Yesterday was my Dad's
birthday. He would have been 80. He would have enjoyed
seeing the Red Sox win the World Series.
I'm still pinching myself to make
sure I'm not dreaming. When I close my eyes I see Keith
Foulke cradling that last ground ball like a newborn
baby, the final out in the most amazing season in a very
very long time.
While I was at the garage today
getting the state inspection sticker for the
non-Auntmobile I watched some of the parade on the tiny,
staticky, black and white TV they had there. Seeing Jason
Varitek standing in a duck boat on a three inch screen is
a trip. Yes, I waited until the very last minute to get
the sticker. Umm, I've had other things on my mind in
October. Hasn't everybody?
I was actually kind of embarrassed
to read in today 's Eagle Tribune that a group of
visiting Dutch educators here did not understand why all
the students (and teachers apparently) talked about for
the past two weeks was the Red Sox. They were expecting
to hear nothing but election talk, specifically Bush vs.
Kerry as opposed to local and state races. One of them
even said he didn't like baseball because of all the
replays and that baseball had no tension. I'll cede him
the point that Fox way overdid it on the replays. They
overdid it on the closeups of pitcher and batter too, to
the point where sometimes you couldn't see whether the
runner was leading or where the fielders were positioned
on a given batter. But baseball is all about
tension. If all foreign visitors see of baseball is Fox
coverage of the World Series it's no wonder baseball
hasn't caught on in Europe. Anyway, I'm not sure why I
felt embarrassed at what we New Englanders look like to
the Dutch. If they'd visited a swing state like Ohio
they'd have gotten the Bush Kerry talk they were looking
for. I don't think there are any undecided voters in
Massachusetts. Nobody's trying to make up their mind,
they're just waiting until Tuesday when they get to mark
their ballots. And I don't know why any organization
would arrange to have a visiting delegation from any
European country come to Massachusetts during the ALCS
and World Series unless whoever set this up arranged it
during that mid-season slump when it briefly looked like
the Red Sox might not even get the wild card, certainly
they would have been idiots to arrange such a visit once
the Red Sox surged in September. Even my saying that
betrays that I feel a little embarrassed. Like why would
they invite European educators when they know people are
going to be going nuts for the Red Sox? Like that's
something shameful that Americans, at least New
Englanders, do that we should hide from European
educators? I don't know, it just sounds like whoever
planned the thing should have found out what the
educators wanted to see in America and sent them where
they could see it... wherever in America it might be that
there isn't a single ecstatic Red Sox fan celebrating the
sweetest victory in 86 years and all the voters
are undecided. And haven't those Dutch educators ever
read the famous quote from French educator Jacques
Barzun? "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of
America had better learn baseball ." Amen to that
brother.
And so, in the heart of Red Sox
Nation, farflung family and friends set the phone lines
buzzing on Wednesday night with everybody touching base
(note baseball metaphor) with their nearest and dearest
at that one moment in time when the team we love reached
the pinnacle of the game we love and October was
everything we thought it could be.
