Friday Night Lights

Treat yourself to a few episodes of NBC's Friday Night Lights. Those who say it's just a football show may also tell you that Moby Dick is just a whaling manual (F. Buechner). The acting, writing, and production style place the show in a class of its own. Kyle Chandler in the role of Coach Eric Taylor does a fine job of portraying a man who is driven and simple but not stupid, and Connie Britton as Tammy Taylor lights it up every time she's in the action. There are no weaklings in the supporting cast either. The characters are realistic and engaging. The stories it tells are our stories. When you watch, you laugh, you cry, you ache, you sing, and at times you soar.

FNL takes me for brief visits to night lit football fields in towns across Arkansas on Friday nights in the early 1970s. I don't revel in some made up glory days and don't have a particularly jockish outlook on life. Nevertheless things happen in the Friday night milieu that shape us in various measure, for better or worse, and tattoo our souls and spirits.

I'm not talking about how "the tough get going when the going gets tough," or how "there's no 'I' in 'team'." I guess there are various degrees of truth sports cliches, but I'm talking about the transcendent moments:

when for a few seconds or a few quarters you and your teammates played better than you actually were, and you sensed something you later in life would learn is called 'synchronicity';

when your heart soared high above the stadium lights as the girl you wanted to walk you off the field actually showed up and did so; and when your heart broke when she didn't, but your father was there, silent and strong, and the meaning of things like 'manhood' and 'family' began to come into focus;

when you learned that underneath your pain and doubt there lay remarkable reserves of strength and endurance which would be there when you needed them in some immeasurably more terrible time in the future;

when you learned that defeat and disappointment are but way stations and not final destinations;

when you looked across a huddle into the eyes of guys who would never sit at your dining table or cruise Frank Brannan's with you in your car or worship with you at your church on Sunday morning but to whom you were utterly bonded in that moment with a unity never achieved by integration, constitutional mandates, or social engineering.

Like all good art, Friday Night Lights gives us a glimpse of the Eternal in the midst of the temporal - of the Sublime amid the mundane - of the Magnificent disguised in the trivial. Good work. Good game.

Adios and Gracias, Flying J

Where the Lowes sits now in Conway, AR, there used to be back in the day a small truck stop named Clawsons, run by the family of a guy who was a fellow Wampus Cat. You might not recognize the place by its real name, and probably knew it as G.J.'s, an abbreviation for the Glittering Jesus Christmas decoration placed in the front window at yuletide. At G.J.'s you could get a burger and fries that would change your life, a honey bun as big as a manhole cover slathered in real butter, and a little taste of the subculture that brings you your food and your stuff and everything else you consume in your life. Clawsons and places like it have been fading out steadily for several years, and as cafes like Pharoah's in Shippenburg PA and Johnson's Truck Stop north of Denver struggle to hang on, they have been replaced by franchised operations like Flying J, Pilot, Petro, TA, and Loves.

When I left 22 years of parish ministry 12 years ago many friends and acquaintances were confused as to why I wanted to acquire a commercial driver's license and hit the road at the wheel of a big rig. There are many ways to address this and I maybe in the future I will, but for now let us say that I left a life fairly rich in amenities and took up a life with very few at all. And because the amenities are few and far between, the ones I do enjoy I also cherish and tend to guard rather jealously.

For several years I and the outfit I drive for have patronized the Flying J Travel Centers across the country. Although it is a part of the driver culture to bitch about truck stops and truck stop food, the Flying J has actually done an excellent job providing services: clean showers with clean towels, fresh (mostly) and reasonably priced food, friendly waitresses and c-store clerks, and enough merchandise to take care of modest material needs and mechanical repairs. At times, at the end of a particularly hard road, a Flying J somewhere on the road has been a virtual oasis for a tired driver.

Word has come down that Pilot, another national chain of travel centers, has merged with Flying J (read: 'bought out'), and rescued it from bankruptcy. Binness is binness, as they say, and anyone with enough sense to rub two nickels together can hardly blame either of these companies for undertaking this task. The stores will be remodeled to resemble Ma Pilot, and the Country Markets, the Flying J restaurants/buffets, will replaced by scaled-down Dennys and maybe even an IHOP or a fast food franchise of some kind.

I will freely admit that I suffer more and more these days from a grouchiness that may or may not be age-related. And I notice that my resistance to change seems to expand as I add on years. But I dread this transition. I hated seeing the Mom and Pop truck stops and cafes slowly wither away years ago, and I hate seeing travel centers which offer a wide range of services and amenities get turned into convenience stores and chain restaurants with truck parking. We have yet to see what this hybridization will yield, and for that reason I am still willing to give the benefit of the doubt to this merger. But this definitely sucks.

The trend toward homogenization of American culture continues to encroach upon all segments of society, even the fairly remote world of the professional trucker. Whatever flair still exists is being inexorably swallowed up in familiarity and monotony, the sadness of which is exacerbated when places give themselves throwback names like Cracker Barrel and Po Folks. Rocking chairs on the porch and clever handles that feign illiteracy will never bring G.J.'s back to us, or the Flying J for that matter.

So, Flying J, goodbye and thank you very, very much.