Basketball Diary

I wrote this post about a week ago, maybe more.  But then I got sick (for the third time) and while I was sick I picked up the one book in English that I've been able to find in Granada - The Goldfinch.  I am better now but I'm hooked on the book so I'm staying in bed a few days longer just to make sure I'm really all better.  You can blame Donna Tartt if I haven't returned your email yet.

Right, so, here's a little recap of Clio's first basketball game ever (played in a foreign country and in a foreign language).  

Two weeks ago was Clio's first basketball game.  She’s a good little recreational player, but has never played on a team before and she’s being coached in Spanish.  Michael and I highlight the ‘Have-Fun-Don’t-Worry-About-Winning’ component while Willa pipes in with “Yeah, but I hope you win!”  

On the morning of the "big game," twenty minutes before we had to leave the house, Clio realized she’d left her gym bag with her tennis shoes, sweatpants, and jacket on the school bus Friday afternoon.  She wailed.  I suppressed the urge to kill her and said “It’s ok, it’s going to be ok.  We’ll leave now and go buy you a pair of shoes.  Somewhere.  Somehow.”  As the four of us scrambled to leave 20 minutes early, I looked down at my own sneakers and wondered if they’d fit her.  Mercifully they did, she wiped her tears, we got in the car, and headed to the school.

 

Now, it's important to understand a little bit about the information that we get from the girls about their activities at school.  As best I can tell, the teachers give their instructions in Spanish and every now and then they have the time or the presence of mind to remember the two English-speaking kids who need a quick translation.  Hopefully the teacher speaks English.  So, our kids either understand it, understand pieces of it, or pretend to understand it.  They will usually, wisely, turn to their friends and ask for clarification but at this point, the information is again at risk.  Because it now relies on whether another 7-9 year old girl, whose second language is English, is both listening to the teacher in the first place and then has the English words available to her to translate correctly.  As you can see, the chances of accurate information coming home to us are slim to none.

With little to no information that morning, my best guess for the upcoming basketball game was that it would take place somewhere akin to my junior high school gymnasium with old wooden fold-out bleachers.  Willa could sit and color there.  I could use the bathroom at half time.  The score board would probably be the old-fashioned kind where the numbers flip.  Clio, it seems, had somewhat grander expectations because she asked me if I thought there was going to be an announcer.

 

When we pulled up to the school the mix of mis-information, dis-information, and non-information slowly played out.  A group of girls that Clio did not recognize were huddled together on the sidewalk.  They appeared to all of us to be 3-4 years older and 6-12 inches taller than Clio.  We reasoned, entirely in denial, that they must be here for a soccer game.  I stalled in getting out of the car because it was just slightly above freezing outside and there was a dense fog blocking most of the sun.  I thought it best to wait in the warm car until I saw a grown-up with a set of keys.  We asked Clio which door to stand near so we could quickly walk to the court inside and be that much closer to indoor heat.  But she said, "Oh, the basketball court is outside, over there."  She pointed past a big metal fence and across a dirt field to a playground blacktop with basketball hoops and no bleachers or sitting devices of any kind.  The now familiar urge to kill her came over me again.  I hoped against hope that she has mistranslated something.

We stood around in the cold waiting for someone to tell us what to do.  Her teammates started to arrive little by little.  Michael helped a very lost British couple in a car find the Alhambra.  Clio’s coach arrived at some point.  I made a mental note to adjust our punctuality towards tardiness.  Parents and kids and coaches stared to gradually and very casually organize themselves towards the court.  It was a bit too casual for my taste but laissez-faire is where the Spaniards excel and where I do not and this was my daily reminder of that fact.

Poor Clio had only a pair of shorts on her skinny little legs and I was afraid she was going to freeze to death but she insisted she was just fine with her little purple fleece jacket.  The other kids arrived with big socks pulled up to their knees or sweatpants over their basketball shorts.  Meanwhile I had on my winter coat, my scarf wrapped three times around my neck, and my hood pulled up over my wool hat.  Clio seemed completely preoccupied with how she was going to defend the very large girls of the other team to notice how cold she was.

As a group, we made our way over to the OUTDOOR!!! (did I mention?) basketball court.  We stopped to pick up a bench and I experienced a brief flicker of hope that there would be more of these collected and brought to the court.  But the bench was not for spectators, it was for the players.  We stood around for half an hour more while the kids warmed up, more players and parents showed up, the adults organized themselves, and the score keeper got out his pencil and paper.  

Clio played in the first and last quarters.  She did a great job defending, even when her team was on offense.  The parents and coaches screamed a lot of things in Spanish, the girls on both teams sang cheers over and over in Spanish, mostly to keep warm, I think.  The referee blew his whistle every eight seconds because the kids were fouling each other, or travelling, or double dribbling every time they moved.  And no one except the score-keeper ever knew what the score was.  The next ten years of my life flashed before my eyes.  (60 second video of the game is below).