I am not a real football fan, of course. This caveat must appear up front. I’m not a real fan compared to the fans of Packerland—those who would not delay a baby name selection as that might delay the placing of that name on the season ticket holder list. I may even have said some things recently and publicly about the morality of a sport that, especially when viewed through TV's warp, encourages us to cheer for debilitating injury. (Years down the road, we’ll be able to say it: we didn’t know anything back then! And they did get paid so much, didn’t they?)
But returned to Wisconsin, I’m remembering how we need football in the winter. About now, many rules of the universe are turned inside out, like how I see in the snowy driveway, every morning, animal tracks but never any animals. And we, the human-animals, are suffering under lockdown. The snowbanks make chutes of our streets, tunnels between work and home. Safe and smothering, the world has been made over, like a bowling game with the bumpers in. Get him, I feel ready to holler. Would you hit that guy? Hours before game time on Super Bowl Sunday, I can see the neighbor hacking with a garden hoe at the snowpack at the end of his driveway, festive in his green and gold parka, and all that slicing feels right, the sun off the white waist-high drifts like thousands of sparkling knives.
Strangely, it was leaving the state that made me a Packers fan--even the type of fan I am, hesitant and lackluster, but still claiming of the name, like a lapsed Catholic. Once out of state, it came out too often that I’d been born in Green Bay. And after all, I wasn’t not a fan. I wasn’t a fan of some other team. I knew the difference between a down and a touchdown, and in the English major and Arty crowd I ran with, that was something.
After all, some of them followed baseball. Others liked Quidditch.
But even as some mix of nostalgia and the twisting pride of an expatriot began to change me, there was never any fooling anyone back home. We didn’t even get most of the games on the West Coast (thus saving me the question of whether I would have watched them). And somehow (but like I had game time set in my internal clockwork) I regularly made the mistake of calling home mid-third-quarter, usually on a third-and-one.
Are you kidding? My parents would ask. They picked up because it could only be me.
And once, I flew home during a Monday night game and didn’t realize it until mid-descent, the pilot circling low over a lit-up Lambeau as if trying for a glimpse at the scoreboard. My parents lived then an hour from Green Bay. My mother and sister solved the problem of my retrieval by driving in early to catch the first half at a bar near the airport and came to collect me at half-time. We went right back to the bar for the third quarter. I was happy to do so, if mostly for the deep-fried cheese curds and the joke of it, and because in those days (an English major a lot like many a Packers fan) I didn’t pass on a trip to a bar. Still, everyone at the Pearly Gates must have been able to smell it on me: my knowledge of the roster didn’t go deeper than the famous quarterback. Not long after that, my entire extended family set to arrive at my parents’ house for another game day, I declined to wear the borrowed jersey my mother laid out on my old bed while I was in the shower.
Now it’s been nine years since I left, and six months since I returned. It’s three and a half hours until the Super Bowl kick-off. And, strangely enough, this year I’m the only one of my immediate family members home in the state.
My parents still live north of Green Bay, but spend a few months of each year volunteering at a park in Colorado. This week, they’ve been helping a group of visually impaired downhill skiers, which is about as funny as the fact that I’m the one here, relaying news of how many inches of snow, how the village of ice fishing shanties sprung up on the bay near our house.
And my sister and her husband live out of state, in Kansas. Yet today, they’re in Texas, at the Super Bowl. T. was the first to see the announcement of their plan on Facebook about 8 p.m. on a Friday night. I was not out pre-tailgating or entering contests for tickets, but in bed already with a novel. I missed the Packers parade the next day too. And, three days later, the victory party at the stadium. I will forget even to watch on TV.
Game Day, my sister posts pictures of her brother-in-law and then of herself wearing a makeshift championship belt. They began tailgating in the stadium parking lot about 11. Now, it’s just hours before the game. I’ve been writing about my feelings about the team, my relationship to my home state, what it means to come home. She posts a picture of herself palming a football, in sunglasses and shirt sleeves in the Texas weather. She posts again. Ahman Green just walked by, and asked if he could take a picture with them. He wanted to wear the belt.
T. is a Bears fan. A fair weather Bears fan at that (which is better? Or worse?). Between the two of us, we don’t own a scrap of green or gold. I think about the jersey I left on the bed at my parents’ house. I try not to remember my mother’s face when I walked down without it.
I wonder if she thought I would put it on that day? I wonder if she thought I’d move back home.
It’s like Christmas, but we don’t have a tree. We didn’t bake any cookies.
T. puts hand on my shoulder, interrupting my typing. “We could go get a Bloody Mary,” he suggests.
And you know, it’s the Super Bowl. It seems like the least we could do.
No comments:
Post a Comment