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Auburn / football / iPhone / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
7
Jan 14

The Reverse Tiger Walk

The often copied, and originally Auburn tradition of Tiger Walk — where the plays walk from the athletic department to the football stadium a few hours before they play — now has a companion tradition. When the team travels there is a Reverse Tiger Walk when they get back home.

This is the walk from earlier tonight, when Auburn’s team returned, tired from a cross country flight and a bus ride across half the state to make it back home. They found hundreds of fans waiting to welcome them, to congratulate them, to thank them:

They lined up diagonally across the length of the indoor practice facility. They were two and three and four and five deep on either side of the path the players would take. The team, fresh off a plane and then a bus, walked through the crowd, looking a bit tired, but there was plenty of enthusiasm in the air.

Athletics director Jay Jacobs greeted the hundreds in attendance and told the players in front of him, saying “This is truly what the Auburn Family means.”

To the fans, he noted, in case anyone lost count, “In the last 10 years no one has won more SEC championships than the Auburn football program.”

Head coach Gus Malzahn spoke to the crowd:

Senior running back Jay Prosch briefly greeted the crowd:

And so did senior defensive back, and Iron Bowl legend, Chris Davis:

Here is some video:

And that wraps up the football season, and the last real football thing I’ll write about here for a while.

Good thing we’re getting back in the pool tomorrow.

food / football / photo / running / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
31
Dec 13

New Year’s Eve

This is Maria. We had dinner at her restaurant, Tutti’s, tonight. Her husband is a master chef. They have a professional soccer playing son and a daughter who is in investment management. Also, the food is delicious. Order anything there.

Got an email this morning from the site where I monitor my exercise. It said I’ve pedaled 1,722.9 miles this year. A very low number. But there’s always next year!

This morning it was cold. Very cold. It was 26 degrees at midday. Before that we went out for a run. So there is the last of the Christmas snow on the ground, ice puddles in small holes and frozen mud, the stuff that doesn’t accept your footprint.

I ran a little over four miles. After we got started it didn’t feel cold. I passed an old couple who were out with their little dog. The guy told me I was doing great and looking good. I also looked like a fool in a windbreaker and shorts. (At least my ears and hands were covered.) As I finished my last big circuit around this park and pronounced it the right time to quit. The chill was starting to get in at the very end. Why not? It was in the twenties.

I’m starting to like running, then. You’d have to, to do something as crazy as that.

So we spent most of the afternoon warming up. Dinner at Tutti’s. We made it back home for football. Johnny Manziel had a New Year’s Eve party on the field:

We’re watching the ball drop in Times Square, relatively warm and in no crowd. The phrase of the night seemed to be “a million people, a million people.” Who needs that?

Anyway, enjoy your arbitrary demarcation of a new solar circuit. As you put the old one behind you — should you find you were fond of it, or simply find that you are fond it is over — I wish you health and abundance and twice the happiness in the next trip around the sun.

adventures / Monday / photo — Comments Off
30
Dec 13

We went to a high school shoving match and a hockey game broke out

Back to New Jersey today for a hockey game. This was my first high school hockey game, which was good, because the pace moves a bit slower, so the action is easier to follow. This was also the first time I tried to take pictures of a hockey game, which was a struggle in a dimly lit arena.

A lifelong buddy of my father-in-law is the coach of a high school team, the Ridge Red Devils. They are wearing black and green:

This was a rivalry game against Bridgewater Raritan.

Bridgewater Raritan is a good team. They were state champions last year, apparently, and returned all but one player this year.

And so while Ridge was outskated, Bridgewater won 3-2, without ever really putting the good guys away.

We had pizza with the coach and his wife after the game. As I said, the coach is an old friend of my father-in-law. His wife went to nursing school with my mother-in-law. They have a lot of friends like this, people they’ve known for more than 40 years, people they’ve both known separately and together, which is a neat thing.

Tim, the coach, said that this was the coldest rink around. After Hurricane Sandy, he said, this area had no power for two weeks. When the power came on he went to the rink and skated. It was the only one around, without power, that still held ice. After two weeks.

It was about 32 degrees when we left the rink tonight. It was warmer outside than inside.

family / photo / weekend — Comments Off
29
Dec 13

New Jersey Christmas

I feel like this: the spirit of Thanksgiving isn’t brought about in a day, but rather through a season. When, really, it should be a spirit we keep throughout the year it is something that is at least always close at heart throughout this time of the year.

If you’ve ever sat around the table and played the “I’m Thankful For …” game you know there are a lot of things that folks choose. Throughout the season, based on how the holidays fall and where I’ve always lived and all of the travel and the various things that go with it, I’m thankful for one thing more than others. Truth be told, I’m probably not as thankful as much as I should be. I probably let the inner-Grinch run roughshod over my sentimental gratefulness too much, at the expensive of my gratitude.

And the thing I’m most thankful, and most grateful, for are the people who’ve come into my life when they didn’t have to, and let me take up a little piece of theirs. We pick our friends, we inherit our families, but we’re absorbed and adopted and accepted by others and that’s just a remarkable condition of humanity.

My family is full of stories like that, a family tree with swirls that shouldn’t be that, over time, make perfect sense. So is yours. People marry in and you come to see them as your own. People that need an extra sibling or a grandparent or whatever they need, and you find a place for them in your own family puzzle. This is a neat, and powerful thing.

A few years ago, for just one example, some friends of mine lost their newborn grandchild just before the holidays. Circumstances meant these two lovely people would have been alone at Thanksgiving. I invited them to my grandparents’ home and they sat with us and joked with us and cried with us like old relatives we’d known forever. It had this ease and casualness and lack of formality or awkwardness that was a marvel. It was one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen in a lifetime of memories at my grandparents’ home.

I’m sure my grandmother sent them home with leftovers, which is also what she does.

I was thinking about that sort of thing, how rich I have been in extra-family, on the drive from Connecticut to New Jersey, where I get to be on the “adopted” side of things. This last Christmas gathering is with The Yankee’s godparents. The families are intertwined in unbelievable ways. My father-in-law and The Yankee’s godfather, a retired teacher and coach who tells great stories, have known each other literally almost all of their lives. My mother-in-law and The Yankee’s godmother, a nurse fully intent on exercising her right to spoil her granddaughters, went to nursing school together.

The two families raised their three girls, only about four years apart, between them. Everyone is all grown up now, of course. The younger godsister, if you will, went to college and married the guy she dated there. The older godsister went to the same college and she and her husband have two children — ages two to five or so, who both already speak two or three languages. All of these people are lovely folks.

They’ve all taken us in, the three guys who married into this family — a biotech sales rep, a bike racer/budding film producer and little old me — with the greatest of ease. And I know this happens everywhere and is not unusual in the slightest, but it is, to me, the most amazing thing, about how families operate.

As gifts I received a beautiful ornament and a really nice shirt and sweater. I’m going to take my godmother-in-law clothes shopping with me. She knows her stuff.

Did I really this entire passage just so I could write the phrase godmother-in-law? Yes.

Even the dog gets presents:

That present that the dog opened was from my mother-in-law, who is among the world’s better present givers. (She’s mine and you can’t have her.)

Also, because my godfather-in-law’s father was there tonight, we had scratch-lasagna with four generations of a family tonight. Four generations! (The second time I’ve done that in a week, since there were four generations at one of my family dinners.) How incredible, and it is something we seldom even think about.

The only downside to this day of travel and festivity is riding on some of the bumpier roads on the eastern seaboard. Small price to pay when you have a lot of things for which to be thankful.

adventures / family / memories / photo / running / weekend — Comments Off
28
Dec 13

Connecticut Christmas

I’ve been battling a head cold of sinuses and various other fun for several days now. I can point to when it began, precisely at the end of dinner on Christmas Eve. This being the holidays, and that meaning traveling and a dozen people’s varying schedules and being courteous to the dietary habits of others, that would have been at around 5 p.m.

We’d had dinner with a portion of the family that was just getting over some bug or another. And I thought, for a time, that I’d been given some fast acting strain of a thing that I did not want.

Instead, before I complain about being sick and never eating, let me tell you about the best Christmas present I received on Christmas Eve.

We show up late, because there is being courteous to the dietary habits of others and then there is being alternatively busy and passive aggressive against the idea of eating dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon. So we sit down, all of the family in one big giant circle. For some this is a nice time. For others, perhaps they’d rather be elsewhere. Presents are passed around because one of the kids has to go to his father’s for another meal — the typical modern American Christmas, of course.

So it turns out that all of the gifts are aimed at the children, as it should be. This set ranges from 10 to 17 or so. Being book lovers, and considering these particular kids, The Yankee and I decided we’d simply do gift cards for all of them to a local bookstore.

The 10-year-old, after the haze of Christmas presents presents burns down to a nice, soft, amber glow in his mind, becomes upset. He has gotten me nothing. He disappears. He scours his room. He sends word that I am to join him there. He presents a miniature American flag. And a child’s giving, loving heart.

For the next three hours he proceeded to try to cheat me out of every dollar possible at Monopoly, but, still, for a moment, that was perfect.

Anyway, that was Christmas Eve, where I started coming down with something in his house. When the plane landed the day before yesterday here I couldn’t hear anything because of whatever is going on in my head. I’ve been walking around sniffling and listening to everything as if I’m three feet under water.

So we went for a run this morning. So we walked up the hill to the park where my wife played as a child, the same park where we had our engagement photos taken a few years ago. It is one of those old, large homes turned into a city showcase arrangements. There are dog runs and empty fields and disc golf and a gravel path and plenty of woods.

It was about 39 degrees and I’m going to be that guy, here, but the run helped me feel better. Cleared my head a bit. Now I’m hearing things slightly more clearly, and so on. I got in just over four miles.

We got back to the in-laws just in time to see Uncle Scott, who was up from New Jersey for Connecticut Christmas. How nice of him to wait for us, huh?

Cleaned up, and then Christmas presents, where Santa did an amazing job of bringing wonderful things to everyone. I’m still very much under the spell of that thing parents tell kids just before Christmas, and I’m always sure that I’ve never been good enough to deserve the Christmas gifts I receive. This year, this fine year, was no exception.

We had Christmas dinner, at a reasonable hour. And I calculated this: I believe it has been eight days since I’ve had both lunch and dinner at or near their regular times.

Now let me tell you about the luck of Christmas dinner. My mother-in-law, she’s a fine chef. Christmas in their home is shrimp cocktails and prime rib. Prime rib isn’t the first cut of meat I’d choose for myself, but she makes it happen and it was delicious, as always.

So I helped her clean up afterward and then went to play with my Christmas presents, which are too many and too grand for a boy like me.

Also, at this Christmas dinner, we open crackers. It seems you have this tradition or you’ve never heard of it. There is a cardboard tube with a ribbon coming out of either side. You pull the ribbons and it pops, a mini-firework! The tube opens and you get a paper crown for dinner, a cracker jack-type toy and a joke. These are the jokes we received tonight:

And Christmas still isn’t finished! One more tomorrow …