| "The Spectator"
His yellow teeth gleamed from his mouth in a joyous smile as he rose to his feet and began to beat his hands violently against one another. “Memphis 88, Gonzaga 79,” (or whatever it was, it doesn’t really matter) shouted the scoreboard amidst the exultant cries of thousands of blue t-shirts. His night was now a success. Several young black men wearing white athletic apparel had put an orange ball into a (slightly more reddish) orange metal ring more times than the other young black men wearing red athletic apparel. Thus, life was good, and happiness was to be enjoyed. He had wept, he had laughed, yelled, complained, instructed, cheered, and chastised for 90 minutes, all without coming anywhere closer than several hundred meters to the action. Could “his” team have won had he caught a cold the night before and been unable to attend the game and shout instructions to them to “run! run! go!”? If he had failed to tell his manager at the auto parts store that he needed off this night to go to the game, and thus the officials were deprived of his counsel and advice on how to call the game, would the victorious result have yet occurred? Probably. Still, he was living out his dreams vicariously in “his” team, and they couldn’t have done it without him, he thought, as his yellow teeth sunk back into his mouth.
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| God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies.
-C.S. |
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