Floating T's and Friday nights

Memories of Friday Night Lights are some of the best.  Football and sock hops (dances for those who are too young) after the home games make up some of the best even though I could never dance and in fact still can't.

notice the boot, 3 surgeries later and I still don't dance

Now I will tell you one story about dancing before I get back to Friday Nights.  My wife, Shouna, is a very talented musician and she loves music and she can dance.  Now I remember some of the classmates telling me about not dancing and in fact they had a list of reasons why we should not dance, they were Baptist just like Shouna.  Now Shouna was and still is a Baptist and most of all she is a Christian but she always danced.  I guess this is one of those deals where someone decided at their church you could not dance but at others you could.  Folks have always disagreed with each other on some of the most ridiculous things and I will avoid that discussion for now.  Anyway Shouna was always wanting to do that, "Dancing with the Stars" type stuff and I have heard that from folks my whole life.  So being from the Osage I decided to start a BALLROOM DANCE CLUB.  You should be amazed because even I was.  It started off pretty good and I was shocked at how many folks liked to ballroom dance and or just wanted to learn.  I got an instructor and we had dance lessons for 1.5 hours then we would dance for 1.5 hours.  That worked pretty good except I was never any good at it and about 6 months into the deal I had a motorcycle wreck.  You see I could say God did not want me to dance but I think it had more to do with the loose gravel I hit with the motorcycle.  That is another story.  The moral or principal of this is stop talking about something and either do it or shut up, so we danced.

Back to Friday Nights.  As a junior or senior at in high school I thoroughly loved sports and one Friday night it was raining cats and dogs and quit frankly I am surprised we even played a game that night due to the storm.  We were actually a pretty good team except for the fullback who really was a little slow and not great at catching the ball or running.  He was a pretty good blocker but that was about it.  That was me.  Well it rained so hard that night when you hit somebody it was like jumping into the swimming pool where there was  a giant splash.  You really could not get hurt because if someone hit you it was like being on a slipper-slide.  I thought it was great fun.  But one thing that always stuck in my mind was during a kickoff the ball would not stay on the T because there was so much rain it floated off.  In fact we could hardly find it when it was needed because it floated along the side line.

Well, what do you learn in the Osage?

• Do something, even if it is wrong!  Like starting a ballroom dance club
• Do what you say you are going to do and stop talking about it
• Some things that seem right to one person and others see it different
• Can dance, can't dance and both read the same version of the Bible
• at least they did read it, can't say that for most folks who seem to think they know what it says
• Your circumstances don't make you, YOU make your own circumstances
• does rain make you happy or do you make the rain happy?

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com