First Saturday back in the South
I am sitting at the bar of the Little Bridge Marina in Southside, Alabama, a stone’s throw outside Gadsden. It’s sunny, hot at the unshaded tables but actually brisk at the covered bar when a breeze comes off the water of the Coosa River, and thermodynamic restlessness beating in time with pregame jitters has me putting on my light jacket and taking it off again in tight cycles.
This is my first Saturday back in the South, and Alabama is about to kick off at Texas A&M, a rivalry that somehow feels old despite this being just its fourth episode in the new series. Nothing else needs to be said about the game, which by the end of its first quarter has me highfiving the women in their 60s sipping bottles of Bud Light to my right.
We don’t have TV or internet yet at the house where we’re staying, so my mother-in-law sends Ginger and I out to view the game while she watches our one-year-old. I’m annoyed at myself for forgetting my Bama shirt in Minnesota when I flew down the day before for a visit to help get my family settled. Consequently, I’m wearing a mint green T-shirt, something so far off the competitive color palate that it can safely be called neutral, uninformed. Ginger, whose own gameday gear is probably packed in some suitcase, has on a burnt purple V-neck that she meant as an endorsement of her alma mater, but is in fact the exact shade of Aggie plum we’re seeing on the TV screens ringing the opposing stadium.
While I’m talking to the women on my right, a guy in his 50s sits next to Ginger and starts chatting. Before long he’s bought Ginger and me a chardonnay and a beer, respectively. These arrive without comment alongside a dose of Fireball in a plastic shot cup. Shit. I don’t want to annoy this guy but I am not really in a Fireball place (that place is called not-parenthood).
I kill it quickly in the hope that the act will likewise snuff out our neighbor’s generosity, but of course it does exactly the opposite, and after he asks me how I got the scars on my face, was I in a wreck or something, a cloned plastic shot with rising notes of cinnamon is placed in front of me. I scoot it along the bar toward Ginger, who gives me a look. Taking it back in hand I explain unequivocally to my new friend, no more whiskey, and after drinking it order a sandwich.
A sentence I’ve written and rewritten in my mind and in notebooks and on the screens of different devices surfaces again: Everything worth telling begins and ends in October.
It’s halftime, and my friend is asking me and the bartender if we want to go on a boat ride. The bartender starts a sentence to explain the obvious, that she’s working, but trails off. He focuses his efforts on me. We’ll miss the start of the third quarter, I say. He disagrees. It’ll just be five minutes.
The last we see of him, the boat he’s on is pulling out of the marina and from the back of it, one foot raised on the gunwale, he holds aloft a large bottle of Fireball, purchased, stolen or conjured I’m not sure, then pulls up his shirt and slaps his tanned belly at us.
Almost exactly four years ago, on a similar October weekend, my parents visited us in Birmingham. We drove to Tuscaloosa for the game against Vanderbilt, which despite a 3–0 halftime score, the eventual champs, with that beautiful defense that this year’s is starting to resemble, closed out handily.
My dad was walking with a limp, bowlegged, as though he’d been riding a horse. He would cock one leg out to the side and then swing his whole body around. He had trouble lifting his feet, kept catching his tennis shoes on curbs, stumbling. He claimed he’d pulled a groin muscle running. Ginger and I whispered to one another, wondering when and how to ask him what was really going on.
Climbing the mountain passes in the upper deck of Bryant Denny, he was breathless when we reached our row. The bleachers above the end zone loomed precipitously over that white ALABAMA in unadorned Helvetica set on crimson. Edging past others to our seats, he tripped again and nearly fell forward, and I had a vision of him tobogganing down over the heads and shoulders of those in front of us to sail out over the field. He and I would joke about this idea the next morning. My mom told me later he almost fell on the concrete stairs, too, as the two of them walked behind us to hide how much he was struggling.
Another man, a stranger, grabbed him by the shirt as he fell, and I hooked his arm with mine. He twisted sideways and braced himself on the back of the bleacher in front of us. We helped him up. That night, back in Birmingham, walking to our apartment from the car, he caught his foot again on the curb, sprawled at length on his stomach on the sidewalk.
The four of us talked about it the next morning. He was seeing doctors, getting tests done. Cancer, a stroke, they’d ruled out a lot of the serious stuff.
This was the first symptom I saw of his ALS, the push that set us in motion to Minnesota for four years. The next October, he had my mom call me over midday from my new job writing for the multinational, and in their living room cradled in his electric wheelchair he told me he’d reached the end of his rope. His words.
And at some point earlier this year, we, too, hit the end of a tether and began to trace a long arc that is bringing us back where we came from. Old but new, as we have not lived in Gadsden together before.
October in Minnesota is interminably gray. In Alabama the changing angles of the shadows on everything let you know the seasons are shifting even if the sun is still out and the air remains warm. But this reminder is subtle, requires active attention. You can ignore it if you like. Not so in Minnesota. The overcast sky is telling you to prepare for winter. Meanwhile, the leaves have not yet quit the branches here in Gadsden. It is easy to call this summer.
The third quarter has me nervous, standing, neglecting conversation with the women to my right. The fourth quarter gets mushy around the edges as we put the game away, thanks to my friend’s generosity. His boat never returns. Dusk is coming, and Saban gives his postgame interview.
It was not remarkable, I think, as I sit at the kitchen table the next morning and look out the back window of a borrowed house at the trunks of loblolly pines shooting upward out of view. But in returning I begin to see this new old place in parallax, adding a second line of sight toward it. It will be the same, but also not the same at all.
