The Ultimate Opening Day

 

Working class sports hero Pete Rose

This week---yesterday, to be specific, was Opening Day of the major league baseball season. For several years now, Jessica has been telling me how big a deal is Opening Day in her hometown of Cincinnati. The franchise there, the Reds, is the oldest in major league baseball and for over a century, Cincinnati was given the honor of being the first game played, and always at home. They have suspended that first part in recent years, but still the Reds are always allowed a home game, as they were this year.

Moreover there is a parade--a huge one--through downtown, with many groups of marchers in costumes and marching bands from around the area. We watched it yesterday morning, streaming it from the major league baseball app, on which Jessica has an account that will allow her to watch all the Reds games this season. It was great fun to have it playing in the morning. Then in the afternoon they played the game and the Reds, in their brilliant white and red home uniforms, won handily, satisfying the hometown crowd. It has been lean far for the Cincinnati fans in recent years, but last year, about six weeks into the season, they were sparked by young talent and went on to win over a dozen in a row, I think, and missed the playoffs only at the last minute. This year expectation are much higher.

The lead-up to yesterday prompted me to dedicate by podcast show this week to baseball (link to show), specifically to the history of the Reds focussing on the part I remember best, which is the "Big Red Machine" dynasty of the mid 1970s, and in particular the spectacular unmatched 1975 World Series between the Reds and the Boston Red Sox. I talked in my show about the idea of baseball as representing the America of the past, before the mid 1960s, but that in 1975, it was still in perfect equilibrium, between the past and the future. 

It was the first World Series I watched, I told my audience. I wanted the Red Sox to win because they were the underdogs. Now I am much happier that the greatest World Series ever was won by Cincinnati. The idea that any team from Boston could be an "underdog" to a team from Cincinnati seems ridiculous to me. Cincinnati is a small market, a city in middle America that is part of the flyover country. 

That Big Red Machine was the last of its kind in that the players were working class athletes. Some had to take jobs in the off season. It was before the era of sky-high superstar salaries, when Americans knew that the well-known players were rich. Back then the players were much closer to the lives of ordinary Americans. This was especially true of the star of the Reds, Pete Rose, perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time. He was a hometown kid from Cincinnati who wound up playing for his hometown team, and winning a World Series for them (and was named most valuable player). 

Thanks to Jessica I know he was from the West Side of Cincinnati, which is the less-desirable working-class part of town, as opposed to the wealthier East Side. 

I was delighted to share all this with my audience and talk about the era of the past that baseball represented, and that I was lucky to meet some kids in fifth grade who drew me into an interest in baseball, and baseball card trading, just in time to see the 1975 World Series, and burn into my memory that moment of equilibrium in America.

It was a fun show.

Of course it is also Holy Week in the western churches. As I write this it is Good Friday. Sunday is Easter, the ultimate "opening day."

I Lie Awake Thinking of You

 (citation)

Waking in the middle of the night last night, I remembered my Lententide vow in the previous post to roust myself for prayer, no matter what the hour it might. It turned out to be almost exactly three o'clock, which is not an unusual hour for me to awake, and moreover for many, as I learned from a Youtube video of the late Fulton Sheen. This automated reader version of Sheen's words I found last week does not do him justice. Who sh'd?

I think of how good it will feel to deny myself the pleasure of staying under the covers. To deny one's appetites is to be able to step outside them, and see how much--at least in my own case---that I have gone through my life as a slave to my appetites, pulled by them by impulse, one to the next, to satisfy them like an animal roughing to a trough. I lack patience, discipline, a sense of duty and obligation. I am disgusted at myelf.

I sit in my office chair without turning on the space heater. I would hardly need it anymore at this time of spring, so that is hardly a deprivation. Without a kettle of water heating for coffee,  I struggle to keep from falling asleep in the chair. I direct myself towards prayer, towards love of God.

It doesn't feel particularly rewarding this morning, the whole thing. It is not about feeling. Feelings will lead one right into the abyss. 

It is not about self-improvement. Can something be about other than your own life pursuits, sweetheart? For once, can you put aside your postmodern need for Me-Me validation? Can you just fulfill your duty to render justice God (i.e. give God what is due Him) by worshipping, praising and adoring Him?

I am dust.

Palm Sunday Rain

 Woke up last night in the small hours, as I do most days, and heard the sound of steady rain bearing down the tiled roof and dropping from the eaves on the pavement.

We have had many good rains the last two months, to the point that the annual golf-tournament-slash-roving-cocktail-party turned into a drunken proto-riotish mud bath that made the civic organizers question the validity of the overall concept going forward.

A couple nights a small front came down the the north in an inverted v-shape, the apex bearing down on us as we were out walking in the park and the soccer fields going down to Bell Road, to which I have gotten accustomed after the trauma of seeing the desert floor razed and graded.

The lightning was heavy in one wing of the v-shape. We could tell all this with Jessica's smart phone, on an app showing lightning strakes. I like leaving my phone at home when I can.

Now it is raining again. I can hear it out my window as I type. It is a sensual pleasure, like a space heater on a chilly morning, or a warm blanket. This being a season of repentance and fasting, I try to be aware of my desire for material comforts and sensual pleasures, and if possible to purposefully deny, or at least delay, myself the satisfaction of it. Or at least not jump to enjoy it so readily.

Waking up in the early morning hours then, with a rain outside and a warm blanket over me, must be God himself intervening, for it is little sense to get up at that hour. Perhaps tomorrow morning I will. I will go rise and go to pray, without making coffee yet, and certainly with no half-and-half until Easter---even to the Orthodox Easter this year. I will examine my sins and repent of them. In this is freedom.

Good Day in Goodyear

 My flight to Burbank had been come at the tail end of what seemed like a barrage of activity from mid February, starting with the trip to NewYork City, that followed almost immediately by the arrival in town of Jessica's father and his wife, who flew from Newark. We try to get together with them at least once a year. Last year we met up with them in New Mexico. This year they came to town, as they have done in the past, and stayed this time in an AirBnB in north Scottsdale not far from us. 

It was a great time seeing them.  On the Saturday of their stay, we went to a Spring training baseball game, of which there are many here, each in separate quaint stadiums, some of which are designed to mimic the grander structures where the teams play their regular season games. We were making. return visit to the same stadium as five years ago, which is the one far on the southwestern edge of Phoenix, in the community of Goodyear, where the two Ohio teams, Cincinnati and Cleveland, both play their home games in the training season. All of the trainig stadiums, I think, are doubled up in this way, shared by two teams. 

Jessica got us seats in the shaded section. It was opening day of spring training. As it custom, the two Ohio teams that share the stadium will play each other on that day, with this year at least, the Cleveland team being the official home team (which meant the stadium announcer had to behave as a Cleveland home announcer in front of many Reds fans sitting on the other side). 

That's where we were, because the shaded premium section was on the visitor side and we could see down at the Red's dugout. I knew some of the players because we had been watching the Reds last year. Jessica purchased a season pass to watch the Reds games on cable. It was fun to see all the players whose names I knew. The players are very friendly with the fans, and many people hang around the entrance to the training facilities, where the players interact with the crowd after the game.

Jessica's father is not a Reds fan, despite living in Cincinnati for many years. He is from northeastern Ohio, in the area of Youngstown, and he is a passionate suffering fan of the Cleveland team. Unlike the Reds, they have not won a World Series title in living memory, despite coming extremely close on several occasions, losing in heartbreaking fashion. He was wearing his Cleveland hat. They used to be called the Indians, but they had to change their name because of political pressure.

On this day, the Reds walloped the erstwhile Indians. I don't remember the score. We ordered chili dogs in the Cincinnati style using our phones to scan a QR code mounted on the seats in the premium section. They were perfect and delicious, and enjoyed in the shade of the canopy above us.

Death in San Marino

 Today finds this part of Arizona poised on the edge between spring and summer.  It was slightly cool these last few days but in between the coolness are the bursts of heat and bright sunshine that let one know that the hot days are not long in coming, and then it will be six months before we see coolness again. 

Last week I did my Spellbreakers podcast/telecast on California, southern California in particular, as I was just traveling there. I flew to Burbank on the 1st, on a late Friday afternoon, and then flew back to Phoenix on the afterrnoon of Sunday. In between those flights was an Uber ride from Burbank to downtown Pasadena, where I checked into the Pasadena Hotel and Pool for two nights in what amounted to a pleasant room in a pleasant hotel in a pleasant part of town. 

On Saturday morning I went to the memorial service of a man I knew for many years. He was a pediatrician in Fort Collins, my hometown in Colorado. He was, however, a native Californian, born in 1929 in Orange County, when it was a very rural place. His temperament marked the men of that generation, a quiet acceptance of duty, and the recognition that life is unfair and difficult, but complaining about it is counterproductive. He became a doctor via the Air Force and lived in Thailand with his wife, and is his eldest daughter was born there, in the late 1950s. Then two more children were born, another daughter in the early 1960s, and a son in 1965. 

I know all of his children, and I adored his late wife, their mother. She passed away just a week before my father did, at Christmas time 2015.

The man whose memorial service I went to had passed away in November in Austin, Texas, just after his 94th birthday. He had been in assisted living. He had moved down to Austin at the insistence of his son, who had been living in Austin since the late 1980s. He had been living a splendid old age until recently taking a bad fall. 

His son flew his ashes to California for the memorial. His two older sisters live there as well. His oldest sister went to splendid well-known East Coast schools, got a law degree, and became a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles for years.  His second sister became a school teacher and taught in Pasadena until retiring. 

So it was natural to have the memorial service there. It was a Presbyterian Church in the nearby community of San Marino, which is just south of Pasadena, as the neighborhoods get nicer and more expensive.  Later I learned that San Marino is where George Patton grew up, when it was rural. He rode horseback on the open hills that became the fancy houses. In the second World War h was our most feared commander by enemy, and perhaps the respected by his men. He remains the face of American military prowess and victory on the battlefield.  In San Marino, I thought how Patton was a phenomenon of those times, and nothing like him will be seen again. 

The memorial service included a video presentation of slides by his son, who has taught film production at a community college in Austin since the 1990s. Before that he went to graduate school in film at the University of Texas. 

Before that he went to the University of Chicago, and other institutions of higher learning, doing the Gen X college switcharound that suddenly became epidemic among my cohort, even the high achievers. 

Before that he graduated from high school in Fort Collins, and before that he went to junior high and elementary school there, all while his father ran a pediatric practice across Lemay from the hospital, and attended regularly in the maternity ward, as they used to call it.

Later he left Fort Collins and worked for vaccine manufacturers. He also worked for the CDC. He helped develop one of the vaccines that babies are now given.  I learned his from his nephew, who is a pediatrician in southern California. He spoke a long encomium of the deceased in the reception in the other wing of the church (a nice complex, as one would imagine).  The deceased should be known to history for what he did, said his nephew. The rest of the family, his three children and other cousins, spoke not a word in response, but politely accepted the accolade of their father and uncle. It was as if they knew the deceased would be uncomfortable hearing himself described as such, out of modesty.

I got to attend two nice evening dinners with his family, on Friday and Saturday, where I sat next to his son, who is my old friend dating from junior high school in Fort Collins. 

We talked about old times.  He has photographs of two of us taken by his father at Mile High Stadium in the summer of 1983. The three of us went to see the first championship of the USFL, between the Philadelphia Stars and the Michigan Panthers. It was mostly local football fans in the stadium---Broncos fans who were rabid for a championship.  The deceased and his son had gone to many Broncos games together. The end game, between two teams nobody cared about, was exciting and ended on a heroic play at the last minute. There was such a release of emotion among those in attendance that they stormed the field and tore down the goal posts. The Denver Police were called and dispersed the crowd with incendiary devices of some kind.  The three of us beat a retreat. Like me, his son is mostly the type to recognize a bad situation and leap out of it. Definitely the deceased was like that