“In Heaven, it is always Autumn”—John Donne
Life is not always easy. Sometimes, there are inconveniences to suffer, sacrifices to be made. And so it was on Monday, when we had to postpone bedtime, get in the truck and mosey on down to the bus station. The Autumnal Equinox was arriving, you see, and at the inconvenient hour of 10:29 p.m., of all times. Nonetheless, someone had to show up to provide a proper greeting lest the Old Girl be offended and whip up a couple of untimely hurricanes or a witches brew of daily thunderstorms, flooding the pastures and muddying the training tracks. It’s happened more than once and a little discretion can still a lot of anguish.
When we were kids, Autumn meant back to school, unlike these days when they come looking for you sometime in the middle of August when Summer’s still in flower. Truth be told, many of us were more than ready to go back, to revisit friends not seen in months, to deliver exaggerated tales of vacation wonders, to finally be relieved of having “nothing to do.” I mean, how many days can you spend at the beach, eating ice cream and chasing girls in tiny bathing suits? In life, there must be balance.
Nowadays, there is no school, of course (unless you happen to be our neighbor, Hal Hollis, who is returning at an advanced age in search of a PhD. Hal is so old the other students stare at him in wonderment—one awed teenager even asked if she could touch him). For the rest of us back on the farm, there are foals to be weaned, yearlings to be sent packing to the trainers. Little Ava, who has long been searching for a playmate to run with, will finally get one in a few weeks when we choose a buddy at the Ocala Breeders Mixed Sale. Norm and Serena will be taken to the mall and fitted with new outfits for their trip to Eisaman Equine and five months of education in the Fine Art of Becoming Racehorses.
Football is in the air, the crowds packing college campuses and tiny high school stadiums alike to watch their heroes lift that barge and tote that bale in search of greater glory for dear old Siwash. They were in the stands on a recent Friday night in nearby Williston, too, thousands of them, chowing down on nachos and funnel cakes, eagerly anticipating the exciting kickoff. Until something funny happened:
Football—Often Better With Officials. No….Really.
Where Have All The Officials Gone (long time passing….)?
A Fellow named Cliff Lohrey is the new football coach at Williston High School this year, although we may have our tenses wrong. Cliff was hired in February to replace the previous coach and athletic director, Jamie Baker, who held the jobs for the previous ten years. Lohrey also inherited the athletic director’s job, which involves overseeing all the other sports, arranging schedules, etc., and is no rookie, having held the head coach’s job at Brooksville High School from 2006 to 2009. So it isn’t like Cliff doesn’t know that the football games work better when you have, you know….officials. Those guys in black and white uniforms who move the ball around, call penalties and get hollered at by the crowd a lot. Yeah—that’s right—them. And as athletic director, one of Cliff’s little responsibilities was actually hiring those officials. It’s a very simple process. You just call these guys at the Florida High School Athletic Association (FHSAA), put in your order and voila!—they show up like clockwork at your little event. Works every time. And just in case there is a rare bobble somewhere along the line, the FHSAA sends your school an email confirmation on the Tuesday before a home football game letting you know who the officiating crew will be. If you don’t GET that email, you might want to check back with the Association for clarification.
Well, wouldn’t you just know it? In the busy hubbub of everyday life—marching the kids off to school, fixing the icemaker in the refrigerator, painting the den—Cliff just forgot to hire any officials. Could happen to anybody, right? And that’s why they have that little email from the FHSAA every Tuesday—to let you know somebody’s coming. Or not. Cliff forgot about that, too. Big oops.
So now it’s Friday night. Tickets have been bought and paid for. Vendors have dragged in their grills and red meat. Cheerleaders bounce around and band members tune up for the National Anthem. The other team motors in, an hour-long trip from Duval County, and both squads begin to warm up on the field. Since the officials never appear until just before the kickoff, there is no suspicion of the horror show that is about to take place. Skies are clear, it’s a great night for football.
Remember the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes where everyone is reluctant to point out that the emperor is, indeed, naked? Well, that’s what we’ve got here. But finally, after the first rumblings of modest concern, a voice rises—a shrill and unwanted voice with a scary question.
“WHERE THE HELL ARE THE OFFICIALS?”
Where, indeed? Are they in back of the rest rooms, grabbing one last smoke? Are they out in the parking lot, the victims of errant timepieces? Are they marooned on the highway somewhere north of Waldo? Surely, someone will soon solve this muddle and the game will be on, right? Maybe not. And so it came to pass that the public address announcer was called upon to deliver the bad news. If an elephant had parachuted onto the field, stood up and started playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the flugelhorn, the crowd could not have been more shocked. They traipsed off, stunned and angry, assured by the school their tickets would be honored for the next game or, if they wanted to be bad sports about it, refunded immediately. The visiting players climbed back onto their little yellow bus with visible looks of “wha hoppen?” on their disappointed faces. The hamburger vendors perplexed over what they would do with the extra gallons of meat. And all of this fell heavily onto the shoulders of you-know-who—our old pal, Cliff Lohrey.
Cliff was fired, of course. Principal Eulin Gibbs had little choice. When these things occur, someone must pay and who better than the dunderhead who forgot he might need some officials? It’s not like you can call a few amateurs out of the stands like at Little League. “I prayed about it,” affirmed Principal Gibbs. “I prayed about it long and hard. And finally, Jesus appeared to me and said, “Eulin—you just toss that peckerhead out on his ass RIGHT NOW!’ And I always try to listen to what Jesus says.”
Still, there is no joy in Mudville. Mighty Cliffie has struck out.
Crack White House Security Team
Take Me To Your Leader! Oh, Never Mind—I’ll Go Myself.
We’ve all seen them, the funny cartoons where aliens land looking for a powwow with The Boss, whoever he might be. But where else do you go when you have earth-shattering information vital to the future of humanity? That’s right—The Prez. And this was exactly the feeling of Omar J. Gonzalez, a concerned citizen from Copperas Cove, Texas, as he drove around in his car—some say lived in his car—for several days, pondering the best route to take to advise Barack Obama of the terrible news that “the atmosphere is collapsing.” I mean, if I were president, I’d want to know. Now, you would think if a person had information of this magnitude he would be ushered right in to the Oval Office to present his facts, no time to waste. And no doubt this would be the case if George Washington or Martin Van Buren were still around. NOW, unfortunately, NOBODY gets to see the president unless they are on his lunchtime basketball team. And, unfortunately, the human filters put in place between the average citizen and their esteemed leader are not chosen for their intellectual prowess. We have all heard the shameful stories of Secret Service Agents’ philandering in distant climes, drinking to excess and taking home prostitutes. This, in itself, is no big problem, of course, unless you are carrying in your jacket pocket a big white envelope with “SECRET PLANS!” written in black crayon on the front and these plans are subsequently discovered, ketchup-stained, at the next-door Burger King.
So how does a dutiful citizen get his important message to the president? It’s a poser. What Omar decided to do is to take the most direct path. That would be over the fence and straight to the White House door. Now, I don’t know about you, but I guess I have always assumed that there might be, oh, I don’t know, some person standing at the door to keep an eye on visitors, maybe open the thing for them to let them in and out. They even have that at the Waldorf-Astoria, for crying out loud. But nope, nobody there. “Must be my lucky day!” thought Omar, looking for the Office Directory. He was finally set upon by rude gorillas, obviously unaware of the vital information he carried, and clapped in jail. Under the circumstances, of course, Omar was ridiculed in the press and made out to be some sort of lunatic. But WE think Omar knew what he was talking about. And so does NASA:
Maybe Chicken Little Was RIGHT!
In mid-July of 2010, NASA-funded researchers monitored a big event in the atmosphere of Earth. High above Earth’s surface where the atmosphere meets space, a rarefied layer of gas called “the thermosphere” recently collapsed, though it seemed to be rebounding.
“This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,” said John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19th issue of the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). “It’s a Space Age record. Something is going on that we do not understand!”
Okay, then. We might be a little reluctant to believe a guy who lives in his own car but that John Emmert surely knows what he’s talking about. So what’s to be done now with poor old Omar, who might have been right all along? Well, authorities are still a little worried about him. Seems that in addition to his innocent little pocket knife, they found in his vehicle 11 guns, including two shotguns, one of them sawed-off and four rifles, “some equipped with scopes.” What? Are they kidding? Omar is from Texas, for God’s sake. This is kindergarten stuff in Texas. In Texas, if you show up with a paltry collection like this they arrest you for “insufficient weaponry.” Get a grip. And, hey—Free Omar Now!
Thar’s all, folks….
