HOW HE SEES IT Preserving autumn afternoons

By PAUL CAMPOS
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
The father of a friend of mine is dying. Worn out by 85 years of life, his kidneys no longer work, while recurrent bouts of pneumonia keep threatening to carry him away.
Last week his doctors gave him a choice: They could, if he wished, pursue aggressive and painful treatments that might prolong his life for another year or so. Or they could make him comfortable and let nature take its course.
My friend's father thought it over for a day or two, and then opted for treatment. "I would like," he told his doctors, "to see one more college football season."
Few things in life are as memorable as walking through the streets of Ann Arbor, Mich., or Columbus, Ohio, or Madison, Wis., or Baton Rouge, La., on an autumn morning, with the big game just hours away, under a real fall sky, with the smell of burning leaves in the air, and the smoke from the tailgate parties, and the frat boys blasting their stereos, and the rich alumni with their Cadillacs and cigars, and the confused excitement of the little kids, who feel the buzz in the air everyone feels, even the bored wives of the Cadillac drivers, and the sorority girls doomed to become them.
In Ann Arbor, the stadium is sunk deep into the earth, and only a thin oval rim of blue rises 20 feet above the ground, not much to look at, really, so it's always a shock to walk through the shadows of an old brick tunnel and step into the light of the stadium itself.
The sheer vastness of it all transforms you for a moment into a child again, as you stare at it like Cortez in the Keats sonnet, coming around a final bend in the mountain path to suddenly discover the Pacific Ocean, thousands of feet below.
One hundred and ten thousand people all happy to be here, and the band high-stepping down the field playing the famous fight song, and the team's unmistakable helmets charging out of the tunnel to an echoing roar, and then the best moment of all, when everybody stands just before kickoff, even the class of 1949, and time seems to stop, and it makes you sad to think that one day you will die and never see it again
That, as Hemingway would say, is the worst sort of flowery writing. Still, it's as close as I can come to saying something true about what many of us will be feeling on Saturday afternoons this fall.
Importance
For the past several months, I've been writing almost exclusively about various political battles, some of which I've been involved with, and others which I've merely observed. Whether one embraces political life or holds it at arm's length, its sordidness tends to contaminate life. Still, the political game is necessary and important, while the football game is a trivial diversion -- or so we tell ourselves in our more sanctimonious moments.
It's not true.
Indeed, the political game is only important because it helps preserve autumn afternoons in Ann Arbor and Columbus and Madison and Baton Rouge. Political life is a poor substitute for life in what pundits contemptuously call fly-over country: for, among other things, the fragile mixture of hope and fear that can be found at any small-town football field, under the Friday-night lights.
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
-- James Wright, "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio"
XCampos is a law professor at the University of Colorado.