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dispatchesfromthedome · 3 years ago

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Whose Side Are You On

If there is one thing people in the South love more than having breakfast at Cracker Barrel on a cold morning when there’s a fire going in the fireplace, it’s dividing into opposing factions. Perhaps it says something about human nature, maybe it’s just a peculiar Southern trait like stopping your car and removing your hat to let a funeral pass by in the opposite lane whether you knew the deceased or not. Whatever it is, it’s encoded in our DNA going back even before we Virginians divvied ourselves up into Colonials and Loyalists in the days leading up to the Revolutionary War.

It didn’t matter what the question was, save those of politics and religion (which, as befitting a well-bred society, were still not discussed in polite company), it was almost always divided into two camps. Do you do your grocery shopping at Kroger, or Wal-Mart? Do you buy your clothes from the ancient Ziegler’s, or “that new place” (opened in 1972) Davis’s. Get your pizza from Sal’s, or Big Mike’s? That one was the easiest, since Sal’s was owned by my great uncle, and now my cousin, Sal, Jr. I’d never even set foot in Big Mike’s

But nothing draws out the diehard partisanship inherent in the South more than football season. Not even the beloved Dixie institution of NASCAR can inflame passions more than the first kickoff in Autumn. Friends stop speaking to each other, families refuse to visit each other’s homes, and local merchants that make their preferences known have been known to lose business over it. When I was in high school, and a captain of the Branscomb Mill High eleven, I almost lost my captaincy because I was dating a girl who went to Branscomb County High. And even though that County girl Essie and I have been married now for twenty years, I still have old high school classmates who give me the skunk eye whenever they see me about town.

In and of itself, the bitter divides that form during football season would be bearable if it weren’t for the fact that there was absolutely no way to stay above the fray. It was one thing to deck yourself out in your team’s colors and cover your car with stickers, it was quite another not to declare an allegiance. No matter where you went, you faced the same battery of suspicious queries: Are you for Mill, or County? Virginia Tech, or the University of Virginia? Cowboys, or Redskins? As always, two choices only. No evasive answers allowed. It was almost like trying to pass a military checkpoint just to pop into Quik-Stop for a gallon of milk.

I am fortunate in that I am still remembered around town as a member of the storied 1983 team that went 13-1 and lost in the state finals, 7-6, in a blinding snowstorm. I was also one of the few Mill players who went on to play in college, even if it was for tiny Division II Mars Hill College, in North Carolina. Unfortunately, my college playing career is all but forgotten because I happened to be in the same graduating class as Stan Kramer. Stan was our quarterback, and went to Marshall University where he played for two national championships during his time there.

Stan was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in the 8th round, failed to make the team, and played several years in the World League of American Football for the Frankfurt Galaxy. He parlayed his brush with greatness into the most successful insurance agency in town, three ex-wives, a drinking problem, and hours upon hours of vainglorious football stories that he will gladly tell anyone within earshot at the bar down at the Waterwheel. I ended up with the love of my life, a good job, a nice home, arthritic knees, and a repeatedly broken right ring finger that now permanently angles to the left. I’ll take that trade any day of the week.

With my Mill alliance established, the next question is inevitably “Tech, or UVA?” As I’ve said, I graduated from Mars Hill College and Essie graduated from West Virginia University; two schools that, when last we checked, both had football teams. Neither one of us saw any reason to declare an alliance to a school we didn’t attend just for the sake of fitting in. Unfortunately, that’s not an acceptable answer. People who had barely graduated from high school swathed themselves in Tech or UVA colors, and followed the teams with fanatical devotion. It didn’t matter to them where you actually went to college, or if you went at all; there were still only two answers to the question—are you friend, or enemy? Tired of trying to justify my allegiance to the Mountain Lions of MHC, these days I’ll just point to whatever shirt and/or hat the person asking the question is wearing say “Go get ‘em” with a smile.

Then comes the most dreaded question of all, “Cowboys or Redskins.” For many years, the Redskins were the de facto home team, by benefit of the fact that we’re only about four hours from Washington. The ‘Skins were everywhere, on radio and TV and all over the local newspapers. Back in the days before NFL Sunday Ticket, the ‘Skins were always the regional game. So even if they were 4-10 and playing 2-12 Buccaneers, you’d see that game instead of two teams who were actually playing for something more than draft picks. While some people became diehard Redskins fans if by nothing other than osmosis, others, motivated by the age-old love of a good feud, took up the cause of the Cowboys.

As a kid, we tended to pick our teams from whoever was winning the most. In grade school back in the Seventies, there were a lot of Miami Dolphins and Pittsburgh Steelers fans. In high school, in the Eighties, there were a lot of 49er fans and a smattering of Oakland/LA Raiders fans. But by the time we got out into the real world, one was expected to put aside their youthful nonconformity and choose column A or column B.

I have always been an NFL fan, content to watch whatever games were on TV back in the days of three channels and no choices. I never developed any real partisanship, because it seemed to get in the way of my enjoyment of whatever game was on. But, when Charlotte got the expansion Panthers in 1995, I decided to get in on the ground floor due to my ties to North Carolina. Even so, I’m not a diehard; if the Panthers’ season is in the tank and there’s a better game on, I will flip the channel. But at least I can answer the question, even if it’s not the answer they want to hear. Fortunately, there are a few likeminded individuals in town and we’re accepted as the town’s oddballs, like the people who insisted on driving Chryslers back in the days when the question was “Ford or Chevy?”

While I am content to mostly fly under the radar, so to speak, my beloved Essie seems incapable of keeping out of the fray. She was born with a quick Irish temper and an immoderately wide hillbilly streak, and does not hesitate to say what’s on her mind regardless of consequences. She is also a passionate football fan, a resolute WVU and Baltimore Ravens supporter, and knows more about the game than probably anyone but John Madden. I played the game for fourteen years, and she still knows volumes more about it than I do; a fact that she never lets me forget when we’re parked on the couch, watching the weekend college and pro games.

This meant, of course, that Essie was capable of giving a comprehensive and informed justification of her choices. And she could do it at the top of her lungs and peppered with very colorful language if the occasion called for it. Her defense of her beloved Ravens would make Ray Lewis tell her to calm down. In our younger days, before Essie learned when it was prudent to hold her tongue, I was often called upon to rise in her defense. I think the turning point came when I almost had to wade into an entire row of combative, sumo-sized, very inebriated Cleveland Browns fans at Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium (or whatever its corporate-sponsored name is at the moment) to preserve her honor.

Before I could actually step up, a veritable tide of purple-and-black clad Charm City faithful descended on the Browns fans in a cartoonish cloud of flying fists and profanity. Essie and I decided that this would be an opportune time to visit the concession stand until stadium security got the whole megillah sorted. Even now, though, most people in town knew better than to put Essie to the test. It still doesn’t take a whole lot to bring out the hillbilly in my beloved girl. Under the right circumstances, she is still perfectly willing to tell you exactly where you can shove your precious Hokies and/or Redskins.

As recently as a couple of years ago, one of Essie’s old high school friends invited us over to her house to watch the VT-WVU game. Dina and her husband were fanatical Tech fans, even though she earned her nursing degree from Radford University and he went straight to work for his father’s paving business right out of high school. They drove maroon cars with personalized VT plates, and managed to work Tech’s maroon and orange into nearly every piece of their wardrobe and home decor. They named their daughter Lane, for Tech’s stadium. Their dog’s name was Beamer. We didn’t make it to halftime, and have never been invited back to their house.

About as far as my rivalries go is the pitcher of beer I bet every year on the Mars Hill-Tusculum game with Pat Noland, a graduate of Tusculum who is head of the Chemical Processes Dept. He earned his Master’s and PhD. from Vanderbilt, and moved here from Tennessee to take the job. Like Essie and I, Pat doesn’t feel like he has a dog in the whole Tech-UVA fight. His wife, Pilar, is from Spain and thinks American football is barbaric. But she could give Essie a run for her money when F.C. Barcelona was playing Real Madrid, if my limited understanding of Spanish profanity is correct.

The upside of having a wife who enjoys football as much or more than you do is that you never have to worry about weekend trips to Home Depot or Sunday apple-picking excursions. If were ever to even suggest giving football a miss, I honestly believe she’d punch me right in the face. The downside is that you watch the games she wants to watch, and you absolutely do not control the remote; a modern form of emasculation. There’s no channel-surfing, no flipping over to check the score of the other games. Even if her game is a beating, there’s no turning it over to the SEC game of the week just in time to see Johnny Manziel pull something incredible out of his backside that you’ll have to hear about all day at work on Monday.

The one haven in town to keep out of the thornier questions of loyalty was at the Friday night games at Memorial Field, adjacent to the “new” gym (built in 1964). It was more than just a game, it was a social event and networking experience. More town business was accomplished in the stands on Friday night than in a year’s worth of city council meetings. Mayor Price and his surgically-enhanced Barbie Doll of a trophy wife sat right on the fifty yard line, where it was like a scene out of The Godfather. Various petitioners would line up to kiss his ring, knowing he couldn’t refuse a request made during a Mill home game.

“Godfather, please put a stop sign at the corner of Holton Ave. and Lee St. Those hot-rodding kids just blow right through the yield sign, and there are children in that neighborhood who are always outside playing.”

“Someday, and this day may never come, I may call upon you to do me a service. Until then, accept this stop sign as a gift on the day of the Millers’ 28-16 victory over Natural Bridge.”

Essie and I went to the games as much for the game itself as we did the community gathering aspect. We both really enjoyed watching football, no matter who was playing. On Saturdays when the WVU game wasn’t being televised, we’d sometimes take the scenic drive over to Lexington and watch Washington and Lee University or Virginia Military Institute play. Following the game, we’d enjoy dinner and enjoy a stroll through the picturesque old town. Lexington is a town made for Autumn evening walks.

We avoided going to her old high school’s games, because those days still held a lot of unpleasant memories for her. Both of us firmly believed in letting sleeping dogs lie. Then, this summer, Essie was asked out of the blue to teach a class on Appalachian folk crafts as part of County’s new culture curriculum. Her longtime friend, Helen Comer, had fulfilled her lifelong goal of being principal of their old school, and believed that it was just as important to give the students a practical sense of where they came from as it was to coddle their delicate Millennial self-esteem and drill them for endless state-mandated Standards of Learning tests.

Helen and Essie had been friends since middle school. Essie was too tall for her age, rail thin, and cursed with being the only redhead in her grade. Helen was chubby, book-smart, wore Coke bottle glasses, and was unfortunately hit in the face with a brick by an intractable case of acne. For most of their high school career, it was an even bet as to which one of them was most likely to go all Carrie at the senior prom. The smart money moved to Helen when Essie became the first to get a boyfriend and was generously gifted by the Puberty Fairy, in that order. I was at their senior prom (and bribed my teammate “Ollie the Oaf” Simmons, a thick-skulled but affable clod, with a case of beer to escort Helen), and it was fortunately unmarred by pig’s blood and fiery cataclysm. Helen had already decided that one day, she would become the principal and repay cruelty with kindness.

And so it was. If Essie was a late bloomer, Helen took even longer. She was nearly 25 and in grad school when her baby fat melted away and her acne cleared up. She returned to her alma mater at 28 with a PhD. and a laser focus on her goal. Five years later, she married Oliver Simmons, Esq., now the Commonwealth’s Attorney (Virginia’s equivalent of a District Attorney), and was named principal. She kept her maiden name, at least at work, so that her former teen tormenters would remember old “Clearasil Comer.” It was an enormous source of satisfaction when those who used to make her life miserable now came up to her and thanked her for the difference she’d made in their kids and in the school. It’s true what they say, success is the best revenge.

Bringing Essie back as a teacher was Helen’s way of destigmatizing the school for someone she knew had almost as awful an experience as she did. It was also intended as a boon to the current students, some of whom might have harbored the same hidden talents Essie did and just needed a conduit for them. As gifted as Essie was with sewing, for as long as Helen had known her, it was an ability that held almost no worth in the strict hierarchy of adolescent values. And she knew that Essie’s abilities were not being nurtured by her distant, self-absorbed parents. Helen wagered, and rightly so, that Essie was exactly the right choice to save someone else from a similar fate.

Teaching one ninety minute class, three days a week, the modest stipend they provided was more than enough to cover the expense of having Essie’s part-time girl work a few extra hours a week at Essie’s Appalachian crafts store, MountainMade. Margaret Epperly, whom Essie had hired while she was still in high school, was exactly the sort of person Helen had in mind. She was a shy, quiet girl with a God-given talent for traditional Appalachian pottery. Essie had seen Margaret’s work being completely ignored at a high school arts and crafts show and recognized it for what it was. She hired her on the spot, gave her display space in the store and paid her the profits on each piece sold, and even arranged an informal apprenticeship with mountain pottery maven Lottie Heller.

Margaret was more than happy for the extra hours, even though she spent most of her time at the shop anyway and she earned way more from her sales than from her $8.15 hourly wage. My Dad, retired from the mill and bored out of his skull, had put his mechanical genius to work turning an unused room above the shop into a pottery studio. He even rigged her a kiln, made from “repurposed” pieces liberated from the mill’s all-but forgotten store of spare parts for obsolete ovens that had long ago been replaced with newer models. The shop and the studio, she told Essie, were the only places in the world where she truly felt like herself. Helen hoped there were more Margarets among her student body, and that Essie would find them and help them finally feel like themselves.

Essie returned to her old school and no longer felt instantly reduced to plain little Essie Leary, the awkward loner. Her old memories of being an irredeemable outsider, ridiculed for her girlish clumsiness and uncooperative shock of Halloween pumpkin orange hair, began to fade away. She was Mrs. Q now, the passionate and funny teacher who knew all kinds of cool, weird, old-timey stuff. She could do magic with just a needle and thread, didn’t believe in quizzes, and said “dammit!” a lot. She was known and liked for who she was, a far cry from the way things were when she was a student there.

She began to feel like a part of her old school for the first time. The adolescent enthusiasm that filled the halls, the sense of belonging and group identity conferred by the sea of silver and blue, was infectious. When a group of her students petitioned to form an extracurricular Appalachian Heritage Club, and asked Essie to lead it, she gladly accepted. Principal Helen green lighted the new club, and in short order, they had sweatshirts made up. The day Essie came home proudly wearing hers, it was the first time I’d ever seen her wearing her old school colors since her graduation cap and gown.

Soon, we started attending County games even when Mill was at home, which was fine with me. I have long since gotten over the whole high school hero thing. I played football; it was a thing I did and I enjoyed it, but I played my last game in 1988 and walked away with no lingering regrets and no “what-ifs.” I’ve gone on to a happy, fulfilling life with a job I don’t hate and a wife I love more than life itself. I still enjoy watching the game, but I have no interest in trying to live vicariously through the kids out there playing the game today or sitting in the stands reminiscing about the good old days with Stan and the rest of the guys whose high water mark in life came three decades ago between the chalk lines on Memorial Field.

It wasn’t like sitting in the home stands at County felt like enemy territory, or being disloyal to my alma mater. Half of the people I worked with in the executive offices at the mill lived in nice homes in the Autumn Ridge subdivision and had kids who went to County. Fr. Mitchell, the rector at St. Michael’s Anglican Catholic Church where Essie and I attended, had two sons on the football team. Plus, it was just nice being at my wife’s side as she finally got to enjoy being recognized and admired by her old school for the wonderful, talented woman she was.

Then came Homecoming. For some reason, Mill had scheduled County as their homecoming opponent this year. Homecoming coincided with the Fall Festival, held the third weekend in October and the eighth game of the season. This was unusual, even though Mill and County played every year, because Mill played in the smaller single-A classification while County was double-A. Mill normally scheduled County early in the season, where a loss against the bigger opponent wouldn’t interrupt their tough district schedule and possibly damage their play-off chances.

When I played, there were only three classifications in Virginia, and only the district champion went to the play-offs. One loss against a tough district opponent, like the always-formidable Parry McCleur, and you watched the play-offs from someone else’s bleachers. Now, there were six classifications, and it was possible under the right circumstances to make the play-offs even with a losing record. Still, playing a much larger team so late in the season made injuries much more costly. County dressed 70 players on their varsity squad, as opposed to the 25 stalwarts on the Mill sidelines. A good many of our guys played offense and defense, so losing even one player to injury could be twice as costly.

In my four years of varsity football, we only beat County once. My junior year, the legendary 1983 team. Stan Kramer played like a man possessed, throwing for six touchdowns in the 49-0 rout. County stewed on that for a year, and beat us 55-6 the next season in a game that wasn’t as close as the score indicated. The last time Mill beat County was in 2004, when a pouring rain and muddy field neutralized County’s high-powered passing offense and favored Mill’s traditional ground-and-pound attack. The Millers’ 14-6 triumph is still spoken of with pride.

This year, though, there was a feeling that this might be Mill’s year. They had the best team they’d had since 1983, currently 7-0 and in first place in the district. The star of the team was Marcus Hansford, a beast of a running back who had already broken the state record for rushing yards in a season and was within 142 yards of the career record. He needed three touchdowns for the single season record, and 10 for the career mark. Division I scouts were in the stands for the first time since Stan Kramer’s heyday. Marcus’s proud mom, Dorothy, worked at the mill and wore her son’s jersey under her apron on the quality control line. His dad, Marcus Sr., worked for the Virginia Dept. of Transportation and had painted his hardhat to look like his son’s battered helmet.

County, meanwhile, had been hit hard by graduation. They lost 16 starters from last year’s team that went 8-3 and lost in the first round of the playoffs to perennial power Salem. They’d also been devastated by injuries, currently missing five starters. As of last week, they were down to their third-string quarterback, a nervous freshman with a bad habit of throwing the ball away whenever anyone from the other team got near him. They were still 4-3, owing to a soft early-season schedule. And they were still animated by the rivalry, and decidedly still dangerous. To Mill faithful, it was okay if the team went 1-9, as long as that one win was against County. They seemed to take that personally.

To add to the drama, Mill chose the Homecoming game to honor the 30th anniversary of the 1983 team. For one night, they would wear throwback uniforms (sponsored by Kramer Insurance), which were probably the equivalent of wearing leather helmets to today’s kids. After the game, the throwbacks would be auctioned off to raise money for the athletic department. Even though my little sister had commandeered my old game jersey when I went off to college, I had no intentions of bidding on my old number 67; not because it didn’t matter to me, but because I didn’t want to turn into one of those sad old bastards who just couldn’t let go.

Essie and I hadn’t really planned on how we’d handle the game. We usually just had a tacit understanding of each other, and I just assumed that she would sit with me and the rest of the old team in a reserved section behind Mayor Price. Unbeknownst to me, Essie had been asked by members of her club to sit with them. Everyone got a kick out of the way she’d scream and cheer during the game, and the way she’d give the referees or the coach what-for if something didn’t go to suit her. “Punting, on fourth and inches on their 35? Are you serious? Did you leave your cojones at home, coach?”

They’d all grown especially close in the weeks leading up to that weekend’s Fall Festival, as they worked overtime to produce enough crafts to sell at the club’s fund-raising booth. They hoped to raise enough to take an overnight field trip to Tamarack Center, West Virginia’s center for traditional mountain crafts. Essie had promised that if they really worked hard, she’d match whatever they raised out of the shop’s profits. The kids had exceeded her wildest expectations, taking the project to heart and bearing down harder than she’d ever seen from a group of teenagers when there wasn’t a more tangible reward like an iPhone or car keys involved. She hadn’t just found another Margaret, she’d found 22 of them.

Meanwhile, the old team had decided, via endlessly RE’d and forwarded e-mails, that those of us who still had our varsity jackets (almost all of us) and could still fit into them (just under half of us) would wear them to the game. The ones who didn’t fit could have their wives, kids, or significant others wear them in their stead. We would all gather outside of the locker room twenty minutes before kick-off, and walk in with the team paired with whoever currently wore our old number or played our old position. My old number 67 was currently worn by a tenacious little fireplug of an offensive tackle who had a talent for getting up under much larger defensive linemen and moving them around like an ant carrying a bread crumb three times his size. He did the number proud.

We would walk out onto the field and receive our accolades, then the team captains—Stan, Dickey Sturtevant, and me—would present a bouquet of flowers and one of the new “old” jerseys to Duron Harris’s mother. Duron, a talented wide receiver who had already signed a letter of intent at Virginia State, was killed in a car accident two weeks after we lost the state championship. His number 83 was retired, his white away jersey framed and hanging above the school’s trophy case. He was buried in his home jersey and letter jacket.

Duron was the main reason we had the season we did that year, it was his always-smiling face and calm demeanor in the huddle that kept us focused even when things looked hopeless. In the regional championship game, down 21-0 to Narrows after three quarters, Duron took over. He told Stan “just throw it, baby, I’ll catch it.” He scored three highlight-reel touchdowns, and the go-ahead two point conversion. For good measure, he then scored on an 85 yard punt return and intercepted a desperation Hail Mary pass to seal a 29-21 victory.

We’d lost ten others from that team in the intervening years, most to the three C’s that haunted this area like a curse: cancer, car wrecks, and cardiac arrest. Jimmy Halloran was murdered, after being caught at the Pinecrest Motel with the wrong man’s wife, and Sam Dalton took his own life after his business failed and his wife left him. But Duron’s loss still hurt the most. He was the first person our age that we knew personally who had died and, almost to a man, we still felt he was the best of us. His death taught us early on the very important lessons that life was not fair, and that we were not as invincible as we’d believed.

As all these memories came flooding back, good and bad, I began to feel connected once again; if not to the school itself, necessarily, to my old teammates. As much as I say I’m over the high school hero thing, this was something that went beyond the transitory celebrity that went with being the center of a whole town’s attention for a few months each Fall. Most of my old teammates, I’d played with since we were seven years old, playing Little League for the Branscomb Park Bears. For two years in middle school and four years of high school, we gathered each season at the beginning of August for grueling two-a-days. We sweated, bled, and hurt together. We went through the crucible twenty-six boys and came out one team.

Reconnecting with these guys again brought a lot of those old feelings to the surface. The old bonds were still there, as I suspected they always would be. The upcoming game, and the planned remembrance, became more and more about we and less about me. That illustrious season took all of us, to a man. It was the product of years of hard work and an unshakeable belief in one another, combined with a fortuitous arrangement of circumstances. The fact that we lost in the state championship game was almost an afterthought; no one had ever expected us to even be there.

Mill did not have a long and storied tradition of football. Though they’d played the game since the school’s opening in 1897, they’d mostly muddled along to unremarkable seasons. A .500 season was an accomplishment, and more people came to the games for the social aspect of the event than for the game itself. It was a last chance to get out and be together as a community before winter drove everyone indoors. Until that season, the town’s attitude towards the team was less “Go get ‘em boys!” as it was “Just try not to embarrass us.”

The team became more of a small, insular community. We gave our all not for the town, the school, or the largely indifferent fans, but for each other. We sacrificed carefree summers to work out and lift weights because we all did it. Playing through injuries and personal difficulties was done without question or complaint, not because anyone asked us to, but because we knew the other guys were doing the same thing. Each of us was keenly aware of the debt we owed each other not to let our teammates down. We were part of something special, even if we were the only ones who could see it.

Game night came, after weeks of anticipation. Essie and I parked down behind the old armory and walked up to the school. Even a half hour before game time, most of us were already gathered outside of the locker room, champing at the bit. Some wore their old jerseys, and hardly any of us looked much like we did thirty years ago. We couldn’t hide the effects of the past three decades, no matter how we tried. I had to wonder how much Just for Men hair dye the local drug stores sold in the immediate weeks prior. Some of us sported tell-tale hats that almost surely concealed bald spots, and I’d be willing to bet that more than one roll of Saran Wrap was holding back more than a few beer guts. Stan’s recent Botox injections had frozen his face in an incredibly creepy fake game-show-host smile. If I didn’t feel quite that old before, I sure as hell did now. My constant companion, arthritis, jabbed an ice pick in my right knee as if on cue.

As we reached the assembled Brotherhood of Used-To-Be, Essie leaned in and gave me a quick kiss.

“I’ll be over on the County side, with my kids from the club. Come join us after your thing.” And with that, she headed over to the ticket booth and disappeared into the arriving crowd.

I’ll confess, I was a little bit stunned. I honestly hadn’t expected this development, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I couldn’t quite picture myself standing on that field again after all these years, surrounded by old teammates but without my beloved girl, receiving the appreciation of a new generation. And to top it all, then being asked to sit on the enemy’s side. My pride was wounded, as that selfish little voice inside asked, indignantly, “Doesn’t she know what this moment means to me, and how much I wanted to share it with her?”

I ruminated on it for a bit, looking around at all of guys standing there with their wives and/or kids. The longer I looked, the more I saw that practically the only ones who looked happy to be here were us. Long-suffering wives, who’d endured their husbands’ boring old football stories at least a hundred times, stood by their mates out of pure marital obligation. Weekend dads, who got their kids from the Ex on Friday evening and returned them like rented DVDs on Sunday afternoon, stood by their bored offspring. For their part, the kids were so immersed in their smartphones that they were probably only vaguely aware they were at a football game.

Just a small handful seemed to be enjoying the moment, mostly those who currently had kids on the team; they were easy to spot, because they wore buttons with their son’s picture on them, festooned with blue and gold ribbons. Only Stan Kramer, recently shed of wife number three and only occasionally able to remember both of his kids’ names, seemed to completely fine with standing there alone. He just stared in the direction of the field, which was obscured by a high fence to discourage non-paying spectators, and seemed to be in his own world.

And he was. He was sixteen again and preparing to run out on that field again to do the only thing he was ever really any good at. The failures and disappointments of the last few decades were carried away on the crisp Autumn air like smoke from the chimneys of nearby homes. Here, now, he was still Stan Kramer and he could do great things on that field. He didn’t need to hide behind his past achievements, they were right there in front of him waiting to happen again. In this moment, he felt immortal. Marshall had forgotten him, sending numerous players on to solid NFL careers and possibly, in Randy Moss’s case, even the Hall of Fame. The World League itself was an inglorious failure, largely forgotten even after they tried rebranding it as NFL Europe. But right now, he was the Stan Kramer. He was transported once again to the best days of his life.

I thought about the best days of my life. At the top of the list was the day Essie asked me to marry her (yes, you read that right). There was the day we found out that my father was cancer-free after three surgeries and a devastating round of chemo that was almost worse than the disease itself. There was the day I signed my scholarship offer from Mars Hill College, thus delaying my all-but-inevitable job at the mill by four more relatively carefree years and ensuring that I’d go to work wearing a white collar instead of a blue one. That bright August morning that Essie and I woke up together for the first time in our own house, a little two-bedroom built in the 1940s from a kit ordered out of the Sears catalog in which you couldn’t run the microwave and the dryer at the same time. The day Essie opened her shop downtown, glowing with pride, as beautiful as I’d ever seen her.

None of my best days happened during that 1983 season. In fact, what I remember most about it was standing on that field watching the red lights on the scoreboard through the driving snow as they ticked away the last few seconds on our hopes of a state title. I remember the long, silent, painful bus ride back from Grundy; each one of us going over every single play, trying to think of anything we could have done to change the outcome. I remember the dull, numb shock of two weeks later, as we carried Duron’s coffin to his gravesite.

I thought about Essie, and what this night meant to her. Ever since she’d started teaching the class and leading the club, she could hardly wait till I got home in the evening to tell me about “her kids.” She was as excited over them as I’d seen her get over anything since the Ravens won their second Super Bowl. It was almost more entertaining watching her talk about the kids, hands fluttering and talking a mile a minute, than it was listening to the stories themselves. And it did my heart good seeing her replace her old, unpleasant memories of that school with new, positive experiences. Having been with her since our sophomore year, I knew as well as anyone the weight of all that old baggage.

I was still pondering the greater meaning of this entire evening when the team began to file out of the locker room with the unmistakable clop of cleats on pavement. We began seeking out our old numbers amid the familiar old school jerseys. Number 67 came out, already wearing his helmet and his game face, looking psyched up and ready to hit someone. I walked over to him and introduced myself. He regarded me like some distant old relative he’d never met before and was unlikely to ever see again. So much for my legacy.

The band came marching down from the band room to a simple cadence of drum clicks, and we fell in behind them just as we did in my day. They led us behind the stands, across the dirt of the baseball infield, and to the far end zone. There, we waited as the band marched out and separated into two columns. They were soon joined by the cheerleaders and a handful of students to form the old spirit line. We used to run down the line and burst through a huge paper sign advocating the total destruction of that evening’s opponent. The student Earth Club put the kibosh on the sign a few years back, citing a wanton waste of paper. The kids on the current team took some mercy on a bunch of middle-aged men with a litany of ailments, and just walked down the line towards mid-field.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Memorial Field for tonight’s homecoming game between your (pause for effect) undefeated Branscomb Mill Millers (loud burst of cheers from the home crowd) and the Branscomb County Pioneers (cheers from their side of the field, scattered boos from ours). This is a very special night, as we’d like to honor the members of one of the greatest teams in Mill history. The 1983 squad finished that remarkable season with a record of 13-1, and were state Group A runners-up. Please welcome them as they, and their families, are escorted onto the field by this year’s squad.” said the public address announcer, in his best radio commercial voice.

We stood there on that field, many of us (including me) for the first time since we played our last game here, as they began reading off our names in alphabetical order. Suddenly, I heard a wave of laughter rise up through the crowd. It was soon followed by a small, but loud group cheering from the County side. At first, I thought some idiot kid might have run onto the field in his underwear, which happened every so often. I turned around to see what the commotion was, and saw Essie running towards me. No matter how graceful and womanly she’d turned out as an adult, she still ran like the gangly teenaged girl she once was. She reached me and practically fell into my arms, out of breath, her face bright red.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” she said, breathlessly, “I didn’t realize I was supposed to come out here with you. I thought this was just your thing.”

“It’s nothing without you.” I said, then hugged her and kissed her between panting breaths. Both sides cheered. My old teammates applauded. Everyone laughed, including Essie and me.

After order was restored and the rest of the names called, they brought Duron’s mother (who had just celebrated her 83rd birthday, a small cosmic touch that was not lost on us) out onto the field in a wheelchair. She held in her lap a framed picture of Duron in his uniform, smiling that ever present everything-will-be-alright smile of his. We presented her with a blue and gold bouquet and Duron’s number 83 throwback jersey. Stan, Dickey and I hugged her and expressed how glad we were that she could be here. Dickey, now a Presbyterian minister, spoke for all of us when he told her that we still carried a part of Duron with us in our hearts. She cried, we cried; even Stan wept, through his frozen grin. There may have been a dry eye in the house, but none of them were on the Mill side of the field.

As the emotions of the moment subsided, those of us who no longer belonged on that field were herded back the way we came as the band played the school fight song. As we reached the end zone, and ducked under the steel cable that kept the spectators a safe distance from the field, I wasn’t even thinking about which way Essie and I would go from there. At that moment, it really didn’t matter. Then, my beloved girl squeezed my hand and looked at me with a smile. We stopped right there, behind the goalposts, midway between either side.

Before long, we were joined by Essie’s kids and quite a few of my old teammates who could no longer bear Stan’s running color commentary after every play on what he would have done in that situation. Marcus Hansford battered and befuddled the County defense, rushing for 316 yards and five touchdowns in a 35-10 rout. This turned out to be his night, as it should have been; we old-timers had our day, and no amount of wishful thinking or Botox could ever bring it back again.

Ask me in thirty years, if I’m fortunate enough to still be around, what I remember from that night, and my first recollection will likely be of the moment with Duron’s mother. That will be etched in my heart forever. Then, I’ll chuckle a bit as I recall Essie running towards me, a comical flurry of knees and elbows. I may even recall Marcus Hansford’s outstanding performance, and that Mill won the game even if I don’t remember the score. But my happiest memory will be of standing there just beyond the end zone with my constantly amazing Essie, on both sides and neither side; at each other’s side, which is all that really mattered.

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dispatchesfromthedome · 6 years ago

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Winging It

It may come as a surprise to some of you, to find out that Your Own Personal Genius is a guy. I mean, you know I’m a licensed, practicing heterosexual. You know that I enjoy manly pursuits, like watching sporting events, obsessing over obscure automobiles like the 1931 Duesenberg J, and lusting after a variety of actresses from Maria Thayer (Stranger with Candy) to Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black). I also used to hunt, fish and change my car’s oil back in my younger days when my proclivities were less refined, and my neck was several shades redder.

So, I’m a man. But I’m also a guy. For all my cultured pursuits, from craft beer to Elizabethan theater, there is the overwhelming desire to drink Budweiser at minor league baseball games. I harbor such wide and varied interests as Egyptology and theoretical physics, but I have been known to watch shows like Game of Thrones and collect movies like Showgirls primarily for the nudity. Don’t judge me. I have been known to yell unkind things at hockey officials during games featuring my beloved hometown Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs of the Southern Professional Hockey League (which, counterintuitively, has teams in Peoria, Ill., and Evansville, Ind.). I will drink a beer straight from the can if the opportunity presents.

But I digress.

Nowhere is my inherent Guyness on display than when it comes to food. Of course, I have a cultured palate that appreciates such delicacies as mackerel sashimi and cabrito asado. But I also appreciate the simple Appalachian staples of my mountain upbringing, such as pinto beans and cornbread. I obsess over the minutiae of such passion-rousing foods as Barbecue and pizza. I love virtually all ethnic cuisines from around the globe, from Pakistan to Polynesia and beyond, but I’ve also got a soft spot in my heart for that humble sports bar staple, the chicken wing.

Hence the title.

Once considered the least useful part of the bird, the wing came into its own in 1964 at a joint called the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY, making it one of the few Yankee-centric foods to have earned such a place in my culinary lexicon. Teressa Bellissimo was the cook at the bar, and her son Dominic was tending bar when some of his friends came in after hours harboring serious appetites. Dominic asked his mother to prepare something for the occasion.

Thinking quickly, she took some chicken wings that had been destined for the stockpot and deep-fried them because everyone knows that deep-frying anything magically increases its desirability. She then further enhanced the wing’s palatability by slathering it in a sauce composed of hot sauce and butter, two things that further increase the deliciousness of almost anything they touch, rivaling only cheese as a universal modifier of all things edible. Which Bellissimo understood instinctively and added a dipping sauce of umami-laden bleu cheese salad dressing to create a nearly-perfect combination of flavors. The rest, as they say when their mouths aren’t full of the now-iconic Buffalo wing, is history.

From their beginnings as an impromptu bar snack to a billion-dollar industry, popping up in disparate eateries from homogenized sports bars (Buffalo Wild Wings, a.k.a. B-dubs) to mediocre pizza joints (all the major delivery franchises). Chains such as Wingstop and Hooter’s rely almost solely on the wing as the star of their menus. More fast casual chains than not offer some variant of the Buffalo wing, usually as an appetizer. My own hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, holds an annual Wing Festival, where both chains and local eateries vie for the title of best wings.

Like all American foods, nothing is sacred when it comes to the wing. The original Buffalo sauce is now just one of a myriad of flavors in which the wing is offered. Garlic Parmesan, mango habanero, Jamaican jerk, even the inexplicable mild variant, all vie for popular tastes. Wings themselves can be breaded (Hooters makes the best and most well-known version) or “naked,” baked instead of deep-fried. There is even something called a boneless wing, which isn’t a wing at all but rather a flavorless chicken nugget dressed up in wing sauce (shame on you pretenders).

Another facet of the wing is its frequent use in ultra-spicy iterations and eating challenges. Usually called something like the Super Stupid-Hot Atomic Death Wing Challenge, an eatery makes the hottest wing they can imagine and challenge patrons to consume a number of them within an allotted time, without drinking anything, for a prize such as a T-shirt and getting their picture on the wall of conquerors. I personally have never had time for such contests, even though my love of spicy foods borders on the obsessive. My love of low culture only descends so far, and they never seem to have the T-shirt in my size.

Moving forward.

It may come as a surprise for you to discover that I bake my wings at home instead of frying or even grilling them. For one thing, I haven’t got a deep fryer. I don’t own one because, after a lifetime of battling my weight, I know that if I were able to deep fry anything I wanted I’d overuse the privilege and end up the star of a reality TV show My 600 lb. Genius. For another thing, I like wings a lot. And like anything I like a lot, I like a lot of it. It’s not unusual for me to eat upwards of 20 wings as a game time snack for a special sporting event like the Super Bowl or the NCAA wrestling championships. Deep-frying that many wings in a tiny home fryer would take f-o-r-e-v-e-r. I don’t have that kind of time, I’ve got important Genius stuff to do.

Seriously.

I cut my wings apart in the traditional fashion, separating the drumette from the rest of the wing. Unlike most places, though, I leave the wing tip on. I believe it makes for a tastier wing, even though you don’t eat it, and it makes the whole thing easier to hold while you’re going after the sometimes-challenging meat. I toss my wings in flour before baking, just to hold in the moisture and make it easier for the sauce to stick, but I don’t really bread the wing like Hooter’s does. As you’ve probably surmised, I like the wings at Hooter’s. Sure, the waitresses are comely, and their attire is appealing, but honestly, I’d go to Hooter’s even if they wore snow suits and looked like the Michelin Man.

As for sauce, many of you know my odd predilection for all sorts of condiments, from hot sauce to salad dressing. It would make sense, then, that I would have an impressive collection of wing sauces, as well. But I don’t. Other than a spicy garlic sauce, like that offered by B-dubs, I tend to stick with the tried and true. The original wing sauce was a mix of Frank’s cayenne pepper hot sauce and butter. Frank’s currently offers a pre-mixed version of this sauce, and Southern favorite Texas Pete makes a similar product. I am fine with either. I’ve not yet tried to make my own wing sauce, using any one of my many hot sauces and a higher-fat European style butter, but who knows when I might take a notion and give it a go.

Why all the fuss over the smallest piece of chicken with the least amount of meat on it? Part of it has to do with the primal nature of eating meat off the bone, which returns us to our hunter-gathered roots Then, there is the fact that wings are little flavor bombs that deliver a lot of taste in a small package, which also allows you to eat a lot of them over a longer period of time. This fact makes them perfect snacks for events that don’t have a predetermined time limit, like sports. Sure, a football game is timed to last one hour with a fifteen-minute halftime, but in reality, a game lasts on average between 3 to 3 ½ hours. It wouldn’t be practical to have a meal last that long without a tremendous amount of work going into it. So, snacks it is, which is an easier way to allow everyone to graze throughout the length of the contest. I have long felt that opera would be more popular in this country if people were allowed to drink beer and eat chicken wings throughout the duration.

Be that as it may.

From their modest beginnings as an impromptu bar snack to a multimillion-dollar industry, chicken wings have earned their hallowed place among American snack foods right alongside potato chips, popcorn, nachos, and whatever the hell Funyuns are. And, in my opinion, make them an indelible part of the Good Life.

Till next time, kids, exit to your right and enjoy the rest of Tumblr.

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