Playing the Game

It's football season.

Sigh.

Being a non-football fan in south Louisiana during football season is like being a non-gambler in a casino. Basically, you have no point. There is no reason for your existence. Why are you even here?

I should be used to this. Oh hell. I am used to this. The thing is, as used as I am to this, I should be better at this. I should be the world's foremost expert, frankly.

It's not just football. All of my life, I have walked out of step, never fit in, failed to find that common ground. And yet, I'm not weird. Truly. I'm just, I dunno, unfortunate. The first girl in the family, after five boys. An A student in a family of 'why-not-coast-by-with-Ds'. A humanist and pro-unionist surrounded by accountants and small business owners. By the time I was 5, I had embraced feminism (tho' I had no idea that was what it was called) and so guaranteed myself a life on the fringe of my immigrant subculture. By the time I was 14, I realized I was a progressive Democrat in a sea of rightwing Republicans. By the time I was 18, I knew I was a liberal Christian, at odds with the increasingly fundamentalist formulations of family and friends. A Chicagoan in every fiber of my being, I've ended up spending most of my adult life in the suburban Deep South. It's no coincidence, I do believe, that I feel most at home in England, an ipso facto foreign country.

So really, football season should just be same ol' same ol': I'm Here and the Rest of the World is Over There. And yet, it never gets easier: The fact that, come late August, I can no longer participate in or contribute to most general conversations in the supermarket check-out lane or in the church vestibule or in the departmental mailroom. That every time I turn around, the tv channel has been changed to one of a hundred football options (with the sound turned off, mind you--Keith truly makes an effort to respect my non-footballness, and I am grateful). That all the mannequins in the storefront windows suddenly sport purple and gold. That my students cannot be expected to focus in class on Mondays because they're rehashing Saturday's results and of course they can't be expected to show up on Fridays because they're preparing for the next day's game. That I can't even listen to my usual Saturday morning radio rhythm-and-blues buffet without having to endure more talk about "The Game." That I have to coordinate my Saturday shopping to coincide with the traffic patterns induced by said "Game." That even my nail lady can only talk football throughout the fall months.

By mid-October I feel like I'm in one of those old science fiction movies, where the heroine realizes that although everyone around her looks normal, they're actually creatures from another planet. I'm on my own in this town of lunatics, a city-wide insane asylum, yet I'm the one made to feel as if I'm crazy. Case in point: I know a lady, a respectable woman, who cannot pee if the LSU Tigers are playing that day. By late afternoon she's in actual pain but she cannot urinate until the game is over. I kid you not. And yet I'm considered the odd one.

No one else seems to notice that football subverts even the legendary Southern politeness. It's Sunday afternoon. We're sitting on a neighbor's porch, having drinks. "Did you see The Game?" asks my host. "Well, no--" reply I. "Boy, could you believe that pass/drive/tackle/ blahblahblah? I mean, I was saying, no way could they pull that one off, did ya think, and then," he's off and running, utterly oblivious to my muttered, "umm, no, no, didn't see that, didn't actually watch. . ."

Some day, I will snap. Instead of muttering quietly to myself, I will leap out of my seat and I will wrap my hands around my host's neck and I will thump his head against the concrete while shrieking, "NOOOOOO! I DID NOT SEE THE GAME! I do not--ever-- watch The Game! I . DO. NOT. CARE. ABOUT THE FRIGGIN' GAME!!!!" And when I am convicted for murder, folks will say, "Well, I always thought she was strange." "Mmm, hmm, I heard, once, she showed up for tailgating and she was wearing, can y'all believe it, a Chicago Cubs tee-shirt." "'Course, she was, you know, [whisper] from up North. . . "

Football season is such a lonely time.