Love Life Read Online Free Page B

trophies?”
    “Yes. That would be great.”
    “What about the other coach?” I asked. I was happy to foot the bill but curious as to where the other team’s leader was in all of this nonsense.
    “Oh, he says he’s done with the season.”
    I held our awards dinner at our local pizza parlor, setting up an awards table on top of the Ms. Pac-Man machine. As I handed out the Golden Basketball Man to each kid, the television above us showed the Oscars being handed out down in LA. The pizza parlor was decidedly more fun and fulfilling. A few weeks later I was informed of a new school policy: Parents would no longer be permitted to participate in after-school athletic programs. This was probably as it should have been in the first place. The next year local college volunteers were brought in. I watched and rooted as an incredibly sweet and well-meaning young lady tried to figure out what a three-second violation was and how to inbound the ball correctly. Turns out she’d never played basketball; her expertise was water polo. The team went two for twelve that year.
    Sometimes at pickup, waiting for my boys to get out of class, I would see my old team on the playground. We’d play a little horse. I’d teach them the Xs and Os, the fundamentals of the pick and roll, but they showed me something, too. From them I learned (or relearned) how important adolescent friendships are, how impressionable young boys can be and how much male, adult attention means to their development. I learned that they rise to a challenge, crave it and desperately want a responsibility they can meet. I saw their humble appreciation of being recognized for a job well done. And I realized that maybe that’s all anyone really wants, including me.
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    When Matthew finally opens the college-acceptance letter that we all prayed would come, I know it will be the beginning of his life without us. This is almost too much for me to contemplate. I prefer to live in denial that my relationship with him will be irrevocably changed.Instead I goad myself into focusing on the bright side of having my beloved firstborn leaving home, of having the empty bedroom full of his boyhood touchstones, the sudden quiet when his incessant techno dubstep electronic dance music no longer blasts through the floorboards down into my office as I try to read a script and maintain my sanity. Yes, instead I think about the amazing! fantastic! wonderful! gifts that will come from being completely cut off from his daily life and academic experience.
    And those would be what, exactly? First and foremost: No more field trips to chaperone!
    My wife, Sheryl, once volunteered me to chaperone my son’s third-grade class on a weekend trip to SeaWorld in San Diego, making Matthew and me captives in a six-hour van ride with a parent we barely knew.
    In spite of being professionally gregarious, in my nonpaid hours I’m a bit of a hermit. After being around a crew of fifty people for twelve hours a day on a film set, I really like my alone time and as always I abhor small talk. I love to delve into subjects one doesn’t in polite conversation, but idle banter, after about ten minutes, makes me wish I was still guzzling kamikazes at the Hard Rock Café. Or, in severe cases, leads me to consider reenacting John Gielgud’s warm-bathtub wrist-slicing suicide scene in Caligula .
    The van ride would provide lots of time to get acquainted with the other class dad. The boys sat in the back doing their thing. I was riding shotgun in what reminded me of Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Machine, but without the charming paint job.
    Things went south quickly.
    I had become suspicious of a Styrofoam cooler in the foot well between our seats and eventually the dad noticed.
    “Help yourself to a cold one,” he said, opening the lid to reveal that it was packed with bottles of Budweiser.
    Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I often play one on television, and I think I know enough about California law to be squeamish about