Are You Ready for Some Football?

Searching around in my slightly damaged memory bank, I find Fall 1986 as the time I began watching Sunday football games on TV. The purpose was to have a topic of conversation suitable for three sons in their late teens and early 20’s. They used to check in with me by phone on Sunday evenings and we compared notes on the games. In the early months of that Fall, I was living in a rambling old house in Quincy, California. I had moved there with high hopes and a tiny puppy named Babe hoping to start a new life after my divorce and my sister’s death. But shortly after arriving to start the new job, I was summarily fired .

I rented a U-Haul and left there on Halloween, driving over the mountain pass as a huge storm literally stopped all the traffic behind me. I found a tiny dilapidated duplex in the old section of Roseville right beside the railroad tracks. I crammed my possessions in as best I could. I was unemployed, broke, and loose from my moorings. Not the very best Autumn of my life, but it got me back to knitting and introduced me to Sunday sports. Those were the years of the Forty-Niners with Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Dwight Clark, Ronnie Lott, et al.

In the Spring of 1987 I moved to Turner Drive in North Highlands where I spent seven happy years and watched my beloved Forty Niners win two Super Bowls in 1989 & 1990. By the time they won again in 1995 I was living off the grid with no TV, but I listened on my little battery powered radio up on Wild Pig Ridge.

Since those days football has changed, the teams have changed, players have switched to other teams or retired. But there is still football on TV on Sunday afternoon. And for more than twenty years…nothing beats sitting on the couch with the window open to a crisp Fall day and my knitting in my lap and the Sunday paper available to read during commercials and WATCHING FOOTBALL. Go Niners!!