I had a mid-day meeting with students about a project in my online class. They were delightful and are prepared. They were also kind enough to indulge what, I am sure, sounded like an end-of-the-year ramble or two on my part.
This mysteriously appeared overnight from the office.
That wasn’t there last Thursday. Or last Friday. Or Monday. Or yesterday. I know because I was there each of those days, and I considered that very wall. It is conspicuous in its usual blankness. But, now, that sign.
Local lore has it that the campus spirits put it up, each term, just before commencement. The legyou listen carend is that the ghosts of old professors always walk with the graduates. If you listen carefully, you can hear their rustling, dusty robes.
Between the student group meeting and the next meeting I started spreading that story that I just made up. Maybe it’ll gain some traction. Especially if no one ever sees that sign come and go.
There was also a faculty meeting today. These are the things we know. These are the things we don’t know. Here is a brief recounting of some other meetings. And here are the next meetings you are encouraged to attend, including one next week!
Anyway, back to grading. The students in my online class, Social Media Strategies, are preparing for their final submission for the term. It is a visual presentation of a social media plan they’ve been working on all semester. Each group has a local non-profit they’ve been observing, and our assignments have grown through there. Now, a little extra feedback on their penultimate assignment may help them prepare that presentation.
But only if i can get that feedback to them.
The semester’s first final, meanwhile, will be turned in tomorrow.
photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Flowers don’t wilt like they used to 3 Dec 25
The weekend before last we went to a year-end party for the tri club that my lovely bride is a member and captain of. It was a nice affair, private rooms at a local restaurant. Big tables. Fixed menus. Only one small speech. An entertaining slide show. Good company. I met a guy who was car shopping. Big NFL guy. There was another gentleman at our table who has worked the chain gang for local college football games for decades. He retired from the job, which he did for free all of those years, but he was so good they brought him back this year. There was a couple who had one daughter in college and another on a travel cheer team. And these are the people you just want to ask what they do for a living, because it all sounds outrageously expensive. There was another couple I’ve met before at our table too. Anyway, it was all delightful.
At the end of the night, we took home one of the small bouquets of flowers from one of the tables. It sat, for a few days, on the bookcases in the library. And then Poseidon, who is the reason we can’t have nice things, found them.
I moved them, when he wasn’t paying attention, to an even higher spot. He found them immediately.
So now we’re playing keep away from the ruiner of iron and the ruster of stone.
They’re doing amazing things with cut flowers these days. This is now, what … 11 days or so since we took them. Still in fine shape.
I’m planning on keeping them around for a while. Changing flowers fit a certain melancholy mood, but I find the way the colors change, and don’t, to be fascinating.
Now we just have to keep the cat distracted.
Anyway, back to work. I have to finish a final tonight. It’ll be available to students tomorrow. My online class is rushing in toward their final group projects, and that means a lot of back-end of the semester work is flooding in. And we’re going to wrap up some talk about scandals in org comm tomorrow. But, in criticism, we’re watching a documentary. It will center on a fair amount of scandal, too, as timing would have it. Should be a lot of fun!
I tried to get this published elsewhere, but failed. I still like it. I’m sharing it here.
We fall in love for a lot of reasons.
I recently asked a bunch of people to tell me about a big sports event they participated in, watched in the stands, or even on TV. You could group their specific answers into a few categories, pure sport, inspiration, and family.
In no particular order …
Someone mentioned the 2021 James Madison-Oklahoma softball game. The Sooners were on their way to becoming the irresistible force in collegiate softball, and JMU played the underdog role to perfection. The two sides faced off three times in the Women’s College World Series.
College softball is perfectly packaged as a televised sport, and that series proved it. The pace is fast, the game moves quickly and the athletes are incredible.
Someone else recalled the 2017 Minnesota Vikings playoff miracle as the moment he became a football fan. Not a Vikings fan, but a football fan, because the play showed him that anything is possible.
And Joe Buck’s “DIGGS!” will give you a little pep, even when you know what’s coming.
A couple of people talked about their own personal moments, being on the field when a championship goal was scored, winning a state championship in track and field, being a part of a David vs. Goliath style upset … I asked them what it’s like to be a momentary folk hero. It must be pretty good, humility wouldn’t let them say so, but the little smiles gave them away.
Ricky Pearsall had a triumph of the human spirit last year. Robbed and shot, he was on the field for the 49ers less than two months later. It’s easy to see why someone might pick that game, especially.
Some of the memories people shared were straight up sports moments, as they should be. Giancarlo Stanton digging in with the bases loaded and delivering, just like every kid that’s ever picked up a bat has imagined, was one such sports memory.
Others were personal. One recalled going to the Yankees Old-Timers Day with his grandfather, seeing some of the greats on the field, and meeting some of the legends in the stands. And to do that with your grandfather … it’s a lifetime highlight. I hope if someone asks him that question one day, it makes the short list.
In every generation, in every Olympics, we are reminded that sport is about our future. Someone recalled watching the 2008 Beijing Games, being inspired by a 14-year-old Tom Daley and becoming a diver, too. I asked, springboard or platform? This is how young that child was when inspiration struck: My mom wouldn’t let me dive off the platform. Moms are moms, and sometimes a mom’s fear overrules the drama of athletic feats and stories well told.
While Daley towered above us, balancing on the edge of cement structures, we were also all looking up as Kawhi Leonard bounced … and bounced … and bounced a ball all over a forgiving Toronto rim. Two people mentioned this one.
Drama is why we keep coming back, no? This year’s 4 Nations Face-Off and basically the entire 2012 NHL Stanley Cup playoffs were mentioned as two great examples of peak hockey.
Some moments just live on the circumstance and the visuals they give us. Maybe that is a part of what we want fandom, at our most romantic, to give us. Like when Bryce Harper delivered “the swing of his life” against the Padres’ Robert Suárez, who saw his ball sent to left-center, and the Phillies saw their season continue into the World Series. Or perhaps Saquon Barkley doing any number of Saquon Barkley things. He comes up a lot with this question right now, as you might imagine. The greats always do when you ask a question like that. Tom Brady and his many rings, Lebron James in Miami, women’s gymnastics at the 2024 when Simone Biles and Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles and Sunisa Lee and Hezly Rivera won gold, all of them no doubt inspiring another generation of talent to follow them.
Early impressions are lasting ones. We are so often fans of teams or players because we either grew up in a broadcast radius, our folks liked them, or they were at their peak when we were coming to fall in love with the sport. It was no different for one person who told about his introduction to the Australian Grand Prix because it roared by his neighborhood a decade-and-a-half ago. There was also the guy who smiled through a memory of going to see the Pittsburgh Steelers’ training camp to meet his heroes, because Mom and Dad made it happen. Similarly, another watched Tiger Woods make his improbable run in 2019 with his grandfather. I wish the older man had been in the room, so I could have also asked him what he thought about that moment with his boy.
It is easy to see how sport can reflect us socially or culturally. We bring a lot of reasons and a history of our own to these things. We put a lot into it. Sometimes we must explain the context of a particular event to help others truly appreciate a memorable moment. It is much easier to explain how they resonate on a personal level. The great plays and best outcomes — the swing, the stick, the deep bomb, the dagger, the buzzer beater, a woman runs fast, a man dives, an incredible backhand, a preternatural putt, a fine day in the sun, a long leisurely afternoon in the autumn shade, the fabled pimento cheese sandwich, the roar of crowds, the improbable post-season runs, high-fiving strangers — really, they’re all just permission, some of the world’s most ridiculous permissions, to fall in love with these silly things.
May we carry them forever.
What’s the best sports play or event you saw live? Why does it stick with you?
I tried to get this published elsewhere, but failed. I still like it. I’m sharing it here.
It started, perhaps, as an in-joke. Maybe a brother-in-law joke. Or a t-shirt, one of those hastily designed gaudy numbers you see at fan shops. Maybe the whole thing began as a bit on talk radio. Sometimes the organic nature of jokes, or even traditions, can be lost to us without a very serious investigation.
This is not that.
I remember it all those ways. A guy said it on the air, off the cuff, from the hip, and wherever else one-liners fall from. I saw it on a shirt. And, if you’re there long enough, you live it, unfortunately.
You don’t book weddings on fall Saturdays in the South.
I have been to several Saturday weddings in the fall in the Deep South, an exercise designed to weigh your love of sport and the ol’ alma mater against these two people standing up there. Who are those people, anyway? Strangers, probably. I mean, do you know the bride’s third quarter rushing stats? Have you memorized the tackle for loss numbers the groom has put up this season? What even is the win-loss record of the person performing this ceremony, anyway? Alternatively, it could be a deliberate measure to keep attendance low.
I mention this because, of course, weddings are organized far in advance, but not farther out than the more-than-a-century long tradition of watching dudes hit each other as hard as they can for temporary victory and immortal glory. Long is the memory, short is the ceremony. The same is true for any given football play, but one of these two events lasts longer in the memory of most of us.
Authurine Babineaux and Merrick Bourgeois — two people we don’t know at all, but who prove my point nicely — were married on Saturday, October 31st in 1959 in Cankton, Louisiana, right there at St. John Berchman Catholic Church. The writeup in the paper, as was the custom, describes the bride’s dress and what her attendant was wearing. There’s a photo with the notice, the image has gone fuzzy with digitization, but the new Authurine Bourgeois looks beautiful. The groom is wearing a white jacket. They had a little reception in the cafeteria of the school they both attended. Maybe they met there. Maybe they hit it off there. We don’t know. We do know there was a four-layer cake. We don’t know when the celebration ended, or if they were able to catch Billy Cannon’s immediately legendary punt return.
There are more than 2,000 returns for “married Oct 31” in the 1959 Louisiana newspapers. And some of, most of, or, perish the thought, all of those people who attended missed Billy Cannon’s Halloween Run at Death Valley. But which did they talk about more, as the years passed?
My first fall wedding on a Saturday in the South was in 1993. It was November 20th. It was 11th ranked Alabama at number 6 Auburn. It was the Iron Bowl.
It was a wedding in someone’s home. And they chose to do this event during the football game.
Perhaps there was some other event scheduled in the living room in the next hour.
Oh, the service was lovely, marred only by my running up and down the hall, getting scoring updates from the radio from the bedroom where the groom had previously been getting ready. “Does anyone have a reason these too should not be wed? And what is the score, young man?” Even then, as a young football fan, I wanted to share the news, and that news was the game and newly emerged folk heroes.
Auburn won that game 22-14. The Tigers were on probation that year: no bowls and no TV. Some entrepreneurial outfit sold Radio National Championship bumper stickers. They were everywhere for a time.
That house, where the wedding was, was full of people. I wonder which event is more memorable all these years later.
In October of 2012, my wife and I (who were married in the summer, thank you very much) attended a wedding that was scheduled on the Third Saturday in October. In the South, you capitalize it just like that. The Third Saturday in October. This is the Alabama-Tennessee game, a joyous collision that seriously impacts commerce in two states. Alabama being atop the polls and facing a heated rival probably hampered the wedding’s turnout. There were some other big games with implications that day third-ranked Florida was taking on ninth-ranked South Carolina, number six LSU had Texas A&M, ranked as the 20th best team in the land.
Why, I asked the bride, beforehand, did you choose this time of year? This date? She attended a huge football school. As did her brother and her mother and her father before her. As did everyone up and down her family tree. As did her husband.
She offered that the weather is too unpredictable in the spring. (It is not.) And that there would be TVs at the reception. (There were not.) It was a fine wedding. I remember there was a bar at the reception – but no TVs with games. On the bar were little chalkboards which told you the preferred drinks of the bride and groom, so you could order the same and be just like them. I don’t remember her choice, but the groom’s drink was rum and Coke.
You don’t have to ask yourself where he was on the idea of a Saturday wedding in the fall.
A few years later, in 2016, we attended a wedding in Tennessee. One of those where the bride and groom had reserved a beautiful chapel and everyone looked terrific, and every single person was in a festive mood. It was a mild October day. I was just getting over a cold and had a terrible coughing fit during the middle of the service. I left so as not to interrupt the beautiful ceremony.
I regained my composure but couldn’t get back to my seat without causing another scene, so I eased up the side of the chapel, and stood along the wall behind these guys.
He was anxious about the event; the game I mean. That installment of the Tennessee-Georgia series turned out to have one of the wildest finishes in the history of the sport. Those border rivalries are always tense, taut, and played close to the rented tuxedo vest.
The young couple got married and we gathered outside for the ceremonial send off. The bride and groom ran through the gathered loved ones and into the waiting car. That’s when the bomb was thrown, and the subsequent Hail Mary.
And that’s when this grown man, the guy above, a pillar of his community, a member of the local education board who was eager to see off a loved one started doing chest slides in the lawn in front of the chapel. The bride was beautiful. The bride was upstaged.
This isn’t about me, but that would become one of my bigger moments on social media. All the right people and outlets amplified the post and eventually it got back to the guy above, a person I did not know. I thought he might be angry that I’d outted him in profile. He thought it was hilarious. I assume that’s because his team won.
And that’s one of the risks you take with a wedding during football season. What happens if the wrong team wins. Now who has a sour taste in their mouth about your wedding day? Your guests? Your partner? Your parents? You?
“But, dear writer,” you may say, “this is not my concern. I am not in the South. I will not be wed in the South. I live here, in the world wide web.”
Fair enough, bride-elect or bridegroom-elect, but consider, that sport is part of culture. We, being social creatures, export the best parts of our culture. This, of course, is made that much easier – and each game made that much more important – because of the dazzling array of streaming and cable packages available to us today. These, then, are cautionary tales for the entire country, certainly a lesson less and less limited to the South.
Put another way, UConn and UMass have been at it since the 19th century, that series is tied, and they have two contests coming up in the next few years. Don’t ask a Huskie or the Minutemen to choose.
If you’ve got love and joyous union on the mind and there are leaves and footballs in the air, consider your audience, and consider the spring or the summer. Green leaves also make for a beautiful photographic backdrop. Baseballs are flying around.
Your guests will likely be paying much more attention to you than a routine pop up to right.
Grading this afternoon. Class prep this afternoon. A bike ride this afternoon. We are getting down to that time of year where any of these rides could be the last nice ride of the year. I hate this feeling.
There will be a few weeks of colder riding. I have some nice long pants and I’ll put plastic bags on my socks to keep out the wind. I have full-finger gloves and a parachute windbreaker. All of that buys me about 20 degrees of toleration. Also, it slows me down considerably. I’m not sure which of those two things is what ultimately drives me inside. Maybe we’ll find out this year! (Sigh.)
But not today. Today was beautiful, and I had a pleasant 30-miler. Here are some of the sights.
I wonder what this building is for:
Whatever it is, those water spigots seem pretty important in the design.
What’s really fun here is that when you get to this spot you’ve been going up a fast false flat, but right at the top, the little hill actually challenges you just a bit, unless you’re really turning over the pedals. And then you see this power station. And then it flattens out and points down just a tiny bit. Free power!
This is work on a 160-year-old steeple. It started this week. The church thinks it’ll be complete before the weekend. There are maybe 400 people in that community, I wonder what it was like in the 1860s. More horses and carriages, I’d guess.
And now a story about the wind. On my last road, headed home, I had a notable right-to-left crosswind. Coming up was a side road that is a .82 mile segment on Strava. So I turned right and rode into the headwind, so I could turn around at the other end and race down it with a tailwind. On the way up, I was riding into the sun, and saw this tree.
At the other end of the road I turned right, just to add on another mile or so, and see some more sights. Like this combine.
And that same combine in profile.
As I turned around and headed for that segment, that wind, which I’d ridden in for about 80 minutes, absolutely disappeared. So I was about 15 seconds off my best time on that segment, which was recorded 53 weeks ago. But, hey, I’m still supposed to be taking it easy. (Until Friday.)
Back at home, a lovely sunset was underway.
Click to embiggen.
This evening, more class prep, and other class stuff. Tomorrow, class!
