The Notre Dame Fighting Irish are at my beloved Purdue Boilermakers tonight at 8pm. A game my father and I are attending. I love sports, love competition and College Football is my most favorite of all. But I am not a person who gets into giving other team's fans a load of crap about it. Much like when I play sports, I'm not much of a trash talker. And it annoys me when other people do it.
These Fall afternoons with the College Football focus really bring out the sentimental side in me. There is also some sadness attached to in and the subtle realization that some things will never be the same again. that sentiment is true in life...we can't go back again. But football weekends for me in West Lafayette, Indiana were almost a Holy Pilgrimage at one time.
For over a decade when my kids were growing up and I was married, the four of us would spend many of our weekends down at Purdue, staying in hotels with swimming pools, making each weekend a mini-vacation and a party of course. We often met other members of our family and there are some wonderful memories of that time. But now it isn't the same and frankly, part of me struggles to even enjoy going to games anymore.
That happens in divorces...lives are torn in two...even though I went to Purdue games for the weekend long before I was married, that activity somehow seems connected to my X and that time of my life. I hate to admit it...but going to games at Purdue was and is a casualty of my divorce. The separation will be complete when my father and I stop going together but the truth of the matter is that right now...I only go for him because it is painful for me to go and I don't enjoy it anymore.
We have tried to get my son involved in going but he is young, engaged to be married, has a great career and has his own life. He actually attended Purdue and his going to school there was also a casualty of my divorce. I never really realized it but one of the reasons I think now that he is reluctant to go to Purdue games is that he too feels seperated from it and it is a painful memory for him as well. He'd much rather cut it off and let it go...forever. I am just speculating about that now but if it is indeed the case, I totally understand that now...
So these football weekends are exciting still in their own way but not in the "old way"...I still love the game but I'd rather watch from home. I wish I could re-kindle that old fire for those weekends but i think there is hardly a mere ember left aglow now.
It's funny that it has taken me this long to come to these realizations about those long lost weekends at Purdue but they truly are but painful memories now. I go back there and things look familiar but FEEL far different. What has changed? Me...I have changed and I will never be who or what I was then. Those weekends were great but they too were more about ME and my ALCOHOLISM then about family or whatever. I wouldn't know what to do with myself now for 3 days and two nights there...
The key is acceptance, just like with everything else...I have to accept those times for what they were...not what they represent in my fantasy filled head. When I can accept that, then I can truly move on. I'm getting a bit closer each and every day...
