Older than Matt Barkley, part III

Up early on a Saturday morning, primping for my tailgate party and finishing Older than Matt Barkley: part III just under the wire. Here goes, and yes I know the Mexican blanket doesn’t at all match my room.

In the summer of 1974, my family and another family drove from sunny Los Angeles to Mexico City. My entire family missed Nixon’s resignation because they were amidst this crazy caravan trek, the stories of which have become family legends at this point. In the end, missing watching Nixon’s speech with all of America was a small price to pay for the epic cross-continent vacation. I was not there, nor was my counterpart, the youngest son of the other family, who turns 35 this March (so if you do the math he was kind of there, and had his parents not “decided” to have one more kid, who knows, maybe my parents wouldn’t have either).

But somewhere along the way, my mother purchased this bright (bordering obnoxious) Mexican blanket. I stole it about five or six years ago, and while although these types of blankets are easy to come by, I maintain that they don’t make ‘em like they did in the mid-seventies (which is true of a lot of things). I use it seasonally. In my old apartment, our entire place was just so ugly, that it didn’t really matter the blanket was so off. Now that I am starting to nest and care very much about how my house looks, I am beginning to wonder if I should move on from this old blanket I love so much. But for our purposes today, it well makes the cut of being Older than Matt Barkley – FIGHT ON and beat the Cardinal.