Thursday, October 1, 2020

Autumn Reverie



Fall Guy

The day’s light shortens, the surly morning temperatures finally nosedive into the fifties.  There are school buses on the streets again, leaves in the water troughs and footballs in the air.  The equinox slips into the room barely noticed, but noticed nonetheless.  The trappings of Autumn bring back memories of sweet youth, of travels through coolish streets of burning leaves, a singular potpourri.

The joys of summer are gone now, but Autumn brings its own credentials.  The daily rains will soon slow, the rampaging grass in the paddocks will stop to take a breath, the onerous heat promises to relent.  Thrilled young women will storm their closets to uncover long-lost boots, angora sweaters, light jackets, making a mental note on where the gloves reside.

It’s time to start anew, to open the book, survey the empty pages and make a plan.  The days shorten and we are another year older, the precipice one step closer.  There is still time to do everything, only the willingness holds us back.




Where Have You Gone, Joey Football Fan?


The Covid pandemic has routed the nation.  It has closed the bars, sealed up the moviehouses, wiped out live music, created a rift in the populace and killed over 200,00 souls and counting.  Thus, few are losing any sleep over the sad fate of bereft football fans who shed a tear as cardboard cutouts occupy their seats, munch on their nachos and fail to do The Wave.

Sneer if you will, but there are millions of these unfortunates, broken up into hundreds of tribes, who weekly inundate college towns and dispense money as if it were penny candy, boosting businesses, insuring jobs, and keeping the alma mater from disappearing into the sea.  Shockingly, the once-thriving scalper industry has collapsed overnight to the calloused indifference of the average citizen.  Who is going to buy all those styrofoam “We’re No. 1” fingers?  Will the hard-pressed chicken-wing industry survive?  Is there any hope for those agile men who quickly print the final score on little cards in the backs of trucks and sell them for outrageous prices to delirious fans?

Where there once were mere Florida football fans, now there is Gator Nation, a growing colossus, which has fans strewn about the Earth, none of them happy.  Multiply this by hundreds of other nations and you get the picture.  Some schools have tried to salve the wounds by allowing in about 20% of their stadiums’ seating capacity, which finds 17,000 people rattling around in an arena built for 85,000.  That’s better than Emptyland, of course, where faux crowd noise and contrived music make a sad attempt to convince television fans that everything is normal.  But where’s Albert the alligator?  Where’s Ralphie, the rampaging buffalo?  Where’s the rickety Sooner Schooner?  And how are we supposed to get through the season without a single glimpse of the nonpareil USC cheerleaders?

If there is a God, and most football fans are sure there is, it’s time he took the suffering of his subjects seriously.  All it takes after all, is one well-placed extra-large lightning bolt into the brewing stew at the Moderna or Oxford pharmaceutical labs and we have a viable vaccine.  Will a significant contribution to the Vatican help?  Can we sacrifice a few virgins to Pele at Kilauea?  Should we build Billy Graham’s son Franklin a summer bungalow in Maracaibo?  Let’s go, before you know it we’ll be selling tickets for the SEC Championship game.  Despite Paul Simon, nobody really likes the sound of silence.



Road Trip

For the legions of despairing wives and scattered recalcitrant males who dislike football, Autumn is a discouraging time.  The bulk of the male population retires to fortified cave dwellings stocked with every manner and make of gustatory joy, locks the door and throws away the key.  Call us in December before the bowl games start.

Why this strange compulsion, ask the disaffected.  What hidden charms does this clash of ruffians possess?  Why do these men raise a silly game to the level of an art form?  Is it a substitute for battle, a love of violence?

Not quite.  While there is undoubtedly some lust for the perfect hit a safety lays on an outstretched pass receiver or the collision between a punt returner speeding in one direction and a 250-pound crusher heading in the other, physical contact is only a slice of the pie.  The overarching appeal is the membership in Buckeye Nation (or a hundred others), the inclusion in a phenomenon much greater than oneself, the bonhomie of a crowd where millionaires and street sweepers sit side by side and worship a similar entity.  Everyone is equal in the stadium, except maybe for those guys high up and behind the glass, and who wants to be that far from the field?

A trip to a foreign venue is an opportunity to be part of an invading army, like Hannibal barging through the Alps.  The visitors storm into town, their little flags fluttering from car windows, their bright colors clashing with the hues of the home team.  They sit in their own wispy corner of the stadium screaming bloody murder to counter the vast swell of the locals’ roar.  If their team emerges from the fray holding the severed head of the opposition, they paint the town red.  If the severed head turns out to be theirs, they bravely suffer the taunts of their enemies and gather in mortified groups to console one another.  It’s only a battle, they reassure, there is still a war to be won.

For the purists, there is the strategy of the game, the cleverness of the offense versus the ability of the defense to solve the game plan and staunch the tide.  One side surges, then the other, as wily coaches put years of experience into practice to checkmate their rivals.  Impossible physical feats are performed, clever sleights-of-hand, a skinny kid with a leg of steel kicks a football through a goalpost 55 yards away.

With two minutes left in the game, the visitors have a nine point lead but the home team is unruffled.  Casey the quarterback leads them down the field in no time and the extra point is good, but a mere 40 seconds remain on the clock.  The only option now is an on-side kick which must travel a minimum of ten yards and somehow be recovered by the home boys.

Magically, it works!  Our side has the ball with 32 seconds remaining and an Australian soccer kicker on the bench.  You know the rest.  The offense moves the ball to the 30-yard-line, the Aussie does the deed and crowd rises as one to celebrate the day.  The band plays “Waltzing Matilda” and the scribes hurry to record these feats for posterity.  Beer is sold by the gallon long into the night, arcane tales are retold and a good time is had by all.  Some love the hullabaloo, a small minority repairs to the sitting room.  All things considered, we subscribers to the fray have always found it was eminently more fun than walking the dog.

      

Renaissance

My mother’s father, Bill Gosselin, was not the shy, retiring type.  He raced whippets, owned a bar, drank like a pirate and smoked like Mount Etna.  He died of lung cancer in his fifties when I was in first-grade.  His greatest advice to me was, “Billy, I got this hole in my throat from smoking Camels.  Don’t ever smoke cigarettes.”  I’ve carried it with me and adhered to it my whole life.

My grandmother’s second husband was the shy, retiring type.  Bob Vogler grew up in a large German family home in nearby Methuen, Mass. and introduced us to tomato farming, “picking the horses,” and the Liederkranz Singing Society, which was a fancy name for a congregation of Germans who liked to drink.  Thankfully, they never bellowed out the Westerwald, at least during regular hours.

The Voglers also like to attend, en masse, the Methuen High School football games, where they sat on the fifty-yard-line in the front rows.  My sports-oblivious grandmother married into this hoop-de-do and decided to make the best of it.  She and Bob started bringing me along to the games.

The Methuen Rangers were not the biggest, toughest team in the state but they might have been the feistiest.  Their diminutive fullback, Rock Bamford, who went about 5-4, could run through the Maginot Line and it generally took a posse to drag him down.  Win or lose, Methuen was in tight quarters almost every game and they never went down quietly.  Their proud blue-and-white dancing cheerleaders sang the fight song in good times and bad and laid on the line, “For our team never falters.”  I never forgot that line.

The Rangers lost football games, of course, and I once equated a loss with faltering.  But I was wrong.  You can teeter, you can drop to your knees, you can lose the battle,  that doesn’t mean you have faltered.  You have faltered when you don’t get up, when you accept the loser’s lot, when you don’t try over and over again until you change the result.

The Democratic Party has taken its beatings lately, a discouraging four-year stretch of crushing losses and embarrassing setbacks to a team of bullies and louts.  Sometimes it seems as if they’ll never win another game.  But lose though they might, they have never faltered.  They have slogged their way through the quicksand, risen from the swamp, put on their Sunday best and marched out to confront the Forces of Infamy.  The battle is soon to be met.  We hope Rock Bamford is still out there somewhere.




What Abe Said:

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.  We are met on a great battlefield of that war.”

Time to kick ass and take names.


That’s not all, folks….33 days to Glory.