Hello Packer Nation

It would seem that now is the wrong time to begin a new blog focused on the Green Bay Packers.  The same could be said about any other N.F.L. team for that matter.  With the current lockout situation and continued uncertainty as to when or even if this year’s season will get underway, starting a writing project about a team that may well go into hibernation seems somewhat odd.

Upon further review it strikes me that current situations in this country as well as globally would make this endeavor seem even more ludicrous. Sons, daughters, husbands, fathers, wives and mothers are off to war in other lands.  High gas prices, increasing inflation, scarce job markets, unstable (at best) real estate markets, investment portfolio values rising and falling like yo-yos in the hands of five-year-olds have nearly everyone on edge.

People are dying from earthquakes, tsunamis, famine, and disease.  Nuclear reactors are blowing up.  Honeybees are disappearing.  So are polar ice shelves and polar bears. Many other animal species are facing extinction at alarming rates.  Alaska is enjoying unseasonably warm winters while places in Mexico have endured below freezing temperatures for the first time in recorded history. It is all just a little too apocalyptic for my liking, making my new Packer blog seem all the more trivial.

As I was contemplating all of this the other night, I had an epiphany.  When I review my life, I can find very few constants.  Friends change.  Lovers change.  Addresses change.  Desires change.  Values change.  Political views change.  Musical tastes change.  Movie tastes change.  Hairstyles, hairlines, waistlines, eyesight, and nose hair…everything seems to change.

I realized the other night there are very, very few things that have been a “constant” in my life.  Changes, both good and bad, are everywhere, yet I can really only come up with six things that have remained constant since the time of my childhood.  One of them is my love for the Green Bay Packers.

I have been a fan since moving to Wisconsin from (gulp) Chicagoland in 1968 when I was five years old.  I was a fan before I could read or write.  I was a fan before man walked on the moon, before we got our first color TV, and before the Beatles broke up. I’ve been a fan nearly twice as long as I’ve known my wife of 21 years, and we had a very long engagement.  It’s a rather sobering realization.

Perhaps that is why, even in the midst of worldwide tragedies, personal struggles and even an N.F.L. lockout that my interest in the Pack has not wavered.  It’s a constant in my life amidst all of the chaos the rest of my world brings.

And so despite, and perhaps to spite, all of these other things, I say, “Go, Pack, Go!”