The Perfect Storm of Horribleness
Live, breathe, eat, drink baseball. That’s what I do, I guess. Never planned for it to happen that way years ago, but it did. Sometimes it rubs off in the subconscious – like dreaming last night I was astronauts with Matt Carpenter – or on my son, who was singing, “the square beyond compare!” after breakfast this morning. But being so avid about anything can have its downfalls…
I think I knew it even as I called Carrie-Bri at exactly noon. We were at the Magic House, Puck and I, with Anneliese and her whole family. Five kids and three adults in a madhouse of children and magic. We had just finished lunch next to the garden and it was almost time to leave. I got a missed phone call and a text from Carrie.
“Are you sitting down?” it read.
Strange, I didn’t assume there was anything wrong with the family, no emergency. I knew it had something to do with the Cardinals. I walked to a less-loud corner of the room and called her back.
“They just traded Allen Craig and Joe Kelly to the Red Sox.”
Gut punch. I walked in a daze back to Anneliese’s parents. Her dad was just as upset as I was. We sort of stared into space, processing this unthinkable news. St. Louis isn’t kidding when they say Cardinals players feel like family.
For the rest of the day, even through our interview at Puck’s new school, and his academic screening, it felt sort of like walking through a cloud. A little unreal.
On the drive home with a crackly game from San Diego on the radio, Puck and I stopped for Hershey’s and Simply Apple. I don’t really know why. When we got back, Puck quieter than usual, noting my solemnity, tried to help by suggesting that trading baseball players was like “slaves in the Civil War.”
I pulled up the latest articles. When I read that shocked Allen and Joe were both in tears, or on the verge of it, that just twisted the knife deeper. Distraught and angry comments spilled all over social media. This was a hard one to take.
Puck came in briefly to strap my dish towels around his knees with Scotch tape. Biked away to chat with a granny two doors down. I absent-mindedly brought in the mail as Puck zoomed up the driveway for dinner.
He yelled back down the street to the granny, “And remember! It’s much better for your body!”
“What did you tell her, bud?” I asked, trying to focus on attaching the new tags onto the Mazda plates.
“She was cigarette-ing, so I gave her advice to get a cigar instead, and she thanked me for my advice.”
To borrow a quote from Adam Wainwright, today was “the perfect storm of horribleness.”