimming. At the end of her senior year in high school, she received the “All-Around Girl” award for athletics, academics and leadership.  She still swims laps several times a week and, in recent years, has tried canoeing, catamaran sailing, speed boating, kayaking and probably a dozen other things she doesn't want us to know about.

As a kid, I never came close to following in her footsteps where athletics were concerned although I did learn a few things about survival from high school gym classes and GAA. First, if you serve really fast in volleyball, the element of surprise may give you a slight chance of scoring.  Second, during a basketball

game when you have the ball and can’t dribble because you’re surrounded by about 25 bigger, taller girls, you might have a chance to escape by shouting, “Wait,” but that only works once or twice a game.  Third, no matter how many layers of towel strips and rubber banded plastic bags you wear under your swim cap, you’re going to leave the pool with wet hair.  Finally, you can’t get away with just ironing the collar and the front of a gym suit if your junior high gym teacher did her student teaching in the prison from “Cool Hand Luke.”

Somehow, I did find a semi-athletic place for myself as a cheerleader. Today, cheerleaders are really impressive gymnasts who do flips and get tossed into the air.  Luckily for me, in the 60’s, you mostly had to be decorative and yell loudly; and you never got far off the ground.  The biggest challenge was doing a cartwheel and the splits which were requirements for cheerleading try-outs every spring.  Now, doing a cartwheel would probably put me into physical therapy for six months and I can’t even visualize what the splits look like any more. 

We did have to learn a repertoire of cheers that were complicated and required a lot of practice.   After dark, the picture window in our living room became a huge mirror so I thought it was a great place to practice.  My dad wasn’t as supportive as he might have been.   He cut off my practice time one evening after I executed some particularly good jumps. “Cheese and crackers!” (or something that sounded a lot like that), he yelled. “If you keep that up, you’ll go right through the floor and wind up in the basement.”  I had to move my practice sessions to a department store dressing room. The mirrors were perfect, but I didn’t realize how narrow the space was until I hit the wall doing wide arm circles and almost broke my finger.  Well, one can’t really excel at athletics without overcoming some obstacles.

Anyway, I enjoyed cheerleading all through high school even though, like most everyone I know who grew up in the 60’s, there were no parents watching from the sidelines.  By the time we had kids, the rules for parents had changed.  I still miss certain things about having young children at home – snuggling up on the couch to read, holding little hands, watching them while they sleep.  I don’t exactly miss changing diapers, but I do remember getting a little teary the day I ended my six-year-long, weekly relationship with Vern the diaper delivery man. The one thing I absolutely never miss, however, is watching kid athletic events. 

Tee ball seemed pretty harmless and it was cute to watch five-year-olds hit the ball and try to decide whether to run to first or third – at least they had a 50-50 chance of getting it right.  Cute was replaced by acute boredom which is what happens when you watch 7 and 8 year-olds try to pitch baseballs to each other’s non-existent strike zones – it takes forever to get three outs, much less finish a complete game in a knothole league. 

Soccer didn't start until the boys were in first grade – there were no in utero leagues in the early eighties. As a sport, soccer offered more action and less individual pressure than baseball.  On the other hand, watching tight clusters of kids in colored shirts and shin guards carom all over the field chasing a ball has limited entertainment value.  The appeal is further diminished when the weather is wet, cold, windy or all of the above.  We stayed with the program, however, and survived four practices and at least two games a week during many baseball and soccer seasons. 

As David and John got older, we graduated to wrestling matches (a lot of sweat and grunting), cross country meets (a lot of driving for a few minutes of running), track meets (a lot of waiting for THE event) and tennis matches (actually not too bad.)  It turned out that, even though they tried a lot of different sports, David and John weren’t particularly good at any of them.  I hope they are too old to have their self esteem irreparably damaged by this revelation. 

Actually, watching a few games, meets or matches would have been fun, but there just got to be so many of them in those endless seasons. That was even in the day before Select, Super Select, Ultra Select and Life Sentence Select teams were invented to give kids even more playing opportunities.  Like many other

things in life, our experience with kid sports could have been better but it could have been worse.  If the boys had been swimmers, we would have spent entire weekends pickling our brains in chlorinated, natatorium air.  If they had played ice hockey, we would have been driving them to midnight practices and games all over the state.  If they had been rowers, we would have been tied to a 364 ½ -day-a-year training schedule.  From that perspective, we got off lightly.

Now, on a beautiful Saturday or Sunday, when we drive or bike past soccer fields and baseball diamonds full of uniformed kids with the sidelines full of parents, folding chairs, coolers and sun shades, I feel like a recent parolee looking back at the inmates.  I did my time, with good behavior, and I can now enjoy a glorious sense of freedom.  I am a little worried, though, because many of my friends are back on the kid

athletic circuit with their grandchildren.  I hope I can still be in the running for “Nana of the Year” if I don’t go to all of Willem’s games.