Wednesday, July 26, 2017

TRADITIONS

My mother asked me if I remembered
The time we got drunk and cheered for the Cowboys.

“It was our first playoff without Staubach” said I 
“I cooked a roast, there was beer in the fridge” said she. 
But there hadn’t been enough beer for a game that close. 
I went to the corner store at halftime.


By the time the fourth quarter started we were down 
Fourteen points with two beers each left.
 How could I forget the way that she howled 
The way that I screamed and danced 
When Pearson put us ahead with forty three seconds left?


We didn’t make a tradition of it, 
The way we made a tradition of playing 
“BugBite” when I was a boy 
The way we sat together at church, 
Me holding the hymnal 
While she sang In The Garden 
Saturday night and Chicken Spaghetti 
Roast beef with homemade giant bread 
Shopping for school clothes 
Meeting the new girlfriend 
The way she called me Stephen when I was in trouble- 
“Wait till your father gets home”- 
And Stevie when I was not. 
We didn’t make a tradition of getting drunk,
 Mom and I, 
(I wish that we had) 
And I‘d never heard her howl like that. 
There was no way of knowing 
Mom would die a few years later. 

The summer had been hot, 
Now the January days were crisp and blue, 
We had no way of knowing that Danny White
Would take us to 3 NFC championships in a row 
And lose them all.


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