"I dreamed I felt the presence of God last night."

"You probably were in the presence of God."

"No, it was just a dream; it wasn't real life."

"Dreams are real life. They belong to you."

The voice says East Texas. The vocabulary says Vanderbilt. No wonder I fell in love. She ordered a Bass Ale on our first date. She suggested we buy Longhorn season tickets together. She loved Truman, the Brittany rescued from the Town Lake Animal Shelter. Her friends threw an engagement party for us at Dart Bowl. She bought me a Martin guitar as a wedding gift. She was far angrier at Mack Brown for the 2002 Oklahoma game than even I was, seething over post-game margaritas at the Blue Goose on Greenville.

Deer do not eat Burford Holly. Or at least they don't enjoy it, Burford Holly being sharp, overly chewy, bitter, poorly paired with red wine and generally deer-resistant. Every piece of landscaping advice I have sought in my career as a homeowner lists Burford Holly in the deer-resistant column. The deer in my neighborhood are poor readers. Or smartasses, one. They have chewed through a few hundred bucks worth of plants over the last few years, which they digest and then deposit back on my front lawn in an effort to screw up touch football games and my ability to retrieve the paper in bare feet. They sleep just outside my front door, sometimes four or five at a time. When I start out the front, they all look mildly surprised to see me, then irritated, like insolent teenagers awakened too soon on a Saturday morning. "What?" they seem to ask. Like any good parent, I begin the lecture.

Climbing hills taxes a man. I'm speaking physically, not metaphorically. The aptly-named Mountainclimb Drive bisecting my neighborhood provides such a test. I need about six minutes to get up it at a decent pace. By "decent" I mean fast enough to think well of myself at the top, but not so fast I suffer cardiac arrest. One Saturday this summer, Mae the Boxer and I passed a man on our ascent. It was about 85 on the way to 117 in Austin that day. In his mid-fifties, this man wore khaki pants, a long sleeve dress shirt and a tie. The yarmulke gave him away; he was going to Temple. I'm guessing his destination had to be the conservative congregation, Agudas Achim. That meant he had another two miles to go and a couple more major hills to climb in the Texas heat. That's commitment. Faithfulness.

The Duke sweatshirt went missing years ago. The last tangible proof that I went to grad school there, other than the diploma I guess, it was classic old school style with the white cut-out block letters in all caps sewn onto the dark blue front. I don't know if they make them like that anymore. One night about a decade ago, the shirt attracted some attention at the Tavern (you're never too far from 12^th and Lamar). A bunch of us were shooting pool when a girl took notice of me, or the shirt anyway.

"That's so cool, did you go to Duke?"

I was interrupted by my friend Trey Campbell, who was always quicker than me.

Boss and Charlie should be two characters in a Howard Hawks movie. Instead, the two boys, ages four and three, sit quietly at the bar with their dads. Reasonably quietly anyway; there is only so much quiet a Sonic kid's meal can guarantee. Boss goes by "Boss" because his full title is entirely too complicated (he is a fifth; I'm guessing his parents don't favor "Quint" as a nickname). Charlie is simply a Charlie. I know this because I have a Charlie. This cotton-topped version gives himself away by crawling undetected under my stool, three seats away from his dad. The two dads to my right and the childhood friend to my left have watched a lot of college football together over the years at various venues. This one boasts Guinness on tap and formidable pizza, not bad. We used to watch these games among friends. Now, more often than not, we watch them among children. There's not really much difference.

If, as I believe, God has a sense of humor, so then does Steve Jobs. Some in our culture think that they are the same person, but I will leave that rather complicated sociological exploration for another day, week five perhaps. The divine God/Jobs humor sings to me, literally, through the vagaries of my iPod. On a random drive to work last week, Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" with all of its rambling invocations of Texas medicine, railroad gin and debutantes who know what you need but not what you want, was followed by the monks of Taize singing "This is the Day that the Lord has Made (let us rejoice and be glad in it)" with all of its invocations to, well, invocation. This brings me, naturally, to southern football fans.

Remember when you could smoke cigarettes in football stadiums? I liked the world better that way. I am neither virulently libertarian, nor am I a member of any sort of modern day Christian temperance movement. My vices are documented in these pages, for better or worse (they include caffeine, Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey older than at least two of my three sons, tacos al carbon, Earth, Wind and Fire and, well, the fact that I took Chris Simms's side most of the time during a certain stretch of Longhorn history, but that's another matter entirely...). I don't believe the world needs to be protected from the likes of Kinky Friedman. I am glad, however, that brother Friedman does his part to protect the world from politically correct namby pamby nursemaid types of various shapes and sizes. Anyway, none of them want you to smoke in public, especially during an athletic event.