Little Reviews: Poem for Friday and Maryland Move-In

Tackle Football
By Dan Chiasson

Snow up to our waists and coming down still.
There was a field here once, when we began.
We marked the end zones and set up the goals.

Now nobody can even move, much less tackle.
I am Ganymede fleeing on a temple frieze.
We stand around like lovesick Neanderthals.

We're Pompeian before Pompeii was hot.
We have the aspect of the classic dead
Or of stranded, shivering astronauts.

It was early in the era of the pause button:
We paused and paused the afternoons away
Indoors, blasting our ballistic erections

At the blurred bikinis of celebrities,
Then, splaying on the linoleum floor,
Awaited the apportioned pizza delivery.

Now, someone has paused us, or so it appears,
But they didn't pause the snow, or the hour:
As the one gets higher, the other gets later.

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Another quickie as I am quite sleepy after a pretty insane week -- I had expected to have kind of a quiet nostalgic couple of days while Adam was away at Turtle Camp, followed by an evening of packing and a fairly standard move-in day. Instead I spent many hours picking Adam up from a hospital, then getting up early and spending nearly 12 hours getting his broken arm examined and repaired, followed by a day of trying to help him pack around a visit to the end of Turtle Camp while he was on serious painkillers.

So on Thursday, we went with my mother to bring the rest of his things to his dorm and get them organized, probably with more micromanaging than Adam would have preferred under normal circumstances, but he didn't want to take too many painkillers while trying to do various activities so he let us. When he was ready to go meet up with people in his program, we left College Park and stopped at the mall for froyo. Then we came home, did some cleanup, and caught up on Legends and Dallas! A few pics: