It’s Tuesday evening and I’m waiting for Lyra to get home from an impromptu trip to her mom’s for dinner with the kids. It’s just past 10 PM and I’ve waited for her to come home to watch this week’s mind-bending episode of “Lost.”
So while I wait for her, I’m channel surfing. The Bruins game just ended and right now I’m on the Celtics game, and they’re about to defeat Detroit. During the commercials I happened upon the MLB Network and the show said that it had highlights of the 1975 World Series. While the Red Sox lost that one, I can handle it emotionally. I was alive, but only a toddler, so I don’t have firsthand memories of the pain. And, despite the loss, the Sox and Carlton Fisk gave us the one of the greatest baseball moments of all time with his homer just inside the foul pole. It’s still fun to watch him wave that ball to stay fair.
But when I turned on the show, it wasn’t 1975 that was on. It was 1986. That’s a different story altogether.
Not only was it 1986, but of course, it was Game Six. Sox up 3-2 in games. Dave Henderson goes deep in the 10th. The Sox tack on another for a 5-3 lead. Calvin Schiraldi retires the first two men on little cans of corn to left and then center.
Bob Costas started to talk about the cellophane being put over the lockers. Mrs. Yawkey was standing next to the trophy.
I changed the channel. We all know what happens from there, and there’s no reason to relive it ever again. As soon as I saw Billy Buckner on the screen I went back to the Celtics.
That’s enough.
I know it shouldn’t matter any more. The Sox won in 2004. The Sox won in 2007. Heck, the team looks strong, it could do it again in 2010 (of course that remains to be seen, and I’ll only believe it after they trade for Adrian Gonzalez).
The demons have been exorcised. The year 1918 is irrelevant.
But still, seeing that stuff still causes pain. I was just 13 years old, and I cried that night. It was the worst.
I remember that my parents were on vacation in Los Angeles, and I watched it alone on the floor, leaning up against an ottoman we had in the living room. I didn’t more for a long time.
Making it even worse, I had asked my mom to get me some kind of keepsake from her trip. She told me on the phone she’d picked me up a Celtics T-shirt, and of course that lifted my spirits (remember, this was the heyday of Larry Bird and the C’s had won the championship just a few months earlier).
So she got home and gave me my T-shirt. It was yellow, and purple. What the ****?
It was a Lakers shirt, that said “Beat Boston.” Not only had I had my stomach punched by the Mets a few days earlier, but on top of it my mom brings me home a Lakers shirt.
Amazingly, I’ve never been to therapy.
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