Back To Business As Usual In Buckeyeland
Well, Michigan gave Ohio State a good thrashing Saturday, so the fever has banked itself for another year. There will be a respectable bowl game, maybe even a top-tier BCS bowl (OSU is 10-2, after all), but, as in many past years, the bowl game will be an afterthought and an inadequate consolation to losing to Michigan.
I had flown to Charleston, SC to watch the game on TV with my brothers, their wives and a couple other of their friends. One of my brothers lives in Charleston, the other lives in Atlanta, so it seemed appealing to gather in the warmest venue among us. The weather cooperated - it was in the mid-70s and sunny, and I kind of gloated when I put on sunscreen for the day Saturday, instead of layers of scarlet and grey padding against the historically frigid Ann Arbor gamesite climate. When I was in OSU’s marching band, there were times when playing Michigan we slathered our valves with antifreeze (we were an all-brass band) and used plastic mouthpieces to avoid the “timmy licked the flagpole and now his tongue is stuck and has to be cut off” possibilities of the more musically appealing metal mouthpieces..
All in all, I’d say we took the defeat with an unaccustomed grace. I think winning the national championship last year imbued us with a kind of magnanimity and noblesse oblige this year, and we watched the season unfold with an heir’s detachment, the national championship like a trust fund that insulated us from the life-and-death gut-wrenching anxiety of watching games. There’ll be time enough to savage the coaching staff next year, when the anesthetic will have worn off.
The oyster roast was nicely stage-managed by my Charleston-resident brother. I prefer my oysters raw to cooked, relishing the saline juice and coppery tinge to the meat. However, I enjoyed the preparation this weekend. My brother built a fire in the middle of his field and eventually coaxed a hot bed of coals. He spread them out, put a grate over them and poured out a bushel of oysters in their shells. We took care to pluck them off the fire just as a seam formed in the incomprehensible construction of the shells. The result muted somewhat the sea-born taste, but the chargrilled quality that replaced it was quite satisfying, and no doubt safer from a bacteriological standpoint.
