Baseball, Fathers, and Sons

The Red Sox just won the World Series for the 3rd time in the last 10 years.  I was once 25 and of the belief that the Red Sox would never win the Series.  My most enduring sports memory -- burned with a vengeance into my psyche -- I was 7 years old when I watched my hero cry uncontrollably as Game 7 slipped away to the Mets.  Boggs believed in that team as much as my 7 year-old heart did. 

It's been a half an hour and I've shared the joy of victory with a dozen friends and family.  30 minutes after the joy of victory and I'm overcome with the joy of deep sadness.  Joyful in the recollection of great loss. My father was an unwavering Red Sox fan.  There were many Sox fans around me growing up in Massachusetts. They were everywhere.  They all believed the Sox would win the Series on March 1st and May 1st and often July 1st.  And they all complained in August and sometimes September and the lot of them by October.  But not my father.  He always believed in the Sox.  Just as he always believed that his eldest son could turn into a lockdown pitcher.  Just like my meatballs over the center of the plate, the Sox always disappointed. They always proved the masses correct in dismissing them  in the late summer or the fall. 

And here we are.  The Sox are the most decorated team of the last 10 years.  And I'm joyous.  I was relieved in 2004.  So high I could barely find the ground in 2007.  Joyously grounded in 2013.  I miss him.  I wish he was here to share this one with me.  I think it's because I'm old enough to appreciate how fucking random sports is - the playoffs?  This makes no sense.  No sports commissioner has every taken a statistics course. I can't believe I thought as a kid that it meant something.

So the stats mean nothing.  So it doesn't have to do with the best of the best.  It means something.  Nothing as tangible as we'd like it to mean:  it means that you just so happened to be the last person standing.  No fault of your own, thank you very much.  But more than that, it means something for the generations.  It means something because I'm a father.  I hold my daughter and dream of my unborn son and think of what my father meant.  Excising the details -- he changed the world for me -- and through every moment we had the Red Sox. 

We had the Pats a little.  But my father wasn't a football man.  We never shared the Celtics.  Though my father cared for basketball.  Hockey was an afterthought.  It may be the peoples' game in Canada, or maybe it once was, but it's been a well-to-do child's game in the States for a long while and I was never in danger of being one of those. 

I wish I could have celebrated any of these with him.  You would think 2004 the most of all.  86 years.  His father.  His father's father.  They never knew what it meant to see the Sox win.  But he and I did.  Or we should have.  '75 broke his heart.  He and my mother married that year.  They should have won that one.  Not as much as '68.  They deserved that one.  But deserve has nothing to do with it.  As we sports fans know.  And as we God fans know.  Sometimes it's your time.  Sometimes it's not.  His time came early.  He missed the Sox win it all.  I miss the hug we would have shared.  Imagine the fucking hug!  What an embrace it would have been! Alas.  It wasn't our time. 

But my sports time has rolled around.  And I'll share this one with my brother and my uncles and these friends of mine.  And I'll love every last moment of it.  And I'll whisper, in the quiet moments, of the father I would have shared this with.  And he'll enjoy this with me, if that's what the afterlife holds.  Or I'll enjoy it, with him, if that's what the afterlife holds. 

Once again, God, eternity, and the meaning of life resonate through a Red Sox victory!  This one's for you Dewey.  This one's for you Boggs.  This one's for you Freddy.  And, of course, this one's for all the fathers and sons and mothers and brothers wherever they may be who gave a part of themselves to care about a team as though themselves.  God bless our fathers who never felt this success.  May they feel it through their sons' success.  That's all they every wanted.

The Death of an Icon

Interesting term that, icon.  Ancient religious roots.  Full of power.  And mystery.  Maybe icon isn't used with the same depth it once had. Icon of Rock n'Roll.  Icon of Punk.  Icon of the underground.   We've come to use the word as a synonym for a person who embodies a concept.  What is that in comparison to a Saint who has come to embody the Limitless Love of the Creator?

Lou Reed is an icon of rock.  Lou Reed is an icon of punk. Lou Reed is an icon of the Underground.  We look at those old pictures of him in tight jeans, a black t-shirt, a leather jacket and shades and think "man, that's rock n' roll."  And maybe that means music and clubs and girls and drugs.  And maybe that means some halcyon age when rock n' roll was pure. 

But the ancient meaning remains.  We put his picture on the wall.  We put some musician's poster on our wall, anyway.  And we feel something more than just music.  We feel a better way to live. Their images remind us of a better place than the one we're living in.  And that's what an icon was always supposed to do.  Icons help us.  They intercede on our behalf.  They offer to help us find that better place. At least they make it seem possible.

I didn't know Lou Reed, but I'll miss him. I'll see his picture, as I have seen it many times in the last few days, and I'll miss him.  I feel as I imagine the plaintive feel when they turn to their icons: the world feels an emptier place for the absence of the person represented there, but, too, their image carries the hope of a better place.

When I think of Lou Reed, I'll think of Berlin and New York - the places more than the albums - he embodied those two cities for me through his music, through a few snippets of film.  I'll think of transvestites.  I'll think of the front row of some outdoor arena on the outskirts of Rome and a little smile from the man himself when I laughed at "two whores sucked his nipples while he came on their feet." I'll think of the roar of a thousand Italians when he struck the first chord of Dirty Boulevard.  And I'll think of Baton Rouge...and of sixteen and a crisp, green football field. 

I was sixteen when I bought my first Lou Reed record.  I bought it in the spring, on a whim.  Long before I heard - or heard of - the Velvet Underground, I listened to that record.  It played on a loop through the summer.  I fell in love while that record played. 

So I see an image of Lou Reed and I think of Love and Perfection and the possibilities of limitless happiness.  He was an Icon.  He is an icon.

God bless Lou.