This is downtown Homewood, late in the evening. Had dinner on the southside with a college buddy. This was part of the drive afterward:
Normally this road isn’t so empty, but Homewood rolls up the sidewalks by 9 p.m., even during the Christmas season.
A wide version of this is now one of the rotating footers at the bottom of this page. There are now 17 of those. The bottom of the page has to catch up, though. There are 38 images in the header. Reload often!
More grading tomorrow, and the last class of the semester.
Pearl Harbor links. One of my uncles, if I am remembering this story correctly, was at Pearl Harbor soon after the attacks. This is him, a few years ago:
Here’s a story from yesterday about some young local boys who rotated through there in 1943 on their way to the Pacific front.
Every now and then I tell a story about something like this, because it astounds me that a lot of these people were my students age. Like these kids, who happened to be in Hawai’i to play football when the Japanese flew in. That’s a great read. And it is hard to imagine those could be my students.
Tons of pictures this week, so they are broken up into two posts. This one covering Thanksgiving and another from the Iron Bowl.
The Yankee taking a sunset picture on Dauphin Island, Ala.
The joke we’re going with is that this is the family crest:
What does Thanksgiving look like on the beach? So glad you asked:
Here’s you a bit of soothing video. Be sure to play this when you’re back in the office this week:
The kids in the family had a marshmallow fight:
No, I did not take part. I just shot video and pictures. In the family video library this is now set to the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
Also, they made sand angels:
Nice view we had:
Do you ever wonder what other people’s families do together? Think they’re all getting along? Think anyone in this bunch is having their patience tested?
Holiday travels this week, so we’re padding this out with videos and memories. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!
Honestly, this entire week on the site has been an excuse to work up to this picture. (Also published, and well-received, on dearphotograph.com.) Since Thanksgiving is a day of family and friends, I’m putting it here.
The photograph was taken in the spring of my freshman year at Auburn. My mother brought my grandmother, and her lifelong friend to campus to visit. They toured the campus, saw the arboretum, took photographs with Tiger VI and even got to “sneak” inside the stadium.
They played a little tackle football, with my mother tackling her mother while Ms. Lucy was the quarterback and referee.
I love that picture, and this year at homecoming I took it into Jordan-Hare Stadium to take the picture of the picture. That’s almost precisely from the same spot, looking to the south end zone.
And what makes it especially nice, this new photograph, is that the two teams playing at homecoming were my alma mater, Auburn, which I love, and my employer, Samford University, of which I am also fond.
This is a charmed life, and so precious little of that has to do with football, but it is a neat way to mention it.
At the big Thanksgiving lunch today I offered the blessing for those that were there and those that cooked this delicious meal. I asked for us to take all of our free minutes of the day to consider the things for which we are thankful and I asked for our friends and loves ones who couldn’t be with us to be watched over and cared for in their absence.
On this day of giving thanks, it is foolish and whimsy to consider something as silly as football, even in a place where it stains the culture as it does here. We have so many things for which to be thankful. I hope you find yourself in a similar situation. And I want you to know I’m thankful for you — be you an old friend or casual search engine visitor — have a lovely day.
Holiday travels this week, so it might be a bit light here. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!
I was raised in an Alabama family. There’s a lot of this, people associating with that school or, more specifically, the University of Alabama’s football team because they enjoyed a great deal of success in the middle of the 20th century. People like winners, and so all other things being equal, they side with the winner. Happens all the time.
So I had the room decorated in Alabama stuff. I remember watching the funeral procession go by as they drove Paul Bryant’s body from Tuscaloosa to a Birmingham cemetery. I remember the sign hanging from the overpass: God needs a head coach.
Joey Jones was a brilliant wide receiver — he’s now the head coach at South Alabama. Mike Shula was a heroic quarterback — he coached Alabama and is now back in the NFL. Cornelius Bennett was a terror. The Goodes, “From Town Creek, Alllll-a-bama!” Derrick Thomas, Lee Ozmint and more, they were all legends on the radio and heroes when they appeared on television.
They didn’t always play on television back then, even in the 1980s. But they were there often. And when they weren’t, there was radio, with the call by Eli Gold (I’ve always liked him a bit more than most as a play-by-play man). The big games were always on television though. And they don’t come bigger than the Iron Bowl.
The 1984 Iron Bowl was a big game. Shula was Alabama’s quarterback on a bad 4-6 team. Auburn was 8-3 and one win shy of their second straight SEC title and Sugar Bowl bid. But Bo Jackson went the wrong way as a blocking back on fourth-and-goal:
The next year there was The Kick*:
Football was a big deal, but not the biggest deal. During part of that game I was outside tossing a ball around in the yard. My neighbor was an older kid. He would stand on one end of his yard and throw huge, deep bombs to me on the other end of my yard. It had to be three-tenths of a mile. He’d hurl it high and I’d catch the ball in my arms and it hurt, but he was clearly athletic. I remember my mother would come outside and tell me what this Bo Jackson guy was doing, and how Alabama was stopping him, or struggling to do so.
My neighbor would go on to break many of Bo Jackson’s high school football records, at the same school. He would play a little college football in Tennessee before his career was over. On the other side of my house was another neighbor who was a state champion high school quarterback. Talented neighborhood.
And that was the world I grew up in, in a world where the joke is you declare your allegiance when you move in or you’re assigned from birth. With no real earned allegiances elsewhere, the University of Alabama was the first choice.
It was not to last, and I think it started right here, in 1992, watching Pat Dye’s last game at Auburn. I was at my step-grandparents house. Alabama won, but this was a somber moment, the circumstances that precipitated his resignation notwithstanding:
Tomorrow, we’ll briefly discuss becoming an Auburn man through the football lens.
* Here’s a fun anecdote stemming from that game, a few decades later and from a living piece of Auburn history:
The setting was a pharmacy in northern Tennessee, where the over the counter drugs are behind the counter. (Your identification insures you are not a drughead, but rather just have a mild medical issue you’d like to shake.) I’d just gone on a mini-rant to the things I would like, including breathing, Sudafed, an improvement in my throat’s general condition and the ability to breathe.
I did have this particular bug, virus, crud, infection or allergies. I did not explain that I didn’t have the local variety, but had rather contracted this elsewhere and was considering adding to the local scene’s viral joy if she didn’t give me the Sudafed.
She was a very lovely young lady, pleasant and chipper. She wished me well. She wanted to chat. I wanted to medicate, tired of not breathing, I’d come to think of those two tiny pills as the miracle elixir. It’ll take many doses, but give me the things, let’s not discuss microbiology.
We’re traveling, clearly. The goal is South Bend for a quick weekend. This is a nice trip, schmoozing on behalf of a non-profit, seeing a friend, perhaps catching a football game.
Watching a game at Notre Dame Stadium will be a treat. It’s a long-time goal that has suddenly materialized as a possibility. How many of those do you get in life? You have an idea of something you’d like to experience at some point in the future. Then, one day, you turn around and suddenly you could be doing that this weekend.
Life is good.
Except for the sniffles.
Saw this at a Chick-fil-A along the way:
Ice Cream was booked, apparently. Actually, they call all of their dairy-based dessert-like substances Ice Dream. I’ll leave it to you to examine their ingredients and tell me why.
Because of the throat pain I indulged in a milkshake. I recommend the peach. Sadly the banana pudding version has been removed from your list of choices.
Spending the night at one of the family outposts. My step-brother was there, ready to set out for his next trip. He travels for a living, which sounds like a lot of fun when you’re in your 20s, as he is. Now, in my 30s, I’m thinking of our trip and realizing “This would have been better at 24.”
Why do we let this happen to us? Why does it take so little time?
Tomorrow, something from South Bend. And then Sunday we’ll be on the road again. Lots of windshield time this weekend.
