When It Comes To Soccer, They Don’t Want A Pizza The Action
When I was a little kid, my parents signed me up to play soccer once a week with a neighborhood team. I played it for a few years, until one day in mid-elementary school when I came home from the final game of the season looking like someone had stolen my favorite stuffed animal. I went to my room without saying much.
Dad: “Did something happen at the game?”
Mom: “She’s sad because they stopped offering pizza at the end of the season. She said that if she knew there wasn’t going to be any pizza, she wouldn’t have signed up at all this year.”
Dad: “You’re kidding.”
Mom: “Nope.”
Dad: “I’d have paid for a d*** pizza every week if it meant I didn’t have to sit on a cold bleacher every Saturday morning.”
Up until this point, I had thought of pizza as a special treat that had to be earned by doing something hard (like playing soccer). It genuinely had not occurred to me that Mom and Dad had money, that money could be exchanged for pizza, and that pizza was a lot cheaper than organized soccer.