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captainsblogI wouldn't know. But I do know, after more than 30 years in and around here, that there are just as few Mets fans in Buffalo.
You'd think there'd be more. We've hosted their AAA affiliate for at least two decent runs; almost all of their games are on the cable here; and, other than those Voldemorts of the Bronx, they're probably covered in the paper and on the sports-talk station as much as any team. It's just never clicked among the general population, for whatever reason.
Except, that is, when it does.
Earlier today, I reintroduced myself to cardio after almost a week away from it. I had a late afternoon client meeting, so I was in around 1 p.m., earlier than usual, and maybe that was the necessary randomness. I also had a new read, one of my treasures from this past weekend:
This was the second and final publication by the original co-director of, and the eventual memorial honoree of, the conference I just attended. I'd read segments of it before this past weekend, but never owned, or even browsed, the entire copy, but when it was on sale between panels, I knew it had to come home. I also knew it needed to be signed, as so many of my fellow author friends have done for me in recent years. Fortunately, Dana's wife was in attendance, and she graciously gave those words to me:
More about Dana's family in a moment. I hadn't even gotten as far as that inside title page, as I was setting up book, phone and water bottle on the elliptical platform, when the guy next to me, probably in his 60s, saw the cover and said, Hey! You must be a Met fan!
Well, yeah, that would be consistent with the book, yes.
Then he floored me:
I was at the last Mets home opener at the Polo Grounds. Then, I went to the first one at Shea Stadium.
Wow. Just wow. Those were in 1963 and 1964. If there are more than a dozen people in this county who were at just one of those two longago games, it would be a lot. The odds of meeting one of those dozen at all, much less the weekend after hearing stories from close to a dozen other people who were also at both of those games, are in Megamillions-winning territory.
No lifelong friendship came out of the moment; he doesn't follow the team anymore, much, and I zoned into my listening and reading, not even getting his name. Still. It was the equivalent of catching a live ball at the ballpark, or witnessing a Met no-hitter; I've never experienced either (and nobody, to this day, has experienced the latter), but it gave me a sense of being, however vicariously, in the company of something very special.
----
Just as touching, in its own way, was having Dana's daughter become my friend on Facebook after we met at the banquet on the second night.
Re-Met, to be precise; she was at her dad's memorial last summer, and the passage I read from at that event (from Dana's first book, not ours) was about his experience taking Sonia to a game at Shea. She's about our daughter's age, so I felt a kinship with her- enhanced, now that I know she's in film studies in college, paralleling Emily's animation studies at RIT. I also felt her enthusiasm for so much of what was going on around her at these events, even though most of the memories we were reliving happened before she was even born. (She won the first of the banquet door prizes- a Mookie Wilson bat- and her smile from that is still lighting up half of the north campus of Hofstra, lo these four nights later.)
The new book above also includes a chapter on Dana visiting Shea with Sonia as an older child, and it, too, parallels our own changing roles as parents of a daughter who's become less of a dependent and more of a friend as she becomes more of her own person. Yet there are so many other memories, opinions, and sheer poetry in Last Days of Shea that I bonded with just as quickly. Perhaps the most Amazing content comes early on, where Dana tells us that he will be co-chairing the conference at Hofstra that just ended; he tells us its exact date, and expresses complete confidence that it would happen, given all the uncertainties that can befall an event in this world.
This event? Transcended even the ending of his own life. And dozens of us are better and happier for it.
You'd think there'd be more. We've hosted their AAA affiliate for at least two decent runs; almost all of their games are on the cable here; and, other than those Voldemorts of the Bronx, they're probably covered in the paper and on the sports-talk station as much as any team. It's just never clicked among the general population, for whatever reason.
Except, that is, when it does.
Earlier today, I reintroduced myself to cardio after almost a week away from it. I had a late afternoon client meeting, so I was in around 1 p.m., earlier than usual, and maybe that was the necessary randomness. I also had a new read, one of my treasures from this past weekend:
This was the second and final publication by the original co-director of, and the eventual memorial honoree of, the conference I just attended. I'd read segments of it before this past weekend, but never owned, or even browsed, the entire copy, but when it was on sale between panels, I knew it had to come home. I also knew it needed to be signed, as so many of my fellow author friends have done for me in recent years. Fortunately, Dana's wife was in attendance, and she graciously gave those words to me:
More about Dana's family in a moment. I hadn't even gotten as far as that inside title page, as I was setting up book, phone and water bottle on the elliptical platform, when the guy next to me, probably in his 60s, saw the cover and said, Hey! You must be a Met fan!
Well, yeah, that would be consistent with the book, yes.
Then he floored me:
I was at the last Mets home opener at the Polo Grounds. Then, I went to the first one at Shea Stadium.
Wow. Just wow. Those were in 1963 and 1964. If there are more than a dozen people in this county who were at just one of those two longago games, it would be a lot. The odds of meeting one of those dozen at all, much less the weekend after hearing stories from close to a dozen other people who were also at both of those games, are in Megamillions-winning territory.
No lifelong friendship came out of the moment; he doesn't follow the team anymore, much, and I zoned into my listening and reading, not even getting his name. Still. It was the equivalent of catching a live ball at the ballpark, or witnessing a Met no-hitter; I've never experienced either (and nobody, to this day, has experienced the latter), but it gave me a sense of being, however vicariously, in the company of something very special.
----
Just as touching, in its own way, was having Dana's daughter become my friend on Facebook after we met at the banquet on the second night.
Re-Met, to be precise; she was at her dad's memorial last summer, and the passage I read from at that event (from Dana's first book, not ours) was about his experience taking Sonia to a game at Shea. She's about our daughter's age, so I felt a kinship with her- enhanced, now that I know she's in film studies in college, paralleling Emily's animation studies at RIT. I also felt her enthusiasm for so much of what was going on around her at these events, even though most of the memories we were reliving happened before she was even born. (She won the first of the banquet door prizes- a Mookie Wilson bat- and her smile from that is still lighting up half of the north campus of Hofstra, lo these four nights later.)
The new book above also includes a chapter on Dana visiting Shea with Sonia as an older child, and it, too, parallels our own changing roles as parents of a daughter who's become less of a dependent and more of a friend as she becomes more of her own person. Yet there are so many other memories, opinions, and sheer poetry in Last Days of Shea that I bonded with just as quickly. Perhaps the most Amazing content comes early on, where Dana tells us that he will be co-chairing the conference at Hofstra that just ended; he tells us its exact date, and expresses complete confidence that it would happen, given all the uncertainties that can befall an event in this world.
This event? Transcended even the ending of his own life. And dozens of us are better and happier for it.