From Dad: "Upon hearing that the Red Sox were down 3-1 to the Rays in the ALCS he immediately tried to crawl back into where he came from but once he learned that the Yankees couldn't even make the playoffs, he decided this wouldn't be a bad world to live in after all."
Congratulations and best wishes.
I've "tagged" you in a "blog meme." This means you have to write a post about your earliest political memory - I'm not sure what the penalty for ignoring this is, but it's bound to be something terrible.
My earliest political memories come in montage version. I cannot claim to remember anything from Nixon's America, and I am not certain anyone remembers anything of the Ford experience. But I do recall bits and pieces from the Carter years. And I certainly remember seeing episodes of All in the Family, which probably introduced me to political culture as much as anything else in those days. I remember Mrs. Carter coming to my home town when she was First Lady and my little brother being excited to meet "Mrs. Washington" (he was about four as I recall). I remember the hostage crisis vividly, most notably my Mom owning a t-shirt depicting Mickey Mouse flipping the bird with the caption: "Hey, Iran!", which naturally was the greatest thing I had ever seen.
By the 1980 I was nine and can clearly remember wanting Carter to lose and supporting Reagan, to the point where I was a budding political cartoonist and could do a pretty mean Reagan, usually involving him threatening to bomb someone and asking for jellybeans, both proclivities I supported at the time. Within a year of his election, however, I came to my senses. I was a liberal Democrat by 1982. I was eleven.
So my earliest memories come from the Carter years, but my political awareness emerged with the Hostage Crisis. I was eight when this played out on my little tv screen in our house on a cable-free dirt road in Newport, New Hampshire, so by my own recollection I was not especially politically precocious. I do have clear memories of sports, and especially baseball and the Red Sox that antedate my political memories or concerns, so I guess that particular path was already cleared even when I was young.
There was a time in my life when my default wardrobe involved sneakers and, when possible, shorts. The reason was simple -- for athletes, there was always the possibility that a pickup game might break out. Basketball, football, baseball, even something like frisbee or golf (whether legitimate or through shenanigans such as sneaking on to the course). The idea that in my life in the next few hours a basketball game might break out is only slightly more plausible than that the Virgin Mary will appear burned into my toast or that our youngest kitten will not take a dump the second after I clean the litterbox. (In fact, my eighteen-year-old self just experienced time-space humiliation over the fact that one of the only points of comparison I could muster was with cleaning the litterbox of ONE OF my cats.)
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to play in a charity softball game against our university softball team. I hurt my back. In warmups. And yet my mind remembers being an athlete even as my body has amnesia. I played through the pain -- in fact, I pitched for our team, was active in the field and at the plate, and as a result I was flat on my back for the rest of the day and was pretty much useless for the next week.
But there was a time when things were different. I can still remember those times. In fact, I can even prove that they existed:
This picture was taken exactly 14 years ago today. On this jump I became the third-ranked long-jumper in Williams College's long track and field history and I won the Williams Invitational long jump title. Later that day I also won the triple jump championship. In the decade-and-a-half to follow I have moved down the list as better jumpers have inevitably supplanted me, though I believe I am still in the top five among long jumpers and I know I remain in the top ten on the Williams indoor and outdoor long, high, and triple jump lists.
1993 sometimes seems like a long time ago. I'm not that guy any more. I wish I could go and tell that guy a few things. I wish I could listen to that guy for a little while and remember him better.
Forgive this self-indulgence. Remembrances from some modest Glory Days can be pathetic, but they also remind us of who we are. In my mind I am still flying through the air, defying gravity and, for a brief minute, time itself.
For many of us "home" is a more problematic concept than it ought to be. Holmes and I grew up in the same home town, and for many years "home" was to us a simple concept: A little out of the way mill town where we attended our one high school and lamented how damned boring life there was. Newport was the poor stepchild in the Upper Valley, a town we rather easily referred to as a shithole, though nestled as it is in the hills and trees of New England it is a lovely shithole and when things are good and jobs are plentiful and the many narrow-minded folks are not winning the hearts and minds of the town, we both can even romanticize it if the conversation flows in the right way.
But then you go to college, and by sophomore year you discover that after a week or two at home you are ready to be back on campus. By senior year, you are comfortable saying that you are ready for break to be over so you can be back in your room, back at your house, back to practice and even to classes. You are ready to be back home, or at least "home." To use academic jargon, "home" becomes a problemetized concept during your college years. To strip away that jargon, for many of us, college marks the first time that we realize that our horizons have changed, and that home will no longer be simply where we grew up.
By now I have moved so often, and my Mom no longer lives in the old hometown, and my Dad is only there for a little more than half the year, and the house in which I grew up was lost (conceded?) in a divorce settlement far from my control or say-so, and though I may return once every eighteen months or so I am rarely there for more than a couple of days, so that Newport is my old home town, but it is no longer home and has not been for a long time.
In recent years home has been Charlotte and Washington, Charlottesville and Athens, Grahamstown (South Africa) and Oxford (England). There have been others as well. Home has been Mankato, unhappily, and now it is Odessa, and I am as surprised as anyone that it is happily so. I've no idea how long this flat, dry expanse between Dallas-Fort Worth and El Paso will be home, but it is for now, and while home is, for most people, a long-time thing, in my peripatetic life since leaving the home town it has also often been a right-now thing.
"Home" is surely more than where you lay your head, though laying one's head is probably a necessary condition. Home is, ultimately, where you live your life not only in the grandest sense, but also where you establish a rapport with the mundane. Home for me is a frustrating and expensive heating/cooling unit and the little old ladies next door with whom we exchange small talk when they teeter outdoors to smoke. It is the Odessa American in my carport every morning even if I will rarely read much of it, and it is the growing campus less than a mile from our front door. Home is where I come back to when I have been somewhere else. Home is a place I defend to outsiders before they have even said anything disparaging and it is a place I need to leave every so often even if it won't be long before I'll be referring to "home," and I'll know exactly the place I have in mind when I say it.
