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Sometimes my dreams bring me back to the town outside New York City where I grew up, and my teenage room comes back to me in dramatic detail. Sometimes I’m in the classroom teaching, as I do each day for a living during ten months of my waking hours, but it’s not the high school where I work; instead, it’s an amalgam of that place and my own high school, and the narrative can’t quite place me as either the teacher or the student, so I’m both, and I’m lousy at both, too.
Yet in this dream I retreat to an interior somewhere, and a woman dressed only in a football jersey comes up to me, approaching with the look of desire that takes me off guard. Thank goodness, it’s my wife.
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****
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But some things will never change, and it may be that my football team, my most magnificent obsession of all, is simply next on the execution list. It seems impossible to imagine, for nothing in my life as superseded the magnitude of being a New York Jets fan.
In waking life, I bring my wife coffee. She looks at me.
"What?" she asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
“OK,” she says, sitting up, taking a sip.
She waits. After all, I have to say it before it leaves my memory. “It’s just that I had a dream about you and I having sex.”
Another sip. “Oh that’s nice,” she says. If not in real life, then certainly in the murky one. “Did we enjoy ourselves?”
“Yes.”
More time elapses. The radio goes on. The college station plays insufferable and gentle folk music for the purpose of making its hung-over listeners more likely to contribute at pledge time. “It was interesting,” I said. “You were wearing….a…”
She nods. She guesses it without so much as a flinch. “A Jets jersey.”
“God, yes,” I say. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised that she’s not surprised. “How did you know?” I feign amazement at her powers of observation. “Did you hear me say something in my sleep?”
No, she shakes her head, staring straight ahead. “I just know you. That’s all.”
Of course she does. “Whose uniform was it?” my wife asks after a few more moments. “Was it Joe Namath’s?” she asks.
I shake my head. This will surprise her, at least. “No. Shafer Suggs. Number 23.”
“Who?”
“Number 23,” I repeat. “Shafer Suggs.”
She sips. “Who's he?” she asks.
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She is unimpressed with my mind’s Encyclopedia of Nonsense. The facts are usually all she wants. Unlike me, she has no place in her heart for nostalgia. She entertains the obscurity of the dream for a moment and then smiles at her own association.
“That’s the Patriots’ stadium,” she said. "Isn't it?"
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Jim the Jock. It turns out she was the kind of girl who wore her boyfriend’s football jacket. I clarify for her, though she won’t respond.
“The final score of that game of that 1981 game of which you speak,” I say, “was a blowout."
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Turns out that in this sense, she is nostalgic after all. I, on the other hand sound like Rain Man. “Jets won the game. The final was 31-7.”
“He was nice,” she said. “He let me wear his jacket. It was so damn cold.”
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“What does it mean?” she asks hopefully. “The dream. Are you thinking about my date with Jim the Jock at Schaefer Stadium?”
No. “Have you been thinking about it?” I ask with a vaguely accusatory tone. I am insanely jealous by nature, as I am, after all, insane.
“Not until just now.”
“Good,” I say.
“Oh stop it.”
I shake my head. “No,” I said. “I wish I could say it was something significant.”
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If the Mitchell and Ness vintage sportswear company put out a #23 Shafer Suggs jersey, they’d just be showing off. And I think that’s what my subconscious was trying to do - yank out an obscure name from the unfathomably deep structures of my Jets memory bank just to make sure I knew that it was on top of its shit. It went with the one thing that I feel only I can know with consistent, complete and total accuracy - obscure Jets players forgotten by time.
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77. Of course.
2 comments:
You write very well.
Well, thanks!
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