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.
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.
We traveled all day yesterday. Up and out of my grandmother’s house, skipping breakfast to her mortification, before 8 a.m. Our route took us across regions both populated and sparse and rural. And also down gravel roads. Not even the good stuff, where the creek rocks have been crushed to dust and spit out to the side by previous generations of tires, but loose gravel roads.
Which might be unfair. It was on a detour. A bridge was out, you see, and the local crew that were in the middle of repairing the structure had helpfully hoisted road closed signs and a detour sign, but no actual detour. So we made our own, on roads that looked very much like what we’d traveled in nearly abandoned portions of Ireland this summer.
And from the gravel roads we made it back to the empty county roads and from there through sleepy southern towns and finally into Atlanta and to the place where we parked our car … just in time to miss the airport shuttle.
No matter, there will be another along in 15 minutes, we are right on schedule and so we are really playing with house money for an hour. So we park, unload the things that are going on the next leg of our holiday travels, leaving behind the first stages of clothes and things. The shuttle comes along, we climb on, meet a new young Auburn fan — he’d just chosen sides before Christmas, apparently, and was very pleased to tell us about the shirt he got for Christmas.
These are golden times, my man, and you’ve chosen wisely.
We got into the airport. I instantly lost track of my wife while fiddling about with a zipper or something on my luggage. That took 17 seconds. At 22 seconds, with my thoughtful, staring face firmly applied, a helpful airline employee asked if I was looking for something.
Turns out she was in the check-in line. (Who knew?) I’d found her myself. We checked. We made it through security, where we probably got ourselves on a watch list by hopping lines. We’d committed to one line before realizing the people there were still trying to reach their spring break destinations. So we changed to something that looked like your typically efficient government operation, rather than a Soviet toilet paper queue.
So down to the terminal train and then we found our gate, grabbed some food, finally and got on the plane. Our flight was uneventful, save for the three year old kid doing a wicked Billie Jean cover off and on.
And I had so hoped that flight would have a talent show.
We arrived in Connecticut, where it is cold, as you would expect. Good thing I brought two jackets! On the one hand, we drove and flew almost a full day. On the other hand, we covered more than 1,000 miles. It was an easy night after that, dinner with the in-laws, hauling luggage upstairs and so on.
This morning, we ventured out into the post-Christmas wilderness, and this:
They had a white Christmas, and there is still a little bit of the stuff lying around. It doesn’t impede anything, but it is cold enough to sit in one spot for four or five days without feeling like it is in anyone’s way.
So today we shopped. A visit to the empty mall here, a quick stop to the reasonably underwhelmed Apple store there. We got in and out of a high end district and hit a big name cosmetics store. We visited a haute couture kind of place for one thing or another — I was dizzy with it all by then — and the lady who worked there spoke with us like we were long-lost nieces and nephews.
She’d heard of Auburn. And it had registered enough that, isn’t there some sort of big game? And some sort of rivalry? It was interesting. People either live it or know of it. Or they are completely oblivious to it. But she had just the most passing knowledge — which, hey, good for her, I guess, a fashion store girl in New England knowing anything about the South and its diversions — and I had to explain how this silly little thing was so much a part of our local culture.
It kind of makes you dizzy.
We hit another place or two and then got our collective acts together. We went, with the in-laws and some family friends, to New York City, tonight, here:
At the Lincoln Center there is a performance of MacBeth, staring Ethan Hawke as the cursed mad king. They play the whole thing for the poetry rather than the emotion. Hawke is a much better mad king than a reluctant and treacherous one. It was a fun show, seeing Shakespeare is always good.
They rushed through a lot of really great stuff — this is Macbeth, so of course it is great — as if they just really wanted to get to the last battle, which felt thin for different reasons. Perhaps if they’d lose the rapid fire delivery, and let the audience think about the spaces in between the lines, the show would feel stronger.
We finally had dinner sometime around midnight, at some cafe on the way back home. My body has no concept of regularly spaced meals any more. We’ll get that fixed tomorrow.
Oh just a fine day. We caught a matinee of the new Hobbit movie:
Better than the first Hobbit movie, with fewer plot elements that were recycled from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But if the existence of them annoys you, sorry. (And don’t pretend like you didn’t notice.) There were drunken elves. Legolas and friends had a fine, running fight among the barrels. Loved the barrel chase. Hated the spiders.
The elvish love triangle is boring, and surely directive from some studio suit. Legolas seems like a different character. Older and harder, though it is the better part of a century before the other movies. This is another way prequels (let’s call the Hobbit a series of prequels) are difficult to swallow.
I’m sure it abandoned Tolkien — I don’t care; I read the Hobbit years ago and found it tedious and not worth my time, feel free to leave now if this is what you judge people against. — but it also gives you Martin Freeman, who is better than you realize. And Smaug is a grand visual thing. It takes a lot to visually impress us in movies these days, but the dragon should.
I wanted Smaug to be Benedict Cumberbatch, but this is a dragon, and they’ve modulated the voice so much that it isn’t Cumberbatch, which is fine. I’m ready to be free of the mercurial dwarves.
But a good movie. It cost $8 per ticket. This was a matinee. Back in my day, and get off my lawn.
We had Mexican with our friend Sara, whom we have not seen in a long while. We had cookies after that. We watched a comedian perform on Netflix after that. It was all a very fine day.
Things to read … These first few are submitted without comment or, simply put, have a nice day:
Sometimes I think the people in Washington over-complicate things. (Which is a naive way of suggesting that they’re actually doing things without grand and sweeping ulterior motives, but we all know better.) So allow me to simplify this. Let’s keep the obligations we have to those with whom we’ve obligated ourselves. Sen. Jeff Sessions: Leave military retiree pay alone, close tax loophole for illegal immigrants:
Sessions said lawmakers should “scour the federal budget for other available savings,” before cutting veterans benefits.
“America’s service members have already sacrificed so much on our behalf and Congress should not put additional burdens on them even as it spares federal civilian workers from the same treatment,” Sessions said. “Removing this unbalanced treatment of our military retirees ought to be one of the key actions we should take before this legislation moves forward.
Disregarding veterans is no way to run a government. You could put a lot of things in as the subject of that sentence. You’d be right. I feel like this is one of the important ones.
Some of these I wouldn’t have put on such a list, but there are some real gems here: 54 Reasons to Love Photography in 2013. That will just make you want to click the shutter button a few hundred more times.
Speaking of photos, the next several days here, at least through Christmas, will likely be just that: snapshots. Come for the ornaments, and come back to see whatever surprises turn up.
