Carved...no
Scraped...no
Landscaped into the landscape, a secondary school campus - its property lines defined by a highway and train tracks - hosted the hopes of two opposing football teams last night.
My niece's husband ("nephew in-law"?) coaches the quarterbacks for Hazel Green High School. His team, the Trojans, faced the Madison County High School Tigers as the sun set over the north Alabama hills - the Keel Mountain "range" and Moontown Airport nearby.
Vintage aeroplanes crisscrossed the skies before the game began, as if an air war were to accompany the pending ground war.
As a child of teachers and a husband of a daughter of teachers, I know all too well the appearance and disappearance of parents' faces as their children enter and exit their school years.
There in front of us everywhere are the precious, specific offspring of adults who've invested more time and and money than they'd want to count preparing their kids for the social setting that public/private schooling provides.
Their stories are similar but never the same. Married parents, divorced parents, widows/widowers, adoptive parents, adaptive parents, involved parents, absentee parents...the list goes on and on.
But they're not just parents. They have lives they believe are their own, defined at least partially outside the parental zone.
For instance, around us last night:
- Dee, whose husband received an award of excellence earlier in the day from General Ann Dunwoody, head of the U.S. Army Materiel Command at Redstone Arsenal and the first female four-star general (if you want to bring up good, tough-but-friendly female role models, I'll take 1 Gen. Dunwoody for every 100 Sarah Palins). [Gen Dunwoody comes from a long line of soldiers, reports the BBC. ” ‘A Dunwoody has fought in every American war since the Revolution,’ said army chief of staff Gen George Casey.]
- Meanwhile, a fellow next to me, a happy father, has two sons on the football team and one daughter in the marching band's flag corps. The father retired from the military and now works as a logistics manager for LG. His wife, unable to attend the football game because of a business meeting, is CFO for a small international firm. They hope their daughter will get an engineering degree at university.
For dinner, we ate at a local steakhouse, Oh Bryan's, (food/beverages served by Jessie), where no one in the place is a stranger to anyone else. I know the worker overlooking the salad bar will take an upcoming trip to the Nashville Zoo. I shook hands with people I don't know although we acted as if we were best friends.
You can't pay for that kind of local friendliness, friendliness that's missing at the political/corporate infighting levels.
And that's why I'm here everyday, because seven billion people are my local friends and neighbours. I am saddened that opportunists make extremist speeches in order to popularise themselves with "like-minded" folks, ingratiating others and making enemies where enemies are not needed.
Drug cartels I can deal with, because politics are unnecessary where guns and money speak louder than words.
I can play the game of subtle political posturing as well, knowing that subcultures need feelings of exclusivity, BUT without raising their fears and anxieties too high.
At lunch yesterday, Miranda, our server at Beauregard's, shared her secret to success with us. She's taking college courses, paying for them with her own money, so that she'll have no debt when she graduates from college with a degree in special education about two years from now. Her happiness and pride in supporting herself shines on her face and in her gray-green eyes.
I sat on the bleachers with the parents, wondering which one(s) of their children will figure out how to self-finance post-secondary school training tracks pointing toward lucrative careers.
Hazel Green pulled off the win last night at Madison County, 7-21. The young men on both sides chased and pounded each other into the ground like warriors. Their seasons barely started, they'll use lessons from this game to start discussions about where they want to be after their secondary school playing years are over.
As the planes buzzed overhead, as the trains chugged by, as a single helicopter flew a little too close to the stadium, I wondered about my own career and what my parents would have thought 30 years ago as I took off my graduation cap and gown to start my post-secondary school life.
Certainly, I am not where I thought I would be with a fully-financed Navy ROTC scholarship at Georgia Tech in my hand back then.
I imagined myself a storyteller from age five onward, writing when and where I can/could. That's where I've always been, my career track a consequence of putting food on the table and a little bit more than that. That's where I'll always be.
How many children in primary and secondary schools know who they are and who they will be from moment to moment? How many parents can say the same?
Circumstances do not make us who we are. Circumstances show to others what we're made of. Writers and thinkers have stated and restated those facts. Non-linguistic animals demonstrate those facts from birth. So do we.
You bring who you are to the game. You take away from the game an appreciation for others and what they're made of. If children know that innately, why do we adults so easily forget?
Isn't it time we relearned who we are and willingly/openly shared ourselves with those who have no want/desire to be what we ignorantly label enemies, who are really just temporary opponents in a game?
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