Last week drained me.
I lost Ernie, a tremendous soul and a very close friend, to what became a short battle with dementia yesterday. Devastating. There has been grief. There have been calls and hard conversations, and helping Christine, a current close friend who was laid off without warning.
All carry things nobody should have to carry alone. There has been very little sleep. And maybe because life does this sometimes—maybe because grief has a strange way of pulling old memories out of storage—I found myself laughing tonight.
Really laughing.
Not because things are easy. Not because everything suddenly became okay.
But because I started remembering the people I loved. Really loved. And I realized something: I never loved quiet people. Not because quiet people aren’t wonderful.
Some of the strongest people I know are quiet. But the people who somehow crashed directly into my heart had something else. They had a pulse. They stood somewhere
Take Kim. My wife, who died suddenly nine years ago of a grand mal seizure. Years before, she moved from New York to Boston, and she looked at me and said, “I’m a football girl.” She went to and loved “THE” Ohio State football team and others in the NFL.
But she also knew she was moving into Red Sox country and into my world. So, it. Then read it again. Maybe a third time.
I taught her baseball the way I knew it by playing it, ultimately at a somewhat high level, for 34 years. honestly? I just filled in the gaps. Nothing special. Big mistake. Because one night at Fenway, late game, the Red Sox late game anthem, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”, everybody was drinking and having fun, when a f🤬😈kin Yankees’ centerfielder star misplayed a ball.
Kim stood up and started screaming:
“Jacoby Ellsbury! Yeah, Ellsbury! I’m talking to you! Forgot how to play here? You screwed up that play! Maybe it’s your glove! Want to borrow my Gucci handbag? It’s nice and big—it might make you a better player! Give at least the optics of not sucking, now.”
The immediate crowd absolutely lost it.
And the best part? Ellsbury turned around, looked up at her......and laughed. Not angry. Not annoyed. Just laughed like: ‘Okay...welcome back to Boston...that was actually pretty good.’
Still love.” I wasn’t sitting there covering my face. I wasn’t thinking please stop.
I was laughing so hard I probably looked worse than she did. Because I loved that about her. Always a bit outrageous, and making memories fun.
Then there was Allie. Celtics game. Through work, she got us courtside tickets at Boston Garden. Somehow, Allie got seated by large, drunk Knicks fans. Bad decisions gathering on the horizon.
To this day, she swears somebody tried throwing a drink at her. Next thing I know, we’re both into it with Knicks fans. And let me clarify something: I wasn’t shrinking in my seat. I wasn’t pretending not to know her. I got right into it, too.
That’s why BOTH of us got thrown out. Security escorted us. The crowd cheered.
Sports was never really the point. The point wasn’t baseball. The point wasn’t basketball. The point wasn’t THE Ohio State (Kim, without warning, kicked me under the table during our first dinner date, thankfully not in her spiked alligator boots but red high top Chuck Taylor’s when I said I had cheered a lot for Michigan football-idiotic share), the Celtics, or the Yankees.
The point was passion. Like the "Free Hugs" guy shared here.
People who throw themselves into life. People who laugh loudly. People who care deeply. People willing to reveal who they really are.
Life has enough spectators. The people I loved, and, love, got on the field.
And maybe that’s what this whole thing is supposed to be. Not perfection. Not performance. Not pretending. Just people showing up as themselves. Loud. Messy. Funny. Heartbroken. Hopeful. Human.