Letter Into Your Heart

I played football in high school. I only played my senior year, because my sophmore year I weighed 135lbs. My junior year I may have been 150. My senior year I hit 175 and put on some muscle.

I wasn't very good. I could run and hit, but I wasn't destined for the NFL by any stretch... not even as a water boy. I mostly did it for the prestige and the letterman jacket.
I still have my varsity jacket. Red corduroy with a gold letter "A" for my home town on the left breast, my last name and number (67) on the right breast, "V" for varsity on the left sleeve. Cougar paw and my first name on the right sleeve (this was pre K-Nine days). Eastern state championship metal pinned to the cross bar on the "A". I was proud of that jacket, I wore it for a couple of years after high school.
It still hangs in my closet now... Looks just like the day I last took it off.

My high school has changed colors and mascots a couple of times. Years before me they were the Indians... Black and gold. A couple of years after I graduated they became the Hertford County Bears, blue and gold.

I was a red and gold Cougar.

One girl a few years younger than I wore her dad's Indian varsity jacket to school one fall and winter. It seemed (to me anyway) to be very cool back then.

I wrote recently about the fact that I would have made a good dad. I saved that jacket all these years, it was very well taken care of. Only one or two small spots on it, no rips or tears.

I thought that one day, my hip and cool daughter might like to wear it to school. Nobody would know or care that I rode the bench most of the time. It's a vintage championship letterman's jacket. That's cool.

More than twenty years have gone by since I was on that team. Twenty years since that team name ceased to exist.

I have no daughter to wear my jacket to school. I have nobody interested in me enough to want to have a daughter who might want to wear my jacket.

An unfulfilled destiny hangs in my closet. Every few years I pull it out and put it on to see if it still fits, and it does... Then I brush the dust off the shoulders, place it back on the hanger and back in the closet... To wait till the next time I try it on in a year or two.