A Newly Minted Celtic (Fan)

I have paid little attention to professional basketball. For that matter, I guess I am not much of a fan of any organized sport. I am not, mind you, disdainful. But since my parents had little interest, I developed their lack thereof. I have enjoyed, in fact, over the years the occasional foray into the bleechers of one sport or another. Hockey. A King's game once. Baseball. Len of Len Speaks has been my host, if you will, at Met and Dodger games, and even the odd Yankee game. Never been to a basketball game.

When I was recently back East, I was in the home of some friends, who are big Celtic fans, and in the middle of a gathering, I noticed most everyone was off in the den catching up on the one of the early games between the Celtics and the LA Lakers that would determine the championship for 2010. I sat with them and they, in between successful shots of their team, asked me who I favored. I had to admit that I was really neutral. Jokingly, they suggested I needed to make a choice, given the loyalties in that room.

I found myself wishing I had the kind of passion for the game that they did. And that I had a team to root for. A passing, not particularly intense thought was this.

Back in Los Angeles, car after car waved Laker flags in anticipation of the last game, the one here at the Staples Center that would make or break it, now that the teams were tied.

Game 7. I happened to run across flipping channels, the beginning of the third quarter. I found myself sitting, and watching. And enjoying. I could imagine my friends back in Massachusetts noisily delighted that the Celtics appeared to stay just ahead of Kobe and Company. I had a slight bias, I realized, toward the shamrocks. I actually felt a little nervous as the Lakers' defense kept the Celtics from shots to get them way ahead. And then the Lakers were able to pull just ahead leaving no further chances for the Boston team. LA wins. My disappointment was nominal. And then. . . .

In celebration, a rather significant number of "fans' of the Lakers decided to rock taxis, vandalize businesses and light inappropriate items on fire. It has happened before. Back in Boston, I hear, the losers were more, well, civilized. Nary a person or thing was disturbed. All was as it should be. But here in LA, shameful behavior, again. And I felt a need, a silly need, perhaps, to rebel.

So, as of that night, I decided. I am now officially a Celitc fan. Next year, I will be watching, and rooting for, them. I will be doing this particularly when they are playing the Lakers. Oh, I know, it wasn't the Laker's fault. I am not necessarily applying logic in making this decision. But it's a statement of some sort, that I need to make to myself, for whatever it is worth, likely nothing. It is, as they say, what it is. Go Celtics, 2011!

Thoughts on a Sunday

I have been kicking around my apartment since I returned from Church and a quick run to Bristol Farm for supplies. And oustide my apartment because the gloom of June ended earlier today and there was sunshine to enjoy. So me and Ellwood shared a sandwich (don't feed cheese to a toothless cat parenthetically. It gets stuck on the room of the mouth) and I made an entry in my private journal while the breeze meandered about me.

This morning, lying in bed just awakened, I thought suddenly about a bronze coin a friend gave me, a memento of hers or someone she knew from the Bicentennial of 1976. I was suddenly cognizant of just how young this country is and how I, probably we, never really consider that the events we treat as ancient history are really adjacent to our own. I remember standing on a Bronx roof, courtesy of one of my late uncles, that overlooked the Hudson, watching the tall ships sailing up in one of the commemorations. I had lived already, 22 years of that 200 years since the founding of our country. I have now lived 56 years of the 234 years since the founding of our county. Not that many generations separate me from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the beginning of the great American Experiment.

Or separate any of us in the fifty states from that delicate balance which is Democracy in America. And yet we treat her, America, as if we can say or do anything without damage to the core values. We treat her, in fact, as if those core values mean nothing, and can be rearranged wily nilly. Or worse, we treat her, as if those core values should be eradicated in favor of those kinds which we have seen if only we remembered destroy the rights of man using deceptive self-aggrandizing rhetoric. I think perhaps Daniel Webster was more astute at discerning the rhetoric of the Devil than we the people have been of late. This country is young and it hasn't taken sufficient root for us to assume that the values of the Founding Fathers, which are by the way under vicious and alas even smug attack, will survive. Without the values there is no America, despite the appeals to their irrelevancy. And some of those appeals are from our own representatives, who refuse to listen to their constituencies about key issues. Even mock those constituencies in an early expression of government despotism.

We haven't been around so long that we can afford to think ourselves indestructible. Countries and empires with far more years under their territorial belts, died writhing deaths, as did their citizens, failing to heed the lessons of history.

I don't know. I don't know why I was thinking about this stuff in my bed on a Sunday in June. But I actually got a littled chilled to think that so little time in the past, a group of adventurous, thoughtful men (and it's ok with me that it was mostly men since that was the society of the time, foward thinking, but still with the frailty of humanity) were birthing something so magnificent that we might let die because of our negligence or wilfullness. Worse because of our ignorance of the value of what we have had.

A Wee Let Down

When you have been out and about in different territory, somewhat adventurous territory compared to one's everyday life, the hustle and bustle begins to seem like it will never end and there is a joy in that. While I was away, there was a lot to do and see, perhaps more than I could possibly manage in just ten days in two locales, one the pandemonium that is New York and the other the quietude of the oceanside in the South Shore of Massachusetts. And then, I came home, to the usual. At first, it was nice. Relaxing. Recouping. Catching up. And then.

Back to work today. The same problems big and small. The same debates. The same, well tiredness, after too many years trying to save a world that just doesn't want to be saved. It's not like I do it "pro bono". I get paid a decent salary. But the time away, seeing the bigger world thousands of miles away from my everyday, reminded me of the glory of possibility that returning to the same ole, same ole just eradicated, all in the space of one 7.25 hour day.

"What AM I doing here?" All this effort to get to management and what? So what? Pension. Check. Other benefits. Check. All done according to hoyle. Check. Not ungrateful. Check. But. . .the forever but. You know. The path not taken. The path too late to take. Choices that did not really seem like choices. But they must have been. And now? Ideas pop in and out of my mind. I even have a folder of those that can be reduced to application or description. And then the existential stuff, the stuff that no folder can contain. Perhaps no mind. Not mine, anyway.

Going away. Coming back. As if it never happened.

The Somewhat Unfriendly Skies and Thoughts of an Otherwise Lovely Vacation

"I'm Afraid to Fly; and I Don't Know Why. . ." goes the tune from "They're Playing Our Song" which has been running in my mind. It was running in, through and around my mind, yesterday, as I was flying home from Boston to Los Angeles around endless lightning storms illuminating cloud after cloud over pieces of the United States but not enough around the concomitant turbulence. Also were words of prayer and petition leaving my lips silently. I worried that other words would escape more loudly. I would have kissed the ground like the ersatz Pope John Paul II, upon arrival at LAX, except I was too tired from six hours of anxiety and just wanted my bags to go home. So, I guess I KNOW why I am afraid to fly. I am amazed by those, perhaps the majority, who are willing to get on planes all the time to go anywhere and everywhere. I'd like to feel like that, but for me, each such trip is an effort. But was it worth it, this typical sturm und drang that is my experience when I fly, to New York this time, and out of Logan?

You betcha! as someone in politics is wont to say.

It most definitely was. Five days in the heart of New York, meeting up with friends and family, re-establishing my life long identity as an adjacent child (the Bronx as you know) of the city, certainly one of those who rode the subway, and the buses, and walked the street of midtown, and lower Manhattan to work. I did a lot more of that walking during those five days, passing one of my first job locations, 60 East 42nd Street, just across from Grand Central, among many other places familiar to me, still, this 28 years after I escaped to a more temperate clime. I shall always be a New Yorker. This is not always appreciated by the more laid back with whom I now reside who find me a bit, well, abrasive. But I am as is the city, vibrant, but a bit intense perhaps for some never immersed in its identity. Fast in speech. Impatient. It is in my blood. And I am happy for this, perhaps only because I know it is an irrevocable reality.

I was staying with a friend of my late father's, now firmly my own friend, a surrogate East Coast "mom" on West 65th Street, the city at my feet. A definite pro on the list, New York v. California, the ability to hail cabs. If I was not walking, I was in a cab, going cross town, at a snail's pace admittedly, but giving me a chance to catch my breath between engagements with Aunt Teri, cousin Carol, cousin Maria, Bob and Ellen (yum, the Bar Americain) along with Len of Len Speaks (on one of his bicoastal work jaunts), Ginny (at the Prix Fixe dinner at 21! and a joyous two hours with the "Jersey Boys" at the August Wilson Theatre), Gary and Noreen at Planet Hollywood, Times Square (prior to their Broadway sojourn seeing "Come Fly Away"), and a special lunch at the Time Warner Center with my oostess Sophia. And there was even the Metro North experience as I road the rails to New Rochelle to see my aged aunt, my father's elder sister, no2 97, at a nursing home. That perhaps was the most bittersweet experience of the New York adventure. I saw her five years ago when she was in a more assisted living environment. She was just losing some of her memory, but there was enough, and still the recognition of family. But now, after some health issues, and the passage of time, she knows no one. My family here had me bring pictures and a cryptic childhood message that, if there was something still to access in her mind, would have surely triggered a memory of her brother, Steve. But it was not to be. She was not feeling well, with an abcess, but some laughter and appeal to the vestige of her former self, still residing within, brought a twinkle of the eye and a bit of her old expression. She had a comfort with the holding of her hand clearly becoming more physically affectionate than she or any other member of the family of seven siblings had ever demonstrated in my memory. It was hard to leave her, knowing that it is likely the last time I'll see her given her age and condition. I left feeling a sense of loss, but also a sense of pride at her well lived life. Not that she'd see it that way, having lived in the Bronx her whole life, a late in life wife, no children. But she is a testament to family loyalty, she who took care of her mother, and her younger (he never knew that, officially anyway) husband when he developed Alzheimer's disease, fighting the pain of a broken hip of her own. She was the family historian. She was the source of help for many of the cousins. I could still sense in her, even with the debilitation of her mind's erosion, a wistfulness she always seemed to exhibit.

Yes, nothing would have prevented me from this segment of my trip.

The next leg was really the raison d'etre for my having gotten on a plane in the first place and beginning my East Coast visit in New York. A high school graduation in Kingston, Massachusetts of a lovely young woman (who, like her brother, soon to follow her) I still see as a 7 year old nascent gymnast, all legs and litheness. doing the Macarena with her red haired then friend, Eva.
Arriving at the Fairview Inn in Marshfield (actually Brant Rock) well after my Estimate Time of Arrival due to holiday (Memorial Day) traffic and accidents, I was greeted by the meditative sight of the Atlantic outside my room's window, followed by a most agreeable dinner at the home of friends of the graduate's mother and fiance, right on the water. A new quiet vibe to replace the frenetic one of the prior several days. I think now of a con about the East, the persistent humidity of spring and summer. I was wet behind the neck most of my trip, except for the blessed breezes of the oceans and bays to relieve it. A small thing certainly, but a reminder of the love I have for the Southern California weather that primarily, keeps me here. For I cannot say I did not, do not, miss the East. But for the extremes in weather, I would be back more often and stay longer.

The graduation escaped predicted thunderstorms by minutes. The child-woman that is Cait radiated even more her natural beauty. Her brother was an usher, straining in his suit and tie (but looking most handsome) opining with amazing logic that suits really were not a meaningful necessity of life, even for special occasions. And then another gathering to celebrate at the waterside home in Hull.

I have seen her college, small, Catholic and on the most amazing ocean bluff in Newport, Rhode Island. Her dad, whose grave I visited briefly, with his wife and in-laws, during the weekend in Cudworth Cemetery in Scituate, would have been smiling broadly at his sweet child and saying "Life is Grand" which he so surely believed and cultivated the belief in us more guarded souls.

And so it was. And is. I guess it turns out that the skies were not even somewhat unfriendly, when you consider what I would have missed had I not boarded.