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Seamus and I started a shorties and parents class at Acroports last week. I figure he’s two, it’s time for some good old fashioned conforming into one of tomorrow’s achievers group activities. I want him to learn to take turns and sit in a circle and and not horn in on another kid’s activity, and I’m pretty damn sure now that M, his daycare provider, has opened her new preschool and left the daycare in the hands of English language-learning relatives that there is no preschool structure going on over there anymore. Which bums me the fuck out, but unless we stay in the neighborhood past this summer, I am not ready to change the situation. Thus beginneth the enrichment activities. I have become one of “those parents”. If I start getting indignant about someone telling my kid to not be an asshole when he is clearly acting like one, I’d like one of you to take me out behind the chemical sheds (hopefully, whoever it is will get that reference).

Acrosports is fantastic. The classes are in one of the old gymnasiums belonging to Polytechnic High. The school closed when my high school opened in 1972, and most of the campus was later demolished for townhouses. the two gyms remain: Acrosports in one, a circus school in the other. I think the wee lunatic classes are held in the old locker room, which is outfitted now with a giant trampoline, some bars and beams for their size, and plenty of crash pads and mats. The teachers don’t give me any grief about Seamus’ lack of immediate compliance; they all say that he’ll slowly start to follow along with the other kids.

The parents are pretty friendly. This is huge for me, as I spent the first year of his life looking for a place to go after we aged out of the new parents’ group at Kaiser and running into um, people I wasn’t enjoying spending money to be around. Some of you may remember the little problem I had last year with my neighborhood playgroup.  I never went back after that incident. I tried, I’d get within a block and just veer for the playground instead. Of course, it may be obvious that I’m trying to get him to play well and be a part of the class rather than adjacent to it, what with the chasing and the somewhat burnt-out attempts at re-directing. (Seamus doesn’t really re-direct. Not through my negligence in trying, he simply refuses about ninety-seven percent of the time.)

He appears to be having a good time, enough that I fantasize about trying to stay in the city and move into the Haight where I grew up, and eventually enrolling him in Parkour classes so we don’t have to sweat school sports, and watching him graduate from Lowell or Wallenburg before sending him off to Deep Springs. Not that I have an active imagination or anything (he also knits complex geometric lace and plays the fiddle). Since a gigantic pile of additional income isn’t raining down on us anytime soon, I’ll re-up these classes if it’s a sustained hit, and then knit next to him while he plays at home in the afternoons.