Game Day

He walks alone

In a cold wind

Past buildings once fields.

He is not going to the game today.

The clouds are choked gray and the fog stays low and heavy in the dawn of this late autumnal morning.

He does not have anything to keep him warm.

He cannot churn up the coals thinking about a defensive scheme to get him out of this bitterness stinging his hands and chiseling at his face.

He would walk this way a little later on home game days.

Today he walks while the students are still sleeping and the news people are sipping the first cup of coffee.

He would walk down the hill towards the stadium. His office holds 60 years of work in wood, gold, silver. Work he struggled at and banged out and believed in.  Work he could not let go. His feet control him. Repeat it until it becomes part of you – muscle memory. The wind is at his back as it has been since he moved here. The fog hides a sleeping stadium. There is passion in steel. His feet move towards a place that no longer holds any present meaning.

He has no more office.  He does not want to be turned away. Old, useless man.

Has it only been two days? His body aches. His feet and hands are cold. He forgot gloves. She always places them out on the table near the door.

He will return home and learn to forget there is no game today for him.

He is gray haired and old and has regret. Heavy regret like the fog that comes and runs his nose. He pulls his hankie out.

It will be quiet now. All the students will go back to their studies.

The news vans will pull out of town and leave this bucolic region to the cows and last leaves before the snow falls and buries the place until late April.

Winters last forever in State College. Perhaps longer. She will be making coffee. She always gets up after he leaves but those are game days and he has no game today. She is good to him.

There will be no words. No inspiring speeches. The time has come for silence because he had no words when they were needed.

The fog still hides the buildings. The lamps turn off and he is an old man lost.

The game plan is.

He didn’t prepare for this one. He always prepared for games. He knows the defense and how his boys would stop the run.

He walks alone thinking of holes for players to run through and slashes opening up the middle and how he would like the shake the hands of the seniors.

But he has watched the farms get ready for winter. He was a few weeks or years of harvesting everything. The cows are far into the fog and he can’t smell them. He remembers when the smell of manure made him want to head back to Brooklyn. Only in early spring and the hottest morning of August does he remember that.

She is sitting down with coffee. He feels a bad cold coming on and his leg just won’t loosen up. He realizes he is lost and sees headlights.

She will have the cup for him. Today he will return.

He will talk of fog and this cold banging in his chest and wait for breakfast that will be warm reminding him of his brothers and brownstones and a city far away in time

and then he will go in and prepare for nothing else but waking up

the next morning

to walk alone.