What If Our Rituals Die?
By: Terry Barr
Tags: Football, Family, This Happened To Me, Ritual, Weeds And Wildflowers

Something else I’ve surely referred to on Medium blogs, late-night phone calls to friends, and in my old Intro to Graphic Novel freshman class, is Craig Thompson’s massive graphic memoir, Blankets. Especially the part toward the end when he says,

“We use ritual as a mnemonic device.”

Boy, do we.

I like to amaze my family by remembering key moments in life when they can’t.

“How do you do that?” they ask. “Well, I remember them according to Alabama’s football season that year.”

Weird, I know, but it’s true.

My older daughter insists on keeping our rituals alive, and she is bound and determined that we’re going to Bessemer every fall to visit friends, and to travel another 30 minutes to Tuscaloosa to take in an Alabama football game.

As of now, some great thinkers are exploring college football’s season beginning in the spring of 2021, instead of in a mere four months. It wouldn’t be traditional, but most of us addicts would take it in a heartbeat.

Now, I’m the sort of person who does not actively resist change, but I did get a new computer last week, and somewhere in all the password renaming, my wife — for the first time in our almost six-week lockdown — looked ready to kill me.

“I’m going outside to chop some things,” she reported, and I was mighty glad I was inside.

I don’t know why I get so anxious when my new computer is merely trying to save me grief and be my friend.

So imagine my spirit at the thought of giving up a trip this fall.

I don’t mean this to sound whiney, because I know my problems are so petty compared to the lives of countless numbers of people right now. Yet, my worries are my worries, my life my life, and my rituals my rituals. And I feel like I’m losing them.

Because time passes so impossibly. How do we process it?

Between the Alabama-LSU game of 2017 and the Alabama-Auburn game of 2018, my mother passed. Yes, there was an entire year within that frame, but when you see only yearly games, the ritual marker feels vague, lost, a faint reminder of something important, and sometimes I just don’t know what the important memory was, or is.

So often at the games — and because our seats are usually above nosebleed level —I’d look out at the western sky beyond Tuscaloosa, watching the brilliance of a sundown that simply defies expressing one, two, or even three colors. I’d feel happy to see it, to be there alongside my daughter and son-in-law, and another close friend. But then I’d think of my father, who started this ritual with me in 1965, and I ’d wonder at all the years and where they went.

Where he went.

So in 2017, after a night game, we returned to my mother’s house. She was already asleep, but the next morning, she was up before us, cooking link sausages, scrambled eggs, and warming hot cinnamon rolls in the oven.

And then a year later, her house was sold, and we stayed not in Bessemer, but with our friend in Crestline. The game was in the late afternoon, and I watched the sun go down in that second half when the score got out of hand. I looked to the west first, and then back to the northeast, where my mother’s house is. Was.

The house, of course, is there.

I felt more strongly then the ritual of loss.

Sometimes it feels like loss is so tangible I can touch it, be touched by it.

I want to keep these rituals alive, and my memory allows me to do so.

But like so many others, particularly those poor souls who have lost other poor souls and can’t have a ritual sense of closure right now, I’m afraid that keeping my rituals alive won’t be possible.

I know we’ll recover from this. I just don’t know how.

Knowing how to proceed in darkened days feels too oppressive and scary sometimes. It always does, which is why and when we turn to our rituals to get us through.

A sunset seen on high.

A barbecue plate.

A house on a street that you can no longer enter, but that you hope you can always pass by.

Remembering.