Go Red Sox

Okay, I live in Los Angeles, but I spent my first 25 years in Massachusetts or New Hampshire and I am a Red Sox fan.

When I was a kid, when we played ball in the yard, my brother got to "be" Ted Williams, while I "was" Jimmy Piersall. Of all the other Red Sox players, I find it ironic that I - a clinical social worker working at a psychiatric hospital - played a guy best remembered for his mental breakdown.

Following baseball and other sports - even golf - was the way I could connect to my dad. I wasn't a boy. I wasn't an athlete. But watching a game on TV or talking about scores, I felt close to my dad and felt his respect. So I grew up loving the Red Sox and the Celtics, and Arnold Palmer. I read Bat Boy for the Braves, Fear Strikes Back, and a biography of Ted Williams. I even used my early writing propensity to start a story about a tomboy who impressed boys with baseball statistics (Ted Williams, .406, 1941 - I still remember it).

When we moved out to L.A. in 1975, it took a while to convert me from a Celtics fan to a Laker fan. Although I can't remember the year that I changed whom I routed for, I guess it was around the time that the Celtics stopped being brilliant and the brilliance of Kareem and Jamaal Wilkes and Norm Nixon and Michael Cooper won me over.

I tried to like the Dodgers, however there was an incident at Dodger Stadium on the 4th of July, that kind of soured me on Los Angeles baseball. A redneck tow-headed family, led by a twanging-talking shrew of a mother/wife, threw firecrackers at me, my black husband, and our friends--also an interracial couple. The incident was terrifying. The woman and her nasty little children, sneering insults, kept lighting and tossing firecrackers in our path as we approached our car. The husband stood smugly against the trunk of his car with his arms crossed. We didn't want to know what might be inside the trunk.

The story is one I don't repeat much. It took us a long time to safely get to and into our car and then to back up out of our space into stop and go lines of other cars trying to vacate. It caused tension among the four of us, as each responded in a different way. Our older black friend had grown up in a time when he knew that not responding was the safest tactic; while his white wife took a more confrontational approach. Years later I went back to Dodger Stadium for a couple of games with the kids and still later to see the Rolling Stones, but I never felt good about it.

But Fenway Park was another matter. I loved Fenway Park. I was in the crowd the night the entire campus of BU poured into Kenmore Square when "we" won the pennant in 1967. I remember fondly the few games I went to with my dad and brother, where I learned to keep score on those little cards, and how I couldn't understand my dad leaving before the final out in order to get us to the car to beat the traffic. How could he give up on the Red Sox before the final out in the final inning? I remember the great green monster and the Citgo sign and the hand-operated scoreboard. I remember seeing the lights, the same ones that Ted Williams shot out, as I recall reading as a kid, with the rifle he was using to kill the problem pigeons.

And of course I remember season after season of hope and disallusionment until that wonderful day in October 2004 when the Red Sox won the World Series. I remember being in a sandwich bar next to UCLA and walking to my car parked on campus. The moon was huge and full and I called my brother and Kyle called me to tell me congratulations. I could never get Ky interested in the Red Sox. He was a Dodger fan, and usually he responded to my "Guess what, Kyle? The Red Sox won" with "Mom, I don't CARE" . . . That night he was glad for me.

And here it is, another October. The Red Sox have won their division and are going into a series with the Anaheim Angels (I'm sorry, I just CAN'T call them the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim). The first two games are at Fenway. The third game is in Anaheim. And, midst a sea of red, I will be there.