Minnesota beat Wisconsin Saturday so hope is restored, the heart is lightened, and I am ready to enter the darkness of December unafraid. I got up early Sunday morning, grateful for the sensor in the bathroom that switches on the light when my physical form breaks an invisible beam. “Let there be light,” as the Creator once said, though He Himself has excellent night vision, and it felt good to be recognized as I stepped, half-asleep, over the threshold and all was made clear, the sink and mirror, the shower, the towel rack, and my target below, and I thought of Wisconsin and let fly.
Six a.m. and the city is only faintly enlightened. My early jobs as a dishwasher and parking lot attendant began at 6 a.m. and I remember this dimness well. It changed my life. I stayed home at night and went to bed early and postponed debauchery to my mid-twenties and then, at the age of 27, I got a job on the 5 a.m. shift and postponed it again. A dear friend of mine, whose parents subsidized her fully, went out late one night and fell in with some fascinating strangers who introduced her to hashish and some other substance and she fell into a psychotic state and had to be hospitalized and spent some time in a drug program where she met more fascinating troubled people and it changed her life. She never found a vocation. Instead, she became fascinated by her own disability and made a career of being troubled, married a troubled man who abused her, and today she’s in a nursing home somewhere, a faint replica of the witty woman she once was, and I am waiting for the coffee to brew so I can get back to work on a novel. Early to bed and early to rise makes for a life that, if not wealthy and wise, is at least pleasant and sensible.
The kitchen is dark because our friend Terry is sleeping in the guest room, which is just off the kitchen. She’s in town to play in The Nutcracker ballet, a difficult part that she’s played a thousand times so she has it down cold and can enjoy the comedy of the orchestra pit, the squawks and squeaks of the reeds, the smirks of the strings when the smart-aleck violinist screws up, the grimaces and snickers at the conductor who can’t conduct his way out of a paper sack, and she comes home and gives us a hilarious close-up account. To the audience, it may be pure magic, the Sugar Plum Fairy and all, but in the pit, it’s a human comedy.
I don’t turn the light on. I can hear the coffee dripping. I deliberate whether I shall go to church at 10 a.m. and it seems that I shall not; I am not in a proper frame of mind, being still exultant over beating Wisconsin. We were down 10-3 at halftime but the defense held and we won 23-13. Wisconsin has been kicking us around for years, thanks to their Teutonic culture, so this victory means a lot, sort of like D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge. I shouldn’t walk into church with this baggage. My sins are selfishness and ingratitude and animosity, and in the early morning, I’m very aware of my loved ones asleep in other rooms and am thankful for the cardiologist who implanted the defibrillator in my upper left chest, but I’m not ready to give up animosity.
I have two enemies, one in Fargo and one in Minneapolis, and I intend to forgive them someday but the defibrillator is postponing that day, and so I hope for them to have wagered their homes and retirement accounts on the Badgers of Wisconsin, a sure bet, and watched Minnesota march to victory, and heard the debt collectors pull up in the driveway, and hours later found themselves sleeping off a bad drunk in the bus depot with no place to go but their great aunt Flossie’s in Wausau, the one with the German shepherd Rolf and the picture of Joe McCarthy on the bedroom wall and the Victrola with the 78 of Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries.
And then I pour my coffee and turn on a light and pick up a pen and write, “Minnesota beat Wisconsin Saturday so hope is restored, the heart is lightened, and I am ready to enter the darkness of December unafraid.” And the rest is easy as pumpkin pie.
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We would love to see you SOON in Ottumwa, Joliet and Holland, MI. Consider a road trip for a little Christmas Joy!
We have a freshman running back, a hapless quarterback and you took advantage of a soon to be closed loophole to have our safety disqualified on the first play. He was standing still, holding his ground, when the runner initiated the helmet to helmet contact.
But if it means this much to you we could schedule to have you win one every 7-8 years.
My Goodness! Somehow I hadn't imagined that a determined sports fan lurked within that Lake Woebegon breast! But then again, you were a sports reporter in high school...
As a Dodger fan, it never seemed out of place to me, that Vin Scully's voice rose several octaves with a bases-loaded home run, or a spectacular double play.
I suppose, the sense of incongruity I'm feeling, is that the Woebegon stories were offered in the third person, by an "impartial observer". There was no impartiality at all in this piece!
Wasn't your brother a Wisconsinite in a portion of his adult life? Was there a rivalry there? I remember the day that I, an LA Dodger fan of some intensity, knocked on my brother's door in a suburb of Chicago. The door swung open and he jubilantly shouted in my face "We Beat You!" "Where in the heck did that come from?" I wondered. It turned that that The Chicago Cubs had recently beaten the Dodgers. The intensity of my brother's "victory cry" seemed really excessive. But then, I suppose there was some ancient sense of rivalry that had been festering in him for ages. If he couldn't "best me" in reality, then maybe he was feeling a sense of "superiority by proxy." Food for thought.