LLT: Don't Day Dream

I don't remember her name. She was a few years older than me, in seventh grade. I don't remember her name, but I do remember how pretty she was. It was 1981 and I was wearing my first pair of real basketball shoes that I'd saved up for all summer cleaning cages and sometimes getting yelled at by my pops at the clinic: Adidas Top Ten. Red, White and Blue, baby. Though that was the only pair of Adidas Top Ten that I ever owned, I'm convinced to this day that they are the greatest basketball shoes ever made -- and I used to be quite a basketball sneaker connoisseuer. I wonder why I still think that.

So I'm standing there in my basketball shoes during the middle of a late season practice. Because of the way my birthday fell, I'm playing on a basketball team full of older kids and I'm struggling to fit in. I was a deadly serious player, but at this particular moment I'd been distracted when Jeff had pointed out that already-tanned girl with the big dark curly hair. The rest of the kids had just quickly glanced and were tuned back in listening to my father, the coach of the team. I wasn't. I was checking out that dark-skinned girl with her shiny sheer blue top and matching shorts.

Until my father's own-dark skinned face was in mine screaming at me, "That's five! Five! Get going!" I felt like my face was going to melt off as I blushed nine shades of red and with tears in my eyes I started running the five lap punishment my moment of pre-pubescent daydreaming had gotten me.

And that's today's Life Lesson Thursday: Don't day dream. There's simply no excuse for not listening to your superior when he/she is talking to you.

Or as a later boss on Wall Street would put it to his employees as he'd slam the desk in a sonic boom whenever somebody wasn't listening to him: "Wake up!"