Around here, these need little explanation.
One’s for a student, the two others for adults.
“There are only 10 or 12 left. You better hurry,” he said when I called Fitness First, one of only several places to get tickets to tonight’s season opener Tivy Antler football game. (Asking Siri “Where do I buy Tivy football tickets?” results in only the stadium and the high school as choices.)
It occurred to me last week that — in light of the kind of roadkill we have around here — we are perhaps one of the only high school football teams nationally which regularly kills its mascot. And that’s just driving home. That doesn’t include the weekend, when we grab the .30-06, sit on the commode, and rest the barrel over a windowsill as we wait for an unsuspecting buck out back the house. We’d fare slightly better if we were the Tivy Armadillos or the Tivy Skunks but, then again, we’d yet see our mascot regularly plastered near the double yellow line on Bandera Highway.
The student ticket, of course, is for our junior son; the middle son is at Texas Tech in Lubbock and has his school’s season opener tomorrow; the oldest is working full-time locally. He has struck and killed two mascots while driving home, and two more have run into his truck while it’s moving. He could care less whether we’re the “Antlers” or not; just so long as we’re not the Tivy Elephants.
It’s highly doubtful our junior son will sit with us. Now 16 and an upperclassman, his attitude alone needs its own section. Aside from too-many-Marvel-Avenger movies to count, I recall when the two older boys sat with me in 2006 at another sporting event. Through our church in Massachusetts, we had scored tickets to a NASCAR race in Loudon, New Hampshire. Ninety thousand people packed into the stands and another several thousand in RVs into the infield for the Sylvania 300. Of those 90-odd thousand, there were probably 4 attendees without tattoos, because my boys and I went with a tattoo-less friend, and my arm wasn’t inked until ~2008. We sat along Turn 3. My friend was a racing aficionado originally from Alabama, and a Jeff Gordon fan. We rented the boys, then 7 and 6, sound-blocking headsets, and we rented headphones that you could tune to the different drivers and pit crews. My friend taught me about a vehicle being “tight” or “loose,” when in my younger years those adjectives applied only to drinking behavior.
We saw three wrecks, none fatal. And that’s frankly what made it fun. The boys got scorched in the unshielded sun. Took us five hours to get out of the parking lot after the event.
At tonight’s 7:30pm kickoff, the air should be about 89 degrees, and humidity is currently 33%. I heard the head coach speak at Rotary Club a couple Wednesdays ago. Passionate guy. Has had great success here so far.
Long live the Antlers.
Biscuit Aisle 