It's amazing what associations I made with certain things and ideas that probably no one else in the world makes. Soccer is the most played sport in the world, except it's called football in other countries, and the World Cup (happening this upcoming year, 2022, all of a sudden!) creates excitement for countries all over the world. Everyone has an exciting soccer story, whether it's watching soccer at a bar, playing soccer as a kid or at higher levels, and Southern California has a lot of soccer fields due to the ubiquity of the sport and climate conditions. I used to play soccer as a kid too, except I was really bad, I scored like one goal in my entire 3-season playing career of combined indoor and outdoor soccer, and I learned some hard lessons about letting down teammates if I didn't pass to them, or kid league soccer coaches putting their sons into the game instead of me even though we were all supposed to get the same amount of playing time. Some of the worst tendencies of human beings come out in sports, whether it's cheating, being too competitive, being a bad sport, bullying other kids (like me) who weren't as good .
The thing that sticks out for me most about soccer, though, are the chocolate round balls of candy wrapped in socce ball foil that I used to eat as a kid. I liked the taste of them even though they were just the plainest milk chocolate possible and they also had basketball and baseball-themed chocolate balls that tasted exactly the same, but for some reason I now associate seeing a soccer ball with eating chocolate, and it makes my mouth water, plus I get a happy feeling of nostalgia. It's indicative of how much of our lives are shaped by our childhoods, whether it's having a traumatic experience, associating certain items with a particular feeling, not liking certain foods because we didn't like it the first time we try it, or knowledge that stays in our heads indelibly even to this day. I'll forget something I swear I memorized a week ago when I actually need to use it like the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, (the next one after Omicron is Pi, then Rho, hopefully we don't get too far after that!) and even though they're roughly the same order as the English alphabet....Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, etc., but I'll remember things I learned when I was 10 years old vividly like that Arcadia National Park is in Maine, or the name of P.T. Beauregard, a Confederate general during the U.S. Civil War (I really liked reading about the Civil War and Revolutionary Wars as a kid. I just liked wars, I guess). Now I wish I would have read more useful things when I was a kid, like SCIENCE ( I disliked science for some reason, a choice that baffled my chemistry professional parents).
I also lament that I didn't learn some of the sports I needed to learn as a kid. I played soccer but never learned how to keep the ball up in the air without touching it, a useful skill for hackysack and fitting in with the local soccer guys......I never learned skiing, something that has burdened me on the slopes every time a friend sends out an invite to the next ski trip in Big Bear, Lake Tahoe, Colorado......and I never truly learned a martial art, even though I took some karate lessons... it was more for the camaraderie, not the skill, and my parents pulled up out so I can concetrate more on violin lessons. Sigh.
TL; DR: Childhood soccer memories: not great, but salvaged by mind association with chocolate to make it seem fun for me! Yay!
No comments:
Post a Comment