It's behind me

. . .the first day, that is. Made it through. So did they. Or so it appears. None of them died in the classroom.

The college where I teach has a football team for the first time in its history this year, and we find ourselves in a brave new world. Suddenly we are beset with bicept-y male-types. What's more, our demographic profile has been radically transformed: the proportion of men to women reversed itself in one year; our percentage of Canadian students went way down (football isn't that big of a deal north of the border); and population of kids from our denominational constituency dropped ten percentage points! We're playing football, baby.

What's more, we've got guys from Texas, Oklahoma, and all over the country, meaty guys who eat, sleep, and drink football. They're at Dordt College for football and football alone. They wouldn't have thought of coming here otherwise. That's new.

I'm not sure we own a sweeter word today than diversity, and now we've got it. We're cross-cultural in ways no soc class ever envisioned, beset by beefy men who love to hit. We've had hockey for years, of course; we've not been without men who like to bang others around. But we've now got 50 or so more Rambos plodding around, and everything just looks different. Calvinists aren't known for sweetness, of course, but these guys lug in an entirely different dimension.

Ought to be fun. Tailgates Saturday--all kinds of them. Go ahead, bang bellies, raise a fist. We're arrived. We'll be on the gridiron this weekend. Don't miss it.

Yesterday in class, a half-dozen of them showed up. We'll see if they can write too.

That would be nice.