Londonderry News

Nomar retired a year ago. Seems like forever, but it was only a year. So in honor of Spring Training officially starting, and Spring Breaks coming to colleges near us — and politics consuming all the oxygen anyway — I’d like to share last year’s riff again. See you on the other side of the elections!

I.

Nomar Garciaperra retired from baseball yesterday. He came back to the Red Sox to do it. Sox fans who predate the 2004 World Series know that Nomar was the heart and soul of Red Sox nation for several years leading up to its emergence from the wilderness, which is kind of like saying Moses was the heart and soul of the nation of Israel until just before they entered the promised land.

In fact, the analogy is more apt than I imagined half a paragraph ago. As the Lord of the Hebrews kept Moses from crossing into the Promised Land with his people, so the Lords of Baseball kept Nomar from winning the World Series with his team — and make no mistake, it was very much his team. There was Johnny Damon and Manny and Big Papi and Shilling too, but Nomar was the leader.

Until the middle of that season, when the Sox ownership traded him to the Chicago Cubs. Once upon a time, in fact up until the end of the 2004 baseball season, I used to think I knew how the world would end: the Red Sox and Cubs would play to a three-game tie in the World Series and then existence would simply cease.

But not so much. And if I recall right, the Sox who stuck around to sweep the Cardinals that year voted Nomar a World Series ring of his own, which must be about as satisfying as kissing your sister: no champagne celebration, no duck boat tour of the town, no name in the record book, but hell, you got a ring. And when he retired, he got an actual one-day minor league contract with the local nine so he could go out as part of the team he loved, even if it had done wrong by him.

Have a nice life, Mr. Mia Hamm, and if you should happen to make the Hall of Fame, kindly wear a Boston cap.

II.
I guess I’m on about Nomar because my sons used to like him. Whatever year the held the All Star Game at Fenway Park, I took the guys to the All Star Fan Experience and let one of them buy an adult-size Red Sox jersey, which he clearly considered Nomar’s although it lacked any number or name. And when we took them to see Red Sox games, they waited for Nomar to get “on deck” before they scampered down to the box seats to take pictures.

The jersey is still around the house somewhere. The boys come through now and then. Next week they’re on spring break from college. So are the college kids I teach out in Rindge, although some of them are actually off to women’s basketball tournaments or pre-season training for spring sports. In fact, for most of the winter, the soccer and baseball fields have been plowed clear of snow, and the batters and strikers have been hitting and kicking in multiple layers of clothing.

Some of my students are seniors. For them, spring break means a week off before the last sprint to the academic finish line. There’s a point preceding every commencement, from high school to Ph.D.’s, where the student realizes there’s no longer anything they can do to boost or bust their prospects of graduation. All that’s left is to put in the time, soak up the experience, and run out the clock with pride.

And for the rest, it seems to be less about the spring breaks in Florida or Mexico that we used to think everyone but us enjoyed when we were in college and just chilling with the folks for a week. For our boys, in fact, breaks seem to divided into about three days reacquainting with hometown friends, followed by four days looking forward to getting back to their real lives, new friends, and musical instruments out in Keene, for the last seven weeks before summer.

III.
So it’s a little difficult to talk to my students about what they will do with their week off. I can’t relate. My frame of reference is different than theirs. I go to show my Media Marketing class a movie about how radio promoted the Beatles, then I realize that I have to explain what it was like when the Beatles first “invaded” America. The closest I could come was a comparison to Barak Obama’s inauguration.

And I assign a Broadcast Journalism class to write about Obama’s decision to cut a return to the moon from NASA’s upcoming budget, and the writing is without passion. Humans walking on another planet is not as amazing to them because they never lived in a time when it had not been done, and when it was only considered impossible because no one wants to pay for it.

And I try to explain to introductory media production students what it was like to listen to skipwaves on an AM radio in the 1960s, and I realize they just don’t care. Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but he forgot to mention that the magic loses its sparkle when the technology becomes passe. We remain connected to it with golden ropes of wonder, but the only wonder for those who come later is how we were ever so impressed.

IV.
Nomar too. When the boys think of the baseball heroes of their childhood, they’ll probably think of Nomar — if they think of baseball heroes at all. They’ve become more football fans and follow the likes of Brady, Favre, and Rodgers.

For me it’s Tug McGraw. He was a reliever for the Mets. His son is a country music singer. His daughter in law sings the Sunday Night Football theme song. He died of brain cancer several years ago.

In 2004, when the Sox traded Nomar, I had a spirited discussion with my boss about whether it was the right thing to do. I cited loyalty and reciprocity, and I said that the Sox owed their Nation the privilege of keeping Nomar around. My boss said it was all a business and the Sox had to do what gave them their best chance of winning. I said that I didn’t think winning was as important as doing well by doing good. And Nomar wound up with the Cubs and the Dodgers and one or three other teams as well, before coming back to the Sox to retire.

And another spring begins to break, and the magic grows ever more distant, and it’s harder to describe Tug McGraw to kids who might miss Nomar, and hard to describe the “British Invasion” to students who thought the Beatles were Paul McCartney’s hometown band from before he started Wings.

A couple of years ago I did a riff on pirates. I wrote it for laughs because, although piracy on the high seas is serious business, its then-current iteration was laced with silliness. The concept of “pirates” today is more likely to conjure up images of Jack Sparrow and Captain Hook than Blackbeard or Jean Lafitte or teenagers in hot motorboats getting shot by Navy snipers when they seized American ships.

Then a bunch of teenagers in motorboats killed a quartet of American senior citizens this week.

I try not to get too agitated in these comments, mostly because I don’t think anyone needs to add my agitation to the load they’re already carrying around just from living and paying attention. But I’m kind of annoyed by the thought that a bunch of teenagers in fiberglass speedboats with rocket launchers and machine guns can tool around the high seas and capture and kill Americans.

As I recall, Thomas Jefferson was a little irked by that idea too – minus the fiberglass. He was confronted with a demand from the Pasha of Tripoli (I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried) for $250,000 in protection money lest His Pashaness continue harassing American merchant sailors. So Jefferson said, “forgetteth thou,” sent the Constitution and Constellation and Enterprise and several other frigates to the Barbary Coast of North Africa, and kicked some pirate butt.

Those were the good old days – literally – when you could go nation against nation, make your point with cannonade, and actually change things. It turns out that things are different in the Indian Ocean off Somalia, mostly because there’s no actual nation to go up against. That benighted country is about as well constituted as a bowl of banana-walnut oatmeal, and has roughly the same level of government. And commerce. And economy.

In fact, one of the biggest economic drivers in that part of the world is – wait for it – piracy. People actually invest in pirates. Think about that for a while: free enterprise in coastal Somalia means bankrolling your local pirate band in the hopes of a share of their spoils. It’s the direct equivalent of banding together with a bunch of your neighbors to sponsor a back-alley mugger.

And this week, a bunch of the neighborhood entrepreneurs hijacked a private yacht sailed – yes, sailed, for God’s sake – by elder Americans, and apparently shot them when they didn’t get a good return for their backers’ investment. Then the American Navy, which was in the area and haggling with these rear ends, gave four of them what they deserved and captured the remaining thirteen.

Did you get that? It took a crew of 17 “pirates” to hijack a boat sailed by four AARP candidates. How manly those buccaneers were!

Now, the American Navy is a thoroughly professional outfit, so I guess it’s too much to hope that the survivors might get shot whilst attempting an escape. Or make a swim for it from 300 miles off the nearest shore. In shark-infested waters. Uphill. More’s the pity.

But even that would not be enough. There seems to be a never-ending supply of these cretins awaiting their turns with the RPGs. Seriously, if there’s a strip of land better suited for carpet bombing by avenging B-52s protecting American lives and commerce, I don’t know where to find it. It seems to me this is exactly the kind of nonsense that you have a navy and an air force to deal with. Don’t respect the American flag? Boom. How about now?

You may say that you don’t earn respect by blowing a backwards land into the stone ages. And you know what? I’m okay with that. I don’t want the respect of would-be pirates any more than Jefferson ever did, and when the Marines went into Tripoli they weren’t trying to make friends. They were trying to make a point: mess with us and you’ll regret it.

Maybe we should take a lesson from William Eaton. Violence and force can’t solve everything, but that doesn’t mean it can’t solve anything. This may well be one thing that it can. And it’s not true that you have to fix everything you break – such as a backwards strip of sand that’s broke bad to begin with, and when you think that piracy’s a swell idea, then you’re clearly broken already.

Speaking just for me, and just because I’m irked, I’d say four retirees in a sailboat is provocation enough. I mean, seriously, pirates? I said it before and I’ll say it again: just rip the damned black flag down.  Or blow it to Perdition, whichever.

I’m getting a little tired of writing about how old I feel. And in fact, “feel” isn’t an accurate word choice, because one thing you discover when you lose a hundred pounds is that you don’t feel as old as you used to. I hiked in to the Musquash Field Day event last Saturday, and I was amazed at how much shorter the route was and how much harder it used to be.

I got a haircut recently too. Oh, and I lost the beard – mostly because I thought it would look strange without the long hair to frame it. (Note to self: change my mii on the Wii console). And people are still walking by without recognizing me,  or they ask who the new guy is. That’s the other thing you discover going through the process of getting healthier: when you lose a hundred pounds, everyone compliments your new haircut.

But then something comes along that reminds you that you might really be older than you feel – or in other words, as old as you used to feel before you cut your hair. Word came out last week that Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, had passed away. Now I have to say, I’m pretty damn sick of death. There’s been too much of it lately. It doesn’t seem right or fair or decent. John Donne had it right: Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind.

And you try not to see yourself reflected in the death of another. To do so usurps the moment from where it belongs and toward oneself. And Ken Olsen’s life deserve all the notice that his passing has attracted. I worked for the man, albeit about seventeen levels lower on the org chart. I actually wrote words for him to say once or twice. And I was a beneficiary of his accomplishments in that I drew a good salary from a great company for eight years of my own life, and that time included many experiences I’ll never forget. Where else could you make a video with two – yes, two – men who had walked on the moon, work aboard an America’s Cup yacht at a trade show, and write one of the first hyperlinked documents ever created on one of the first link-ready publishing tools?

I got to do those things because I worked for Ken. Yes, we called him Ken. It wasn’t the forced informality of a chief executive trying to project a common touch. It wasn’t the transparent posing of a politician. It was who Ken was, just an engineer who drove an old truck and lived in a suburban split-level with a vegetable garden in the backyard. And who, by the way, had totally revolutionized the computing industry.

Ken was the guy the poseurs try to imitate, but they can’t. Only Ken could be Ken.

And I was doing well with that until the other day. When a guy like Ken passes away, reporters always do retrospective pieces that note all of his accomplishments. The Boston Globe had this online “slideshow” this week, full of black-and-white photographs showing Ken and all the things he had done.

The problem is, I recognized them. As a general observation, it’s not good to recognize things shown in monochrome photographs. It’s ancient technology even by film-based photography standards, and to see in it things that you used to work on – and in fact, were among the first to receive, because Digital was always its own biggest customer – inevitably implies that you could be seen in grayscale too.

But there they were: a PDP-8 like my high school had (“your high school has its own computer? Cool!”), VT220 terminals (I remember moving up from my original VT100), the VAXstation workstation (we each got one – our own VAX computer, back when a VAX was as good as it came: at least one one-thousandth the performance of the Apple on which I’m typing this, and shared by 24 users), the first VAXes that looked more like refrigerators than computers, the VAX 9000 “supercomputer” that I helped to roll out, and the Alpha chip that lingered in service until not too long ago.

And I could see myself against each of them, weight and hairiness increasing year by year, and therefore I could see myself in relation to Ken. We all saw ourselves that way at Digital. I remember the day that Ken left the company – we all felt a little lost. And I didn’t remember the name of the guy who came next until he showed up in the slideshow, selling the company to Compaq. That was a sad day for us DECcies too, but it also seemed totally fitting: the only right thing for the guy who came after Ken to do was to close the company down.

I didn’t mean to look at my own reflection in the pictures of Ken, but sometimes it’s just can’t be helped. Every now and then there’s a life that is so consequential that it helps shape the world around you, and any image of yourself might include one of those new shapes. With Ken it was big things, but the things don’t have to be big. Parents and teachers and friends now gone help set the shapes of our lives too. It’s not for us to distract from their passing to focus on our sense of loss, but remembering how they helped shape our lives reflects credit and honor on them.

The Red Sox equipment truck pulls out of the Back Bay Fens and heads to Florida – weather permitting – next Tuesday. I don’t know of any other Major League Baseball city where the departure of bags of bats and balls and Heaven knows what else is anticipated with this kind of fervor. It leaves one to wonder whether there will be six more weeks of winter if the truck driver sees his shadow.

Oh, who are we kidding. There will be six more weeks of winter anyway. The question is only, how bad – and whether anyone will be able to see the truck leave as it winds through the Alp-like snowbanks lining Boston’s streets.

But it brings us to the Red Sox. Only recently have Boston fans have not viewed the spring with fatalism. “It only leads to summer,” we said, “and then comes the choke, and then comes the fall, and then comes the next winter.”

And you know what next winter brings. Spring. Ugh.

Year after year, I keep coming back to the ritual of baseball’s spring training. Did I ever tell you that once, when I was in college in Boston and feeling a little blue, I decided somehow that a freight train parked under the bridge where St. Mary’s Street crosses the turnpike was in fact headed to Florida, and I pondered hopping a ride?

That was a long time ago, and I mention it precisely because it was. I’ve always been sentimental – when I was in college, I was a 21-year-old columnist for the Daily Free Press who was already nostalgic for his youth, which generally meant anything more than six months in the past. So those late winter mornings it was easy to pine for the baseball season that had ended just a little while earlier. It comes from entering school as a freshman in a college where you could hear the organ at Fenway Park play the National Anthem through your window, in the year of the epic seven-game World Series that featured Carlton Fisk’s classic “wave fair” home run, then a seventh-game defeat. And that February with the freight train was a few months after the season that ended with Bucky “Who the hell is Bucky Dent?” Dent’s pop fly into the Green Monster net in a single-game playoff loss. Like I said, I was 21, and that was plenty time enough to work up some nostalgia.

I’ve always had that sense of time and age, but it’s a little more real now. I’m years past the point where I have more spring trainings to remember than those I can reasonably anticipate. That’s not fatalism, just realism that goes all the way back to the Psalmist’s’ “threescore years and ten,” even ”if by reason of strength they be fourscore years”– which I’m also hoping to exceed. And I think the day that you can accept that without worry or dread is the day when you’re finally grown up.

But you put that aside for baseball in the spring, especially for the glorious fortnight between the report date for pitchers and catchers and the first spring training game. If we love baseball – and I do – it may be less for the game as it’s played on the field than because it was played before we were born and will go on after us. We have no living memory of baseball beginning. It has always been there. It never began for it: we were all, quite literally, born into it.

That’s why any given number will always belong to the first player you saw wear it, even if he was only Eddie Kranepool. That’s why new ballparks can never feel as much like home as the old ones they replaced, even if they’re infinitely nicer. That’s why the Rangers and the Dodgers and the Athletics and the Braves are still mere wanderlings in their current cities. That’s why the Mets and the Bluejays and the Rockies can never attain the same status in lore as the Yankees and the Cubs and the Reds.

And ultimately, it’s why we care that baseball is almost back, even if we’re old-guard New England fatalists ingrained with the cranky confidence that, no matter how well the Red Sox do from April through August, September will certainly bring a collapse. That helps us deal with the great likelyhood — for fans of any team, not just us — that this probably won’t be Our Year, and because of that, there’s less chance that we’ll ever witness it.

And that’s why we may even prefer the collapse, or the lingering expectation of it – it makes us feel that things are as they always have been, which is to say, as they should always be. Even if we’ve reached the age where fervent fanship fades by July, it still kindles in late winter, and we savor the flame while it shines.

The mail that used to go to Karen’s mom’s house now comes to us. That means our recycling bin Is just chock-full of papery goodness every week.

Thank God for recycling. Otherwise all this stuff would wind up in a landfill as Londonderry’s burden of paying for someone else’s freedom of speech. Someone who wants to sell sheets or shoes or personalized gift items by mail. In the year 2011.

Okay, I get it. Not everyone has a computer, so not everyone shops online. My mother-in-law didn’t have one. I also get that direct marketers select mailing lists based on some set of parameters that suggest (to them) that you and I might be interested in buying what they sell. By mail. In the year 2011.

Among the ways I know that is, when you don’t buy something after receiving several catalogs, they mail you a warning that they just might stop sending you more of them unless you break out the ol’ checkbook and make a purchase, presumably motivated in part by the need to ensure you continue to receive catalogs from which you haven’t bought anything in quite a while. “Did I really need that hip-length shoe horn or toilet paper cozy? Well, no, but I wanted to make sure I could continue not to buy them for years to come!”

But what’s up with other companies with other customer bases – and yes, I’m looking at you, L.L. Bean. Why are you sending me paper catalogs when everything we’ve ordered in the past several years – and we’ve ordered fairly frequently – has been by computer? And often in response to emails you send us darn near every day? Do you really doubt I’ll think of you when my third pair of LL Bean snow sneakers need replacement?

Catalogs cost money. You pay to shoot the pictures, someone actually makes money writing the copy, someone earns a living putting words and pictures together on the pages, someone has to print them, and it costs a lot to mail them. Then you have to factor in everything else that’s consumed in the process of manufacture and delivery, like time, transportation, raw materials, and energy, and it turns out that an awful lot of people depend on mail order catalogs for their incomes, regardless of whether mail order catalogs still sell anything anymore.

(Which they must. I mean, if catalogs didn’t bring in the sales, why would people keep printing them. It’s just like strip mall restaurants: they must all turn profits, otherwise people wouldn’t keep opening them, right? Right?)

But catalogs are also old technology. They’re based in an aging business model of push marketing, where a company contacted potential customers by mail to introduce themselves and their wears. The goal was to gain awareness in the minds of potential consumers, so when and if they decided to buy something that you sold, maybe they’d think of you. You can do that just as easily with email or other online media, which also save oil and ink and trees.

And it’s not just the catalog vendors: other people play that game too. Not very long ago some organization that I’d never heard of, called me to thank me for my past support, and offer me an opportunity to contribute again. Really, they used those words: an opportunity to contribute. Just how often have you found yourself saying, “gee, I’d love to make a charitable donation right now, but I just don’t know where to send it?”

I know these callers don’t read this – the ones who want me to buy tickets for children to see a circus (question: why not just let them in for free?), the celebrity endorsers who want me to help their pet cause (question: why don’t you give them the money I paid to see your last movie?), the soundalikes for well-known nonprofits who are content to let you be mistaken (question: just why is that?), and everyone who sends me letters with “breaking news” about an earthquake or flood or hurricane that was all over TV last week (question: do you think I’m that dumb?)

But maybe if I say it here, someone else will say it where they will hear. It’s this: You don’t need to send me catalogs, letters, and phone calls to tell me who you are, what you sell, or who you purport to serve. I don’t need you to offer me more exciting opportunities to buy or give. Save yourself some money – or better yet, put yours toward a better purpose than asking me for more of mine, especially you “charities.”

I’ll know how to find you when I’m ready to donate, shop, or gather signatures your cause. Your freedom of commercial speech ends where my right to ignore you begins. Or in my recycling bin.