where college football
deemed indispensable
as blood to the heart

Steve Hummer of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote in his article, Bad day for college football could reverberate in the South, of the overall awfulness of a fall with out college football.

He wrote, “That has to deeply, on a gut level, concern those who live in warmer latitudes and in like-named cities. Places where college football is deemed as indispensable to the fall as helium is to the party balloon or blood is to the heart.

Huge dominoes have fallen. Are they crashing our way?

Know that it’s really big news when the coronavirus pushes back football in the Big Ten and the Pac-12. But also understand that if those in the SEC and ACC eventually are compelled to do the same, that would represent a seismic culture shock. Then we’d be talking about a family crisis.

Of course they love their college football in those other precincts, too. But Southerners have elevated the sport to a way of life. Some would say we have made it too important, but lose a season’s worth of games and then tell me that it didn’t hurt.

Perspective isn’t absent here. We know it has been close to seven months since the first case of the coronavirus was confirmed in the U.S. and that we’ve lived through far graver things than the putting off of a little tackle football. This disease has picked and picked and picked at the fabric of life, badly fraying it. Denying a Southerner his or her college football would be just another colorful thread pulled loose. Just so happens to be a thread tied at one end to the soul of the South.“

Before I could get up on mount my high horse to shout out a loud OH BLESS YOUR HEART I ran across this in a letter by EB White.

He was writing in the spring of 1957 to a friend of his who had just experienced the death of his father.

Mr. White wrote a warm, chatty letter about what traits we inherit from our parents and what traits we pass along.

He added a postscript, “It is also necessary at this season to establish firm emotional connections with a major league ball club, to share in the agonies of their defeats and the ecstasies of their triumphs. Without these simple marriages, none of us could survive.“

If Mr. White could feel that way, can Mr. Hummer be far off.

I, for myself, am not in a position to argue.

memory takes me
from all my yesterdays to
all my tomorrows

So writes EB White in his essay, The Years of Wonder.

All the senses are gobsmacked by memory.

Sites.

Sounds.

Smells.

Touch and feel.

Tastes.

And the famous one way passage of time.

Small wonder that Christmas time can be an emotional baseball bat that wallops me upside the head and leaves me dazed and shaking.

For me, much of the Christmas experience is the look back from today.

The memories.

I can look at the books on my shelf and pick out one, no two, no three, too many to count, that were gifts and I remember when and where I got them and who gave them to me. My Mom and Dad. My Grandma and Grandpa Hendrickson are as much a part of this Christmas as the ones when I got those books as gifts years ago.

For me, much of the Christmas experience is the new memories I know that are as of yet unopened like the wrapped boxes under the tree. My grandchildren together and my children together.

What will I be remembering from this year?

For me, much of the Christmas experience is the look ahead that is possible through the salvation made possible by the Christ in Christmas.

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach says Ebenezer Scrooge.

And, Mr. Dickens writes of Scrooge, “and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!“

Michigan, West Coast
The long blue edge of summer
Soul claps hands and sings

I told someone that you can the boy out of the lake but you cannot take the lake out of the boy.

I was able to spend a couple of days along Michigan’s West Coast, the East Coast of Lake Michigan.

The smells.

The sounds.

The feel of the water, the sand and the air.

I could have been 10 years old, 59 years old or any age in between.

The long blue edge of summer.

Back in the day, 1982 to be precise, my Mom bought a vacation guide to the shorelines of Michigan.

Since we lived on the shore of Lake Michigan, just south of Grand Haven, in the Summertime, I had to ask why she thought we need a guidebook.

That is where that line comes from in today’s Haiku.

“I don’t know,” said my Mom, “I just liked the title, The long blue edge of summer.”

The last line is from Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

But then again, it is really not from Sailing to Byzantium.

Soul clap its hands and sing is a re-occurring theme throughout the writings of Jim Harrison which is where I first read it.

It shows up in several of Harrison’s writings along the lines of this passage from The Road Home.

The question, of course, is how you make your soul clap its hand and sing. My bones seemed to be built out of incomprehension.

All I can say is that I stood on the edge of Lake Michigan, along the long blue edge of summer, with my feet in the water and my soul clapped its hands and sang.

Usually the title of each day’s haiku is the first line.

But for the Landmark Bookstore Haiku Contest, the submissions needed a title so for this one I decided on, Once More to the Lake, which allows me to get in another EB White tribute.

W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

The road home by Jim Harrison -New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, ©1998. Fiction : English