I am going to write this post, but I want to let it be known that, at the time, I am concerned about the health of my father. He was diagnosed with a very low heart-rate, and although he would be the last person who would want anyone to bemoan his condition, I feel that I should preface this post with this concern. Right now it is a waiting-game for about four weeks until he can visit the cardiologist again, and it is difficult to judge the seriousness of the situation. I just know that he and my mother seem worried.
So I wanted to write about watching (and listening to) the UVA football game in Charlottesville last weekend, deleting any details about his condition. He would hate it if I wrote about that.
I was supposed to leave on Friday afternoon. The day got so away from me, however, that I reluctantly cut my losses and left Saturday morning. That Friday, I had to deliver a letter to the dean’s office before five, and I hurriedly rushed to write the letter, drive to Greensboro, and find the office of the dean in order to “personally hand it to the dean,” as per instructions. It turns out that the library that I have been calling a second home for the past three years has a whole hidden labyrinth, or maze, that leads to the dean’s office. After finally finding her office after a couple of switchbacks and a portal or two, I was greeted by a dry-erase message board that said “back at four.” I put the letter in her box and took a couple of steps back and said to myself, “no—hand-delivered means hand delivered.” So I worked my way back (I should have left a trail of breadcrumbs) and found the assistant dean. She became the recipient of the hand-delivered letter. Job done, if not necessarily so well.
That task out of the way, I asked the pallid circulation-desk attendant where the nearest Barnes and Noble was located. He gave me the typical “I know something that you don’t” sigh, and condescendingly gave me the directions. Okay, usually I don’t “out” my own lying in the middle of a post, but I have to be fair to this kid, he really was pretty good about the directions. I’m just trying to embellish a little on the hardships of my afternoon. Picking on Guilford undergrad is as good a way to do this as any.
It was raining. Hard. And it was about 3:45 on a Friday afternoon, which means it was rush hour, because in modern America rush hour lasts from 11:45am until 6:30pm on Fridays. I was driving Margaret’s Subaru Impreza which is like a squat and elongated AMC Pacer, for whoever remembers that monument of American engineering. Lots of fishbowl-like windows. Yea, spell check doesn’t accept the word Impreza. Why? Because it doesn’t exist. What is an Impreza? Is it Spanish for something?
That day it meant: “my defroster don’t work.” I was halfway to the Barnes and Noble and soon I was completely fogged out. It was like a Cheech and Chong movie but with the smoke on the outside. I couldn’t see shit. I did the old sleeve-wipe on the windshield and this helped for a moment, but then the glare from oncoming headlights would temporarily blind me. I tried the fan switch, pushing and pulling it back and forth in order to get it to kick on, but to no avail. I gave the windshield another swipe with my sleeve and pulled into the shopping center where I thought Barnes and Noble would be.
Usually, Barnes and Noble is the easiest store in the universe to find. I mean just look for a six-trillion-square-foot shoebox stuck in the middle of sprawl-ville and you’ve got it. I had the window down by this time, and had circled the parking lot three times—one of which put me back out on the road I came in on and provoked a string of “creative language,”—before I happened upon the secret, hidden, mini-B&N. Oh yea, I forgot to mention, I had Booker(the dog) with me.
So I braved the Friday afternoon yuppies, who were probably searching for the next set of revelations from Thomas L. Friedman, to grab a couple of Patrick O’Brian novels for my father. Thankfully, this B&N had the next in sequence, ones we haven’t read yet. But I couldn’t find Guns, Germs, and Steel in paperback. Probably not a bad thing though. Contemporary history can be an iffy proposition with Daddy.
Back out in the fishbowl of fog, Booker waited patiently. I couldn’t see to pull out of the parking space, so I had to take it on blind faith that I wasn’t about to back into a Range-Rover. This is when I decided to cut my losses, something I am more and more reluctant to do these days, and give up. I wouldn’t try to make it to Charlottesville that night. The sun was going down, and the defroster situation would only make things more dangerous at night, so I pointed the Impreza west and headed home. The weather was forecasted to improve on Saturday.
The next morning, the sun came up in a brilliantly blue autumn sky. My bags were already in the car, so I just loaded Booker in and headed off. I took 158 to Reidsville, which was especially nice on this fall day, with the colors waning from the leaves but still displaying notable exuberance. The pendulum which is my mood swung way over to ecstatic during the drive up, and even Booker pulling me into the mud at a pit stop didn’t effect my state of well-being. On highway 29, I started to notice cars with little NC State flags flapping off their antennas. State was playing UVA in Charlottesville. This is why I love fall. I arrived at Mom and Daddy’s at around 11:30.
After about twenty minutes of trying to get Booker to calm down, and catching up with my parents, it was time to watch the game. My father has been a Virginia fan all of his life, and he compounded his fanaticism by graduating from “The University” in the nineteen-fifties. His father captained the football team way back at the beginning of the last century, and there is a popular story, that gets told often, about how my grandfather was the only Virginia player who ever had a chance of scoring on Harvard—which was apparently the Ohio State of their day. On a pass play, the ball came down, hit the side of his head and dropped innocuously into the end-zone, eliminating the chance for a Michie to become immortalized through any type of athletic endeavor.
When I was a kid, during the seventies, Virginia never won a game. Then one day, maybe in 1978 or something, my father came home with a half-gallon of Bourbon—the good stuff—and declared that Virginia had finally managed to bumble their way into the win column. I thought they had won the Rose Bowl. Daddy spent the evening demonstrating his rebel yell and singing the school song which begins, “that dear old song of Wahoo Wah.” Occasionally he would break out his UVA records and play them on a massive piece of furniture with a record player inside called a victrola. Okay, here’s a testament to how things have changed, spell check doesn’t except the word victrola
either.
So watching a UVA game with my father has a weighty history behind it. I once tried to read a book while the game was going on and this was met with, what I perceived to be, unspoken distain. So this time I focused on each play and was ready with an analysis worthy of an NFL color man. “Wow, that defense is really penetrating the right side,” and “I think they’re going to call this one back—holding.” Things like that. By the end of the first half, Virginia was up seven to nothing. State had been plagued by penalties, and Virginia’s defense was plaguing them even more.
My parents live in an elevated area outside of Charlottesville, and it is a beautiful spot. The one disadvantage they have is a phone system and an electric system that seem not to have been updated since the early nineteen-sixties. A strong gust of wind, or a squirrel making his last leap onto a live wire, can knock their electricity out for hours, even days. The wind was whipping itself into high gusts that day (the punters were having fits with the wind), and minutes before the start of the second half, the TV blinked off and all of the white noise that encapsulates a house went silent.
After a few graphic declarations about a company called Old Dominion Electric or something, and a quick inventory of the radio and battery situation, Daddy made the decision to listen to the game in the car. Booker raced around in the yard as we sat in my parent’s compact car and listened to football in the original broadcasting format. One thing about radio, the commentators have to be twice as emphatic and descriptive, and I began to get a visual of the grid of the field, and where the teams moved, and how the plays were carried out. It was a very back and fourth third quarter, but with no score added to the scoreboard. Virginia was still up by seven.
During a commercial break, I left the car to throw a stick for Booker. I would direct him to find a suitable one and he would return with a dried piece that he would then proceed to chew up into small pieces, until dropping a slobbery nub at my feet. After a while, I chose the stick. Booker was so excited to be in his element—he was born and spent his puppy-hood less than a mile from my parent’s house—that he was markedly cockier than when he is at the park in Winston. He wanted to challenge me for possession of the stick at every throw, and it ended in a wrestling match where he squirmed out from my grasp and left me rolling in the grass and laughing. We went at this for a while, until he had worn me out, and then I returned to the game.
As I sat, listening to the beginning of the fourth quarter, I started to realize that my parent’s car had a funny smell. I couldn’t quite place it, but it seemed earthy yet pungent. Kind of like sour mud. I shifted around and the smell got worse. Was it coming from the back seat? Was it coming from my dad? Was it coming from me? I inspected my left shoe. Nothing. Then my right shoe. Dogshit.
I was wearing shoes that have little capillaries of tread, and all of these tiny veins were now filled with canine excrement. I had to go inside and try to clean my shoe, which really required a microscope and a scalpel. I did what I could, but I felt a need to return to the game, so I listened to the rest of the game with one shoe on. My mom took up the challenge of de-shitting my shoe.
Virginia won, fourteen to seven. State was able to slip by Virginia’s impressive defense for an eighty-plus yard drive, which tied the game. Then in an unprecedented show of determination, Virginia’s offence, who, until now, had been giving a lack-luster performance in the second half, drove eighty yards to take the lead. They held on to this lead, and the game ended, which was good because I wasn’t sure if I could go through overtime with one shoe off, the wind whipping furiously outside, and Booker taunting me with a gnawed and drool-covered stick in his mouth.
I left the next day and the power was still off. This is such a common occurrence for my parents that they have a collection of electric lanterns and flashlights fit for a spelunking expedition, so that night, we talked by the light of Coleman and Duracell and turned in early. There was no clock in my room, so I got up when the sun rose. Old School, I suppose.
Mom went to church and I helped my dad build a fire. We sat in the living room, Daddy reading the Washington Post, and I doing reading for school, and listened to the wind as it traveled in fits and starts through the Ragged Mountains. That, and the crackle of the fire, was only interrupted by a political comment or an observation about the strength of the wind. I ended up getting a good deal done to start the week, and when my mother returned, we brainstormed for a little while about an upcoming project I have due. Then, reluctantly, I loaded up my bags and Booker and headed back down 29.
On the way home I listened to an interview with a philosopher named Jacob Needleman on NPR. He talked at length about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the enlightenment philosophy that went into it. The pursuit of happiness, he said, was not about acquiring things, but about finding a balance in life, about finding that core of well-being, free from material restraints, that we all share. He spoke of how the Quakers have a community that exerts this idea into their community life in an almost mystical way, by stirring that core, making it available, and realizing that all humans possess it. This helped me on my drive back to a busy, uncertain week. As I sit now, almost a week later, and look back on how watching (and listening) to a football game with my father can transcend my age, it takes me back to a time when I would have done the same thing then as now. At age ten, I would have also gone outside during the commercial, play with the dog, and run inside to discover that while I was moving in the ethereal autumn bliss, I had, inadvertently, stepped in something.
