Three Cheers for Monday Night Football

Last night, I became a football fan.

Nobody refused to honor our flag. No kneeling, no fists raised defiantly against our national anthem. Nobody took advantage of their employers' very public letterhead to denigrate the things that symbolize our hard fought greatness and our best intentions. Nope. Instead, every member of two football teams locked arms in a circle of solidarity, speaking volumes in one silent gesture about what is right with our country, and how we can make it better.

Like a lot of football fans, though, I switched over to the great debate, the Superbowl of America's newest spectator sport that is the 2016 presidential election. The culmination of a seemingly endless flag burning in which we have chosen to take seriously a candidate who denigrates everything and everybody and values only himself. For ninety minutes, I entertained myself by sharing incredulity in multiple text conversations and trading audible gasps and occasional punches in the shoulder with my viewing companion.

Here's why I am a newly minted football fan:
(1) some awkward and tasteless attempts to make a point have led to soul searching and even some better ways to make a point; and
(2) even though one team will win and one team will lose, both opponents know how to play.

And to think I used to be troubled by W's grammatical issues. Or a little bit of pandering here and there. Oh, how I yearn for the dignity of old fashioned politics and strange bedfellows. How did we get here? As I drove past Springfield, Illinois yesterday on my way home from St. Louis, I nodded in silent apology toward Lincoln's profile on a billboard.

The biggest difference between Mark Cuban and Gennifer Flowers is not that Mark Cuban is still good looking. This a season of false equivalencies and non sequiturs, and I hate myself for paying attention. My only explanation? Fear, with a healthy dose of despair.

I am learning to love football. Big League.*

*In all fairness, he did not, as many of us thought, use the word "bigly." That would be silly. 

Sittin' at the Ritz

I had a dream the other night that my father, who would be turning 97 next month, was driving me around in his Cadillac. He was as nimble as ever behind the wheel, his senses as sharp and his reflexes as quick as they always were.

It's always good to see him. Every time, we laugh about how the doctors told him he didn't have long, and here he is twenty years after they said that, full of life, with no end in sight. The joke's on me, a little bit, when I wake up and realize he's not here, but still, I'm grateful for the visit.

This weekend, an old friend's son is getting married. I am remembering the kindergarten playground, tucked away on its own side of the building, away from the bigger kids. The start of my life in suburbia, still alien to a girl who grew up in concrete playgrounds without jungle gyms resting in beds of wood chips. My children would grow up protected, in a place designed to soften their falls.

We hovered over them back then, when they were in kindergarten, before we had any clue about how they would turn out. No clue, just lots of dreams. We hovered less as the years went by, but still we watched, and raked the wood chips, and prayed for soft landings.

They are starting to get married now, those kindergartners in the playground on the safe side of the building. I search their faces, all these years later, often struggling to match them up with their younger selves. I laugh when I think about how important everything seemed back then: timed multiplication tests, birthday party snubs, spelling bees. My friend and I reminisced last night about the word that knocked his son off the stage one year. Background. We wondered, that day, how he would amount to anything when he couldn't even spell background. Somehow, he has managed.

This is new territory for us parents, those of us lucky enough to be launching our children into this next phase. We revel in each others happiness almost as much as we revel in our own. We are as powerless as we were back then, in the schoolyard, but we still watch and hover and hope for the best. And we hope that our children have not yet figured out how powerless we really are. (Stupid, yes; powerless, no.) As grown up and independent as they seem, I like to think they still believe we can help soften blows. I still count on my father, who visits me in my dreams and still manages to make things see all right.

Up for Grabs

Fall of 1976. Freshman year, my first college football game. Though I'd venture to say we lost, I could not tell you who we played. Still, the memory remains vivid.

Security guards back then worried about the little things. Literally. Like me, the little thing who suddenly got hoisted into the air by her new sophomore (and sophomoric) friends and passed up to the top of the stands, handed off from one row of outstretched arms to the next, gripped and grabbed by total strangers. The original deflated football. When my nightmarish journey finally ended -- the guys in the back row were at least sober enough to let me down rather than toss me over the back railing to my death -- the security guard at the top lectured me about how I shouldn't do that. It's dangerous he told me. Today's me would have said something sarcastic; that day, all I could muster up was a blank stare. 

I soon realized why passing girls up the stands had become a pastime at my school, the school whose football team regularly jockeyed for position at the bottom of the Ivy League. The only school in the League whose marching band had missed the memo about not taking itself so seriously, a school where football was simply a good excuse to enjoy a beautiful fall afternoon in upstate New York before the early snows fell. Where the massive stadium was only filled to capacity one day a year -- graduation day. Assuming the snow had melted by then. 

Today, I am in Ann Arbor, sporting maize and blue nail polish, and I am going to the Big House for the first time. My first Big Ten football game. A non-Michigan grad among thousands who, as one friend who went here admits, never stop drinking the maize and blue Kool-aid. I am a little nervous. Not about reliving the nightmare of my first college football game -- the folks I am with, no matter how vigilant they are about their workouts, would have no interest in throwing their backs out just to grab and grope a squishy 56 year old. I am nervous about my historical lack of school spirit, my lifelong lack of enthusiasm for football. About how I will fit in. 

I am nervous because it is supposed to rain all day, and not going to the game (or the hours long tailgate beforehand) is not an option. I am nervous because my perfectly blown dry hair will be soaked, reduced to frizzy strings, which would not ordinarily bother me, except I am paying a visit to my mother-in-law tomorrow. Ex-mother-in-law? I'm not sure what the proper term is. 

Though I have never been to the Big House, the long drive to this neck of the woods is hardly unfamiliar. I came here every Christmas, and every summer, and many times in between. My oldest child learned to walk in a hotel room in Kalamazoo, where we were stranded by a snow storm. I spent every July Fourth holiday at a cottage in Canada, celebrating my Scottish mother-in-law's birthday and watching fireworks across the lake in Ohio. The Irish Riviera, we called it. I liked to think of it as our family's version of a compound. I learned to love Steak n Shakes, toured the cereal factory in Battle Creek, knew which McDonalds' had the cleanest bathrooms. 

It's been years since I last made this journey, or saw my mother-in-law. Ex-mother-in-law. We had been friendly and close, but life got in the way and, almost like being passed up the stands, though it wasn't my fault, I feel as if I am somehow to blame. Or, at least, that it was a bad idea -- no matter whose idea it was. 

I am hoping she remembers me, hoping she doesn't make any comments about how much older I look, or how bad my rained out hair looks. I am hoping for the outstretched arms that always awaited me after that long drive. But first, Go Blue!!!!

Lost in the Weed

Acronyms are fun. I was thinking about "S.H.I.T." as an acronym recently, and, for "i,"  I came up with "irrevocably spongy." A revelation about the state of my body going forward, and my new excuse for giving up on exercise.

A.L.E.P.P.O. "A" is for "Are you high?" As in Gary Johnson, riding in on his independent and self-righteous white horse to save us from our other choices, looking like a deer in headlights when he was asked what he would do about Aleppo. Not because he wasn't sure what he would do, but because he had no idea what it was. 

"L" is for "Oh Lord!" I admit, when I listen to friends and family members agonize over fantasy football picks I feel woefully ignorant when I don't recognize most of the names. I admit it: I am ineligible; I cannot participate. I admit I don't know the names of every world leader and I find it difficult to keep track of the ever-shifting borders in the Balkan States. It's just one of many reasons I'm not running for president. 

"E" is for "Ex-lax brownies?" Johnson claims he has not smoked weed for months, which is commendable, I suppose, but if he wants to save face without contradicting himself, he might want to blame it on some laced desserts. I'm willing to bet his little snafu sent him on more than a few trips to the bathroom, so it's an airtight defense.

"P" is for "Pathetic." The other "P" is for "Poopy." The metaphorical kind of poopy, as in this was probably the most pathetic moment in an altogether poopy election season. A poopy and pathetic and particularly unprecedented unpresidential presidential election. If the immediate past is any predictor, Johnson's poll numbers will probably get a boost. "P" is for "puzzling."

"O." "OMG." I'm moving to "Oaxaca" for the summer, and "Ontario" for the winter. How I yearn for the end of October, when this will all be almost over.

Back to my "S.H.I.T." acronym. Here's hoping the country is tougher than my body, and the damage isn't "irrevocable." 

A La Carte

Wednesday arrives, my new friend told us, and sometimes I just think where are those damn women?She is ninety years old, my new friend (and soon to be family member). Those damn women are her two sisters, her two older sisters, both of whom passed away this year, within a few months of each other. 

Roz doesn't look like she's ninety, certainly doesn't act like she's ninety, except to the extent that she pulls rank on all of us and makes us follow her rules, at least when we are in her home. She is an accomplished cook, an impeccable hostess, and a self-proclaimed chocolate addict; only a fool would turn down an invitation to lunch at Roz's. Even when I know she will ask me, every time, how I managed to have two such beautiful daughters. Rare good luck. That's her current theory. She is smart as a whip, a probably right.

Wielding a sharp knife with shaking hands, she demonstrated for us how she single-handedly transformed a bowl full of radishes into a bouquet of intricately cut flowers. She assigned us our seats around a table set for royalty, and disappeared for a while into her small kitchen to prepare individual plates for her assorted vegetarian and lactose intolerant and unabashedly omnivorous (that would be me) guests. Obeying instructions, we did not even attempt to help, even as she emerged, holding one precariously tipped plate at a time, to serve us. 

The ostensible recklessness of the sharp knife and the radishes notwithstanding, Roz is acutely aware of her age-related limitations, but still, they continue to surprise her. She told me once that she doesn't know how she got to this place, to being ninety and unable to do things as well or as quickly as she once could. I get what she's saying, though when I look at the bouquet of radish flowers I imagine that a younger, unlimited Roz must have been quite a force of nature. At fifty-six, were I to attempt even a fraction of her culinary or vegetable paring feats, I would be missing at least a few fingers and sporting at least a few third degree burns. 

Though nobody, least of whom Roz, was caught by surprise by the passing of her two older sisters, the pain of the loss hangs heavily over Roz's beautiful table. On our way down for lunch, my daughters and my future son-in-law and I talked about family and staying close and about how fleeting everything is. We are still reeling from the excruciating and untimely loss of somebody dear to us, and we find ourselves, still, holding on to those we love with a bit more urgency. We know how quickly life can change, and we know not to take things, people, or time for granted. We are afraid to blink, sometimes. 

In Roz's eyes, we are relatively young, my children and I. We cannot possibly imagine what it's like to blink and realize nobody lasts forever. She had a good run, we say, as if that kind of conventional wisdom somehow diminishes the hole left by a friend or a parent or a sister who has always been there and now just is not. And as acutely aware as Roz is of the inevitability of loss and limitation, she is just as acutely aware, if not more so, of new gains and new possibilities. She is excited about her grandson's upcoming wedding to my daughter, thrilled that her family, recently shrunken, is about to grow again. 

My baby is off to Paris today for a semester, and there's a chunk of me that wants to handcuff her to her bed and make her miss her flight. I felt the same way when my son left for Japan, and I will feel the same way when my older daughter and her fiance return to New York on Monday. I feel the same way each time I let any of them go. I will simply learn to channel my inner Roz, who never ceases to find joy in the good stuff. I will make flowers out of radishes.