The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

Baseball Ambassador

by 2 Comments

On Tuesday I gave a talk at the primary school to a bunch of six-year-olds.  Each class year was learning about specific country for the entire week.  The year 1 one classes  (first graders) were learning about America.  So, I went in and gave them a little introduction to my favourite sport—baseball.

I loaded up a gym bag with a few bats, some bases, a couple of gloves, and some balls from my baseball collection.  I gave a short little presentation on what I liked to do at their age.  When I was little, my hero wasn’t Wayne Rooney—it was Tony Gwynn.  We didn’t play football, we played baseball.  I told them about my little league team.  I let them each hold a baseball and feel what the gloves and bats felt like.  I showed them my special foul ball I caught at a Padre game in 1996 after years of taking my glove to the ballpark (still in a protective case). 

Then we went outside to hit balls and run the basis.  I used wiffle balls and a foam bat.  We set the bases out in a small diamond and had all the kids stand in a semi-circle in the outfield.  Each child came up to the plate to hit the ball while the others cheered them on.  I threw underhand and most of them were able to hit it and run the bases.  It was a great time.

Most people in England don’t know very much about baseball (the same way most people in the States don’t know much about Cricket).  It was one of the things I missed the most when I moved here 12 years ago.  No baseball. 

Baseball is such a big part of American life. Even if you are not a fan, you have a general idea how the game works.  It’s woven into our culture.  Television programmes make occasional references to baseball.  We use baseball terms in common speech.  So, when kids over here watch American TV programmes, they don’t always understand when there is a baseball reference.  I was watching Arthur (the cartoon—not the Dudley Moore movie) with my kids and they were playing baseball on the show.  My kids are familiar with baseball, but many of their friends are not.

But kids here love football (okay, soccer).  Even at six-years-old, they knew a lot about the World Cup.

Surprisingly, the classes I spoke to knew a little bit about baseball from Wii Sports.  That was their exposure to it.  At the end of playing with one of the classes, a little girl who hit the ball pretty well said to me “I never hit the ball on the Wii, but I hit the ball today.”  She had a big smile on her face. 

I’ve done my part as ambassador.

My toe

by 2 Comments

About three weeks ago, I broke the little toe on my right foot while playing around with my kids.  I think it’s broken, anyway.  It turned purple and swelled to half its size.  I never bothered going to the doctor because common wisdom is there is nothing you can do about a broken toe.

Three weeks later it still hurts.  I try to let it heal, but I can’t protect it. 

All my life I’ve had a tendency to stub my toes on things.  Maybe it’s my California background that makes me think I should be able to handle bare-footed-ness better, but I should probably be required to wear shoes 24/7.  My tiny outer toes frequently snag on door frames.  My big toe always hits one of the bed posts in my room.

There is nothing cool about stubbing your toe.  It never happens to action heroes in the movies.  Even in the first Die Hard movie where Bruce Willis was barefoot through the whole movie—he stepped on glass and got bloody, but here never jabbed his toe into a door frame while knocking off all the bad guys.

The strange thing about stubbing your toe is that no one realizes you’ve done it.  One second, you’re walking and talking and the next second you’re limping very fast—making a sucking sound with your mouth—and swearing.  

Bruce Willis I am not.

New Years Resolutions

by 3 Comments

I’m a big believer in New Year’s Resolutions.  Having said that, I hadn’t really thought of any.  Sure, there’s the resolutions that could be carried over from last years—all that diet and exercise stuff—but nothing new.

At this time of year, I feel self-conscious about running. Tomorrow morning will the the worst.  The sidewalks and pavements are always packed with runners on the first of Jan.  Since my long career in running has not done much to reduce my weight (imagine if I didn’t run!), I always look like a novice when I’m out there.  I look like a New Year’s runner.  But still, there’s nothing wrong with being someone out on a run because they made a resolution.  Good for them!  They probably feel self-conscious too, but they do it anyway.

This time of year, if you talk about resolutions, 3 or 4 people say the same thing– “My resolution this year is to not make any resolutions!”  Hah!  Get’s me every time!  How clever.

The problem I always had with resolutions is that I fear being mocked if I don’t carry them out.  I felt the same way when I started running or earlier this year when I started going to the gym.  I felt that if I start, I could never stop because that would be failure somehow. 

If I go for a run on 1 January, for example, I feel as if I have to run every day after that.  If I start going to the gym, I need to go for years.  But the truth is, this kind of fear stopped me from doing lots of things.  If I go to the gym once, it’s one time more than never going.  If I see it as something I need to do today rather than a commitment to something for the rest of my life, it makes it much easier to handle. 

My most famous resolution with my family is the time I decided I would become a vegetarian.  It lasted 7 days.  But that burger on January 7th was fantastic!

My parents quick smoking on New Years when I was a kid.  They never took it up again.  Resolutions are not always broken.

There’s nothing magical about a New Year’s resolution—it just gives you an excuse to make a goal.  An it’s easier to tell people how long you’ve been keeping it up.

I’ll spend today thinking of a good resolution.  It seems a waste of a calendar change if I can’t come up with one.

Happy New Year and I wish you a wonderful 2010.