Super Bowl Sunday

The Super Bowl takes me to the mid-80s and Michael Jackson’s flammable hair, 1984 and the original Mac, to my brother John’s living room in his townhouse off of O’Malley Road in Anchorage. I have spent most of my Super Bowls alone or not watching the game. At Auburn, TV was illegal. If we weren’t on home leave during the big game, I was probably playing basketball in the gym. He may have liked football, but as a doc, he would frequently be gone on weekends. So we never developed that father-son bond over a game. So the Super Bowl began for me in 1984 with the hammer breaking Big Brother’s screen.

In ’84, we were at my brother’s house. Jessica was fresh-born. Her cousin, Lacey was only a month old. For some reason, the Super Bowl is frozen in time in 1984. I loved going over to John’s house. We went over there so many times for a couple of years. Saturday nights, John and I would go to the video store (with his 10 video punch card) and select one of the 50 videos they had on the shelf. There were a few games that the Seahawk games would be blacked out in Anchorage, so we would find a bar to go watch the game. ’84 was also the year that the Hawks made it to the AFC title game, losing to the Raiders, that year’s champs. I can still hear the Raiders yell, “Watch the pitch to 33, watch the pitch to 33” as the Hawks were setting up a sweep. Doornik got tackled for a loss.

I also think about the original Mac that John bought that very year. It was portable. It came in a big blue carrying case. The disk drive carried the system folder, any program you wanted to use, and all the data that you needed to store. When you popped the disk out, the Mac’s brain popped out with it.

By 1986, our Super Bowl run was over. John had Guillain-Berre syndrome. He was down in Seattle on a respirator. The first Saturday he went into hospital, he asked me to run home and get his Mac. I did. It gave me an excuse not to go to church. When I got back to his hospital room, it was empty. I asked the nurse where he was. She said he was transferred to the ICU. When I got there, I remember that he was already on the vent. I thought he was going to die. I took his Mac back to his house.

Since then, Super Bowls have been mostly solitary. I have watched a few games with others since then. I had to watch XL alone. I couldn’t trust myself when I actually had a team I cared about. Today, I sit alone on the couch. My cat, Nigel was lying on my right arm, making typing difficult. Honey, the dog, sleeps in front of the TV preventing the remote from working. I have to watch the game live, without the benefit of the DVR rewind and pause. I am not really alone though. I have a Mac on my lap and I am typing messages back and forth to my friends across the country. One friend in Florida is at a party. A friend in Minnesota should be eating Indian food and wearing a toga, if he told me the truth. Several friends are in Western Washington. Who would have thought, back in 1984 when the hammer broke Big Brother’s hold on technology, that we would watch the game thus? I do miss John, though.