Homecoming

We did the high school Homecoming thing this past weekend. They were having a ceremony to honor the first football team our school had had 10 years ago (Mr. Moose was one of the captains of said team) and he was invited to come out and participate. Considering my boss happens to be a member of the school board and the member in charge of this event, I figured it would be ideal to encourage him to go. Not that it took too much effort – he was thrilled to relive his football memories. I was a little bored – I hung out with my MIL and SIL most of the night with a few visits to some old friends of other classes (none of my own classmates were there – secretly still protesting the addition of football to our fair school, perhaps? We were Seniors when they announced that they would be adding a football program the following year and none of us were terribly thrilled about it. As I recall, we all silently protested it by skipping the lunch-time pep rally thrown to kick it off and for once, all showed up early to our 6th period classes despite the fact that most of the other students and teachers were still down on the field whooping it up).

At one point, I went to the area behind the bleachers to see if anyone I knew was milling about back there. There were plenty of current students in clusters talking or playing and some younger kids were playing a pathetic game of football (more like catch with a football instead of a baseball). All of a sudden, I felt something hit me, kind of hard, in the stomach – and a football fell to the ground next to me. Suddenly, there was no interest in said ball – everyone around had turned their backs in my direction and were simply standing around talking (it was an accident, so I was hardly going to get overly mad – you’d think some kid would just come up, mutter “sorry” and grab his ball to go return to playing, but whatever.) I got a little concerned about the baby, but figured that while it did hurt, it wasn’t all that likely to have hurt her. My SIL (who teaches at the school) offered to go after whoever had done it when she returned from the bathroom, but since I didn’t know, we dropped it.

Mr. Moose and his former teammates had been invited to stay and watch the game from the sidelines, and, armed with a camera, took pictures until halftime. By that point, my feet were killing me, I was incredibly bored and I really just wanted to go home. We got in the briefest of spats on our way back to the car and in telling him about my attack-football incident, I suddenly and uncontrollably began to cry. My dinner that evening had been pitiful and I really wanted him to stop for a milkshake, but I couldn’t even seem to get that out. (He ultimately ended up feeding me and it was good, even if it wasn’t a milkshake.)