My parents both hoped for a boy when my Mom got pregnant for the first and last time. They meant different things when they said that, however. I believe that my Mom hoped for someone like me, a boy who would totally collapse in Fourth Grade when Mira Smith called up and dumped him. My Dad hoped for someone... I don't know... Someone else. Which is why we were both so thankful about my love for the National Football League, and for the Minnesota Vikings in particular. Which is why, on a frozen Sunday afternoon in December of 1975, in response to my Mom wondering if we could watch golf when her father, Papa, arrived, my Dad gave a happy whoop of a laugh and said, "You've got to be fucking joking."

Papa was a slender, taciturn man who dressed in stiff-collared polo shirts and plaid pants, regardless of season. Skin crumpled up at his elbows, but his arms were still strong, and his hair, though fading and sparse, was still blonde, like that of Jack Nicklaus. Papa admired Jack Nicklaus. When Jack Nicklaus appeared on TV, shading his eyes to peer down the length of a fairway, you could almost see him as a younger Papa, with his whole life in front of him. This was kind of a sad thought, because Grandmother, the love of Papa's life, had died in the late summer of that year.

All of the above information— about Jack Nicklaus, about Grandmother's passing away— unfolded itself in the silence that followed my Dad saying, "You've got to be fucking joking."

And so technically my Dad was answering himself when he backtracked and whined, "The Vikings are on."

"Do you what you like," my Mom called.

We had a second TV, a little black-and-white set, on the workbench in the unfinished basement. My Dad wiped it clean of sawdust, brought it upstairs and placed it directly on top of the first. That way we could watch both at once: golf on the small one, with the volume turned down, and the Vikes in full color, purple and gold, with all of the voices of all of the people in Met Stadium pouring out— especially in the fourth quarter, when Fran Tarkenton, the quarterback, took a snap from center Mick Tinglehoff, scouted the field, then evaded one oncoming man and crumpled against the next like a pop can before twisting free, before finally setting his feet and hoisting the tiny spinning ball into the white sky like a delirious prayer.

"Go!" my Dad screamed when the pass came down and was caught by a Vikings receiver. He jumped up and down, screaming "Go!" upon impact. Seven, eight times he did this. "Go!"

And though I was cheering, too, I've had to admit that the rage moving up through these Go's was jarring, and that I was conscious of more than my Dad would ever have believed: how Papa's left hand, for example, rose to secure his cocktail glass, or how the little black-and-white set appeared to be turning to one side. Which is to say I could have done something. I could have stepped in to prevent Papa's golf from tumbling and being smashed on the floor, and my parents from fighting, and my Dad, possibly, from having to deal so soon with the embarrassing loneliness of the apartment on Lee Street.

But to say so is pointless. I was a kid. I was eleven-years old. Not in a million years would I have done something to cause my Dad to believe he was alone in what he felt about the touchdown.

* * *

Scott Garson is headed east. His stories have appeared in The New Orleans Review, Quick Fiction, Fourteen Hills, Juked, and other print and online journals.