The texting thread of old tennis pals flashed up lamentations for Razorback football late Saturday afternoon.
A minor directional school in drab green trim had just tricked the Hogs into declining to tackle the punt returner.
I chimed in. "The Arkansas football of our lives: From a national championship in 1964 to forgetting to tackle in 2018."
Fifty-four short years ago, Helena's Ken Hatfield returned a punt for a touchdown against Texas. And that was with Texas players actually aware of the imperative under the rules to tackle him.
It all managed to put me in mind of a simpler and happier time, of an Arkansas vignette for 60-somethings that I first related the other day on social media, before Saturday's outcome in Fayetteville made it seem all the more poignant.
It goes like this:
If you are an Arkansas son of the '50s and '60s, then, at a very young age, 8 or 9 in my case, your dad took you outside and showed you how to operate the lawnmower safely, how to overlap the lanes to make your cutting efficient, how to use the non-flap side of your mower to maneuver closely around flower beds and how to make your corners.
We didn't use an edger in those days. We didn't have any pavement to edge against. If you fired up an edger next to the gravel on our lane and driveway, then you were going to need an eye doctor and perhaps other medical disciplines.
Anyway, if you could wield that mower like my dad could, and as he taught me, then you could cut right up against Momma's flowers. Sometimes you could even cut down Momma's flowers.
Your dad directed you to share the mowing chore with him a time or two, to take a turn under his supervision. Then one day you overheard him tell your mom words both flattering and troubling: "That boy can cut grass ever bit as good as I can if he'll just do it."
Then it happened. Your dad told you mowing was your job from then on.
He added that he didn't want to have to tell you that it was time to mow; that he expected it already to be done.
You asked him if he'd show you how to take a hose and suck gasoline out of the car to put in the gas can and then the mower. And your mother squealed, "Don't you let him do that."
Your dad, grinning, said, "I'll handle the siphonin'."
Mowing was a hellish responsibility. You'd hit the backyard to play and notice the grass would need cutting and not know what to do. You wanted to buy another day, but what if he had to tell you?
He said he didn't want to have to tell you. What would happen to you if he had to tell you?
After several years of this kind of child abuse, a young Arkansas boy of the '50s and '60s came to realize that the two things he looked forward to most every year were the end of mowing season and the Arkansas-Texas football game.
It came to occur to the boy that these days of work-force liberation and game-day excitement always came on the same Saturday.
The last mowing, one barely needed, came on the third weekend of October when the Hogs, having opened their season in mid-September and defeated Oklahoma State, Tulsa, TCU and Baylor, would take on the almost-always also-4-0 Longhorns in an annual showdown in the old and infinitely more rewarding Southwest Conference.
When the boy was 10, the Hogs defeated the Horns in Austin by 14-13 and went on to a version of the national championship. When he was 11, the Hogs defeated Texas by 27-24 as part of a 22-game winning streak that ended on the gross injustice of a shoulder injury to quarterback Jon Brittenum in the Cotton Bowl against LSU.
These were the happiest days of the Arkansas boy's youth, even as he was obliged on those days to give the mower the year's last ride over grass that had just about retired for the season.
He mowed on those mid-October Saturdays with excited visions of flying Razorbacks in his head.
Momma's flowers faced enhanced jeopardy. No four-o'clocks were safe.
On the third weekend of October this year, the Hogs will play Tulsa, loser last weekend to Arkansas State.
It's just not the same.
I told a man that story the other day, and he pondered it.
"I wonder if climate change is affecting that," he said, meaning the end of grass-growing season. "I'm going to check that out."
I said, you know, I'm going to check that, too. It's been more than 50 years.
So that was a good perspective, providing a political and scientific issue suitable for this space.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/18/2018