Word: sox
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...Anyway, when the Sox nailed the coffin shut that day, pulling within three of the Yanks and sending a shiver back in Manhattan, I called the folks from a pay phone. "I told your father you'd be calling," Mom said in answering the phone. ?"Isn't it unbelievable!" So she's aboard again, riding with us to whatever it is that fate and the Yankees have in store this time...
...painful joke: winning it in our lifetime. Morose. A related joke is that the Red Sox have taken years off our lives. Each spring we warn each other against getting wrapped up in their June successes, as September's swoon or October's shortfall will burden the heart unnecessarily. My mother, for one, tries very hard to stay aloof each year. May, June, July she will counsel Dad, me, Kevin and Gail not to care. Dad will have the game on NESN and Mom will emphatically read her mystery novel on the other couch, paying no attention until the final...
...This year, by August she knew who Pedro and Nomar were, of course, and by Labor Day she knew that some rookie ??"Doobie?"?"It's Daubach, Mom" ? was having a fine campaign. Shortly thereafter the Sox went into Yankee Stadium near the tail end of a tremendous late-season road trip and swept the reigning world champions three straight, finishing by beating Roger Clemens. (He's a player in this saga, too. Is he ever.) I was vacationing on Nantucket with my wife and daughter, listening to the Clemens game on my mother-in-law's 30-year-old transistor...
...Fate. I didn't mean to use that word. I tend not to be fatalistic or superstitious about these things. I don't think the Sox are cursed because they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920, or that the wobbly 1978 home run in a Sox-Yanks one-game playoff by a guy whose name rhymes with lucky was simply meant to be. To believe such hogwash would be dishonor our fathers. What were they believing in, all those years, if it was impossible? Were they idiots...
...father, for his part, is fourscore years-plus, hasn't missed a game all season on TV and has himself in fine post-season shape for this series against the Yanks. My friend John's father, who lives in Providence, is pretty sick, and has us all praying the Sox do it this year. Another John, in Andover, Mass., lost both his parents in the past few years, so it didn't happen in their lifetimes. But his wife Anne's mother, in Winchester, is going crazy over Pedro, and John and Anne have a son and daughter old enough...