The Green Bay Packers

A Letter to My Father

I took a little break for Thanksgiving. Football, F1, shitty food, video games. My Chargers played the Raiders again. I started to type “your Raiders,” but that changed when they left L.A.

It still amuses me that you decided on the Green Bay Packers as your new team. Your logic—they’re owned by the people of Green Bay, so they’ll never leave—was flawless. They’d never abandon their fanbase.

I remember thinking it made sense that you, of all people, would want a team you could count on to never leave. I was sure it wasn’t a coincidence. It took me a little longer to realize that was where you and I had considerable overlap.

As precocious as I may have been, the obvious could sometimes fly right by me. You and I—we were the same. The reason you were the perfect person to raise me was because you knew what it was to be abandoned by one of the two people who should default to loving you.

You never told me your stories. I had to hear them from Grandma and Uncle Charlie. Stories about being lef…