A December to Remember

As I glanced at my "Blog Archive" after finishing my post yesterday, I realized that I've been blogging for almost five years now. If I blogged more than twice a year, I might actually have enough material for that memoir I'm going to write. The one where every chapter starts with a few lines from a country song.

Last night, as I sat musing at the end of a long and complicated week, I found myself wishing that I had a "prompt" to get me writing every day. The November of Thankfulness, had I thought of it soon enough, might have worked well to do just that. Starting it a whole month after the fact, however, seemed like even more of a cop-out than being a only few days late to the party.

The answer came, of course, from ESPN. As a member of the rapidly-shrinking DVR-less minority, I am forced to suffer through commercials with my SportsCenter. Which means that I spend every December being repeatedly reminded that every woman who is not yet married (with the notable exception of myself) is about to receive a sparkling surprise and every married woman will soon be peering out the window to find an oversized red bow on wheels parked in the driveway. I console myself with imagining that the squeals of joy are actually cries of dismay when the wife that discovers that the husband has traded in her trusty old reliable roadster for something with half the gas mileage and twice the insurance premiums, and stuck her with a $500 a month car payment to boot. Who, me, cynical? Not at all. But I digress...

So to get back to the point, at least once every evening I find myself stuck watching an ad for the "December to Remember Sales Event," during which men with more money than good sense can purchase bow-bedecked luxury sedans for their doting wives. And from this inspiration, a prompt was born.

So today I will -- I hope -- begin a month of writing each day about memories. Some significant, some humorous, some that maybe I would prefer to forget, but all part of the past that has brought me here.

I'm writing this post in the bar area of one of my favorite Italian restaurants, with one eye on the Alabama-Georgia game and one ear on the conversations of the waiters who keep drifting by to check out the score. College football has never been a huge part of my life, which is a comment akin to blasphemy here in the South, but I'm a long-suffering Philadelphia Eagles fan. Apparently I'm among friends, a fact that has just come to light as the bartender (who I overheard a few minutes ago mention that he was born in the same year that "Cheers" went off the air) and I shared a lament over the laundry list of injuries that have plagued us this year.

I could continue this post with a laundry list of memories about my football-watching exploits, from the time I almost started a bar fight with a 49ers fan in Omaha over a game that we ultimately lost, to the slightly more romantic road trip that I took to Nashville for a game that we lost, to my first game at the Linc -- in a luxury box, no less -- which we, imagine that, also lost. But I think I'll just end here and let one of these college football fans have my seat.