Year End List, Fuel for Inspiration 2008: Part Three (This Time It's Personal)

FOR PART ONE, click here. For Part Two, here.


3) The House That Ruth Built

Part of being an Irish American is being aware of your deep seeded propensity for a kind of maudlin sentimentality. It can bubble up and get on you at anytime. Kind of like baby spit up.

Ritual and history become important. Maybe it's the writer in me too, getting slutty for any kind of symbolism you can seize upon.

But whatever the reason, one of the big moments for me this year came on a Thursday night at the end of June. I met my friend Matt at the Union Square subway station in Manhattan, and we climbed on the Number 4 for the trip up to 161st Street and River Avenue.

The last game I saw at Yankee Stadium was with my Uncle Christy. That's when my Yankees had names like Bucky Dent, Lou Pinella as a player, Catfish and Goose and Reggie Jackson and the Captain and Catcher, the late, great Thurman Munson. And yes, I know it was really the 2nd Yankee Stadium I went to -- the post '73 reno stadium...but it was still physically in the same place. It had the advantage of all the old ghosts. That's another thing we American Micks love...the old ghosts.

My Uncle's gone now, but I'll always remember being a ten year old, walking out from the grey halls into the light, and looking down on that field in wonder. My Uncle knew every cop, it seemed, and waved to a bunch of other types along the way. Matt and I sat in our box seats on the first base line, a couple sections back, and watched a reasonably lackluster game. The team wasn't in fine form. But it didn't matter. It was the stadium of my dreams, and when I closed my eyes, I still see and feel the roar of the crowd...all the crowds, stretching back to Mantle and Gehrig and the Babe.

I visited Wrigley for the first time this year, too, and felt a similar chill. It's the chill I felt the first time I saw a hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens.

All these new stadiums may be sleeker, and have more boxes for the big money. But when I close my eyes, all that vibrant color fades to brilliant black and white -- and the cheer goes down the line, through generations gone.

The Yankees lost. But it didn't matter. When the organ started and they played "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," I hid my Irish eyes in my palm, pulled the cap a little lower, and sniffed the air in that stadium for the last time. Spilling out onto the street after the final out, I looked around and it occurred to me, absently, "I was born not too far from here" The thought seemed otherworldly, almost inconceivably strange and so much less relatable than the ritual I'd just gone through.

A shuffle toward the subway. An express pulled up, we got in, and thirty minutes later I was back at the Hotel Bar in Grammercy -- like none of it had never happened.

But it did happen. And believe you me, that's one pilgrimage I'll never regret.

But there, that picture of the brand new stadium under the lights...mmm...well...

It's never too late for new memories, right?

Number 4 train, here I come...

2) The Genius setting on the New Ipods.

Because I don't know how it knows. But damn.


1) November 4, 2008.

I probably can't match my heartfelt here.

But if I had to choose just one inspiring thing from this year, the thing that will carry me forward through the tough time ahead, it's the fruit of that wonderful moment of 11PM ET, November 2008.

The rejection of the politics of smear and fear; the fiction of the Bradley effect, the turnout, the redemption, the feeling that maybe thought and thoughtfulness and wisdom would hold sway now, finally, after so long.

It's already changed some of what I'm writing, and how I approached one project. It will be interesting to see if my old show, The Border, rises to the challenge of transforming itself from a Bush-era conception of the Canada-U.S. relationship to that new reality. I'm rooting for them.

Meanwhile, optimism is in, as is pragmatism and sense.

It'll be wonderful and exciting to see what characters and situations TV writers come up with now. Just read the story of where this chapter of American history came from, and you realize that the stories we have to tell are more diverse, more exciting, more unusual, and more unlikely than we've dared to dream of before.

The dreams are different in a Yes We Can world. And Thank God for that.


Twenty more sleeps.