Tag: nostalgia (Page 11 of 11)

Where Were You When?

June 24, 2004 / DB

I finally heard the trade rumor I’ve been waiting for: Paul Pierce to the Pacers. Unfortunately, it came in a column that was being funny rather than serious. But, as my wife said, a boy can dream.

I found this list of questions yesterday on a blog I frequent. Some outstanding cultural milestones in our lives worth remembering and sharing. Your memories are welcome in the comments.

Where were you when you heard that Ronald Reagan died?
Sitting on the couch reading something when my wife saw the crawler on CNN and told me about it.
Where were you on September 11, 2001?
I had just arrived at work and was getting some coffee when one of my least favorite coworkers came in and told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I tried to get away from her as quickly as possible thinking, “I don’t know what’s really happened, but this can’t be the person I will always remember told me about this.” I remember how slow all the major news websites were working that morning then going down to one of our conference rooms to watch coverage after the towers had collapsed.
Where were you when you heard that Princess Diana died?
We had just returned to Bella after a night out in Westport or on the Plaza. Stayed up at least an hour watching CNN.
Do you remember where you were when you heard that Kurt Cobain had died?
As discussed here in the past, sitting on my bed reading a book about college basketball recruiting. I had the radio turned on at low volume and noticed the DJ seemed to be talking a lot. Turned it up and found out why.
Take one for the Gipper: what’s your favorite flavor of jelly bean?
Can’t say that I have a favorite. I generally eat anything in the bag except for the black licorice flavor. And I pretty much only eat jelly beans if someone else bought them and put them in front of my face.
Where were you when Magic Johnson announced he was retiring from the NBA due to HIV?
Brushing my teeth, getting ready to go to work at the cafeteria in McCollum Hall. When I got to work, I told one of my basketball buddies who didn’t believe me. He was a Celtics fan and thought I was just trying to mess with him. “You better not be joking because that’s pretty sick.” Why would I joke about that?!?!
Where were you when Reagan was shot?
Sitting in Mr. Dice’s class in 4th grade at Norfleet Elementary school. Mrs. Patterson came running in and said “The President’s been shot!” and they wheeled a TV in so we could watch the coverage.
Where were you when the Challenger exploded?
I first heard about it combing my hair in the boys restroom at Raytown High (That’s what we did after lunch, we combed our hair. Literally, no Weird Science euphemisms here.) Found out for sure when I got to science class two periods later. Our math teacher refused to speak about it.
Where were you when the OJ verdict was announced?
Sitting in my apartment in Lawrence. I had a roommate that year that was from Peru who started tossing racial bombs when the verdict was announced. We were scrambling to shut the windows before he got us all shot.

Catching Up, Part One

April 6, 2004 / DB

Trying to organize my thoughts from recent trips while watching the national championship game. I think it’s safe so say I’m one million times less tense tonight than I was a year ago tonight (or April 7 I guess). I don’t recall a time when I was wound as tightly as I was leading up to the KU-Syracuse game. Even if we had won, I don’t know if I could have enjoyed it as tense as I was that night. Tonight, I can just sit back and watch. One of the benefits of your team losing when there are still games to play.

Good grief, are there really only two seniors starting in this game? Not to mention the fact Tech lost freshman Chris Bosh a year ago. I need to start looking for tickets to the Tech-KU rematch in Lawrence next year; there’s going to be a ton of talent on the court that night. I think Paul Hewitt is my favorite young coach in the college game. Obviously, he’s a heck of a recruiter, he’s proving his a very good coach, and I love his demeanor off the court. Seems like a very solid guy.

I’m working away this afternoon with MLB Gamecast or Gamecenter or whatever they call it pulled up, following the Royals – White Sox game (not realizing until tonight the game was on WGN and I could have been watching). It gets to be 7-2 White Sox and I shut it down to concentrate on some other projects. For grins I check the score around 5:00. Heavens to Betsy! What a comeback! I think the decibel record which had to have been set on opening day in 1999 when Mike Sweeney launched that absolute bomb off of Minnesota had to have been broken when Beltran went deep today. Nice little starts for Juan Gone and Benito Santiago.

First bad call of the game, Tech called for a foul on what looked like a clean block. Bang-bang, so by itself not a bad call. But the ref waited until the shot was missed to blow the whistle rather than calling it immediately. One of my officiating pet peeves. And now we have our first 12-30 reference. Thanks, Jim Nantz, thanks a lot for ruining my night. Four more free throws…

As you may recall, a week ago I spent the evening just a couple miles from the house we lived in during our year in the Bay Area. Being the reflective cat I am, I reminisced a little as we pulled into San Leandro that night. While it was very strange to fly over our home in Indianapolis last month, it was equally as strange to look down during our final descent into Oakland and see the golf course I worked at, the court I played basketball on almost every afternoon, and the street we lived on in ’86-87. When you leave someplace and return later in life, there’s always a time machine quality to your experience. During a trip to the Bay Area last spring, I actually drove over to our old neighborhood, cruised by the house, the golf course, and a couple other landmarks. Things seemed the same in some ways, like I hadn’t left in others, though I realized my memories were probably vague enough that things that simply seemed familiar were probably quite different. What really blew my mind was when I realized it had been 17 years since we lived there! I had been gone long enough to finish high school, go to college (for a long, long time), live through my 20s, get married, and move another 500 miles further east. The year we spent there was such a big part of my development that it always seems more recent than it really was. Was it really almost two decades ago that I spent my afternoons hooping on the eight foot goal at the elementary school, hoping I would get invited over to the real games by the older guys from Oakland who ran the big court? (Not that I ever became a great player, or even a consistently good one, but I swear, each time I got recruited to the A league games, I always, always knocked down a couple jumpers early so everyone thought I could play. I made sure I passed a lot after that so I didn’t ruin the image. Those of you who have played with me in my 20s probably wished I continued to stop shooting so much.) Was it that long ago that I spent my evenings bundled up, driving the cart that picked golf balls off the driving range, listening to LL Cool J and the LA Dream Team on my Walkman?

Make it two bad calls against Georgia Tech. I’m really torn. Billy Packer will obviously always side with the ACC teams. So do I agree with him in these situations, or call him an idiot?

With the gender of Little Girlfriend established, I’m noticing more and more songs that can be used as a soundtrack for raising a daughter. I mentioned Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” last week. On a recent flight, while shuffling through the MP3 player, I found another. Although written more as an ode to a woman who wears the pants in the family, Neil Finn’s “She Will Have Her Way” seems like an appropriate way of summing up how little girls wrap themselves around their daddy’s fingers (or is it the other way around?). Neil adds an excellent coda to the song on his Seven Worlds Collide live album. “There’s something about that face when you wake up that makes everything, everything alright. Yeah, she will have her way.” I’m already turning into a big softie.

More later (including now out of sequence thoughts on the Tech-UConn game)…

Where Were You?

February 5, 2004 / DB

It’s fair to say I feel ambivalent about Miracle. The previews are certainly exciting and interesting (and the early reviews are glowing) but in many ways, this seems like one of those moments that should be left alone. I remember a thoroughly horrible TV movie shortly after the fact. Maybe as a member of the generation that has ownership of this moment (at least the childhood perspective of it) I’m worried that a movie will replace the actual moment and people’s memories will be of the cinema and not where they were that Friday night in 1980. But if you watched, can those memories ever really be replaced or augmented by a movie a quarter century later?

Each time ESPN Classic replays the original game, I’m taken back to our living room in Jackson, MO. I remember sitting there alone (that had to be one of the first times my mom ever let me stay home along) watching on my chair literally inches from our 13″ TV. I had my massive National Geographic atlas on the floor by me, so I could see where the USSR was (as I had done with Czechoslovakia and Sweden earlier in the tournament). And I totally remember completely wigging out when the clock counted down. I don’t care what your sport and team affiliations are: if you’re between 30 and 40 and you saw that game that night, there’s been no bigger sporting event in your life. Sorry, it’s not even close.

Christmas Classics

December 29, 2003 / DB

One of my biggest failings in recent weeks has been not providing you with my guide to modern Christmas music. Initially, I wanted to review Band-Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and John Lennon’s “So This Is Christmas”. Then, on my drive from San Jose to Monterey, as I listened to the CD I made for Christmas a year ago, I thought of doing a little blurb on each song I added to that disk. Finally, I decided to pick the highlights from the disk rather than each song. This began in my hotel room in Tucson while watching Rudolph. Sadly, I’m just finishing it now. Hopefully you can use this to prepare for next year’s holidays.

“The 12 Days of Christmas” – Bob & Doug McKenzie – I just discovered what a toque is. So after 20 years, the song finally makes sense. To an 11 year old in 1982, this was the height of comedic genius. Who would have imagined that Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, not Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas would be the most visible stars of SCTV two decades down the road (Not to mention John Candy, RIP)? For those not familiar with the Canadian version:
A Beer in a tree
Two turtlenecks
Three French toasts
Four pounds of back bacon
Five golden toques
Six packs of two-fours
Seven packs of smokes
Eight comic books
They got distracted and missed the last four days.

“Father Christmas” – The Kinks: Full of classic Davies Brothers smarminess, a great song that just happens to be about Christmas. “Father Christmas, give us some money. Don’t mess around with those silly toys. We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over. We want your bread, so don’t make us annoyed. Give all your toys, to the little rich boys.”

“Santa Claus is Coming to Town” – Bruce Springsteen. Pure holiday joy. “He’s coming up through Philly. Flying over New York. He’s flying down the Jersey Turnpike.”

“Do They Know It’s Christmas” – Band-Aid: The song that launched 1000 tributes. It’s not possible to underestimate how important this song was, how perfectly it fit its times, and how great a song it is to boot. Pure pop simplicity, if you had to pick one song that summed up all the best of the New Wave, pick this. It trounces the utterly ridiculous US counter “We Are the World”. Where the US singers were all made up following the Grammy’s, and the video was heavily produced, Band-Aid was done on low budget, with many of the artists looking as if they had just rolled out of bed to be there. Forget Ethiopia in 1984, it’s a timeless message that deserves to be repeated each year. The only downsides to the song: Phil Collins’ visible presence and allowing Sting to sing a line with the word “sting” in it. “There’s a world outside your window, and it’s a world of dread and fear.”

“So This Is Christmas (War is Over)” – John Lennon: Band-Aid’s older brother, a classic song of the season with a social message. Yoko’s completely over-the-top singing actually makes the song. I’ve always loved the drums coming out of each chorus and the big, bouncing bass line. It just destroys Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” once again proving John was the better Beatle. “And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?”

“Chanukah Song” – Adam Sandler: I’m not a huge Sandler fan. This works nicely, however. “OJ Simpson, NOT A JEW!”

“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” – John Cougar Mellencamp: A great example of taking a classic song of the season and converting it to an artist’s sound. The bluesy, southern sound Mellencamp provides here is gorgeous. Adding JCM’s then toddler daughter for the closing chorus was an excellent touch.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” – Various: I’ve always thought this an odd Christmas song, because when sung properly, it’s actually kind of sad and somber. An extremely popular song, I have versions by Coldplay, the Pretenders, Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo, and Diana Krall. Mr. Hanky tugs at the heart with his emotional reading (complete with toilet flush at the end), but Coldplay’s rings truest.

“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” – U2: Darlene Love’s original version is arguably the greatest rock era Christmas song ever (Bonus trivia: Love was Danny Glover’s wife in all four Lethal Weapon movies). David Letterman has said as much. U2’s version is both true to the original, and modern in sound. More a song about lost love than Christmas, you can hear the pain in Bono’s voice. The band is in extremely fine form as well.

“Christmas in Hollis” – RUN-DMC: There were hip-hop Christmas songs before, and since, but it’s never been any better than the masters from Hollis. I love DMC throwing typical MC stylings in, like “the rhymes that you hear are the rhymes of Darrell…” “It’s Christmas time in Hollis, Queens. Mom’s cooking chicken and collard greens.”

“O Holy Night” – Eric Cartman: South Park kids + cattle prod = genius. “Those aren’t the words, Eric!”

“Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo” – South Park: A modern icon for Christmas, suitable for all religions, colors, and creeds. I hope all of you remembered to eat your fiber on Christmas Eve and got a visit. “Sometimes he’s nutty, sometimes he’s corny, he can be green or greenish brown.”

1982

November 26, 2003 / DB

All week I’ve been thinking of Thanksgivings past. Our epic drives from southeast Missouri to Central Kansas in the late 70’s (If you haven’t made 12 hour drives in ice storms with nothing but AM radio to keep you awake, well, you haven’t lived. The added bonus of hearing Billy Joel’s “My Life” 900 times in 1978.). Leaving Kansas City after my mom got home from work at 10:30 to drive all night in 1982 (and hearing “Maneater” 1000 times). On to high school, when I discovered the joy of eating dinner with my family, then going to two friends’ houses and eating again two more times. College, when you used the break to prepare for finals, invent drinking games, and play football on Friday. Finally, adulthood, when you’d rather rent a movie and get some extra sleep on Thanksgiving Eve rather than drink until you’re silly. Add in the Dallas Cowboys to each age, and you’ve got a mishmash of memories spanning my life. But one Thanksgiving memory sticks out.

I’m guessing it was 1982, when I was in sixth grade, and the weekend before Thanksgiving we had a pretty heavy snowstorm. Within two days, it was warm again and the snow was melting down to the perfect consistency for making snowballs. The day before Thanksgiving, after getting out of school, a large group of fellow middle schoolers congregated at a section of our neighborhood that was well hidden by trees and houses, but allowed for good visibility to the traffic in both directions. We began assembling an arsenal of snowballs and picking off the cars that passed us. To our left was a large hill that went for several blocks, so the older guys could always identify high school kids early enough that we were extra ready to pummel them. What a great day! We were inside 18 hours of Thanksgiving dinner, football, and a four-day weekend. We had snowballs and steady traffic. For an 11 year old, this was about as good as it got. (It should be noted I was equally happy about blasting cars with snowballs when I was 21 and snowed into a house in Lawrence that sat at a busy intersection, but that’s another story.)

At some point, after we had entered a state of ecstasy that can only be achieved in winter when there’s a healthy supply of snow, someone shouted out, “TEENAGERS!!!!!” as a car slowly made it’s way down the hill. By then, our radars were locked in. Our packing skills refined. We were mean, lean, throwing machines. Every boy frantically scooped snow and dropped the lumpy product at his feet. Eyes twitched, arms hung loose yet poised, we all licked our lips in anticipation. Finally, the blue K-car came into view and we unleashed our destructive volley. I can still hear the smack of tightly packed ice against metal and glass. POP POP POP. It seemed like every snowball met its target, more than a few hitting the windshield on the passenger side. Before we could begin celebrating, however, a wicked screech pierced the air. The car jerked to a stop, and the passenger door flew open. Out jumped not a teenager, but a grown man in a suit and tie. Being a coward by nature, I turned and ran before most, so I didn’t hear the shout of, “STOP! POLICE!”

The next few minutes were a haze. All I know is my pre-teen, world class speed was confirmed, as even across empty fields and snow, I was one of the first to come out in the next neighborhood. I’m not sure why I went with the pack that way. I could have easily cut through a grove of woods and circled back to my home. Maybe it was the alleged police officer that was chasing us. Yeah, that’s probably why I stuck to the front of the pack, rather than separate myself and bring unwarranted attention. I know we made a couple abortive attempts to shake our pursuer, by eventually his partner in the K-car appeared and we were cornered. Again, my cowardly instincts took over, and I moved from the front back into the pack. The panting office that had chased us on foot walked up and joined his partner. He kept his hands on his belt, which held his suit coat back so we could see the badge attached to one side of his belt, and his revolver on the other. “Holy shit,” I thought, “I’m going to get shot by a cop on Thanksgiving Eve!”

I don’t remember much of the speech we got, although I do remember it was delivered in classic good cop – bad cop style. The passenger was angry, yelling and often turning away from us in frustration, while his partner attempted to diffuse his anger. One thing they said has always stuck with me, though, “They don’t serve turkey in jail!” What?!?! We’re going to jail?!?! I can’t go to jail, I’m only 11. I didn’t really do anything wrong. It’s Thanksgiving. How would my mom know to come and get me? What if I’m stuck there all weekend because of the holiday? I’ll miss the Cowboys game and copying Dungeons & Dragons manuals. This can’t be happening!

Eventually, the cops left us, confident their severe lecture had taken ten hoodlums off the wrong path in life. We shuffled back slowly back to our homes. No one was even interested in a good game of snow football to end the day. We all just wanted to get inside and hope nothing else came between us and the next day’s feast. Until I got to college, I never threw another snowball at a car unless I knew exactly who was driving it. The image of the Raytown police officer, complete with his stereotypical mustache, brazenly showing his holstered gun to us was burned into my head. I think most of the other people I was with that day ended up in prison, but I learned my lesson. I wasn’t about to let a little classic American hijinks get between me and my favorite holiday, or anything else.

May all my loyal readers have a safe and happy holiday. I’ll be posting stuff throughout the weekend, so if you’ve still got access, check in from time to time.

Paging Orson Welles

October 30, 2003 / DB

(Make no mistake; there will be some discussion of LeBron James in this space later today.)

All this heightened solar activity has me thinking: why isn’t anyone taking advantage of this? It’s Halloween week, for crying out loud! I don’t care so much about sporadic cell phone usage, Arctic communications being cut off, or high frequency radio being wiped out at times. What better time to put a modern version of War of the Worlds out there? It’s the perfect confluence of world (I guess solar system) events, timing, and general unease.

I’ve always been fascinated by the original War of the Worlds broadcast. A link below tells the story of the impact it had on the nation. What’s most amazing to me is how much things have changed in the space of our grandparents’ lifetimes. Less than 70 years ago, the nation was so unsophisticated and dependent on one form of communication that a clearly identified radio play could spread unsubstantiated news reports and panic across the nation in less than an hour. Other than the sophistication and communication aspects, 1938 and 2003 aren’t much different. Then, they were still struggling to shake the Depression. War was a year away in Europe, and everyone feared what the US role would be. Pearl Harbor was three years away. Today, we’re coming out of a fairly deep recession. We’re in the midst of the war on terror. 9/11 and it’s resulting uneasiness is just two years in the past. As in 1938, we wonder what America’s role in the world is and what the implications for our health, safety, and security are.

A modern War of the Worlds would never work as effectively as the original. In 1938, you had the radio and nothing else. Outside urban areas, you generally had one choice for local radio coverage. If you wanted to listen to something else, you had to manually tune around to find a signal strong enough to fill the living room. Today, if say NBC decided to do a War of the Worlds, you have 100 other stations with different coverage proving whatever is on NBC is a movie. We’re pretty sure there aren’t any advanced life forms on Mars with the capability of launching an interplanetary invasion. Lip-synching entertainers, confidence scams, or urban myths can hoodwink us. But the days when an entire nation could get totally freaked out by a piece of fiction are long gone.

I wish some enterprising writer/producer living in a cheap apartment in LA took the massive releases of energy from the sun, added some sinister, imperialistic life form, and whipped up a piece of work that even if for only a few minutes, made my skin crawl just a little when I walk out to get the mail today and look up at the sun. Lacking that, I’ll dig up my MP3 of the original War of the Worlds this afternoon. I’ll imagine myself as a teenager in 1938, living on a farm somewhere far from a big city. I sit in front of the radio with my family, working on my lessons for school while gramps and granny listen to big band music. Suddenly, an announcer breaks in talking about explosions on Mars…

I Vote No

October 15, 2003 / DB

Sixteen Candles 16 years later? No thanks, especially if you make it for TV rather than the big screens and lose the PG-13/R rating option. Let’s count the ways this is bad:
No politically incorrect references to Orientals, a Chinaman named after a duck’s dork, retarded kids wearing red sweaters and tan trousers, alien breasts, public urination, shots of women nude in the shower, or oily-type beau-hunks. I bet you can’t even put Joan Cusack it the halo and make her try to use the drinking fountain these days. I doubt you’ll see Samantha get felt up by her grandmother, either.
On top of all that, you ruin the ending of the original movie. I don’t need to hear how Jake and Sam both suffered third degree burns when they kissed over her birthday cake and their shirts ignited. Or how Farmer Ted became an serial date-rapist based on his success that one weekend his freshman year.
This all sounds more like a bad SNL skit than a legitimate movie project.

Ode To The End Of Summer

September 2, 2003 / DB

Labor Day weekend, the traditional end of summer. I don’t need a weatherman or astronomer to tell me when summer is over. I know it always came the week the pools close and we had to go back to school (How about these poor kids that have to go back in mid-August now? Add in a general lack of air-conditioning in public schools, and I think you’ve got two grounds for cruel and unusual punishment.). A few weeks back, an uncle who works for a newspaper in New Jersey sent me an article he wrote. His editor asked his staff to all write something about a summer memory. My uncle wrote about the massive garden my grandfather kept for many years, and having to eat all the fresh vegetables my grandmother put on the table each night. Sounded like a good exercise to me, so I thought of what reminds me of summer most. Two words: swimming pools.

I recall a time when summers weren’t full of weddings, moves, honeymoons, and bridal showers. No, not the summer of 2000, but farther back. In the early 1980s, while I was busy absorbing the pop culture of the age, I would retreat for a month or so to my ancestral lands in glorious south central Kansas. For most of the time, I actually enjoyed being away from the city. It was a completely different world, but since I was staying with grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, it wasn’t entirely foreign.

Summers in rural Kansas were idyllic, storybook times. That may sound strange, but they were simple, which is the required element for a good summer when you’re a kid. I knew I would watch The Today Show and The Price is Right every morning. After lunch, my cousins and I would be dropped off at the pool in town. If we had been especially good that morning, we would be allowed to sit in the back of the pickup as my grandmother drove slowly down the dirt roads. It was a 15-minute ride, and we would quiver with anticipation the entire way in. We’d literally jump out of the pickup as soon as grandma brought it to a halt, ignoring our grandmother’s pleas to behave ourselves and vaguely registering the time she promised to return later that afternoon. The hint of chlorine and Coppertone in the air. The fuzzy sound of the piped in radio station. The heat of the concrete on my bare feet. These are the things I remember immediately.

For the next three or four hours, we splashed almost endlessly, chasing each other around the edge of the pool (but not so fast we got yelled at by the lifeguards), dared each other to go off the high dive, and held impromptu races of varying distances. I also remember trying to use my city kid status to impress the high school aged lifeguards. I was the picture of manhood as I parked my skinny, tanned body next to the lifeguard stand to talk to my favorite, Lauren, for hours at a time. Back then, I thought she saw something in me that could cut through the six year age difference. Now I realize she probably thought I was mentally challenged or otherwise impaired and just felt sorry for me. That’s not far from the truth, since I was generally stumbling around half-blind without my glasses on. There was no lower point that talking to some girl for 50 minutes, only to see her frown when I put my glasses on during Adult Swim so I could count out change to get some Laffy Taffy or a chewy Sweet Tart.

Being the city kid did have some advantages. I was never called away from the pool to help with cattle or to work the fields. I was always conflicted when someone I had been throwing the Nerf ball to on the high dive got called away. I was glad I was staying, but also thought it unfair that 12 year olds were asked to give up their summer fun to help adults. Wasn’t that what all the college guys who moved to town for the summer were for? The fact I had actually been to Royals Stadium and seen George Brett in the flesh made me especially popular among the other baseball fans. Despite all our talking about the Royals, we never dared bring our baseball cards to the pool, lest they be ruined in a run-away wave or tossed into the pool by older bullies.

Between 4:30 and 5:00, we would reluctantly wrap ourselves in towels and wait for our rides back to the farms. On the really good nights, when our grandparents, or some other adults had to go into town, we would eat a quick dinner of sandwiches and root beer floats, then pile back into the pickup for the evening hours at the pool. It’s funny to look back and realize that after spending hours in the afternoon sun, we would get a burst of new energy and think it was the greatest thing ever if we had a chance to go back for two more hours at night. Today, if I’m at the pool more than 30 minutes, I quickly doze off and even then have to sleep extra late the next morning.

Sure, there were negatives to being five hours from civilization. There were only three TV channels, all of which were received with inconsistent degrees of clarity. There was the annual “get the city kid on a horse and see what happens” game, in which I inevitably ended up flat on my ass as the horse galloped away. Some summers there would be a decent radio station within range, others I would be stuck listening to nothing but the Royals in the evening. (The story of when I broke down all kinds of musical barriers in my family, ironically with the Footloose soundtrack, is one for another time.) But all things considered, I don’t regret spending five straight summers in America’s outback, where my only excitement came from spending afternoons in overly chlorinated water.

Today when I go to a pool (a very rare occasion) I worry about if I’m burning, if my gut is too big, whether I can get a lounge chair or not, how loud the a-holes on the other side of the pool are being, and so on. When you’re a kid, though, the pool is your social club, work out facility, and sanctuary all in one. I miss being able to go to the pool with that same lack of care and sense of abandon, not realizing or caring how annoyed people were by me flying off the edge of the pool to catch a poorly thrown football over-and-over. Memories of summer always include Little League, vacations, chasing girls, and the amazing sense of freedom we had. More than anything, though, the swimming pool is what I think of most when I recall the summers of my childhood.

Royals-Yankees

August 14, 2003 / DB

I hate the Yankees. I hate their uniforms, their dirty stadium, their pompous owner, their arrogant players, their boorish bandwagoning fans, their money, their tradition. I hate the Yankees. Beating the Yankees is good.

What memories! Royals-Yankees, full house, mid-season series. Was this 1980 all over? Flip the venue, and last night’s result reminded me of when the R’s went to Yankee Stadium in June 1980 and scored NFL-like numbers of runs. That’s when the script was set for that October’s series. That roar you heard last night at the K was present every night back in the day. Happy, yet sad, again.

Chris N. was contemplating a nickname for the Royals. How about the Retread Royals? Kevin Appier, Brent Mayne, Michael Tucker, and Joe Randa all started with the Royals, went away, and then came back. Throw in career minor leaguer Aaron Guiel and you’ve got a lot of mileage on some of the tires.

Appier’s performance was fantastic. The only way to explain it is Tony Pena. That man is amazing.

Jeremy Affeldt is a sick, sick man. When he’s on, he has some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen. I remember Rick Honeycut, Frank Tanana, or someone like that in the early 80s would shave off a few layers of skin from their fingertips before pitching. I wonder if that treatment would help Affeldt and his blister issue.

The Royals have two inspired and one horrible choice for pre-At-Bat music. Joe Randa’s “She Sells Sanctuary” by the Cult is about as good of a choice as you can find. Surprised Dave V. and I haven’t spent an entire night talking about this. Brent Mayne uses “This is Radio Clash”. Very nice. Finally, did Mendy Lopez really use “Fight Fire with Fire” by Kansas? I see the local angle, but at least use one of Kansas’ good (popular) songs if you’re dipping into their catalog. Something tells me he didn’t pick the song. He hit his first home run in two years last night, so maybe I should shut up.

(If I were choosing music for when I was batting: “Safe European Home” by the Clash, “Hail, Hail” by Pearl Jam (two songs that have great beginnings that could be played for 5-10 seconds as I calmly strode to the plate), “Paid in Full” by Erick B and Rakim, or “Dust In the Wind” by Kansas (But that one only works if I was a base-stealing fiend and with fans who could figure out the pun).)

The old highlights of Royals-Yankees games were great, if overdone. Royals Stadium was a very different place than the K. Artificial turf, 12” outfield walls, zero advertising around the field. All the players were skinny. And they all hustled too much. Witness Mickey Rivers firing the ball back to second when Buck Martinez was safely standing at first with no thoughts of advancing. The brawl between George Brett and Craig Nettles was one of the all-time great baseball moments. I can’t believe A) it happened in the deciding game of a playoff series and B) neither player got ejected. I watched that game a few years ago, and it just made me sad. That Royals team was much better than the Yankees, then they fell apart in game five.

Overrated chant? At a professional baseball game? Really? D- for the KC fans on that one.