Recently a man in my town took up residence on the town football field, in a small tent in the northwestern corner, near the copse of trees.
He had been a terrific football player some years ago for our high school, and then played in university, and then a couple of years in the nether reaches of the professional ranks, and then he had entered into several business ventures, but these had not gone so well, and he had married and had children, but that had not gone so well either, and finally he took up residence on the football field, because, as he said, that was where things had gone well, and while he knew for sure that people thought he was nuts to pitch a tent on the field, he sort of needed to get balanced again, and there was something about the field that was working for him in that way as far as he could tell after a few days, so, with all due respect to people who thought he was a nutcase, he thought he would stay there until someone made him leave.
He had already spoken with the cops, he said, and it was a mark of the general decency of our town that he was told he could stay a while as long as he didn't interfere with use of the field, which of course he would never think of doing, and it was summer, anyways, so the field wasn't in use much.
He had been nicknamed the Hawk when he was a player, for his habit of lurking around almost lazily on defense and then making a stunning strike, and he still speaks the way he played, quietly but then amazingly, and when we sat on the visiting team's bench the other day he said some quietly amazing things, which I think you should hear.
The reporter from the paper came by the other day, he said, and she wanted to write a story about the failure of the American dream, and the collapse of the social contract, and she was just melting to use football as a metaphor for something or other, and I know she was just trying to do her job, but I kept telling her things that didn't fit what she wanted, like that people come by and leave me biscuits and sandwiches, and the kids who play lacrosse at night set