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!!!!
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