Life is What Happens to You While You're Busy Making Other Plans

My mom and I drove north into the greener parts of the panhandle today to check out a festival that promised some good folks and good food. The fact that Betsy Badwater and the Hillbilly Chrome were in attendance was certainly not a mark against them, either. Some photos from the fun:

Men usually aren't very romantic. They scoff at the lovey-dovey way girls will moon over a boy, berating the time spent imagining what a union could be like, disparaging the inability to give up on a boy who just doesn't seem to know they are alive. But I know better. I have seen a time when men swoon, stare lovingly into the world they long for, faithfully hope for the affectionate responses of their objects, and generally go all googoo.

Of course, that time is the beginning of football season.

Each year, I feel it before I see it. My husband's eyes shine brighter. His attention wavers in conversation. He obsesses over draft picks and free agents. He talks about major athletes as if they are on his speed dial. And he is not the only one, by far. The fever swells to a pitch in early September, until the first coin is tossed for the first possession in the first game of the new season. A time of innocence and hope. Flaws are just speculation. Success is still tangible. Blank scoreboards are potential conquests. Arguments can be made for any team to rise from the ashes of last year. And anyone could... go... all... the... way.

I tell my husband, who is a Miami Dolphins fan since birth, that the worst thing his beloved team can give him is hope. But it is really not true. The team doesn't do anything. It does not matter what happened last year, what players have been rounded up on gun charges or assault charges, the hope just arrives like Santa Claus every year. Belief isn't necessary. The presents still appear under the tree.

I have learned that there are really good reasons why this pastime has captured the American imagination. It isn't the opportunity to mindlessly munch fatty foods in front of the tv all day. It isn't the excuse to let the lawn grow, the sink stay clogged, the car stay dirty for just another day. It isn't even the fact that many wives disappear on that day or spend it in the kitchen providing snacks for the guys gathered in front of the tv bought the day before the start of the season. It is The Game. The people. The dynamic plays, the gut-wrenching injuries, the missed opportunities, the emotional roller coaster. It's drawing a line down the center of the room and becoming Us and Them. It's trash talk and consolation. It's fantasy lineups and runaway scorers. It's records broken and hall-of-famers opining between plays. It's the real possibility that each game holds.

It is hope.

I love that my husband moons over football. I used to say I never wanted to be a football wife, but that was before I understood. Now I watch games all alone, by myself. And I even know what's going on. The 2009 football season has just started climbing the first hill. The really big one that lets you look out over everything for miles around and feel something wonderful flutter in your stomach as you realize anything is possible in this beautiful world. The moments just before you crest that hill and the car drops out from beneath as your heart stops and your stomach tries to climb from your mouth. It's the same coaster as last year. Still, there is always hope that you'll reach the end and be the one who didn't throw up.

Many Americans were genuinely elated when Barack Obama was elected. There was bound to be a point when the general feeling of positivity after the election came to an end. But the tide has turned so sharply, and I see people arguing about the nuttiest things. When I was in school, we studied government, the history of our country and the checks and balances of our modern system. We studied it objectively, pretty much, and discussed broad points of law, such as the bill of rights. Mostly, I paid as much attention as was necessary to get through the class.

When I was in the fifth grade, we were sitting in class one day when suddenly the PA system crackled to life and told us they were going to play the launch of the space shuttle being broadcast on the radio for us. We heard the faraway sounds of the countdown, then the loud but muffling sounds of takeoff. We heard the announcers tell us how far up the shuttle was. Then they started to tell us about how the fuel tanks would soon separate before the shuttle left the atmosphere. This was a very very special shuttle mission. A civilian - a teacher - had been chosen to accompany the crew into space, garnering much media attention for the flight. People all over the country had pinned their childhood hopes of space travel on this lucky woman and begun to believe that it could be anyone going up someday. The country was breathlessly riveted as the shuttle took her up for the first time. We sat in our desks, quietly smiling, thinking of the weeks we had spent studying the shuttle and space and the wonders that might be seen as the shuttle left the atmosphere.

Then there was a sound. An awful sound. The announcers on the radio sucked in their breath and told us incredulously that the shuttle had just exploded in the air. My teacher's hand flew like a bird to cover her mouth. We looked around the room at each other, some of us crying, and were afraid to speak or breathe. They said that pieces of the blown wreckage were raining down on the ground below, leaving firey trails through the sky. All I could think about was the poor teacher, killed at her happiest moment, and her family, robbed of their moment of pride and plunged into sudden horror. Her name was Christa McAuliffe, and I will never ever forget her, because of the quiet, hopeful, then horrified moments we spent in that classroom that day. We learned a great deal during that address. We learned that history is a constantly happening thing, that we were a part of it now and would be forever, that it mattered because it wasn't just the old happenings, the days of pioneers and inventors, but every new moment that passed into history each day. No one even considered the possibility that we should not hear that radio address in our classrooms.

No matter your beliefs on who Obama is, he is still the president, leader of the country, and that is fact, not opinion. It is a part of all of us, good or bad. The same was true when it was G.W. up there, despite personal objections to policy or precedent. History is being written everyday, and our children are as much a part of that as any one of us. They don't need to be sheltered from anything that the president has to say. And the president will have a million people there to make sure he does not politicize a speech to children. He is still a father, he knows what children need to hear and what they don't, but none of that is really the issue. Our children are the future, and they need to learn the lesson I learned the day the Challenger exploded miles into the earth's atmosphere: that history is ours, and it happens every day. Because no matter what else is happening or being hotly contested, make no mistake - all of this will one day be history. And I pray the history books are kind to the growing number of people who can do nothing in the wake of their political disappointment other than name calling and childish arguments.

Let's not teach our children that they are not a part of this, and let's not teach them that the way to voice a disagreement is by calling someone names. There's a way to disagree, and people have forgotten that and turned the country into a huge sandbox to fight in.

Grow up, people.

Thanks to Facebook, I got to ramble through some old (and some really, really old) photos of my hometown, Fort Walton Beach. Scanning through the former faces and places, I remembered so much from my childhood, like the snowstorm my mother still talks about as if it only happened on Kepner Drive, where we lived, when my sis and I were very young, the now-absent sunken amphitheater in the mall where I sat with friends, ate ice dream cones with Moopy, and told Santa for so many years exactly what he ought to bring me (he never seemed to take my advice).

There was the old theater where we used to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show on mischeivous Saturday nights. The night club on the island that everyone used to sneak into when they were underage. The red, white, and blue wooden roller coaster that used to watch over the island throughout my childhood. It sat there for many years after it had stopped running, then was finally torn down to make way for neon signs and swimsuit shops. There was the old cement water slide, simply called the "Water Boggan" that was on the island for many, many years before being added to and eventually torn down. There's a cute picture of a 2-year-old me riding that slide with my mom one day when we were out there with my dad and Moopy. Val was there, I am sure, but too young to ride.

These places come and go, and they leave their marks on your life. But do we leave our marks, too? I mean, beyond graffiti and damage. Everywhere I look in the old pictures of Fort Walton, I see Moopy, and Val, and my parents. I see things that aren't there, but hold fast in my memory. I am keeping Moopy tightly held in Fort Walton Beach, even after she has been gone for so long. But who will keep her there when I am gone? Will she disappear like the old roller coaster?

"When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship ...is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them."

-Mark Twain