While you were watching Game 1 in the English Department
utility room, I was asking my students to call to their minds the imaginary
room in their homes that they all go to -- the secret sanctuary room in their
heads that no one else knows about. Let’s
all go into that room, I said, and write everything we see. A few looked at me strangely, with facial
expressions that suggested I should slow down, take a step back, because, hey,
what if we don’t have secret imaginary rooms in our heads (but of course they
all do, and they all had a lot to write about).
In that moment I recalled the recurring dream I used to have of an
imaginary room in an apartment I inhabited in Boston. You had to step down into it, like a sunken
living room, and it had a couch that always seemed beautiful in the dream but
was mostly bland when I’d wake up. Gray, cheap vinyl -- really, a
disappointing object for my unconscious mind to care about. The secret room I wrote about had a
100-gallon fish tank and a chrome kitchen countertop with a pineapple on
it. But nothing that would allow me to
watch a baseball game.
Because of the night class, I had to record the game on our
DVR. I watched the first pitch around
10:15 central time, which I’m guessing was around the 7th inning in real
time. Around the third (DVR’d) inning, I
started getting text messages. I knew
this meant the game was over. With the
Sox leading 5-0 at that point (in unreal, DVR time), I hoped the texts were
from friends celebrating a win, but years of Sox misery creates ridiculous
fatalistic habits, and I worried that the texts were condolences to make me
feel better about a historic Cards’ ninth-inning comeback. I guess my awe at St. Louis’s glorious
back-from-the-dead win over Texas in the 2011 World Series -- ensuring a winter
of well deserved misery in the George W. Bush household -- still wasn’t enough
to erase my memories of the ‘86 World Series against the Mets. If you’re a Sox fan of a certain age, you
feel like an evil deus ex machina is always waiting in the bushes to sabotage
you.
I thought about just fast-forwarding to the end, or just
reading the texts and getting it over with, but then a calm came over me, too,
and this made me think of the serenity you felt during the NLCS. This was the same calm I mentioned in one of
our Facebook emails -- an equanimity I felt when Koji Uehara was pitching to
Austin Jackson in the ninth inning of Game 5 of the ALCS. I watching the DVR’d version of the game, but
I knew it already was over because I’d received a few text messages. The game was too tense for me to dare read
them. As Jackson came to the plate, I
paused the recording. I was too anxious
to continue watching. But then a soothing
understanding came over me. The game was
already over in real time, and I wasn’t feeling ecstatic or despondent. The game was over in real time and I didn’t
feel a thing.
I was thinking of the old Zen story of the sailors who
anchor their ship inside a dark cave to protect themselves from a dangerous
storm. They’re suffering from horrible
thirst, so one of them casts down a bucket into the cave water, hoping it might
be drinkable. It’s delicious – he’s
dying of thirst, and this is the best water he’s ever tasted. Bucket after bucket, he gulps down the cave
water. The next day, with more light
filtering into the cave, he looks down and sees that the cave is actually a
burial ground, and the water he had been drinking is tainted with ooze from decomposing
bodies. As soon as he realizes this, his
stomach turns upside-down and he starts puking violently. Once he’s recovered -- weak and dehydrated
from vomiting, but no longer sick -- he comes to a sudden, calming realizing of
emptiness. “Nothing happened between
last night and this morning,” he says. “The
water was delicious last night, and it’s the same water this morning, even
though I’m aware now that the water is tainted by corpse putrefaction. But the only thing that really happened was
my mind.”
So I restarted the recording. Koji was pitching to Jackson, but the game
was already over. The only thing
happening was my mind.
Well, shantih shantih shantih, if only I could maintain that
equanimity. It lasted until the first
pitch of Game 6. All my own base
instincts came back right away. To make
things worse, my extended in-laws are all Tigers fans -- they all grew up
around Toledo and Detroit. My
father-in-law, Stan, and I have a great rapport, but we both went dark during
the ALCS. When the Tigers won Game 1, he
didn’t text me; when the Sox came back to win Game 2, I held back. Neither of us wanted to gloat and make the
other person feel bad. But of course we
wanted nothing more than to disappoint the entire city of Detroit (me) or Boston
(Stan). But by the time of Victorino’s
grand slam, I can’t say I was feeling any equanimity at all. I was attached to a Sox victory -- thoroughly
attached, in the Buddhist sense, as in “addicted.” I didn’t matter that my joy hinged on the
disappointment of an entire fan base, including my wonderful extended family of
in-laws. Jose Veras is, I’m sure, loved
deeply by his family and friends, and if I were truly living up to the
Bodhisattva ideal, I wouldn’t want him to feel as horrible as I’m sure he did
when he hung that curveball to the unspeakably intense Victorino, who then
knocked it over the wall for the Sox’s second game-turning grand slam of the
series.
But, like you, baseball is my place for base instinct. No place for bodhisattva ideals. I’m reminded of an email I sent a dear friend
in Boston last month. I was explaining
to him that the emotional distance I’d cultivated during the Sox’s 93-loss,
last-place plummet last season was disappearing. This was around the same time that Mariano
Rivera’s unending retirement tour took him to Fenway, where the Boston Cello
Quartet played his signature song, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and the team
gave him a 1934 seat from Fenway park (with his number on it). I want to boo
Mariano Rivera every time I see him take the mound. He caused me irreparable baseball-misery over
the years, and the bare fact that he reached baseball-retirement age doesn’t
take away the pain. Every time I hear
announcers rending their garments over “Mo’s” retirement, I think of Kevin
Millar’s walk and Bill Mueller’s single in the 2004 ALCS -- I still see Rivera
sprawling on the mound after his futile attempt to stop Mueller’s hit from
getting through the infield -- and I feel a twang of justice in my heart. Literally, I call this “justice,” which I’ll
be the first to admit is a total perversion of the word. But here I am, suspending all my political
anger at, say, the Republican party’s desire to let poor people die from lack
of health care, and I’m saying it would be “unjust” if Rivera saved another
game against the Sox. It defies all
spiritual reason, but there I go, right to my basest instincts, as Jonny Gomes
starts his obsessive-compulsive rituals in the batter’s box, looking like he
can barely contain the twitches and spasms of his central nervous system.
I get it, absolutely, how in the middle of the last night’s
game, you could start to feel hostility toward the city of Boston. Along with San Francisco, it’s the city of my
imagination, but if the Sox were playing the Giants in the World Series, I’d
want every single baseball fan in the Bay Area to be disappointed today -- even
though I begin each day with a meditation session that (at least when baseball
isn’t involved) is meant to create the conditions for me to be good,
altruistic, and full of loving-kindness with everyone I encounter that day.
I planned to talk more about how we root for our individual
teams -- I’m fascinated by what you said about the roots of your
Cardinal-rooting, and I, too, came to my chronic Red Sox fanaticism through
circuitous paths. I grew up in
Pennsylvania but I’ve lived most of my life in Boston and Chicago, the only
cities that truly feel like “home.” When
I watch Fenway games on TV, I feel a pang, knowing that my apartment was about
a 10-minute walk from Fenway, following the trajectory of the right-field foul
line. But I’ll save this for our next
emails.
Best,
Tony
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