When I was young, I used to dream about how I might spend Labor Days in the future and desperately wished that it might involve going to Michael’s to buy craft supplies to make a Texas Travel brochure for my daughter’s Texas History class. I’m happy to report that dreams do come true because that’s how I spent the day and it was everything I imagined it would be. I mean why would you want to spend the day at the pool or the lake when you have the option to stand in a long line at a craft store and then have the extraordinarily relaxing experience of listening to your daughter sigh loudly as she glues tidbits about various Texas landmarks on a piece of construction paper?
Maybe you can sense some sarcasm.
It actually was a fairly low key weekend around here. Caroline was playing in a soccer tournament in Plano so she and P spent Friday through Sunday in Dallas while I stayed home with the dogs. We’d tried to figure out a way we could all go, but since we now have the responsibility of our Community Worship Service one of us needs to be here every Sunday and it just didn’t make sense for me to go all the way to Dallas to watch what would have essentially been one soccer game.
So things around here were quiet until Saturday night when this happened.
I went over to Gulley’s to watch the Aggies because that’s what we do. And in the words of one of our other friends, we have our Aggie watching party on “LOCKDOWN”. This essentially means that there is only a very small, select group of people that we can be with while we watch an Aggie game. Largely because we are not fit for public consumption. We are not capable of making polite small talk while the Aggies are playing, mainly because there’s a better than 94% chance we will be ignoring everything a person says while we watch the game instead and might interrupt with “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, SPAV? WHO TRIES THAT SAME TIRED PLAY THREE DIFFERENT TIMES ON THE GOAL LINE? PUT THAT PLAY IN THE SCRAP HEAP!”
But other than that, we are perfectly lovely and sane.
Unless it turns out that Coach Chavis is all he was cracked up to be and has managed to create a defense that looks dangerously close to being the return of our beloved Wrecking Crew. Then we might lose our minds. One of Gulley’s husband’s old friends was there watching with us because he shares our intensity and crazy and he had to keep apologizing to the kids for his outbursts. “Sorry kids! Uncle Joe Joe just gets really excited.”
By the time I got home after the game was over I was so wound up that I had no choice but to watch all the various news coverage of the game and read all the message boards and watch all the video clips.
And for all my talk about how I wasn’t going to get overly excited if we beat Arizona State because we beat South Carolina last year and it didn’t end up meaning anything in the long run, I’m in full drink the maroon kool-aid, buy tickets to the SEC championship game, optimism reigns supreme mode. But this is the beauty of college football season, you can be on cloud nine one weekend and tweeting about your team being a dumpster fire the next.
It’s my favorite time of the whole year.
I spoke at Community Worship on Sunday morning and refrained from making any part of my talk about Aggie football and instead spoke about how God meets us in the middle places of our life. And then I came home and took a delightful Sunday afternoon nap before my people got home around four. Caroline was so tired that she almost cried when she had to walk up the steps to get in our backyard. It only took twelve years to figure out a way to wear that child out, but apparently it involves a whole lot of soccer in the 100 degree heat, getting up at 5:45 a.m. and a road trip to and from Dallas.
And that brings us to Labor Day when all my Texas History brochure dreams came true. Truly giving new meaning and significance to the term “Labor Day”.
***Quick note: Several of you have emailed to let me know you’re not receiving my blog posts through your email subscription right now. I’m not sure what is going on but we are working on it. And by we, I mean that the nice people I pay to help this site run smoothly are figuring it out. Stay tuned.
***Of course I realize that if you aren’t receiving my blog through email then you may never get this message and the whole point is moo. It’s a cow’s opinion and it doesn’t matter.