Autumnal equinox! Get your Grade A eggs ready!

Where goes the sun? - The flip side of a Beatles hit record? I was on Falcon Field at Severna Park High School a little past high noon on Sept. 15 contemplating the best place to perch for photos. I asked a young girl at the scorer’s table, ”Is this your home field?” and she responded,” Yes,” and I rebounded, “So which way is the sun going?” A 100-mile stare greeted that question, so I elaborated, ”Which way does the sun move across the sky in the middle of the day here on your home field, because I want to have the sun at my back?” She responded, “You want the sun on your back?” This all ended with the predictable, “I have no idea,” which I could further infer meant, “Please go away now.” This Friday, Sept. 21, is the autumnal equinox, so get your Grade A eggs ready. Ask your high school athlete and honors student to explain this astronomical event, then sit back and enjoy the “I don’t know show.” Perhaps you could spin the globe and them around three times and you could all go find Syria; just wait for the Earth to stop spinning before you touch it.

GPS - Technology makes no impact if you don’t understand the concept behind it. The rationale is the same for teaching algebra. A student may ask, “What is the practical point in learning any of this?" and the teacher starts to talk about thought processes and reasoning but the kid is already back in LaLa and LOL land. I once sat at a bar - actually more than once - schmoozing with some world-class Sunfish skippers who had just competed in the Inter Galactic Super Nova Championships. I asked them to give me the coordinates of the course, you know, longitude and latitude, and if the horizon line was always the same distance in miles from their bow-wow and what was that distance? No one knew - which I expected - but they went on attack: “Who cares, anyway?”

Replacement refs - Long ago and far away at a Lewes Junior High football game, Barry Lynch and I were pulled from our pickup trucks as replacement refs for the Selbyville versus Lewes game. It was either us, or nobody, and I told then-coach Dan Coffman that a bunch of nobodies would make fewer mistakes. We did it, and I know I was making stuff up, and I can’t speak for Barry, but he was roundly criticized by Lewes locals suggesting Roxana-reared Barry had a dog in the fight and was obviously biased. It was the worst athletic experience of my life, and I’ve had a lot of bad ones. I couldn’t be paid enough to degrade myself to officiate a Monday night NFL football game. Can you imagine jumping onto a big pile of chemically enhanced behemoths, peeling them off one at a time to see who really recovered a fumble? I wonder how long they would wrestle each other if the officials simply said, “We got all night, knock yourselves out.”

Snippets - Late in the Cape varsity 5-0 home win over Lake, I sat at the end of the bench and called up a picture of number 9 Fred grandbaby James and passed it to grandbaby number 1 Anna so she could see her new cousin for the first time. The girls were all into it, saying, "Yep, a Fred head all right, looks just like Anna." Out on the field during the junior varsity game, I snapped a photo of sophomore Mariko Daisey. Her dad Blaine is a former star track guy for Cape in 1983, a Kevin Kennedy Award winner and former sprinter for University of New Haven. There are Cape-connected family stories all over the Cape athletic program. Cape center Matt Hurlock is 6-foot-4, 255 pounds and a top-shelf academic guy with 30 college credits by the time he graduates. Matt is looking to go premed and hopefully play some college football. I’m making the Temple contact but told Matt, “I want to see you driving linebackers through the secondary like rented Geo Trackers." Sophomore Sam Broadhurst saw Cape lacrosse coach PJ Kesmodel along the fence after the varsity field hockey game against Lake Forest. Sam said to him, “Coach, if you’re going to be attending field hockey games, we need to get you some field hockey attire.” Everyone nearby laughed and Coach PJ said, ”No, that’s all right, I don’t expect I’ll be attending that many.” Go on now, git!