You aren't going to believe what happened to me last week. No way. It's amazing news.
I'm still a little stunned myself. I haven't told anybody yet. Not even my wife, whom I usually tell everything to.
Not yet, but I will. You, my friends, will get a world exclusive a few lines from now.
But first ...
****
As I started suspecting a few weeks ago, I will indeed be making a long, long trip out of town for Thanksgiving Day. And it won't be to visit relatives or friends.
For the sixth consecutive year, one of our football teams has made its way all the way to the state championship game. They clinched it with a win at the dome in Marquette on Saturday, Nov. 21. The title game is at Ford Field in downtown Detroit on Friday, with a kickoff at 9 a.m. Central Time. (It's 10 a.m. down there.)
The team had looked like it would be defeated in the first weeks of the playoffs. But they won against two strong teams and then dominated their regional opponent and, on Saturday, their opponent in the state semifinal game. Next stop: Detroit.
So much for my plans for visiting friends this week and having a quiet Thanksgiving dinner at home (for the first time since 2003). And the funny thing is, 2009 was supposed to be the "regrouping" year for our team, the one when the players acquire varsity experience, take a few lumps, exit the tourney early and get to do some deer hunting. But everyone has matured faster than expected, the team improved markedly during the season. And the 2010 team? It's really supposed to be something. Who knows how many more Thanksgivings I will spend down there?
I'm going to go down there--I just don't know how yet. Three options. Last year, for the first time, I was able to ride on the team bus--experience the entire week with the team. They sent two buses down to Detroit. This year, due to budget cuts, they're just sending one team bus, and odds are 99:1 against me riding along.
Option two is the fan bus, if there is one. Here's what that would be like: ride in the bus for 10 hours or so, climb out to watch the game (about 2 1/2 hours), then climb back on the bus for the 10-hour drive home. Remember to pack along the Tylenol!
Option three is the way I have gone almost every year: Driving down there myself, in my own car. Coincidence or not, I bought new tires a week or two ago, so that part should be OK. The advantage of that is that I can visit my older son (who visited here last week) and have time to talk with him. If I go there by myself, we can really talk. If my wife and/or son invite themselves along, there is almost never time or privacy for that. So I think you know what I would prefer.
In past years, we have watched the Lions game on TV, then watched a movie, or else the kids played some games. Once or twice, we have all gone across the river into Canada, to spend a few loonies--Canada's Thanksgiving Day is in October, so Thursday is an ordinary working day there, and all the stores and restaurants will be open. If we do that, though, we to take our passport cards along, and David doesn't have one.
No matter what happens, I am on the road by 7 a.m. Friday, heading downtown to the Ford Field parking lots. After the game and the press conferences, I start the 10-hour drive home. We have had very mild weather for November--some snow is supposed to move in this week, but the ground is not frozen, the lakes are fairly warm, so everything should melt quickly and roads should be no worse than wet.
Saturday, I try to gather my thoughts together for the article about what happened. It's a long, difficult time. What I really need to do over these next few days is get some extra rest--It's going to be a busy week.
****
Back to the main topic: my surprise. It's about an old girlfriend who has found me. She is delighted that she has. So am I.
She was my girlfriend before N was. And B. And S. And even my wife. And I have never seen her in person.
Our history dates back nearly 45 years, when I was in high school. I was taking German in high school (in suburban Milwaukee), and we were told that if we wanted to, we could write to a penpal in West Germany. I wanted to try it, and that is how I started writing to a girl named Martina. We wrote on this onion-skin paper, trying out our German and English on each other, folded it up booklike, put it in thin envelopes with red and blue diamonds on the edges (to indicate air mail), put extra postage on it and mailed it.
We wrote about ... I don't know. This and that. Whatever teenagers talked about during the mid 1960s. Popular music, of course--the Beatles were big on both sides of the Atlantic, along with the other British groups. I was a Rolling Stones fan even then, and the Beatles were a close second. She liked the Beatles most, and when their "Help!" soundtrack record album came out, I scrounged up enough money to buy a copy and mail it to her. That cost some money. I think my dad cut out a thin piece of plywood to keep it from getting smashed--evidently it worked.
We wrote for about two years. Then ... I don't remember. Either she graduated from her school or I did from mine. Anyway, life intervened, and we stopped writing each other. Kids, you know. They have the attention span of a fruit fly.
But I remembered her, her name, the city where she lived ... and when a German woman named Martina contacted me via Facebook last Friday, it awoke those memories of a Martina from long ago. I asked if she is the same Martina L. who lived in R. ... and she said she is.
Today she is a "Chefsekret�rin bei einem Strafverteidiger" (chief secretary of a defense attorney), is married (second marriage) and has a son and granddaughter. Her Facebook profile says her favorite quotation is "Vergangene Tage, nicht weinen, dass sie vor�ber, l�cheln, dass sie gewesen."
Literal translation: "Past days, don't cry that they are over; smile that they happened." A pretty good philosophy on life, I think.
All that happened out of the blue. So now I am trying to remember how to speak and write German, what the different words mean, the rules on word order and word endings and umlauts and genders and cases and all that stuff. I haven't studied German for over 40 years. So among the things I will look for while downstate this week will be ... a good German language guide and dictionary.
Wow. Amazing.
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