The wind blew in just the right way the other day and cranked up my rusty mental gears.
Isn’t that weird?
I went from not thinking about those days at all to having extremely vivid memories.
Isn’t that weirder?
In high school, friends and I had a more-or-less standing game of backyard football. They were pick-up games, but some of us met the night before to design new plays to run.
Let’s get specific about the weather: It had been raining but not while we were playing, and it wasn’t cold enough to see your breath, but you could expect plenty of shivering during the long walk home.
I can barely imagine putting myself through such an ordeal today. If there were some kind of emergency or freak storm, we all like to think we’d do what needed to be done without regard for comfort no matter the conditions.
But what we did on those fields was in the name of fun. Even looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I still see it as a good time had by all.
Not to complain about the wonders of amassing so many birthdays year after year, but I miss what my body could do back then. I wasn’t much of an athlete, but that body of mine stretched and moved in ways it has since forgotten. It ran, I tell you. These days, I’m proud when I walk kind of fast.
I wonder if girls had similar activities. I’m sure there were some girls who loved tackle football in the cold, wet grass, but I never saw them. Did girls have equivalent ways to wile away the hours?
The only thing that comes to my mind is tea parties, but that doesn’t sound right. Maybe that’s how British girls went wild, but the Southern girls I knew must’ve had their own ways. If I’d actually thought to ask one or two young ladies about their leisure time pursuits in those days, I might have improved my dating life. We’ll just call that water under the bridge, I suppose.
As far as my backyard football abilities went, I had an amount of game. I was well matched with the competition, none of whom ever went professional in any way that required athletic skill or natural talent.
I made some one-handed grabs and threw a few touchdown passes. I made my share of tackles and ran through a few tackles.
I also fumbled, threw interceptions, and missed tackles, but why harp on the negatives when reminiscing?
During one game, when it was cold and wet, I’d learned how easy it was to fall on the slippery, muddy ground. Rather than juke one way and jive the other, I decided to run straight at all tacklers. I’m not going to tell you how much I weighed back then, but I wasn’t anyone’s idea of a tank.
So I got the ball and followed the plan and ran over my friend Damon. He went down, and I took it in for the score.
It was a great triumph, except that Damon’s collarbone broke. (You’ll notice I didn’t say, “I broke it” or “He broke it.” That’s called deniability.)
So the recent rainy, cold weather outside reminded me of scoring that touchdown and my friend getting hurt.
It’s weird how a cold breeze blowing on my face could trigger a time travel trip to the distant past, but I guess that’s how memories work.
