I am a football fan. Not a fanatic but a real fan, nonetheless. By that I mean I do not have heart palpitations if I miss a game on TV, not even a UT game or a Cowboys game. But I do love the game and will take advantage of every opportunity I have to watch the gladiators of the gridiron go at it. I realize that sentence with its blatant anachronisms dates me but I have been watching the game for a long time.

There are some things I have a hard time getting used to. I know there are some who do not remember when Thanksgiving Day did not mean the Cowboys and someone else playing football. Thanksgiving was always the day Texas played A&M. You waited for that day, knowing that you would see some fireworks on the field. Now the NFL owns Thanksgiving Day and we have to wait until Friday to watch the game of the season

I guess, however, we need to get used to change in our lives and in our routine, I really don’t want to go back to the good old days. They weren’t what they are made out to be. I remember when there was no television. Not even black and white. You lay down on the rug in front of the radio and listened to your favorite stories. It took a lot of imagination. Each one of us had our own mental picture of Captain Midnight, Hop Harrigan, Jack Armstrong and Smiling Jack Martin. However, believe it or not, you saw those episodes just as clearly as we see them on TV today. I even once had my own Little Orphan Annie decoder ring telling me to ‘drink more Ovaltine.”

I remember when you did not start singing Christmas carols until the middle of December and no one in their right mind would have lights on their house and a Christmas tree in their parlor before Thanksgiving.

In those days gasoline sold for ten cents a gallon. A new Buick was about $2500 off the show room floor and a five-room house could be built for about $4000. Sounds good until you look at my daddy’s pay stub for those years; he was well paid at about $1200 a year. Maybe prices haven’t gone up so much, after all.

I like the remarkable age in which we live today. There is more to do, to see and to know than in all of man’s history. The knowledge base has doubled, tripled and quadrupled in my lifetime. The information is manageable only with the aid of a computer, which you soon learn is not your friend. None of this just happened. There were no atoms that one day came together and formed a computer. It all is the result of intelligent design. There were brilliant minds that took the known and followed it to the unknown. How can anyone look at the world in which we live and doubt that there was an intelligence that created it all?