D-Day

"I always liked to hear about the old timers. Never missed a chance to do so."

-- Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

--

Friday night last night and my girlfriend was out of town.

I was running late on my way to the Esquire, the indie cinema a little south of the University. The move theater is on Ludlow, a Bohemian sector with an Indian sensibility, a place where you can see an indie flick, grab some high-quality Indian food, and walk into a shop whose windows are plastered with reminders that Americans killed Indians by the thousands. The Esquire's rustic marquee fits in perfectly. Clean-cut freshman students as well as loving old couples walk along this strip with equal pleasure. The students chatter and the old folks walk stroll in silence.

I parked three blocks away with two minutes to go and ran across a bank parking lot. Seems odd, running to stay on schedule with oneself. I wasn't meeting anyone there, but I ran anyway.

A five-person queue at the box office and I panted a little while I fished out my expired student ID and seven bucks. (Student discount is four bucks and Hillsdale doesn't put expiration dates on cards.) It was seven o'clock exactly, and I was about to be late.

When it was my turn, I stepped up. "One student ticket for Harvard Beats Yale 29-29."

--

Got past the concession lines for the 7:15 feature and made my way around drab-colored corners to the back of the theater, where the film was playing. As I walked in, I heard an old man's voice and thought, Shoot, it's started already. I even missed the previews. In I went and stood for a second, transfixed, confused, before I darted to the nearest chair and sat.

An old man in a dark blue blazer and tie with a gold pin in it stood in the center aisle, his hands on the two seats on either side of him. He leaned forward as he spoke. Scattered throughout the other seats sat three elderly couples, the men on the left, the women on the right with their arms gently resting in the crooks of their husbands' elbows.

I was the only person there under age 60.

The old man spoke and no movie showed on the dark screen behind him. "It was a tumultuous time," he said, a rough, huffy voice that surely once could scream but now was reduced to the low rumble of storms that had come, gone, and passed. "We all remember seeing Martin Luther King on TV; he was assassinated that year. In 1968. And I'll never forget where I was when I heard Bobby Kennedy was shot. Cleaning dishes at work, and one of the girl waiters came back into the kitchen and just yelled it out, 'Bobby Kennedy's just been shot!' And down in Miami and up in Chicago were the riots. So the nation was in confusion, all of us wondering where we stood on all these issues. But."

He looked behind him as if to make sure the movie screen was still there. "But at least at Hahvid, the one thing we all agreed on...was football." Some of the old timers and their wives chuckled at this. "Yale, too, from what I understand. We could all disagree on all these social, uh, political issues, but what did it matter when your quarterback was scrambling on the field? Nothing. Didn't matter. All you cared about--all you could care about--was the game. Always the game. This game in particular."

--

He talked for another twenty minutes and no one minded. He summarized the game upon which the documentary is based, and they seemed to know the story, anyway. I, who didn't know the story and wasn't there for the game--I, the only one in that place who didn't--listened, fascinated. It was like I had walked in on a private viewing for the Yale and Hahvid alums in Cincinnati.

After he finished, he sat, and the film began. It was surprising how low-budget and amateurish, frankly, the movie quality was, but it had the same nostalgic effect my own home videos have on me. Even though it's poor quality, at times embarrassingly so, the stories, the happenings on the weathered faces, the stories within the story, all work a sort of power over me. I get the feeling that I could have watched that movie forever, just listening to story after story.

Poets at open-mic nights say they are perpetuating the oral tradition of Homer. They slam their politics and anguish down while others sip coffee and snap. The young instructing the young.

That's not the oral tradition. This was. The old timers recalling names and information and history and making it all personal. Saying I-was-there, and this-meant-this. Amazing, that some of the men in the film looked so sad but could get so happy remembering the game, as if the last forty years of their lives had not lived up to that day, that in four decades nothing so miraculous as a lucky fumble had ever occurred. You can look right through the folds and wrinkles on the skin of their faces and see youngsters goofing off in old yearbooks, hear the jokes they told. The games they played and the legends they made.

George W. Bush getting arrested for leading the charge to tear down goal posts. Mythical quarterback names and sideline exchanges. Untimely injuries and the regret that followed--one man, confessing that he took So-and-So out of the game on purpose and tearing up from aged guilt. About a football game, all of it, just about a football game. But with sages and socrateses like these, no wonder a sports documentary can wax philosophical.

And Tommy Lee Jones among them. Talking about his Hahvid roommate, Al Gore, playing with brand-new touch-tone telephones. And Jones, just having done a film about the passing of time, the loosened grip of the old timers.

--

Today is D-Day and my girlfriend is still out of town.

At risk of sounding like a prosaic patriot, I have to write a simple thank-you to the old timers. We wouldn't be there without them.