And the award goes to....

A big part of being a parent is trudging to endless events to watch your kids play sports or lead cheers or sing songs or do other assorted cute things.

The events, I generally don’t mind. But almost every activity has an accompanying year-end awards ceremony or banquet, and those can be pure torture.

For one thing, at a ball game, I can concentrate on watching my son play, or my daughter cheer, and ignore everybody else. But at these banquets and ceremonies, I have to watch this parade of kids I don’t care about going to receive awards as I sit there and clap listlessly for three hours and hope none of the other parents make eye contact and want to talk to me.

Just last week, there was a year-end awards ceremony at my kids’ high school, and it was every bit of the thrill-fest I thought it would be. I haven’t had that much fun since my last MRI.

In the “everybody’s a winner” climate that exists today in schools, they seem to be determined to see that every student gets some sort of award. They honor the student with the highest grade-point average in every subject – and I do mean every subject. My favorite was the kid who won the weightlifting award. That’s going to look good on a college resume.

They also gave out “perfect attendance” awards. I like to point out to my kids that I had perfect attendance in school from kindergarten through the 11th grade. Not because I was some nerd who loved school, but because I knew if I had any illness this side of the Ebola virus, my mother was going to make me go to school.

It wasn’t because she was mean, but there was really nothing else she could do with me when I was sick. She couldn’t miss work, and my dad was at work, and nobody had heard of “day care” in those days. So she’d slap some Vick’s Vapor Rub on my chest, tell me to suck it up and shoo me toward the school bus. So I never considered perfect attendance an accomplishment – it was a mandate.

I am, of course, proud of my kids, and they both were honored for having an A average throughout the school year, which seems impossible since they do homework or study about as often as Haley’s Comet passes the Earth. But I may just have to find a reason to be out of town when next year’s awards banquet comes around. If that makes me a bad parent, I’ll live with the fallout.

Since my kids are also involved in athletics, there are “sports banquets” to attend. This year they combined the football and cheerleading banquets into one, which meant it lasted longer than the Yalta Conference. And just this week I attended a baseball banquet, which wasn’t that bad, except that the food would have been disallowed by the Geneva Convention, and people my age aren’t meant to sit for two hours at a school cafeteria table. Those seats were designed for smaller butts than mine.

They like to thank people a lot at sports banquets. Anybody who makes any minor contribution to the team or the program gets a plaque. This is preceded by a speech that usually goes something like, “There’s a special person here who I want to thank. She was responsible for bringing the napkins for the concession stand, and let me tell you, without her, I don’t know what we would have done. Every game I could count on her being there with the napkins, without me even having to ask her. We played a lot of games, so that’s a lot of napkins, and people don’t realize how much effort that takes.”

This goes on for about 5 more minutes, and then they bring up the person who brought the ketchup, and two hours later you begin praying for the Ebola virus to strike you, at last.

In the end, I suppose it’s worth it. My son was named his team’s Most Valuable Player and was given a large wooden plaque, which he wanted to put on the front of the refrigerator. Most valuable, but perhaps not most clear-thinking.

I reckon there’ll come a day soon when I’ll miss going to these sorts of events, but right now I can’t picture it. I’m just glad summer is here and eight weeks of blissful nothing-filled evenings await me.