Could President Abraham Lincoln have imagined upon his death bed 150 years ago that one day there would be such a fine automobile as this named after him?
My son, Owen, has really gotten into cars of late. He had a thing for them many years ago, probably at a point when his fascination for subway trains ebbed a bit. We've gone to the annual auto show in Boston each of the last several years. He's excited for this year's show, which is sometime just after the New Year.
When I was his age my thing was 18-wheelers: Peterbilts were my favorite, followed by Kenworths. I was into cars, too, but not like Owen is right now. How excited is he by cars? When I told him today that I bought him the 2016 auto issue of Consumer Reports, he looked at me like I'd just told him he'd won the lottery.
"You did?" he asked as we drove home from school. "Thanks," he said with a handsome grin.
My dad liked to talk about cars. He enjoyed pointing out that "1 in 5 cars you see broken down on the highway is a General Motors car." I don't know a damn thing about how cars work or how to fix them, but I enjoy calling out classic muscle cars and restored gems from the 1930s through 1950s. Owen pays them little mind.
Named for the 16th president of our fine United States, the Lincoln Motor Company was founded in 1917 by Henry Leland, who'd voted for Honest Abe in 1864, according to Wikipedia. Five short years later the company was in financial straits, and was acquired by Ford Motor Company.
So many car companies have gone under over the last 115 years. It's nice to see a classic one like Lincoln still around almost 100 years after its founding. Now, if they could just do something about those annoying Matthew McConaughey commercials.
Well, at least Jim Carrey put the naked bongo player in his place:
Yes, Leonard "Lenny" Kosnowski, the Lone Wolf himself. Don't get me wrong: I like being alone to read and write, do crossword puzzles, listen to music and watch TV. I crave quietude. But too often I reject popular opinions or fads because I think I'm above such things. I'm not, but for some reason I like to give the impression that I can't be bothered with mania.
In high school, my good friend Andy was really into Elvis Costello. For a long period, whenever I was in his two-door Toyota station wagon (which looked sorta like this, and which on at least one occasion crossed north of the 100-m.p.h. mark on a late night in our sleepy hometown, but you couldn't prove it by me) he'd be cranking My Aim Is True, This Year's Model or Armed Forces. These albums were chock fulla great songs -- "(The Angels Wanna Wear) My Red Shoes," "Less Than Zero," "Pump It Up," "Lip Service," "Accidents Will Happen" and "Oliver's Army," to name just a few. Andy got our friend Bene (R.I.P.) into Costello and his band, the Attractions. So Bene would often blast the Artist Formerly Known as Declan Mcmanus as well.
And they'd sing along and rewind songs (yes, rewind, kids; this was the olden days) to hear favorite parts, and replay the same songs ad nauseam. They'd pound the steering wheel and dashboard, pretending they were Pete Thomas on the drums. I liked Elvis, sure, but I didn't want to hear his music so much. So, rather than join in the fun and just go with it, I'd give them shit about it.
"Why are you playing Elvis again? He's not even that good!"
Eventually we went to see him live, and he was terrific. And at some point, after their mania died down, I admitted to myself, and perhaps to my friends, that this Costello guy was pretty damn talented. I don't own a lot of his albums, but I have a few and really enjoy them.
I've had this contrarian reaction to plenty of other things in my life. My wife and her family decide to drink Dark 'n' Stormys during our annual Cape Cod vacation, and I opt for something, anything, different.
I bought a liter of Orange Crush and mixed it with vodka, dubbed it Orange Crash and pretended that it was just as good as their beverage.
At a family gathering, my family -- sister, brother, cousins, wife, kids -- were having a fantastic time playing Heads Up! on somebody's iPhone, howling with laughter as they acted out clues. Along with a few other folks, I was chilling in my sister's living room when the whole Heads Up! gang rushed into the room, insisting that I had to play.
I didn't react well. Not at all. I pulled the Grumpy Old Man and told them I didn't want to play, and that if I'd wanted to, I wouldn't have been hanging out in the quiet living room, would I?
They shrugged me off and went back to their fun. I felt like an idiot.
I'm an introvert, plain and simple. This doesn't mean that I don't like to have fun, but it does mean that I have a hard time joining large gatherings and being spontaneous. But my oppositional attitude is more than that. I want to be cool, to be the one who discovers an awesome thing, whether it's a band (I take at least a little credit, but none of the blame, for the popularity and longevity of the Flaming Lips) or a TV show ("American Gypsies," which turned out pretty stupid).
On those times when I follow the trends, I often get burned -- "Heroes," "Nashville" and the first season of "Glee," I'm talkin' 'bout you.
In the grand scheme of things, this quality of mine isn't a big deal. I joke about it. I'm comfortable with it for the most part.
This topic has been on mind a bit in the last few months, as I watch my fortunes fall in a fantasy home run derby contest run by my wife's brother-in-law.
The contest goes like this: before the MLB season starts, each person picks a team of 15 guys who he thinks will hit a ton of home runs during the season. You can't pick anyone who had 30 or more round-trippers the previous year. I've played three or four years now, and have never done all that well. I've had times during the season when I'm hanging in the Top 10 (there are usually between 25 and 40 competitors) but eventually I fade. I finished very close to the bottom a few years ago.
This year, like every year, I swore I was going to climb up the rankings by conducting exhaustive research into players, teams, power rankings, Fantasy Baseball listings, etc. I don't play regular Fantasy so I don't follow the game too much outside the Red Sox and the American League East.
But I put in the pre-season number crunching and scouting to see which older players might have some power left, which up-and-comers are gonna break out, and which superstars who were injured the prior year might be eligible this time around.
This year the big story of spring training across the league was Kris Bryant of the Chicago Cubs. A rookie, Bryant hit more home runs than anyone during pre-season. I had him on my radar, of course, but was also looking at one of his teammates, Jorge Soler. A rookie like Bryant, he was projected to do well and hit a fair number of home runs. But the odds-on favorite for biggest breakout star, and probably Rookie of the Year, was Bryant.
I went with Soler.
As of this writing, Soler has 7 long balls, and is injured. Bryant has 24 and is the awesome player everyone expected and most people, perhaps everyone, went with on their derby teams.
I thought I knew better. Just like I figured Mike Napoli's great spring training would translate over to the regular season, despite his being on the old side and never having hit more than 30 home runs, and that was four years ago.
With two and a half weeks in the season, I'm in last place. By a lot.
The valise was where Mr. Farquhar said it would be, under the red maple tree just past the ".5 miles to summit" sign. Normally, Si Amadon would have put Pierre to the task. But this was a delicate mission. "Discreet, all the way," Amadon told Mr. Farquhar.
Getting his oft-shined boots dusty in the pursuit of contraband was hardly Si Amadon's forte. Dapper as Clark Gable, Si Amadon was a teetotaler and physical fitness enthusiast, the living embodiment of his banking business: tightly controlled, disdainful of G-men and zip-lipped.
On occasion, though, he sought out adventure, as it reminded him of tramping through the woods on his family farm as a boy. Though he'd chosen finance as a way out of the hinterland, he still kept in his heart memories of his favorite book, "The Pirate's Treasure or the Strange Adventures of Jack Adams on the Spanish Main."
And so he walked up the mount, his freshly pressed, Hart Schaffner double-breasted overcoat pulled close to maximize a quick ascent. Before he reached the red maple, he caught a whiff of his quarry. His heart fluttered like a money-counting machine and he allowed himself to skip, just once, before reaching behind the tree and taking hold of Mr. Farquhar's gripsack.
Within the folded red silk of the case, under the Kipling book and bottle of powdered rhubarb, beneath the false bottom, Si Amadon found the prize.
Lifting the box, he looked 'round for interlopers. Seeing none, he opened the lid, bent forward just a bit and let the waft rise to his ample nostrils. It was deep and earthy, but also heavenly and capable of transporting him to an exotic, foreign land. He fumbled in his coat pocket for his lighter. Removing it, he admired its dazzling sheen and likeness of a bathing beauty. He fired it and smiled.
Holding the box steady with his left hand, he carefully removed the cigar with his right. It was a Sancho Panza Molinos, trucked up two days ago after arriving in the port of New London. She was a beauty, hand-rolled in Cuba and stashed in a bag of sugarcane. He lit the cigar and savored it. As instructed by Mr. Farquhar, he emptied the box into his coat pockets and placed it back in the valise with the other items.
Then he turned to descend, back to the bank, back to his wife and children, back to a place where nobody knew his vice. There, standing in the middle of the path stood Bigfoot, who snapped this picture.
"Play like an old man," Beth always reminds me before I head to play softball.
"I will," I say.
I have every intention of keeping that promise in the abstract. I know that I'm the oldest guy on the team, and there's no need for me to dive after ground balls or run my hardest around the bases. It's a very laid-back league and nobody will really care if I don't give 100% effort.
But once I get on the field, I'm not so practical. I'm not much more than a singles hitter, but I pride myself on my defense. I try and get to every ball that's close to me, whether in the infield or outfield. I dive, lunge and hustle to the best of my ability.
After injuring myself in the first game of the season (see April 25, 2015, "My Favorite Pastime"), I took a few games off, and once I returned I took it relatively easy. I was feeling good about my fielding and hitting.
Last night was our first game in a few weeks, and I was excited. "Just stick to playing third base," I told myself. "You don't have to move too much."
But our team was shorthanded, so I ended up switching between the hot corner and the outfield. That was fine for the first five innings (one of which I sat out because, well, I don't know, rules of some sort about not having enough women on our team). In the bottom of the sixth I jogged out to right field, figuring not much would get hit to me.
Well, you know where this story is going. A right handed batter slices one between me and the foul line, and I take two steps, reach out my glove and feel a jolt of pain in my right groin/hip/upper leg. I hit the ground and know I can't get up. The center fielder backs up the play but the guy rounds the bases. I limp off the field and trade places with the designated sitter.
I stretch and try to walk it off for a few minutes while the other team bats. I know this won't do any good, but I have to try. Then it's our turn to bat, and I have to try that as well.
I come to bat with the tying run on second base and two outs. I hit a hard grounder to third, but two steps out of the box and I can't go any further. I'm out, the game is over, and I feel stupid.
I slept like crap last night, a cocktail of pain, self pity and inward-directed anger swirling through my body. I tell myself I have to stop playing softball, period. I'm a fool to think that I'm not going to keep hurting myself, especially after having had hip surgery (see August 1, 2013, "On the Mend").
But then I move around, and while my groin/adductor muscles are still quite sore, and I'm shuffling like a zombie, I begin to see that I have another game or two or three in my near future. I realize that if I play smart -- really smart this time, not just abstract smart -- I can continue to enjoy the game and the fun that goes along with it.
Maybe some day soon I'll be able to hit 'em like this guy:
Preparing myself mentally for this Saturday, when my family will spread my dad's ashes in a garden at his church, I came back to Neil Young's "Daddy Went Walkin'," a song that took on great meaning to me in the days and weeks after my father's death. I was surprised, as I searched online for Young's interpretation of the lyrics, by other people's impressions of the song.
In a PopMatters review of Young's Silver & Gold album, Bill Holmes's interpretation is that the song "deals with broken families from the perspective of a hopeful child." Concert reviewer Chris Nelson, writing on MTV.com, says of the song: “While the lyrics seemed simple, Young’s purposeful delivery rendered the lines cinematic. One could picture the song’s narrator, only as tall as the weeds, walking beside a towering father."
"'Daddy Went Walkin' is just a playful number about Dad going out and cutting wood, accompanied by the barnyard cat. Is that really worth a song?" asked Jeffrey Overstreet in reviewing Silver & Gold on Tollbooth.org, a Christian-themed entertainment site. "Like a William Carlos Williams poem about a red wheelbarrow, Neil Young is calling attention to the lasting value of simple memories, simple lives, simple tasks."
Other reviewers thought the song simple and rather stupid, and not worth their time.
Looking for meaning in a song, poem, book or movie is subjective, of course. Where others hear a child's voice or the value of honest work and living simply, I divine a middle-aged guy imagining his father in the afterlife, ambling along happily with his former pets, doing some chores and thinking about the day he'll be reunited with the love of his life.
Mama's waiting / at the top of the hill,
They'll be laughing / oh the stories they'll tell...
When he holds her / in his arms again
They'll be sweethearts / with time on their hands
I plan to recite, possibly even sing, these lyrics during the short service on Saturday. Listen to the song, and let me know what you think it means.
That's me up there, in 2009 before the last baseball game of my illustrious career. A teammate took that shot of me prior to our game in Cooperstown, aka the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. I played in one game of a tournament on the same field where they filmed parts of "A League of Their Own." Known as Doubleday Field, the diamond was built in 1920 and has hosted games of all sorts, including some regular season Major League exhibition matches, throughout the years. I felt honored to play on the field, but bummed because my appearance there marked the end of a five-year period where I returned to hardball after 25 years away from my favorite sport.
I stopped playing because it just wasn't right for me to disappear for a summer's worth of Sundays when I had two young kids. When I returned to the game at age 40, my son, Owen, was three. Two years later, my daughter was born. After five years, I considered joining another league that played weeknights, but opted out after Owen decided he wanted to play Little League. I coached his team and didn't know if I could commit to night baseball while overseeing his team.
Prior to my five-year return to America's national pastime, I played softball for a few years with my wife, Beth, and her father, Rich. I really liked playing, but as I crept toward 40, I harkened back to my youth, and my favorite game: baseball. I played Little League and Babe Ruth for seven years, and sandlot baseball seemingly from birth until I went away to college. I was never much of a hitter, but I prided myself on my defense.
I made two All-Star teams, one in Little League and one in Babe Ruth. I have no problem telling you that the reason I made the Babe Ruth team was because my best friend's father coached the team.
All of this is a long way of telling you, my faithful follower(s?) that last night I got back on a softball field for the first time in more than a decade.
Recruited by a neighbor, I joined a team with the unfortunate name of Awesomesauce. The only time on a field I had before the game was a brief batting practice last weekend with two neighbors and one other teammate. Felt good to be out there, which made me excited for a game.
I had no idea how much I would play, or what position. Mostly, I thought about not hurting myself. Every season I played hardball I managed to tweak something: a hamstring, a quad, a groin. One year I got spiked and hobbled around for a few games afterward.
I went to the gym yesterday morning, focused on stretching, a bit of cardio and not too much strength work. And of course, I managed to tweak my left adductor muscle doing an exercise I should have been smart enough to avoid.
Last night was a cold one for softball, but I was happy to be at Hoyt Field in Cambridge, a diamond I never knew existed although it's only 15 minutes from home. My teammates are all nice, and the game started well with us scoring a bunch of runs. I knocked in a run with a single in my first at-bat. I made a few plays at shortstop, and knocked down a ball that prevented a run from scoring (although that run and a few others scored later in the inning).
Trouble came in my second time at the plate. I hit a grounder to third and had to hustle down the line. About halfway down the base path that tweaked muscle announced to me that I was perhaps a fool to be doing what I was doing. I limped across the bag a second after the ball hit the first baseman's mitt.
I played in the field again, and had one more at-bat, during which I hobbled around the bases and managed to score a run. By that time, however, our team was down by quite a few. We lost to a team with a lot of big hitters.
I'm bummed about the injury, but hoping I can nurse it along with stretching, Advil, whiskey and taking myself out of the action a bit more. I had surgery two years ago to clean out torn cartilage in my left hip. My hip/lower back/upper leg nexus are weak and aren't gonna get any better. My right hip has begun to feel sore lately. If I can't play more than a few games this season, that'll be it for me.
It sucks that the older we get, the harder we have to work to do something as simple and fun as play softball. Last night I watched balls fly over my head, deep into left field, and thought, "Man, five years ago I could've run that ball down." My father-in-law played softball well into his 60s, and many of the guys from my hardball team are still chugging along well into their 50s and 60s, so hope is alive in them.
I know, I know. Sounds like I'm making too much of an injury. But it's a nagging one that has plagued me off and on for quite some time, and there's nothing I can do to make it better. Rest, stretch, baby it a bit. Maybe look into hip replacement or bionic adductor surgery....
It's been a long winter, and although spring has sprung, it hasn't brought very warm temperatures to Boston this week. But that's OK, because it's Opening Day!
One of my favorite memories of going to Fenway Park is the game that Beth and I attended with Owen and my dad in 2009 (see picture above). A friend of mine from college handed over tickets (free of charge!) to the State Street Pavilion. We had great seats along the third base line, didn't have to deal with huge crowds for food and beer and honestly I don't remember if the Sox won (I think they did) but it was just so cool to be there with three generations of Sox lovers.
My dad passed away a year ago today, the day after my 49th birthday. Those few days in the hospital with him and my family were the toughest of my life. I'm thinking of him today and remembering all the times we played baseball, listened and watched the Sox, both on TV and in person, and just enjoyed the simplicity of soaking in our favorite sport.
