Lughnasa and the Harvest Moon
Monday gratefuls: The real deal. Authenticity. The Ancient Brothers. Getting better. The Colorado/Colorado State game. The Rocky Mountain Showdown. A barn burner. The Marvel Universe. My son’s nerdiness. D.P. Songtan. The great recycling show on Sunday. Chicken noodle soup. Jewish penicillin. This time made by a Korean.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: The body rallies
One brief shining: Sitting on the couch, really a futon bed/couch, in my son’s living room, both of us sneezing and coughing, he found the Colorado/Colorado State game on Youtube and we settled in together, two former Minnesota guys with Colorado tenure rooting for the Buffaloes.
You probably missed it. Mountain Time in the evening. A game that usually has resonance only in Colorado and even then for only the small number of folks who followed the non-legendary Buffaloes and Rams over the last couple of decades. Usually.
This year though. Coach Prime on the sidelines. Two of his sons on the field. Two wins already in the bag. The first against the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs who lost the 2022 national championship game to the Georgia Bulldogs and ended the year ranked #2 in the nation. That got the sport’s worlds attention.
The Rocky Mountain Showdown however. Whoo, boy. Without a 98 yard touchdown drive in the literal final two minutes AND a two-point conversion for a tie the Buffaloes would have lost a game in which they looked out of sync and ineffective.
College football does overtime differently now than when I last tuned in several years ago. More like the soccer shootout. A coin toss. Winner of the toss gets to choose whether they want the ball first and choice of ends of the field. Both teams get the ball on the opposing teams 25 yard line. They maintain possession until they score, run out of downs, or there’s a takeover. Got that? In the second overtime both teams have to try for two points rather than kicking. Yeah, I know. Here’s a page that explains it all, sort of.
I say all this because the game went to two overtimes, both teams scoring in the first. In the second the Buffaloes scored, but managed a takeover against the Rams offense and the game was over. Whew. What a ride!
Later on my son and I watched Winter Soldier, a Captain America entry in the Marvel Universe. My son’s an athlete. A physics/astrophysics major in college. Now a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force. We’re substantially different. Not an athlete. Philosophy/anthropology. Protester against the Vietnam War.
But. We’ve traveled a lot together. Since his plane landed on December 15th, 1981, he’s grown up and I’ve grown old. We not only love each other, we like each other, like spending time when it’s possible.
We share a love of comic books, Marvel comics especially. Football. Travel. Politics. Family.
It is a sweet and wonderful thing to have a strong relationship with a man whom I knew first as a four and a half pound baby, all thin arms and legs.
