Making the Team

My father waited in line with calico ladies and papier mâché children. Between quilters and people who glue googly eyes on gourds, a sixty-year-old man stood with his bottle of pink craft paint. 

His big hands would daub it onto five plastic elephants, fully developed individuals with names like Bobo and Sha-La-La. He would lay out newsprint, smearing his completed New York Times crossword. He would wash the paintbrushes. The herd would greet me after a long day in fourth grade.

My father could not continue watching The McLaughlin Group and Meet the Press when there were rumors of dioramas. He compelled me to watch for five minutes—“see how these buffoons yell at one another!”—then found the world inside a Keds box. 

The assignment involved sea levels and sediment, but we agreed this was a low waterline. Leave the sand art to the fairgrounds, and the tide tables to Encyclopedia Brittanica. Our ocean would cackle with blue-footed boobies, their feet handcrafted by an executive from Bristol Myers-Squibb.

My father agreed that “Squibb” was an excellent word, second perhaps only to “Schwab.” But then there was “slaphappy,” which he could coax into eight or ten syllables for my squealing pleasure. The world was scarcely ready for our words, his naughty “masterpiss” or my “dreckage,” as in, “I wrote a story, and I don’t think it was very good, but there may be pearls among the dreckage.”

My father had cataracts when it came to dreckage. He cried at every Sunday sermon, even when the pastor was away and the deacon mispronounced “Zacchaeus.” He took himself to movies about talking animals—Air Bud and Fly Away Home and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—after I got too old to be wise. He carried my novellas to Squibb to read aloud at lunch. He preferred store brand pecan sandies. He said “puerile acting” made the Star Wars movies more excellent.

He made mistakes with his hands. The most terrifying day of third grade came when I bit down on my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. It was crunchy, grotesque. Little Pete from down the street suggested that it must be full of dead beetles. I ate my banana and cried. My father spent a decade apologizing for this unauthorized introduction to crunchy peanut butter.

He made stories as though he were taking vitamins, supplements for his survival. They were endless and effortless. The license plate in front of us was not GTM-1D5. It was Gentle Turnip Man’s 1st Day of 5th grade. My bedtime was not routine. It was an amphitheater for the adventures of Bobo the Pink Elephant and her sisters. My assignment to interview my parents was not a fact-finding mission. It was an opportunity for my father to solemnly answer that he was five years old, and his favorite musicians were Beethoven, Vivaldi, and Paula Abdul. 

My father answered every question about his age with “five years old,” until I was twelve and glimpsed his driver’s license. In an instant, I heard every school secretary who had ever announced, “Your grandpa is here to pick you up.” I’d furrowed my brow, churning between my braids as I wondered how adults could be so silly.

My father wrote new stories for the daughter who quit playing ball. He was there when unfamiliar fathers descended the bleachers to scream at me. I had only been saying “amen” to the sunset, lucky to be in left field while colors danced. How was I to know the ball was beside me, with two girls out and three girls on? My father said I made the better choice.

Once he started going to animal movies alone, my father streamlined his recipes. He made amends. My mother winced when she hit the crunchy pieces. I stopped eating bread. 

My father made it to Squibb until he was seventy. He made the best of the community bus ride to his new job, where one tall father and twenty Bahamians and Trinidadians sold gutter helmets over the phone. “We are rejected hourly, yet not in despair!” my father insisted. He taught his new colleagues World War II songs. He caught “Soca fever” and introduced me to the triple-entendres of vintage reggae.

After he fell down the church stairs, my father retired as an elder. He made amens. He burnt his toast but salvaged his daily bread from the dreckage.

My father cried over bobsledders and pole vaulters every four years, cheering for whichever country was most beleaguered. Between Olympics, the best he could do was cheer for those who cheered for teams. He wanted to appreciate basketball but couldn’t. He found the finer details of baseball “greatly humbling.” 

My father made a conscious decision to pick a team when he turned seventy-five. He did not find football interesting, but he could not shake the sense that he was missing out on “collective enthusiasm, our species’ tribal fire.” He never explained why he chose Auburn, two thousand miles and a cultural cosmos away. He bought hats and jerseys as orange as Jupiter. 

I don’t know what became of his licensed Auburn merchandise. My mother and I had to pack up the house quickly, setting breathless midnight alarms to keep working between naps. My hands did not land upon Bobo or the blue-footed boobies. I grabbed a paperweight with his initials. I found a drawing of a Purple-Headed Oogie from the Land of Ah, a sea scroll preserved in mercy’s jar.

My father’s sense of humor paints space and time. He selected my team, the University of Tennessee. I have never lived south of New Jersey, but he liked the story of its big orange T, a tangerine crossbeam like the figurine stretching his arms to say, “I love you THIS much.” I don’t understand football, but I’m almost young enough to understand enthusiasm again. 

My father stands in line with slaphappy saints whose stories no one jotted down. They are making up new words and making amens.

ANGELA TOWNSEND (she/her) is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, seven-time Best of the Net nominee, and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review's 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Epiphany, Five Points, Indiana Review, The Normal School, Redivider, SmokeLong Quarterly, Terrain, Under the Sun, and World Literature Today, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College and works for a cat sanctuary.