H’okay. I’m gonna try to say this in the least meathead way possible:

……To me, Spring equals MARCH MADNESS.

In February, I don’t start bracketizing every aspect in my life or bet on which player will sustain the most gruesome injury that makes even the nearest bird mascot hide his eyes under his wings.

March Madness is only significant to me for one night—the last one. The final game. Because that means I’m hanging out with a bunch of old white Republican men.

Every year, my dad and his buddies get together to watch the game. A judge, an electrician, a retired guy, and my dad the accountant were there last year. Two of them made a $1 bet on the game, then trash talked the whole time about the fate of that dollar. That’s pretty much how the whole night goes–

Retired guy says, “I been drinkin’ the low calorie beer now. It’s not too bad.”

Electrician glances at him, [looks him up and down] “Yeah? You ain’t drinkin’ enough of it.”

The judge has been divorced three times and because of this expertise, presides over family court divorce proceedings. He says, “Then the lawyer approaches the bench and he says, ‘Judge, this is an elderly couple, you know how they drag it out sometimes’ and I look at the documentation and I see that the husband is a month younger than me! So I say to the lawyer, ‘Did you say ELDERLY?’ And he realizes and says, ‘Oh no, judge, I just meant there were no dependent minors to worry about, that’s all. That’s all!’”

Someone pipes up– “So I’m guessin’ he didn’t win the case.”

Every man in the room has been divorced but my father. The topic of ex-wives always pops up sooner or later.

Retired guy says, “Bonnie still doesn’t drive. She doesn’t leave the house! Pays a neighbor kid to get the mail for her. Long time ago when we needed to meet up at school for the kids, I told her I’d call her a cab. She said, ‘No! It might be a foreign man and he might want to have sex with me!’ I told her, ‘You should be so lucky.’”

I KNOW they’re even more crude when I’m not around.

Dad points to the judge and says to me, “Listen to what he does every Sunday for his parents. Just listen!”

Judge says, “I make them breakfast. Eggs, sausage, toast, bacon.”

“AH?! AH?! What a good kid! So whaddaya wanna do for ME on Sunday?”

Before I can answer, Judge says, “Well, I didn’t start doing it until they were both 90 years old.”

“Oh, you ruined it! Why’d you ruin it?!”

I tell dad I’d be happy to make him breakfast every Sunday once he makes it to 90.

Two of the men here have gotten remarried. The judge has no trouble finding girlfriends–he looks like Richard Gere and dances like a 30-year-old.

My dad is the only one of them who goes home to an empty house every night.

Usually, we watch the game at the Insurance Agent’s house, but his wife’s cancer is back, so he’s with her tonight instead. The doctors can’t help much this time. She’s getting weaker. The last time I saw her, her backbone traced a line of silk bumps under her blouse.

This is a story Dad and I know well. The doctors couldn’t help much with my mom, either.

These men have known each other for more than forty years.

They know the whole trajectory: from single bachelor to married man, to father, and in my dad’s case, to widower. And in other cases, to divorced, to remarried, to divorced, to remarried, to divorced again.

This night is a yearly springtime tradition for them.

My weekly tradition with my dad is breakfast every Friday at 6 a.m. I don’t cook it for him, though—we meet at a local diner.

And every Friday at 6:53, when we’d be leaving, Gary, who my dad knows because of Rotary Club, would walk into the diner.

We’d say hi, chat for a bit about the weather or he’d give my dad a hard time about tax season.

Gary was a 91-year-old widower. Ever since his wife passed away, he’d gone out to restaurants because she’d cooked him every meal. This, too, is a story my dad knows well.

One Friday morning, Gary didn’t walk in at 6:53. He had passed away.

I feel his empty table absence on Fridays, and I wonder on this March Madness final night, if all these men who surround me watching the game will eventually surround themselves with restaurants full of people because they don’t want to enter the kitchen and interrupt the memory of their wives bustling around in there; if they’ll go out so they won’t have to listen to the clock tick inside an empty house. Or that one day, one of them will wake up from a nap on the recliner, still half-dreaming of the smell of something good cooking, something familiar and warm.