relief

The city has been buzzing with dreams of Super Bowl rings for several weeks now. And while I'm as big a football fan as the next person, Super Bowl Sunday caused a re-shuffling of my normal weekend schedule.

Generally, Sunday is my designated grocery shopping day…the day in which I restock the staples of my kitchen, such as coffee and Pop Tarts. The thought had crossed my mind to keep with my normal schedule and head out on Sunday night after the game...knowing that shopping before the Super Bowl was a bad idea because of the last minute chips, salsa, and pretzel buying public stocking up for many hours of television munching, but at the last minute I decided to replenish my Pop Tart supply on Saturday instead.

I headed out to Target, a store that always impresses me with the variety of Pop Tart offerings that are on display, and after grabbing a box I took a detour through the electronics section.

I always make a point of walking through the technological wonderland of every store that I go into. My meager paychecks don't actually enable me to purchase any of the amazing gadgets that I find there, but I like to keep abreast of all the hip and cool items that I won't ever be a proud owner of. $300 Ipods, $800 GPS devices, $5000 flat screen plasma television sets...all things that I desperately want in my apartment if it wasn't for the fact that my wallet would go into cardiac arrest and flat-line if asked to extend itself to this type of credit overload.

As I was sadly saying my goodbyes to all the television sets that lined the wall, I overheard a college aged girl asking her friend about a purchase that she was pondering.

"I really need a TV set for my bedroom, and look at this one...only $120 for a 20 inch set! What do you think? Should I buy it?"

"Listen," her friend told her, "I refuse to watch anything on a TV that's less than 32 inches. A TV set that small and you'll need binoculars just to see who's sitting on Letterman's couch every night. I mean, really, what's the point? You may as well just read a book."

They both laughed and walked away from the little set, a set whose ego had surely been bruised by this rebuff. I guess I never realized just how out-of-date books are. A few hundred years ago, when the printing press was the pinnacle of modern technology, I’m sure that books were all the rage. Now, however, they’re the entertainment equivalent of the ice box. Though I'm sure if books were given a technological twist, such as a remote control that would flip and fast forward through pages, sparing your fingers all that difficult work, more people would probably buy them.

I spent the next day watching the game with my family, a game in which my heart stopped beating several times. In fact, I had to crack open the box of Pop Tarts I had bought the day before and begin munching on some simply to calm my nerves.

And though it was an ugly win for the Steelers, it was a win none the less. As my little league coach once said, “Regardless of how you get it, a win is still a win.”

Of course, shortly after he told us this, Billy Strothers, who was our catcher that day, lost the baseball in his chest protector and the other team ended up scoring three runs, winning the game in the process.

After the Steelers victory, the typical post-Super Bowl win festivities ensued in our city…festivities that included drunken mobs swarming the streets and cheering until the wee hours of the morning, all caught on television and shown on every single local news station.

But it wasn’t until the game ended and the hordes of people began filling every street in the Pittsburgh area that I could finally let out a sigh of relief.

Not only because we won the game, but also because I had gone grocery shopping the day before. Because there was no way I would have been able to drive through that crowd of people to buy my box of Pop Tarts.