Childhood memories

5/30/10 Childhood stories, letters, and photographs, returned

Serendipity led us to Fenway Park today, just forty-eight hours after selling our home. I saw it as a celebration of our accomplishments and a reward for our hard work. Joanna saw it as a cool adventure for our four-month-old child. Chase saw it as an incredible sensory-overload experience.

I do see the proper education of my son as a primary responsibility, and raising him to revere the proper sports teams is part of that education. At the very least, that thinking gave me the excuse to make it to one more Red Sox game before heading west. We approached the adventure with the right mindset, deciding to get to the game early, spend our time walking around and eating, and then departing early, before Mr. Seventeen Pounds of Fury could get too cranky about the whole experience.

A fine time was had by all three of us, and although we missed out on the chance of having Big Papi sign Chase's hat, we couldn't have asked for a better first trip to the ballpark for our son. (Sox won, 8-1, and we thoroughly enjoyed the three innings we watched. I've found that newborns tend to lose interest about the first third of the game.)

We were also eager to leave the ballpark because it meant returning to Joanna's sister Amanda's apartment, where she was preparing a gourmet meal for us. As the coq au vin simmered on the stove, we presented Amanda with a number of stories, pictures, and letters she had written as a child. We had discovered them among Joanna's things as we packed up the house last weekend.

While Amanda was most enthusiastic about performing dramatic readings of her childhood stories "It's Not a Frog If It Isn't Brown!" and "When Everything Was Wrong", I most enjoyed the dramatic illustration she has made of Dracula standing over a lifeless bride. Very timely, I thought, given the current pop cultural popularity of vampires.

Of course, Chase was sound asleep by the time dinner was served, but I don't think he would have appreciated it, anyway. Just like the baseball game and the school-age stories, sometimes it takes a few years before we really appreciate the events of our childhood.

Looking back can give us even more joy than the original experience. Here's to good memories.