Everyone in the New Orleans area has a story right now. Everyone will always remember where they were when Hell froze over and the kick went through and things changed.
But for every Monday morning after, when we found what heaven was truly like and everyone loved each other and everyone celebrated with strangers and tears flowed for all the right reasons, there is a Tuesday morning when life picks up and starts again.
It's Tuesday all over... where are my shoes?
I read in a book recently, "life is meant to be swam upstream." Seems right to me. For all the joy I felt Sunday night and even for a writer who specializes in details it is a blur, I understand this morning that life won't stay there.
For every mountain, there is a valley.
I'm beginning to get over the death of my dog in fits and stops, beginning to get over my jet lag, though I've been up since 4:30 a.m. I'm beginning to find myself again in a new life, a new world -- one in which Frankie is gone and the Saints are in the Super Bowl. I hesitate to decide just whether it's a world I want to be in.
As I stood on the corner of Earhart Drive, 200 yards from the Superdome on Sunday night waiting for my ride, two men walked by me talking. One said to the other, "I don't know how to act right now."
That's what I feel. Misery and assuredness of being a loveable loser walked with me for all the time since I began watching the Saints and that includes all 43 years minus one season in Nevada where I saw them play once on TV. How do we act in a world in which we too are asked to come to the party? How do we act in a world in which limitations and walls and can'ts don't exist any more?
That's what we will explore in the next couple of weeks. I know only this: I say that Philippians 4:13 is my motto, my belief. It says, "I can do all things through Christ (or him) who strengthens me." Do I believe that or not is the pertinent question. Do you?
The Saints victory Monday night was about more than a football game, and I know that's hard for people to understand. Had Katrina not happened, it would STILL have been about more than a football game. It was about, in my opinion, all those of us who have never done it all, won it all, been through it all. Those of us who are not only the middle class but the middle of the class. Those of us who dreamed that one day we could be up there looking down instead of always looking up. It was about wanting to be...something.
The irony is that we've always been something in Christ, we just forget. Winning a football game doesn't change that. But what I learned Sunday night is that we are all, every single one of us, in this together. We love and we hate and we win and we lose and we watch our loved ones die and we live on and somewhere in all of that, God is walking in the garden looking for us.
It's Tuesday and time to come down from the mountain where life lives.
(at least till Feb. 7)
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