Watching Exhibition Football 

The Buffalo Bills and the Cleveland Browns are engaged in a preseason exhibition game, but I’ve stopped watching and drifted away; I’m standing in the midst of misty memories. Some happy, some risqué and ribald, others a little sad. Laughing voices are calling me back to paths I had danced along eons ago, light-footed with youth, full of passion and ambition, searching for something, maybe truth?

New York’s Finger Lakes, Bangkok, Mississippi, Michigan, Montana, Vietnam, Spain wax and wane. Different faces appear…Shorty D and Rat, Deedee and ‘Death Valley’, Climon and Leo, and a thousand guys named Johnson…marching merrily along through Basic Training in Geneva, New York, cruising Calgary, Canada or raising hell on the Ramblas in Barcelona, faces  unchanged by time…jaw lines and cheeks still softly molded in the gentle curves of the last vestiges of  lingering post-adolescence.

Mr. D, Berv, Wes, Beavers, White Tower hamburgers and Cask 59, a cheap wine that congeals to a varnish-like hardness when neglected spills are left to dry. What does it do to our stomachs? Wrapped in the cocksure invulnerability and assured immortality of untested youth, we don’t have time to consider such inconsequential things…we’re too busy enjoying living, and the as yet unheard of country of Vietnam, with its indelible experiences, is years away in the future.

Berv’s ’52 Packard, engine whispering quietly like “the sound of money” as the car glides over Detroit’s bumpy, neglected streets on the way to the Twenty Grand, The Famous Flame Show Bar, and “The Projects” in search of whiskey, women and song.

My gleaming black ’57 Ford Fairlane 500, its glass-packs making muted thunder, tracing that same route long after Berv has shipped out: “I’ll drink to the girls who do, I’ll drink to the girls who don’t, but not the girls who say they will and later decide they won’t. But I’ll drink from the break of day to the wee hours of the night, to the girl who says I never have, but just for you, I might.”

Singing and dancing in Mamma Bea’s Bar in tiny New Haven. Mamma Bea presiding from behind the bar, cheerfully singing in her gravelly voice, echoing the show girl she had been years before.

Making sweet love to Betty in the back seat of the Ford on the little hill overlooking New Haven. Weeping like a little kid because I have orders to leave Michigan for Spain. Looking in the rear view mirror at Betty pleading, ‘come back’ as I mournfully drive away headed for home, then Spain.

Ten years later, I do come back, driving a ’69 GTO this time, having stopped off in Montana, Korea, The PI, and Vietnam, among other places, on my long, long journey back from Spain. Shouldn’t have come; neither New Haven nor I are the same. We’ve both grown up. New Haven is no longer a sleepy little town, and the last lingering hint of youthful naiveté vanished from my cheeks years ago without a trace, forever erased by experience.

Mamma Bea is entertaining the angels with her gravel voice now, and Betty is long gone. It occurs to me that I don’t remember her last name. With a sigh, I drive away, headed for Finland, Minnesota and yet another tiny radar site out in the boonies. There’s no reason to look back, this time.

The mist clears, the memories fade away, and I see my fingers hunting and pecking over the computer keyboard. It’s midnight, the football game between the Giants and the Browns is over, and I don’t know who won.

But that’s okay…I preferred the memories, anyway.
 
© Thurman P. Woodfork 8/19/2008