Another 5-day week for me, and this was a tough one. Thank goodness I have three days off, as I seem to have contracted some sort of disease. Summer cold, sinus infection, free-radical poisoning from coconut oil left on the stove to fill the house up with smoke – I dunno. Whatever it is, it’s been long and lingering and has made it difficult to breathe and to sleep. I still have a pretty snotty head and a sore throat, but that part seems to be abating.

Unfortunately, I seem to have something else going on that I don’t know whether it’s related or not. I’ve been getting frequent heartburn and bouts of nausea. Feelings of pain and pressure on my diaphragm (brought on by the simplest of things like drinking water, fer chrissakes). I’ve even been awakened in the middle of the night by stomach (actually, more up higher than that) pain and lying there trying not to puke. I was at work yesterday and wasn’t sure if I was going to pass out or throw up (or maybe both).

As if I wasn’t nauseated enough, last night was the first game of the SU football season against Villanova (an “FCS” team, which I think used to be called Division I-AA, and which is in theory a step down from an FBS school like Syracuse). We had (not, I say “had”) high hopes going into this season, but Syracuse was terrible – the QB got thrown out of the game in the first half for lamely punching another player in the face mask, which is pretty pathetic; if you’re gonna get tossed out, might as well go for the throat) – and barely escaped with a one-point win in two overtimes.

It would appear that another long season is at hand.

This is the first time we played Villanova since 1975 – I game I went to with my dad and my sister. My dad used to get tickets from where he worked from time to time, so we’d get to go. On this occasion, he was sitting with the other guys from work somewhere arouind midfield, and we were in the end zone of good old Archbold Stadium – a big bowl dug out of the ground back in 1907 with concrete “seats.”

To me, it looked like the Roman Coliseum.

As I recall, it rained so hard in the ends zone during the second half that my sister and I wound up going into the building behind the stadium and watching the rest of the game through a window. It never rained on my dad’s part of the stadium – in fact, I remember him saying they never even knew it rained at all. Welcome to Syracuse weather.

It’s amazing for me to think that I’m pretty much the same age now as my dad was back then. Of course, unlike me, he was a grownup with four kids – three old-timers in their mid to late twenties (one of which had already gone to and thankfully come back from Vietnam) – and 14-yr old me.

I know a lot of people think sports are stupid. Maybe they are, I dunno. To me, football (in particular) elicits memories of good times. My sister is 9 years older than I am, and when I was just a little fella, she, my dad, and I would go to the high school games on crisp autumn afternoons (no “Friday Night Lights” back then – or even electric scoreboards). I remember the high school kids looking so grown up, and the players looking so big. And I remember the cheerleaders jumping and twirling so I could see their red panties (yes, I was a little pervert even back then).

And then of course there were the times when we’d get to go see SU play – and even sometimes make the trip down the Thruway to see the Bills play. When Syracuse tore down Archbold and played a couple of games at Rich Stadium in Buffalo (where, at the time, I was going to school), my family came to visit and we went to the games, and we also went to the first game in the new stadium a year later.

So I guess that’s at least one reason I like sports – makes me think of good times with my dad. Then again, so does going to the laundromat – which the trio of my dad, sister, and me did on Saturday nights for several years when I was a kid and we had no washing machine. I don’t remember it as a chore at all – we got to hang out, and I always got a Welch’s grape soda from the machine (damn, those were good), and I even remember having fun helping to fold the sheets and blankets and stuff.

Of course, my thoughts are even more with my dad than usual right about now. Next Thursday, it’ll be 20 years since he died. Two decades – I don’t know what’s harder to believe, that he’s been gone for so long or that I’m in my fifties now.

Neither one of those ideas seem real.