Well, the Ravens didn't slink off the playing field muttering "Nevermore" yesterday, but they DID get beaten by the Patriots, and I was right there on the 50-yard-line enjoying every minute.

This photo (pre-game) shows nothing except how very good my seat was. Many thanks to the Kraft family, who own the Patriots, and who have an almost-11-year-old granddaughter who is a book-lover.

I remember high school football games from my adolescent years (until I went to an all-girls school for my final two years of high school) and I remember being COLD. Games were on Friday nights and thogh we bundled up, it seems in my memory as if my feet always froze.

When I was in junior high school, in Tokyo, my older sister's boyfriend was a football star. Funny, I remember that his number was 41----that goes back 60 years!  The games were played in Meiji Stadium, in Tokyo, which had been built for the pre-war Olympics; and during the summers we swam almost every day in the Olympic pool there---I seem to remember that we could walk there from our house, but I could be wrong---maybe we took some sort of bus. Even as kids (I was 11, 12, and 13 in Tokyo) we made our way everywhere by bus and train, and sometimes bike, very easily and safely.

During spring vacation, and also again one summer. I went alone by overnight train to the city of Kure. A friend of mine from Tokyo had moved with her family down to an island called Eta-jima in the inland sea, very near Hiroshima, and reachable by boat from Kure. Her family met my train, I suppose, and took me over to the island for a lengthy and wonderful stay.  Just a couple of years ago, reading the terrific novel "The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard, I recognized the island of Eta-jima as part of the setting, though the author mis-spelled its name (I emailed my friend Allen Say, who spent his childhood near there, to corroborate the fact of the mis-spelling I suspected).

I just looked online, googling Eta-jima, and came up with photos that transport me back in time. The village on Nagako, on the island: 

I would not have been looking for BEER as the sign says, not at age 12---but I certainly wandered and out of all the shops. And here is the ferry to and from Kure; I was a passenger on it many, many times:

But now I have wandered down memory lane way farther than anyone would possibly want to follow me!