Being thankful, watching soccer and other things Americans do irregularly

by Nate Clark, Town Cryings
Posted 12/1/22

I spent my Thanksgiving holidays like I do most years: watching a soccer game being played in a small Middle Eastern country. That’s a joke. I don’t watch soccer … ever. I prefer …

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Being thankful, watching soccer and other things Americans do irregularly

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I spent my Thanksgiving holidays like I do most years: watching a soccer game being played in a small Middle Eastern country. That’s a joke. I don’t watch soccer … ever. I prefer to watch contact sports around Turkey Day. That’s why I always find a seat as close to the door as possible at Walmart on Black Friday. There are more shin kicks and elbow jabs at a southern Walmart on Black Friday than in a year of WWE wrestling. After all, what’s a world championship belt compared to a 70-inch smart tv for five hundred dollars?
This year’s World Cup I have more or less vowed to watch. I kind of figured the World Cup is kind of like 2019 Game of Thrones - I might as well watch it so I can understand what everyone is talking about. Watching soccer games does allow me the fun of playing my favorite fantasy game: “what if America’s best athletes actually played soccer?” I imagine if we threw out the University of Georgia football team on the pitch, a lot of those countries would just forfeit. I mean, they’re used to playing 165-pound boys from Wales. Can you imagine them staring down a 280-pound monster from Valdosta that runs a 4.6 forty-yard dash? It would be so bad the Europeans would be flopping before the games started.
Back to Thanksgiving, while beautiful, crime-free Iuka suffered record low temperatures, the Clark family spent the week at the in-laws’ place in Florida. Let me tell you something friends: nothing makes you set aside petty family squabbles like seventy-degree weather in late November. We traded our turkey and Ugg boots for shrimp and flip-flops. I’ve never been happier walking off Thanksgiving dinner than when I did it last week in shorts. All of the Floridians were super nice, too. They all said they had never seen such white legs on someone that wasn’t medically homebound before.
Of course, I’ve never had mosquito bites a month after Halloween, either. So, maybe I just traded pneumonia for the West Nile Virus.
Driving from Northeast Mississippi to just south of Jacksonville, Florida with two children is a journey not for the weak of heart. I’ll just say this: if General Sherman would have had his kids with him on the campaign, he never would have made it to Atlanta. He would have pulled the entire Union Army over to the side of the road and everybody would have got a whuppin’ whether they needed it or not. He probably then would have given up on the whole venture and opened up a vape store somewhere on the outskirts of Chattanooga. The drive to the Atlantic Ocean side of Florida is so long that I think I went through a midlife crisis somewhere between hours six and eight. Of course, the four of us plus our luggage wouldn’t fit in a Corvette, so I just made everybody miserable by listening to every obscure SEC football podcast my iPhone could find.
Thanksgiving in Florida is like a holiday anywhere, except for the part where you all gather around a palm tree and sing Jimmy Buffet songs. But whether you gathered with your family to watch the Egg Bowl or Germany versus Japan, or whether your uncles argued over parking, or one of your in-law’s family members kicked an alligator to win a bet, I hope you took a moment to be thankful. For family. For friends. For friends who are like family. For all the ones who drive us crazy, but make us who we are.
And, while we’re all in a familial mood, let’s get behind our skinny boys playing soccer for us. USA! USA! And, somebody, get those little boys some mashed potatoes and gravy.