I am behind, as they say, the proverbial deadline 8-ball so this may be the quickest Pembroke Mafia Football League column ever written. But first a somewhat lengthy note.

Friday, I was at work when I got a call from Dad telling me Mom was being admitted to the hospital in Brunswick.

And lest you worry I’m about to spring something sad on you, it seems this story will have a happy ending. Hence the above headline. Still, it’s been a weird and occasionally scary ride and I just got back to the office Wednesday, also known as yesterday.

Here’s the chronology. Friday we were told Mom, who is 74 but healthy, had a bad heart and was a very sick woman and only had a couple options - the worst being open heart surgery. Uh-oh.

So, we circled the wagons.

My hippie sister (who works for the American Heart Association, by the way) flew in from Denver despite being in the middle of recovering from a broken hip she got from mountain biking somewhere out in Utah. If you saw someone resembling a flower child buying a cane in the Richmond Hill CVS Sunday night, that was my sister.

Dad, meanwhile, camped out beside Mom. I did what I could wherever that was. And after a long weekend, we were told Monday that Mom would need to go to a larger hospital with “more tools,” and had the choice of either Jacksonville or Savannah.

Mom, who kept her cool throughout this process despite being confined to a bed and hooked up to hoses and wires and tubes and alarms that kept going off and also charmed her doctors and nurses while keeping her family from having a giant conniption fit, chose Savannah.

The Brunswick folks then found a bed in the ICU at Memorial. An ambulance got Mom up there Monday night while the rest of us got there as quick as we could.

Note: If I think my commute to Richmond Hill stinks, and I do, I realized Tuesday night it would smell a whole lot worse if I started off or ended up in downtown Savannah. Some of those people got problems. And why, pray tell, do we build more lanes to speed traffic up only to put up obstacles like lights and media cuts and massive mix-used developments to slow it back down? We’re cads.

Anyway, by Tuesday life got much better. The doctor there, a cardiology whiz of some repute named Dr. Bottner, determined that my mother’s condition - I can’t spell it - can be managed with medicine. The upshot is she’ll be out of the hospital today and back to a mostly regular life, just in time for Christmas. We are grateful to all those at both hospitals who took such good care of Mom and her sidekick Dad, and my sister and me. I’d name them, but I’m afraid I’d leave someone out.

Just know that, as Mom said during her six-day stay in the hospital, it takes a special kind of person with a great heart to work in medicine. Especially those who make like $10 an hour and never get much credit.

“I don’t know how you do what you do,” she told nurses and aides and PAs and everybody else as often as she could. I don’t know how they do what they do either, but I’m glad they do. 

Also, my apologies to the City of Pembroke for not making it out to their Christmas parade on Saturday night. I had scheduled myself to cover it but my schedule went out the window.

Now, it’s been so long since I wrote about the PMFL I probably need to do a quick explainer on what the PMFL is.

It’s a group of smart, good-looking individuals who pick college football winners. How smart? How good looking? I have once been accused of being smarter than a rocket scientist and better looking that Brad Pitt dude, albeit somewhat older and shorter and wider, and I’m the funniest looking one of the bunch. Except maybe for Ernie Mitchell, who at times has been mistaken for an astute and well-read yard gnome. But still, he and B.J. Clark, our CEO, are so suave they’re often referred to as the Intellectual Ricky Ricardos of Pembroke, in interchangeable order. “Babbaloo, everybody,” they say. “Babbaloooooo!”

I don’t know what it means.

What else? Well, Richmond Hill City Clerk Dawnne Money Greene won the first half of the PMFL season, missing only 46 picks all season. That’s pretty high cotton for a New Englander. In second is Bryan County Administrator Ben Grinch Taylor with 49 misses, while Georgia Southern Dean of Sororities Mark Rogerson placed third with 52 missed picks. In fourth is former Bryan County Assistant Editor Ted Schembechler O’Neil with 54 misses; Mitchell had 55 misses, the Rev. Brad Pistol St. Pete Butler had 57 misses; Clark and his nifty son Mike the Shark Clark had 58 misses, etc.

Bryan County Schools assistant superintendent Dr. Trey Robinson, who by the way had the only perfect week all year and that was in week 5, and Pembroke City Administrator Alex Jane Fonda Floyd tied with 61 misses. The biggest news came from me, because I made my patented late-season surge to finish ninth with 73 misses.

Last was District 1 County Commissioner Noah Gravy Boat Covington, with 74 misses.

The good old Gravy Boat is so into GOP power politics these days and he just had a grandkid, so he probably doesn’t give a rat’s caboose where he wound up. That’s what makes him such a great politician. That and his beard. It’s like he’s Caesar Augustus, if Caesar Augustus had a beard and liked UGA football and the Dixie Chicks before they turned liberal.

Coming up next week, maybe, is the second or fifth annual PMFL Bowl Challenge.

In a top secret ballot, PMFL members have already picked their winners of all 329 bowls and a tiebreaker, and those will be revealed next. Last year, yours truly was the winner. That’s because I am a very stable genius.