Hate

This morning I peeked at the standings for the first time in a while. Now, don't get me wrong: I know exactly how many games back (six) the Yankees are of the Red Sox. And how many games up (three) the Yankees are in the Wild Card race. It's just that I haven't lately taken a global view of the baseball season. So what did I learn? I learned that the Devil Rays have already been eliminated and that the Royals' magic number for elimination is 1. I learned that the longest winning streak (five games) in the majors now belongs to the Washington Nationals; their magic number for elimination is eight. I think the most surprising thing I learned is something that shouldn't be that surprising at all: most teams in baseball have played 140 games. That means--follow my genius-like thinking here--that there are only 22 games left in the season.

The end of the season is just around the corner. Then the real season begins: the playoffs.

But that's not what I really want to talk about today.

No, today I want to talk about the first day of school. Today Sam and Owen each had their first day of school. Yesterday, Sam had a play date with one of his friends. They went for a bike ride and when they came back, the friend had a talk with Owen about who Owen's favorite baseball team is. The friend, wearing a red Papelbon t-shirt, had clearly already made his choice.

This conversation happened outside in our front yard, not far from where I'm typing this right now. And just across the street, I can see some yellow and orange leaves encroaching upon the greenery of my neighbor's huge maple tree. In other words, fall is upon us. But the question posed by a seven-year-old to a four-year-old on the last official day of summer vacation actually took me back to the one of the first warm days of 2007, Easter Sunday. That day, I was enjoying the warm air that an April Easter can sometimes bring to New England as well as some family time with Sam and Owen and my college-age neice who was visiting from Boston. We had an Easter egg hunt in the morning and then settled into a post-sugar-buzz lethargy in the late morning. I should say that the adults were a little lethargic; the kids were anything but.

In an effort to restore a little sanity to the house, I sent Sam and OWen outside to play. They did so, happily, and peace was restored. And then a few minutes later, I noticed that I couldn't hear any play-like noise outside. I looked out of all of the windows, and didn't see any children related to me playing in the yard. I did see an Easter basket that hadn't been prepared by me or my wife, or the Easter Bunny for that matter, sitting in the grass next to our neighbor's yard, and a couple of candy wrappers marking a kind of a trail towards our neighbor's front door.

I walked outside, went across the grass and knocked on my neighbor's door.
"Do you have any strange children here, by any chance?"
"No, but we have two nice ones here," she said.
There they were, Sam and Owen, sitting on the couch next to my neighbor's brother. On his lap was a photo album full of pictures of baseball and baseball cards.
"I hope you don't mind," he said. "I'm showing them some of my Red Sox things. I don't know if you're a Red Sox fan or not, but I figured I'd try to get to your kids while they're young."
My first thought was one of outrage. I mean, here it is, Easter Sunday--the holiest day of the year in Chritiandom--and my neighbor is trying to convert my kids to his weird religion. How would they feel if I kidnapped their dog (they don't have any children) and somehow had it unlearn it's housebreaking?
Okay, not the same thing.
But what if I went door-to-door, say, and tried to convince people to give up their most strongly held beliefs and instead embrace whatever it is that I hold dear. Perhaps I'd even print up some literature to leave behind for those who couldn't be convinced in a minute or two.
You get the picture.
Sam and Owen didn't mind at all. The extra Easter basket, carefully prepared by our neighbor, was just another mother lode of chocolate and jelly beans and Easter-themed Red Sox swag. It was just more stuff.
But I thought about this attempt at conversion (I didn't tell my neighbor that I'd kind of given up the fight about whom my kids would root for) yesterday because Owen told Sam's friend that he hates the Red Sox.
He did use the word hate, and I don't like the fact that he said that. Call me prudish or old-fashioned or what have you, but I've been fighting this battle lately because Sam, seven years old and feeling his oats, has been saying hate as a way to declare a bit of linguistic independence, I suspect. And his younger brother, in the throes of hero-worship for his older brother, has picked up the habit, too.
"How can he hate the Red Sox?" Sam's friend asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I guess Owen's just a fair-weather fan."

A couple of weeks ago, we took a short family vacation to Lake George. A couple of days before our trip, we received in the mail the membership kits for Red Sox Kid Nation. These kits included a lunch box with a picture of Jonathan Papelbon on it, an official Red Sox Kid Nation hat, temporary tattoos and a number of other items. I gave the kits to Sam and Owen just before we got into the car for the two-and-a-half hour drive to Lake George; I figured it might be good for a few minutes of distraction. And just a few minutes is what I got. After they opened the lunch boxes, put on their caps, and leafed through the various papers inside, they immediately latched onto the tattoos. My kids couldn't understand why I couldn't put a gothic red "B" tattoo on their faces while driving 70+ miles per hour on the highway. You can guess what I had to do pretty soon after we pulled into our motel.
On our last day of vacation, we went in search of a souvenir in the shops in Lake George Village that line the lake front. After looking at the very best Lake George Village has to offer in terms of two-for-one t-shirts with various incarnations of Lake George emblazoned on them, we scored at a store that had some t-shirts done up to look like baseball jerseys. Sam and Owen got the same shirts: a blue t-shirt with the familiar NY logo on front and a number 13 and Rodriguez on the back. This meant that for the next several days--yes, the t-shirts proved just as difficult to remove as the temporary tattoos--Sam and Owen, but especially Owen, went around with a Red Sox tattoo on his face and a Yankees t-shirt on his body. It reminded me of that scene in Full Metal Jacket where Matthew Modine is inspected and the inspecting officer questions why he has a peace medallion around his neck and "born to kill" written on his helmet. "I guess it reflects the duality of man, sir" Modine explained.
Owen couldn't care less what his fashion statement reflected. He was happy. What was interesting to watch is how people around him, almost all of them adults, reacted to what they saw. More than one tried to explain to Owen how he can't root for both the Yankees and the Red Sox. With only 22 games left in Owen's first full season as a baseball fan, he can name virtually all of the players on the Red Sox and many of the players on the Yankees. With the help of baseball cards, he also knows players on many other teams. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to name more players than he can. But Owen at this stage is not a fan of a particular team, which is why he can accurately say that he "hates" the Red Sox. He is instead a fan of baseball. Just this afternoon he spent more than an hour in the yard, by himself, playing baseball with a mitt, a tennis ball, a batting helmet, bat, and pitchback. No one else was allowed in the yard because the whole thing was being used for his field. He likes everything about baseball, from the umpires--which he calls "vampires," to the locker room to, of course, Big Papi. He's happy when anyone makes a good play, hits a home run, or scores. What I'm wondering is how long such innocent fandom can last, with all of the pressure out there to choose sides. And, of course, soon after you've chosen sides, the pressure comes to not just root for your team, but to actively root against--to "hate"--the other team and everything about it. And that hate, unfortunately, can become real hate all too often.