while watching the eagles and the pats 11/25

Hey buds, it's been a while, welcome if you're with me though I doubt it.

Since last I wrote here, Peyton was beat again by Brady coupla weeks ago I guess, other bigger things have happened to me than keeping track of quarterbacks. Like one of my cats got run over in the street in front of the house, but beyond all that, the worst thing was my momma died at age 89. To think I was unprepared for her leaving life as we know it, is the understatement of my life!

Whenever I had a round with my mother, she would end it with "You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone and lying in my coffin!" Well, you know, she was so totally right about that, and about a lot of other things as well. Not anything about football, no, she wasn't into sports, only the sport of flirting and catching a man, my Daddy, so one day I will have to write a book about their WWII romance, their contact only by letters to the field where Dad tried hard to survive the killing fields of Normandy, Belgium, Germany all the way to the Czech border with the 90th Division. He and his battalion hit Utah Beach first, and of course, he always thought himself extremely lucky to have landed there instead of Omaha Beach. But even MORE LUCKY, though than that, he thought was finding my mother, an Army Nurse, a Lieutenant at that, before he got his orders for the invasion. Mom had invaded his heart at Sweetwater, Texas where they met before they even knew where or when he would disembark.

They didn't marry until the war was over. Well all that is a really long story, and with their beautiful pictures and their touching letters which I must gather one day to share with whoever values their kind of experience, chiefly myself, my daughter, even my older brother is a possible reader of such a historical romance.

So she was right about many things. One was "Don't chase the man," but she definitely chased Dad with her sparkly blue eyes the night she met him when she was actually with another guy. Another thing she would tell me oodles of times was, "God gave you a brain, so it's up to you to use it!" So here am I in New York, after having seen Kermit the Frog in the Macys' Thanksgiving Day parade, Kermit who helped me raise my daughter, now 33 and living in Brooklyn, we are sitting here on the couch with one of her roommates watching the Pats and the Eagles. I am using my brain tonight to stay awake for the early flight back home to Florida and will miss my girl terribly, but to see her so content and sharing her interest in sports with her roommate, it is a relief for my brain just to know this, to hear them laugh at my remark that, "Wow, Brady's balls are so hard, it must hurt just to catch them!"

It makes me glad I have made this trip up here for Thanksgiving and my birthday, so much better than staying home alone with the dogs. So this year was a difficult one, but there is more to life than worrying about Peyton Manning, female surgery, and death in the family. Far more important to me is to keep humor and practice love for what is left of our little family.

People who can laugh with you, at you (she says my bangs now that I cut them look like Jim Carrey in Dumber and Dumber!) and watch the game with you, that makes a family for me! It makes life worth living even though there is so much else you wish wasn't there to deal with, but just to laugh and watch the game, astonished that the Pats perhaps might even lose, it makes it a great trip. I am usually called "a trip" myself, and it's a welcome change to not BE the trip, but to live and enjoy it with family!

So hope you had a Thanksgiving holiday that somehow resembled mine, with sports, good food, but best of all, someone in your family that could share it all with you. You never know, it may be the last time you are ever with them. So make it count!

Ovarium Scarium

Tell a girl in her mid-fifties she should have had her ovaries removed when she had her uterus removed, and a wan look takes over the face. Not again, not another cutting on me. This one then has to be the death knell for me.

I hate surgery. Most of all, I hate shivering alone waiting for the anesthesiologist to ask me who I am for the fourth or fifth time and asking me why I am there at the hospital. I was trembling so before the first surgery that I had them send for a minister who has an office at the hospital to hold my hand and pray over me. I was that scared.

Turning my fate over to the professionals has always been scary, but to have to turn over my consciousness to professionals who are perfect strangers to me is the hardest.

I felt they were going to kill me. I didn't think any of this would do any good. So last February, Valentine's Day, it was, I was 50% right. They didn't kill me. But it didn't do any good.

I still need to be opened up. This time because my ovary on the left overreacted I think, to the tumor on the right hand side of my uterus insisting on being removed and disected. No, it was the Dr, no, three of them, that insisted. So now the ovary is besot with cysts. My left one four times larger than my right.

I will soon go under and hand over my body, my fate, to the Doctor.

They say I don't need this stuff anyway. Gee, I thought I did.

But that's another story. Well, at least I am not writing about Peyton Manning this time. And there is a cute boy in a wheelchair here that says Mt. Auburn Hospital on the back. I think it will be o.k. to talk to him. Perhaps he likes to blog as well.

Best wishes to all except Peyton Manning. He doesn't need my best wishes. He has his Super Bowl ring after all, and the way he snarled at those two poor boys Jimmy Kimmel hired away from American Idol, well, it just let me in on the real Peyton Manning. He wasn't there to be kind to them, you just could tell. So much for the egocentric sports heroes. Enough said.

Kath

How awful can a Super Bowl get?

Yes, it was THAT AWFUL. like two high school varsity teams slogging it out on a muddy field, the Colts embarassed the Bears. It was no super game at all, but a miserable mushy mess of a field in the pouring rain. The Bears from the rough weather of Chicago could not hold onto the ball. The only guy who could was Joseph Addai of the Colts.

At least I was right about that it might rain. It came down in sheets, the streaming water down their bare arms, and the announcers saying that the rain might just be affecting their play just a little.

What a horrible way to win the NFL title. Peyton earned his mvp not by being the best player, who of course was running back Adai, but simply by acting mature and not throwing any hissy fits of any great consequence.

I'm so glad Peyton read my blog and gave his teammates credit when he was up on stage instead of saying Amen to Dungy's usual speech about God winning the game for them. This time Tony Dungy backed away from his usual fundy theology and said "sometimes God asks that you work for it." Well he was close. God asks that you work for it ALL THE TIME, NOT SOME OF THE TIME.

Listen to the Jesuit saying, "Pray as though everything depended on God, but work as though everything depended on you!" That said, I haven't been working hard enough.

The best work the Colts and Peyton did wasn't in the Super Bowl. It was two weeks before when they taught Tom Brady that he can't wait til the last minute to get to work. What the Colts and Peyton did in that second half was the real Super Bowl. I'm glad I didn't miss it.

And how are you? Is anyone there?

Peyton Manning, Will he cry in the Rain Super Sunday?

Here in Dade City, the country boys are rooting for the Bears, just because I guess the qtrback on the Bears is a Gator. Other than that, they just can't stand Peyton Manning. They call him "CRYBABY" here. And the older dudes who remember the old Bears are reminiscing about McMahon and the olden days. None of them think the Colts will do it Sunday.

Then there is the weather forecast for South Florida Sunday. It doesn't look good. Rain is predicted for the Super Bowl, and of course, the Colts home is a dome.

Will Peyton change overnight and become the cool, calm, non-reactive dude I want him to be or will he scrunch his baby face cheeks into his usual pout and be a crybaby in the rain like the country boys here say he will?

Peyton Manning, I want to say something that I can speak of from my own personal experience. You need to practice holding in your tendency to wallow in grief, and the best way to learn this is in group counseling.

Nothing was harder for me than the circle of clients wherein each gets to say to another something that is intended to set you off, and you have to practice just listening to it and taking it without saying anything back except for the standard counseling group phrase, "Thank you for telling me that." I couldn't do it for weeks. I would just react negatively like Peyton does when things go wrong. I would say, when they told me I was full of myself, "SO ARE YOU, and You haven't walked in my shoes. I have a right to feel the way I do," etc.

Group counseling would be great for the Colts. For Peyton Manning, no doubt a colicky baby in his youth, to be able to handle the negative without scowling and blaming everyone but himself, would be a major step for him. It doesn't happen overnight. Sometimes it takes months, even years to learn to "pick your battles." Limit your over reaction to things you can really do something about. Accept that other people have the right to criticize you, and even if you hate them, listen to what they have to say. They see you as you appear to them, so it's a mirror you hate looking into. If people say you are a crybaby, maybe you are. Maybe you don't respect others because you are so wrapped up in yourself.

Peyton, the guys here want Tony Dungy to win because they know how the Bucs treated him and didn't deserve him and wish the best for him. But, they don't feel this for you. They really want the Colts to lose just because they can't stand the way you act up. Will you be a CRYBABY who loses in the rain this Super Bowl Sunday? Gee, I hope not, but if you do, you will be quite the dramatic performer who will draw their ridicule for years whenever they play the tape. How do you want to go down in history.

Think of it, Peyton. You don't have much time to decide.

Kathy

Apologies to Peyton Manning

It has come to my attention that in my article about Peyton Manning, pensive or petulant? that what I said about his checking his thumb for injury could be construed as mean spirited.

What I meant was that his flair for the dramatic bothers me. Not because it affects me so much, but that it affects performance and tends to increase his own anxieties. The more dramatic one's reactions, the more upset one gets, then no doubt more drama follows.

So what could he have done? -- checked his thumb for injury surrounded by staffers so as not to reveal his latest worries to on-air announcers, who just love this kind of fodder for speculation as to his fitness to continue the game. Where he differs in personality and performance from Brady is that Brady will walk back from a missed opportunity straight faced and with the question in his mind "So what will we do next?" The Pats are always planning, constantly changing their play according to what the other team's reactions are to their attempts.

So where Brady is letting go of failed attempts, and moving on to the next plan to use, it seems to me Peyton is getting bogged down in reacting to failures, or even stubbornly refusing to abandon a strategy that is obviously not going to work against the other team. This stubborness and reactiveness is not doing him any good.

A "drama queen" is a word that comes to mind for the "diva" of football. But Peyton is no queen, there's not a thing effeminate about him. But the boyish reaction to failed attempts really needs to go. It would help his game, it would help him grow.

When Peyton Manning can show that things can't "get to" him, his reactions will be controlled, his manner will be as reflective as his comment that "you have to be careful what you wish for," and he will be a better man, not just a quarterback who is the darling of the AFC.

Kathy

Peyton Manning, Super Pensive or Petulant?

I know nothing of Peyton Manning except what I've seen of him on the field and after game interviews. Therefore, you are forewarned. I only know what I think of male behavior from my own horrible experiences in life. Just before the Pats/Colts game, Peyton was asked who he preferred to play in the final playoff for the AFC, he replied very pensively, "You have to be very careful what you wish for. The Pats are a different team in the playoffs than they are in the regular season." How well spoken, how mature, I thought. Peyton is so thoughtful, it's very appealing. HOWEVER, what else do I see in Peyton, a boyish, emotional, petulant pouter, who has been known to complain when he has essentially NO Time in the Pocket, "I CAN'T PLAY BOTH OFFENSE AND DEFENSE!" This is the Peyton I cannot trust, I find hard to respect, the Peyton Manning who fiddles with his thumb on camera to see that it is still there after crunching it into a helmet, probably a helmet of his own teammate from the way things were going in the Pats game. Beyond that, the constant pouting when his Hail Mary passes couldn't get through due to a fantastic Pats secondary, especially thanks to the constant batting down of Asante Samuel (sp?) And finally, what grates me most of all, is his boy/father relationship with wild eyed Tony Dungy who told reporters the reason the Colts came through and won the AFC was that GOD CAME TO THEIR AID in the second half. Oh, wow, that means by inference that Our Heavenly Father doesn't like the Pats, or the Pats are not God fearing football players as are the Colts. I was absolutely stunned that Dungy could not say that they won because they abandoned their long pass strategy because it wasn't working and once our petulant Peyton found his rhythm with the short passes, he proved he could operate more effectively than Tom Terrific in this particular tough one. I have always given God ample credit when he comes to our aide in difficult times, but to claim God is up there watching football games and determining who deserves to win is just more than I could stand. Therefore here I am on my own never before attempt at a "blog." Really, Peyton, stand up and be a man, not a boy, and say, Hey, I've learned from my competition. I no longer hate Tom Brady, but Tom is a 2 minute man, and he can't do in one minute what takes him two. Brady is a super quarterback, but where Peyton is doing commercials, Brady is dating supermodels and actresses, so which is more beneficial to his game? Well, that one is up to your own personal beliefs, as is your own version of religion. But here let me say, Peyton Manning is also a super quarterback, but in my mind he won't be a grown man until he remains more pensive than petulant, more thoughtful than boyishly emotional, and can admit out loud that it was his team's effort, and not God's preference for the Colts, that brought him and them to the SuperBowl. Grow up Peyton Manning so we can give you and your team credit, and let God just enjoy the game from on high, without determining who will win or lose. After all, God has far better things to concern himself with, like war and peace, and on Sunday, he is listening to the prayers of Church goers, so on Sunday games, let's just say, it just depends on God whether he even has a moment to care how it turns out.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for listening. May the best team effort really go for it. Let's not have another heart attack game like the AFC championship was, I was ready to call 911, I am that bad off.