Chapter Eighteen: Weekends

Chapter 18: Weekends

We take turns, my husband and I. One weekend he flies, one weekend I fly. Neither of us minds flying, but the person flying has to leave work right away on Friday, and neither of us wants to burden our coworkers by doing this every week. We’re both “Gold Preferred” on USAir, which means we can usually upgrade to first class at no extra cost. The best part about flying is reading. If I didn’t fly every other weekend, I might never get a chance to read! Mostly I read in the airport during layovers. I read a little on the airplane, but I am so sleep deprived I usually fall asleep before we leave the ground. I take along two books: one non-fiction - usually on how to be a better principal and one fiction – my dessert.

When it is my turn to fly, I always tell my faculty in the Friday morning meeting. They nod their sleepy 8:00 a.m. heads as they munch on chocolate donuts (my Friday treat to them). I tell them because I don’t want them to try to talk with me at the end of the day and then feel upset at my brusque demeanor. But they forget and on flying Fridays I can be found trying to extricate myself from intense conversations as I watch the clock and estimate how fast I’ll have to drive on I-75 to make my flight, crossing my fingers I don’t run into heavy traffic or a thunderstorm.

I have become familiar with the Orlando airport and familiar to its employees. Danny at USAir gives me a big smile and waves me over to his station when I check in. He knows I like a window seat in first class and not the first row, please. I’m always running late so I appreciate it when Donna at Big Apple Bagels starts to assemble my vegetarian bagel sandwich as I approach the counter. She remembers the extra avocado and no mayonnaise. I fill my water bottle at the third water fountain by the elevators - it has the best pressure. I don’t use the fourth stall in the women’s room by the Disney shop - it has no lock. Oh, another thing I know about the Orlando airport I learned from dropping off my husband Sunday nights – don’t kiss on the escalator from the pedestrian tunnel: you get a shock! Just as I do on campus, I wear my sneakers with my skirt at the airport; I know I’ll have to run.

USAir often forces me to run by delaying the departure from my first airport so I have to sprint at the connecting airport. I prefer to connect through Pittsburgh: high ceilings, great shops. My plane often lands near Ben and Jerry’s ice cream shop. Do I really have time before my next flight and do I want one scoop or two? Charlotte isn’t bad, but Philadelphia is the worst. The corridors are narrow, crowded and dark; I always have a long walk between gates and the Philadelphia employees are either surly or apathetic.

I arrive in Rochester around midnight and collapse in my husband’s arms. He knows from my cell phone calls whether I got my Ben and Jerry’s or not. If not, he has some ready for me. Our Rochester weekends are quiet times. We barely let go of each other all weekend and Sunday comes way too fast.

Things are different when my husband flies to Florida. We often go to one of the Disney World parks – we bought season passes and we both love Disney, especially EPCOT, especially the food at EPCOT. But once football season starts, we can’t go to Disney on Saturdays.

Are You Ready for some Football?

Football is huge here in Florida. None of my students follow baseball, a few can discuss basketball but nearly every boy and many girls like to talk football. Living with a rabid Jets fan for over 25 years, I can fake my way through superficial football discussions. On Saturdays from August through November there are non-stop games on two fields at Berke Jungers Park. Berke Jungers is in the southeast section of town about eight miles from Prospect. When I learn ten of my students play on football teams, I begin spending my Saturdays at Berke Jungers to watch my students play. The students are always excited to see me and my husband at their games, and they delight in discussing the highlights in the parking lot on Monday mornings. The county has 25 teams, divided by geography roughly corresponding to school district lines. Games for younger children start at 8:00 am, the middle schoolers start at 10:00 and run until after 8:00 pm. Since my students come from all over the county, I know boys on at least half the teams. One Saturday my husband and I join my teacher Daphne at Berke Jungers to see Brock and Timmy play.

Brock and Timmy are both white. Their team, the Broncos, comes from the northeast corner of the county, which is very rural and very white. Timmy is a chubby, blond, baby-faced boy who acts younger than his 13 years while Brock subscribes to high times and has been known to stash marijuana in his cleats. Brock barely acknowledges our presence but when he is on the field, as he often is, I see Brock sneaking glances at us. Timmy bounds over to us and smiles proudly and talks about the game. We see Timmy’s Dad in the bleachers. Timmy’s Dad is a bag of bones; he looks older than his age. He smells of cigarette smoke, and discussions with him are interrupted by spasmodic coughing. He is raising Timmy alone - Mom is a “crack whore.” I am guessing Dad doesn’t have long for this world; his sunken cheeks and gray skin remind me of too many men I saw fading away on San Francisco’s Castro Street in the 1980’s when AIDS first attacked.

During the game children who are too young to play football along with girls not interested in being cheerleaders, gnaw on boiled peanuts as they gambol barefoot in the dirt and trash strewn grounds cavorting over and around the cigarette butts, peanut shells, soda cups and crushed potato chips. They lean over the chain link fence to watch the game when signaled by the voices of Grandmothers with multiple tattoos who momentarily remove limp cigarettes to shout encouragement and obscenities at their kin. Sweat coats everyone as the temperatures climb into the 90’s by mid-morning.

As we go to leave, we see two other Prospect students in their football uniforms, Eli and Tayshaun. Eli is a thirteen -year -old Hispanic boy; Tayshaun is a twelve -year -old black boy. They are hanging around the hot dog stand, engaged in the manly art of blustering about whose team is better. Their games are later and I won’t get a chance to see them play today. Tayshaun and Eli make me promise to return another Saturday to see them play.

High flying adored

Tayshaun has been bragging to me for weeks about how he is a star, so I finally say I’ll come judge for myself. One Saturday, my husband and I make good on my promise.

Tayshaun is the team captain of the Junior Giants and he is also the quarterback. I watch him position his teammates at the line of scrimmage by making them hold out their arms while Tayshaun jogs up and down the line to check for compliance. Tayshaun scores most of the points for the Junior Giants. He can throw, pass and run. Tayshaun ties the score at the last minute to send the game into overtime. The crowd is standing and chanting “Tay-shaun, Tay-shaun, Tay-shaun.” The Junior Giants win in overtime on a score by Tayshaun.

Wow, Tayshaun really is a football star! Besides his repeated claims, I had a few other clues about his athletic prowess from Tayshaun’s coach and the daily newspaper. Tayshaun’s coach picks him up every afternoon at school to make sure he gets to practice on time. Every day counselor Rusty or I stop the coach and, leaning into the window of his pick up truck, we talk about Tayshaun’s day: his attitude and academic work along with any concerns we have regarding Tayshaun’s behavior. We take the time to do this believing that from time to time the coach talks to Tayshaun about something other than which plays to run. Thanks to the generosity of our local newspaper, all my students receive the paper every morning at no cost to them or the school. Thursday is Youth Sports Day in the Sports Section. Tayshaun is frequently mentioned. Columns referring to Tayshaun are cut out for many a current events assignment and posted on bulletin boards. Tayshaun’s fame eclipses that of our elected officials.

Now how do we get Tayshaun to use his leadership skills in the classroom? Tayshaun is smart, attractive and athletic but I worry the good things about Tayshaun will not be enough to counter the negatives: Tayshaun is quick to anger, physically violent, defiant, dishonest and disinterested in academics. Maybe if we had cheerleaders in math class?

One afternoon Rusty brings Tayshaun to my office. This morning Tayshaun wore a sweatband to school, which is not allowed. He’d take it off when asked, but refused to give it to staff. As soon as the teacher turned her back, Tayshaun had the headband back on or was snapping it at other students. All day he’s been belligerent and rude, cursing at his teachers. Rusty called Tayshaun’s mother. She said she couldn’t come get him because her car was in an accident. Tayshaun is now sitting in my office, scowling and looking at me sarcastically. I try to talk about Tayshaun becoming a leader in school the way he leads on the football field. He interrupts and taunts: “Whatchya gonna do, call my coach? He don’t fucking care. He thinks ya all’re full of shit. All my coach cares about is football.”

I’m guessing that goes double for Tayshaun.

My husband and I saw Eli during Tayshaun’s game, he was suited up, but his game wasn’t scheduled to start for a couple hours. We said hi but didn’t stick around for his game. On Monday I overheard Eli, Tayshaun and some other boys talking in the bus circle. Tayshaun was bragging, “Ms. Smee came to see my game.” “Yeah”, says Eli, “mine too and her husband was there. Man he is tall, like seven feet tall.” Unlike Tayshaun’s team, Eli’s team has a losing record. His peers start to give him the business about his team, Eli defended himself saying “Ms. Smee and her husband came to see me play because I’m great, even if my team isn’t!”

The only problem is, I still haven’t seen Eli play and I feel guilty about it. I know how much it means to my students when we go to their games. I really need to get a football schedule and figure out when Eli plays.

Too bad my girls don’t play football. They need some appropriate outlets for their anger. I am reading Odd Girl Out, a book on aggression in girls. (I think I need to read this book fast. Girls make up 20 percent of our student population but they cause a disproportionate number of our problems.)

My husband’s interest in football extends to visiting football stadiums. One hot Saturday, my husband and I take a trip to Gainesville to visit the famous Ben Hill Griffin Stadium; “the Swamp” of Steve Spurrier, UF Gator college football fame. The campus is quiet and mostly deserted. We walk around the perimeter of the stadium hoping to get a peek inside. We try a couple gates, but they are locked. An official looking gentleman approaches. We expect he is about to chastise us for trespassing. He breaks into a big smile as he nears us saying, “Would you all like to take a look inside.” We nod and soon find ourselves seated in the sunny “Swamp.” It is media day and on the field players are perched on tall chairs with an array of microphones and cameras. A handful of curious onlookers wander the stands. I doze off on the warm but hard bleachers.

When my husband and I are in Florida and we aren’t going to football games or going to EPCOT, we are running. We are training for the Disney Marathon, which takes place every January, and we have “long runs” scheduled for every other weekend. Since there are no shoulders on Florida roads, we do our long runs where I do my daily runs – around the apartment complex. Since the road is a one-mile loop, we make many loops on Saturday mornings. It isn’t as scenic as the long runs we’ve done in rural upstate New York, but at least we don’t have to stash our water and Gatorade in side of the road shrubs; we just set the bottles on the bumper of our car and take a swig every lap. The Florida heat slows us down so we get up at 6:00 am even on Saturdays.

Shortly after moving to Lakeboro, my husband and I developed a Saturday ritual: after running, we drive through Lakeboro neighborhoods looking for the best place to build a house. After many months on the market, we finally sold our former house outside Syracuse, New York. We did some househunting in Rochester, New York (where my husband’s company has its headquarters) but we didn’t find anything we liked in our price range. We are determined to have our next house increase in value. The real estate market in upstate New York is “soft”; we lost money on our last home and we don’t want that to happen again. Real estate in Central Florida appears to be a better investment.

The arguments for buying a house aren’t all logical. We feel uprooted, homeless and anchorless with our one-bedroom rental apartments in Rochester and Lakeboro. We want to have a place for our son, relatives and friends to gather on holidays and vacations. We want to hang our paintings and photos and to plant oleanders, gardenias and crape myrtle. But putting down roots in Lakeboro is somewhat frightening and fraught with unknowns: Will I continue to be principal of Prospect? Is the Central Florida culture too alien for two northerners? We can’t know the answers but we do know we want a house.

Our Lakeboro househunting keeps bringing us back to one new sub-division, Kimber Pines. We like the style of the houses, the many trees left intact and the layout of the neighborhood. We tour some model homes and talk with a builder. We wander around three lots for sale. My husband paces the property, dodging giant spiders and envisioning the layout of our unbuilt home. We debate the pros and cons of building a house in Lakeboro. My husband and I are not timid about making decisions, this is not to say our decisions are always wise ones but we can never be accused of wishy-washy indecision. We select a model, meet with the builder to discuss modifications, arrange for financing and then, after our Saturday runs, we spend our Florida weekends watching the progress on our future new home. During the week my husband will often phone to ask whether anything new has happened with our house. I have trouble providing him the details he craves – I rarely leave work before dark so the best I can do is pull onto the dirt, put on my high beams and step carefully around our land trying to notice what is different.

At least once every weekend my cell phone rings. Sometimes it is a teacher telling me tales of illness and warning of a Monday absence, but usually it is The Boss. The calls from The Boss aren’t urgent, he usually wants to assign me something to do first thing Monday morning. I don’t like work oozing into my weekends. It makes me feel resentful since I devote nearly every waking hour and a few sleeping hours to work Monday through Friday. I need the weekends to refuel.

The weekends are wonderful, but much too short. Sunday nights are horrible. At the airport, we both try to be brave and not let tears show, but we hate parting. Every Sunday I question my decision to move to Florida.