I don’t know why that song in particular. I don’t know how I even came by that song in particular. But as I stood in the Oasis Laundromat in Mountain View, California, watching game 6 of the American League Championship Series, I kept hitting the “back” button on my new (ish) gold iPod Mini over and over, and listening to the Pogues play “Thousands Are Sailing.” There was a full moon, there was Curt Schilling bleeding through the sock, and I was watching the baseball postseason in a new place for the first time since 1997, and the Boston Red Sox were trying to pull off the single biggest comeback in human history since Our Lord rose on the third day.
I wasn’t remotely a Red Sox fan in 1997. I was aware of the existence of the Sox, was becoming vaguely aware of the whole mythology around the CURSE, had met several folks that year from the general area of Red Sox Nation. I suppose that by the time I left DC, they were my American League team of record. I’d been to a game at Fenway, but that wasn’t saying heaps; I’d been to an ALCS game at Yankee Stadium in 1998 and a World Series game at the Jake in 1997, plus games at Kaufmann Stadium in Kansas City, Shea Stadium in New York and – of course – Oriole Park at Camden Yards. And I suppose from a fandom standpoint, I was already much more invested in the San Francisco Giants, whose own World Series trip in 2002 had gone pear-shaped.
But Boston meant some very good friends – some of my best, actually – and it also meant a whole lot of the DC Irishness from the Four Provinces and thereabouts. I did plenty of screaming along with the McTeggarts’ version of “Charlie on the MTA” at half-past midnight. I’d read all the pertinent literature by then, of course – Updike and Shaughnessy and the like – and I’d been a shirttail participant in 1999 and 2003 postseason failings. To say I was part of Red Sox Nation was completely incorrect, but I could at least claim a valid visa good for six months without recourse to public services.
The song is all about the Irish who had to leave their own country to escape the poverty, the famine, the general hopelessness, and I suppose in a way it rang true with me. By the time I left DC, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to have to leave. I suppose maybe if the last couple of years hadn’t been such a battle, if I hadn’t felt like we were never, ever going to break through against idiot users and even stupider upper management – if I’d had a shred of hope that we could win, I would have wanted to stick it out and keep fighting. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen, and I knew which way the future lay, and I went.
Standing there in the laundromat, watching Schilling bleed through the sock like some sort of arcane mystical act of blood expiation, I guess I was hoping for a symbolic victory of my own. By proxy, if the Red Sox could climb out of the grave and do the unthinkable, if they could do something that had never been done, then maybe we’d have a win. And maybe it would mean eventual victory in the real world, somehow, and that the fight hadn’t all been for nothing.
I don’t miss the fight. But since I still have the fight, I miss not having to go it alone. And if I can’t have my crew, Monday to Friday and weekend nights to boot, shoulder to shoulder, I wish I at least had the cigars back.