I’m not Catholic, I’ve never been to South Bend, and I don’t have a single family member who’s ever been a student at Notre Dame.

And yet I’m a Fighting Irish football fan.

I’m a Duke fan, but a Notre Dame football fan.

Growing up in a state that requires one to pledge allegiance to either Duke or Carolina before his first day of kindergarten, I sided at age six with my grandfather and became a Blue Devil fan.

Which was great for me (and still is) during basketball season.

However, Duke’s football team was (and still is) abysmal.

So, growing up I never had anything to root for during football season.

That all changed in 1993, though, when I saw Rudy. That night, right there in the cinema, I fell in love with the story and the tradition, and to this day I maintain my loyalty to the Irish football program.

When you mention being a Notre Dame fan, people invariably have strong reactions one way or the other. And very few of these people side with you; instead, most immediately tell you how much they loathe Notre Dame.

And this surprises me.

Not because I imagine there are hordes of people with just cause for supporting the University of Notre Dame, but because I can’t imagine that watching Rudy didn’t cause untold numbers of people who (a) didn’t already have a favorite team, or (b) didn’t previously care about college football to suddenly become Notre Dame fans.

I mean, come on… when homeboy sprints on the field at the end of the game and gets the sack? When Jon Favreau, before he was anybody, screams “Who’s the wild man now?” When Charles S. Dutton gives the inspirational triple clap?

I simply can’t understand it.

I beg you to explain: unless you already had a team, how are you not a Notre Dame fan after watching Rudy?

Several years ago I read Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone. In the book, the narrator recounts how, sitting in her schoolhouse on the day Kennedy was assassinated, her teacher came in the room and delivered the news like this:

“For the rest of your lives you will remember me for what I’m about to tell you. Hearing this news from me, in this room, with these people, will link us all together for the rest of our lives… President John F. Kennedy has just been assassinated.”

September 11th, 2001 was the JFK assassination of my generation. And just as the teacher put it in Wally Lamb’s novel, I am forever linked to certain people because of it.

So as I sit and reflect on September 11th, 2001, as I mourn the memory of all of those we lost, I remember those with whom I am inextricably linked because of it—those students and that professor from Liberty University whom I would have doubtless forgotten had we not been bound together by our proximity to one another when we received the news of the towers falling.

There was Kevin Hay, my freshman and sophomore year roommate, whom I passed in the hall just before walking in to class. It was he who first said to me: “Did you hear?”

There was Mr. Hall, the very kind communications professor who relayed the news to us before dismissing us from class.

There was the blonde girl from Pennsylvania who cried because she feared she may have family hurt in the Shanksville crash. She happened to be sitting beside me that day in class.

There was the incredibly intelligent boy who always brought a copy of the New York Times to class and who always had insightful things to say about whatever we were discussing. He sat silent that day.

Finally, there was my roommate, Patrick, who didn’t have classes that morning and whom I came home to our apartment to awaken and repeat the term everyone in the country was saying: “Have you heard?”

And with those words, I inextricably linked myself to Patrick, as he will forever remember me when he reflects on this day.

Just as I will always remember how he and I sat silent and unmoving at our television for the next four hours, both wondering how evil so unspeakable could exist.

This morning I pray for those who lost loved ones in the attacks, and I pray for those students and that professor whom I would have otherwise forgotten. I don’t doubt that some of them may today be remembering me the way I remember them: Not by name, just by face, just by vague personality recollection.

Just by remembering that they were near me when they heard the news.

Wherever they are, whoever they are, I hope they are doing well.

And as for Patrick and Kevin, I will call them this morning to let them know how thankful I am to be linked to them for the rest of my life.

I wrote yesterday of my little pal AJ from the Big Brothers Big Sisters program.

Prior to the dinner I wrote about, as AJ and I were waiting on April to get home from work, he and I sat on the front porch together.

AJ is six, and I told him that sitting on the front porch and chatting is what men do. As the words left my mouth, I suddenly remembered my grandfather having (what he liked to call) man-to-man chats with me as a boy; all we did in these “chats” was sit together and talk about anything I found fascinating.

I told AJ that he and I were going to have a man-to-man chat and that this meant we could discuss anything he wanted to discuss. I said we could talk about women or weather or sports or games or movies or books. Anything, I stressed.

Then I said, “So, what would you like to talk about?”

He thought for a second and then said, “Dogs.”

“Dogs?” I said.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Dogs.”

“What kind of dogs?” I asked.

He pointed at the Gator Pup who was sitting on the ground at our feet. “Gator,” he said.

“Yeah, I like Gator,” I said.

“Gator’s my favorite dog,” AJ said, nodding at me and then looking off at the street.

“Yeah, mine too,” I said.

And that was the end of the talk. For the next few minutes, until April got home, he and I sat quietly—just absently staring into space. Just enjoying one another’s company without feeling the need to speak.

In other words, doing what men do.

Yesterday night April and I hung out with our little brother from the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. His name is AJ and he is six.

AJ’s favorite food is shrimp, so to celebrate school having just started back we took him to eat at a local seafood restaurant.

He was given a large plate, and seeing as he had leftovers, he asked us if he could take the rest of his food home.

Two hours later, after taking him to the park, we walked him to the door where we met his mom and, lifting his leftovers to her, he said, “Here, mom, I brought you some food so you wouldn’t have to cook.”

Now, if that isn’t the sweetest thing you’ve heard all day, then I want to hear your story… because that is some touching stuff.

In reading C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves this weekend, I was blindsided by this bit of wisdom:

“The rivalry between all natural loves and the love of God is something a Christian dare not forget. God is the Great Rival, the ultimate object of human jealousy.”

This, to me, was a surprising way of looking at things. And by “things” I mean, well, God.

We spend so much time focusing on how God is Love that to hear Him referred to as “the Great Rival” seems a bit subversive.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized Lewis was (is) right. He goes on to explain:

“[God], that beauty which may at any moment steal—or it seems like stealing to me—my wife’s or my husband’s or my daughter’s heart.”

What Lewis is getting at is how we have a natural tendency to make gods out of everything but God, and how we unconsciously fear God sweeping these false idols out from under our feet.

This parallels what Tim Keller writes about in his book Counterfeit Gods, where he contends that we make false idols out of money, status, things, and politics.

Things like church and faith and family.

Whenever we put our security in anything other than God, in anything that is temporal—in other words, all the time—we leave ourselves vulnerable to having that which we’ve put our identity in being snatched away from us. And this leaves us scared and resentful.

I suppose this all ties back to what the Psalmist was getting at when he said that man in his greatest state is pure vanity.

But for God’s grace, all we care about is benefiting ourselves and/or making our lives more comfortable, and it is only in God that we can find a benefit and security that will last.

Now if only we could stop begrudging Him for it.

I’d never had a dog before April brought home The Gator Pup.

When you’ve grown up without a dog, you become the kind of person who doesn’t really like dogs. You don’t actively dislike them; you just aren’t comfortable around them. And what can you expect, really, when you’ve never had a chance to grow comfortable with them.

However, when April plucked The Gator Pup from that man’s box at Wal-Mart, effectively saving her from the kill-shelter to which she was otherwise headed, I had a six-week-old puppy show up at my apartment and turn me into a dog-lover. Just like that.

Consequently, I can much better appreciate this story now than I could have before:

At the beginning of the funeral last month for Jon Tumilson of Navy Seal Team 6, his dog, Hawkeye, walked up to the casket and lay under it, without moving, for the remainder of the service. The dog loved his master, and, like the rest of the family, was grief-stricken over his loss.

It really is an astonishingly touching story, one that I can much better appreciate now that the little Gator Pup is part of my life.

Watch a 30 second clip of the touching moment here.

If you watch MTV with any sense of regularity, you are well aware that Gen-Y and the Millennial generation feel that the greatest virtue one can have is to “be real.”

No one on these shows has ever, of course, come out and told us this, but seeing as it is the subtext of every argument that ever happens on every single MTV reality show, it is safe to draw the inference.

Whether it’s Jersey Shore or The Real World or The Hills, every young adult finding fault with a castmate invariably accuses him or her of “not being real.” Likewise, each person trying to defend him or herself from an attack by a castmate invariably says, “I am real”– the implication being that the person attacking them isn’t.

Seeing as MTV is a good (albeit, sad) representation of how today’s young adults think, we can always look to it for good sociological insight.

In this case, because we see all of the MTV casts placing value on “keeping it real,” we can extrapolate that the majority of young adults in America believe “keeping it real” to be among the most important virtues one can have.

And I commend them for this; certainly we can all agree that “keeping it real” is a very noble thing.

However, here’s the problem:

If MTV teaches us anything, it’s that when a castmember of one of these shows says to another, “I’m real,” or, “You’re not real,” we can be 100% certain that the person saying it is not real.

In other words, MTV teaches us that whenever anyone under the age of 30 speaks of “being real,” that person is, in fact, a poser.

And I don’t mean to use the word poser in a denigrating way.

What I mean is that they are still trying to figure out who they are and, due to a deep sense of insecurity, they are overcompensating by accusing others of suffering from their own biggest fear about themselves.

They don’t realize they are doing this, of course, but that’s the whole point. They have set a goal they want to achieve (being a functional, mature, responsible adult); they just don’t know how to become that person yet.

I can attest to doing this myself.

I remember in college when AIM first became a big deal, my profile quote was “Be Real.” Meanwhile, I would often speak of how I didn’t like to be around people who were “not real.”

This was during the least “real” point of my life, a period when I was constantly doing things and saying things that were– if not flat out hypocritical– self-contradictory, at best.

So the lesson we should take from MTV programming is this: “being real” is a noble goal, but anytime we hear ourselves using the term, we have a long way to go before we have reached it ourselves.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we are spending Labor Day weekend at April’s folks’ place in Hendersonville, NC.

Every Labor Day Hendersonville hosts its annual Apple Festival.

If you’ve ever seen Doc Hollywood (or one of the million movies just like it), you understand that there really is nothing like a yearly festival in a small southern town.

Like Doc Hollywood’s Squash festival, Hendo’s Apple Festival brings out the entire town. There is music, crafts, folk art, and food galore.

The festival begins each year on Friday and culminates with the town parade on Monday.

I mention all of this to say that I have been eating like a king this weekend. A horribly unhealthy king, mind you. But a king, nonetheless.

Saturday I had an Italian sausage hoagie, a chicken on a stick, string fries, homemade ice cream, and lemonade.

Yesterday I had a steak and cheese gyro, string fries, homemade ice cream, and homemade fudge.

We are now minutes away from heading back downtown, and I am feverishly trying to decide what I will round out my gluttonous weekend with.

I am leaning toward revisiting the Italian sausage, but I may go chicken-and-cheese gyro or greasy cheeseburger. Fries are a given, of course, and the ice cream and fudge purveyors will definitely see me again in a few hours.

Can I feel myself getting fatter? Yes.

Am I loving it? Yes.

Is there any irony in this post? Yes:

I haven’t even glanced at a healthy apple at this Apple festival.

We are spending the Labor Day weekend at April’s parents’ house in Hendersonville, NC.

This mountain town really is a beautiful place. So beautiful that, of all the places in the world, Pulitzer-winning poet and Lincoln-biographer Carl Sandburg selected it as the place he would spend the last twenty-two years of his life and compose over a third of the body of his hugely important work.

Sandburg was the consummate American, a populist in every sense of the word, a voice for the voiceless and a defender of the common man. H.L. Mencken said of Sandburg, “He’s indubitably American in every pulse-beat.”

Sandburg died in 1967, and today his house and thirty-acre-property is a National Historic Site.
Every time we are in Hendo, April and I hike the trails of his property. In fact, it was here that I originally planned to propose to April until rain put a damper on those plans.

Today we are going to take The Gator Pup and her boyfriend Hammer (April’s brother’s dog) on a hike to the top of the property where the view opens into a breathtaking vista view of the Western North Carolina mountains.

As we hike I will, as always, wonder which poems came to Sandburg while sitting atop the property, and as I pass his old house on the way back down I will wonder whether he and my hero, his contemporary John Steinbeck, ever chatted on the phone in that room, whether Steinbeck ever expressed joy or concern to him over the progress of East of Eden, whether Sandburg ever ran Steinbeck’s ear about the difficulties or joys of chronicling one of the nation’s greatest presidents.

There is something very special about walking over the ground where greats once lived and worked, something transcendent almost, and I am grateful that every time we come to visit my in-laws I get to experience it.

Now that I have defended both the Oxford comma and the semicolon, it is time I take issue with a certain piece of punctuation. This is going to upset many Gen-Xers and Millenials (especially Millenials).

I feel the ellipsis has become the most overused, ill-used punctuation mark in the English language.

Whereas it was originally intended to connect a longer quote for brevity and clarity’s sake (or occassionally to indicate a pause), it has now become something of the postmodern period.

It now functions too heavily as the punctuational equivalent of the Seinfeld episode’s “Yada yada yada,” and Lord knows we, in our 21st century verbosity, love to drop a yada yada yada in our storytelling.

Meanwhile, in today’s email correspondences, if being used at the end of a sentence, the ellipsis is no longer only employed to signify an ongoing thought; rather, it gets purposelessly added to the end of each sentence like a steroid-infused period. (a la: “I went to the store today… I got some eggs and milk… I talked to my mom on the phone on the way home…”)

I hate to wreck on the poor ellipsis, because I have been known to drop ellipses quite often myself, but seeing as their sudden ubiquity has obfuscated their once important functionality, they have become prose killers at worst, stylish sideshows at best.

In other words, they have become the Terrell Owens of punctuation.

Sorry, but it had to be said.

Let the hating commence.