Chateau Lloyd

In Michigan, August of weather is something of a paradox.  It is often the hottest time of the year, when temperatures test the 100 degree mark and humidity becomes next to unbearable.

Yet it is also the time when evening temperatures touch in to the mid-50s, a hint of the change of the seasons to come.

Such shifts can be deceiving.  I recall heat waves in late September that overwhelmed our air conditioner and running the a/c into October.

At the same time, there have been years where September is remarkably moderate and October sees the first snowfall.

Such are the joy of living in the Great Lakes State.

Tomorrow night college football will open its season in my leafy university town.  I frankly dislike this business of Friday night season openers, preferring the warm afternoons of the late summer.  For one thing, the climate isn't very favorable to it.  I can recall more than one Friday night game delayed by lightning or marred by Biblical deluges.  Definitely not my thing, and it's a choice forced on the sport by the soulless demands of television marketing.

That being said, I am looking forward to football starting up again, with its silly traditions and semi-corrupt economics.  I've booked my slot in the Alumni Band and am making halting efforts to practice the songs and steps I learned three decades ago.  Indeed, one of the most powerful aspects of the experience is slipping back through time.

The most resilient aspects of the human experience are those that resonate, and I think this is why the college football game day continues to have such a strong hold on us.  It is a thoroughly modern tradition, one that hearkens back to earlier rituals and while it has a secular gloss, there is unquestionably a spiritual component to it.

Modernity has emphasized youth over maturity, recoils from the mere mention of mortality, and yet is there anything more representative of momento mori than gathering with the most aged members of one's fellow graduates to look back on what has been?