The Cowboys Stadium’s 80,000 folded seats resembled bats with wings neatly tucked, awaiting their night flight from a grand cave. It was barren as an abandoned Roman coliseum.
Food vendors tried hawking their wares to — no one. Team paraphernalia bedecked with logos and favorite player numbers remained boxed and unsold. Even the women’s restrooms, with their customary interminably long lines, were empty and silent, save the incessant dripping of leaking faucets. Pigeons, expecting crumbs from the crowds, lurched awkwardly, pecking at nothing. Scoreboards displayed scores of zero, awaiting digital signals that would never come.
This year, no one attended the Super Bowl. The looming question is: “Why?”
Everyone who should have been there stayed home. Instead of pouring into their cars and clogging the roadways, they reneged. Rare as a Super Lotto winner, the odds of everybody deciding – the same day – that they, like me, would stay home, were long odds indeed.
Some say this year’s Bowl was cursed. Freezing weather across the center of the country, including a rare ice and snowstorm in Dallas, made traveling foreboding, even hazardous.
Perhaps the stay-at-home populous staged a silent protest of the Super Bowl venue, NFL’s newest football shrine, the $1.15 billion Dallas Cowboys Stadium that lined the pockets of the wealthy while homeless squatters huddled in the shadows of the nearby metropolis.
Some said it was because would-be fans had grown weary of watching hired guns, football behemoths who had no natural linkage, except for their paychecks, to the respective teams and cities that employed them.
Decades had passed since their wedding night at the humble motel in the cheap part of town. Ben and Anna had preserved the memories of their first night together, as if snapping an entire 12-shot roll of film on their Instamatic camera.
Now they wanted to see the place again, after so many years down life’s road together. Life had been busy – Ben, compactly-built and full of vigor, had become a practicing attorney. Anna, tall and lively, had successfully trained as a registered nurse. They had each rigorously worked their way through school. The eventual satisfaction of the professional payoff had been fleeting; their jobs were demanding, kids came along early, and time evaporated quickly.
Appointments to serve on various boards had rewarded them with satisfying recognition, and they had managed stepping into increasingly larger houses as family and prestige required and finances permitted. But the departure of each son and daughter, now in turn leaving the residence for places of their own, made its rooms increasingly echo, leaving little else behind but memories and the fading bumper stickers that heralded their status as honor roll students.
Life accelerated hard and had landed them, at times, where they had not expected. Friends and family had moved away. Without them along, the vacation cruises had been a bit flat. Plans for trips to serve in developing countries gathered dust. Their overly-enthusiastic faith in the stock market yanked the financial carpet from beneath their feet.
Their bucket lists containing all they wished to accomplish in life remained, they believed, largely undone.
This day, for better or worse, Ben and Anna would recall where it all started in the motel room decades ago.
Pulling into the motel’s drive, they recognized the building on the left. Newly painted in beige with lively colored trim, it had fared well over the years, giving temporary shelter to lives on-the-go and in-the-making.
Next to it, it seemed, was a newly constructed addition. Or was it? It shared the older building’s substance and color, but it seemed curiously flat. Slowly, they perceived its meaning. A mural had been whimsically painter over the bare wall on the existing building, depicting an expanded motel. The mural’s fantasy ended only when parked cars beneath interrupted it.
Momentarily, Ben and Anna caught their breath. On the mural’s second floor stood a man of Ben’s stature, arm raised to waive, several decades younger. On his right, tall and attractive, Anna stood beside him. They appeared optimistic, eager, as if challenging the future.
The mystery of how the mural came to be remained unsolved. But Ben and Jennifer puzzled over the greater mystery all the long way home. Was the mural an apparition of what had already been, or a vision of what could yet be?
One day last week, before the alarm interrupted my sleep, a dream played through my mind:
I entered a house of massive, temple-like dimensions. Inside, I was greeted by the wealthy owner’s wife, who showed me around the gigantic rooms. The vista from the kitchen window revealed an expansive view of a large swimming pool and, beyond it, a clear view to the ocean below. As we exited the kitchen, I encountered, almost incidentally, her husband, the wealthy owner of the house. He stood tall and straight, dressed in an elegant sports coat and neatly pressed slacks. His greeting was polite, but for a man of his financial stature it was surprisingly gentle, almost understated and deferring. His wife escorted me to the spacious entryway as I made my way out of the mansion.
My second visit to the house confirmed the prosperity of the owner. Major renovations and construction were underway. New plaster was being applied to what seemed to be acres of walls, making the house appear even more cavernous. Again, the fashionably-dressed owner bid me a courteous but restrained welcome, and I wondered what currents ran beneath his calm demeanor.
During my final visit to the house, the gracious owner sat in an office with the proportions of a large game room. Long and hard, the owner and his two adult sons earnestly discussed strategy for the family business. After some length, the sons rose from their chairs, their opinions firm, their gestures passionate. Their views conflicted with those of their father; I expected the father to respond with some animation to defend his own assessment. Instead, unflinching and stirring only slightly in his chair, his demeanor remained placid and relaxed as he took it all in and deferred to their views. I recognized by now the qualities of the man and his mastery of the craft of listening, how to step aside from superficial irrelevancies, and how to maintain the principles that governed him, like the steadying rudder of a ship at sea.
His ever easy and gracious manner seemed to bloom from the congruence his life held with his values. He shed that which was petty, trivial and distracting.
After my departure, I saw the owner once again, this time as a picture: a piece of shiny steel, pressed between two opposing forces, compelling him to conform to their pattern. He bent and unbent again and again, but always retained the integrity of the metal’s true shape.
And that allowed him to conform only, but fully, to that Power which governed his life and purposes, and to graciously let go of the rest.
The woman waiting for her train to arrive tried to recall how long she had been chasing lions. Since her first visit to the zoo, they had been her love, and ever since, her affection for them endured. Despite their enormous power, lions display tenderness toward one another, qualities she admired—restrained strength with gentle affection, the same qualities she would have welcomed in a lover, had such a lover ever materialized.
She longed to be near lions, but she refrained from joining the circus life. She once considered it, but their pure and imposing essence seemed tainted by their imprisonment and the taunting of their trainers. The prospect of joining the team of those who stage-manage the antics of such creatures made her blanch—wild carnivores acquiescing to perform tricks in exchange for meals of domesticated meat.
Still, her dream persisted. Even now, waiting on the bench, lions were in her head. They were still in her dreams.
Unable to reconcile her passion, she remembered how she had longed for a new vision of power and tenderness. She came to admire the desire of nuns living out their quest for their cause, of spiritual mission and its promise of tender redemption. She eventually gave herself to service in a convent, learning the holy life and attempting to fulfill its requirements. She admired and desired the quest, but she discovered that she didn’t do so well implementing the means of achieving it. The rigors of the disciplines chafed at her. Regulated days filled with predictable tasks; predictable tasks held structured sequences. She belonged to the ideals and the faith, yet the restrictive system crossed her longing for freedom. Like the circus lions, she felt confined and controlled. She started dreaming of wild lions again.
She thought of them as her train neared its rendezvous with her, oblivious of her fellow travelers waiting on the platform. She was even unaware of the neatly-dressed man wearing tan slacks and black sweater, waiting along with her at a nearby bench. He had immediately noticed her, with her head cocked and peering toward the sky. His scrutiny might have intimidated her, but it went unnoticed as she held her vision of the lions and wondered what the path beyond the convent would now hold for her.
As the black-sweatered man stared at the women, his gaze slowly lifted, expanded, filled, and gradually an image appeared that he did not comprehend: faintly appearing above the woman were what appeared to be clouds, or cats, or maybe lions—wild lions.
He trembled involuntarily at the wonder of the vision, and the mystery of the woman.
The train’s bell clanged as it came to a stop, calling the travelers on the benches to embark. The black-sweatered man with the tan trousers arose and hurried to the same coach the woman entered, searching for and finding her. He seized the seat directly across from her, and as he drew in a breath to begin an uncertain sentence, he found himself, suddenly, as he had never before found himself—supremely comfortable, at peace, seated beside the enigmatic women from the bench.
She flinched in sudden surprise at her new traveling companion. Her throat briefly grabbed and clutched the air. When she found her next breath, her exhale was long and quiet, as if she were expelling a long-dormant, soured mist. And then—at that moment and for the first time—she released the lions from her dreams. In their place and occupying their space, she made way for the black-sweatered man, strong and tender.
