The Dismount
Reflections from 2021
This whole Simone Biles thing made me realize how little I care about the Olympics. When she left the gymnastics team I realized I was truly interested in an Olympic “event” for the first time. It was an act of such sheer humanity. And it reminded me of my son’s kindergarten days.
We sent my son to the same kindergarten I attended as a child, in someone’s home down the street. It was a place where I felt happy and loved. The woman who ran the program when my son was five was the same woman who had welcomed me when I was five, and being in the South where we secretly pine over the lost plantation days, everyone called her “Miss Shan,” Shan being her first name.
The thing is, the neighborhood where I grew up was also the lair of the Junior Leaguers. Where plaid was a gateway drug, and one I never took to. It appeared that not much had changed in the thirty years between my kindy days and my son’s. I remember once in the drop-off line I hopped out to ask the woman in the car behind me a question and she was frantically putting on her makeup and she kind of shielded her face when I was talking to her so I wouldn’t see her naked features. And I just had nothing to talk about with those ladies, who were nice enough. I mean, how much is there to say about shrubbery?
Of course we were thrown together at social events and I was generally at the fringes listening like I was some kind of Dixieland anthropologist. It reminded me a little of when I was young and thought I wanted to be in the in-crowd but I didn’t get the routine and never would — only now I didn’t give a rat’s ass. It was just weird and tedious.
But one day we were at a birthday party at a bowling alley and most of the moms were gathered in that awful little party room with the plastic chairs and the ladies were sitting in a circle on the floor and one woman was talking about this OCD episode where she completely lost it and had to be hauled off to the psych ward. My ears perked up. The other women expressed their sympathy and support and one by one left the room and I crept over and started interviewing this woman about exactly what happened and in what order and what meds she was on, comparing them to my meds. I liked her, she had a Southern Living house in the right neighborhood but she was zany enough to be interesting and fun.
One morning when I picked up her son for a playdate she said — let’s call her son Trey — that Trey had been acting out that morning and she told him to stop because she was “feeling fragile.” I got it.
Anyway, the whole perfection thing of the Olympics in general and the lurking cruelty of women’s gymnastics in particular be damned, Simone Biles made my week.
