Not in the Face

The sides of my nose still hurt a little from last night but I think I’ll live. Last night, we worked on emptying the tall teen packrat’s bedroom of three years of detritus so we can do some drywall, carpet, and painting. To blow off some steam, the boys and I started throwing an undersized small, semi-flat kids soccer ball down the hall at each other. The goal was to throw it as hard as you could and hit somebody somewhere where it wouldn’t hurt enough to have to stop playing the game. The taller boy caught it in the kidneys, the younger, on his right ear. I avoided injury until the very end, when I thought the game was actually over. We were resting, sitting peacefully on the couch. Only a few feet away, the younger son had the ball, so I put my hands up and said, “Throw it soft.” Instead he threw it hard, right at my face, knocking my glasses into my nose and then off altogether. I guess I was asking for it.


TANGENT 1: As a kid we used to play a lot of catch, mostly with a real football or a frisbee, then we got our hands on a Nerf. Sometimes we played catch indoors, a little too close to Mom’s fancy antique organ lamp. The danger of it made us really focus and use sure hands.

TANGENT 2: The Tick (an awesome cartoon with many, many puns) was a superhero with the battle cry "Not in the face . . . not in the face!" which was later replaced with "Spoon!"

TANGENT 3: I enjoyed more football success in the backyard than I ever did playing high school football. But that's a story for a different day.