The State Drink of Wisconsin
The state bird of Wisconsin is the robin. The state flower of Wisconsin is the wood violet. The state tree of Wisconsin is the sugar maple. The state animal of Wisconsin is the badger. The state wild animal of Wisconsin is the white-tailed deer. The state domesticated animal of Wisconsin is the dairy cow and the various breeds-Holstein, Brown Swiss, Guernsey, Jersey, etc.-take yearly turns. The state fish of Wisconsin is the muskellunge. The state insect of Wisconsin is the honeybee. The state mineral of Wisconsin is galena. The state rock of Wisconsin is red granite. The state soil of Wisconsin is antigo silt loam. The state symbol of peace of Wisconsin is the mourning dove. The state of Wisconsin is undecided on the state of Wisconsin's drink. The legislature continues to argue the issue. Beer could be the state drink of Wisconsin. Milk could be the state drink of Wisconsin. Or both beer and milk.
Touchdown Jesus
My father liked to take me to football games at Notre Dame. He liked to point out how gold the gold on the helmets of The Fighting Irish was, how they were as gold as the gold on the dome of the big building on the campus we could see from the stadium. Navy's helmets were gold and Pitt's helmets were gold but not as gold as Notre Dame's gold helmets. I saw O. J. Simpson play in South Bend. We always sat in the end zone, and I remember watching him hauling in the kickoff ball and starting his sprint up the field right before us. I saw Roger Staubach and Navy in a snowstorm. Crushed tight together in the stands, everyone wore heavy wool coats before the coming of down parkas and Gore-Tex. I was there when Dan Devine's team changed its uniform to the green jerseys from the blue. The entire stadium went crazy seeing this brand new team emerge from the tunnel. And I remember when Notre Dame built the library beyond the other end of the stadium and finished off the nine-story facade with a mosaic of a beatific Christ, His arms raised above His head, in the jubilant gesture of the referee signaling a score. He hovered, it seemed, above the goal posts, above the thronging crowd, above the teeming stadium, the Goodyear blimp drifting above His head, exhorting us all. Touchdown! Touchdown! Touchdown!
We always got there early. Sometimes we stayed by the car and tailgated in the parking lot, eating our lunch from a cooler in the trunk. But more often, especially when we were with some of my father's old high-school teammates, we would all drift over to the field house to look at the names of the lettermen on sacred plaques, admire the immaculate cases of memorabilia, trophies, and photographs of the old great and holy teams. My father had gone to Central Catholic in Fort Wayne. They had been the Fighting Irish too, and in his senior year, his team had won the mythical state football championship. My father, who had been quarterback, and his old backfield would recite the names on the plaques, remind each other of games they'd played in or seen.
Most of all I liked it when we went to the far end of the stadium before the game, to the locker room door. A crowd had always gathered to wait and watch for the Notre Dame players to emerge alone or in small groups, threes or fours, from their campus dorms and drift toward the stadium, wading through the crowd into the locker room. The players were huge. None of them had necks. They were stuffed into the insignia-dripping letter jackets of dark blue wool with glossy blue-black leather sleeves.
Touchdown Jesus looked down on us all gathered in the plaza before the locker room door. Look, there were some more coming our way! Often, just by the door, there was a boy-it was never the same boy-about my age, waiting in his wheelchair or leaning on his crutches, his body mangled into a cast or contorted or quaking with palsy. The players had been tipped to his presence. The crowd parted as they approached. The players tolerated the back-pats and the praise as we moved to make room. We just wanted to touch them, to get a word in. They said "excuse me" politely, didn't stop for us as they made their irresistible journey toward the door. But when they spotted the kid by the door they were drawn to him and to the football that miraculously appeared in the folds of his hospital blankets, in the crook of his traction-set arm. We all watched as each player took the ball to sign it, signed it, and handed it back to the bandaged kid, saying a few inaudible-to us-words and then tousling his hair with their beefy hands before disappearing into the changing rooms to be transformed for the game.
My Mother Invents a Tradition
At our dining room table in the house on Clover Lane in Fort Wayne, my mother made it all up. She was the dean of girls at Central High School. The city school system had announced Central's closing and the busing of its students to the six other high schools in the system, two of them, Northrup and Wayne, just being built. Mom would be going to Northrup, and her job now was to manufacture the particulars of the new school's identity. There was a committee, a group of students and teachers drawn from the constituencies of Central and the two northside schools siphoned off by the expansion.
I remember the group listening to records of marching bands playing fight songs and alma maters, the words absent, in our living room. They rated the melodies on graph paper with scales from 1 to 10. "This is `On Wisconsin!"' my mother would say. And one evening the band uniforms and cheerleading costumes were modeled and judged there too, but that was much later. My mother had to do the heavy lifting of the task force, actually writing the words to the songs the band members would play in the future. She would also narrow down all the choices of styles and colors in the catalogues she gathered from the wholesalers of academic garb, the purveyors of embroidery and emblems, the flag-makers, the jewelers, trophy stores, yearbook printers, decal suppliers, and fund-raising companies. Then she would guide the committee to her favorites.
At the dining room table she had to get herself in the mood for her creations. For this new school she was constructing a nostalgic past out of nothing. It was named for a former superintendent, no help there. So she relied on the stored memories of her own high school, the images of high school created in movies she saw while she was in high school. There had been ivy on the red brick walls and a senior door only seniors could walk through. Every year the graduating class planted a climbing rose bush along the fences of the stadium, and the trowel used for the job was handed down to the next class at a ceremony in the spring as the roses budded and began to bloom. Northrup had none of these rituals as of yet, it was being built in a scrapedflat cornfield on the northern edge of town. The excavation left a few trees from a woodlot nearby, and mother mused to me that perhaps that could become a lover's lane. She imagined the moon over the copse of trees. "The students," she wrote for the students in the new handbook, "call this spot Lover's Lane."
I was in high school then, at North Side, my mother's high school, the one she waxed with nostalgia as she worked at the dining room table. At North Side now no one remembered why the seniors gave a garden trowel to the junior class. The rose bushes had been torn out during a renovation before I started there.