Chaosball

SO, in deference to the Baseball Gods, They Who Are Real and Must Be Propitiated, we've been conducting our summer plans as if Angus's Little League Majors WEREN'T going to win Provincials and have to go to Glace Bay, Nova Scotia three short days after the championship game.

Maybe we should have been a little cockier. We would have been better prepared.

They played the final on Sunday. Angus pitched the entire game except for the very last batter (at the bottom of the sixth, he only had 7 pitches left of his allowed 85. My Dad said "they won't use him." I said "yes they will - they'll use him to his very last pitch". My Mom, with perfect grandmotherly faith, said "seven pitches - he can get two out with that". AND HE DID.) He was also responsible for four of the six runs batted in, and hit the game's only home run. My brother-in-law, the cardiologist, got up at six a.m., took the train to Ottawa, rented a car to drive to Casselman, watched the game then turned around and went back home to work that night. It was nice that Angus made it worth his trip.

photo credit: Rhonda Legault

My poor husband is running around like a headless chicken trying to help the woman who is organizing accomodations and plane tickets and who's bringing what equipment and what has to be carried on because we're screwed if it gets lost and the hosting city was supposed to be billeting players but then there weren't enough families willing to have billets so then they wanted to stick all our kids on cots in classrooms in some school and we said, uh, NO, so now it looks like everyone is staying in university dorms and my husband is trying to shake his pissed-offness at how big a screw-up this is, but it's hard, because this city has known for years that it was hosting, so GET IT TOGETHER, FOLKS, and I'm just doing laundry and keeping my head down and Eve is totally confused.

Did I mention that they're going for the whole tournament, which is twelve days, whether they win or lose? And if they win, which they PROBABLY won't, because some team from B.C. usually wins, possibly because they get to play baseball for so much more of the year there and here, well, we get weather, but the last time it was NOT a B.C. team that won and went to the Little League World Series it was an East Nepean team, which is, um, us? And that if they DO win, they go directly to South Williamsport Pennsylvania and stay for the WHOLE Little League World Series, and that the parents basically sign their child away at the beginning of the tournament and see them again at the end? Meaning I could not see my husband or kids for more than three weeks? (Matt said to Angus "please don't win. It will be very expensive" and Angus said "okay. The last game, I'll throw everything into the dirt").

photo credit: Rhonda Legault

It's crazy. I'm happy for my son - this is going to be an intensely memorable time. I'm happy and sympathetic towards my husband - this is going to be an intensely memorable time and a huge pain in the ass. I'm a little bewildered on my own behalf - I knew this was a possibility, but it seems sort of surreal now. Eve and I will just have some fun girl time and be supportive from a province or so away. Angus's coach hugged me and thanked me for giving birth to his star player at the team party. Um, you're welcome? One of the other parents made some drunken comparison between Angus and Mike Tyson in his early days. He wandered away in the middle of it and I locked eyes with the coach's girlfriend and said "did he just compare my son to Mike Tyson?" Um, thanks?

Life is weird.