Colin's 3rd Football Game In Band Ever: Unicorns vs. Clemens

Colin 3^rd Football Game in Band Ever 

Feeling guilty, an emotion I am more and more suspicious of, I volunteered to work the ice cream stand for the band boosters at this game.  After all, other parents were sitting up in the stands next to my son and around 100 other kids in the Mighty Unicorn Band fetching them water, walking them to the bathroom, picking up their trash, keeping order, and generally seeing to their welfare. 

            So after a day helping run a training conference for Texas State’s tutors, I directed Roger, Colin’s dad, or tried not to, as he drove us through I35’s rush hour to Madison High School in San Antonio.  There we circled, looking for a stadium, until I finally spotted a student crossing the parking lot.  The game was in New Braunfels, she said, kindly not pointing out our now correctly donned but well out of context New Braunfels High School athletics and band booster shirts.

Yes, I had believed an online calendar (or was it the preceding year’s?) about the game’s location. 

To my credit, it had been a busy week, and I hadn’t asked Roger to double check the game’s location.  And, not wanting to “bother” anyone, I hadn’t called my band parent friends to check.  So, after driving back to New Braunfels (the whole, round trip wasting about 1-1/2 hours), I had Roger drop me off at the NBHS football field’s back gate to begin my booster parent duties. Walking through the small lot crowded with pick ups and golf carts, I was at least able to dredge up a small measure of gratitude that Patty, the head of fundraising and captain of ice cream sales, thought I was coming straight from a conference and did not know of my escapade to and fro on the interstate.

So, having spent much of the day submersing my hand in coolers filled with ice and water numbly shifting sodas and waters so that tutors could have chilled drinks during the training, I found myself balancing on the edge of a trailer and sticking half of my body into someone’s freezer to pull out single-serving containers of mint chocolate chip, cookie dough, butternut crunch, cookies and cream, homemade vanilla, and dutch chocolate ice cream.  This because by that point in the day, I could not trust myself to correctly count money. 

            However, at the band booster ice cream stand (a card table next the trailer), I did get to meet Ray, whose teenaged son is in band—french horn—and whose toddler son has chesnut ringlets, just like Colin’s hair as a toddler.  I also met Denise, whose son Victor is, like Colin, a clarinet player and a freshman in the band and learned that Victor had gone to the same middle school as Colin. 

Later when I asked about his fellow clarinetist, Colin said, “I stay away from him,” instantly raising a host of parental worries.

            “What do you mean,” I asked.  “You were in middle school with him.”

Colin shuffled his oversized sneakers and stared at our scarred wood floor. 

“Was he nice?” (i.e., did he threaten or bully you?).

            “Yes.  I have nothing to do with him.”

            From what I could tell from exchanges between Denise and Patty, Victor was making more social progress in the world than my son.  He’d shed his glasses for contacts, grown his hair long, and made forays involving Patty’s daughter as a driver.  He’d even been with Patty’s daughter to Whataburger—of his own free will.  This is the kind of activity we have yet to hear of from Colin, who has no normal friendships that we know of:  normal friendships here meaning a relationship between two people that is continuous and involves the two involved parties visiting and doing things with one another because they want to. 

We’ve had Colin bring home kids for formal play sessions for years, “peer play” in the lingo of Applied Behavioral Analysis therapy (ABA), the vehicle we used to teach Colin in his early years.  But almost all of our “peer play sessions” were back when Colin was young and arranging “playdates” was something the parent’s did anyway.  Later, our autism consultant and then, still later, Colin’s autism resource person at the elementary school had helped us get together with other parents who were willing to let their children be used as “peers” in what was usually a very structured (and mostly arduous) activity. 

The experience was like playing puppets by yourself:  You talk for the left hand puppet.  You answer for the right hand puppet.  You prompt your child to talk, at first and for much of the time by feeding your child his lines.  You answer for the other, neurotypical child by feeding that child his lines.  And so on, and so on . . . .

            Then the whole play session dissolves when your four-year-old daughter comes into the room and starts her own conversation with the neurotypical puppet child, who suddenly develops the capacity to talk on his own and a desire to interact hitherto unseen.

            And, it’s understandable that the peer puppet child does, in this case, did. The whole exercise was exhausting for me and not nearly as rewarding for the other child as talking to Colin’s “despicable sister,” Chloe.  Early on, the peer and Colin liked “playing” some, when it involved things like me pushing the kids around in plastic laundry baskets and yelling “choo choo” or spraying shaving cream onto his tiny yellow, blue, and white table and drawing in it. 

Truth was, by the time conversation became involved, we could only get Colin interested by reinforcing him with treats extrinsic to the activity.

            Though we had tried a friendship-like interaction with an actual same-aged peer this summer, we’d had similar results, though Colin’s “peer" was able to answer questions on his own.  And this peer was, thankfully, understanding when, after about 45 minutes of trying to play together on the PlayStation, Colin said, abruptly, “I’m ready to do the game alone now.”  Besides being mature and good-hearted and himself a high school “Unicorn” and an Art person like Colin, Isaiah has known Colin since pre-k and thus also what to expect.  

Beatific Isaiah, Colin's mature, Unicorn, Art Guy, Pal

           But back to the game, where, after putting in two hours of selling ice cream, we booster parents packed up.  And Ray, before we finished, very kindly let me go to the fence to watch the halftime show and take some cell phone shots, though I did see the pit gang trudging back from the field (Go Clayton and Jennifer, go!) and took a lousy cell phone shot of them.  As per last game, my digital camera and I were separated, though this time because Roger was sitting with it in the stands, taking fantastic photos for me.

            I thought. 

            When I did clang up the bleachers to sit with him, however, Roger told me his photos were awful.  I looked at one.  He was right.

Spying a parent-aged woman with an actual “big” camera, the kind with the lens one attaches, I asked what I could do. 

According to Monique, not much.  A native Australian, she had a son in ROTC and had spent plenty of time trying to document the exotic culture of a Texas High School football game.  She could barely get a good still shot without a tripod.  And, our flash would do us little good.  A pity as it was dark out now.  Feeling guilty again, I took pictures anyway.  On the bright side, they would at least be a record, Monique said. 

Yep, the whole Mighty Unicorn Band, with their backs turned to us.  Colin's a smudge wearing a plume out there.  Somewhere.

Unicorn Band, field level.  See the stand from which the drum majors take turns conducting?  See all the heavy stuff?

  

Colin, dead center, walking away.  Downright fantasic shot, huh?

Brass section.  Colin's not in the brass section, but at least this shows you the kids attentively playing music.

The best picture of the entire game was of the creature Colin said had “bugged” him the previous game.

  

Best Picture Award Winner.

            No, the "creature" is not the man in the picture.  That’s Roger, Colin's dad and my husband (for those who've forgotten).  The one with the gray hair.  The one facing away from the camera.

            While she watched me toil with my digital, Monique did have to offer her own astonishment and fascination with the football culture from the eyes of a “ferner” (that’s foreigner, in Texas, “Auslander” in New Braunfelsian German).  In Australia kids and adults played cricket mostly and football (yes, the ’mercan kind) once a week, but the experience of it was never “like this,” she said.  Even her friend in Virginia said they nothing like it.

            All the activities revolving around the practice of Texas High School football—the band’s, the cheerleaders’, the drill team’s, and twirlers’ performances; the seven-foot mascot’s lurching; the boys racing with giant flags or the girls dragging a blue papier mache-looking Unicorn before the stands following the team’s touchdowns—all of these strange activities simply don’t take place outside of this state. 

            Listening to Monique, pondering from behind the drill team (this time), and staring at the back of Colin’s head while he tried to dance with the band during their between-performance performances, I found myself thankful, for Colin’s sake, that we were here, where insurance only recently started helping with autism treatment thanks to legislation passed too late for Colin but thankfully, soon enough for the next generation of ASD kids.  And where, again, we had a band that would let him in a group, a social group, that accepted and supported him. 

           

            But the best item to report came from Colin, my somewhat unwilling participant in this blog.  Here is his answer to “what you thought about band and the game and what you liked the most about it and what you liked the least”:

            “I didn’t want to do this at first, but I loved the fact that I got to stand up and dance once a friend of mine named Dakota asked me to do it.  I was very very exhausted when I got there.  My back was aching and I couldn’t stand in that position—straight—but I knew that it was part of being in the band and I had to deal with it.  I did and still love to cheer the football players which was about the only thing I did like.  I like the football players because they are unicorns and that is what we are.  It came up in my head through feeling and instinctively that it’s important for them to win.  I wouldn’t want to play football because it seems really hard—you have to tackle people and I wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t like losing or being attacked or beaten.

            I didn’t like the fact that we lost especially on our own field and I didn’t like to [wear] my band suit because it was sweating my neck.”

            Colin especially didn’t like it when one of the “elder classman” (his words) made fun him when he lost his balance and said, “Whoa.”  While I told Colin that freshmen always get teased, he insisted he hasn’t noticed it happening to another soul.  Now, why would I think my highly socially aware child wouldn’t notice others getting teased . . . ? 

            His answer to the question, “Why do you think you get treated differently in band or school”:

            “I thought I got treated differently because the way I usually behaved, you know, very tempermental and silly a little bit and how I kinda react to things.  People wouldn’t understand me.”

           

            And, finally, that first display of foolishness, or at least the first that I am willing to admit to from my last post:  a photo of my Heiseman trophy-winning, football-playing-squirrel shirt, complete with Colin’s band “button” photo (which is a good photo—Colin’s wearing a mild, adolescent-rocker snarl, and sporting enough hair to be a candidate for a an 80s hair band), on a field of goldenrod, the color of the opposing team, the Clemens’ Bisons, from last game: 

Fantastic squirrel tee shirt.  Colin's Band "Button" photo upper left on shirt.

 Until the next game, Aufwiedersehen, or something like that, and Go, Bluuuuuuuuooooooohhhhhh!!!!!!!