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.