June to Football
What do you make of the broad, unfootballed stretches of time called spring and summer?
Fully moved back to Alabama, with a new business now open in a small city you are learning to think of as home, you buy a lawnmower. You mow your lawn. You go jogging as early in the day as possible, but still get stuck walking the uphills in the dense humidity. You watch the soccer games of Europe, of the Americas. You smile as Cleveland grabs a title.
You contemplate making America great again. You let words and phrases sift through your mind like threads of sand pulled through the shoreline foam. You go to India for work, visit the homes of farmers in a village washed with pastel pinks, blues and greens, walk with them through their small fields of betel vine, coconut and maize. Rice paddies stunted brown with drought, monkeys running along tree branches outside of a school. Careful Carl, the man with the baritone voice from the NGO says standing in a courtyard, many cobras are here.
You and your wife watch cartoons for middle schoolers, find them strangely resonant, uncannily mature. Perhaps because all the world’s grownups sound like idiots. You try to find solutions to the Fermi paradox online. You listen as your kid goes from saying words to saying sentences, even if he doesn’t have enough words to populate them. You bake him a strawberry cake for his second birthday. You turn thirty-five.
What is football to June, June to football?
Football season gives a structure to the year, even when you’ve left the academic calendar behind. But this year in particular, since football ended January 11 with Saban & Team claiming their fourth of the past seven in Glendale, time has dilated beyond usual bounds. Maybe it is having a child. Or starting a business, with only the work you make for yourself filling your days. Weeks move with stunning speed and yet when you think on it, it feels like years have gone by since you’ve seen a football snap. Whole universes inflate in the meantime, full of both excitement and sadness.
And maybe it’s having a child that makes all the shitty shittiness of this collective year so far feel increasingly poignant. A sense of dread gathers more quickly over every awful story, and you start watching cable news for the first time in your life without being able to explain why. You wonder if this is how your grandparents felt in 1968, this sense that everything is being wrenched apart by a dark energy, something undetectable that everyone nevertheless knows is there. All worlds, good and bad, feel possible. You think, we’re still here, but where is here exactly? How long do radio signals take to return home? What is the governing order of things? When did orange juice become so chalky? You look for answers, find nothing, everything. Every website has a chart, a video, a dataset that explains it. John Oliver did a sick piece on it last week.
June is that farthest point in the orbit, when all the drive away from the structuring center of gravity converts itself from kinetic to potential energy, the slightest pause before you begin plunging back toward the familiar.
Perhaps this is why people who still follow sports as they get older continue to do so. Football seems a paltry salve for what we’ve all endured, what we’ve put ourselves through this year. But still. There is the cycle that comes around again, and it gives assurances. At least we will hold games again this year. You wonder what it must have felt like when they cancelled the Olympics during wartime. An admission that it was not the time to play.
Sitting in the bar of a business hotel in the corporate outskirts of Delhi, I talk with Sunil the manager of the hotel restaurant about American politics. He says he is afraid of America again for the first time since Obama was elected. No doubt there are people who will be glad to hear this, who believe we’re better off as a country when the people of the world fear us.
I fly back to Atlanta, mind boggled from crossing continents, and drive on a Saturday afternoon through the livid, silent hills of east Alabama. For weeks I listen to how angry everyone is in person, on tv, online, and I grow angry myself, thinking, we have it really good in this country actually, calm down.
It is a simple thing to want, most likely a form of escapism. But some football would feel good right now.
