I guess I missed a good game Sunday. It was the Super Bowl but, to tell you the truth, I turned it off after Madonna’s 53-year-old strut across the stage, which reinforced my belief that we really don’t need to do that after 50.

Sure did. I turned that thing right off and grabbed Stephen King’s book “112263.” They say the second half was “thrilling” but I’m becoming more concerned about my “second half” and figuring out the whys of the field we play on everyday as people.

I tend to live in the past now and then and this King book is taking me there. I enjoy the past, I know what happened there. Not always the “why” but at least the “what.”

For instance, Mike Walker died of colon cancer in ’83, with his three little girls still left to raise. I’m still wondering why. Mike lived for football and was poised to take over the head coaching job at Escambia High School in Pensacola, Fla. When the Super Bowl rolls around I think of what Mike would have been doing. He’d have been glued to a TV somewhere, at the age of 65, a daughter, maybe a granddaughter and bowl of chips not far away with his wife hollering “Mike, turn that thing down.”

I’ve got the “what” but don’t have the “why.” I could make up a lot of stuff to make me feel better but, he’s not here and I am. A lot of people I really like (present tense) lived in the past (present folks accepted) and I figure if I don’t think about them at least once in a while, they are really gone and probably not coming back. That would hurt.

I suppose they could be in a heaven somewhere but some of the ones I liked the best could be kicking field goals or running for touchdowns in a remote area of the sun. Mike wouldn’t be one of those, he was Catholic. I wonder if he would have watched the halftime show with his granddaughter, as the aging Madonna, gesticulated across the stage while some other “singer” gave the finger to the crowd; A crowd screaming in awe of such awesome “talent.”

I wonder why we’re manipulated by people we don’t even know who influence the buying of everything from cosmetics to underwear to thoughts -- people who have no real control of our lives (outside what we allow) unless we’re playing a game of trivia.

I wonder why the real Super Bowl, the contact sport we all experience every day as we meet new people is seldom watched with any interest.

Many of the questions we have can be answered by those around us, not those on television or in a video game. I suppose the answer to “why” resides in all of us. The answer to “why” is us.

It’s why we’re here. We are here for each other. To get to know someone we’ll miss if the day comes when they are no longer around and we remain. The ones we keep in our heads and hearts.

I miss Mike, and I might have watched the second half if he had been here. I could go a long time without seeing Madonna again, and I don’t even have to ask why.

Sonny Harmon is an educator at Georgia Military College. Visit his blog at http://sharmon09.blogspot.com.