Jubilating

     Riding in the car with my husband recently, I got to thinking about jubilating.  We have the noun form, jubilation.  Why shouldn’t we have a verb form?  Jubilate.  It has a nice ring to it.  It sounds active.  It could mean either to be joyful or to make joyful.  Thus, it could be either transitive or intransitive.  For instance, children jubilate over Christmas presents.  And, when good sense prevailed and we canceled our holiday travel plans due to the triple threats of snow, wind, and extreme cold, the only thing for it was to jubilate the house.  It is now well and truly jubilated.

     Three of our grandchildren gathered for Christmas at our daughter’s house, and they jubilated her house like a whirlwind.  The living room tree is particularly pretty, all silver, white, and blue, and garlanded with tiny snowflakes.  “Good jubilating,” I complimented them.  And, once I’d explained the term, they embraced it. 

     There was a lot of jubilating in that house.  There was Christmas, of course.  There was also a new baby, a girl, born earlier this month.  She’s a marvel.  All of us, except for her parents, masked up when we held her, and tried not to be selfish in how long we kept her.  That was hard, though—holding a baby is such a profound pleasure.  It makes your heart soar.  And jubilate.

     We witnessed jubilation at a robotics competition shortly before Christmas.  It was a regional championship for the Washtenaw Area Pick-Up Robotics and sponsored by our wonderful Ann Arbor District Library.  WAPUR’s website describes the event as high school robotics teams “throwing together” large, wheeled robots to play “fast, fun, 2-on-2 matches involving dodgeballs and mop buckets.”

     Each year, the robots are built to meet a different challenge.  We went to a competition for middle school teams some years back; their robots had to shoot balls into a target.  At this year’s high school level, the challenge was to capture yellow mop buckets and put them in designated spots on your side of the field of play and to keep dodgeballs out.  This also, of course, means stealing or otherwise dislodging the opponents’ mop buckets and sending as many dodgeballs as possible onto their side.

     Each high school sent one robot, and the teams clearly lavished attention on their creations.  Some even had LED lights with messages.  One had several messages, ranging from “RESTART” to “GOGOGOGOGO.”  A crowd favorite, Omar, appeared in different configurations in different matches.  In one form, Omar fell over and then righted itself with alacrity. 

     There was a lot of speeding about.  Head-to-head clashes occurred regularly, although not Battlebot style–the league frowns on aggression that might damage another robot.  Amid all the thrashing and crashing and mayhem, my favorite maneuver was one of precision:  one of the robots slid a hook under the lip of a mop bucket and then, bucket in tow, drove elegantly away, as if pulling a float in a parade.

     The competitors and their fans were in high spirits.  Lines of young people engaged in dances our music-teacher daughter tells me were the Cha-Cha Slide and the Cupid Shuffle.  These prescribe footwork that is fun to watch.  The little squirts in the bleachers near us not only watched intently, but tried to duplicate the movements.  At the other robotics event we attended, the middle schoolers line danced to “Watch Me Whip/Nae Nae.”  And, to their supposed mortification and secret delight, so did their parents.

     Sitting near us was a delegation of student supporters from Pioneer, one of the Ann Arbor high schools.  They cheered, and they taunted.  One of the taunts ran along the lines of, “Gimme a G!”  “Gimme an O!”  “Gimme a Home!”  “What’s that spell?”  “Go home!  Go home, Huron!”  Huron is their cross-town rival.  The taunt was silly, but not mean.  If the Huron delegation noticed, they didn’t seem to mind.  The whole contingent of high schoolers was busy jubilating.

     The master of ceremonies got elementary-schoolers involved, too.  “Who wants to throw a ball in?” he asked before each match.  Kids would volunteer, most of them shyly.  The emcee would introduce them when he introduced the competitors.  The match would get underway and, at a designated time, he would cue the kids.  When the moment arrived, one safety-goggled child on each team’s side would toss in an official tennis ball.  It wasn’t clear how the tennis balls affected the scoring, except by adding to the action, but the effect on the child volunteers was clear.  When they returned to their families in the bleachers, their eyes sparkled and their faces glowed.  In short, they jubilated.

30 December 2022