Dust to Silver

As I write this, the fourth World Series game has not yet started. As I write this, I look out onto a patch of ground that has been brown and dusty all summer but which is now becoming green, and the green under the brown stalks turns the landscape silver.

Every year I forget about the California early-winter silver. Every year I rediscover it.

The rains have come early: October is early for rain in these parts. The cold’s here too. So is the silver.

I’ve been thinking a lot about two people who took me to Fenway Park back in the late 80s. They were fathers of friends of mine; both were passionate about the Red Sox. One of them introduced me to baseball altogether; the other one taught me a lot more about it.

They are both gone now: two Red Sox fans (how many, many more must there have been?) who were born after 1918 and who died before they could see their team win the World Series.

Their silver hair and blue eyes swirl with the smell of hot dogs and the Boston accents and the lousy beer and the sound of bat on ball, CRACK not POCK like a cricket bat, that impossibly lush green diamond. I wish I could send them both a letter thanking them for this. I wish they could see it. Eddie’s scorecard would be trembling in his hands, the seventy or so years he’d heard “wait till next year” rolling by like innings, his yellow golf pencil clinking down onto the seat in front but lost in the roar that is not the collective victorious howl of when we beat the Yankees last week but something soft and sweet, grateful, not quite believing, like the October rain that paints this landscape silver. I think I’m hearing it now.

I think next year’s here, guys.

Postscript, Thursday morning: Red Sox flags have been turning up all over Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, according to a piece in the Boston Globe:

This will be the final, regular post to the Bambino’s Curse weblog. The site, however, and all the archives will remain online forever, as a small testament and recollection of what it was like to be a fan before the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918. (Like anyone wants to relive that!)”