Katie the Prefect
A piece about daughters and Harry Potter from my favorite sportswriter that turned out to be the best thing I have read in a month. I’ll excerpt the best part of this piece here in hopes that it will convince more people to read it:
“Something that disappoints me sometimes is that it seems exuberance and enthusiasm can be such rare qualities in people. There are so many discouraged people. There are so many people who appear to be going through the motions — lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them (I knew that Thoreau study would come in handy someday). The older I get the more I have come to believe that we can make such a difference by showing just a little bit of zeal, doing a little bit more, showing just a bit more of our spirit.”
“
Of course, there is sadness, even if sadness is not what Ernie wants. Well, people in Detroit do love Ernie Harwell as much as he loves them. The voice and the city suited each other — Ernie always has believed in Detroit, through the hardest times, and for a simple reason. ‘Good people,’ he said, time and again. The other day he was on the field in Detroit, and he said a few words to the crowd. He said that his life has been a great journey. He said that he loved the people of Michigan. He said that the Detroit Tigers fans were the best.
But it wasn’t so much what he said… the deepest meaning was in that voice, that familiar voice with the lingering Georgia twang. In Detroit, in Michigan, in the memories of anyone who turned car radio dials in search of baseball, this is the voice of breezes and lemonade and late evening sunshine and the last days of school. This is the voice that wafts through screen doors and sounds over splashing at swimming pools. This is the voice of Tiger Stadium and a stolen base by Ron Leflore and a line drive off the wall by Norm Cash and a Jack Morris scowl and a Mickey Lolich fastball that would dive into the dirt.
This is the voice I would listen to while sitting in my father’s beat-up green Audi — Dad bought that car for $600 and it often seemed that the only thing that worked in it was the radio. I was 16 years old in Charlotte, N.C., and that radio could pick up the scent of baseball in far-off places like Cincinnati and Philadelphia and St. Louis. And that radio could especially pick up Detroit and an announcer who would not chastise a man for looking at strike three but would instead say he was ‘window shopping.’
”
“Some nights, abed, Will put his ear to the wall to listen, and if his folks talked things that were right, he stayed, and if not right he turned away. If it was about time and passing years or himself or town or just the general inconclusive way God ran the world, he listened warmly, comfortably, secretly, for it was usually Dad talking. He could not often speak with Dad anywhere in the world, inside or out, but this was different. There was a thing in Dad’s voice, up, over, down, easy as a hand winging soft in the air like a white bird describing flight patterns, made the ear want to follow and the mind’s eye to see.
And the odd thing in Dad’s voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy. Many nights Will drowsed this way, his senses like stopped clocks long before that half-singing voice was still. Dad’s voice was a midnight school, teaching deep fathom hours, and the subject was life.”
“I was in Orlando once — this was a long time ago, almost 20 years ago now, before I had kids, before I was married, years before I had even met my wife. I was in love with someone and I wasn’t — I never was exactly sure about that. It was New Year’s Eve, and I sat in my hotel room, and I looked out the window, and I felt thoroughly alone, a kind of desolate loneliness, the sort of acute melancholy that I imagine sparks love songs, good and bad, and poetry, good and bad, and drunken nights in hotel bars. I never felt that alone before and I never felt that alone since. And the strange part, the part that did not make sense, the part that I still do not quite understand, is this: I kind of liked it.”
Joe Posnanski (as usual)
Just go ahead and read the whole thing. A rambling, fantastic response to Up in the Air.
You say Mangini, I say Mangino
Excellent article by Joe Posnanski. It’s ridiculous how well he writes.
“Funny thing: I once saw a longtime professional wrestler in a restaurant, and we talked for a few minutes, and I asked whether he preferred being the good guy or the bad guy — he had been both a baby and a heel many times over the years. He considered the question carefully. Good guy or bad guy. Baby or heel. Finally, he shrugged and said something like this: ‘What’s the difference? It doesn’t matter if the people love you or hate you. As long as they feel strongly.’”
I live in New York. My interests are varied.
