boys and busted knees.

It is football season all around; college football (which nobody in my house cares about), NFL (which one person in my house cares about an unhealthy amount) and Winston-Salem City Flag Football (which everyone in my house cares about... a lot.) Mark has played in this league for five years, September-December, most Tuesday nights. I love when it's football season because it comes in coordination with cooler weather and boots, wearing socks, cold cold wooden floors, the disagreement about what temperature is the heat threshold. Pumpkins are also a highlight. Anyway, the guys brought in this season with several shut out wins in a row, and they were on track to do it again last Tuesday night. Up by at least twenty points with fewer than three minutes left to play, all of the wives and fiances were cold and ready to go home, happy to take home winners (because when they aren't it's not pretty), and Mark threw a long pass to Kyle Welch, who plays wide receiver. It was a perfect throw, perfect catch, imperfect pivot. Kyle went down hard, crumpled up like trashed manuscript pages, rolled twice and then just layed there. Dana and I booked it over to the ten yard line where he was quite obviously exceptionally injured, groaning, panicked. It was terrible, even the pissed-off opposing players came over to offer At least you caught it, man.

Working for three orthopaedic surgeons does have its advantages, so Mark and I took the non-weightbearing Kyle to the home of the head NP at my office where she wrote him a script for some serious pain meds, put his blown out knee in an immobilizer, and told him to come with me to work the next day where one of the docs would take care of business. Owing to the fact that Kyle doesn't have a wife to deal with these yearly football injuries, it usually falls to Dana (friend and fellow football wife) and myself, so Mark and I brought Kyle to the homestead. Needless to say, it was a rather agonizing night for Kyle, but some day I think he will look back on it with something of appreciation. Mark sort of turned into Kyle's crutches. He all but carried him into the house, fixed him up with take-out food, took off his mud, sweaty socks, and to really put the crumbly topping on the muffin, held him up in the shower so he could wash off all the grime. I sat outside the bathroom door half laughing, cringing at the yelps of agony when Mark tried to get some of the mud off of the busted knee. When they opened the door Kyle said, "Well I don't think either of us will ever forget that."

Two days later we found out we're going to have a son. Neither of us knew "what" we were expecting, but when we saw that little boy squishing around on the ultrasound we both about fell apart. We knew his name would be Jack Marshall Evans, honoring some precious family members, and we spent Thursday night calling and texting, starting to imagine what life with a son will be like. I couldn't help but think about Tuesday night, the football, the injury, the twenty-eight year old boys that still play sports and take care of each other. I was thinking about a son maybe a little like Mark, maybe even a little like Kyle, and it made me sort of happy and excited for every minute of the future.

Kyle probably tore most of the acronyms in his knee, we'll find out next week. I texted him on Friday.

"By the way, it's a boy. -- Jack Marshall"

"Sweet. That's so awesome. Jack Daniel?"

Ha. Some things might never change.