Yesterday was the most beautiful Saturday I can remember in a long time. The weather was warm, but the cooling breeze was never too far away. With such gorgeous conditions, Randy and I decided to make it a day of outside activities: tennis (which neither of us are good at), frisbee (which both of us enjoy), and golf (which I hate for no good reason).
In the morning, we packed up our little SUV and headed off to Gordon Moore Park, which is a huge park we just now discovered by our house. The plan was to try tennis first, but that got quickly dashed when we arrived at the near-pro tennis courts with near-pro athletes playing. I can just picture Randy and myself floundering around on the court hoping to make 1 volley but accidentally sending the ball into other players' courts, ultimately messing up their A-games. So, we decided frisbee would be the first order of the day. We found a nice open space and started our play.
Not long after, I see a young boy, maybe 11 years old, come into view. He slowly gets closer to us, and before I know it, he's standing about 10 yards away watching us play. Randy, being the nice guy he is, asks the boy if he wants in on the frisbee action. The boy quickly agrees.
So, Randy throws him the frisbee, and the boy returns his throw with a pretty darn good throw himself. Impressive. I get to talking to the boy... he's in 5th grade. He has a bully at school. He's talked to his parents about it who promised to talked to the principal. He's never played frisbee because his dad can't afford to buy him one. After all, if the kid gets a frisbee, his 3 siblings will have to get something, too. His dad works at Dominoes Pizza. Man, kid. I'm starting to feel really bad for him. He's a sweet, polite, good-lookin' kid, and he's very accommodating when the frisbee flies off in the wrong direction... he'll hustle to retrieve it (nice!). So, after about 45-minutes of playing, Randy decides it's time to try golf, so we say good-bye to the youngster. But before we depart, Randy hands his $10 frisbee that we've played 3 times in our 5 years together to the kid. The kid is thrilled and takes it back to his siblings and parents who are at the nearby softball fields.
Randy liked that frisbee. It was a good frisbee. But, the kid needed it more than we did. We can afford to go buy another nice frisbee whenever we decide to play again in the next 5 years. The best part: as we were driving off to conquer our next sport, we could see the kid throwing the frisbee around with his brother and sister. Yep, they'll love that frisbee just as much as Randy did.
