I WAS MAKING my way by bike through the Western Addition. Crawdad had a flat tire. She'd called from in between jobs, driving from one job to the other. Crawdad works two jobs.

I write this column. I write poems, play the steel drum, make steel drums, and sit around philosophizing with the chickens. If and when we ever have childerns, I get to be the mom. Now, since Crawdad wears the pants in the fambly, don't you think she ought to learn to change a tire?

I do. For her birthday I'm going to enroll her in one of those auto-mechanic classes. Meanwhile, I have to put aside what I'm doing, put on a pair of pants, and pedal over to Sutter and Pierce.

Her car was in an underground garage. She gets out at seven, and I tried to time it: I didn't want her to have to wait for me. At the same time, I was expecting a ride home and didn't want to have to wait around for her in an underground garage for more than, say, 15 seconds.

It seemed to me I was running early, so I took a scenic route through some park where a bunch of kids were having football practice. Three or four different age groups were represented, all in full pads and helmets. Coaches were screaming and hollering and blowing whistles.

I made my way to the far end of the park, where the smallest kids, the pee-wees, were actually lining up and running plays. Basically it was the same play over and over. The pee-wees center would snap the ball into and straight through the pee-wees quarterback's little hands, he'd fall on it, and then everyone else, offense and defense, would pile on.

Then the coaches would blow their whistles and start pulling kids off the pile, screaming and hollering and lining them up to run the same play over again. Behind the fence stood a handful of fathers, cheering on their little boys.

"Hit somebody!" this one guy would yell after every snap. "Don't just stand there! Hit somebody! Hit somebody!"

I love football. You know me. Football season is one of my two favorite seasons, and the other is baseball season. This time of year, when the two overlap, is my favorite time of year. I sat there on my bike with the parents and soaked it in. If I'm going to be a parenting part of our upstanding society some day, I need to start soaking stuff in.

"Hit somebody! Hit somebody!" the same guy hollered.

I agreed. I couldn't tell which one his kid was, but looking at it from the point of view of any one of those boys, I would have to agree that "hit somebody" was very good advice.

When, 5 or 15 fumbles later, it finally sunk in that I wasn't going to get to witness any actually executed "plays," let alone a crisply run timing pattern for a 20-yard gain over the middle, I rode away. Across the street and around the corner there was another park, and here a group of girls were practicing being cheerleaders, jumping and twisting and spinning. No coaches were screaming or hollering at them, and no parents at all were cheering on the cheerleaders, so I stopped and sat there on my bike, other side of the fence.

"Hit somebody!" I hollered. "Hit somebody!"

Then I went and changed Crawdad's flat tire, finishing exactly at seven. She was late getting out of work, so I had to sit in the underground garage grooving to fluorescent lights and exhaust fumes for about 10 minutes.

But she was so grateful and apologetic that I got a good sushi dinner out of the deal. Osaka Ya in Japantown Center. It's a quaint little wooden place – like eating on a boat, was how Crawdad put it. Not a bad place to eat sushi.

They didn't have any saba, but they did have a way to get a good sushi dinner for only 10 bucks: a five-piece nigiri combo for five bucks. One yellowtail, one shrimp, one eel, one tuna, and one egg. All very good. So you can get that twice, or you can get it once with a couple of hand rolls. I got one with tuna and one with eel and cucumber – $2.50 apiece, for a grand total of ... $10!

Did I miss my friend saba? Sure I did, but these $10 sushi finds aren't easy to find, so I can't complain. And it was all good, like I said.

"So, Crawdad," I says, poking a little more wasabi into my soy sauce, "so ... what? You sure you want to have a childern?"

Sure she's sure. We've known this forever. It's time to unwrap the wiener.

And every one of my cells yells, "Hit somebody!"

Osaka Ya. 1737 Post, S.F. (415) 922-2728. Sun.-Thurs., 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 11:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Takeout available. American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Beer and wine. Wheelchair accessible.

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Dan Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).