We went to a college women’s volleyball game as an end-of-season outing with Lizzy’s team. It was very exciting. Those women are better than the high school and middle school girls we usually watch.
The venue is also better. You can eat concessions, and the stadium seats have backs; and when a player makes a block or a kill to win the point, her name, picture and stats flash across the screens all over the arena.
I think my name and likeness should flash across screens when I do something awesome. Miiiindyyyy Millerrrrrrr!!! With the successful carpool completion! Mindy Millerrrr, playing the mom position, with the nutritiouuuuusss DINNER! And that’s team co-captain Mindy Miller with her ten thousandth career load of laundry!!!
Also the picture of me that flashes up would be incredibly flattering.
Of course, the play I most want recognition for is driving someone somewhere. Because I had a realization the other day. While driving last Sunday afternoon to our church’s fall festival (hay ride pictured above), a forty-five-minute-each-way journey undertaken after we had already driven nearly an hour round-trip that morning to church and back—but a journey that was nevertheless stunningly beautiful with the foliage and mountain views getting more and more brilliant as we neared the farm—I realized: it’s not the driving per se that bothers me so much. It’s a feeling I can’t quite articulate, but something that puts me in mind of junior high school, when the unambiguously cool kids would stand in a well-defined circle in a very specific spot in the hall before homeroom.
I was not in the circle.
But I have clear memories of seeing the outside of the circle from my lesser spot in the general area of the hall.
Something about driving really far (relatively speaking) when EVERYONE ELSE (translation: some number of other people) had to drive really short somehow reminds me of looking at the outside of that circle in seventh grade.
And I’d feel a lot better if every time I showed up anywhere, everyone else stopped what they were doing to cheer and said Wow, Mindy, you are awesome! The stats screen says you just drove 22 miles for a grand total of 76 miles today! We can’t even imagine being as awesome as you! We just put on our shoes five minutes ago after taking a nap all afternoon. How do you do it?!! You put more effort into life than we would ever be able to!
Although that still wouldn’t soothe the concern that possibly all my friends and acquaintances are hanging out without me, since they’re all next-door neighbors.
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But also after the college volleyball game, the players sit at a table for people to line up and get their autographs. So maybe if people also clamored to tell me how awesome I was, after being informed by a flashing screen how awesome I was, and if they’d rather stay to hang out with me than go be with their friends and family and all their cool kid neighbors, then I’d feel pretty good about driving twenty miles to town.
This might be a me problem.
You must be prepared to work always without applause.
~ Ernest Hemingway
