pressure

The pressure of the Super Bowl! If the world around you is watching The Game and you’re not, shouldn’t you be doing something that benefits from the sudden quiet as the game begins? The world’s moved indoors, huddled, with bowls of chips and chicken wings and cold six packs of locally brewed beer. And where are you, oh football detractor? Are you skiing the empty trails? No? Not that? (No snow.) Are you at the cinema, enjoying great seats at movies that tonight aren’t packing a crowd? Not that either?

In fact, the day is unusual, even as, by the end of the game, it turns very ordinary.

Brunch. There is a birthday brunch for a friend. Downtown. Can’t think when I last ate brunch downtown. And, since it is just a smidgen above freezing and all the slush has long trickled off, I can bike.

Cold, but good for the soul.







Brunch is with the Younger Set. Meaning – the small pool of friends that I sometimes see even as they’re all half my age (or thereabouts).






They’re hearty eaters – not yet at the wake up age where food becomes the enemy. We met at Samba Grill – Madison’s great place for buffet salads and endless meats carved at your table. It is the perfect place to go without Ed. Beef? You have beef? Layer it on!

Is it appropriate to say that one can pig out on cow?


I bike home.


 


Ed is in a reclining mood and I spend the rest of the day attending to chores and phone calls with various parental figures.

In the evening Ed asks – want to go to Dane Brewery?

We never eat out. Ever. And so I don’t turn down the invitation because I can never tell if there’ll be another.

Are you sure it wont be packed? Because of the Super Bowl?

Ed calls. In fact, it’s a quiet night there.

We sit at the bar, eat, drink, with one eye to the screen (especially when the ads come on) and the other – buried in the newspaper. Comics. Ed’s reading comics.

I feel we should not be reading during our rare dinner out.

What’d you say gorgeous?

I shrug and pick up a section of the paper while burly players topple each other and the clock moves slowly towards halftime.

And then we go home.