The Hawk

Recently a man in my town took up residence on the town football field, in a small tent in the northwestern corner, near the copse of cedars. He had been a terrific football player some years ago for our high school, and then played in college, and then played a couple of years in the nether reaches of the professional ranks, where a man might get paid a hundred bucks a game plus bonuses for touchdowns and sacks, and then he had entered into several business ventures, but these had not gone so well, and he had married and had children, but that had not gone so well either, and finally he took up residence on the football field, because, as he said, that was where things had gone well, and while he knew for sure that people thought he was nuts to pitch a tent on the field, he sort of needed to get balanced again, and there was something about the field that was working for him in that way as far as he could tell after a few days, so, with all due respect to people who thought he was a nutcase, he thought he would stay there until someone made him leave. He had already spoken with the cops, he said, and it was a mark of the general decency of our town that he was told he could stay awhile as long as he didn’t interfere with use of the field, which of course he would never think of doing such a thing, and it was summer, anyways, so the field wasn’t in use much.