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This is Dani Smith

 

I am Dani Smith, sometimes known around the web as Eglentyne. I am a writer in Texas. I like my beer and my chocolate bitter and my pens pointy.

This blog is one of my hobbies. I also knit, sew, run, parent, cook, eat, read, and procrastinate. I have too many hobbies and don’t sleep enough. Around here I talk about whatever is on my mind, mostly reading and writing, but if you hang out long enough, some knitting is bound to show up.

Thank you for respecting my intellectual property and for promoting the free-flow of information and ideas. If you’re not respecting intellectual property, then you’re stealing. Don’t be a stealer. Steelers are ok sometimes (not all of them), but don’t be a thief.

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    Entries in Friday Night Lights (2)

    Tuesday
    Nov162010

    Who Rocks the House: My submission for NPR's Three-Minute Fiction Round Five

    For the fifth round of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction, they asked writers to submit very short stories that begin with the line “Some people swore that the house was haunted” and end with “Nothing was ever the same after that.”

    Go browse through the stories that were posted. There are some amazing bits of fiction over there.  Some focus in on a particular moment in rich detail.  At least one manages to be epic in less than six-hundred words. Let me know your favorite.  

    Here’s the story I submitted. Questions, comments, remarks, observations, and miscellaneous personal abuse are welcome below.  Okay, no personal abuse, but I have to deliver that line* in its full glory. 

    Who Rocks the House by Dani Smith

    Some people swore that the house was haunted. The groundskeepers standing in the lush grass heard only the jingle of the wind through the chain-link fence. Some people could feel a cold presence as they approached the gate and read the name of a man on the wall. His aura reached out from the house, tingling spines in the local halls of government. His ideas buzzed in the ears of civic leaders, inspiring some and disgusting others.

    Born and raised in that small-but-changing town, he knew everyone important. If you didn’t know him, you must have lacked influence.

    Once upon a time he inspired respect with his enthusiasm for tradition and his can’t-give-up attitude. Those who remembered that positive attitude were long gone. The respect eroded to trepidation and the enthusiasm to bitter stubbornness.

    The folk that still knew him didn’t know why he was important. His cause was not always their cause.  Sometimes they shared his goals, but eventually they outgrew him. Most only cared while their sons and daughters worked in the house.  While they ran plays, shouted cheers, marched out drills and notes.

    When their lives moved on, when their kids grew up, their interest in the house faded.

    But not this man. The quintessential football booster. Honorary President for Life of the football booster club.

    “Did he play football here?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “Did his kids play?”

    “You got me.”

    “Why do we care that he doesn’t like this coach or that turf or his seat at the banquet? Does he give a lot of money?”

    “He gives what he can, but it’s not much anymore.”

    They cared what he thought because that unrepentant football-Marley wailed out his laments. He rattled the down-markers and clanked the trophy case, bemoaning his nostalgia for a lost time when football was bigger. The hits harder. The blood thicker. The taunts louder. The coach meaner.

    He longed for the days when the fans shook the house, packing and creaking the bleachers, pouring their souls onto the field in a ritual letting of spirit. He hung onto football in his teeth. He lived and breathed and ate the memory of his days in that house.

    He wanted it back. The glory and the fury. The testosterone-rich, drug-fueled, slobber-knocker football glory of legend.

    “So the stadium IS haunted? We got a ghost in here?”

    “Him?  He ain’t no ghost. He’s just a mean old bastard.”

    Keys to the house and the trophy case fell out of his hands when the EMTs lifted his body from his reserved seat in the bleachers. The groundskeepers took off their hats as the gurney passed, then the older one spat on the ground below the stands.

    The superintendent gave the man’s keys to the president of the band boosters.

    Nothing was ever the same after that.

     

    *That line was frequently used to conclude a discussion by one of my favorite and most influential professors.

     

    Saturday
    Nov222008

    Rituals

     

    Day 22 — 45,403 and counting

    When I say that I like Friday night high school football in Texas, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.  I’m not some rabid, season-ticket holder, though I go to most home games (at least through halftime).  The only school shirt I own is a hand-me-down.  I’d mostly rather see the band than the football team (but then I was a band geek).  I don’t even have a kid in high school.  I am aggravated when the athletic boosters step over the line and make offensive statements in the giant spirit signs that line our main street on game day.  And I am indignant when the football players get advantages that other athletes and other disciplines do not enjoy.  That happens, almost every week.  

    And yet.

    There is something really marvelous about a high school football game in Texas.  Last night I went to a good one.  The air was crisp and just a little cool.  The wind chilled our noses.  The band played loud and proud even though they’ve already shifted most of their activities to concert work.  The stands were packed, the yells were loud, the air horn startled us every time.  A good slice of our town was there.  People who haven’t been to a single game all season came to this one.  At least one person who has never been to an American football game of any kind was there.  

    Five teenage boys took leave of their senses to spend three hours in the chilled wind with no shirts and their bodies painted in the school colors, so that they could run up and down the sidelines with giant flags when we scored.  Girls in tiny skirts with glittery cheeks (and sweatpants, and turtlenecks, because they were smarter than those five boys in the paint) stacked themselves into impressive pyramids from which they tossed and caught the smallest of their number in stunts that I can only imagine their mothers find hard to watch.  It was so much fun.  And our team won, which made it even better.  They played well, they acted right, and they’re moving on in the playoffs.  It was a scene repeated all over Texas and the rest of the United States last night.  

    I haven’t ever been able to find just the right words to explain why I enjoy a high school football game.  Then my kids led me to the right words.  

    Tonight we were all sitting here in front of the computer, and I was doing random searches of whatever popped into their heads.  We searched speed stacking.  Ipswich lace (really it was Partner that threw that one out; he recently read this book—good idea, not a great ending).  Pseudonymous Bosch.  Treasure Island.  And hula.  Which led us to some You Tube videos of people doing hula.  The kids were really into the guys who do hula.  Which led us to a conversation about why people hula, and different styles.  Which led to a search of haka.  Which, beautifully enough, led us to this NPR story about the Trojans of Trinity High School, in Euless, Texas, of which, I’ll quote a smidge:

    “The rituals are precisely defined:  There must be music and dancing, chanting and marching.  Sticks are twirled and thrown spinning into the night sky.  The tribe’s future — its strong, beautiful young men and women — paint their faces, don costumes and perform amazing feats of physical prowess for the pleasure and admiration of their people.”

    And that refers to high school football, not the haka that the Trinity players perform before each game.  

    Oh, and the Euless Trinity Trojans beat the Plano Wildcats 42-35 to advance to their next round of the playoffs as well.  We’re not in the same class, but maybe we’ll see them in Dallas in December.