One of the most entertaining parts of life in Arizona is driving my son and his friends around. To the movies, the pool, to spring training baseball games. They get caught up in a frenzy of animated story telling. Their middle school adventures are retold like they happened yesterday, even some that happened years ago. They repeat themselves a lot. How they tricked this or that teacher. Their schoolyard fights and football games. The time they got detention for defacing somebody's social studies poster about racism and anti-Semitism with "Hitler and the KKK are gay" graffiti. Trying to interject that they shouldn't fight or say bad things about gay people only gets the response (if any) that we're never backing down and what do the teachers expect when they let people put up posters with Hitler and the KKK in a room with black, Catholic and Jewish kids.
Even when the stories turn dark there's still great revelry in their telling. After the basketball game at Maryvale in central Phoenix when the other team's cheerleaders followed them to the bus shouting profanities and throwing rocks at our team's bus as it left the parking lot. The baseball game when our black pitcher was winding up and a Latino parent cheering for the other side shouted to the batter "wait until he throws you another watermelon!"
The most troubling story was about a cousin getting suspended for slamming a schoolmate's head into a door and opening up a cut that required stitches. I asked why in Heaven's Name would he have done that. His cousin sitting in the back seat matter-of-factly replied: "This Mexican kid was following him around all day calling him the N word. So my cousin got fed up and clobbered him. Then the kid's parents got after us and said they'd shoot us if we ever walked by their house. So after that my cousin and I always had to take the long way home from the Sunnyslope community center, cause they sounded like they really meant it."
