Friday Night Lights to Sunday night lows

This past Friday night I went to the local high school football game with my dad. It was really great being in the crowd watching the people who loved the game and the great majority who were just there because everyone else was. It was small town football at it's best and the home team dominated from opening kick off to the final ear drum shattering horn. I was told how great my dad was when he played ball for the Tigers and chastised for not having enough spirit by the biggest fan there Calvin. We walked over to the game, through the woods, down the hill and into the field that wasn't there when my dad played. His games were in the park in the middle of town. There are about as many people in the town of Clatskanie as went to my high school so things were on a much smaller scale but the same Friday night Football dynamics endure just as strong in the northwest as they do in Southern California. The little kids are playing in the grass behind the goal posts, the middle schoolers are watching the high schoolers and the high schoolers are fighting the mostly losing battle to be cool. The game was not good, but since the hated rivals Rainer blew out this team Clatskanie was obligated to do the same and they obliged.

Saturday morning I went to breakfast and then a short garage sale seesion with my lovely cousin Crystal and then parked my self in front of the TV for a long day of college football. Having a TV that gets those extra channels and being back in the Pacific time zone allowed me to watch the 9 AM ESPN game all the way through to the Hawaii game that ended around 11 PM. There was a lot of great football in there and one terrible car wreck of a game. My parents worked feverishly all day to get the house ready for Kate and Finn while I pinned for them in front of the TV with a bag of chips and a fantastic channel that should all the games in tiny little screens so you could flip around at will. We all have our own way of preparing!

I would like to say that I got more done on Sunday but really how could I with all those pro games on. I had to watch the Indy game so I could text Nathan, something I am afraid is going to be a tradition for me for years to come. Then the Raiders came on and it's been years since I have seen them play. The Raiders didn't disappoint either snatching defeat from the claws of victory in typical Raider fashion. I did get a bunch done to get Finn's room set up and all of Kate's clothes up in the closet so it wasn't all vegging. It has been a great weekend of football watching at almost every level but it really isn't the treat that it once was for me. I would have traded all those games, well maybe not the high school game, for a chance to be in the Aalsma's backyard with all of these beautiful people.

Allergies, Sunshine, and snow

In the Midwest the weather is a big deal. Much bigger then it was when we were in Santa Barbara. Apart from the June Gloom there wasn't any real mystery with SoCal weather. It's gonna be nice, real nice! Here in the Cross Roads of America is a different story though and nothing shows the difference like the last two weeks. Two Sundays ago we had Sunday dinner at our house and ate in the back yard under a warm setting sun. It was a wonderful spring evening with great friends and even a traveling musician playing some Southern Blues and Gospel tunes with the kids helping on the chorus. The warm weather continued for another week and then it went from 75 degrees in the afternoon to snow flurries the next morning. There was a 50 degree drop in temp in less then 24 hours! In between the Sun and snow was a Thunder storm, or more aptly a lightning storm since the Thunder doesn't really bother me as much as the thought of getting hit with one of those bolts, that turned the sky green and dropped copious amounts of rain and hail. We had Tornado warnings, Thunder Storm Warnings, and Flash flood warnings for a triple crown of Midwest danger. During all this craziness my allergies have been flaring up like mad. It is really bizarre to have itchy, watery eyes when it freezing outside. I have been in a medicated haze that is particularly unique to allergy medicine.

Our Village

Sunday nights we have dinner with a growing group of people in our neighborhood. The meal is hosted by a different family each week and we are up to 9 different families who make meals. The host invites whomever they want to join the core group and the meals are always great. This past Sunday dinner was at the Aalsma's house which is one of my favorite places in the neighborhood. The Aalsma's are just so cool you could easily be intimidated but they are too friendly for that to last long. Their house is big with lots of great art, funky fold furniture, stacks of books, and toys for all kids of all ages. They had two tables set up in the dinning room and kids running around everywhere as parents took turns eating and watching each others kids.

Like I said the meals are always great but part of the magic of Sunday nights is community. The living of life in close proximity to each other. I got my haircut in the middle of the room where the babies were pulling every toy they could reach out of the box on the floor. Older kids ran around Tina as she deftly maneuvered her pregnant belly and scissored hands without hitting me with either. College Basketball played silently on the TV in the corner even though very few beside me cared what happened between Kansas and Kentucky. A friend of one of the families, who happened to be a pediatrician, stopped by to check on an ear of one of the kids. Around the table Kate was recruiting writers for the neighborhood paper and babysitting duties were traded like baseball cards.

Next week the dinner will be at our house again and it might be nice enough to be outside. I can't wait to see what happens, who comes, where the conversations goes, what gets broken. This week Kate and I will worry about what to make, not with any unhealthy pressure to impress, but with the desire to cook something fitting of the great people that will come. We will invite someone from Kate's work that she wants to be friends with and neighbors from down the block. It will be a great night and most of us will not realize just how great until years later. We don't often get a sense for how great something is until much later in life but lately I have had a real tangible sense of how great Sunday night is. There is something so beautiful about the time, the people, the whole event that I sometimes start to think about when it will inevitably end and can't help but get sad. But it is not ending this week, and this week we get to have our house over run with life and the energy of it lived in such close proximity and it makes me smile.

Congradulations Colts

Finn and I tried to get inside the Dome to see the Colts but we had a stroller and they weren't allowing strollers in the building. We arrived at 3:00 because we thought the team would be there by 4:00 but they didn't get in until 7:00. By that time we were warmed back up in our house enjoying left over wings from our Superbowl party the night before. It was incredible being in a Superbowl city for the weeks leading up and the game itself. The city was a buzz with Colts pride.