Reviews - GEORGE VECSEY

Scientific Fact: Watching Super Bowl Makes Time Pass – 6

1/31/2014

R.A. Dickey Reminds Us of Knuckleballs (Photo, 2013)

I have consulted with noted Talmudic and Jesuit scholars and am assured it is all right to watch the Super Bowl as long as one thinks pure thoughts of spring.

Say to yourself:

“I am watching it for the ads.”
“I am watching it for Renee Fleming.”
“I want to join the water-cooler conversation on Monday.”
“The TV just went on by itself.”

It looks as if the blizzard I predicted for this week hit the South instead. Oops.

New York is unscathed. Gov. Christie hasn’t shut down any bridges or tunnels, so far.

And six of us were on the East Side of Manhattan the other night, had a lovely meal at Teodora on E. 57 St. – and there was not a trace of Super Bowl in that part of Big Town. Not one button or chant.

Just repeat: Pitchers and Catchers. Pitchers and Catchers.

Ed martin

2/1/2014 04:50:41 am

see Dickey in a Toronto uniform reminds menof "knuckleheads."

(those who traded him.)

George Vecsey

2/1/2014 07:29:53 am

They didn't bring back Hawkins this year, either.
Different...but the same.

Alan D. Levine

2/1/2014 05:27:57 am

George--You've said it all. Just fifteen days to go--and counting.

George Vecsey

2/1/2014 07:33:10 am

Alan:
I'm going to do a baseball riff most days from now til then.
Like throwing a log on the fire.
Or lighting a candle in the darkness.
Thanks
GV

Alan D. Levine

2/1/2014 08:24:09 am

No, thank you.

Alan Rubin link

2/1/2014 08:01:04 am

George

No better way to get past the end of winter. It is snowing in Hinsdale, MA right now.

Just got home from a youth soccer session at the Fieldhouse in Canaan, NY. A baseball group came after us. Both sports are there most days of the week.

http://www.thefieldhousecanaan.com/

A nice trip down memory lane.

Ed Martin

2/1/2014 08:59:40 am

Here's a photo/memory to help out in the cause.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=554307294632694&set=t.100001939736590&type=3&theater

George Vecsey

2/1/2014 10:07:58 am

Ed, that is nice. I've been flipping through photos for my current series on baseball. It's interesting (or sad) to watch the evolution of spring training sites from funky old parks to moderate-security institutions where players sign autographs through fences. But still, the warmth and pace of spring training will be welcome....Thanks for the addition. GV

Brian Savin

2/5/2014 12:32:26 pm

Thank you for this.

Yepi Group link

6/1/2014 09:46:55 pm

I enjoy reading through your article..

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Scientific Fact: Watching Super Bowl Makes Time Pass – 6

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