Friday Night Lights

Friday nights mean only one thing: Drill Team.  Regina and I get home from work, catch and saddle Romeo and Button, and haul them, and the kids, into town.  Dylan and Grady ride around the rodeo arena with the rest of their Drill buddies, the parents all stand around, a few folks come in to watch, and Jimmy grills burgers and dogs in the snack shack.  Friday nights at the Pleasure Park have suddenly become the hottest hangout in Scott Valley.

Drill Team and youth baseball often overlap, and several of the kids do both.  Some even leave their games early, throw some jeans over their baseball pants, and catch the last half of drill practice.  We might be doing the same, had we let our kids know that baseball was a sport that lots of kids do.  Instead, we took them to an Oakland A's game on an especially hot day.  The sweat, the concrete, the pace of a professional game all mixed together to leave a pretty distasteful smear on their memories.  They haven't asked to join Little League since.

I have a buddy who has two boys in baseball.  Last Saturday, we compared notes on our previous evenings.  I told him Drill Team parents all bring coolers full of beer and there's a BBQ after every practice.  He sighed.  Apparently, cracking open a buckskin at the Little League field is frowned upon and all he got for dinner was Big League Chew and red vines.

May Rodeo is this Sunday and the kids have been working hard on their riding patterns and timing.  Clara, the awesome lady who volunteered to organize the monkeys, is getting them into top form.  They're improving steadily, but it's a young crew.  I think Dylan may be the oldest kid there.  When Clara tells them to go left at the end of the arena, there's only a 50% guarantee they'll go in the right direction.  And that estimate is high.  Sometimes the horses get snotty and buck (usually a pony is the culprit -- go figure), sometimes the kids get frustrated and whine, but they're all getting better on horseback, they're usually having fun, and their parents are certainly having a blast.  And somewhere in town, beneath the lights of a Little League field, there's a dad hiding out by his truck, pouring a Coors Light into a Nalgene bottle, and looking wistfully at the bright, bright lights coming from the Pleasure Park, thinking, Man, that looks like fun.