Opinion: My world, your world

Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dog walker who lives and works in Contoocook.

In my last My Turn, with Bob Seger’s Night Moves spinning around on the turntable in my head (yes, I am that old), I wrote about the bittersweet feeling of autumn closing in as summer comes to an end. For me, however, the sweet has always outweighed the bitter. My summers were fun, but as far back as I can remember, fall has been my favorite season.

My happy fall memories take many forms. Some are sense based. The aroma of fallen leaves and the sound of crunching through them takes me back to walking to school in the fall. Now here’s a funny one. I take a backseat to no one when it comes to hating tobacco – cigarettes helped my mother die much younger than she should have – but I still recall, with great fondness, the sweet smell of smoke from burning pipe tobacco that wafted my way in Ohio Stadium when my parents took me to football games there.

Another cherished autumn memory dates back to junior high school. When I sat in a study hall during the last period of the day, I could hear the high-school band out on the football field practicing for their next halftime show. The warm breeze coming through the windows, carrying band music with it, held the promise of Friday night fun.

My high school football team didn’t win many games when I was young, but Friday nights were the highlight of the week. I could walk to the stadium from my house, and I knew I was getting close when I could see the glow from the stadium lights above the school building and when I could smell the popcorn popping away at the concession stand. All my friends were there, and if we got to the right spot at the end of the game, we could clap the players on their shoulder pads as they ran back to the locker room.

Friday nights were for Bexley High School football. Saturday afternoons were for the Ohio State Buckeyes. Starting in the sixth grade, I made it to nearly all of Ohio State’s home games, and my trusty transistor radio brought me the road games.

The first few times I went to Ohio Stadium, I sat with my parents, but then I got my own pair of tickets and started taking friends. Often at the end of the game, I would go to the locker room door where I would clap the players on their shoulder pads and beg for chin straps. Twice I went home with that prized souvenir. I rushed the field after three consecutive victories over Michigan. Once I took home a chunk of sod from the field and kept it alive in a flower pot in my bedroom for over a month. The sound of the victory bell still echoes in my ears.

When I was a kid, autumn was not just fallen leaves and football; it also signaled the start of school. I always looked forward to a new grade, a new teacher, a new classroom, and a new set of classmates. Then when I went to college, I found that I had a whole new life. Experiencing all that newness in the fall of 1975 made a deep impression that has stayed with me ever since.

The bottom line is that for a variety of reasons, I love autumn. And, as it happens, many of my happy autumn memories revolve around football and school. I suspect that my love for football is rooted in the fact that going to football games with my parents was one of my first paths into their adult world. As for school, academics always came easily to me, so it makes perfect sense that my memories of school are happy ones.

But that is just my world, not everyone’s world. Some people can’t stand football, and there are compelling arguments to be made that the sport itself and our fascination with it are fundamentally ill advised. And while I loved school – college after high school, grad school after college, law school after grad school – there are plenty of people who experience the start of school each fall with a foreboding that equals or exceeds the magnitude of my eager anticipation. Football and school are not everyone’s cup of tea. My autumn is not necessarily your autumn.

Recognizing that my world is not everyone’s world reminds me of the moment in every Chabot family Passover seder when the leader points out that the miracles that saved the Jews came at the expense of an untold number of innocent Egyptians. At that point in the seder, we are asked to temper our joy by remembering and honoring the sorrow of the Egyptians.

We all live in our own unique worlds, and we should not lose sight of the worlds inhabited by the other people with whom we share this small planet.