Watching Football with Her

Entwined we sit an hour or two laughing, listening to music and stories of mayhem, listening to stories of Santa Claus, listening to stories about an insanity clause. We were listening and laughing during those autumn afternoons of beer commercials and college football games. It was a time of rustling, bustling, hustling. It was a time of suggestions. It was a time for anecdotes and jokes.

Daydreams and talk big and personal about life filled those hours together between glances up at the wide screen television filled with color and details and escape. The silence washed over us like water at low tide. There was something tender in the quiet as your eyes watch the players run, stop, run. The bartender brings taller glasses of beer. We find time to gulp thanks, not speak thanks.

Listening, laughing this is the dreamy dialogue of college students trying to decide what to do on Saturday night. There is much wonder in our slurred words. Now and then between sips we speak a strange language of epigrams, epitaphs, and dirges. Misery circles around us but remains voiceless, ignored. We bow our heads when a goal is missed. We murmur about the possibility of another losing season about to wash over us. The sky explodes in colors vibrant, colors multigenerational in shades of beauty and hopefulness. Our interest curves away from the game to love, to tomorrow, to God.

The commercials end. So much is discarded or forgotten while a game is on television. Life does not truly stop, but time does something to our perception, our reception of stimuli. The game becomes our old love, our current love. All we remember is the game. The game makes us swoon.

We are lost in the vast noise and color of the game of strange sundering movement, somehow elegant yet elegiac. Sooner or later a missed score will make us yell and swoon. How sweet it is to watch this game.

Nothing overwhelms those eyes watching this game, those eyes who have an interest in one team winning because of some rivalry or ranking. This is a time of quiet. This is a perfect time for discernment as the heart, mind, and soul can drift into a loving, compassionate reverie.

But when the inevitable defeat arrive melancholy arrives; but with the inevitable defeat sadness survives. Compassion, mercy, stop me from teasing, from taunting with statements juvenile and cruel but so irresistible.