That Was a Great Day

I'm a baseball fan, and have been about as far back as I can remember. Growing up, I have many life memories that in one way or another attach to the game. Long, languid summers playing pickup ball in a furloughed school yard. Listening to the Blue Jay games on static from a radio station in Leamington, Ontario. Going to the games with friends.

The 2023 is winding down, and recently, I was asked a question that is variant of one I suppose every fan thinks of from time to time.

In your memories of baseball, what was a great day.

It's subtly different from "what was a great game." I of course can think of many great games - some wins, some losses.

But great "days?" That's something different.

Two great days come to mind when I think a bit. Bookends, of sorts.

They were not “great” in the sense that something huge happened on the field. No heroic performance by a player, no season-changing outcome. There was no perfect game, or four home run performance. The San Diego Chicken did not make its debut nor was anything of historical import done.

For me, they were “great,” though.

In mid July 1978, as a young kid, we were visiting my grandparents in Cleveland, Ohio. My parents took us downtown to see a game at the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

I had never been to a professional baseball game before, but having just the year before begun playing, I was really excited.

The old stadium was one of those huge, horse-shoe shaped fields with a giant main concourse underneath. I remember emerging from the tunnel to see the brilliant sky and green grass. The smell of vendors hawking popcorn and hot dogs.

I can clearly remember the loudspeakers playing a 1970s, easy listening song, “Summer Breeze” (no; really), by Seals and Crofts.

The opponent that day was the Kansas City Royals, in their powder blue road uniforms. As part of the festivities, children were allowed onto the field to have our photos taken with one of the Cleveland players (in those days, the Indians). Eight year old me chose Horace Speed, who was the starting centre fielder that year.

As a souvenir, I asked for a pennant and a plastic batting helmet. Being from Toronto, I was a Blue Jays fan (the Jays had just begun play a year before), so my parents got me a Blue Jay helmet. I remember going back to my grandparents’ house that day after the game was over, and pretending to be a big leaguer, racing around imaginary bases with my helmet on.

Over the subsequent years, I’ve been to many hundreds of games, but my first is probably my favourite.

On the other end of the spectrum, in 1994, now 24 years old and in my final year of grad school, I went back to Cleveland, where my parents had settled. This time, to see my father. It was June, a week after school ended.

I went this time with my father to the new Cleveland Stadium - called Jacobs Field at first. It had opened that same year, and was brand new. Just my father and I went, reliving an experience and memory nearly twenty years past.

It was not the same, of course. I was not a wild-eyed eight year old. We couldn’t go on the field, and everything was on a more human scale - the field was still as green and the sky as blue. The game and the dimensions had not changed, but I had.

I was in Cleveland because my father had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

Going to Jacobs Field in June 1994, the day before I came back to San Francisco to start my first job, was the last day I got to spend with my father when he was alive.

The games themselves were not great, and in fact, I don’t even remember who won.

There Is No Going Back

 

Yesterday, my family and I went to see what is likely to be the final Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

It's not a bad ending for the franchise - plenty of action. Some one-liners. Nice cameos for Jonathan Rhys-Davies (Salla) and Karen Allen (Marian). 

The vehicle, both literally and figuratively, is a device that actually does exist, the Antikythera mechanism, which was discovered for real in a shipwreck found in 1901. Now, the device is unlikely to have actually been constructed by Archimedes, but many consider it the first real computer. It could not do what the movie implied, but it was obviously way, way ahead of its time. 

I have written a fair amount about technology - how it changes life, what the pitfalls as well as benefits for humanity are. Mainly, I think what tech does is enhance what we are capable of rather than changing our nature. With the rise of so-called "AI," and most notably and recently, Chat GPT, I was thinking about how the current young people cannot imagine a world without some of the inventions that are now more prosaic. Mobile telephones. Tablets. The internet.

As Gen-Xer, I would start by pointing out that the AI and the internet are technologies, much like others. And they obviously have had and will have a profound impact on life.

But are these changes more significant than others. More than, say, the automobile? The telephone?

My wife, son, and I during COVID began watching the television show Downton Abbey, and in Season 1, the manor house gets its first telephone. Everyone is mesmerized by it, save for the dowager mother of Lord Grantham, who views it with cynicism and suspicion.

The younger servants in the house (e.g., Thomas) could be said to be the “last generation to experience what life was like before the telephone.”

Every invention that came before us, to our conscious minds has always been there. My grandfather was born in 1908, so for him, although the airplanes became a routine device, it had not always been around, and it surely was not ubiquitous.

I can remember when I was first exposed to a computer (in 1981, an Apple II+). I clearly remember my first modem (a Hayes 300 baud device that you put the telephone receiver to, circa 1983). I can clearly remember trying to send documents via email using uuencode and uudecode. Then Stuffit, then WinZIP that did everything automatically. Then you could just drag and drop files into an email.

The internet has, more than any other of these inventions, had a massive impact on culture. My son is 16, and he simply cannot imagine the world without it. The idea of going to a library, sorting through a card catalog, getting books, and doing research that way is as odd to him as would be using a telegraph to me. Hell, he has never seen a real encyclopaedia, or had the thrill of waiting for the “update” that came every year in an extra volume to augment the now out-of-date information.

Almost everything he needs or wants to know, he can get in minutes from a tiny device that’s the size of an old Texas Instruments led calculator that I used to use.

That puts information at his disposal that 16 year old me could not dream of.

On the other hand, it also means less human connection. “Relationships” are often virtual. Friends are icons on a screen. I got a glimpse of this in graduate school, where one night, two people waiting for their simulations to converge (I got my degree in mathematics) were using a live chat whilst sitting at their SUN work stations.

They were sitting in the same room.

I thought it odd, and dysfunctional at the time. I couldn’t imagine things like WeChat or twitter then.

So something gained, and something lost.

We gain information, we lose human connection.

In short, it’s a Faustian bargain. Like all technology is. It’s up to us to use it wisely.

And finally, I do not accept the premise that it will never be the same again. The Romans at one point had engineering and technology that along the way got lost. It took humanity in some case centuries to learn back what was known.

It would be incredibly hubristic to think that we cannot fall to the same situation as they did.

Live Fast

At a recent awards show, former pop idol Madonna drew some fairly unkind comments about her battle with aging - a fight we all face in one way or another - and how badly her obvious plastic surgery had turned out. 

People often think of celebrities, and often, it appears as thinly-veiled jealousy. They're rich. They have lifestyles that appear glamourous and easy. Few people say "no." My own life is comfortable if not glamourous. I have complaints of course, but in the grand scheme of things, there are few things that I really want that are out of reach. Most of those are not really worth having, to be honest. 

So I am not envious of celebrities. 

But the comments about Madonna and subsequent arguments in social media made me think. One in particular popped up - "What celebrity, in your opinion, has aged the worst?" Almost all the responses focused on people who either got fat, lost their hair, had bad plastic surgery, or some combination of the lot.

I do not have the money and apparent carefree lifestyle of a Hollywood star. On the other hand, as I get older, and look older, no-one cares. I am not going to wind up on the cover of a tabloid being photographed in sweat pants walking out of an AM/PM.

And thus, my answer is likely different compared to others. And it is this.

Rather than engage in a discussion of people who once looked great but now as they have gotten older do not look so good anymore, or posting “shocking” pictures of a 55 year old woman without makeup, I would say that when it comes to aging “poorly,” nothing can top not aging at all.

The celebrity who aged “the worst” in my opinion is River Phoenix, who if he were alive, would be the same age as I am. We were both born in 1970.

Phoenix ran out of tomorrows in 1993. He was 23 years old.

I have no idea how River Phoenix would look today if he were alive. But ultimately, Madonna is alive and River Phoenix isn't. And that counts for something.

We should feel grateful that we are given today and not regret that we looked better at some point in the past.

People, if they are lucky, age. None of us - not you, not me - look better at 50 than we did at 25. It’s just that simple.

88 MPH at 45 RPM

I am a kid of the 1980s, though in truth, I am no more a "kid," as birthday 53 is looming just over the horizon. I still remember when, in the words of kitsch pop group "Bowling for Soup," MTV still played music.

Since Bruce Springsteen, Madonna
Way before Nirvana
There was U2 and Blondie
And music still on MTV
Her two kids in high school
They tell her that she's uncool
'Cause she's still preoccupied
With 19, 19

1985

At that time, there was a throw-away line from an old Van Halen song that said something to the effect that, every day, your life is growing shorter while your memories are growing longer. Of course, it's undeniably true. Time is relentless. It is unforgiving.

Read last night as I was heading off to sleep that another former high school mate has left us behind. Death comes for us all. It just comes for some too soon.

One thing that today offers that yesterday did not was the ability to summon music on command. Spotify, YouTube, and even (a bit earlier), Napster allows us to curate playlists that, 40 years ago, we had to patiently create by placing cassette tapes into clunky tape decks, await our favourite songs to be selected, and then wait for the deejay to end his "talk up" to press, simultaneously, the PLAY and red RECORD buttons.

Going back generations, writers of science fiction have talked of time machines. HG Wells. Stephen Spielberg made a time machine, famously, out of a DeLorean car in 1985.

Time machines, of a sort, in essence already exist. They exist in sound. 

Maybe I am alone in thinking this, but I find that certain songs, more than any other medium, have the ability to take us, instantly, to a specific moment in time. On New Year's Eve, we were counting down with ABC, and Duran Duran were one of the guests. Hearing Simon Le Bon sing "Hungry Like the Wolf" immediately took me back to walking home from seventh grade, stack of books under my hand, with my Sony Walkman and foam headphones. As a young adult, "Bittersweet Symphony" or Marcy Playground conjure up an image of the day I moved into my first house. Even weirdly enough, the Seals and Croft song "Summer Breeze," which was on the recorded track at Cleveland Municipal Stadium for between innings, reminds me of the first time I ever saw a professional baseball game in the cavernous, and now gone, stadium. I can smell the fresh grass and hot dogs when it appears.

Now that I have Spotify, I can put on a playlist from 1982, 1995, or even 2005 (when my son was born), and I do not need 1.21 gigawatts. 

No plutonium needed.