Copyright (C) 2005 Ted Holden
"I'm telling you, if that kid wasn't happy with our school, he could buy his own highschool or have his parents build him one across the street from us."
"You absolutely have to be KIDDING me! Why Andy's in my calculus class and there's absolutely not a single thing which would make you think that; the boy wears jeans and sweatshirts to class and drives an old VW microbus like hippies used to drive, which I suspect is a hand-me-down; I mean there just isn't anything ostentatious there at ALL! Just a total model of politeness and they say he plays football both ways like in the early days of football; I mean rich kids just don't do stuff like that. Or do they these days?"
"Don't know. Maybe I can find out something or other at the jock hop..."
The "Jock Hop" at West Andersonville High was a bi-weekly sock hop for the schools athletes, based on a loose notion that the athletes who represented the school on its various teams might find more in common with eachother than with the general run of the student body. The occasion was the first such "jock hop" of the season.
One of the chaperones at these affairs was a tall lady with strawberry blond hair who spoke with a lilting and musical sort of an English accent and who was sufficiently pretty to be taken for a model or actress of some sort in her mid thirties; nonetheless she also had the look of somebody whose mind was never completely at rest and something of a permanent look of mischieviousness which you could see in her eyes, and a kind of devilish and non-serious air about her which would allow her to say almost any sort of thing to anybody without ever arousing hostility of any sort. Some thought of her as a sort of a prettier and somewhat taller Mae West.
The first question most people would ask about this chaperone was what she was UP to and, at these "jock hops", she was generally about the task of eliminating what she saw as the cardinal sin of "wallflowering".
"Pardon me, I was eavesdropping, and couldn't help overhearing a couple of you fellows talking about "getting lucky"... I assume you were talking about girls... anything I could help you with?"
"I wish. We were talking about Evans Prep next week and how lucky we're going to need to be to have any sort of a chance against them. Their offensive line AVERAGES about 255, and we're just a normal highschool football team."
"They outweigh us almost forty pounds per man."
"I'd heard several boys talking about 'size problems' today. That must be what they meant, thank goodness it's not anything more serious than that."
"Thanks for the kind thought, ma'am, but when you're the one out there on the field with opponents who outweight you that badly, it can seem pretty serious."
"Damn, getting lucky with girls I can help with; that kind of luck is beyond my powers, I mean forty pounds per man in four days... Nobody here cooks that well, certainly I don't. You're the transfer student I was hearing about?"
"Yes ma'am, Andy Parker, and you're..."
"Susan Brown, I teach English and math and girls phys ed. Is there anything to what they say about you playing both ways? I'd heard about people doing that in the 1940s and 50s, but not recently."
"Outside linebacker and wide receiver ma'am."
"Call me Susan, please. Isn't football a dangerous enough game simply playing a single position these days, or were you hoping to earn double salaries in the NFL or something?"
"You know, maybe if somebody wants to pay me a hundred million dollars to play in the NFL for five or six years I might could get interested in it, but basically I'm just trying to get into shape for the olympic decathalon next year and football seems like a way to do that. West Andersonville had injuries at linebacker and receiver and coach didn't seem to object to the idea."
"The decathalon"?
"Something to tell my kids about if I ever get organized enough to have any. Football is more problematical. My family might not want me in the NFL at all, they might want me somewhere in the diesal engine business."
"Your family... I mean, they could have put you in any school they wanted to or left you in your old school for one last year; wasn't this sort of a hardship?"
"My father was transferred here with the new small marine diesal division ma'am, and I live with my family. I go to school where that turns out to be."
"Most wealthy people don't have that much faith in our public schools..."
"They send me to public schools to learn how to deal with and get along with people, and not be an asshole. Anything complicated or serious I need to learn we have tutors for, either that or I can pick up from somebody in the business."
"I see. Still you don't seem particularly interested in any of the girls here; is there some reason for that?"
"I'm sorry, ma'am, Susan, I hadn't really had time to think about looking for girl friends here and I hope nobody takes any offense, the girls here are certainly nice enough and they're more than pretty enough."
"But..."
"But they all seem to be munchkins; biggest one I've seen was about five-seven, five-eight."
"I see. And your tastes in women, I take it..."
"Run towards larger ones, or at least towards taller ones."
"Your mother and sisters are all tall, aren't they? Would ... I ... be large, or tall enough?"
That one took a second or two to digest. When Andy got his composure back together he replied "There can't be such a thing as getting THAT lucky."
Musical laughter: "That wouldn't be terribly lucky for anybody really, my husband would kill both of us and then my poor cat and my poor rug rats would have to live on his cooking. I was merely curious, but you seem adept at flattery. Do you actually find me more attractive than the girls here?"
"It isn't just me ma'am. I've heard several of the guys on the team say they're afraid to look at you for more than three seconds for simple fear of never being able to work up any further interest in teenage girls at all."
"God, you've certainly a honeyed tongue; in theory at least there should be better uses for that than talking to old married teachers. Come, there is something I must show you, one thing and one thing only at our little school here which you might find interesting. The lum-mox is such a wallflower she's easy to have not noticed."
Susan in her English accent pronounced 'lummox' as two words with the accent on the second word and, as I may have noted, made it sound musical and pretty enough that none would have taken offense had she used such a term for the queen mother.
"Lummox"?
"The center on our little basketball team, it's just a pet name, she's pretty for sure and most will think her prettier than I am, but she's so big that she frightens the boys here. Ah, over there, talking to two of her friends with her back turned to the hall as usual so that all that you see is her hair... Lum-Mox, I need your attention for a moment, I've brought something for you; you other two, SCRAM!!"
The two other girls were as instantly gone as in any vanishing act; then there was the rustle of three and a half feet of glossy raven hair turning 180 degrees and of its lanky owner all but falling over herself and snapping to a sort of gawky attention; a fascinating combination of hard muscles and soft features; innate strength and developing coordination, and a sort of a deer-in-lights look.
"I, Yes ma'am, I..."
"Lum-mox, this is Andy Parker, our new super athlete who plays football both ways like in the 1940s. That's crazy of course, but you're not in much of a position to demand sanity in such things. Andy likes bigger girls, and has been having difficulty finding any lately. Andy, this is the Lum-mox. Was I lying to you or did I miss anything?"
"Not about being pretty, but I fear the two of you are having fun at my expense, there aren't any TEENAGE girls that pretty."
"Be careful, he has a honeyed tongue... how old are you, Lum-mox?"
"I'll... be eighteen a month before we graduate, ma'am. I was backwards in grade school."
"We have a lie detector in police studies down the hall, we could strap her into it if you like, and..."
"That won't be necessary ma'am, Susan... I owe you some sort of a favor."
"Your name cannot possibly be Lum-mox; you are..."
"Ludmilla Andrews... LouAnn if you like, I like that a bit better than "Lum-mox". You're not afraid of girls bigger than you are?"
"You're maybe an inch taller than I am and thirty pounds lighter, that's not terribly frightening. I start being afraid of women when I see eight or nine of them coming towards me with knives and guns in their hands, and I avoid mean-spirited girls and women but that very obviously does not include you; would you like to dance?"
"You've heard Clint Eastwood say that God hates idiots, Lum-Mox; He hates wallflowers too."
"I... God, if this is a dream, don't let me wake up, don't let me...
"I'll take that as a yes, come." Andy bowed slightly and offered both hands to the tall, raven haired girl and she took them, and Susan Brown's task of eliminating wallflowering was reduced by two.
"...now, if I can find people for Lum-mox's two idiot friends to dance with..."
One of the two friends replied: "Try to figure out a way to deal with a football team which outweights us forty pounds per position. If you're going to be a miracle worker, that's the really big and immediate need here..."
"That would almost require voodoo or some sort of a modification to the laws of physics, wouldn't it?"
"The laws of physics might not be all that absolute, ma'am; Isaac Newton or Einstein or one of those guys said two bodies can't occupy the same physical space at one time and you wouldn't know that watching LouAnn dancing with that new guy, sheeeeshh...."
"She deserves this. One of the nicest and beyond any doubt the prettiest girl we've ever had here and in seventeen years, the first time anybody's ever asked her to dance. Unbelievable..."
"You asked him about the microbus?"
"I didn't really get to talk to him a whole lot, he spent most of the time dancing with LouAnn, but yeah, I did ask him about the microbus."
"What'd he say?"
"One of the neatest vehicles ever made, can carry four or five football players and all their gear or several guys on a hunting trip along with rifles or bows, treestands and any deer or hogs whose luck doesn't hold out on the way back, gets 25 miles per gallon no matter where or how you drive it, and stone simple to work on, sort of a German version of a Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine..."
"We've either entered the twilight zone or we've hit the mother lode here..."
"Your sisters are all my size?"
"Close. Sisters, aunts, cousins... Girls much littler than I am don't really look right to me."
"And they didn't all gang up and bully you when you were little and try to dress you in doll clothes and put makeup on you and stuff?"
"Sure. The trick was making them think I wasn't strong enough to do anything about it, but by the time I was twelve or thirteen it was pretty obvious I was faking it, and they started leaving me alone."
"Their loss, and my gain."
"You can actually jam basketballs?"
"Sure, watch....."
"Good Lord!"
"I can get from about five or six inches below my wrist above the rim, that's more than enough to jam. As long as the hair is tucked that is, nobody can jam with hair all in their face."
"Basketball was always the one major sport I could never figure out, watching a ball low and a hoop high at the same time, it always seemed like trying to play a piano with your hands too far apart. You're not allowed to tackle in basketball, are you?"
"That's just in real basketball games; you can tackle ME when it's just the two of us playing like this, just no bone-jarring tackles like you put on other guys, and the other thing that's all wrong with the way guys tackle in football is it doesn't last long enough. You just tackle the other guy, then let him get up; that's not what girls are looking for at all. Oh yeah, that's a LOT better, ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....."
"Voodoo??"
"Don't start sulking on me, LouAnn, or I shall become angry. Andy here is not going to be much use to you dead and if we don't figure out something to do with Evans Prep by Friday night, our whole team could look like General Lee's army after Gettysburg."
"I'm trying not to sulk... But do you have any idea what it's like to be six foot one and weigh 165 pounds on your fourteenth birthday and watch all of your little friends going out on dates while you sit home watching Have Gun Will Travel on cable channels, and then God or someone sends somebody like Andy to me, and the first thing you want me to do is start talking about my cajun relatives and voodoo, and scare him to death?"
"I told you I don't scare easily and Susan is right, the main thing we have to worry about here is Evans Prep. If you've got some old crazy aunt or grandmother or anything like that out there in the Bayou who knows something about voodoo, then we need to pay your relatives a visit."
"Okay, but I'm telling you, those people scare ME, and I'm related to them. What do people who don't drink do to calm their nerves?"
"Telling stories and listening to stories is one thing. Andy was going to tell me some sort of a story about assholes dying young which I'd made him promise to tell me about; maybe he can tell both of us. I mean, it might sound gruesome, but we sometimes need reminders that no matter what we face in life there are people out there with worse problems than ours."
"That's not much of a story, more of a lecture. It's one of a number of modern day Aesop fables which my grandfather insists that all children in the Parker family hear at least once while they're growing up. LouAnn, would you like to hear this or would you rather talk about something else?"
"Couldn't be any more gruesome than this game with Evans Prep coming up Friday; let's hear it."
"I'd told Susan that my family sends kids to public schools mainly to learn not to be assholes, and this subject came up somehow. What Grandad says is that you have to watch yourself when dealing with things which amount to perceived wisdom; in other words, sometimes some sort of a truism or moral lesson can get passed down over centuries until finally society or conditions change so much that the truism becomes untrue in some sort of a dangerous way without anybody ever realizing it's happened, and that one of the worst cases of all is the thing which you sometimes hear that "only the good die young". Grandad says that in the town where he grew up, there were a number of kids who heard this and figured
'Hey, I got it knocked!! I mean, I'm an ASSHOLE; that's gotta mean I'm gonna live to 100 years old, and nothing can happen to me at all!!!!"
"Now, in reality, as my grandad says, assholes are PARTICULARLY susceptable to dying young, and the truism is not only untrue but is untrue in a dangerous kind of way since it lulls those involved into a false sense of not only security but invincibility. He mentioned a number of examples and cases like the four guys trying to drive the old lemonwagon over S loops like it was an Alfa Romeo and..."
"Whoa, that'll do for the time being, we don't need your grandfather's examples, we have examples of that right here; LouAnn, you remember the two Jacobs brothers and Tommy Johnson and..."
"Good Lord, who could forget?"
"What you've just heard, LouAnn, is how the intelligent rich educate their children. There are wealthy families which I'd not marry into on a bet nor for love nor money, but this is different."
"Andy and I are a long way from getting married, and we've got to survive Evans Prep before anybody tries to worry about teenage weddings or anything like that anyhow. I'll call my Aunt Sally and see what she has to say about voodoo..."
"I don't know how much you two know about football, but I'm not really the one in danger here. Six three, 225 is more than big enough for an outside linebacker and it's downright huge for a wide receiver. The problems are going to be on our lines, particularly our offensive line. But between me and ninety nine percent of defensive backs, highschool or college either one, I'm not the one with the size problem. If we can find some way to make them really pay for that kind of matchup, there might be some hope. You might want to mention that to your aunt."
That night, which was on a Tuesday, Andy Parker, Susan Brown, Tom Brown, Susan's better half, LouAnn, Coach Davis, and Mike Stadler, the quarterback of the West Andersonville team were gathered at the Whiskey River Landing, along with three of LouAnn's relatives, the old aunt previously mentioned and two uncles who appeared to be in their late forties or early fifties.
There were introductions, and then LouAnn's Aunt Sally began the conversation.
"I know you people didn't come here for any sort of a theology lession so I'm going to make this part of the thing real short, and then LouAnn's Uncle Bob here is going to try to help you with your actual problem. Bob was a backup quarterback for Bear Bryant in the late 70s and it'll pay you to listen to him. Now for the theology lesson. Ninety nine percent of anything anybody might call "voodoo" in this country is pure bullshit, including the little pin-dolls we sell and every sort of thing like that. The other one percent, if there is such a thing, is worse than bullshit, at least in our age; you're talking about trying to ressurect antique religious practices which were abandoned in ancient times for real reasons.
"Between the time of the flood and about the time of Alexander, almost all religious practices amounted to attempts to communicate with the spirit world directly, and this included the prophets of Israel, the Greek oracles, idolatry, and several other kinds of things, and some of those things actually worked in those days. The greek city states went for hundreds of years with every political decision which ever came down the road being made by oracles which amounted to teenage girls in trance states speaking with voices from the spirit world, in other words the girls making their minds available to the spirit world and the spirit world speaking through them, and answers to questions always came back immediately in clear and simple terms no matter how complicated the questions were. There is no way that could have gone on that long if it didn't work.
"The prophets of Israel also brought back real information for a certain period of time, but even that broke down and according to Hebrew scholars, at the time of Zechariah the Jewish council asked the Lord to remove the curse of idolatry from the world and they claim that he did, but that prophecy was lost at the same time. At about that time, information brought back by prophets began to be seen as obviously worthless and Zechariah himself refers to prophets as unclean spirits and admonishes parents to actually kill children who try to be prophets. What that really means is that being a prophet meant using the human mind in some sort of way which is no longer possible now and the admonition was to kill children who went on trying to use their minds that way:
ZEC 13:2 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered: and also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.ZEC 13:3 And it shall come to pass, that when any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live; for thou speakest lies in the name of the LORD: and his father and his mother that begat him shall thrust him through when he prophesieth.
"Now, that sounds pretty heavy to us moderns but there was a lot of heavy stuff going on in ancient times. In particular, the practice of idolatry nearly turned the world into an insane asylum and that's the reason for the first commandment reading the way that it does. Idolatry was similar to prophecy and oracles, at least it amounted to using the human mind in a similar manner, and the people were hearing real voices from those idols, and were being commanded to fight wars and sacrafice children by those idols, which is not a formula for success in life. The old testament is full of stories about the Lord destroying cities and entire countries for idolatry and, like I say, that's basically what the first commandment is about.
"By the time of Christ, all such practices had ceased to work. The Book of Hebrews starts off:
1 God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,2 Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things...
"Which basically amounts to a flat statement that none of the ancient religious practices, particularly prophecy, work any more and that henceforth, as Jesus himself claimed, we know the spirit world through faith. In particular, the chances of any sort of an ancient religious practice helping your football team is LESS than the chance of hell freezing over tonight. Like I say, that's the theology lesson, now let's talk about football."
"Just one thing..." interjected LouAnn, "Wasn't being a prophet supposed to be about seeing into the future and are you saying that there's no such thing as that anymore?"
"Being a prophet meant joining your mind to the mind of God so as to determine God's intentions. Seeing into the future was regarded as a side effect, presumably because God exists outside of our notion of time. Like I say, it doesn't happen anymore."
"You say you used to play quarterback for Bear Bryant?"
"Not that you'd have noticed on television at the time, I was about fourth or fifth string depending on the day of the week, but even a fourth stringer had to know how that system worked; I'm something of a student of the game and I understand the thinking which went into that system.
"Now we're talking..." said Coach Davis: "THAT's the kind of voodoo I can get interested in!!"
"Can I assume you guys run SOME option play, and that lining up set in a wishbone once in a while wouldn't immediately cause you guys any sort of a heart attack or nervous breakdown, Coach Davis, Mike??"
The quarterback replied "I enjoy running and we've practiced wishbone plays occasionally so our defense will know what it is but we normally run option play with slot backs in motion. The common assumption is that the wishbone is outmoded."
"ANY offense which involves forgetting how to throw the ball is outmoded and has been since the 1930s. The Okies got away with it for a number of years and then the Florida teams started simply lining up with ten or eleven guys on the line of scrimmage and daring them to try to throw the ball, and the whole thing collapsed. Do the same thing to one of Bear Bryant's teams and it was an automatic seven points, that just put Ozzie Newsome and two other gifted receivers out there with man coverage."
"For the first six or ten years of the wishbone, TV camera crews were consistently being fooled and following the wrong guy down the field. For over a decade, the two most powerful football conferences, Big 8 and SEC, were dominated by wishbone teams. But only one guy ever totally made a science out of it and that was Paul Bear Bryant. The whole thing hinged on what happened when a defense tried to line up with ten or eleven guys on the line of scrimmage. When Alabama went to throw the ball in those days, it didn't look like a desparation act, it looked like something they practiced and were good at and planned on doing 20 or 25 times in a game."
"What about safety and the question of getting quarterbacks killed?" asked Coach Davis.
"It wasn't AS dangerous as the pro type game, which is inherently dangerous because of its dynamics. The Wishbone, if you did it right, was safer all around. Backs had one guy to beat before being into the secondary, receivers got hit by one guy running in the same direction they were if they got hit at all, and quarterbacks got hit by guys closer to their own size and they at least saw it coming so that the thing about making quarterbacks an endangered species was a myth. We never had a quarterback hurt at Alabama in those years and the Okies only had quarterbacks hurt for about two weeks in all that time. During the same time there were weeks in which over half the NFL starting quarterbacks were out with injuries."
"The ONLY one guy who really took more of a beating with the wishbone was the fullback who pretty much got hit on every play so that wishbone teams often subbed fullbacks a lot.
"We were hoping we could find some way to use Andy here to maximum effect..." said Coach Davis, "but we don't know if we're going to have time to throw the ball at all with the difference in size of our lines. At least anything other than short passes."
"How quick is Andy?"
"About nine four, nine five in a hundred yards." replied Coach Davis. "White boys don't come much quicker than that."
"I know he can catch balls from what I read about the game with Brentwood last week, and he's not little... You willing to hit people, son?"
"Believe it."
"Aunt Sally, you got that laptop computer of yours and that mpeg from the 75 Cotton Bowl?"
"Sure do."
"Gather up close folks, what we're going to show you here is some footage from a game against Penn State in which Bear Bryant's offensive line was soundly defeated the entire game, in which Penn State defenders were playing in our backfield all afternoon, and Bama still won. Some people would call that impossible."
And indeed, as the people from West Andersonville sat in stunned amazement watching the old film which had been converted to an mpeg file, that is what they saw. They saw a game in which the magical shell game of the Alabama wishbone negated an overwhelming disadvantage in line play and in which Penn State defenders were constantly missing tackles by half an inch and tackling the wrong man as the Tide ground out yardage; a game in which Penn State defenders were utterly unable to defense a passing game operated behind a running game which their entire defensive unit had to be up close to have any hope of stopping as the Crimson Tide's skill players defeated the overwhelmingly stronger adversary.
"If that isn't voodoo..." said Tom Brown, "then like Fats Waller used to say, it'll have to do until the real thing comes along."
"Even an English girl who knows jack shit about American football would call that magic..." added Susan.
"If I hadn't seen it, I'd never believe it was possible." said Andy.
"Folks assume the wishbone died in that horrible debacle Florida State laid on the Okies but they overlook those last five years Bear Bryant coached at Alabama. Nobody ever figured the Bama wishbone out. Bryant won two national titles with that system in the final few years before he died.
"Now, assuming you can figure out how to run some of this, not necessarily all of it by Friday night, then the question becomes what happens to the other team's secondary. What happens to some safety who gets wiped out by downfield blocks on three successive option plays and then has to stop Andy catching the homerun ball on the next play. If you run your plays in the right kind of sequence, a guy like Andy here could make those guys wish they'd never been born."
"As far as playing defense goes, what you're going to want to do is seal off the outside and anything deep. You know they're going to grind out yardage going north south with that big line, but you want to limit them to that, make them work for everything they get and grind out yardage three and four yards at a clip and not ten and twelve, and then try to outscore them."
Thus the little strategy meeting proceeded for about another half hour; then a band still working on instruments in another corner of the landing was persuaded to play for a while and there was about an hour of dancing on the landing's old wooden floors, including a few more attempts to nullify the laws of physics or at least the one about two bodies not being able to occupy the same space; violins, banjos, an accordion; the sweet swirling strains of cajun music and Francophone songcrafting, and then the little group departed the Atchafalaya basin and went back to Andersonville to get whatever sleep they could before the sun came up again.
West Andersonville's football team was generally a serious one, but football was not the end all and be all of the town's existence. They took their shots at state titles in years when they had the talent for it, and in years like this year they tried to win eight or nine games and showcase their serious players to the colleges. But everybody knew that something unusual was up on that Wednesday morning, and that some sort of a maximum effort was under way to win a game which had been widely viewed as hopeless coming into the season. A lot of missed classes, a lot of screaming and shouting and practice involving new formations, a couple of people nobody had seen before helping coach the new formations, and bodies flying in hitting drills. A lot of players who seemed possessed over the next two days, and who appeared less adept than usual at focusing on other purposes. You can believe that the whole town was at the stadium on Friday evening.
"Andy, you know John here, starting left linebacker from last year, ankle before the season.. he's at something like 99% and is playing that position tonight. You're back to the easy life, playing one way like the rest of the world, offense only tonight, I want you to totally concentrate on catching footballs and flattening safeties."
"This is sounding more and more like fun..."
Half an hour before the game, Coach Davis addressed his squad.
"Is there anybody here who still believes we can't win this game and beat these bastards? I mean, speak up, or hold your peace..."
No takers.
"I mean, I believe we've put a huge opportunity in front of ourselves here tonight. Nobody in the state of Louisiana expects us to win this one; win it, and any of you with any shot at playing major college ball in any fashion whatever will guarantee yourselves enough attention to do that. We owe this one to ourselves, we owe it to West Andersonville, we owe it to some of LouAnn's relatives and we owe it to an old bear up there in the sky somewhere; I want you boys to win this fricking thing for me, I want you to win it for yourselves, and I want you to win it for Paul Bear Bryant!!!"
A huge cheer went up, and there was a sort of a murderous determination in the players' eyes which some of the townspeople claimed they could see as the team ran onto the field.
The nightmare for Evans Prep began almost immediately. It started with Andy Parker catching a pass for twenty yards over the center and dragging a 180 pound cornerback another eight yards before going down. There followed three option sweeps to the outside with Andy putting crushing downfield blocks on the Evans free safety and then, with that unfortunate trying to figure out what town he was in and what he was doing there and a cornerback and the other safety trying to cover Andy, there was a homerun ball to one of the two halfbacks in a pattern underneath Andy's route as Andy flattened the other safety.
And, as Evens defensive backs started playing deeper to try to cover Andy, the nightmarish shell game of the Crimson Tide wishbone began to assert itself with Mike Stoddard and the two halfbacks reeling off long runs as Evans linebackers and linemen tackled air and guys who didn't have the ball, and Andy repeatedly wiped out defensive backs trying to make a saving tackle downfield. By the end of the third quarter the score was 48 - 21 and Evans was playing with three extra linebackers in lieue of a secondary which had been bombed worse than Dresden and essentially trampled underfoot. At that point of course, linebackers having no chance whatsoever of covering Andy, Mike Stoddard and Andy simply began playing pitch and catch. Susan and Tom Brown along with LouAnn and a bakers dozen of LouAnn's relatives and the rest of the girl's basketball team had shouted themselves hoarse and were two or three days getting back to talking above whispers.
Somewhere up in the cool night sky, an old bear was smiling. Evans didn't lose another game that season, but their efforts to forget that game were in vain.
"You're not unhappy about me taking the left linebackers spot back?"
"Hell no, just leaves me a bit more time to practice olympic events; no pro team's ever gonna let anybody play both ways anymore. You did a pretty good job at against Evans."
"Do you two coordinate your wardrobes?"
"Why do you ask?"
Aside from being the same basic size the two of you dress so much alike I've had a couple of people ask me if you're cousins or maybe even brother and sister..."
"What'd you tell em?"
"I told em it was was more like a sort of a plus-size version of Romeo and Juliet or something like that."
"I don't wear jeans and sweatshirts to church but they're hard to beat for anything else; never need ironing and don't really need washing more than about once a week."
"What about you?"
"Listen, I've GOT to wear loose clothes and jeans and sweatshirts are the simplest of such. I mean, yeah, I'd look sexy in tight clothes, but I'd also look like I was eight or nine feet tall and the guys in this school would stop simply ignoring me and they'd all run and hide. Except for Andy here of course but that'd still make for a weird school..."
"This is a Volkswagen Microbus... is this the one which had the problems with head bolts detorqing?"
"No, those were the early ones with pure beetle engines, this one's type four, steel headbolt inserts, spin-on oil filter, all that kind of good stuff. Wait a minute... girls aren't supposed to know that kind of stuff??"
"Nobody's ever really treated me like a girl before. Is there enough room in the back for two people over six foot to practice hugging and kissing?"
"Anything beyond that would be problematical, but hugging and kissing, yeah, apres vous."
"Ummmmmm, you remember the fair last week, the weight-guessing thing?"
"I've always been good at that, some sort of a natural gift or something."
"Let's try this one again; how much would you figure I weigh?"
"Hundred ninety five, two hundred..."
"More like about two five, two ten."
"You're kidding me?"
"You've never really seen me in anything other than loose clothing and you're guessing I'm built like most basketballers. Here, get your hands up under the loose clothing just a bit, there..."
"I see, but you don't NEED upper back muscles like that for basketball; what's that from, just lifting weights?"
"Mostly archery probably."
"Archery?"
"Several cousins shoot bows and they gave me a leftover bow and taught me to shoot it."
"What kind of bow?"
"An old PSE Thunderbolt, around 70 lbs..."
"DAMN, if you don't ever cease to amaze... you can actually shoot something like that?"
"I've killed a couple of rabbits with it. I don't know anybody who actually hunts or anything like that, my cousins are just into target shooting."
"Well I'll tell you what, a couple of MY cousins and I are going out hog hunting next weekend with bows, and you're coming with us."
LouAnn's been walking around with that shit-eating grin like that all day long; any idea what that's about?
"She said something about being invited out on a hog hunt..."
"A hog hunt??"
"A hog hunt."
"With high-powered rifles, or dynamite, or..."
"With her bow and arrows I think."
"That's ****ing crazy; girls don't go on hog hunts..."
"Just like Romeo and Juliet... I guess If she comes back alive we'll ask her about it."
"And so, you took this woman of your dreams out on a hog hunt???"
"I'm sure you've had reason to regret that by now, care to tell us about it?"
"You mean her bagging the 400 pounder and me with a sow and one little meat hog? I mean get real, you don't really think I'd be jealous over something like that, I mean there'll be other hunting trips and other trophy hogs out there."
"I don't believe this..."
"We needed to go on tying him up and dressing him in doll clothes, he couldn't handle it when all that stopped and his mind has snapped."
"And this girl is taller than us?"
"Half an inch, an inch."
"Prettier?"
"I mean, you two are pretty enough for government work but LouAnn... I mean, that's like comparing stars to the sun, or a pond to the ocean, or..."
"He's lost it."
"Either that... or just maybe he's actually found it; when do we get to meet your basketball center?"
"The big barbeque at the school tommorrow, after classes."
"Barbequed boar meat I take it?"
"What else?"
And so it went.
In an ideal world you might think that West Andersonville would have continued using Bear Bryant's system to forge into the state championship. In the world we actually live in karmic laws forbid that sort of thing; they went back to playing normal football including a normal amount of option play using slot backs in motion, and won their nine games and gave their serious athletes shots at playing major college ball.
And the thing between the super wide receiver from the wealthy family and the basketball center, which many had assumed to be a sort of a fling, showed no signs of deflinging. About a month and a half or so from the end of the school term, Susan Brown answered a knock on her office door.
"Ah, what could make an English teacher happier than to have Romeo and Juliet come to visit her? What can I do for you two this morning?"
Andy replied "Some advice, and opinions, from somebody who's been observing the world a bit longer than we have perhaps..."
"Is there some sort of a problem?"
LouAnn answered "It's getting towards the end of the year, and we're both having college recruiters talking to us and calling up our families, and they're all talking about becoming billionaires, and trillionaires playing sports, and in the normal course of things I guess, we'd both go off to whatever school made each of us the best offer, and we might or might not ever see eachother again. In the normal course of things, people nowadays are supposed to go to college and get married when they're 25 or 35, and nobody expects to see highschool classmates again except at reunions."
"I see, and I take it neither of you want that..."
"But for two teenagers to get married these days without anybody being pregnant, everybody would think they were crazy." replied LouAnn.
"I told two major college recruiters to kiss my ass yesterday and one of them was from an ivy league school." said Andy. These guys actually think I'm going to pick a school on the basis of its football team."
"How serious are you two about eachother?"
"I... if Andy were to ask me... to marry him, this very day, I'd do it." the girl replied. "I've always heard about, and read about love... and being in love, but I never had any understanding of what it meant... I've never WANTED another person like this, wanted to be with another person so much, like this."
"In a couple of months, we'll both be eighteen..." said Andy, "and granted that isn't terribly old but it's about a fourth of a normal human lifespan and in that much time I've never found anybody I enjoy being with this much and I don't have an easy time thinking that such a thing might happen again five, or ten or fifteen years down the road. I mean, obviously getting married as teenagers isn't for most people, but if you've really found the right person... "
"And so..." replied Susan, "true love comes up against the spirit of the times, and the dictates of rampant yuppyism. If it were just me I'd tell you to get married next week and screw yuppyism, but I'm really only 37 years old myself and that doesn't really qualify me as any sort of a wise woman. What I'd like you to do, Andy, is to meet me here tommorrow morning, you and LouAnn, and bring your grandfather along as well; the one who warned your siblings about assholes dying young. King Solomon has been dead for something like 3000 years, and that might be our best shot.
And so in fact the next morning, Andy, LouAnn, Susan Brown, and old Mose Parker were sipping tea in Susan Brown's office.
"We've got two questions we need to talk about." said Susan. "How do you go about making a rational decision about a college when you've got all these lunatic recruiters screaming at you, and what is your best advice for two people who are totally in love with eachother at eighteen years of age in our present world. I've heard some of the moral lessons and parables you provide for the children in your family from Andy, and I want your opinion on these things.
"Let's start with the easier question." replied Mose Parker. "The most major difference between colleges I'd attend and those I wouldn't has to do with how classes are taught. In good colleges, classes are discussion groups; you go over materials and problems on your own time, and then meet in class to discuss whatever you've gone over. In colleges which I'd not send kids to, and this includes an awful lot of big-name schools, you walk into a classroom, a bell rings, some clown starts writing stuff down on a chalkboard and you sit there trying to copy it down until another bell rings an hour later. That or anything which much resembled that would prevent me being interested in any school, no matter the name or prestige rating. What I'd normally recommend for most kids is asking permission to observe typical classes for one day at any schools you might be interested in."
"Then there's the fact that a number of really big name schools, near as I can tell, have pretty much degenerated into political correctness factories which I can't picture any reasonable kid wanting to be in and Andy for sure coming from a family of industrialists doesn't want to be in any sort of a school like that. Last thing I read on the subject was Dinesh D'Sousa's 'Illiberal Education' and granted that's a bit dated by now, the problems he described were big enough it's highly unlikely they'd all be fixed."
"There's one other thing here... unless you're trying to be a lawyer or a doctor, there's usually not that much correlation between what people study in college and what they end up doing for the rest of their lives. What that says is that the things you want to be studying in college are things which are interesting and meaningful to YOU, first and foremost. Time spent studying anything which ISN'T meaningful or of some value to you is time wasted, and you don't have that much time in life that you want to waste much of it."
"Now, as to the wisdom of teenage weddings where nobody is pregnant, which might be rare enough we could sell tickets to it, what I'd tell somebody now and what I might have told them even thirty or forty years ago are not the same things. In Andy's case since there's no question of where food and shelter are coming from and I suspect the only real question in his mind is what our family thinks of this whole thing, I'd have to say that if another month goes by and he HASN'T asked this girl to marry him we're probably going to figure he's lost it and have him committed..."
"Guess that settles that part of it." said Andy and at this point LouAnn really did break down in tears and flung herself into Mose's arms.
"I'm going to give you back to Andy here, young lady, my wife Sarah might be in the next world but she's going to FIND a way to kick my ass regardless if she sees me holding somebody as pretty as you like this. We've never figured we needed princesses or pedigrees in our family, good bearing and good breeding will do, and we've never had anybody in the family who could jam basketballs."
"And so the idea of teenage marriages doesn't bother you at all?" asked Susan.
"Nowhere near as much as it might have forty years ago, like I said. A lot of water's gone over the dam the last fifty, sixty years. A lot of things people used to believe in have turned out to be either junk science or just plain junk, and it's pretty obvious by now the junk belief systems haven't done mankind a whole lot of good. I read about our founding fathers being called "dead white men" in some of our schools these days, and a more interesting category of things might be "stupid white men". Suppose I were to ask your opinion as to the stupidest white man who ever walked the Earth, what would you tell me?"
"That's a hell of a question." replied Susan. "I suppose I could say Hitler or the men who led Europe into WW-I, or maybe I could look at the Panama canal, Iran, and what's left of Rhodesia and say Jimmy Carter, but that's just off the top of my head."
Mose replied "Assuming by all-time stupidest you mean some sort of scholar who should have known better whose ideas and writings have had the most damaging effects on the world, the three or four guys whose names come up immediately, at least to my own thinking, would be Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, Nietzsche, Carl Marx, and maybe one or two others like that. Communism and naziism and the "eugenics movements" were based on this idea of man being a cosmic accident; Newt Gingrich said it best when he said that the question of whether a man views his neighbors as fellow children of God or as meat byproducts of random processes simply has to affect human relationships."
"And so we had these isms and the world wars and then a brief period after WW-II, the baby-boom years when people at least in this country forgot about Thomas Malthus and Charles Darwin for a while, and then you had another candidate for all-time stupidest white man to walk the earth named Paul Ehrlich and his famous book 'The Population Bomb' which scared folks so bad that from that time till now both society and government have put negative incentives in place for ordinary middle class people to marry and have children. We've raised two generations of sterile cuckoos both in this country and in Europe, people who want to get married at age 40 and have one point five children and, you know what? The first time a western country ever actually DOES get its reproduction rates down at or below replacement levels, the fricking government and parties go and invite the rest of the world in as voting blocks and cheap labor, and the middle class people who tried to be good citizens by not having children themselves get to pay for all of those people's kids."
"Not much point to it if you look at it that way, is there?" said LouAnn.
"Not hardly, but the real problem is that humans are biologically intended to marry and have children when they're eighteen or twenty and not when they're thirty or forty. At this point, given what's actually happened, I'd tell American kids that if they had any way to do it at all, to marry and have children when they're eighteen or twenty, and then try to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives ten or twelve years down the road rather than trying to marry and start families when they're 35 and the woman is already in the middle of a career. I mean, we've seen the results of all the 'yuppyism' as you call it."
"And so" said Susan, "How do we send out wedding invitations to this? Something like
"You are cordially invited to an actual teenage wedding (18-year-olds) in which nobody is pregnant, at least not yet, motivated by nothing in this world other than love, romance, and a desire for happy lives, just like in the 1870s or 1880s."
"That might do, or something not much different from that. You might want a picture of Jesse Ventura bodyslamming the evil yuppyism man on the thing. Just one thing young lady, I want you to be SURE to invite this aunt of yours who gave the little theology lecture Andy told me about."
And in actual fact, that is pretty much what happened. Andy and LouAnn spent the next two months scouting colleges and planning a wedding and went off to a school which was much to both of their likings the next fall as a young maried couple and are doing quite nicely.
Those interested in questions of prophets and oracles and how they worked need to obtain a copy of Julian Jaynes' "Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and might wish to look at the the bearfabrique page on the subject at:
http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/babel.html
Paul (Bear) Bryant was the famous coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide football team from 1958 to 1982:
http://crimson-tide.tusc.net/bear.html
http://coachlikeapro.tripod.com/basketball/id14.html
The reference Mose Parker made to Jesse Ventura referred to ads which Ventura used against both democrat and republican candidates for the Minnesota governor's race in 1998. The democrat, Adlai E. Stevenson III, was considered the rising superstar of the democrat party but has not been heard of much since defeated by Jesse Ventura using ads showing an avatar of Jesse bodyslamming the "evil special interest man".
http://www.northwoodsadv.com/news/news_articles/ventura_star_trib.html
http://www.canoe.ca/SlamWrestlingVentura/dec25_action.html
"In one memorable ad, two telegenic tykes make the Ventura doll battle Evil Special Interest Man, who holds out a dime as the Ventura doll says, "I don't want your stupid money."
The story which Andy Parker started to tell about assholes dying young trying to drive an American stationwagon as if it were a sports car is a true story. There was one survivor out of about six people and that one was a vegetable afterwards.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, as Mose Parker noted, is the kind of junk science which gets people killed in large numbers. Sir Arthur Keith in "Evolution and Ethics" noted that:
VISITORS TO GERMANY IN 1934 FOUND AN emotional storm sweeping through masses of the people, particularly the more educated. The movement had much in common with a religious revival. The preacher in this case was Adolf Hitler; his doctrine was, and is, tribalism; he had stirred in the emotional depths of the German people those long-dormant tribal feelings which find release and relief in mutual service; men and women who had been leading selfish lives or were drifting aimlessly were given a new purpose in life: service to their country the Third Reich. It is worth noting that Hitler uses a double designation for his tribal doctrine National Socialism: Socialism standing for the good side of the tribal spirit (that which works within the Reich); aud Nationalism for the ethically vicious part, which dominates policy at and outside the German frontiers.The leader of Germany is an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice. For him the national "front" of Europe is also the evolutionary "front"; he regards himself, and is regarded, as the incarnation of the will of Germany, the purpose of that will being to guide the evolutionary destiny of its people.
For more on Chuck Darwin, check out the bearfabrique evolution page at:
http://www.bearfabrique.org/evolution_main.html
Thomas Malthus was a cousin of Darwins who pioneered the idea of economics as the science of zero-sum games. Malthus' treatises on population led to the infamous English poor laws and to much of the social pathology of the last 150 years including the various "zero growth" movements. For refutations of all such thinking, see Lomborg's "Skeptical Environmentalist" and you might want to look at this:
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/Spring02/NoLimits.html
As Mose Parker noted, Paul Ehrlich, like Darwin, is another scholar whose theories have not withstood the tests of time. According to Ehrlich almost all raw materials on this planet should have been used up by now and we should all be starving and living like cannibals:
http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-15-99.html
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/People/julian_simon.html
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/people/paul_ehrlich.html
Ehrlich penetrated the American consciousness with his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Given the economic stagflation that struck the world in the 1970s, books with pessimistic outlooks claiming humanity had enormous problems to solve were to be expected.Ehrlich went way beyond this and instead predicted famine and disaster on a scale unprecedented in world history. In the prologue to The Population Bomb he wrote, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..." (1)
and:
But Ehrlich did not publish The Population Bomb as a mere academic exercise. He called for legislative action in the United States (which he believed was as overpopulated as the rest of the world) to solve the overpopulation problem.In the prologue to The Population Bomb, Ehrlich is quite explicit that, "Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail." (4) What sort of compulsory population control methods did Ehrlich support to stop the mass famine he predicted for the 1970s?
Later in the book he mentions a proposal by some of his colleagues (who he doesnt identify) to require adding contraceptive materials to all food sold in the United States. He ultimately rejects this proposal as a bad idea, not because it is wrong in itself, but because he thinks it is politically unfeasible (and of course at the time scientifically unfeasible). Ehrlich expressed support for changes proposed by then-Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Oregon) to decrease tax deductions for dependent children. (5)
Believing that the United States could only support a population of 150 million, Ehrlich proposed that "luxury taxes could be placed on layettes, cribs, diapers, diaper services, [and] expensive toys..." and suggested giving "responsibility prizes" to couples who went at least five years without having children or to men who got vasectomies. He called for setting up a federal Bureau of Population and Environment to oversee reducing U.S. population growth.(6)
Ehrlich thus saw people like Andy and LouAnn Parker wanting to marry and have children as the world's biggest and most pernicious problem. In real life of course, it is people like Thomas Malthus, Ehrlich, the Club of Rome and the greens who are the problem.
Dinesh D'Sousa's famous "Illiberal Education" first documented the scale of the problems of political correctness and overbearing ideologies on American college campuses in 1991. D'Sousa's web page is at:
http://dineshdsouza.com/
LouAnn's Aunt Sally spoke of the flood as if it were a true historical event. It is essentially an article of faith amongst many scientists that the story of the Noachian flood is either a fairytale or an aggrandized story of some disasterous but local flood. The truth of the matter may be viewed at:
http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/floods/flood.htm
Square/cube Problems
LouAnn and Andy Parker choose the school which they did because it had good athletic teams, good language, math, physics, and engineering departments and offered both of them chances to actually learn things. Andy thus wasted no time in asking his physics professor about the problem of jamming basketballs:
"You know, my wife is a hell of a lot prettier than I am but she's not ballpark for being as strong and yet when we go to jam basketballs, she gets damned near half her forearm over the rim and best I can do is about from an inch below my wrist, and her arms aren't more than maybe an inch longer than mine. I've got to be looking at something backwards or the wrong way..."
"Our old friend the square/cube problem again."
"Say what?"
The physics prof explained that weight is proportional to volume, a cubed figure, while strength is proportional only to cross section of bone and muscle, a squared figure so that when a creature doubles its physical dimentions, it cuts its power to weight ration in half. Basically, in growing larger and stronger than LouAnn, he had grown heavier than her at a faster rate than he grew stronger and that in something like jumping which depends on ratios more than pure strength, she might actually have an advantage. Bearfabrique offers a book on this topic in its product section at:
http://www.bearfabrique.org/books/books.html
and a couple of papers on the subject in html form at:
http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/sauropods/dinosaurs.html
Stewardship and the Dodge Stratus
Mose Parker drove up to the wedding in a Dodge Stratus and Susan Brown asked him about it.
"What exactly is the thinking behind a man who could so easily afford any car he wanted driving a Dodge Stratus?"
That elicited a sort of a mini lecture on Christian stewardship and an endorsement for the Dodge small cab-forward cars (Stratus and Neon). After the wedding, Mose and LouAnn's Aunt Sally were observed driving off together in this Dodge Stratus, presumably to discuss theology...
http://www.biblicalstewardship.com/
http://www.mcleanbible.org/resources/series.asp?SeriesID=37
http://www.dodge.com/stratus_sedan/