Watching the Super Bowl in "heaven."

 Stupid Bowl LVIII 

My sister writes, Moira, the dead sister:

. . . I had oatmeal for breakfast this morning with the raisins cooked in and milk and brown sugar. I actually cooked the oatmeal - it didn't just appear. I stirred and stirred it into the boiling water. Doing something with my hands - cooking oatmeal, making a sandwich, writing a letter - reminds me of what it was like to be physically alive, walking on my own feet, talking and tasting with my own tongue, watching with my own eyes, having a cold in my own nose. Sadly, it's only a reminder. They are only reminders, I am not physically alive. (I've tried to explain this to you before, how it feels and how it doesn't feel, I think.)
     In any case, after breakfast - sweet and filling (if, yes, in a ghostly way) - I walked over to Lisa's; I hadn't seen her in a while. And we walked to the coffee on the corner place where we met Gretchen Moore and her John, and Phil that we went to high school with, and a girl named Jack, who was in college for a year with you and Lisa before she transferred to the University of North Carolina. And we all drank coffee and listened to Phil and this Jack talk about the Super Bowl. Apparently, that's soon. But here's a rub I think (hope, trust) you'll appreciate, no one here gives a damn about it - not even Phil, or Jack. Their conversation was a mock litany from the Church of Football Foolishness they belonged to while alive, though they agreed with none of its tenets even then. Who did truly? they wondered. Wasn't it all media hype and cultural pressure?
     Jack, who wrote sports for a paper in Carolina for a while, avowed when the litany was over that football was the stupidest game ever invented and the older it got, the stupider it became with coaches in the sky talking electronically through their helmets with players on the ground, with players on the ground growing ever larger so that more than a few weighed close to 400 pounds and none in good enough condition to run over 40 yards, but who had to be in better than that since the average play lasted about six seconds and substitutions were unlimited, whereas the time between plays averaged almost a minute when the clock was running? A game one hour long took three hours, at least, to complete. Doesn't that mean that the clock wasn't running for two hours!? In any case, of that one hour (played over three), only about twelve minutes were spent in actual play. Is this true, do you think? - I don't know, but Jack sounded like she knew what she was talking about.
     Then she asked if any one of us was having a Super Bowl party. She was willing to: beer and snacks, a TV the size of the side of a house; we could all get drunk and feel shitty the next day (shitty and triumphant if our team had won, I gather, just shitty if our team had lost). Apparently, there's a local exemption for former Foolish Church believers that covers both parties and hangovers, you just have to get a license. She would do that if enough of us wanted to, or were willing to, join in. What do you think of that? Should I? Phil said he'd take me - and Lisa - if one or both of us wanted to go. And Jack thought she could "scare up" some fools from her Carolina days.
      So, did we want to go? I asked Lisa on the way home. She said she'd rather go to the library and read Finnegan's Wake, but maybe we should. She was trying to remember Jack. "Melissa Drake?" she said. "I think." But she couldn't remember where she was from, or why she wanted to be called "Jack" and wanted to transfer. "Ask your brother," she said.
     Do you know?
                                 Love, Moira
                                                                           02.09.24