Wednesday, March 09, 2016

Smile

The football team had been practicing on a hot Arkansas August afternoon. It was the second practice that day. I had worked in between practices. Most of us wanted to sit on the cool concrete walkway in the shade and drink from the water hose. We dreaded when Coach would call us back to the practice field.

The practice field was the elementary school playground. It was three blocks from the field house. It was mostly a dust bowl. But it was better than the lot right across from the field house. We had a nickname for that place. The Sticker Bowl. Coach didn't care about the stickers. We still ran our drills on the ground. Linemen could hardly put their hands down in the pre-snap position without landing on the stickers. It would have been comical if it had not been painful.

So that day during the break Coach starts to get on us about being so down and blue and sad. "Come on, guys, smile!" It didn't work. We were tired. It would take more than that to make us smile. Maybe if our girlfriends drove by…then we might smile. If there was some reason to call off practice early…then we might smile.

"Do you know how many muscles it takes to frown?" "Forty-seven," I said quickly.

Sometimes my wit is tempered with wisdom. Sometimes it's not.

"That's right!" he said. I have no idea how many muscles it takes to frown. He probably doesn't either. Maybe his wit was a tad sharper than mine. Then he said it only took X number of muscles to smile. Frowning took more effort than smiling, he said.

Who knows? I don't but I learned an important lesson that day. A couple actually.

One is, don't try to outsmart the coach. As I've aged and especially as I've had teenagers I've learned that age is an advantage in many aspects.

The other lesson I learned is that attitude trumps almost anything. If you have a good attitude about even a mundane task you will be much happier. And the task won't seem so bad.

I guess we've discovered that there are too many germs in a water hose so we can't drink from them anymore. We especially can't pass it around to forty other guys. But when I'm out mowing on a hot summer day I'll slip over to the water hose and take a drink. And I almost always think of that day of practice on the elementary school playground.

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