During this past spring break my family and I got to stay at a hotel that offered a bocce court. For those of you who don’t know, bocce is a game that is kind of like horseshoes, but instead of throwing horseshoes at a stake in the ground, with bocce you throw different sized and colored balls at each other, the object being to throw the larger colored balls down the court as close to the smaller white ball as possible. Or, if you are a boy, the object being to use the biggest, bluest balls as props in a series of obscene pantomimes.
Actually, I use the term “boy” loosely, since this was a game that was apparently started by my husband, someone who is several decades beyond his boyhood. But it was also a game that was enthusiastically received by my son, Clyde, who at eleven still has years and years of boyhood in front of him. Or, if my husband is any indication, decades and decades.
Watching them together on the bocce court (they did get around to playing—eventually) made me glad once again that there are two of these “boy people” in my family, because, really, if there was only one I think that he would drive me absolutely crazy. Or, at the very least, crazier.
For whatever reason (maybe my girlness), I’m just not cut out to handle boydom on my own. While I often think that some of the crude and obnoxious things they do are funny—hey, I liked Beavis and Butthead, too—unlike them, I have my limits: my amusement (and tolerance) begins to wear thin after the third time someone sneaks up on my while I am lying on the couch and farts in my face, not to mention the thirtieth time. And there are only so many times (okay, one) that I can listen to the Southpark Christmas Album before I declare it verboten. And as for Family Guy—well, I think everyone knows by now that my tolerance for that dried up a long, long time ago.
And that’s why I am so very grateful there is another boy in the house to pick up my slack. Grateful that there is another boy in the house who is not only willing but excited to go see the new Three Stooges movie. Another boy in the house who can understand that clearly the new Call of Duty game is completely different from the last six, and needs to be pre-ordered today. Another boy in the house who knows that there is no such thing as too much pizza.
My husband once explained the connection that boys have with each other by telling me that the only person in the world who can stand to be around an eleven year old boy is another eleven year old boy; that, he said, is why the friends you make at that age can remain your friends for years, even after the point when all seemingly rational people would have abandoned the friendship. (Like, for instance, the fifth time your friend’s antics get you arrested.)
I’m not saying that girls, and their friendships, aren’t just as irrational sometimes, and aren’t just as intense. And I’m also not saying that girls friendships, and relationships, don’t have their annoying features that can easily get on an outside viewer’s last nerve: they do. Anyone who has ever been within hearing distance of a multi-girl sleepover can attest to that (if they manage to hang on to their hearing after the first few high pitched giggle screams, that is).
But, I have to admit that there is something that is special about the relationship boys have—if special is the right word for something that is seemingly based on trying to punch each other in the testicles over and over again.