It’s Sunday afternoon mid-winter in Canada under a brilliantly blue and glimmering sunny sky and as vividly cold. Rumour has it that the traditional new year Super Bowl football match is scheduled on television today. We do not have a television.  We abandoned it for our laptop computers instead – though, for my part, I haven’t any ambition or expectation to submit to such a boob-tube production. Competitive sport has never been an amusement of mine. I am as usual riveted to my desk overlooking the white frozen fields and iced upriver view.

The Super Bowl is the annual league championship game of the National Football League (NFL) of the United States. It has served as the final game of every NFL season since 1966, replacing the NFL Championship Game. Since 2022, the game has been played on the second Sunday in February. Prior Super Bowls were played on Sundays in early to mid-January from 1967 to 1978, late January from 1979 to 2003 and the first Sunday of February from 2004 to 2021. Winning teams are awarded the Vince Lombardi Trophy, named after the eponymous coach who won the first two Super Bowls. Because the NFL restricts the use of its “Super Bowl” trademark, it is frequently referred to as the “big game” or other generic terms by non-sponsoring corporations. The day the game is held is commonly referred to as “Super Bowl Sunday” or “Super Sunday”.

The game was created as part of a 1966 merger agreement between the NFL and the competing American Football League (AFL) to have their best teams compete for a championship.

Discounting the Super Bowl has made me eager to do something which qualifies, for anything, something which deracinates meaning from the furrowed rows of snow or from beneath the shifting waves of ice and snow upon the river. The horizon disappears down a slope at the rim of the globe, an infinity embroidered with clumps of fir and avenues of bark until it reaches the sky. I remember decades ago cycling along Paterson Street and Old Almonte Road, never imagining half a century later I would be poised aloft following the identical channel of vision – but this time whilst sipping espresso and comforting my butt upon a bespoke cushion at my mahogany desk. I suspect I haven’t any better insight what is ahead of me; but I am as certain now as likely I was then that the vista before me is a treasure, the rough country road separating the farmlands from the river’s edge, rolling up and down towards the village.

And I am in concert.  Only yesterday we implored one another, “Who buys or sells CDs anymore?” That too has changed. Now – with my Bose® headphones – and connected to Apple Music© through the internet (I still don’t really know what that is), my musical entertainment is resolved. Typically I cannot envision a better option than this. Thinking back again 50 years, I recall having bought a cassette player to listen to “Baby, I love your way” while traipsing down Rue Ste-Catherine 0uest in downtown Montréal. Always there must be music.

The sky today is so cold and clear that there is not a cloud to be seen, nor so much as a wisp of white.  The sky is a perfect mould of blue overturned upon the earth. The Classics are subject to algorithms – slowly changing from Baroque to modern, from extravagant to musing. The reflection and contemplation dissolves into the unblemished panorama. The evaporation of ice, snow and crystals on the balcony lounge chairs has been momentarily halted by the “Extreme Cold Warning”; but by tomorrow I suspect the the dissolution will continue, boundaries retreating like shadows until, like magic, the evidence is gone.

Meanwhile the instructive classics have turned to American standards, softening the day once more, relieving me of the arthritic pain which so contaminates one’s gusto. Perhaps today is a day with no need for conclusion. We’ve had enough. Instead I content myself to listen to heartening music. Staring beyond, thoughts blow across the fields, the frozen river meanders, the picture captures all there is to say.