College football and the Garden Tour

Alabama vs. Tennessee warm ups. Final score Ala 34 Tenn 20.

My daughter Meredith and I love Alabama football. There really is just not much that will beat going to a game and watching them thump some poor unsuspecting team. They never seem to do it without looking completely inept for at least half the game, but that just gives me more to scream about.  

Maite, Meredith and Ben, avoiding the photo enroute to our seats in Neyland Stadium.

Maite is not a big football fan. Not at all. We came to Knoxville last weekend to see Ben and Meredith and to go to the Alabama-Tennessee football game. She came to the game to be polite. Ben doesn't like football either. Not at all. He went to the game to be polite since I had bought them each a ticket.

Half way through the first quarter, the score is 27-0 Alabama. OK, good having fun right? Ben and Maite decide to leave. I am a bit perturbed since I paid about $178/ea for their tickets, but hey that's cool. I really didn't understand. Even if they didn't like football, it's a spectacle! There are 102,000 screaming people dressed in anything from a formal Alabama gown to an orange burlap sack. There are T's and A's everywhere. What's not to love? Nevertheless, they left.

Front entrance of Monticello

On the way home to the boat from Knoxville we stopped off at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was his heaven on Earth, and he poured all of his creative energies into it. They had several tours going the morning we arrived. There was the House Tour, the Slave Tour, and the Garden and Grounds Tour. Maite and I both love history and we were really looking forward to going through the house, much like we did Mount Vernon last fall. The great discontinuity in Jefferson's life was that he wrote so extensively on the evil, destructive nature of slavery, yet maintained over a hundred slaves on his plantation. After his wife died, he even managed to carry on a romantic relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings, having six children in the process, yet never acknowledge her or his children from that union. He did free those children upon his death but left Sally a slave the rest of her life. Upon his death those hundred slaves were sold as common possessions in order to pay off the considerable debt built up by the plantation through the latter years of his life. He was an obsessive record keeper, recording slave births, deaths, marriages, the weather, rainfall, levels of ice in his ice house through the summer, even the number of nails made in his nailery every day.

Leaves with bulbs and stuff

Little purple flower thingies

Anyway, back to the purpose of this post. After the Slave Tour, while waiting for our turn for the House Tour, we started on the Garden and Grounds Tour. This tour was not at all about the grounds, it was an older southern lady giving us a gardening lesson on the types of flowers, shrubs etc that were planted on the premises. "This is an annual". "Doesn't it have just the most beautiful leaves and small delicate violet flowers"? "You must trim this back but leave some foliage to feed the bulbs". "This is a perennial". I looked at Maite, and said this is killing me, where do you want to go now? She said, "I don't want to go anywhere". She saw the pained look in my face and said "College Football". I said huh? She said "now you know how I feel"! "The next time you want to go to a college football game, now you know what I feel like when I go with you".

Ok then. That set me to thinking!

Ed after a narrow escape from the dreaded "Garden and Grounds Tour"

Retiring on a boat, one spends much more time with your spouse than ever before. If you are like us, during our working lives we spent a great deal of time apart, doing our own thing, 'cause we had to. Kids, careers, meetings, lunches, often without your spouse. When you are retired you don't have to do anything apart. 

There are some activities that are just plain more fun without your spouse, and freeing them from the drudgery of doing something they hate just to avoid hurting your feelings is a gift.                                                
                                                            
Since I am usually the guy that puts all the hair brained trips together, this was an epiphany. 

Maite and the view on the back of the nickel

So from now on I will go to football games with someone else, and Maite will follow her gardening or whatever she likes with someone who is interested in those things when I am not. 

Giving each other space and freedom to pursue those interests that we do not have in common is as important I think as searching for and doing things we both like together. 

After all, absence does make the heart grow fonder.