My Jay Babies

Tonight was the first game of the KU football season, holla!! And we won 49-3, holla holla!! Well in honor of my boys, I've decided to post an essay I wrote one year ago, on the weekend of the first game of last season. Enjoy:

I really wanted to be in Lawrence tonight. Tonight was the first game of KU’s football season. I am among the family of people who are, according to the saying, “Kansans by birth, Jayhawks by the grace of God.” Let’s just say my mama raised me right. She’s a KU alum, and while my dad’s an Iowa State Cyclone, let’s be honest, KU has superior athletics by far. So dad has humbly bowed out all these years and, bless his heart, he even cheered for the Hawks last year when they played ISU because the Jayhawks were having such a miracle season. Plus, well, my brothers and I have been raised in Kansas, so it just makes sense.

Last year I was a graduate student for a semester at KU. My parents and I went to a game, and the day before the game I ran into an old friend of mine from undergrad (i.e., attractive male) who was doing his graduate studies at KU as well, and we invited him along. To my delight, he accepted our invitation, and also brought along his roommate to the game, another attractive male. It was a fantastic evening. We started at “The Wheel,” a historic bar in Lawrence where my parents used to date 30 some years ago. While we were sitting inside, eating our delicious pizza with Coors Light, Dad and attractive male #1 were in conversation, and my mom leaned over to me, pointed to a platform in the corner and said, “your aunt Jill danced up there once.” I just don’t receive those kinds of factual tidbits at any given moment in my life. Just one of the reasons why that day is stored so fondly in my memory.

The Jayhawks were undefeated at this early point in their season, which was exciting in itself, and little did we know that we would go on to be (almost) undefeated (due to a loss against a team that I do not care to speak of) that season, something unheard of for our beloved football boys. We stomped all over Florida International that night. There was a 100-yd runback for a touchdown by Akib Talib. Dad joined in with the college kids in their chanting response to the refs’ bad calls: “bullshit, bullshit.” I learned to wave the wheat that night. I watched with wonderful enjoyment as my 56-year old mother chanted “Rock Chalk Jayhawk” and “Go! Fight! Win Jayhawks!” without a drop of hesitation, as if she never left the campus or her 21 year old life.

I ended up dating attractive male #2, which didn’t last too long in the end, but it gave me an added excuse to go visit attractive male #2 (and, let’s be honest, attractive male #1) as well as attend more games during Kansas’ glory season.

All this being said, you can see why I am nostalgic and aching for a piece of my past tonight. My family has since moved, so I am the only one of my tribe to locally represent the Hawks. Simply put, it’s lonely. I love football, I love my family, I love fall weather, I love ringing the bells with my family in the driveway every time the Jayhawks or the Chiefs get a touchdown. I love that in all of the homes we’ve ever lived in, our neighbors have never said anything to us about the bells. I presume this is because they find us, shall we say, intense, and are frightened of offending us and stirring us into some sort of defensive, football rage. I’m not sure what they think we would do. Ring the bells in their face? Perhaps they like the bell ringing and are afraid their comments would cause us to behave more politely and civilized, meaning the bells would cease to be rung. Yeah right. Like we would ever stop. But I digress.

The other thing about last year’s game was that aside from football season, my life was a huge mess. I was a big ball of anxiety. I was studying social work, participating in an internship, and spending all my spare time freaking out. For the first time in my life, I visited a counselor and took prescription anxiety medication. All of these things taught me a lot, made me stronger in the end, let me know that social work was not the field I should be in, brought me closer to my parents and my oldest brother Kelly, a mentor to me then and still today. The time I spent at Memorial stadium that fall, and in Lawrence, was some of the greatest peace I experienced the entire semester. It was my alternate universe, yet it was a real one, a tradition I had been a part of from a distance my whole life, cheering on the Jayhawks from whatever city we lived in, chanting “Rock Chalk Jayhawk” while yet in diapers. Therefore I could feel as if I was escaping, ignoring my reality for an afternoon, but simultaneously remain in real life, so that I was still being an adult and could actually shed some of the pain and anxiety of my life. However thin a layer that was shed, it was significant enough. In the movie Remember the Titans, Coach Herman Boone walks out onto the empty football field in the quiet night, with the flood lights filling the stadium, and he tells his assistant coach, “this is my sanctuary.” That’s what Kansas football was to me last year. My sanctuary.

Now, a year later, my life has its own new set of anxieties, fears, frustrations, angers, sadnesses, confusions. I have missed my closest friends and family a lot lately, not just because I am without them emotionally, but because I am on my own for the first time in life and I would like some help. I just don’t feel quite right asking my roommate to pick up some cat litter for the animal who worships me but who won’t come near her. Just once I would like to have clean underwear just show up in my bedroom again, because Mom did a load of laundry. All this gets me thinking about a mate, who I do not want yet, I know this full well, but I am just reaffirmed in my need for a long term husband, eventually, and such musing sets me off in a tailspsin of thought. I think you get the picture.

So tonight I wanted to be in Lawrence not just for the fun of it all, for the smell of the transitional summer-to-fall air, for the sounds of bodies crashing together on the field (strange that as a pacifist I feel that way, but I used to go on walks in college by the football field during practice just to hear the sound of their helmets and pads crashing together. I don't like the sound for its violent connotations, but just aesthetically and for the game it represents, my favorite game. Also, they have pads and helmets on, they're safe, so I'm not a total freak). I wanted to pay tribute to those boys on the field, to the campus of KU, to the attractive male students who were there last year and who will always fill the sidewalks of Lawrence (even though I'll eventually be too old to date them), to the game of football, to community, to tradition. Who knows what the football players think when they hear the crazy roar of the crowd. Aside from understanding that we are impressed by their talent and excited by the thought of a win, I don’t know if they realize that some of us have deeper emotions behind our applause. I’m not even sure most of the fans realize it.

It’s like when you watch a chick flick. You think you feel happy when the couple in a movie gets together, but if you’re a single person watching that film, you’re definitely sad and jealous too. You might be optimistic, hopeful for your future with your heart in the right place, but that’s not the point. I’ve made people angry before for suggesting that they are feeling mixed emotions at the end of films like that. Perhaps I’m wrong for assuming such feelings to be present in everyone, but they certainly exist, whether universal or not.

I know that some people in football stands have very clear emotional ties to the game they are watching, have a concrete sporting past that they can point to, but I think the majority of us are experiencing a stirring that we are not quite fully aware of, something stronger than can be perceived by our own conscious imagination. I think that’s why some of us cry when we lose a really big game. If it were really “just a game” (which, yes, I fully believe and understand that it is, on some level, just a game, but that is another essay for another time), we wouldn’t be so moved to tears.

While generally trying to be different in life, I usually avoid asserting myself as a member of any sort of group or club or following. The swell in my breast that I feel during football games, however, humbles me to a realization that I am a part of a group, a team. I’m a part of KU, of Kansas, of football, of the human race. I am vulnerable, I am sad when I can’t be in Lawrence when I want to be, I can’t be in love when I want to be, I can’t have my family by my side every day, I have to trudge through bad jobs on my way to better ones. It’s a good thing to be part of a team. It means I’m not alone. I can’t even pretend I would survive on my own, so I might as well learn to enjoy a healthy dose of conformity, or whatever it is, for lack of a better term. I have help. I have surrogate families. I have neighbors who offer me a beer when I walk in the door, and keep me for dinner and an episode of sci-fi television, which I would otherwise never watch nor enjoy, but with them, it becomes enjoyable.

So to all this I say, despite my chance to be in Lawrence tonight, go team. GO HAWKS! Thank you for explaining love in a language without words. Albeit a somewhat violent language…but love all the same.