Football & Fall

BACK IN THE AUTUMN OF 1974, we left Tulsa and headed west. Being young and fairly newly wed, leaving friends and family brought challenges and great times. We’ve been gone from Tulsa for a long time now, and even though we return often, I still miss it. When we are there, I feel like I’m Home.

You’ve probably heard the old joke: Show me someone with an OSU (Oklahoma State University) hat and I’ll show you someone who went to OSU (or had a family member that did). Show me someone with an OU (Oklahoma University) hat and I’ll show you someone who went to Wal Mart.

If you live in Oklahoma but outside the Tulsa metropolitan area, chances are good that you either have a red shirt or an orange one. You might not even know there is another Division One football team in Oklahoma.

There is. It’s the Tulsa University Golden Hurricane. Strange mascot moniker, right? Why the mascot picker chose “hurricane” for a school that’s 500 miles inland, I have no idea. And, why the singular hurricane is golden is even more perplexing. But I don’t care. TU is my school. I went to school there and have the hat. I can whistle the fight song and even know most of the words. The Gold and Blue and Red stir me as much as the red or orange of those other teams do for their fans.

Tulsa’s best season was in 1942, going 10-0, including wins against Oklahoma (23-0), Oklahoma A&M (now OSU) (34-6), and Arkansas (40-7). The Golden Hurricane went to the 1943 Sugar Bowl against Tennessee. Tulsa lost the game on a late Volunteer touchdown, justing missing a National Championship.

Being the smallest school in Division One, as Golden Hurricane fans, you never go in to the season thinking this could be another 1942, the year we win it all. Here’s the cool thing about that, you can just enjoy the atmosphere of a college football game in its innocence and simplicity. If you have indigestion after the game it is likely because the hot dog, nachos and “cheese” covered pretzel you had are indigestible, not because the “game” has become so much more than a game that we work ourselves into a frenzy that sets priorties that might include going out to find another multi-million dollar coach. (Although, I will confess that I’m really glad to have that former Baylor Offensive Coordinator, with his high-flying offensive schemes as our head coach.)

Spending an autumn Saturday afternoon at Skelly Field in the heart of Tulsa is just as fun today as those Saturday afternoons I spent there as a kid.

GO Tulsa! and Sooners! and Pokes!

I Shouldn't, But...

Oh, I do have opinions, and strong feelings, convictions and dogma. I have a son who teaches on a college campus. I have another son who is a U.S. Infantryman and National Guardsman. I have a granddaughter in a public school.

Because I’ve promised myself this blog would not take the easy path of political commentary, I’m only going to say this: I am sickened by the loss of lives in these senseless, unrelenting mass shootings. Can you imagine what the families of victims are feeling today? I can’t.

“They’s times when how you feel got to be kep’ to yourself.”

— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Spinning Backward

I DID SOMETHING THIS WEEK that I haven’t done for forty years, and it was surprisingly fun.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

— T.S. Eliot

I’ve noticed something about me and my peers, when we get together and talk, we talk about what we used to do. Somehow, in these strolls down memory lane, we come off braver, stronger, smarter, more adventurous, athletic, and talented. Our exploits were grander, more romantic, more genuine, more enduring.

We tell stories about school, summers, cars, girls, jobs and such, that all start the same way: “Back when I was young…”

If you were to eavesdrop on one of these chats, you might hear something like this: Back when I was a kid, I hauled hay all day long…that was back when hay bales were heavy…before the Obama administration made the farmers grow all this genetically altered grass. We were lucky if we got paid ten bucks a day, which was enough for a tank of gas and money for a date. Thankfully, I was dating girls before Ralph Nader, the Clintons and Obama invented seat belts. That way, she could sit right next to me. We didn’t have air-bags either… we didn’t need them… and our dashboards where steel back then… see this scar?

Regardless of the alignment of our memories to actual reality, it’s still fun to recapture an occasional moment from our youth.

And this week I did just that—for the first time in a long, long time I bought a record! That’s right; a vinyl, 33 and a third, Long-play album! It was highly invigorating.

Thanks mostly to today’s neo-hippies, and young urban hipsters, and their marketplace of choice which includes stores like Urban Outfitters, record players and vinyl records are making a comeback (along with beards and beads and bellbottoms).

So, for once, when I told My Amazing-Missus, “Yes, I want to keep that, it may come back in style,” I was right! I dug out the box of my old records and it is an apt collection indeed. Sgt. Peppers, Rubber Soul, The White Album, Revolver, The Doors, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, Miles Davis, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Carol King, James Taylor, Crosby, Stills Nash & Young…

I even found my turntable. Unfortunately it’s gears are frozen up, it’s wires are frayed and its needle’s a little rusted; sort of like its owner’s.

In the next few days the FedEx guy will carefully (I hope) place a box containing my new record player on the front porch. So this weekend I’m hoping to set everything up, then maybe I’ll put on my headphones, light some incense, platter-up Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, and give it a spin.

I will live in the 60s again for a little bit, and then I will go to the Social Security website and sign up for Medicare, because I’m in MY 60s now, and I only have a month to get this done.

Then I will put The Beatles on the turntable and listen to “When I’m 64” and wish that it was 1964 again.

my first album purchase in many many years--the amazing Bill Evans.

I HAD A Dream

For which of you, intending to build a tower,
sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost,
whether he have sufficient to finish it? 

Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it,
all that behold it begin to mock him, 
Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.  

—The Gospel of Luke 14:28-30 (KJV)

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SO--IF YOU'VE READ THIS BLOG MUCH, at all, you know of our dream to have an Airstream trailer. We thought we were so close. How close? Close enough that I even opened the polls, so to speak, here on About Pops, asking for help in choosing an interior color scheme.

Well, it’s a long, long story. But it comes down to this: I “sitteth not down, and counteth the cost” (thoroughly enough anyway). And now you are free to mock me saying, “This man began this adventure to have an Airstream, but to this point has not been able to git ‘er done.”

Turns out, when I finally did sit down to count the cost of the Airstream model I had been coveting; let’s just say reality setteth in. The weight of the cost was not just in dollars; however, I did grossly underestimate the sum thereof. Along with things like doc fees, freight charges, taxes, extension mirrors, weight distribution hitch, anti-sway bars, hoses, blocks, chemicals… ad nauseum; there is also the cost of stress, anguish and uncertainty. Suddenly my visions of sitting under the awning of this silver beauty alongside a rushing stream on a cool morning, enjoying a cup of coffee, was overtaken by visions of a sitting alongside I-70 just outside of St. Louis on a 109 degree August day with a flat trailer tire, and being so broke I would have to work until I was 80, having nightmares of Dave Ramsay warning of careless spending.

Emotions are mixed. On the one hand, the horrific images of a holding tank disaster are gone, as are the potential panic attacks of pulling an aluminum carcass down the highway through the onslaught of a sudden Oklahoma hail storm. Unfortunately, also gone are those dreams of adventure on the open road I had imagined for us in our silver streak with the salsa interior.

Really though, deep down, I know the adventures will continue. They will just be different. You see, my Amazing-Missus and I are best friends. We were married eight years before our first child was born. (We didn’t want anyone to speculate that we “had” to get married [wink-wink]). So, living life together isn’t new to us. We’ll be fine.

“Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren’t things to think about any more. All that matters is value - the ultimate value of what one does.”

— James Hilton