When my brother was little he was obsessed with wanting to learn karate. For the record, I was not in favor of him attaining any additional ways of physically attacking me… his cowboy boots were weapon enough. And after some interminable level of whining and begging, we dropped him off at his first karate class.
An hour or two later and he was ready to quit. “All we do is stretch. It’s too much stretching.” And so his belts remained elastic.
In the last few months, Jacob has also reached “karate age.” It appears to be a gene that activates at age 7. He’s been talking about wanting to take karate… I’m sure the submersion in Pokémon hasn’t helped. I admit I’ve been dragging my feet… do we really need additional instruction and encouragement in the art of punching and kicking one’s closest blood relations?
As luck would have it, our old swim club was called AVAC (pronounced A-vac) and our new swim club is called ABAC (pronounced A-back). ABAC is actually the sister club to La Madrona, my childhood swim club. All of this incestuous swim club context is simply to note that ABAC offers free Kempo classes twice a week.
For those of us new to the world of Mixed Martial Arts, Wikipedia describes Kempo as “a martial art characterized by the use of quick hand strikes in rapid succession taught by a red-bearded Sensei Gary.” I’ve never met a Sensei not named Gary.
Sensei Gary runs a very disciplined barre studio turned dojo. He is a firm believer in zero tolerance and effectively uses physical consequences as a means of mental control. He expects a respectful and convincing, “Jacob Sir!” with the proper level of martial arts oomph. His ability to corral 8 little boys via push-ups and mountain-climbers is impressive.
Now before the boys attended their first Kempo class, I did my best to set expectations… “Don’t be surprised if there is a lot of stretching. You probably won’t get to kick or hit anything. You may just do some exercises and stretching. Remember the story I told you about when Uncle Geoff took karate?”
“Yeah, yeah Mom. We still want to go.”
That was weeks ago. The boys came home all hopped-up on Kempo, having had the opportunity to “spar” under Sensei’s watchful tutelage.
I ask hopefully, “How much stretching did you do? Was there lots of stretching??”
“Uh, no. Not really any stretching.”
I was really counting on more stretching Sensei Gary.