For Spanish
American families today have a lifestyle somewhat different from that of earlier generations. Nowadays it's typical for both parents to work outside the home and to share duties such as taking the kids to sports practice. Fitting these trips into the time left after two full-time occupations requires a bit of juggling. Inevitably it takes time away from work that used to be done at home, such as cooking. More and more families eat meals away from home or buy fast food.
I had a chance to participate in this lifestyle recently. My 10-year-old grandson Paul was playing in a roller hockey game, and my daughter Martha invited me to come and watch it and eat dinner with them at a restaurant afterward. She had to leave work, pick Paul up, then pick me up, and drive to the site, where we met her husband Tim, who had come from his job, picked up their son Erik at his school, and brought him to the game.
I used to like watching ice hockey games, and I played field hockey myself in high school, but roller hockey is a sport I wasn't familiar with. It didn't exist when I was young, and I don't recall that it did when my children were young. Roller skates, as I knew them in childhood, were metal contraptions with 4 rollers arranged two and two, like the wheels on a car. They had to be strapped or buckled onto our shoes so we could skate up and down on the sidewalk. Some kids, whose families were wealthier and who went roller skating regularly at inside rinks, had shoe skates. On these, the wheels were attached to the shoe, a high-top leather affair that laced up all the way to provide support for the ankles. But the wheels were still arranged two and two.
Today's roller blades, as they're called, are a relatively recent invention. They have all four wheels lined up one behind the other, which makes them more like ice skates and thus no doubt more adaptable for playing hockey.
Paul and his teammates, the "Ice Bandits," are in the 7-10-year-old league. They all wore black adult-sized jerseys with the team name on the front and a number on the back, and helmets with visors. So little of their faces (and bodies) showed that we could only identify them by number.
The game was played in a large outside rink at one of the local high schools. The rink was nothing but a concrete floor with a cage at each end for the goalies. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and there was one bench along the side for spectators. Some of the parents brought their own chairs, but most just stood.
One of the things I used to enjoy about watching professional ice hockey was the speed of the play. There's never a dull moment. But these were kids, and while many of them were very good, I had to remember that they were still learning the game and its moves. So there were moments of great speed and grace, but others where the kids were less than polished. Paul was certainly one of the best players on his team, maybe the best. [Grandma's objective opinion]
The coach of the other team, the "Razor Blades," apparently thought he wasn't doing his job if he didn't "coach" every single minute. So he was continually shouting from the sidelines, "Go for it, Scott," "Take it away, Bob," "Good job, Jeff," "Nick, come back to this side," "Bob, shoot NOW," "Nick, move in," "Dan, watch out." It was amusing at first, but got a little tedious.
Erik, who is almost 6, wasn't too interested in the game, so he wandered around amusing himself in any way he could. At one point he started picking up things that he found on the ground. He brought back quite a collection. One of the items was a metal strap, the kind with arow of slots, that you fasten in place and tighten with a screwdriver. I know that small ones are used on radiator hoses, but this was a big one--it must have been over 4 feet long. Erik played with it, putting it together to make a circle which he slipped over his head. Then he asked me to tighten it to make a belt. I did, but it wasn't tight enough to suit him, so I pulled it tighter. What I didn't realize was that these things go only one way. Once in place, it couldn't be loosened. So here was poor Erik with this "belt" with a 3-foot (1-meter) extension sticking out and waving around. We tried keys and coins to undo it, but nothing worked. I went up and down the row of parents asking, but no one had a knife with a screwdriver. You'd think someone might have had a Swiss army knife, good for all emergencies, but no luck.
Finally Martha wrapped the extension around Erik's waist, tucked it in, and told him he could wear it that way till he got home. He wasn't too happy about that, but there wasn't much he could do about it. As we walked toward the restaurant he hung back, embarrassed that someone might see him. It didn't seem to bother him that the T-shirt he'd worn all day was covered with stains in mud-brown, sand-brown, earth-brown, and dirt-brown.
The restaurant we went to, Maya Quetzal, is on 4th Ave. in downtown Tucson and serves Guatemalan food. On one wall is a huge mural of a Guatemalan rain forest with a couple of quetzals in the foreground. They are birds something like parrots. The tables were covered with colorful woven cloths, no doubt Guatemalan also. There's an outside patio in back, but since we'd been sitting out in the heat for an hour and a half, we decided to stay indoors and be cool. Martha ordered a Modelo Negro beer, and Tim had a Tecate. Paul and Erik had horchata to drink. Erik ate a lot of chips dipped in salsa, adding tomato-red to the brown stains on his shirt. By this time he seemed to have forgotten the belt.
Guatemalan food is similar to Mexican in many ways, but the Guatemalans do different things with vegetables. Martha likes paches, which resemble tamales, but they're made with a potato masa instead of corn meal. Guatemalan tostadas, which I had on an earlier visit to the restaurant are made with beets, which I haven't seen in Mexico. Black beans are apparently a staple food and are served on every plate, along with rice. They were both delicious. I had chiles rellenos which were stuffed with spinach and walnuts in addition to cheese.
Tim had albondigas, Martha had a vegetarian plate (they have a number of vegetarian specialties on the menu), Paul had tortilla soup, and Erik had chicken taquitos. All of them were excellent.
We passed up dessert at the restaurant, but Erik kept begging his dad to take him to a place down the street called the Chocolate Iguana. Yes, I thought, that's all he needs to make his costume complete--a few more stains, this time in chocolate-brown. Boys are one part of the American family that hasn't changed.
