The Heady Glories of the Soccer Parade

So I’m standing at the kitchen counter cutting a bagel, laying it flat on the cutting board and sawing with quick little strokes, the way you fillet a decent fish.

Some guys stalk the mighty golden trout. Me, I stalk the mighty golden bagel. Just this morning, I bagged a dozen.

“What’re you doing, Dad?” the little girl asks.

“Butchering bagels,” I tell her.

And I crank open the kitchen windows, open them full to the good fall air, then fill a pan with bacon and drive the neighbors crazy with the smell.

Then I put on coffee and drive the neighbors crazy with that. Bacon. Coffee. Fall air. It’s amazing anyone can sleep.

“Time to get up!” I yell toward the bedrooms.

“Yeah, get up!” yells the little red-haired girl, always eager to help.

Forty-five minutes later we are walking toward the college stadium, lining up for the soccer league’s opening day pageant, where more than 100 teams will parade before parents and grandparents in honor of the great sport of soccer.

“I still smell bacon,” says the little girl.

“That’s me,” I say.

“You smell good,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say.

It is cold as we walk toward the stadium, and the little girl gets closer and closer, till she can almost climb into my pants pocket. A big baggy pocket. She’s sure there is room in there, with the referee’s whistle and the lottery stubs. There’s got to be room.

“You keep stepping on my foot,” I tell her.

“That wasn’t me,” she says.

*

So we walk into the stadium, where there are 2,000 children, all wearing various shades of green and orange, soccer’s primary colors--hues not found in nature, only in nuclear laboratories or salad dressings. Nice colors. One team is the color of Catalina dressing. Another team, red vinaigrette.

“I think we’re over there,” I say, grabbing her hand.

For 15 minutes, we can find no one. Other teams are lining up to march with six or seven players and we have one. I start to imagine how it will be when they call our team’s name and just the two of us parade before the grandstands. I wonder who will hold the banner. I wonder if we should leave.

“Hi, Coach,” someone finally says.

“Hi, Coach,” says someone else.

Before you know it, we have five or six team members together, here in the middle of the field, waiting to march in the parade. It’s a respectable number, six or seven. Enough to hold a banner.

“When do we go, Coach?” they ask.

“In a few minutes,” I say.

Now, if you’ve ever been fortunate enough to attend an opening day soccer pageant, you know it’s never a few minutes. It could be a few hours. It could be a few days. Weeks pass, sometimes, and you’re still waiting.

“Just a few minutes,” I say over and over again. If I told them the truth, there might be violence.

“How much longer?” one would ask.

“About five weeks,” I’d answer truthfully.

And they would begin to do cartwheels and tip over buses.

So I lie to them and we wait and they use my arms for ropes, swinging like Tarzan.

“You have pretty eyes,” one of them says.

“Yeah, they’re kind of pink,” says someone else.

“Have you been crying?”

“Not recently,” I say.

“My rabbit has pink eyes,” someone says.

“Does he coach, too?” I say.

These are the kinds of conversations we have. For an hour, we talk about rabbits and Pokemon and how one player’s father has a fungus all over his feet.

“What’d you pay for that haircut?” someone asks.

“Six bucks,” I say.

“You got gypped,” someone says.

“That’s a good-looking mole,” one of them says.

“Thanks,” I say.

For a while, they kill time by falling down on the grass. They take a few steps, then fall down happy. They are always doing this, falling down happy. On their knees, then their bellies.

So they practice falling down for a few minutes, then sit on the edge of the parade field and watch the other teams beginning to march. Teams like the Green-Goes and the Mega-Bytes and the Y2K Bugs, many sponsored by software companies. Three years ago, only a few teams were sponsored by software companies. Now it seems they all are.

“The next team . . . is the Millenniums,” the announcer says.

And finally, the parade begins to move a little and before you know it some guy is telling us to step up and onto the dirt track.

“The next team . . . is the Green Scream,” the announcer says as we parade before the grandstand, banner held high, our software company’s shiny logo in the lower right corner.

The girls scream when our name is announced, a prearranged thing they’ve been rehearsing since the first practice. “Green Scream,” the announcer says, and they all do.

“Do we get treats now?” one of them asks as we march away.

“Only after games,” I say.

“That’s OK,” she says, running off to find her mother amid a thousand mothers.

“It’s over already?” says the little girl as we trudge off toward the car.

“It happened so fast,” I tell her.

“I know,” she says, grabbing my hand and inching closer.

“You keep stepping on my foot,” I tell her.

“That wasn’t me,” she says.

*

Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.