Scott Ellington's Blog

10 SEP 2001

I rolled into North Platte, Nebraska in a sunny frame of mind knowing that one of my favorite former Forty-niners, Ed McCaffrey, would figure prominently in the early-regular-season Monday Night Football contest between the Giants and Broncos.  I was pumped and primed, finding the much anticipated snappy-looking sports bar that spoke brilliantly of an inch-thick ribeye and a pint of Miller Genuine Draft. 

       And like a dream come true, the salient variables coalesced into a mesmerizing nimbus of ideal events; delicious dinner, a waitress resembling Faye Dunnaway, 6’5” Ed McCaffrey, sure-hands, great speed and a world of knacks until … the compound fracture of two large bones in his left leg threatened the end of a brilliant career and the steak in my gut instant-replayed repeatedly against the instant rebellion of flesh and blood breaking bones on the devastation of a tall man’s glorious field.

       I slept that night, I think, on a picnic table at a rest stop I’d found on the way into town and rose before dawn with the chill of a sleeping bag that provided slight comfort from the early frost and McCaffrey’s loss.  Then I turned on my radio, learning of a jumbo jet’s compound collision with the World Trade Center in what seemed at the time to be the biggest blunder in the history of international aviation until it happened a second time and the Pentagon took a hit as did a field somewhere in Pennsylvania.

      I made a point of walking at street level through the World Trade Center just three weeks earlier on my 51^st birthday adventure jaunt when I took the day off from the search for a job and went in search of a very good time in which I managed, magically, to get neither lost, swindled nor strongarmed and got all the way back to Yonkers by no means I can at this time recall, Your Honor.

     On Sunday, September 9^th, however, my mother’s pleasantness evaporated like a New Year’s resolution and she suddenly found fault with each and every thing I did ranging from the length of the shower I took that morning to the speed with which I turned the last corner in doing her the favor of taking her to return the vacuum cleaner she’d borrowed from her lifelong friend in Brooklyn … but she cut me to the quick by inflecting that last absurd traffic critique with a, “… just like your father!” 

The friendly little journey to Brooklyn ended with those words and the illegal U-turn I executed in returning my mother and her borrowed vacuum to the home she’d bought (for us [Why did I imagine I could live with her again?!]) in Yonkers where I deposited her with silent civility, rounded up my belongings and left for San Francisco.  I was asleep in my car at a massive rest stop in Toledo, Ohio by midnight.

It’s my 75^th birthday today.  I’m writing these notes in a Quality Inn just across the street from the University of Wyoming in Laramie, twenty-four years after my last visit.  I’m trying, vainly, to decide whether to go south to visit Denver, where I’ve never been, or to head west again on Interstate 80 toward a hometown (San Francisco) and a state that’s now infested with millionaires and billionaires who have, it is rumored, ruined every corner of the state of California by inflating the cost of a beer beyond reason and raising the co st of living far beyond the reckoning of a sudden quarter millionaire like me.  Did I forget to mention that the sale of my mother’s co-op apartment three years after her death has made me a whole lot richer than I’ve ever been and not rich enough to go back to my home town?  Am I bound for Denver to close a goofy loop or Salt Lake City to do something else?

So Christian McCaffery is Ed’s son and a star running back Forty-niner, which ends this blog entry on an odd note that resembles something circular, a little ominous and more than slightly sinister.  Film at 9/11.

22 Aug 25 - Posted by Scott Ellington | Uncategorized