- A city street--
I crossed the street to the gym. A few of the players were already waiting to carpool to the field. We sit on the concrete blocks waiting for the rides to come. The president of the college pulls in smoothly and goes into the gym to look at the progess being done in preparing it for the chef competition. I wish our college didn't engage in publicity and money stunts.
***
The truck pulled up, and a
bunch of players jumped in. They pulled out, and I was left with
another player waiting for the next ride.
***
A car pulled up with another
student to carpool.
"Hello," he said
in a silly voice, "What's your name?"
"There's no one else
waiting for a ride?" he asked.
"Six of them already
left?"
"I thought the coach
said 4:30, it's just past four."
"Well, he filled up his
truck and left. We're waiting for the other person."
"Who already left?"
After the other person went
through trying to describe all the players we didn't remember the
names of, I went through and listed them all out by name.
***
The ride pulled up almost to
our feet. The player got out.
"Hello, what's your
name?" was asked to the driver.
"Joe Smooth," he
replied. "Since you're short, you probably should go in the
back."
"Who are you calling
short?"
"Just watch the stuff
in the back."
We stuffed ourselves in on top of his sweatshirts, shoes, bags, papers, etc. We took off, with the radio blasting directly behind my head. I thought in my head "At least the seatbelts all work."
***
He was a relatively safe
driver anyhow.
"I was coming here
going 70 in the 55 zone, and there was this white truck trying to
pass me, and I was like who is this idiot in the white truck trying
to pass me. We had been alongside each other a while, so I looked
over and it was the coach."
He drove pretty carefully,
though was exceedingly jerky pulling in to merge. He didn't change
the radio until we were going straight though. The radio worked
better the faster we went. The players all turned their hats
backwards so as not to be blown off from the wind pouring in through
the wide open windows.
"Does this seatbelt
works?" one of the players asked.
"No," the driver
player replied.
At that point I noticed he
wasn't wearing one either.
***
It wasn't all that far, and
we made it there without rolling over.
"We'll carpool tomorrow
too, and probably for the forseeable future," the coach said.
"I wish our college didn't engage in publicity and money stunts."
ReplyDeleteIt does seem to detract from the mission's seriousness. But it seems to be expected and it is argued such stunts are necessary for continued survival. There are some people who might argue similarly that collegiate athletics, even on our small scale, are a waste of resources.
:)
Vignette 3 confuses me so badly that I never recover in this piece. How many people are waiting? Who is asking all those questions? One person? If so, why multiple grafs and separate quotation marks? If many people, who are they? We need some indication of shifts in speaker unless only two speakers or context makes the shift clear--which it doesn't here for me.
So, interesting: the speech class piece worked nicely; this, I'd say, is an honorable failure. Batting .500 ok or do you want another plate appearance?
I think it just needs a bit of clarification, looking it back over, with no names it was confusing. I have no idea what I was doing, and it looks like their are some question marks where they should not have been and such. Not too difficult to fix, I don't think. Thanks.
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