Saturday, November 27, 2010

The Lost Season

I sit sipping coffee on the last football game of the season. This is actually the first one that I feel like I’ve actually been at though it is cold and the streets of Athens were unusually deserted last night.

The first game of the season I slept walked through the motions of decades of traditions and friends. Everything about it reeked of loss and reminded me of things that I used to have. Of course the kids and my friends went overboard on my behalf, giving me rides, taking me out, poking fun at the emotions that I brought to Athens with me.

They also worried about me among themselves; talked about me privately; expressed concern that I wasn’t taking care of myself. Several sought me out for private conversations just to let me know that they had survived similar things and that I can always count on them.

In the middle of it all I took a Sabbatical from football season and went back to St. Martin missing two games. This is sacrilegious and I am certain that I am now condemned to football purgatory for at least two years before advancing on to football nirvana.

On those two Saturdays that I was in the Caribbean as I stood on the beach as game time approached, I knew exactly what everyone was doing though I was thousands of miles away. Our routines and traditions are long established so in my mind I celebrated with them but needed something different for myself as I continue to envision a new life because there isn’t much similar to the old one.

I drove up alone yesterday for the first time since the first game of the season. All of those games in between, I either rode with my friend Bill or was flying in from somewhere so that Chelsea and Sam would pick me up in Atlanta and bring me to Athens. Yesterday I had four hours to think about everything that has happened this fall.

On that first game day of the season I sat exactly where I am sitting now doing the exact same thing. It was a season full of promise and hope. Aside from a new quarterback we had so many starters coming back. Last year had ended with a flurry so expectations were high.

Alas, things did not go as planned.

I know how the team feels.

Last week I was making my way from Pittsburgh to Atlanta to Savannah and I texted my son Jeremy asking him for the score of the Falcons game.


“You care?” he wrote back.

“I do,” I shot back. “What’s the damn score?”

“It’s good to have my Dad back,” he conveyed and then gave me the score.

When you go through difficult stuff you get through the best way that you know how. Of course everybody else wants you to do it differently but in the end it is just you getting yourself through. As we do, we often don’t realize that we are going through major changes in who we are and how we do things. Our family and friends see things that we are unable to see as we fight our way through being re-born. Giving birth to something new can be a painful and traumatic thing.

When you are done though, there is something new. A new life emerges.
I feel as though I have lost this entire season. I just wasn’t really here. But I am looking forward to today. I am excited about it. And I am no longer the same person I was on that first football Saturday. Something new is being born.