FOOTBALL FAN

Damn Dallas Cowboys! They are making my life difficult this week. I might not be the biggest sports fanatic in the world but I do read the sport pages and watch ESPN. I tend to closely follow the teams I like but I definitely do not like the Cowboys. Living in a town where the local team happens to be the biggest most popular, most successful, sports team in football history and also personally happens to be your least favorite football team is not easy.

To locals the Cowboys are not just a team, they are a deity and Tom Landry is the prophet that led them through the desert and into the promised land of Texas. More often then not when talking sports I omit the fact that I am not a fan. It’s bad enough admitting to the Texans around me that I was born in New York. When I mention that fact I always expect to get a reaction akin to that old Salsa commercial when the grizzled cowboys sitting around the fire discover that the poor quality jarred crap they are eating was made, to their disgust, in “Newwwww York Ciiiteee?!?!”

Tomorrow night the Dallas Cowboys are playing the Green Bay Packers in an important game. Both teams have a 10-1 record and the winner of the match will likely have home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Personally I could care less who wins since I have about as much love for the Packers as I do for the Cowboys. Of course when I worked in Wisconsin I was pretty damn quiet about that fact too. I am really afraid of Green Bay fans; they are like Cowboy fans except more intense with their devotion (the team has been around 40 years longer), and significantly larger physically (the vast quantities of readily available beer and cheese help to make you burley enough to withstand the brutally frigid winters up there).

Most of my family does not really follow sports. My oldest brother is the athlete of the family and since he liked the Giants and Yankees, those became my favorite teams too. You never really outgrow your boyhood favorites (should I annoy my wife and mention Bernadette Peters here again). My Dad pays absolutely no attention to any sport although he did take me to my first baseball game in the mid 1970s. Some friends of his had first baseline box seats to a Mets game. I’m sure he had no idea what was happening on the field but he enjoyed a bunch of beers with his buddies and after the game in the clubhouse bar while they chugged a few more, I got to meet home run slugger Dave Kingman.

I started following the Miami Dolphins when I moved to Florida. Adopting a new sports team is not always easy but Junior High School Dan found a convoluted road to Dolphins fandom. The New York Giants and the New York Jets play in different divisions. Giants fans hate the Jets. One of the Jets biggest rivals is the Dolphins. I usually pulled for whatever team was playing the Jets so it was not a big leap to start rooting for Miami all the time instead of just when they play the Jets. Now if you are not a sports fan this logic might not make any sense but it worked just fine for me.
Over time I have become less of a Giants fan and more of a Dolphins fan but football has not been kind to me this year. The Dallas media has been full of hype for tomorrow’s big battle between 10-1 teams. Meanwhile my lowly Miami Dolphins have yet to win a game this year and have a record of 0-11. I am sure now that my brother in Boston has just learned that I am a Dolphins fan I will hear from him about his team, Miami nemesis, the New England Patriots being 11-0. At least I do not hate the Pats as much as I hate the Cowboys.

TURKEY DAY FROM FAR AWAY

I do not remember Thanksgiving. OK, I remember when Thanksgiving is; I just do not remember the Thanksgivings of my past. Well there are the really fun ones I spent in Chicago that started with mimosas for breakfast, moved to gin and tonics while cooking and ended with a bottle or two of Beaujolais Nouveau with dinner but those Thanksgivings I do not expect to recall too clearly. I am talking about when I was a little kid. I really do not remember any Thanksgivings.

Maybe it’s my bad memory or possibly they were so traumatic I’ve blocked them out. I clearly recall the prep that went into fancy meals in my New York house when I was a little kid. Mom’s good dishes (i.e. the ugly china with the funky pattern that my Parents got as a wedding gift) were kept in the basement. To prevent major en-masse damage, my four siblings and I had to carry the dozen place settings up the two flights of stairs one piece at a time each. I might not recall any Thanksgiving meals but I sure as hell remember the slow parade of carrying the dishes up the stairs and then after the clean up carrying them back down the stairs one at a time to be stored for the next occasion.

Years later my Mom admitted to always hating those dishes that she treated so preciously for decades. After finally getting a beautiful set of gold trimmed Royal Daulton for everyday use, she invited some friends over for dinner, served a meal on what for years had been the good dishes (the ugly china with the funky pattern that my Parents got as a wedding gift), then brought out a trash can and made us throw the dirty dishes into the garbage. Many of us objected but she demanded we toss them out fulfilling a dream of hers that grew stronger with each passing meal served on the wedding gift ugly china with the funky pattern.

My parents are old fashioned and from an era that I would expect them to have served a very traditional Thanksgiving meal but as much as I strain my brain I cannot come up with a memory of any of them. I will have to ask my siblings about what we did every year, I bet they can get some of those cob-webbed memory cells in brain to start firing up again. I do remember one Thanksgiving my oldest brother worked half a day making salads at a restaurant and we had to pick him up after he got off but I do not recall the ensuing large meal.

The earliest Thanksgiving that I remember clearly from beginning to end was during my first year of college. Just prior to the holiday a group of old friends got together for a pre-Thanksgiving weekend long party a few hours away at a mutual friend’s place. Unfortunately it turned into a weekend long miserable fight about infidelity between my girlfriend and I. This threw me deeper into the life-questioning funk I had already been in. My parents were traveling during that time and my siblings were all spread out around the country so rather then sit alone for the holiday; I flew to Memphis Tenn. to see folks.

Nothing brings more cheer to a young depressed teenage college student more then sharing a dumpy hotel room with his parents at the Admiral Benbow Inn for an isolated impersonal Thanksgiving Day meal in the middle of nowhere. My Folks really tried hard to make sure I enjoyed myself that weekend but I was too busy brooding in own little self-inflicted angst-ridden crisis world trying to figure out what to do with my life (I’ll let you know if I ever do). The first night was fun; we took a small tour that culminated with a dinner at a little blues club on Beale Street. Things went downhill from there.

Thanksgiving day we had a nice meal at some nondescript restaurant but we mostly just sat around the hotel watching TV because everything in town was closed. For Friday my Mom had made a long list of fun things we could do. Unfortunately as we criss crossed town from one tourist attraction to another, we learned that in Memphis in the early 1980s everything is closed the day after Thanksgiving as well. Riverboats, museums, aquariums, zoos, breweries, state parks, trolleys… everything was shut down.

My Mother was (and still is) not a fan of Rock in Roll music. She was born and raised in a very different era and she already had four kids of her own before Elvis came along. She referred to Rock music as ‘Yeah Yeah’ music. My Mother has traditional values and views. Yes, she was the type of woman who kept ugly china with a funky pattern that she got as a wedding gift for decades longer then she really wanted to because that was what you were supposed to do.

This trip to Memphis was only a few years after Elvis died and Graceland had not yet become the carnival-esque freakshow mega-tourist stop that it is today. That Friday morning as we drove away from each closed attraction on my Mom’s long list I kept saying in jest that we could always go to Graceland. By noon we had exhausted every possibility on the list and now my Mom was faced with the reality, it was Graceland or nothing. I think the memory of that Thanksgiving has not slipped away because never before could I have conceived of the image of my Mom and I standing in the cold November wind looking at Elvis’ grave together.

Happy Thanksgiving, I hope it is a memorable one.



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A few extra words about the Admiral Benbow Inn. After writing my blog I did some research and found out that this local motel chain has quite a sorted history. Most of them do not exist anymore but 25 years ago, the one we stayed at in the Memphis suburbs was no palace but it was certainly not the cesspool that apparently they later became. If you are at all interested, the reviews in the first 2 links are short hilarious ‘must read’ reviews and the next link has an extremely long but great history of this dubious faded Memphis icon.
http://reviews.metroguide.com/d.asp?pi=29999
http://reviews.metroguide.com/d.asp?pi=29966

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.memphisflyer.com/backissues/issue574/images/cvr574b.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.memphisflyer.com/backissues/issue574/cvr574.htm&h=205&w=300&sz=11&hl=en&start=73&um=1&tbnid=71nCLjCBy0DXtM:&tbnh=79&tbnw=116&prev=/images%3Fq%3DAdmiral%2BBenbow%2Binn%2B%2B%26start%3D60%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

COMPANY

My wife and I just said goodbye. Calm down, not to each other!!! We said goodbye to company. We had a houseguest for the past week. I love how having someone different in your home, even for a short time, causes a domino effect with normal day-to-day routines. It is healthy to mess up your schedules once in a while. It stops life from getting boring and causes you to look up from the rut that you sometimes do not even recognize that you are in.

The obvious problem I have had the past few days is that we have been so busy going out and entertaining that I have not had time to sit down and work on this week’s blog. Now that I finally have the time to write I am quickly approaching my self -imposed deadline and I find myself without anything to write about. My mind is all over the place. I keep bouncing from topic to topic without focusing long enough on anything.

Originally I started writing about our houseguest, an old college friend of my wife’s that flew in from Taipei. There were some very minor cultural differences to deal with but I think we all seemed to have a very nice time. My wife and I tried to be good hosts and attempted to pack the days and nights with lots of activities. Well at least we certainly ate a lot.

Things went very well. Too well. Boringly well. Before the week began I assumed I would get at least a couple of blogs worth of stories out of the visit but in reality there is not much to say. You would think taking a Taiwanese woman fresh off the plane to a southern style gospel music Sunday morning brunch would have generated at least one minor anecdote to write about. The situations were there but the wackiness never ensued. Maybe I should write about my childhood dog named Pussycat instead.

The only thing that struck me as odd about our guest was her habit of taking a photograph of every meal she was served. I guess I should have asked her if this was something common where she was from or is this just something that she does. Maybe it is some long-term art project. I can imagine walking into a gallery and seeing an instillation consisting of five year’s worth of dated photos of every meal consumed by the artist. Hmmm, maybe I should start doing that. Nah, it would just depress me to look at the massive quantities of bad food I choose to eat. Then again it might work as a good diet plan. Feeling hungry? Go sit in the photographic massive food quantities room.
Years ago when I was on the road for work I visited friends all the time. I tried my best to be an excellent houseguest but sometimes my visits lasted a long time. My friends would always assure me that it was ok to stay longer but I often felt like I was intruding into their lives or overstaying my welcome. I do not really know if I was one of those guests that you love seeing come as much as you like seeing leave. Now that I am the one that has settled down I find that it’s fun to be the host. So when are you coming over?

DENTON

Have you ever been to Denton Texas? Denton does not look and feel like the rest of Texas. Unfortunately I do not mean that in a cool and funky Austin way or a San Antonio historic way or even a cosmopolitan Dallas way. It is different in a run-down college campus student ghetto in a northern Mid-western rustbelt university dominated town way but with a slightly Texas rednecky edge. To get to Denton from Dallas you have to drive north up the Stemmons Freeway, an overcrowded outdated torn up Texas highway that is tightly sandwiched between a service road lined with car dealerships, warehouses, factory outlets, chain restaurants… It is the appropriate gateway to the city.

I am sorry if I am insulting some reader that is oozing with intense Denton pride but the city just does not impress me. Of course I have a family history of insulting entire towns. My Dad took a short-term job running a business in Brockton Mass. A few days after he arrived there the local newspaper ran a story on the front page that included a quote from my father that, unbeknownst to him, he gave to a local reporter calling Brockton ‘a little crap town half shot down’. Needless to say he did not make friends fast.

For the record, I should say that at different times in my life I have had a blast hanging out in towns like Madison WI, Columbus OH and Bloomington IN, all of which have sections that seem very Dentonesque. I am sure if I were with a group of fun friends that knew the right places to go, I would eventually end up liking Denton. The city is even famous for it’s great music scene but I have not experienced any of that. That did not happen. Today I spent the day alone in Denton for a very special reason; I had been called for jury duty.

To comfortably make my 8:20 a.m. jury duty call, I had to leave the house at 7ish. After sitting 45 minutes with 200 or so other potential jurors in a large room within the Denton County Courthouse building, a judge came out and swore us in. They outlined the rules and quickly weeded out the folks that could not serve due to a legitimate excuse, insanity, past criminal behavior or really creative bullshiting abilities.

They next assigned 40 of us to a potential jury pool that would not be picked until after 1:30 pm. They told us to report back in close to four hours and suggested to kill time while waiting ‘we should get a jump on our Christmas shopping at the local (and only) nearby shopping mall’. I figure this is Denton’s way of stimulating their obviously moribund economy. Legally require an ever-changing large group of people to come to your town daily and give them a forced four hours block of time to fend for themselves. I’m sure countless dollars are dropped into their local economy with this simple trick. You would think they would use some of this newfound tax revenue to fix up the damn place.

Denton may only be 30 miles north of Dallas but it is a different world. People look far less cosmopolitan. Even the slick lawyers walking around the courthouse looked a bit like a bigger city department store shoe salesperson with slightly ill fitting suits that looked a bit ruffled. The secretaries and aides looked mostly lumpy and dressed pretty frumpy. My wife recalls seeing a lot of very big belt buckles when she was called there.

To kill time I drove around town from one crappy neighborhood to another. I found a place to eat a slow breakfast and sip a few dozen cups of coffee. I looked at my watch and realized I still had over two hours left and I had already run out of stuff to do. Out of boredom, I next took a walk around the sickly looking Golden Triangle Mall (so I’m good at following instructions) and noticed the music playing throughout the mall was Christian rock.

At the appropriate time I headed back to the courthouse (not before I put my two new shirts into the trunk… dammit their plan worked!). My group waited in the same large room for some time until our bailiff (who looked nothing like Rusty from the Peoples Court) marched us upstairs to the courtrooms. We all stood around the hallway for a couple of hours until they informed us that case had been settled and we were all dismissed. I high tailed it out of Denton before I spent any more money there.


http://www.dentonmainstreet.org/Default.aspx

http://www.discoverdenton.com/see_and_do.shtml