Three Below

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.

Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.

He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;

Though he'd often say in his homely way that he'd "sooner live in hell".

-Robert Service

The Cremation of Sam McGee

A beautiful, sunny morning back up here in Corning, but three below zero is a little tough for these thin-blooded sons and daughters of the South to take.

I recall complaining in my last post that it was 33 on the farm the other morning, when I was afraid our new calf would freeze to death. I had the same worry for my own soul as I shuffled out to the truck in darkness to start the engine and let it warm up before P drove to work at Guthrie. One could've played "spot the ignorant Southerner" and won easily--the heavy coat was appropriate, but the bare head and moccasin slippers with no socks were sort of a tell.

I could babble a little here about the cold, or our adventures on the way up from Wyldswood, but I've already accomplished the former in the preceding paragraph, and the latter is a post for another day.

Instead, I'm musing over Super Bowl Sundays past, after wisely giving up at halftime last night, resigned to the conclusion that my beloved Chiefs were doomed. So many moments in my life are anchored to that day--my earliest memory of a Super Bowl was when the Chiefs won and beat the Vikings to get the taste out of their mouths from their drubbing by the invincible Packers in the very first Super Bowl--I can't say I recall that one, having been two years old at the time. Then there was sitting on the couch with Dad on Lee Ann Drive cheering wildly as the Cowboys downed the mighty Dolphins in 1972, or binging on junk food with Mom in 1981 in Hemet as the Raiders dismantled the Eagles. There was the night the Bills lost to the Giants in 1991, with all of us watching in the alert barn at Dhahran maybe three weeks into the war. I recall watching the 2000 Super Bowl in my room at the Pier Hotel in St. Petersburg, having traveled down there for a mediation the next morning. Panama City's own Will Witherspoon played brilliantly at linebacker in a lost cause. I was bitter about being away from home on our national holiday, but duty called.

But my favorite memory of Super Bowl Sundays past was the annual trek out into the woods north of Panama City to spend the evening at Virgil's.

Virgil ran the car stereo shop on Ohio Avenue in Lynn Haven, a place that proclaimed in huge letters on a sign outside that its proprietor had once held the world record for the loudest car stereo on the planet. Judging from the cars out front, one could surmise its business mostly consisted of installing $3,000 car stereos into $2,500 beater cars. On my way home from work on Friday nights, Virgil would usually be out standing in the parking lot with his posse of paunchy, ballcap-wearing bubbas, drinking Busch Light out of a can. On cold nights they'd have a fire going in a 55 gallon drum. You could always tell which one was Virgil--tall, lanky, wearing jorts and a t-shirt regardless of the weather, with a gray goatee and salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a pony tail.

Virgil was something of a banjo prodigy, the son of a professional bluegrass musician who once played with Lester Flatt or Earl Scruggs. I can never recall.

His Super Bowl parties were not to be missed. Virgil lived in a very old single wide out in the woods near Deerpoint Lake, with a homemade plywood porch and carport out front that housed whatever project cars he was working on at the moment. The cooler on the old, gray porch was always crammed with cans, always cans, Busch Light, Keystone, and lots of other stuff I bet you've never drank. I always brought my own six pack of some snooty IPA that was guaranteed to leave me in GI distress for the following couple days, and drew eye rolls from the posse as I'd clear a space in the cooler and start stuffing bottles into the ice. "Feel free to share," I'd cheerfully offer. They never did, perhaps thinking they'd be unmanned by the experience.

Inside the trailer, I was immediately confronted by a big screen TV with the volume turned all the way up (working in the stereo industry is apparently hard on one's hearing, particularly if one's branding involved installing the loudest car stereos on the planet), then into the kitchen to slide my plate of deer sausage onto a table filled with homemade delicacies and Fritos from the other revelers. If you kept walking you'd end up in his bedroom, a seventies bachelor tableau of water bed, mirrors, and a hot tub that was probably worth as much as the trailer itself.

But the real sight came as you walked down the stairs out back and into Virgil's magnum opus, a homemade man cave larger than the trailer itself. There was foosball. There was a video game machine he'd rescued from an arcade. There were more fritos, more wings. But best of all was the video room, maybe twenty by twenty-five feet, and pitch dark except for the illumination from the projection TV that literally filled one wall with images of Tom Brady and Eli Manning that were taller than the men themselves. Again, the sound was deafening--the thin plywood siding and sheetrock vibrated with every syllable thundering through speakers that surrounded you if you plopped down in one of the home theater chairs or beanbags scattered around the space. Folks would cycle through, sit for a spell and watch the game until bladder or empty Keystone mandated another trek to the front of the trailer, freeing up a seat for another to plop down and start a conversation meant to convey a modicum of understanding of football with the slightly drunk guy in a trucker cap in the adjacent naugahyde chair.

The women scattered around the scene mostly hung around the kitchen minding the bean dip until halftime came around, when they'd venture into the TV cave for a few minutes to critique the performance while the menfolk peed and gathered on the front porch (often one and the same event) to talk about fuel injectors or how to rebuild a clutch. I just nodded with an air of silent wisdom, knowing nothing of either. If I wanted to join the conversation, I'd find some story about a fiery car crash I'd litigated, or something funny like the time the lady emerged from her car after a fender bender with a chihuahua lodged between her augmented breasts.

By the end of the third quarter I was out-of-beer and needing to get home to put boys to bed--tomorrow was a school day, after all. I thanked Virgil for the hospitality, and promised to be back with more deer sausage next year. That was true every time but the last farewell, I guess.

Fast forward to this year. Our memory this time around will be returning to the Corning Elks Lodge for wings, a chili dog (Peggy displayed obvious revulsion as I happily wolfed it down), and a couple Smithwick's while P drank horrible cabernet from one of those little airplane bottles. Barefoot, I think. The bartender said she'd never sold a Smithwick's before, and tried without success to twist off the top before realizing the necessity of a bottle opener. The rest of the place was an older, blue collar crowd swilling Budweiser, or Mich Ultra if they were watching their weight while feasting on fried chicken tenders and a basket of french fries the size of a catcher's mitt.

It was 19 outside when we left to ride up the hill just before halftime and watch from the comfort of our living room a bizarre halftime show featuring a dancing troupe of apparent burn victims with faces masked in bandages with no opening for their mouth (the social commentary was utterly lost on us), then to bed with our books. Just before lights out I had an exchange with Jimmy on Facebook Messenger in what must've been the predawn hours in Moscow, remembering how much he loved the Bucs in his childhood and deciding it was all okay regardless of who won because, as he recalled, I'd been a Chiefs fan since I was barely out of diapers. Both teams had a place in our hearts, we agreed.

And so this Super Bowl Sunday ended, with lights out and a sense that everything is very, very good.