A Private Club

The vantage point with the highest altitude in this little mountain town is the press box above the football field. I hesitate to call the place a “stadium” as this is a liberal arts school and we can afford with neither our finances nor our concern to create such a thing. A few of us scraped the flesh of our palms on the top of the chain link fence, sneaking in. One of us got stuck between two of the metal fence panels. We sprinted the field, climbed the stands, lifted ourselves and our alcoholic cargo through the window of the press box and up the ladder to the roof. Thanks to the nearby aluminum processing plant, only the strongest of constellations could compete with the glare and the haze, but it was a nice night.

Mark, my old roommate from two years ago, he was there with us, visiting as an alumni turned congressional assistant. I turned to him, immediately returning to the kind of conciliatory manner that comes from cohabitation, and I said “isn’t it nice. The press box. The bar we have here.” Ian, who is a professional bartender, did what he could with the materials at hand. “To truly enjoy the freedom of the press, and all the liberties there implied” I guess I’d had a few “And to observe, and record. . . what goes on here?” Surely, Mark agreed, there are better places on the planet to put a press box than atop the scene of something so stupid as football, or worse, the games played here at night.

“Someone should name this new place,” he said. He was looking at me.

You don’t name things from the press box. You describe them.