UPDATE: Heavy, wet snow clings to trees, causing power outages all around. Not a fun way to spend a blizzard,

You know, you really haven’t lived until you have been witness to the pre-blizzard shopping habits of Midwesterners. Since this current blizzard gave even more advance notice than the one last week, people had all weekend to contemplate the couple of days they are going to spend sheltering in place when it drops another foot or so of snow down on the bone-dry streets.

Another foot of snow begins to fall. Note bird in dogwood tree. Bird block party going on at the feeders all week: downy woodpeckers, cardinals, black cat chickadees, tufted tit mice, phoebes, bluejays, flickers, robins, mourning doves…you name it, it was chowing down on suet & seed.

I ventured out to Costco late yesterday morning, a Sunday, only to find it a veritable mob scene. Normally, it’s pretty quiet at that moment during the weekend since most people would be at church, possibly praying for an alternate weather pattern.

On this day, however, the parking lot was packed with more than a few cars parked cattywampus–yeah, you heard me right—abutting giant snow mountains deposited by snowplows about its perimeter.

The critical driving issue in most lots is the blindspot created by these snowpiles, which conceal the frantic shoppers lurching from behind them and make competition-level space-spotting in the narrow plowed paths fairly treacherous.

So, when I surveyed the Costco lot, I knew the local media had whipped everyone into a frenzy with their European Computer Models and snowfall calculations in the double digits and shrieks of keywords, like “Bread!”, “Milk!”, “Eggs!”.  Then when the national press descended to scoop existing snow with their mittened hands on camera before the first new flake had fallen, well, that’s never a good sign.

Throughout the rest of that day and into today, stores were packed with panicked shoppers and carts careening down aisles at Daytona speeds. Predictably, shelves were bereft of bread and freezers devoid of milk and eggs.  Hardware stores reported near rumble conditions among the men circling the few remaining snowblowers.

We’ve taken all precautions: snow implements are cleaned and at the ready for use during the post-blizzard dig-out. Vast quantities of bread, milk, and eggs are stored and the pantry is bulging with all manner of food for any potential blizzard condition with or without power.

I’m guessing no one will need to grocery shop again for at least another month.

Snow falling again after we just moved 1 foot of it off the upper deck: argh.

Shoveling ahead…when the snow stops. We’ll clear this first, then rake snow from the roof. That will dump several feet and then we’ll shovel it off the deck again.

Today brings a well-publicized winter storm, already living up to its hype. This serene view from Flat Rock Creek belies the vehicular chaos reigning on area highways, many of which are now closed down and littered with abandoned cars. Schools, malls, bus routes, and even the airports have closed as the snowfall per hour ramps up.

This has been named Winter Storm “Q” by the Weather Channel because they couldn’t think of an actual name beginning with the letter “Q.” I suggest they root around the archives of early Sesame Street episodes during the next break between storms.

I guess I’m OK with a storm that sounds like the name of a James Bond villain. I am not so enamored of one inspired by the name of the transit line a national weather celebrity back east took to get to work.

Thanks anyway, Weather Channel. I am going to stick with a moniker that resonates in these parts and recycle the one we used two years ago, the last time this kind of storm dropped more than a foot of snow and brought the entire region to a halt: Blizzard of Oz.

It fits and offers just a bit more metaphoric bang for the buck.

Stay safe and warm throughout this storm, my fellow Midwesterners!

(See my daughter wield a mean snow rake below. Oh, yes, there are such things and they really work by pulling snow off your roof to prevent dreaded ice dams.)

It would suggest a target demographic to which I do not belong and likely have not been a member of for the past 40 years. It is lively in its cheap, plasticky design, and, importantly, it fits my seemingly archaic phone, which now clocks in at slightly over one year old. This—by industry standards—is prehistoric.

When I sought help loading my contacts and pics onto the new phone, the Sprint store associate could hardly mask his scorn when I asked about a new case. He took one look and held the phone up to the light, transfixed by its apparent ancientness. He shook his head and with thinly veiled snarkiness assured me they hadn’t had a case for this phone in the store for the past 6 months because that’s when they had CLEARANCED them out. In fact, he was pretty sure they hadn’t sold that phone IN ALMOST A YEAR.

So this little number just arrived from Amazon where I paid a whopping $1.26 after enlisting my teenage daughter to help me locate one for my newly replaced phone which I purchased—with insurance, mind you—for $100.00. Trust me, I am a far more savvy consumer than I appear.

But I was talking to my sister about our parents on my cell while grocery shopping, which means I attempted to cradle the phone in my neck while examining a pack of stupefyingly-out-of-season-strawberries. Said attempt resulted in what my kids would deem an “epic fail” when the phone sailed from my shoulder squeeze and went airborne, soaring in a perfect arc toward the case of organic vegetables where it turned and spiraled downward, landing at my feet in a thunderous splat. When I turned it over, I could still hear my sister talking, blah blah blah, but immediately noted the black screen of death behind the spider web of shattered glass.

Gasp!

“Not here, not now, I don’t have time for this,” I sputtered into the phone. I knew all too well from a mere 2 months prior what the cost, both financial and convenience-wise, was going to be. Because my teenage daughter had accidentally/carelessly? let her cellphone slip from her fingers and launch from an even greater height: the loft hallway where it wafted onto a carpeted family room floor but only after its glass face nicked the wood cabinet on which sits a flat screen TV, which was mercifully spared in the phone’s unceremonious descent.

Honestly, each event lasted nanoseconds and could easily have been a featured problem in a high school physics textbook: if a dense object launches from a height of x and flies through the air to crash land at point y, what is the projected trajectory of flight?

And let this be a lesson to you, adults: you actually need 2 hands to grocery shop!!! Get off the damn phone. Words once spewed at me by impatient siblings years ago when I had nightly talkathons with my best friend Kate despite spending every waking moment with her all day every day at high school, I now utter as a mantra whenever I enter Hen House or Target. This is not, after all, some harvest gold receiver with a 10-foot coil that will snake across the kitchen floor at high velocity and snap into a wall when dropped.

But this is:

Yes, a thoughtful and useful Christmas gift from my sister, which my daughter found hilarious. She gave one in black to our older brother who planned to use it on his 12-hour drive back to Michigan. We estimated that if he got pulled over in states where talking on the phone is illegal, the ticket would probably cost $5.00 instead of $500.00.

From what we heard, he chatted up old college buddies and long-lost friends for hours to keep himself awake during the onerous drive, incurring nary a wince from passing motorists and no retro tickets.

Stay tuned for the next post, in which I blurt my philosophy of technology to my teenage daughter whose attention, surprisingly, was less than rapt.

Do tell, what was your most heart-breaking, phone-break mishap requiring replacement and just how dearly did you have to pay for it?

MU vs Texas dustup: Sept. 29, 1979

On the day we met, my husband took this picture of my younger brother and me at Faurot Field the morning before a football game, remembered more for its record-breaking crowd than for the sports event that occurred therein.

Look closely: I’m inside the stadium, about 20 people in on the top right side of the photo, and my brother is also in the stands but nearer to the field.  My husband is hanging out of the door of a Highway Patrol helicopter.

He said:

Mizzou–Texas, Sept. 29, 1979. First game working for the University of Missouri PD. Maj. Mick Deaver arranged for me to ride in the MO Hwy Patrol helicopter to photograph the maximum capacity crowd (surpassed only by Penn State the following year) and surrounding area (to assess parking lot capacities and firelanes). My pics were used for years by the athletic department in Mizzou promotional media.

Met Phil Bradley (the ORIGINAL dual-sport athlete before Neon Deion and Bo Jackson) after he retired from baseball and, while he was signing an autograph for me, he recognized that pic as they same one hanging on his office wall.

Oh yeah….and on that day 33 years ago I met my bride to be.

She said:

And it was definitely recorded—by my future husband, who, as a University employee and rookie in its police academy, hung out of the open door of a Missouri Highway Patrol helicopter as it circled on its side around the stadium, shooting photos of that packed venue that were used by the university in postcards and posters for the next 15-20 years.  Be still, my heart.

As for my brother’s account, well…let’s just say it’s best told in person—our family has a tremendous story-telling capacity that way—with all parties present to ensure sufficient embellishment.

The illustrious day ended with a tiki-torch party at the house where I lived. As it happened, my husband and his best friend, later the best man at our wedding, stopped by upon my loose invitation, which was issued after my brother struck up a casual conversation with him at my behest while we waited on the field for the crowd to exit the stadium: “My roommates are having a party tonight.  You can come if you want.”

Disclaimer:

I suppose I should let you know that my narrative theory leanings are perhaps best captured in the preface to a final exam question I wrote for a Sam Shepard play I was teaching in Intro to Drama about 25 years ago:

“The stories we tell about ourselves and the stories others tell about us are almost never wholly true…”

Filed under: 1. Flat Rock Creek Tagged: college football, fall football, MU, when first we met ]]> http://flatrockcreeknotebook.com/2012/10/01/heres-looking-at-you-kid/feed/ 2 Flat Rock Creek Notebook: Memoirs of the Here and Now MU vs Texas dustup http://flatrockcreeknotebook.com/2012/08/28/hole-in-my-heart-3/ http://flatrockcreeknotebook.com/2012/08/28/hole-in-my-heart-3/#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2012 14:37:54 +0000 eveningstar1 http://flatrockcreeknotebook.com/?p=2862 ]]>

This dog was all about power naps.

Words fail at the sudden and quite unexpected loss of our beloved 8-year-old Brittany Spaniel yesterday due to a ruptured abdominal tumor. So I give you the eloquence of my teenage daughter instead:

Got into the trash almost everyday? Check. Constantly taking shoes? Check. Jumped the fence? Check. Barked at everyone who walked by? Check. Ate my favorite necklace? Check. The list could go on. Sound familiar? He was a Marley and Me kind of dog…but better. Because he was my dog. He was meant for my family. Love you, high maintenance dog. You will be missed.

Yeah, he was all that and much, much more. Here’s how I know he made it to dog heaven despite his earthly shenanigans: On the way to share the sad news with our college son in another town, I stopped by a Starbucks there to mitigate a crying-induced migraine with caffeine.

Head down, I went to pay and looked up through my tearful stupor only to see the barista’s white plastic nametag emblazoned with black capital letters in bolded block print.

Her name was a British name, that of a Shakespearean heroine, and the very one we had carefully chosen for our female dog who passed away shortly before we got this guy.

Of all the gin joints…

from The Kansas City Star, Feb. 26, 2012

Jayhawk Country erupted in the kind of revelry they generally reserve for when they take all in the Final Four of the NCAA tournament. Tiger Nation collectively wrung its hands into the wee hours over a call that didn’t get called and the one that did, both game-changers.

Sportcasters were all but apoplectic, labeling the whole affair “epic” and deeming it the most exciting game in the history of the sport. Seriously?

I have other, less generous labels, and not for this game but for the purported rivalry between two schools I happened to have attended. I use the term “happened” by design. You see, in-state tuition was a lure for me as an undergraduate and even moreso when I was footing the bill myself as a graduate student.

Funny how AP polls and recruiting sweepstakes never figured into my decisions and my personal bottom line trumped all other considerations given that both schools had stellar academic offerings in my areas of interest.

Rivalry seems a gross understatement as a means of capturing the intense and utter hatred of fans by fans that fuels this competition allegedly dating back to the Civil War. I detailed a few of the most unseemly elements of what’s called the “Border War” in a post here when the Big12 conference began its slow-moving implosion two years ago, which coincided with my epiphany that the entire country needed to be cited for unsportsmanlike behavior.

Frankly, I’m not sure it’s possible to fully appreciate this insidious cultural beast unless you’ve lived smack in the middle of it and endured the heinous trash talk that marks the week preceding MU-KU games, which is cleverly called “Hate Week.”

By “middle”, I mean literally the middle. As in the Kansas City metropolitan area which straddles the state line, dividing two states and numerous municipalities therein. Because the unseemliness doesn’t rise up out of a wheatfield in western Kansas or from a tobacco farm in the Missouri bootheel quite the way it does in KC.
Here in the heart of America it gets real ugly, real fast.

Schools and workplaces all over the KC metro area will not be full of good-natured banter and ribbing, but, instead, bitter, biting, hurtful comments lobbed from and at both sides. And sadly, no one will bother to say, “Oh my gosh, wasn’t that just a terrific and exciting nail-biter of a game?” Nope. Nobody. Not even me.

‘Cause that’s how we roll now as a sports culture. Just check in on the Twitter chatter from the weekend or some other social media venue that permits instantaneous knee-jerk reactions that blossom into screeds or that fosters sheer vitriol in discussions that are but thinly veiled cyber-bullying. I guarantee the hatred will be palpable.

And since it virtually begins at birth when parents start inculcating their children with this hatred through bibs and ballcaps, it plays out on the playground before anyone ever gets to college.

Conspiracy theories abound now that multiple colleges are exiting the Big 12 to go to other conferences not governed by the Lone Star State. But politics, posturing, predators and power grabs have defined this league in recent years, much the way they define all of college sports, even the upcoming beloved bracketology of March Madness.

So by now you’re thinking, “Hey, it’s just a game, people!” And, in another part of the universe you might be right. But not here, not now. And you don’t have to go all the way back to the Civil War to figure it out.

Just go as far back as thwarted proposals to rebuild after a devastating 1951 flood demolished parts of the KC area right before the Civil Rights movement and study the history of local city constitutions, real estate covenants, and a 35-year saga of public school desegregation and you’ll discern more than you ever wanted to know about how this rivalry reflects far more about the policies of Reconstruction than abolition.

Then, against that tense historical backdrop, toss in the carving up of limited resources, refusal to cooperate on bi-state efforts, endless poaching of businesses from both sides of state line. To that toxic mix, introduce the current climate of college sports, which historian Taylor Branch so masterfully outlined in his Atlantic article, “The Shame of College Sports”, last fall, and, finally, add on the economic bust that is felling higher education across this region.

You get the picture. This heralded, bally-hooed sports rivalry, deemed historic by its sheer longevity, is a not-so-covert expression of the worst kind of ill will, the arrogant kind that perversely revels in the demise of others in all forms and forums: political, social, cultural, racial, economic, educational.

A time-out lasting at least several years is in order just so people might learn to live together before they even think about playing together again.

A glimmer of hope turned up on my doorstep a few days before that final game at the height of Hate Week. Ferocious prairie winds ripped a rotting rope in half on the flag pole in our yard, liberating an oversized team flag I’d given my husband as a Christmas gift, sending it sailing down the block while we were away.

An unknown neighbor, most certainly one who favored the other team, found the flag and tucked it, neatly folded, inside our door.
That, in my book, is true sportmanship.

So, is MU-KU hatred an anomaly? What is the sports rivalry like in your neck of the woods?

So the black hole that was our hall linen closet instantly came into high definition view and the dark corner at the end of that same hall suddenly blossomed with a generous beam of light cast by a gallery spot fixture via its dimmer switch, now softly illuminating a pale watercolor painting of a tender blue iris that has hung on that wall for an age.

image by vorakorn kanokpipat

These projects required studying and measuring walls, creeping around rafters of an unfinished attic, suspending untold amounts of cord, running wires down walls, installing boxes within walls, affixing switches and light fixtures, and finally screwing in decorative wall plates. Basically, things my husband relishes doing.

But before these tasks, there were several visits to Home Depot and possibly another hardware store where he hunts down requisite materials in the same way I stalk purses at TJ Maxx.

This, by the way, is a man who beamed with pride at installing dark wall sockets in our college son’s old room after scraping and texturizing the ceiling and painting the walls right before Christmas. He thought they looked more masculine against the flint grey walls and white trim and better matched the furniture. He could not wait to show off his handiwork to the kids, who nodded politely but struggled to fully appreciate the magnitude of his accomplishment.

How did I get so lucky to find this man, you are asking yourself. I ask myself the same question on days like today when he flips the switch to demonstrate how his manual labor has brought such magnificent light into our world.

I bite my lip and overlook the fact he tossed tablecloths and towels from the closet onto the stairs and created a small fabric mountain by dumping the cleaning rags onto the floor. I will admit that he did vacuum up the vestiges of a wide spray of plaster crumbs that showered the shelves, so my re-sorting of the closet was a small price to pay, really, for the fact I could now actually see what I was doing instead of randomly packing it with stuff, which has been the case for the 17 years we’ve lived here.

FYI on the DIY: This, people, this is the stuff of which long marriages are made. Just ask Home Reared Chef.  Oh, and Happy Anniversary to all who celebrated anniversaries with some sweet home improvement surprises in lieu of upsizing their diamonds.

Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it, too? Why, I believe that’s just what we are about to do in this photo taken 29 years ago.  Our post Christmas wedding was on an unseasonably warm January day, very much like today, in fact, which rendered my mother’s year of incessant fretting about the prospect of snow completely unwarranted.

And her fretting at the reception about everyone donning clown noses and ears and all of the frivolity and crazy photo ops that ensued…well, let’s just say you don’t get through the 29 years following this day without at least a modicum of humor.

My brother Mark and a friend, serving as ushers, saw supervising the use of these accoutrements as part of their role, perhaps to offset the discomfort of wearing tuxes.

Frankly, the clown ears and noses cost pennies on the dollar when compared to the photo booth and props I saw in use at a wedding reception last fall.  Just a thought for frugal future brides.

My choice of dress was clearly inspired by Princess Diana’s, mine was just more princessy and comprised of one football-field less of material.   Plus,  mine was not inflatable.

My dream dress struck a bit of a medieval look, which suited an English literature major quite well: an ivory satin Priscilla of Boston princess cut with fitted bodice that blossomed into a fuller floor-length skirt and train that could be bustled, satin buttons all the way down the back, a sweetheart neckline, and long fitted sleeves that puffed out from the elbow to the shoulder.

It had no lace—that was a primary consideration in my criteria—because I understood myself not to be a “lace” sort of person at the tender age of 24. My veil, by necessary contrast, was marked by beautiful lace work throughout, edged in beads, and anchored by an ivory pearl Juliet cap.

Forgive my little reverie, but what better day to contemplate the style of your wedding dress than your anniversary?

The church aisle was lined with candles and ivy, the altar blanketed in red pointsettias.  At the reception immediately following, there was live music and lively dancing enjoyed by family and friends.  The wedding day’s festivities inspired countless stories we all still tell, including the one where I get my hair braided by my sister’s friend at a dry cleaners after the salon couldn’t replicate the simple style they had rehearsed a week prior.

And the one where the fitted bodice of a bridesmaid’s cranberry moire taffeta dress splits on each side as she comes down the aisle because it had been basted instead of sewn when altered to fit her slender figure.  (She cleverly clutched her bouquet of rubrum lilies and let the pouf of taffeta covering her upper arms hide the seamstress’s gaffe throughout the nuptial Mass, making a quick pit stop at home to sew it up before the reception.)

As I recall, I spent the first portion of the reception in the powder room where a dear friend’s mom worked feverishly and repeatedly to secure my veil’s comb in my uncooperative pin-straight hair until I finally abandoned wearing it altogether later in the evening.  This wardrobe malfunction caused me to miss tasting the painstakingly chosen stuffed mushroom caps offered to our guests by servers with trays; the after-the-fact-questioning about this segment of the reception is part of our wedding lore to this day.

See, this is the stuff of which marriages are made: resourcefulness, resilience, humor, patience, support of family and friends, and a healthy respect for each other even when you are wearing clown noses.  Oh, and an endless stream of stories you both lived to tell. Did I already say patience?

I’d love to calculate the hours I spent poring over bride magazines and ideas for that beautifully decorated wedding cake and the planning and the organizing and the meeting with all of those prospective florists and caterers and wedding industry folks.  And then I’d like to have those hours back.

I’ve got so many far more pressing things to use it for now, like taking down a gigantic Frasier fir Christmas tree sagging under the weight of a diverse assortment of ornaments we’ve jointly acquired over a 29-year period.   This array includes a rather full set of remarkable and slightly fragile, one-of-a-kind ones crafted by hands that we can hardly believe were once so tiny.

Indeed, endeavors such as this take much more time than you could ever have imagined back when you first began starring in your own love story.

I wrote this piece as a cathartic measure over a year ago and find that though I am now dispassionate and resigned about the inevitable outcome, my original thoughts are exactly the same.  Enjoy—if that’s possible given the topic.

OF POSTURING, POLITICS, PREDATORS, AND POWER GRABS

How’s that for some alliteration?  Or should I say, “obliteration?” I am now going to write about a topic I know virtually nothing about: college football.  Though it’s probably invisible to those who live well outside of the heart of flyover country, a major athletic conference here is currently imploding at the behest of powerful and greedy folks all over these United States.

And in its wake, this implosion will leave local and regional economies in tatters and major university brands tarnished.  Wait, institutions of higher learning have brands?  You bet they do in this day and age.  And in this day and age, it’s dawning on me how so very far we have not come.

Believe me when I say I am an outsider to the discussion of league loyalty and the revenue-generating behemoth that is now college football.  I still don’t get the game and don’t even care that I don’t get it.  No one ever wants to sit next to me at a game because I ask a lot of questions. And just when I think I’m starting to get the hang of it, some bizarre play goes down, evoking an obscure rule which is then trotted out as evidence that something quite complex is going on down there in the gladiator pit where people are pushing and shoving and grabbing each other.

Tennis is my true love, if you must know, but I like lots of other sports as well: volleyball, swimming, skiing, track.  Basically, the kind of strategy-based athletic engagements where nobody hurts anyone else except through the accrual of points and where there is some personal best at stake in the competition.

For purposes of full disclosure, I will confess that my husband and I met at an MU-Texas gridiron dust-up 32 years ago, when the two colleges were tossed together as a non-conference event back when Mizzou was a member of the collection of Midwestern colleges known as the Big Eight.  I don’t even remember who won because, well, I might have had my mind on something other than the game.  Like, I don’t know, a handsome, dark-haired, newly-minted Missouri grad who was working at the game.  I do know, however, the Tigers vs. Longhorns game on September 29, 1979, drew the biggest crowd ever recorded at Faurot Field in Columbia, Missouri.

And it was definitely recorded—by my future husband, who, as a University employee and rookie in its police academy, hung out of the open door of a Missouri Highway Patrol helicopter as it circled on its side around the stadium, shooting photos of that packed venue that were used by the university in postcards and posters for the next 15-20 years.  Be still, my heart.

And, of course, I’ve had great fun throughout my life as a spectator at football games.  The best parts for me were the social contexts in which these games were mired.  The Friday night lights of games at the local all-boys Jesuit high school my brothers attended where girls would flock to see and be seen and the mixers that followed the games.  The fabulous tailgate spreads provided by my dear friend Linda’s parents on football Saturdays during my college years.   And even the handful of games each subsequent year my husband and I have attended with friends on crisp October Saturdays.

As Irish Catholics and with a Jesuit Notre Dame grad in the family, my parents were avid supporters of Notre Dame.  My dad tracked their seasons and watched all of their games and my mom and her friends cooked up casseroles and sundry hors d’oevres for local alumni fundraisers.  They even had an enormous set of china (known as “the Notre Dame plates”) they hauled around for these frequent gatherings, which perfectly integrated several areas of their lives: religion, football, and socializing.

My parents and a group of their friends also religiously followed the Kansas City Chiefs in their heyday and the early days of the Super Bowl.  They sipped thermoses of  hot chocolate spiked with vodka to keep themselves warm on bitter cold Sunday afternoons in December on the bleachers of the old Municipal Stadium.  So even though I was hardly the greatest fan, football was a constant in the sports background of my life.

A highlight of each collegiate football season culminated in the game between two old rivals, MU and KU.  I am one of the select few who attended both schools, so I’ve always been somewhat bemused by the contest called the Border War.  The state line divides this metropolitan area roughly in half, and team loyalties with it.   The rivalry dates back at least 118 years in football seasons, but most people believe it arose out of Civil War battles.

People from both sides have been known to engage in pranks and goofy behavior in support of their preferred team.  My friend Linda’s brother-in-law, for instance, gave her dad, a die-hard Mizzou fan, a ransom note tied to a miniature stuffed version of the KU mascot when he married her sister.  At the wedding reception, he tauntingly vowed to raise all of their offspring as Jayhawks.  A police officer I worked with at a department in Kansas locked a cassette tape player in his locker for days blaring the Mizzou fight song (on a continuous loop).

My younger brother hasn’t missed an MU-KU football game in 33 years.  We figured the rivalry was intense when, on one of his first visits to MU, we attended the game and soon witnessed the bands getting into a tussle on the field.  He flies in from California to make the games these days.  Honestly, the most fun has always been when MU’s basketball team was good enough to give the Jayhawks a run for their money or the nail-biters where KU’s football team had the moxie to beat the Tigers.

These gentle pokes presaged a rougher era to come.  The football game used to be held at each campus as part of their regularly scheduled play.  But somebody realized they could make a lot more money if they held it at a professional stadium in KC and drew from the larger metropolitan area instead of just the colleges, so they abandoned the tradition of fans from each college trekking to the other’s campus every other year and wittingly let the local merchants in the two college towns lose money those weekends and kept a generation of college students from experiencing the Border War culture firsthand.

The first year, no one bothered to divide the gigantic stadium parking lot by school and the game was held late in the evening to maximize TV revenues, never minding that it also maximized the amount of alcohol that could be consumed by people tailgating since daybreak.   Behavior inside the stadium turned ugly and the walk back to the car in the dark was more than frightening.

Broken bottles, smoldering embers, and tailgate trash were strewn from one end of the parking lot to the other and people old enough to know better were staggeringly drunk and aggressively combative.  I clutched my young daughter’s arm with both hands after my husband’s college roommate deftly pulled her out of harm’s way when an intoxicated adult saw that her fan garb was not displaying the colors he preferred and began to charge at her.  Not exactly a family entertainment venue I would recommend.

Moving the game to this new site was a telltale sign of things to come.  In recent years, the taunts and antics of rabid fans and the contrived narratives of this longstanding rivalry with roots traced to the Civil War ramped up significantly—on both sides—to, at best, insipid and juvenile profanity (Muck Fizzou) and, at worst, sheer viciousness and racism.  For what you may wonder?

Based on all of the sports columns and articles I’ve digested the past few days, at the end of the day, it is, indeed, all about the money (See Sports Illustrated writer Joe Posnanski’s brief history of the Big 12  for historical analysis or any of KC Star sports writer Sam Mellinger’s insightful columns covering the demise of the conference and its impact both last year and this month.)

College football is so much about the money that it has now become about absolutely nothing else except the power and greed that money fuels.  Playful rivalries, tailgating traditions, silly pranks, the agility and prowess and lives of the young athletes, the spirited cheering, championship seasons, and the nature of the game itself all now rendered quaint artifacts of a bygone era and evolutionarily inconsequential.

Don’t think for a minute that this phenomenon is confined to MU or KU or even the Big 12.  All conferences and athletic programs are complicit.  And if the mirror isn’t registering any vestiges of fog at this moment, take a last look in it and ask yourself: who buys the outrageously priced tickets?

An interesting rhetorical and freedom of information angle to all of this is the fact that sports bloggers, assumed to be independent, are breaking all of the juicy stories well ahead of traditional sports media.  That presumed independence is evidently a farce in many cases as colleges and their minions manipulate the bloggers and the series of unfolding events by feeding them tidbits of information, often untrue, to force discussion and then events down other paths that favor their agendas and goals and permit these officials to claim Pollyanna-ish naivete and–laughably—innocence. This plot thickens like the oil in the gulf and is propelled by precisely the same  motors as the BP leak: money, power, greed.

Some of the simplistic narratives of the implosion created so far by the power players and the media desperate to document them are worthy of study if only for their amazingly shallow nuances invoking all kinds of archetypes with metaphors mixed six ways to Sunday.  You’ve got your scapegoat, your hero, your back-stabbing BFF, your chess game, your card game, your poker face, your all-dressed-up-with-nowhere-to-go dance card holder, etc.

So on the heels of Enron and Goldman Sachs and BP, the Midwest offers up the collegiate version of cataclysmic corporate volatility carefully choreographed by the power players through the waving of wads of cold hard cash and promises of personal cable networks and endless air time and myriad streams of revenue, revenue, revenue.  Color me disgusted.  And very, very sad.

Is there anything in our culture that’s not for sale?  I’m guessing folks were asking the same question when the last gladiator was left standing, right around the spot where archaeologists recently unearthed the remains of about 80 of those mighty warriors in what appears to be a gladiator graveyard.

The fallen were last seen on the TV news with scientists dusting their bones as the lead researcher affiliated with a British university speculated on how they’d likely met their rather gory deaths at the mouths of predators.  Of course, he couldn’t help but marvel at their considerable brawn.  That much of their story was revealed quite clearly through their well-preserved remains.

The aptly named Special Beginnings Early Learning Center was just that: a tiny but extraordinary center offering care for infants through school age kids and serving as host to a wonderful community of families.  The center boasted low teacher turnover and ongoing professional development for staff and provided age-appropriate learning experiences for budding minds.   Our son was in one of the first graduating classes of kindergarteners and is now Facebook friends with some of the kids he built Lego creatures with with back in the day. 

My daughter met her overnight guest in the baby swings in the infant room there when they were each but a few months old.  Fifteen years and countless sleepovers later, they have learner’s permits to drive and aspire to work at the center together next summer when labor laws permit their employment. 

As a working parent, I can’t begin to tell you what it means to have your children cared for by people who love them and nurture them.  Here is an excerpt of a heartfelt letter I wrote to the director ten years ago when our daughter was exiting the center:

Special Beginnings is essentially a second home to our children, a safe haven, an oasis of stability in the chaos that occasionally ensues in the lives of families with two working parents.  The kind of relationship a working parent has with a daycare is much different than one that exists between parents and a preschool or even an elementary school.  This relationship is truly an extension of the family since providing care is the central focus, and it is therefore marked by an intense and mutual trust that the best interests of the children will always take precedence over any other considerations.

A good daycare is much more than a place for children to socialize with other children and learn academic information.  It is a network of caring relationships between teachers and children and families and staff.  It is a community.  We are privileged to have been a part of this community for most of our children’s lives.   

This is why I have always described SB to coworkers and friends as truly a home away from home for our children…This is how I could go to work every day without fear, without concern, without apprehension, and with the knowledge that my children were loved and cared for.  This is also why our children looked forward to going to SB every weekday morning.

I distinctly remember that moment when our tenure at Special Beginnings drew to a close after seven years because it occurred in the very same parking lot I’m now driving out of.  I had loaded my daughter into our van as I prepared to pull away for the last time.  I started weeping and the original owner of Pizza Man, Bob, came over to see if my daughter and I were alright before he got into his car.  I explained my sobbing and he smiled and offered comfort by telling me it would be OK and that I would forever be eligible for the Special Beginnings discount.

From her special beginnings my daughter went on to flourish at a public elementary school I have often referred to as “school heaven,” a unique place populated by master teachers who creatively implemented a well-designed curriculum and thoughtfully nurtured young hearts and minds.  Oh, and her school BFF?  A friend she had met in the preschool room at Special Beginnings and with whom she will now share a high school locker.  There simply are no friends like old friends.

Six months before we found Special Beginnings and I began working full-time, I was a lecturer at the university where I had pursued my graduate studies.  There I’d had an amazing intellectual journey, finding an area of study that would fascinate me for the next twenty years and ultimately discovering my true calling as a teacher of adults.

Initially, the mother of a friend from graduate school lovingly cared for my son along with another little boy on the days I commuted to the university.  However, by the time my son was 18 months old, it was necessary for me to seek full-time employment that provided health-care benefits. 

I felt discouraged before I even started the job hunt as I knew it was highly unlikely that there would be any local positions in my specific area of interest and I assumed I’d have to take a job I didn’t particularly want.  Until I opened the newspaper to scan the want ads for the very first time and spotted my dream job listed therein.  My mentor counseled me on my application materials and helped me prep for the interview.  Another dear friend and colleague offered abundant moral support and helped me pick out appropriate interview attire.

I was convinced I had bombed the interview since the eight-member faculty committee sat stone-faced, appearing to have no response to a single answer I gave to their series of questions.  My mentor consoled me and then congratulated me a month later when I was surprised to learn that, indeed, I was the candidate selected for the job of my dreams.

But in all my excitement at the prospect of employment in my field and the careful handing over of the reins of my classes to another teacher mid-semester, I hadn’t counted on the utter despair I would feel at leaving the place that had been my intellectual and emotional home base for the past five years.  After packing up my office and loading the trunk of my Corolla with books and papers, I drove away from campus with the image of the university in my rearview mirror, crying so hard I could barely see the road as flashes of friends, colleagues, teachers, and students flooded my mind’s eye.

Fast forward through 19 years of sheer career bliss in an unusually supportive environment with tremendously talented colleagues and endless professional opportunities to this moment now at hand.  After two stellar years of academic study and working as a writing tutor at the local community college, my son has chosen to complete his degree unexpectedly at the flagship research university where I attended graduate school.  When we first visited campus last fall, it felt at once serendipitous and strange to be accompanied by him as an adult since the last time we’d been there together he was in a stroller.  I admit it felt even stranger to have my mentor and my dear friend both speak with my son about prospective majors and offer counsel on how to thrive as a student in a much larger academic universe.

By this time, he’s blossomed into a considerate and responsible adult with some strong opinions about life, the universe, and everything, including politics, a topic he raises at least daily.  He and I share some interests—anthropology, writing, literature—and a few political tendencies, so the conversations have become increasingly frequent and intense over the past couple of years; in fact, he’s pretty good company these days.

All summer, I’ve tried various strategies to prepare myself for his departure which comes next week.  I kept myself sufficiently distracted during the entire month of June by sponsoring a national conference at the college where I work.  The July calendar was packed with doctor and dentist appointments and the completion of reams of paperwork associated with my daughter’s high school and his college entry.  During the past two weeks, I’ve been buried under myriad shopping treks to help my son accrue the requisite objects he needs for the new domicile he will share with seven other guys.

His imminent leaving inexplicably hits me at odd moments—checking out at the grocery store, picking up books at the library, enjoying a family dinner on a random week night.  I have a passing thought about what life will be life without him at home and I suppress the tears welling up and move on to the next task and corresponding deadline. 

But I fully realize even as I postpone the inevitable that it will catch up with me, no doubt just as he and his father are pulling away from the house for the last time, trailer in tow loaded with his bed and shelf and desk chair, and I am waving goodbye from the porch with tears free-flowing as visions of Legos and Thomas the Tank Engine and Harry Potter and pow-wows and Pokemon and Calvin & Hobbes and Boy Scout camp and CYO basketball and monthly campouts and Latin Club and Eagle projects and weekends at Westlake Hardware store and the Writing Center and Native American Studies and Biology and Physical Anthropology swirl in my head. 

I suspect I will be only mildly comforted by my hard-won albeit bittersweet knowledge that all endings harbor the prospect of future serendipity and, most importantly, the promise of special beginnings.