Who’s Got the Ball Now, Lucy?

There’s a moment from the Peanuts comic strip that I’ve always related to: Charlie Brown gearing up to kick the football. Every time, he gives it his all, determined to finally succeed. And every time, Lucy pulls the ball away, leaving him flat on his back, staring at the sky, wondering what just happened. That’s Charlie Brown’s charm, no matter how many times he gets knocked down, he keeps getting back up.

I’ve felt like Charlie Brown plenty of times in my own life. I work hard, set my sights on something, do everything right, and somehow it still doesn’t go as planned. You’d think after enough rounds of it you’d stop being surprised. You never do.

Recently I had one of those moments. I’d been passed over for something I really wanted at work, and it left me feeling defeated in that specific way where you replay the conversation on a loop, looking for the sentence where it went wrong. Like Lucy had yanked the ball away right as I was about to kick it, and I hadn’t even seen her get into position. I happened to be in California for a business trip that week, so instead of flying straight home afterward, I took an extra day to meet up with two old work friends. One of them brought her daughter along, and the three of us, plus one very excited twenty-something, spent the day at Disney California Adventure Park.

My friends are both in their fifties, and the daughter had the kind of energy you only get once, in your twenties, before your body starts sending you invoices. I have multiple sclerosis (MS), and one of the leftover souvenirs from a relapse back in 2016 is a limp on my right side. Most days it’s manageable. I know how to compensate, how to time my steps, how to make it look like nothing’s wrong if I concentrate. So that morning, walking into the park, I was determined to keep up. I wanted to be the guy who could still hang, still do the full day, still be the fun one instead of the guy who needs to sit down. Pride is a hell of a motivator, even when it’s working against you.

We started with the rides my friend and her daughter had already mapped out, the two of them seasoned Disney pros who knew exactly which direction to walk first and which lines would be short if you hit them before ten. I just followed along, grateful to have somewhere to be that wasn’t my own head. It was July in Anaheim, and the heat hadn’t fully arrived yet, just a promise of what was coming, so I kept pace fine. Nobody would have known anything was different about the way I walked.

By lunch, the sun had other ideas. We found a shaded table with the smell of funnel cake drifting over from somewhere nearby, and I could already feel it, the drag starting in my right foot, the kind of thing that happens with MS when your body’s internal thermostat gets pushed past what it can handle. Heat doesn’t cause damage, but it exposes what’s already there. My nerves don’t fire as cleanly when I’m overheated, so the limp that was invisible that morning was becoming a lot less invisible by early afternoon.

I told my friends about the promotion over lunch, about feeling like Charlie Brown again, another year of doing the work and still ending up flat on my back. They didn’t offer platitudes. My friend just shook her head and said, “That’s bullshit, Matt, you know that’s bullshit,” and her daughter, halfway through a churro, added that whoever picked someone else clearly hadn’t met me. It wasn’t profound. It didn’t need to be. Then we went back to talking about which ride to hit next, which was the right call.

We had Fast Passes for Radiator Springs Racers and timed it perfectly, no line, straight onto the ride, the kind of small win that feels bigger than it should on a day like that. Luck was on our side with the other rides too, one green light after another, barely any waiting. But even with the best strategy in the world, the Anaheim sun doesn’t care how good your plan is. By mid-afternoon the heat had worked its way into everything, and I stopped trying to hide it. I was dragging my right foot with almost every step by then, catching the toe of my sneaker on the pavement if I didn’t consciously lift higher than usual. My friends slowed down without making a thing of it, the way people do when they’ve known you long enough to adjust without asking. The daughter was still running instead of walking, which is its own kind of reminder about what twenty-three feels like compared to what forty-something with MS feels like in ninety-degree heat.

Around six we decided to grab dinner before parting ways, my friends heading back to wherever they were staying, me back to my hotel and an early flight the next morning. So did everyone else in Anaheim, apparently. Every restaurant we tried was packed with families trying to eat before the fireworks or whatever evening show was starting. Every hostess we asked shook her head before we’d even finished the sentence. No tables. No room for walk-ins. Maybe try back in an hour. By then my leg wasn’t just dragging, it was aching, that deep fatigue-soaked burn that shows up after a day of asking a compromised nervous system to keep pretending it isn’t compromised.

I could feel that familiar sensation bubbling up again, the flat-on-your-back feeling, like Lucy was lining up to pull the ball away one more time just to make sure I got the message. Why even bother asking at the next place. We’d probably end up eating gas station sandwiches in a parking garage, exhausted, sunburned, my leg barely holding me up, a fittingly mediocre end to a day that had started with me trying to outrun a bad week and ended with my own body reminding me I couldn’t fully outrun anything.

But something made me try one more hostess anyway. Maybe it was just that we were standing right there and it seemed rude not to ask. I stepped up to the podium, asked to see a menu, and asked how long the wait might be, already bracing for the same head shake.

She paused, actually looked at her screen instead of just answering on reflex, and asked, “How many in your party?”

“Four,” I said, still bracing, weight shifted onto my good leg without thinking about it.

She smiled. “You’re in luck. We just had a cancellation.”

Just like that, we had a table. My friends and I looked at each other in genuine disbelief, the kind where you almost want to double-check you heard the hostess correctly. Before I could say anything, before I could even fully register that we weren’t about to be eating gas station food in a parking garage, my friend’s daughter looked up at me, grinned with the kind of perfect timing you can’t coach into a kid, and said:

“Who’s got the ball now, Lucy?”