4 Down, 158 to Go

It’s bottom of the sixth and the Red Sox are down 3-1 against the Toronto Bluejays. The Sox are 1-3 on the season and already people are talking about what’s wrong with them.

You’d think I was a big baseball fan or something, but I’m not. Not a big fan, anyway. My wife? Well, that’s another story. She’s the serious sports fan in the family, especially when it comes to baseball. I like baseball, but not as much as she does. She savors it, loves the fine points, and is much more in tune with its history. My enjoyment of it is much more conditional, and situational.

For me, baseball is best enjoyed in person on a warm summer night or bright fall afternoon. Or, better yet, on an AM radio, listening to the voice of the announcers, waiting for things to happen, the white noise of the crowd and radio static punctuated by the occasional drama. As much as I am not a big baseball fan, some of my fondest memories actually involve baseball – and AM radio. Listening to a game at night, particularly when the Sox are on a West Coast road trip, sitting on the porch on a Sunday afternoon while pretending to tend the grill, or when I was a kid, sitting in the barn with my grandfather and my dad on a hot summer afternoon. My grandparents lived that much closer to Boston than we did (only about 50 miles), and we could actually listen to the game on AM radio from Fenway and WHDH in Boston.

So on my way home from my evening meetings during baseball season I’ll already have the AM band preset for the local Red Sox Radio Network station and get my 15 minute fix of baseball on the radio. They were made for each other.

Journals & Blogs

I never wrote in a journal, never kept a diary, not seriously anyway, until 1998. Blogging was still several years away but 1998 was the year of The Ice Storm, the year my mother had a stroke, and the year I turned thirty-five, which I sometimes refer to as the year I was finally old enough to be President but was smart enough to know it would never happen. Those of you who were in Maine at the time know which storm I mean. And, in time, we recovered from the storm as my mother recovered from her stroke. But I didn’t completely recover from journal writing – almost, but not completely.

For about ten years I wrote pretty faithfully, often several times a week. My writing became part of an evening ritual, especially on Sunday nights. I would sit at my desk listening to St. Paul Sunday, Pipedreams, and With Heart and Voice on Maine Public Radio. I enjoyed the act of writing, putting ink on paper. At the time I was much more into fountain pens and writing was as much an aesthetic exercise as anything. And I’ve got both larger bound books, small Moleskine notebooks, spiral bound and other notebooks, some full and others mostly empty because I got them when I didn’t have any of my other journals or notebooks with me to write in.

All Political Ads, All the Time

Now that the Iowa caucus is over all that political advertising, along with the GOP candidates, makes its way to New Hampshire. This means we’ll be treated to non-stop presidential wanna-bes, in between which we might see a little programming. And being in Maine, we don’t even get the pleasure(?) of seeing or voting for any of them. Of course, not being of the right persuasion, I wouldn’t get to vote for any of them anyway.

Maybe we’ll get lucky, find out the Mayans were off (i.e. late) by a few months, and we’ll all be spared the pleasure.

Time Travel

Monday night our middle daughter and I saw Rush in concert at Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut (see my earlier post on this subject). For all the years I have been listening to Rush, I had never seen them in person and was really looking forward to it. I mean really looking forward to it, so much that I might have been setting myself up for disappointment. I shouldn’t have worried.

The concert was largely an exercise in nostalgia, though there were a couple of new songs from their upcoming album, and no little amount of poking fun at themselves and their fans. For some, poking fun at your fans might be dangerous, but Rush has been around long enough, established enough of a relationship with their fans, and gained enough respect (grudging, in some corners, like the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame, for example) that they can not only get away with it, but revel in it, embracing their inner (or not so inner) nerdiness.

A Valentine’s Day Postscript

Sometimes the best thing I can say about Valentine’s Day is, “it isn’t Halloween.”  I shouldn’t (and don’t) need to have a special holiday set aside to let my wife know that I love her.  And, of course, we really don’t need it, and why not look at it as an opportunity, after all?

Well, this year, I found myself trying to come up with some new way to express myself on Valentine’s Day, so the flowers, the chocolate (the correct gift for any occasion, I think), or the nice bottle of wine (or all three, if I’m feeling particularly ambitious) just wouldn’t do.  Time was running out on Sunday afternoon when I happened to be listening to “The Vinyl Cafe” on the radio. After listening to the story “Love Never Ends” I knew what I had to get my wife for Valentine’s Day.