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August 20, 2008
Take Me Out to the Ballgame
Alden finds herself torn, like Solomon's baby, between several fierce grandparental allegiances. On one hand, her Grandma Elisabeth is a devoted Duke basketball fan, Red Sox fan, and Patriots fan. On the other hand, her Grandpa John is a Kansas Jayhawks basketball fan, a Kansas City Royals fan, and a Kansas City Chiefs fan. Fortunately, her Grandpa Bob and Grandma Seiko probably don't even know what a layup, grand slam, or field goal are, so one could argue that this tangle of conflicting loyalties could be much worse.
There are those beyond the family sphere who dare to compete for my child's sporting preference.
My colleague Clifford, for example, who placed the orange socks of his beloved Baltimore Orioles on Alden's legs.
Emboldened by her failure to protest, he draped a tee-shirt of even more garish orange across her tiny, defenseless frame.
Clifford took one look at the Orioles/Alden combination and declared that she was obviously a fan. I begged to differ. To settle the argument, we took her straight to Camden Yards to see for ourselves whether she would cheer for the Orioles or Sox.
At first, she couldn't see over the rowdy Orioles fans in front of us. And so I helped her to a better vantage.
As the game progressed, the score was knotted at 0-0. Alden looked anxious. Clearly she cared.
But who was she cheering for?
At the top of the second, Boston slugger Jason Bay hit a towering homer to put the Sox on the scoreboard. A few batters later, Boston's catcher and captain, the great Jason Varitek, who has been struggling all season, came up to bat and hit a homer of his own.
I looked to Alden, trying to read her reaction to the events of the inning. She was not unhappy with Boston's success, but neither was she elated as one would expect a true fan to be.
I considered the question thoroughly unanswered.
In the bottom of the fourth, Baltimore's slugger Aubrey Huff belted a fastball over the fence in center field. I looked to Alden for response, and suddenly we had our answer.
Even though Boston still had a 2-1 lead, she was clearly dismayed. I tried to console her, to tell her that it would be all right, that baseball is just a game, that life is full of peaks and troughs, that true character comes from turning the other cheek, that important lessons can be learned from loss. For a moment, it seemed as if she understood. But as Huff crossed home plate and the scoreboard registered the Baltimore run, it was clear that the Red Sox fan lodged deep within my child's tiny heart had just been unleashed.
Posted by bogenamp at August 20, 2008 10:22 PM