The Silver Lining

So I wasn’t actually able to watch the game Monday night, and this is a great disappointment, because as a former denizen of Chicago, IL (or Pervertsville, ILL, as I like to say) I have watched sixty-three Packer-Bear showdowns on enemy territory (at home or in the vile temple of BEARphomet itself, Soldier Field) before I moved to De Pere in ’93, and I hope to see at least that many here in the bosom of Packerland before I am shuffled off to the big Meat-Packing Plant in the Sky. But I didn’t have a choice.

I knew the evening was trouble when I came home from the paper mill and I saw that the big screen I bought with my settlement money was gone. I admit that I was pissed off, because I was willing to put up with missing a finger and losing my favorite ring when I had a great big TV to watch the Packers on, but when I came home from work yesterday I didn’t have any TV at all and still only nine digits. Well, I knew exactly what happened, even before my wife told me – my son Ronny stole it.

See, Ronny has a troubled childhood. He was born in Chicago and lived there until he was fifteen, at which point we moved to here to De Pere. And I confess that he developed an affection for the Bears. I guess deep down inside I thought that if I never put it into words, if I never confronted him about it, it didn’t really exist. But it did, and so when he started school in Wisconsin he didn’t get along well with the other kids. He started spending summers in Door County, hobnobbing with transplanted drug addicts and Bears fans, and after that he was a lost cause. I love him, though, even if he is a colossal f#ck up who ruined my life, and so I still let him live at home.

The upshot to letting him live at home is that his daughter Annie lives with us. Annie is the smartest little girl you have ever seen, clever and kind-hearted and beautiful and innocent and lovely and angelic, and it is a real joy to raise her, since my son can’t be trusted to do it, and she just loves living with Nana and Papa. She will never wind up dancing at Beansnappers like her mother, if I have anything to say to it. Even if I am moldering in my grave I will heave my corpse out of the earth and shamble as the walking dead to block the door of Beansnappers. “Over my dead body,” I will moan.

So what does this have to do with the game, you might ask? Lony, you didn’t even see it, you might say. True, true. But look at it this way: My son Ronny is a f#ck-up. Only word that captures his every nuance. Still, that f#ck-up managed to produce Annie, the greatest gift this Packer Backer has ever received. And if that layabout long-haired loser son of mine can make a smart little girl like that, then surely even a sad sack of dingleBEARies can overcome the NFL odds and pull off some decent football once in a while. And if a smart little kid like Annie can overcome all the adversity that has so far plagued her short life to get five or six stickers EVERY WEEK in her kindergarten class, then clearly a team with such skill and grace as the Packers can correct what is obviously just an aberration, the universe factoring the remainder of the awe-inspiring calculus that created this season’s roster. I believe. Do you?

~Lony Olec