mention of football now filled me with relief.
“Sure,” I said, feeling my shoulders relax a little as I glanced at him.
He reached out and turned on the radio, bypassing his usual country stations and punching the dial up to AM 1310, The Ticket, tuning in to an animated conversation about Rhodes and how disappointed everyone was in Austin. “Bronco fans are already rubbing their hands together for the first Saturday in December, when they will have the chance to avenge last season’s bitterly close loss to the Longhorns,” Bob Sturm mused.
“Sure hope so,” Coach talked back to the radio.
“With Rhodes on the field and Mrs. Carr up there on our case … we
can’t
lose.”
“Yeah. It’s the least the big guy upstairs can do for us,” he said, as I pictured Mrs. Carr, waving her teal pom-poms up in heaven.
The first photograph ever taken of Lucy and me together features the two of us lying side by side in a playpen, staring up at the ceiling with cross-eyed, blank baby expressions. We can’t be any older than two or three months, just two blobs—one with blond fuzz and blue eyes turned red by the flash (Lucy), the other with a thatch of dark hair and eyes (me). We were wearing matching onesies with the vintage Walker logo, a cursive
W
ensconced in a horseshoe. I couldn’t find the negative, and the only surviving copy was yellowed and ribbed from the sticky pages of one of my mother’s cheap albums that predated acid-free scrapbooking. So I carefully excavated it, took it to a specialty photography store, and had it restored, then framed—one for me, one for Lucy. I put mine on the mantel over the faux fireplace in my apartment, along with a handful of other momentous photos, and gave Lucy hers for her thirtieth birthday, a few weeks after mine. For a year or so, she kept hers in an equally prominent spot in the family room of the three-bedroom bungalow she and Neil had bought together. But I recently noticed that the frame had been demoted to a dresser in her guest bedroom and, more troublesome, our photo replaced by a professional shot of Caroline, standing alongside a white picket fence, wearing a pink monogrammed sundress.
When I called Lucy out on the unsentimental swap, she looked sheepish, a rare emotion for her. “We have far better pictures together. Like that one,” she said, pointing to a shot of the two of us, arm in arm, sporting buns and voluminous yellow tutus from our first ballet recital. “Besides,” she said, “don’t you hate the way they used us as props like that?”
By
they
I knew she meant my mother and her parents, all Walker grads and close friends during their school days. My father had even adopted the Broncos, because Williams, his alma mater, didn’t have much of a football team. As Lucy reassembled the frame, our photo on top again, she said, “I will never foist that rah-rah crap onto Caroline.Don’t you ever feel … brainwashed? Just sick of it all? The same thing—year in and year out?”
“No,” I said, thinking that summed it up, really. Lucy was absolutely correct in saying that our mothers used us as yet another way to highlight their love for Walker—right along with the flags and banners that they raised over their front porches on game day. But I could never understand why she had always seemed to resent our shared heritage, the way our friend Aubrey seemed to resent the red hair and freckles she inherited from her father’s side, and Pastor Wilson’s sons balked at Bible camp. Football was
our
religion, the very fabric of our hometown and state, and praying for the Broncos should have been effortless for her, a joyous experience from her sweet box seats on the fifty-yard line. She cared about her father’s team, of course, hoping that they’d win, disappointed when they didn’t. But she never truly devoted herself to it. Never became one of the faithful.
Coach Carr once explained it this way: I was born on February 22, 1980, within the
“Sure,” I said, feeling my shoulders relax a little as I glanced at him.
He reached out and turned on the radio, bypassing his usual country stations and punching the dial up to AM 1310, The Ticket, tuning in to an animated conversation about Rhodes and how disappointed everyone was in Austin. “Bronco fans are already rubbing their hands together for the first Saturday in December, when they will have the chance to avenge last season’s bitterly close loss to the Longhorns,” Bob Sturm mused.
“Sure hope so,” Coach talked back to the radio.
“With Rhodes on the field and Mrs. Carr up there on our case … we
can’t
lose.”
“Yeah. It’s the least the big guy upstairs can do for us,” he said, as I pictured Mrs. Carr, waving her teal pom-poms up in heaven.
The first photograph ever taken of Lucy and me together features the two of us lying side by side in a playpen, staring up at the ceiling with cross-eyed, blank baby expressions. We can’t be any older than two or three months, just two blobs—one with blond fuzz and blue eyes turned red by the flash (Lucy), the other with a thatch of dark hair and eyes (me). We were wearing matching onesies with the vintage Walker logo, a cursive
W
ensconced in a horseshoe. I couldn’t find the negative, and the only surviving copy was yellowed and ribbed from the sticky pages of one of my mother’s cheap albums that predated acid-free scrapbooking. So I carefully excavated it, took it to a specialty photography store, and had it restored, then framed—one for me, one for Lucy. I put mine on the mantel over the faux fireplace in my apartment, along with a handful of other momentous photos, and gave Lucy hers for her thirtieth birthday, a few weeks after mine. For a year or so, she kept hers in an equally prominent spot in the family room of the three-bedroom bungalow she and Neil had bought together. But I recently noticed that the frame had been demoted to a dresser in her guest bedroom and, more troublesome, our photo replaced by a professional shot of Caroline, standing alongside a white picket fence, wearing a pink monogrammed sundress.
When I called Lucy out on the unsentimental swap, she looked sheepish, a rare emotion for her. “We have far better pictures together. Like that one,” she said, pointing to a shot of the two of us, arm in arm, sporting buns and voluminous yellow tutus from our first ballet recital. “Besides,” she said, “don’t you hate the way they used us as props like that?”
By
they
I knew she meant my mother and her parents, all Walker grads and close friends during their school days. My father had even adopted the Broncos, because Williams, his alma mater, didn’t have much of a football team. As Lucy reassembled the frame, our photo on top again, she said, “I will never foist that rah-rah crap onto Caroline.Don’t you ever feel … brainwashed? Just sick of it all? The same thing—year in and year out?”
“No,” I said, thinking that summed it up, really. Lucy was absolutely correct in saying that our mothers used us as yet another way to highlight their love for Walker—right along with the flags and banners that they raised over their front porches on game day. But I could never understand why she had always seemed to resent our shared heritage, the way our friend Aubrey seemed to resent the red hair and freckles she inherited from her father’s side, and Pastor Wilson’s sons balked at Bible camp. Football was
our
religion, the very fabric of our hometown and state, and praying for the Broncos should have been effortless for her, a joyous experience from her sweet box seats on the fifty-yard line. She cared about her father’s team, of course, hoping that they’d win, disappointed when they didn’t. But she never truly devoted herself to it. Never became one of the faithful.
Coach Carr once explained it this way: I was born on February 22, 1980, within the
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