Rewind

Lord, I have been busy, doing what I have no freaking CLUE. But, it seems, I haven't had the wherewithal to put pen to paper, or however one describer the act of self-analysis called blogging. As if anyone much does it anymore, like so much nowadays, blogging has fallen by the side of the road, much like me. I used to have a friend who spent a lot of time going though friends like that, I used to joke that we needed jackets.

I was watching the news, the big news is the USC/Notre Dame came coming up this Saturday night.
I don't talk too much about USC as my husband and his family used to announce, out loud and in front of me, that they believed Trojans eat their young. They all thought this was high comedy, just too hilarious for WORDS.

I WENT to SC. As did my step MIL who, while hardly on my list of people I want to show up for coffee this morning, didn't deserve crap like that either. I eventually stopped mentioning I'd even GONE to college and hoped my spelling ability would speak for itself. I stopped following sports because the hubster refers to football as, let me see, I don't quite remember it exactly, it was something like 11 grown men chasing an over inflated pig bladder around a field or something like that. He thinks THAT'S funny too.

I LIKED going to USC. My husband would assert, again publicly, that USC stand for the University of Spoiled Children and that a USC degree means you can extort and embezzle all over the world and I would sort of curl up and die, something that seems to have stuck with me lo these 30 years later. It took me 20 years to realize that actually Bruins (from cross town rival UCLA) do NOT talk to people like that, they respect the USC Film School we admire their theater department, they talk about the  extraordinary Annenberg School of Communication at USC and the groundbreaking school of gerontology and Trojans have no end of respect for the UCLA Medical
School and it's world class hospital. Bruins used to come to our fooball games and we used to go over to their basketball games and before the SC/UCLA football game they would put guards around the round little bear of a mascot that stands in their quad and we would wrap Tommy Trojan in protective hefty bags and keep a 24 hour guard around it and it was a good time, a really good time. And none of us could stand Stanford.

In short, we co-existed back then, and still do. If you want film, you try for USC. Theater: UCLA. Medicine is UCLA, Dentistry is USC. The students and alumni have always been on board with that. It's the people who didn't actually GO there that aren't. My FIL claimed to have graduated from UCLA, he had alumni license plates. I remember how he got them too, he went into the office waited until they got really busy, claimed to have graduated and needed a new alumni license plate frame, when they couldn't find his records he claimed to be late for a business meeting on campus and the flustered student worker, now very busy and with people lining up finally just gave him the damn things.

His obit skirted the issue a bit and stated that he attended UCLA after graduating from Los Angeles City College. I don't think he graduated from LACC but I did explain to my kids that I had no doubt he attended UCLA, I'm sure he went to a couple of basketball games at Pauley Pavillion over the years and, as we knew, he had gone to the alumni office.

What my FIL and the hubster never realized, or realized and didn't care about, is that the years of constant ridicule took their toll on me and, eventually, left a hole in me where that part of my identity and my general glee as summer gives way to autumn and college football gears up is gone. But this Thanksgiving morning the news talk here in the Los Angeles area has turned to football. UCLA upended USC last week, which happens occasionally although not often, and all eyes are on the long standing SC/Notre Dame game this Saturday. SC was ranked #1 at the beginning of the season and now, Notre Dame is in that position, SC is off the radar. And the newsman was talking about a column this morning in which the writer reminisced about the 1964 US/Notre Dame game and how the underdog Trojans upended the top ranked Irish in a HUGE upset.

I know. I was there. I was 10 and it was my first football game and I had to prove I knew the rules and the object of the game before my parents would take me and I did and they did. We sat at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on that autumn Saturday after Thanksgiving and I waved my Notre Dame pennant and remember Jack Snow and John Huarte tearing up the field and Notre Dame played the first half and USC played the second half and SC played a little longer and won the game.

Oh, how I remember those wonderful days, the days when I was what I was and not what I was expected to be, the day when I could watch football and play baseball and just be the hoyden I was as a young girl 48 years ago. And yes I remember where I was when I heard Kennedy had been shot, I was in Geography class.

FORTY EIGHT YEARS AGO?   Crap. I'm going back to bed.