Gonna knock you right in the head
You better get yourself together
Pretty soon your gonna be dead
What in the world you thinking of?
Laughing in the face of love
What on Earth you try'na do?
It's up to you
Yeah, you
-John Lennon
I am not a superstitious person generally. I think of myself as set in my ways, unwilling to change routines unless I have to, a bit routinized but sometimes I wonder. This comes up right now because of the start of the baseball season, my favorite time of the year as related to the NY Yankees. Living in Massachusetts, heart of Red Sox nation, has led to lots of teasing as related to this. However it always leaves me a bit queasy to do so and I generally only partake of the tease with good friends, and gently.
Two stories…
It is 1978 and I am working to save for graduate school in a group home on Lon Island. Most of the kids are inner city kids from the Island, hard core. The program director is a die-in-the-wool Staten Island born, Yankee fan. All through the spring and early summer we lived through a disappointing season fraught with injuries and underperformances. Then in mid summer, with the New Yorkers 14.5 games behind, the fortunes started to change. We began a ritual where each night all the kids and staff watched the games together and the well behaved during the week got the special treat of watching the Friday night game in the director’s office and got to stay up late to do it. By early September the lead was 4 and they faced each other in a four game series, with NY winning all four by a combined score of 42-9. Kids were running around the house squealing about the “Boston Massacre” and the Yankees returned to and won a second consecutive World Series. Even until the very end of the Boston series, I never assumed the Yankees would win and did not rub this fact into others.
In 2004 the Yankees collapsed in the playoffs against the Sox but only after I had confided to my son that I felt bad for the Sox after game three, a rout by the Yankees, putting them up 3-0. They lost the next four games and went to the series themselves. I blamed myself for this moment of weakness. There is nothing more to say. The karma got me, I don’t know what I was thinking.
It is 1978 and I am working to save for graduate school in a group home on Lon Island. Most of the kids are inner city kids from the Island, hard core. The program director is a die-in-the-wool Staten Island born, Yankee fan. All through the spring and early summer we lived through a disappointing season fraught with injuries and underperformances. Then in mid summer, with the New Yorkers 14.5 games behind, the fortunes started to change. We began a ritual where each night all the kids and staff watched the games together and the well behaved during the week got the special treat of watching the Friday night game in the director’s office and got to stay up late to do it. By early September the lead was 4 and they faced each other in a four game series, with NY winning all four by a combined score of 42-9. Kids were running around the house squealing about the “Boston Massacre” and the Yankees returned to and won a second consecutive World Series. Even until the very end of the Boston series, I never assumed the Yankees would win and did not rub this fact into others.
In 2004 the Yankees collapsed in the playoffs against the Sox but only after I had confided to my son that I felt bad for the Sox after game three, a rout by the Yankees, putting them up 3-0. They lost the next four games and went to the series themselves. I blamed myself for this moment of weakness. There is nothing more to say. The karma got me, I don’t know what I was thinking.
So this year the Yankees are off to a good start and the Red Sox have yet to win a game in this young season. They play each other today. I have been very careful about my chiding of certain Red Sox fans, friends, but making no attempt to stir up the karma. I do not want to get knocked right in the head…
1 comment:
And see what happened?
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