A Sports Fan Thanks Her Dad Part Three The End

Only a few years later a date took me to my first game at Fenway. Dad had been right, I was in awe. The lush greenness of it; the perfect diamond. It was a closed universe, a paradisiacal light-year away from the crowded city beyond the green wall. When the teams took the field and began to play, I instinctively looked not at the pitcher and batter, but at the outfield. No one had ever described for me that moment when the pitcher goes into his windup and the whole team behind him comes to high alert. "It's beautiful," I cried to my date, and thought of my Dad and got a lump in my throat. I still think that's one of the most beautiful moments in all of sports--whatever else they may have been doing, however nonchalant they had seemed, when the pitcher goes into his windup all of them, infield and outfield, lean forward in a state of deep concentration and readiness. The moment is full of high drama and caught breath. Wonderful.

So now the Patriots have won the Superbowl three times and my Dad would be ecstatic. I just know that throughout the New England region there were fans like me who thought of their dads and had a bittersweet moment of feeling an aching loss along with the jubilation.

And the Red Sox...In New England, we often got into discussions about what we'd do, how we'd feel if they ever won the World Series. Would we be able to live with it? Would it somehow lessen our obsessive love for the team? What, a group of us asked each other a few years ago, would be the first thing you'd do if the Red Sox won it all?

I didn't even have to think about my answer. And when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, I held true to it. I took a Red Sox t-shirt, hat, and large banner to St. Anne's cemetery in Cranston, RI. I put the shirt over the gravestone marking Joseph Francis F......(it's an Irish name), perched the hat on top, and wrapped the banner over the whole thing. The banner said, "They did it, Dad! Rest in peace."

Sports have been, at various times in my life, distraction, obsession, amusement. Sports have taught me about the human reaction to victory and defeat, made me think about ethical dilemmas; helped me recognize, in other areas of my life, the apparent conflicts between striving for a personal best and sacrificing personal glory for the sake of a group goal. Some people think following sports is a trivial pastime, nothing to do with real life. True sports fans--like the ones who lean out of the way to give a fielder the opportunity to catch the ball and make a play--even if he's on the opposing team--know that sports encompass all the drama and comedy, all the lessons about fair play and living with a bad call, that real life dishes up every day. I'm proud to say I'm a sports fan.

Thanks, Dad.

A Sports Fan Thanks Her Dad part two

Although this sounded extremely boring to me (wasn't getting the ball and scoring the whoe point of the game? and therefore wasn't it crucial to follow the ball?) I did what he suggested for the next few minutes. And of course it turned me into a sports fan for life. Because I saw how all the action on the field was designed to further each team's goal: score or prevent the score. No matter how remote from what I had thought of as the center of the action, each man was performing a specific task that enabled (or didn't, if he didn't do his task well) the entire team to succeed.

"Hey," I said in wonder to my father. "I see what you mean!"

He beamed at me. "But what's the 'down' business all about?" I asked. "I mean, I know as long as they keep making ten yards they get to keep the ball, but what's a down?"

"A down is, is--OK, a down is a try," he said. "The team that has the ball has four downs, or 'tries,' to make ten yards. If they make four yards in their first try, then they have a second try to make the remaining six, and so on."

Oh. So simple. I even figured out the fourth down punt on my own. I was actually beginning to enjoy this. Football was strategy and logic as well as huge behemoths pounding into each other.

Warming to this new-found appreciation I was exhibiting for one of his passions, he gave me the key to all team sports.

"Don't watch just football this way," he said. "Basketball is a great game to watch when you occasionally take your eyes off the ball and see what the defenders are doing, and what the rest of the offense is doing to set up the next basket. You can tell how good a player is by watching what he's doing away from the ball."

The Red Sox were my father's favorite team. He lived and died with them each season. Watching them on TV was OK, but you couldn't really see the whole field, he told me. The beauty and symmetry of it. He couldn't take me, because a few years earlier he'd lost a leg to arteriosclerosis, and while the prosthesis was fine for getting to work and church, it really was an ungainly thing which he found difficult to maneuver in crowded situations. Someday you'll go, he told me, and you'll see what I mean.

The Red Sox game was always on the radio, the background to whatever else was going on. If he was working in the garage or mowing the lawn, the game was blasting from a transistor radio on the back steps. Driving the car: there was the game. Frequently, on hot summer nights he'd turn off the TV and he and my mother would retreat to the small sun porch with a beer and the radio. Their conversations about life, work, kids, etc., would punctuate the night air, accompanied by the whispery crowd, the announcers' murmuring, the cracking noise of a bat making contact. My Dad died very suddenly, having just gone to bed, on just such a night. He would have said it was a perfect way to go--Mom by his side, the two of them turning in after an evening of contented conversation and listening to the summer night sounds of crickets and the Red Sox game.

(To Be Continued. I will wrap this up in the next post, I promise!)

A Sports Fan Thanks Her Dad part one

On a Sunday afternoon sometime in the mid-60's my father spoke the words that turned me into a sports fan. He had three daughters; I was the one in the middle. We were all sports fans in that we rooted for specific teams, even if we didn't "get" all the nuances of the games. The teams we cheered for were his teams, of course, and since we lived in Rhode Island our hearts belonged to the Providence College Friars, the Boston Celtics, the Boston Bruins.
The Patriots were our team, too, but they were part of the fledgling league and their games weren't carried on television. Some network executive somewhere decided that since New England didn't have its own NFL team, we would root for the closest alternative--the New York Giants. Consequently, every Sunday throughout the Fall New England fans who wanted to see football on TV had to watch the Giants. Many New Englanders fell for this ploy, and some even today are fanatical Giants fans. My father, though he thought New York was a wonderful city, hated all New York teams on principle. But he loved football, so each Sunday he would settle down to watch the game and root for whichever team the Giants were playing against that week.
Throughout the afternoon one or all of us would join him for at least a few minutes--boys weren't the only ones who bonded with their dads through sports. We would make comments, ask questions, or just enjoy sitting with him and thrill at the level of enthusiasm he could muster for every play.
On this particular day I was alone with him--he in his chair and me across the room on the couch. I was still in the pre-teen stage and he was still the Ultimate Source of knowledge for me, the Final Word on all subjects. I had fallen madly in love with him sometime in infancy and as far as I was concerned he was the smartest and best man in the world. There was a time in my teens when that changed--it suddenly became clear to me that everything he did or said, even his mere existence, was calculated to embarrass and mortify me and that, in fact, he knew absolutely nothing about what really mattered in life. Fortunately, I snapped out of that a few years later.
That day I complained to him that I couldn't see what was so great about football. "Everybody just plows into everybody else, which takes two seconds, and then they take five minutes to get back in line and plow into each other again. And besides," I added, "I can't follow the ball--whoever has it is in the bottom of the pile."
And then he spoke the magic words. "Don't always follow the ball," he said. "You'll never understand the game if you're just watching the ball or the action around the ball. If you really want to understand what the game is about, pick out a man, any man on either side, and watch what he does for three or four plays. Then pick out a man on the other side and watch him for three or four plays."

(To be continued. This is going to be longer than I'd thought!)

sail away

Today my friend Kathy and I escaped from our normal routines and took the ferry tour of Rhode Island's lighthouses. It was so much fun to put my face in the wind and watch the light sparkle on the water. The tour was wonderful, and once again brought that frequent thought that we don't often enough take advantage of the natural beauty in our own backyard. Perhaps we should think like tourists even in familiar climes; fresh perspective can be found just in looking in a new way.
But the best part of the day was careering from deep conversation to unfettered hilarity with Kathy. Although we try to get together often, it somehow works out to be only a couple of times a year. But we make the most of it when we finally pull it off.
How grateful I am for the ocean and for friendship.

These past few months have been tough for me at the library. We had a substantial reduction in our town appropriation for the first time in years, going from $814,000 in FY 2008 to $732,000 in FY 2009. We do have other sources of funding, but the town money is what keeps our doors open.

I spent much of the summer preparing various budget drafts that would reflect our new financial reality, and finally concluded that we'd have to do what I'd so wanted to avoid: letting go of staff. So over the last week I've met with people and told them the sad, sorry news.

I have fired people before--for incompetence and a number of other serious infractions. It's not easy to do, but when people's lack of performance drags down the quality of service, and the rest of the staff suffers in countless ways trying to make up for it, you do it for the sake of the library. But this is different--this is letting go of people who have performed well, given good service, and in no way deserve to lose their jobs.

People who don't use libraries have this strange stereotype in their heads about small children going to storytime and little old ladies checking out fiction. They have no idea, because they never come through the doors, what a lively hotbed of activity the library is. People of all ages come in for such a variety of information needs; our literacy program is thriving, filled with eager students hungry to learn to speak and write English so they can get ahead; we have quite a number of shut-ins from the six elderly housings in town who look forward to their visits from the library; and the computer classes are always popular.

I hear or read comments about there being no need for libraries anymore because we have the Internet. Please. There is a large portion of our population who don't own a computer and whose only access is what we provide at the library. Yes, lots of kids have computers at home to do their homework and print out amazing research projects, but our computers are in use every night by kids who, if they didn't have access to them, would be at a serious disadvantage.

So now we will reduce staff and hours and make the library less accessible for the people who need it most.

It really makes me sick at heart.

blog name: inspired by Tennyson

Alfred Lord Tennyson has inspired this blog name. He wrote one of my favorite poems, "Ulysses." I won't quote the whole poem, but here are the relevant lines:

...
"The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the
deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyong the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we
are,-
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Oh, how I love the stubborn insistence that we can and will go on, we will continue to strive no matter our infirmities, until the last breath. Not because we must, or because we have no choice, but because life has been such a precious gift, and the only way to honor it is to live it fully even to its wondrous end.

This is true even for those of us who have suffered unbearable losses--we seek life, and joy, and love, knowing the terrible sorrow that awaits us when it ends, but knowing, too, that the amazing happiness and contentment is worth the risk. "'Tho much is taken, much abides..."

And, of course, the sentiment I heartily embrace: There is always a cause, there is always something else to be achieved, there is always a way, if there is a will, to make things better. Readers of this blog, I exhort you:

"Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world."


Fran