My Brush With Greatness

Like most people I am completely enamored in the lives of celebrities. Every morning I have to wake up and find out what the latest is between John and Kate Gosselin of “John And Kate Plus 8,” or as it is now called “Kate And the Kids” and “John Minus 9.”


Well because of my constant fascination with the celebrity, I will now tell you about my two brushes with greatness recently. I hope you, dear reader, appreciate these brushes with celebrity much more than my wife did.

My wife and I recently took a little get-a-way trip to the lake. We found a cabin and just wanted to get away from everything and “see what happened.” Well, I'll tell you what happened, were in the presence of greatness most of the weekend.

First of all, the first evening we took a little trip to Winstar Casino in beautiful and historic Thackerville, Okla. I wanted to do a little research to see if I could quadruple my money in just a little over an hour (UPDATE: after several hours of research, I found that it is indeed impossible). I won a little bit of money, but that's not the greatness part. The greatness part was a man called Jason Aldean.

For those of you who may not know, Jason Aldean is a country singer of such hits as “Amarillo Sky,” “Hicktown,” “Laughed Until We Cried,” and my personal favorite “Back In This Cigarette.” He just happened to be in concert at Winstar Friday evening and people were loving it. Every country music fan was dressed up in the Friday-go-to-concert best and stood in line waiting for the show to begin.

That's when it hit me.

I looked at my wife and said, “Do you realize that we are breathing the same air as Jason Aldean right now? Right now.”

She looked at me like I was crazy. But I thought it was pretty cool that we were in the same “building” as the great country singer.

Anyway, we stayed in beautiful and historic downtown Thackerville until I won some money back and then we walked away from some slot machine named “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Where Did My Money Go” and went back to the cabin.

That's when the other brush with fate happened.

Our cabin happened to be on Lake Texoma, one of the largest lakes in Grayson county. Lake Texoma is a confluence of two rivers: The Red River and the Washita River. It's a great body of water.

The weather was beautiful, so we went outside to enjoy the full moon on the lake. As we sat there on the show, taking in the sounds of the water lapping at our feet, the smell of fresh lake air, the sight of the moon's silvery reflection on the lake, I explained our situation.

I turned to my wife and said, “Do you realize that this water has small, microscopic remnants of Sam Bradford's pee?”

“You see,” I explained, “the water from the Washita River is more than likely carrying some water from the water reclamation center near Oklahoma City and Norman. Sam Bradford, who lives in Norman, when he's not sitting with the gods on Mt. Olympus, “makes water” in Norman, flushes the toilet and then the water floats down the sewer system to the water reclamation plant. Most of that water gets cleansed and sent back through the system somehow. Some of it, however, sneaks out and runs south through the river systems, eventually winding up in the Gulf of India.

Just kidding. It winds up in the Gulf of Aden.

Kidding again. It actually mingles with urine along other rivers all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico (You're welcome).

My wife just looked at me like I was nuts and then hit me on the shoulder, like I had ruined a perfectly romantic evening.

But this is Heisman Trophy Winner Sam Bradford. Future NFL quarterback Sam Bradford. And we were sitting on the bank looking over millions of gallons of water, quite possibly holding some of this future Hall of Famer's bladder refuse.

It was pretty awesome.