BAD HAIRCUT . . . AND OTHER STORIES

Alright, I’ll admit that Tom Perrotta used that title first for an engaging collection of short stories (the story “Thirteen” is a true classic of adolescence awakening). I hope he doesn’t mind my borrowing it as a heading for this blog post. It seems to be a good catch-all for what follows.

MOO
So, a couple of days ago I took our Springer Spaniel in for grooming. She got the worst haircut ever: she came home looking like a Holstein calf! In fact, the next morning when my wife was out walking her, a guy in a pickup truck slowed down and shouted out: “Hey, nice cow!” My wife called back: “Hey, she’s a dog!” The man revved his engine and said: “I was talking to the dog.” Ha-ha!

WALKOFF
Okay, that story was only partly true (the bit about the bad haircut). But this is all true: for the second time this baseball season, I had drop in my lap a ticket for a great seat at Fenway Park—this time almost directly behind homeplate, about 15 rows deep. The price on the ticket was $94: my friend Joe, who invited me to accompany him to the game, got a pair as a “perk” for something or other, and we ended up getting far more than face value out of them. The game was delayed almost an hour-and-a-half because of a passing thunderstorm, but it was well worth the wait and the resulting late night as the Red Sox walked off with a win over the Cleveland Indians when pinch-runner Jarrod Saltalammachia slid in headfirst to score on a close play at the plate after Jacoby Ellsbury lined a single into center field in the bottom on the ninth inning. Exciting! Joe summed up the evening nicely in an email the next day: “I’ll not soon forget the cheese steak, the usher’s bench wipe, the rain delay, the high-quality brews, the thrilling outcome, the packed Green Line car, and the last Red Line car back home. Last night was an eleven!!!”

THE LAST OF THE MOHEGANS
One more “story” that warrants telling involves the less-than-24-hour visit to Block Island, RI that my wife and I enjoyed over the weekend. We strapped our bikes onto the back of the Batmobile then ferried over from Pt. Judith for an overnight visit with my wife’s sister and her husband and their three daughters, who had rented a place with a breathtaking outlook on the Mohegan Bluffs. The weather was perfect—mid-80s—and we savored the whirlwind getaway. As we were ferrying back to the mainland, we caught sight of my sister-in-law running along the jetty waving to us. Was she a Siren attempting to lure us to our doom on the rocks? Or was she simply making sure that we left her and her family to enjoy, without visitors, their final day on that glorious spot?

WEEKDAY MATINEE AT FENWAY PARK

The last time I attended a weekday matinee at a ballpark was long ago and far away: April 29, 1983 at Wrigley Field in Chicago, to be exact. I was a grad student at Notre Dame at the time and drove up from South Bend with a friend to meet my brother who was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago at the time. I don’t recall much about the game: mostly I remember just that the day was miserably cold and rainy and that the hometown Cubs were an embarrassment in a 4-3 loss to the Dodgers and that the smattering of fans who weathered the game let them know it. Hardly the equivalent of that wonderful scene at Wrigley in Ferris Bueller's Day Off . . .

But I remember the date so precisely because it has achieved infamy thanks to the profanity-laced tirade directed at the fans by Cubs manager Lee Elia in a post-game press conference. I have to admit that watching it on TV that night back in the South Bend, I was caught somewhere between a grimace and a grin with every bleep inserted into the rant. Because this is a family-oriented blog (well, my daughters occasionally read it), I have asterisked this representative excerpt from the transcript of Elia’s diatribe:

F*** those f***in’ fans who come out here and say they’re Cub fans that are supposed to be behind you rippin’ every f***in’ thing you do. I’ll tell you one f***in’ thing, I hope we get f***in’ hotter than shit, just to stuff it up them 3,000 f***in’ people that show up every f***in’ day, because if they’re the real Chicago f***in’ fans, they can kiss my f***in’ ass right downtown and PRINT IT.

They’re really, really behind you around here . . . my f***in’ ass. What the f*** am I supposed to do, go out there and let my f***in’ players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the f***in’ nickel-dime people who turn up? The motherf***ers don’t even work. That’s why they’re out at the f***in’ game. They oughta go out and get a f***in’ job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a f***in’ living. Eighty-five percent of the f***in’ world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here.

Ouch! I suppose that, given our lofty academic aspirations, my brother and my friend and I could have taken Elia’s remarks personally: “the other fifteen percent,” indeed. Maybe it’s a variation on Stockholm Syndrome, but to this day I still just chuckle and nod my head and wonder if Elia was not far off the mark after all.

But what a difference 28 years can make! This afternoon, I attended the Red Sox-Royals matchup at Fenway with my friends and colleagues Len and Matt. Like the Cubbies, the hometown Sox lost 4-3 in a somewhat subdued performance (especially after they had drubbed the Royals the previous two nights). But it was a gloriously sunny day, and even though we were in the farthest seats possible from home plate—Row 40 in Section 37 of the bleachers—we enjoyed the novelty of a weekday afternoon at Fenway. Afterwards, we paid a visit to the Lansdowne Club across the street from the ballpark. Out of the corner of my eye I saw on the television screen above the bar Red Sox manager Terry Francona’s post-game press conference. I’m not the best lip-reader in the world, but I would swear that he didn’t use one word starting with an “f.”

A TALE OF TWO SEATINGS . . .

Okay, I’ll resist the temptation of saying “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—in largest part because I would be lying. We enjoyed both of the Red Sox games we attended over the weekend. In fact, getting to go to two games in a three-day period was more than “double the pleasure, double the fun”!

On Friday night the Sox beat the Oakland Athletics 8-6. My wife and two of our daughters and I had the game marked on the calendar from early in the week, and I ordered tickets once I knew that we would have “baseball weather.” Or so we thought. We thought that we dressed warmly enough for a night game in early June, but a brisk sea-breeze made us think otherwise pretty quickly. A bad night at the ballpark may still be better than a good day at work—and this wasn’t even a bad night as the Sox got back on track and rallied from the 4-run hole they dug for themselves in the first inning—but we were sitting on our hands and shivering for a good part of the evening. I never thought I’d have a hot chocolate on top of a beer—at a ballgame, no less—but so it went, especially high up in the bleachers: section 38, row 36 . . . just about as far from home plate as you could sit.

But what a difference two days can make. Sunday afternoon was still a bit breezy and cool, especially in the shade . . . but for that game my wife and I had it “made in the shade.” About two hours before game time our across-the-street neighbor rang the doorbell and offered us a pair of tickets for the Pavilion at Fenway Park, a seating area we never even knew existed. With neighbors like that who needs a sugar mama or a sugar daddy? . . . Well, I’ll let the photo tell this tale: from where we sat, in the third row of a luxury deck directly above home plate, we could almost read the names on the lineup cards being delivered to the umpires during the pregame ritual! And the seats came with waiter service from a full bar menu. And oh yes, the Sox won 6-3 to complete a 3-game sweep of the A's: maybe it was the best of times after all . . .

DUNKIN' DUGOUT . . .

So . . . last night my wife and I took our three daughters and a boyfriend of one of them to the Red Sox-Indians game at Fenway Park. It wasn’t the most dramatic game of the year . . . though we were already on our feet applauding the return of Mike Lowell to the lineup (he had been on the injured reserve list since late June) when he really lifted us up by hitting the first pitch he faced into the Monster seats, delivering what proved to be the winning run in a 3-1 Sox victory. Josh Beckett, who I checked out during his pre-game warmup in the bullpen, pitched very well—he allowed only three hits (one of them a solo home run) and was able to wriggle out of the several minor jams that he found himself in.

We enjoyed the game and the entire evening despite sitting in nosebleed seats—Row 48 (out of 50) in Section 41 of the bleachers: we were just two rows below the seats donated by Dunkin’ Donuts every game to kids in Boys and Girls Clubs and similar non-profit and charitable organizations. The Dunkin’ Dugout.

Fenway Park has its history, and it has its traditions—though some of them are relatively recent, like the en masse singing in the late innings of Neil Diamond’s hit “Sweet Caroline” and the Dropkick Murphys’ “Tessie” and even “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. (The singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the seventh-inning stretch goes without saying.) But we also have a family tradition at Fenway that involves a visit, before the game, to a particular sausage stand on the street outside the ballpark. It is run by the family of a teacher our daughters had in high school: he works at the stand himself, and he and the girls always have happy reunions whenever we make it to a game. Not that we’re superstitious, but we have to believe that our faithful observance of that tradition contributes to the success that has become another Sox “tradition” in recent years!