Roger Pires Oct. 27, 2011
When he's not offering his take on daily life, Roger Pires spends his days as a computer systems analyst. It's not exactly a glamorous calling but hey, it pays the bills. He enjoys hockey, canoeing, snowshoeing, and spending as much time as he possibly can outdoors. He lives in Udora with his wife and two kids, who are his prime inspiration for Ravenshoe Ramblings.
Previous
The great escape
The rat race can make for some strange bedfellows. Like husband and wife. When you crawl into bed at night, the warm body beside you may be excused if they ask, “Who the heck are you?” Let’s examine the evidence. You spend half your waking hours at work. The first to arrive at home is bestowed with the honour of feeding the starving hordes. If time permits, dinner will not come out of a box. But on those days when you both get home late, you crack open some science experiment from the frozen food section and hope you don’t end up glowing in the dark. The last to arrive takes the opportunity to knock a few items off the honey-do list.
When dinner is over and the light bulb that’s been out since February has been replaced, you are finally ready to relax. That is, until you are volunteered to chauffeur one of the brood to another event; the kid’s got a social calendar that’s the envy of TMZ. You inquire as to your options: it’s either take one to here or pick the other one up from there.
When the limo service has finally shut down for the night you think maybe, just maybe, there are a few moments left to spend together before you both lapse into a coma. Alas, this is October, which means the baseball playoffs and the start of hockey season. When your better half asks you if you’re coming to bed your answer should be: “I’ll be right up.” But no. Some male primal instinct puts a hammerlock on your good sense. “I’m just going to check the score.” She doesn’t need the Neanderthal-to-English dictionary to know this means you’re going to spend the next three hours flipping between a myriad of sporting events. Guys and our sports. It probably started with the cavemen. Grog and the boys would be hunched over the fire pit, hitting rocks together to see who could make a spark. Lowest score wins. And it wouldn’t stop there. Next morning as they prepared to go kill breakfast, they would discuss last night’s game ad nauseum.
The Greeks evolved male sporting rituals to an art form. Trouble was, they did everything in the buff. I doubt nude javelin could crack TSN’s nightly lineup. The Romans took a grittier approach. Combatants were thrown to the lions and would end up as the main course for the home team. Every game was a sellout. The bookies didn’t get a lot of action though.
The ethos of gamesmanship remains even if the venues have changed. And so I found myself watching baseball from the comfort of my easy chair. Ah, the grand old game. Unconstrained by the rigors of time, a match could end on the next pitch – or it could it last, unresolved, into the middle of the night. Well, it didn’t end on the next pitch. Once again, I rejected common sense and decided to stay until the bitter end. After all, leaving the scene of a playoff game is punishable by the loss of several “man points.” How would I explain that to the boys at the water cooler the next morning?
I didn’t have to explain anything to my wife; her patience outweighs my foolishness. However, I would have to convert some of those hard-earned man points into some much-needed brownie points. But how? The schedule for the coming weekend was already full. Our son would be having his birthday party. It’s tough to find “us” time when the house is under siege by teenaged boys. But where there’s a will, there’s a devious plan to ditch the kids and go out for dinner.
The boys wanted to see some blow-up special at the Roxy. That was our cue. Going to a movie with your parents is the fourteen-year-old equivalent of showing up at a singles bar with a sore on your lip and a couple of kids. We had no trouble convincing the urchins they’d enjoy the movie more without us. At long last, we were alone. No jobs to go to, no dinners to cook, no household chores to perform. We had finally escaped the rat race. Even the baseball playoffs would be an intrusion at this point. The only task left was to pick a restaurant. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if the place had a big-screen TV.
