When I was knee high to a grasshopper, just old enough to begin forming opinions and finding what kinds of things I liked and didn't like, my parents found it difficult to actually make me do that. I suppose in retrospect I can understand the difficulty, seeing as to this day I continue to be ambivalent to most things that I am introduced to. Sports, music, movies. I just didn't care about anything that my parents tried to introduce me to. It wasn't until a trip to Las Vegas (somewhat ironically, given that not a single person in my family actually enjoys being in Vegas, myself included) that we managed to find something I could actually like.
It was a dinner event, and I don't think anyone can honestly say why we decided to go to it. But it was themed as a tournament in the middle ages, with a set of knights battling it out on foot and on horseback in a variety of games and competitions to decide who was the greatest knight among them. Cliche? Sure. Over acted and clearly an act? Probably. But I was mesmerized. Utterly captured by these men in shining armor, competing to show their strength, masters of their animals, a complete lack of fear as sparks flew and metal clashed. They put food in front of me and I didn't even touch it. My dad had to get me fast food on the way out because I hadn't eaten at the dinner show.
Years later, my dad had tried to teach me to play piano. As usual, I was completely uninterested. I wasn't very into the sound at the time, I didn't want to be sitting down at this big, dull instrument, and I couldn't for the life of me remember where the hell middle C was, whatever the hell that even meant. I tried for maybe a total of two days before giving up, and my dad was short behind me. Then, while visiting some family friends a few months later, my dad came home from the store and put down an acoustic guitar in front of me. He had just seen it and decided, if I didn't like piano, maybe I would like guitar.
Unlike piano, however, there wasn't a single member of my family that knew how to play the guitar. So for that day, I messed around with it a bit, having no idea what anything on the wooden thing meant, before putting it aside, presumably to be left in the dust. It was another few months before, in a boy scout meeting, my dad was introduced to a guitar teacher that a friend of mine was under the tutelage of. The next week, so was I. And ten years later, I'm still playing guitar.
But that wasn't all that boy scouts gave me. Eventually, my family became heavily involved in boy scouts, to the point where we were some of the primary planners of troop outings. And in looking for potential trips, we found a deal with a sports team called the Stealth who played a game we had never even heard of before - Lacrosse. Out of curiosity, and being reasonably close to the event, we decided to check it out.
We knew none of the rules. We don't know any of the people. We could barely keep up with what was going on. But when the Stealth scored their first goal, it was like magic. One second I was dully watching the game, trying just to understand the basics of what was happening. The next I was on my feet, screaming my lungs out in excitement. I didn't even remember getting out of my seat. I remember sitting down afterwards, and my dad was ecstatic that we had found something else that I enjoyed.
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