28 February 1998: Durable Things

Saturday, 28 February 1998:

Durable Things

This month is remarkable in a calendar sense because it fills exactly four rows on a Sunday-to-Saturday calendar. It's also interesting in that we had a Friday the 13th this month, and we'll have one next month, too.

I ran a few errands today, taking care not to aggravate my cold (which is going away quite nicely, thank you). I finally bought some boxes to ship some comics to Brazil, and I went to the University Book Store and finally found a nice binder-style book to hold a notepad. You'd think such a thing wouldn't be hard to find, but most of the ones I'd seen had either been gross overkill (I could store pens, pencils, a calculator, rules, and various other goodies in it), or were flimsy and bent easily. All I wanted was something durable, with a stiff back, to hold a notepad and other loose papers. This one also holds a pencil, which is fine.

I rarely shop at the University Book Store, mainly because they score low on some political and social issues. For instance, they reportedly once fired (or tried to fire) a woman who was openly lesbian. Apparently they're owned by some fundamentalist-Christian types, and I know some people who won't shop there no way no how. I only go there when I think they might have something that I haven't been able to find elsewhere (for instance, I bought a small art utensil case there a few months ago, since I couldn't find quite what I wanted at the local art stores).

In fact, paper and art supplies are pretty much the only things I buy there these days. As a bookstore, they're outclassed by any number of other businesses in town. I tend to go to Borders for new books, and many other outlets for used books.

I'm reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's autobiography Wait Till Next Year right now. Goodwin is a noted Presidential historian, and was interviewed at length for Ken Burns' Baseball series on PBS a few years back. The book is about her growing up in the late 1940s and 50s in Brooklyn, following the Dodgers, in the heyday of New York sports. (Between 1949 and 1959 New York baseball teams won the World Series every year save one, the exception being the 1957 championship by the Milwaukee Braves, the only team to win a World Series for three different cities.)

It's interesting to contrast Goodwin with her fellow Baseball interviewee, Thomas Boswell. Boswell is a baseball columnist in the Washington, DC area. On film, he came across as a little bit stiff, and perhaps a little bit pompous. Goodwin, on the other hand, seemed warm and invigorating, relating highly personal tales of her youth and fandom.

In print, though, the tables are turned. Wait Till next Year, for all its personal history, seems a little too planned, and a little too straightforward to really excite. Some of it is that, as a lifelong agnostic, I can't relate to Goodwin's tales about the Catholic Church, and I also did not grow up with baseball, having dived into it only in high school. But the writing doesn't really make me relate to her experiences. On the other hand, Boswell's collection of baseball essays, The Heart of the Order, is deeply moving and inspirational, telling us that when all is said and done, a pennant race is only a pennant race, and statistics are only statistics, but that it's the people on the field (and off the field) that engage us and keep us interested even as the personnel change from year to year, and decade to decade. It's essential reading for any baseball fan.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)