2008, 2012, GOING, GONE

By Larry Walker

December 31, 2012

This is an article I wrote for the November/December issue of James magazine. I wrote it shortly after 2012 SEC Championship football game between Georgia and Alabama. I like the article and got good responses from it. Consequently, I decided to share it with the Houston Home Journal readers. Here it is.

James has asked me to write of events of 2012 as if they expect some enlightenment, and which I expect they expect to be of politics, the economy or business and what I see around the corner. I will do my best, but must back up, for some inexplicable reason, to a football game to start.

It was 2008, four years ago, and Georgia, the football team, had been administered serious corporeal punishment by its neighbor to the west – they being, by whatever name called, Red Elephants, Crimson Tide, or Ivan The Terrible. It was bad. And so I have the feeling, again, the ultimate feeling born of the 2012 certain results, but with some pride retained even with the latest defeat of just a few days ago. Even now, I remember 2008 more clearly than the 2012 event. A lettered psychiatrist may be able to explain and with possible emphasis on the great disparity of the scoring in ‘08.

We got updates as we winged even during the 2008 game, eastward to Spain on a huge Delta airplane and in the company of our Governor Perdue, eventually losing interest, not in the altitude, but in the developing score, perhaps becoming weary with the inevitable. And then we landed in a far country, and football seemed as far away as the USA and of only slight importance, at least temporarily.

And so it is, the events of 2012, culminating in a domed ball shell in Atlanta, have caused memories of 2008 in a distant, though sophisticated land and a metaphor for how I view 2012. Let’s see.

In 2008, we spent forty eight hours, or so, in Barcelona, Spain, and then the Governor’s entourage, of which I was a member, boarded a bullet train to travel half-way across that country to Madrid, and so fast that you could look backward with no more enlightenment than you could look around the next rushing curve in a land previously unseen and unknown.

First, as to the immediate past, I don’t understand what has happened, and just like on Spain’s trains, I can’t see around the corner. I know this: We had an election, indecent amounts of money were spent, there were polls sworn to under oath that both candidates were going to win, robo phone calls disturbed and aggravated (it being equal irritation and aggravation), one of the candidates won, and now we are rushing towards a ‘financial cliff’. It’s been that way (the cliff part) with my law firm and me since September, 2007, and we are not the only ones. I’m tired of it. That’s it. Now, let me tell you what I do remember about 2012 and what I will try to remember into the future.

The quail hunting was good – all of it: the dogs, the guides, the food, the scenery and even the shooters. Bass fishing was rewarding, including how we did in the Perry Rotary Bass Tournament. Oxford, Mississippi and the campus were beautiful in the spring, and Fairhope, Alabama was a great place to visit in the summer. An All-State grandson basketball player with a school record of 69 three-pointers is something to be savored and not forgotten. The mountains at Caesar’s Head, South Carolina are neat. Time with the Kuhlkes in Augusta and catching an eight-pound gar on the Savannah River won’t be forgotten. Neither will names like NeSmith, Goff, Wilheit, Bowen, Stalvey, Cole, Rhodes, Hopkins, Tarbutton, Griffin, Deal, Byrd, Wrigley, Huckaby, Ralston, Fain, Stafford, Minter and many more.

I mentioned Caesar’s Head, South Carolina where we visited the Stalvey’s and while there watched the Georgia-South Carolina football game with ten other couples – twenty Gamecocks. It was brutal. One day, I hope to forget. But, what I won’t forget is the unlikelihood of the Dawgs even being in the 2012 SEC Championship game in Atlanta a few days ago, which reminds me of the whipping we took at the hands of the red pachyderms in 2008, which reminds me of Spain and how hard it is when everything is moving so fast and your not being able to see anything in front and very little behind, which lets me know the futility and failure of my being able to even attempt to write a column like this, it being what it is.

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