too cool for school

So it's homecoming weekend, which has historically meant to me little more than that the public drunkenness, traffic stupidity, and feral sorority girls will be in greater supply than on a normal weekend. In fact, as usual, I didn't even know it was homecoming weekend until all the bronco-shenanigans directly interfered with my ability to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it.

What I wanted to do was go to the rec center. Somehow I failed to catch on to the beauties of the student gymnasium during my first, oh, NINE years of college (unfortunate, considering I spent the first two of those surviving on baked potatoes, sweet corn and saltines with key-lime jelly to avoid gaining the dreaded Freshman Fifteen) but now that I have to pay for it, rest assured I'm taking full advantage. Alas, not on Game Day. On Game Day, I was glibly informed by a couple of girls nursing hangovers, the Rec Center is cuh-losed, hello.

You know, my mom doesn't play football. My stepdad doesn't play football. Hell, he never went to college. Yet he can antagonize her by wearing a blue T-shirt with the name of her state emblazoned on it in yellow letters. They have entire friendships that are based on bantering about the relative virtues of Peloponnesian war heroes and ill-tempered woodland creatures. Regardless of the fact that their daughter has gone to Some Other State U for nine years. Did I say nine years? Yes, I did. NINE. I guess what I'm getting at is that football is something that seems largely irrelevant to my life, and seems to play a greater role in many people’s lives than seems warranted.

I was reflecting on this while I steamed and fumed back to my car (imagine, thanks to game traffic I had to park so far away I was forced to WALK ten minutes to get to the place I was going to try to get some exercise), and while I came no closer to an affinity for football, I did stumble onto the marching band, and I have to admit, they kind of had me on that one. I was, myself, a band geek. Back in high school I shouted my share of dorky cheers and came down with my share of head colds after hours’ worth of sleet down the back of my polyester collar. The frozen fingers, the chapped lips on cracked clarinet reeds, the elation of taking off the double-breasted coat in the smothering-hot gym after a performance. Best of all, the sensation of filing down the street with a full drum corps backing you up. You could feel those drums thumping in your chest. God, I wanted to hire them to follow me everywhere, running to the grocery store, pumping gas, down the hall to class… and let me tell you, my chosen university has one helluva marching band. You know, if you’re into that kind of thing.

So the band strutted their stuff in a little pre-game, pro-bono show across the street from the stadium, right next to the locked rec center, and I stuck around. And at the end, the director climbed up and invited alumni to gather round the band and people just kept appearing out of nowhere, twenty-year-olds, sixty-year-olds, everybody, and sang the alma mater. And here’s the thing: these were people who were here for four, maybe five years, some of them forty years ago. They came to this school and puked in parking lots and lit their farts on fire and slept with each other in the dorms and occasionally went to class, and something about those years was important enough that they come back and stand in a big circle and sing the words to a song that, after forty years, they still remember – a song that in my nine years here I have failed to learn because for so much of that time I was busy quietly feeling that my cynicism made me smarter, more interesting, superior.

Something tells me that’s not all I’ve failed to learn.

why it works

For the record, I offered not to publish the following conversation, just in case the neighbs thought anyone who knows him personally would breakfast upon his testicles if they happened to stumble onto it, but he said it was okay.

Him: what are you doing right now?

Me: I thought I'd go buy some shoes.

Him: Mmmmwwuuuuuuuuhhhhhhh....

Me: No, seriously. I got rid of two pairs and I'm planning on replacing them with just one pair.

Him: Oh. I guess that's not so bad then.

Me: I'm also going to see if my favorite shoes can be repaired, and if they can't I might have to buy another pair to replace them.

Him: [with (mostly) genuine alarm] Not the ones with the kitten heel?!

Need I say more?