Trying to Teach My Mother

I was thinking about my mother this morning. She died in 2007 and lived a full life. She wanted to know what was going on with current events and she wasn’t afraid to tackle new things.

One thing she wanted to learn was football. The woman enjoyed college basketball and following teams like Iowa State and Iowa, but when it came to the game of football, she didn’t have a clue.

On several occasions, I tried to patiently teach her football. Football is an extremely complicated game. It’s challenging to understand blocking schemes and offensive and defensive play-calling. But even the simpler football aspects can create difficulty.

I think she finally understood the scoring system: six points for a touch down and three for a field goal etc. But the aspect she could never master is the down-and-distance factor. You get four downs to make 10 yards which is really basic. Except for football games are not played in tiny, little neat packages. You have penalties, you have loss of yardage and even loss of down. That creates all kinds of problems for the down-and-distance factor. And as I discovered, this problem can greatly hinder the explanation process.

I think my mother finally made peace about not understanding football. I made peace with it too as I quit trying to explain the game.

But as I think about it, learning football is a whole lot like cooking. Whether its football or cooking, the down-and-distance could come back to bite you. And if I had to follow one of my mom’s recipes and make some food, I shudder to think how the food would turn out.