Adventures of Donald and Buck

It's so blasted frustrating! On weekends, my news programs and cultural programs on television are delayed or cancelled. Why? Because we're in the football season.

At a high school in Ohio, a certain two of my students, Donald and Buck, were on the football team. Donald would sleep every day in my class. One day, I held a skit with a few students in front of the class. I awoke Donald to tell him that it was his role to walk from his desk some fifteen feet, and pretend he was roughing up Toby. To everyone's utter surprise, Donald sprang like a tiger from his desk, flew across the room in a football crouch, slammed his elbows and body up and against Toby chin, lifting Toby two feet into the air, and collapsing the helpless boy like pile of laundry onto the floor. "My God," I thought to myself in horror, "a hospital emergency and a lawsuit!" But Toby rose, recovered, and managed a crooked smile before returning to his own desk.

When I asked Donald how he could change like lightning from sleep to superman, he replied that his moments of his narcolepsy had ended just before I instructed him on his skit role. Narcolepsy! How in the world does someone with narcolepsy play football? When I asked that of his coaches, they replied, "Well, Donald's a lineman; yes, he often falls asleep in the game, but his teammates quickly wake him in time for each play." Incredible. When I later met with Donald's parents, and asked them about the physical danger of an unpredictable narcoleptic playing football, they agreed but shrugged saying, "But what can we do? Football is Donald's whole life. He couldn't live without it." What do you say to that?

Buck's name seemed suspicious to me. What boy has "Buck" as a legal name? When I kept asking him for his legal name for the sake of the school records I had to prepare on him, he kept saying "Buck" was it. I insisted it was his nickname. Had he never seen his birth certificate? No, he said. So I called his mother. She too insisted Buck was his legal first name. Because this was Ohio, the land of the Buckeyes, and because this family was football people, I just knew "Buck" was short for "our little Buckeye." It took me fifteen grueling minutes on the phone before I led the mother to admit, with maximum reluctance and even disappointment in her voice, that, yes, "Buck" was given to her boy at a young age---but at such a young age, she added, "it might as well have been his legal name." There's more: even though she acknowledged that "Buck" was not the real name, the woman could NOT remember her son's legal name, saying that she would have to consult the birth certificate!

Donald and Buck both won football scholarships to college. They lasted only one or two semesters. Donald and Buck were functionally illiterate. My news and cultural t.v. programs are again overrun by football games. Well, at least Donald and Buck aren't among the players I can blame for this. May the Lord continue to bless and protect all our football players and their parents.

-Old Doc