In this house, we live, we laugh, we love, and we hold athletics in middling-to-light esteem.
I mean, we do like to try them. We just don’t want anybody getting any ideas about how many weekends a year mom and dad are willing to sit on a set of bleachers and look invested in which 7-year-old can hurl a basketball most convincingly toward the correct hoop.
My kids dabble. So when they asked to try the karate dojo a short distance from our house, my response was the same as it is with all sports: an emphatic and resounding, “I mean, sure.”
It’s been a couple of months, and although I intend to require their full commitment to karate until one or all of us gets tired of it, I can say I’ve already learned a few important things.
1. Kids are capable of a lot more than we think they are, including paying rapt attention to an adult who is not their mother and who can use nunchucks. Also, I suspect many members of the toddler class are capable of defeating me in hand-to-hand combat.
2. Parents at other sport practices like to lean forward, elbows on knees, to watch their child’s performance and, I assume, collect commentary for the inevitable HBO documentary about his or her rise to global sports dominance. Parents at karate practices like to read fantasy novels. Or sometimes just leave.
3. If your childhood was supported by a robust diet of early-90s popular culture, you will impress your children by already knowing what a lot of karate stuff is called. They don’t need to know the weapons on the wall were all wielded by either a ninja turtle or a member of the X-Men at one time or another. Similarly, you’ll be able to assure them, when the time comes, that waxing Sensei’s car is all part of the path toward vengeance and/or owning a successful chain of car dealerships in their mid-50s.
4. The mechanics of a body in karate action are extremely difficult to capture in stick figure form. Especially when you forgot your fantasy novel and are trying to doodle the dojo’s window decal without anyone noticing.
5. If you put this sweet radial sun behind a stick man, however, whatever he’s doing will look awesome.
Until we meet again, grasshoppers.
