ↁ's Notebook

As I mentioned earlier, Friday was field trip day for Meghan with the bonus of having me tag along as a driver/chaperone. We were going to Conner Prairie, one of those old time re-creation towns that is on the site of one of the first white settlements in Central Indiana. It’s also five minutes from our house and I had never been there in almost nine years living here. Hey, we’ve been busy!

I was dreading the trip a little, mostly because I imagined a carload of screaming first-graders making the drive to-and-from Conner Prairie a nightmare. There were enough parents, though, that only one of Meghan’s classmates rode with us, and she is a friend who has been to our house before and knows me, so there was no uncomfortable, shy quiet from her. They giggled and sang the whole way there.

We had over three hours to explore the site. There’s a lot to see, but on a day when the temperature was well into the 90s, that was a long time. We were free to go wherever we wanted, so we often joined into groups of 4-6 girls and their chaperones and wandered together. The girls were excited to see the schoolhouse, the hospital, the pottery store, and the hotel. The telegraph station was a big hit. Any time we came across a horse or cow there were squeals of delight. The baby animals in the barn were a huge hit, although the extremely pregnant mama sheep was kind of gross with her misshapen belly.

One girl in the group tried to get her picture taken with a rooster. He responded by pecking her leg and drawing blood. A mom who was close to the incident said, “Those roosters do NOT like having their pictures taken!” Indeed.

I enjoyed the Civil War section, although the girls weren’t very interested in my half-assed explanation for why there was a Civil War. Probably for the best, as there was a group of African-American students around us then and the conversation could have been extremely awkward had the girls started asking questions.

America! Circa 1832.

Did I mention it was hot? The drinking fountains were very popular. By about 1:15 all the girls were running out of energy and only the 10 minutes scheduled for the playground at the end of the tour kept them going. But even that turned into a bust as a trip to the bathroom kept our group from getting to the playground long enough to play every long. But they weren’t too disappointed to be herded back towards the cars and vans for the trip back to school.

I’ve avoided these school trips for the most part, always having the excuse of a baby or younger sister at home to get me out of them. I’m pretty sure that excuse is disappearing though, and this was the first of many, many volunteer opportunities for me at St. P’s. I hope they all go as smoothly as this one did.

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• The Clash - 35
• PS I Love You - 12
• Exitmusic - 10
• The Cult - 7
• Radiohead - 3
• The White Stripes - 3
• Jack White - 3

I was chaperoning a first-grade field trip Friday so wasn't able to post a video then. It worked out well, though, since Dario Franchitti gave me the excuse to play this fantastic song.

Vitalic - "My Friend Dario"

We've reached the manic, two-week period of spring in which all the high school sports cram their playoffs into the final days of the school year. Which means many chances for me to work. In theory.

This week I grabbed the plum assignment, the 4A softball sectional in which four of our teams were playing. Wednesday I was to cover both semifinals, including the #2 ranked team in the state (CG, one of our schools) and then the championship game on Thursday. The plan was for me to write a lengthy story for Friday's paper not about just the final, but also CG's quest for another state championship.

And then they went out and got beat Wednesday. Whoops. In the other semifinal, the team I was covering, FCHS, had a two-run lead going into the 7th and promptly gave up seven runs to lose. So I went from writing the feature story for the Friday sports page to losing my assignment for tonight since we had no teams in the final.

That disappointment aside, it was an entertaining night at the park on Wednesday. CG is a wonderfully balanced team that has great pitching, perhaps the best defense in the state, and a terrific offensive attack that features lots of speed and gap hitters. They were limited to a single run on five hits Wednesday, by far their lows for the season. The starting pitcher, who was 18-0 coming in, had a rough night, but still gave up just three runs. Most nights that's enough for CG to win. CG was the host team, so there was a nervousness in the air as the innings passed and they were unable to score.

It's not like they lost to a bad team. The winner is ranked #20 in the state, but CG had beat them 18-6 earlier this season. A big upset no matter how you look at it.

In the nightcap FCHS took on the #15 team in the state, NP. NP scored two runs in the first and left the bases loaded. It was looking like a quick game that would be run-ruled after 5. But FCHS pushed a run across in their half of the first, held NP through the next two, then took the lead in the bottom of the third. The teams went back-and-forth through the sixth, when NP scored two in the top of the inning and FCHS three in the bottom to take a 7-5 lead into the final frame. Which is when the roof caved in.

The top of the seventh began around 9:00. My deadline for writing about two games was at 10:15. That half inning took 25 minutes. Fortunately FCHS went quickly in the bottom of the inning and I ran out to my car without doing any interviews to crank out the story. I submitted at 10:14. It's been a long time since I've cut it that close.

Adding insult to injury, the two non-4A schools we cover both lost Wednesday as well. So we went from having a state title contender in 4A and a top 10 team in 1A to nobody left playing in about four hours.

Baseball sectionals began last night, too, and there's a chance I'll cover a game on Memorial Day. But the way things have gone this week, I'm not going to count on it.

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I wanted to write something about the passing of Donna Summer. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized her music never really qualified as “mine”. Sure, I heard her songs a million times growing up, but her peak - 1976-79 - came before I was reposnible for the music that I listened to. I heard tons of Donna Summer songs because I had young parents who listened to pop music, especially disco.

So while her passing is sad, I feel like my mom, who would have been 60, would have reacted more strongly. Perhaps a little like I responded to Adam Yauch’s death two weeks ago.

He’s not my mom’s age, but Joe Posnanski is a couple years older than me, and thus fell into Donna’s era more directly. Of course he wrote a brilliant piece about her death and his childhood. Go read it.

More than anything, I listened to Last Dance. I don’t remember hearing that song as a child … I mean, I know heard it many, many times because I still know all the words but I don’t remember any specific time I heard it. I connect no particular moment to it (even though I know it was on the Freaky Friday soundtrack). But there is something I connect to it, a time, a vague, indeterminate feeling. I didn’t ask to be a child of disco. I didn’t not ask to grow up in an AM radio time and place where Elton John lip synching on American Bandstand felt like the cutting edge of music. I didn’t choose to hear Last Dance again and again and again rather than, say, Darkness of the Edge of Town or Elvis Costello or The Clash or whoever might have been cooler.

Last Dance

Also, rest in peace Robin Gibb.