Colin's 4th Football Game Performance in Marching Band

Colin’s 4^th Marching Band Performance at a Football Game, Friday, Sept. 17, 2010:  The Mighty Unicorn Band vs. the MacArthur Brahma Band or “I can’t stand the rain” (thanks, Missy Elliot).

(Read with my advance apologies:  I've edited, and I've read bad stuff, a lot of it my own, so I hate to see this, but in the interest of time . . . here is this entry . . . so far.)

Missy Misdeamenor, Colin can’t stand the rain either.  The second game, when the Mighty Unicorn Band faced the Clemens' Bisons, I had gotten a call from the speech pathologist telling me she was calming him down about the chance of rain during the game.  Knowing Colin’s sensory trouble with rain, the touch, sound and feel of it distresses him, I was ready for the worst at MacArthur game in San Antonio as it was almost certain to rain.  But I talked with the booster president and teachers to let them know and learned that he’d be given a poncho to wear should rain happen.

And it did. 

But a minor miracle occurred, considering that Colin still sticks his fingers in his ears and wads himself into a tense crouch when it rains and we’re driving:  he did fine.  In fact, he did really well.  It could have been the preparation for the performance at the game, the talks about the ponchos the director gave them all, and the fact that it had been drizzling a little for a while, giving him a slow transition (transitions can be hard for autistic kids, but no transition is worse).  Thus, when the drizzle became rain, Colin simply did what all the band kids did, as a group:  put on his poncho and . . . continued. 

He's the kid in the center, the one with the unponcho-ed clarinet and no glasses

Meanwhile, we sat as close to him as possible without causing a problem.  He’d skipped school the day before on my orders to help him recover from a bad cold, so I did have to sidle up to a booster parent who was chaperoning the kids as inconspicuously as possible and solicit help determining whether or not he’d taken his decongestant.  Of course, I remembered this after realizing I’d gotten so caught up taking photos that I’d forgotten to check on his medicine when we’d first arrived.  I’d had to give it with a permission note to the booster president, who gave it to the nurse that always accompanies the band.

And, as the rain started, I dropped my pen, my one pen, the one I was using to grade, as karma would have it, on the restrooms below the bleachers, forcing me to notice the football team slipping up and down the field. 

I’ve been forgetting them.  The football team.  Not that Colin has.  Entry before this, he talked about wanting the guys on the team to win.  His mother, however, with her bad memories of football Sundays growing up where the women folk cooked, cleaned, and fed first the men folk watching the Sunday game, had been somewhat deliberately pushing those kids in the pads and helmets out of her mind.  It’s not like they are anymore anonymous than the band, which from what I can tell, is meant to function kind of like Star Trek’s conception of the Borg’s “hive” mind.  Every member is but a part of the whole, etc.  And under the plumed hats, square-shouldered uniforms, and white gloves, band members are little more recognizable as individuals than football team members. 

Let’s face it:  football team members are probably more recognizable.  At least they hold different, if strangely labeled positions, to this perversely ignorant viewer.  The football team has running backs and now, I learned, broken into different subspecies, such as half back, quarterback (where are the zero back, ¾ back, and whole back? Even a tail back exists.  What about the head back, torso back, limb back?).

             The point is that I keep forgetting those kids, boys all, yes, running backwards and forwards on the field between hanky throwings by the guys in stripes.  Except when one is injured.  Because then even I remember that they are kids, and that, somewhere in the stands, a parent is as fear-filled as I would be. 

            And I also admit that autism has metamorphosed my attitude toward team sports, especially the single sex ones.  Because of my son’s differences, I’ve become the parent I’d never thought I’d be:  I’d be backing him in football, soccer, or any team sport were he to show and interest in it.  In fact, because of autism, I wish he would play a team sport.  I never thought I would say that pre-autism.  Fringe soul that I was, I thought my kid wouldn’t want to or need to be part of a crowd. 

            Again, autism affects you, the parent.  Not like the child—I know that.  I don’t have to deal with the sensory and intellectual/emotional differences attendant with a different neurology.  All of a sudden, being a member of a group that is so popular in mainstream culture has meaning, appeal even. 

You figure this out the moment your kid can’t play with other kids, can’t want to play with them.  You figure out that being a willing part of a group can actually be good, even helpful. 

As you vainly try to get your 6-year-old autistic kid interested in tee ball because it involves social interaction you, newly realizing the snobbery inherent in your natural, loner proclivities, realize that working with other people is an intelligence, and a necessary part of a full life—especially for your child, who can’t.  Who really, painfully can’t.  It’s one of those moments parents start to grieve.

            So it was we watched Colin in tee-ball, when he was 6 and going through his rose and yellow colored glasses phase—literally—and standing around in the outfield like Ferdinand the Bull, but even more bored than the bull, who at least cared about the flowers. 

Colin wanted out of there and away from those other kids.  The home run he did make, or maybe it was even just a score, was under duress that results from lot of parental pleading and cajoling.  Come in, come to this strange little pad and touch it with your feet.  Please.  Now! 

            And so Colin did walk from third to home, where he stopped, looked down, then deliberately stomped on home plate, as if to say, “I am finished, through, caput with this ridiculous farce in which I have no interest whatsoever.”

            Karate, a one to one sport that we prayed would hold more interest, absolutely did not.

            I’ve even tried to get him interested in wrestling something some parents would cringe to see their 8-year-olds interested in.  Because at least it’s normal.  Now that he enjoys watching it, at 15, I’m absolutely thrilled.

            Remember Pokemon, which had so many parents, of all varieties and flavors, running scared?  While some parents were trudging out of movies (or being tugged into them by their eager children) praying for coffee or valium, or dragging their kids out of narrow-walled, claustrophia-inducing comic book stores, we were teaching Colin about Pokemon ourselves, vainly trying to get him interested in those strange little, wide eyed characters whose names we remember more than he did, or does . . . because other kids loved them, and because if he did too, he might want to actually talk to thtose kids about them and play with them using them!

            Thus autism has changed me, made me a believer in sports because I feel I have to be, because kids talk about this stuff and do it, and it’s a social activity, because one the of the core deficits of autism is the inability or severely limited ability to interact in social situations, and again, sports are a social activity. 

            Back when he was four, I had taken him to Wal-Mart, to try to get him to choose some sheet for his bed.  There, I had encouraged Colin to like those typical boy things I used to despise because of the way they type case children according to gender.  I’d probably still despise them if Colin didn’t have autism.

Sheets bearing cars, or footballs, or basketballs.  And he simply didn’t care.  In fact, at that point, he barely even had the language to say he didn’t care, and I felt, simply, exhausting grief.  Again, he was isolated, and I was reminded that he was different and in a way that could keep him alone for most his life, and in a dangerous way:  it’s difficult to hold a job alone, to have no relationships.  We, his parents won’t live forever, and I can’t ask his sister to take care of him.  What I saw, in that little despised sports sheet (that we bought anyway, hoping), was his future, alone, forgotten, abandoned. 

            So our Unicorn football team, the reason the band performs and the other kids’ groups assemble much as I might not like it, those young men in that institution I’ve held a long seated grudge against—they didn’t do so hot this game.  In fact it was Unicorns 14, Brahmas 28. 

            And Colin, bigger hearted than his mom by far, cared about that loss. 

            In fact, when as if by providence, karma, whatever, I lost my pen and couldn’t continue, I had to watch those padded guys, who run through an inflated unicorn at the game's beginning and middle.

The team runs through this poofy thing . . . 

 . . . and then they touch this blue thing, a hand-molded blue unicorn dragged around by a crew of girls called the "Swarm," and then, after the good luck ritual, out to the field to "play the football" (as my husband Roger's grandma called it)

            And I felt for them.  It had started raining. And they had started losing.  But they endured, and Colin endured, and, as this kid illustrates, sometimes you can endure and maybe even like (sometimes, but not always like) both things we thought were important and things we never believed were important.

Yes, it's dark.  My camera skills are inadequate as my editing here, but you can still see the tuba player, dead center.             Tuba player number 63.