At least where we live, in central Vermont, this
summer is all about the good, the bad and the ugly.
The
good is the weather.
Vermont – and seemingly only Vermont – has had beautiful,
warm weather stretching back to at least the ides of March. Yes, there’s been some rain and cold
and storm and humid heat but not too much. Mostly it feels like Southern California. Without the congestion. The days pour hot, dry sun out
of a clear blue sky. Aside from a hateful deer fly season, the bugs are tame; gardens are busting with bounty. While much of the rest of the country has borne fire and flood, heat from the edges of hell and old-testament sized thunder and lightening we have had nothing but gentle breezes. It is bliss.
The
bad? Well for that you must be a
Red Sox fan. As baseball follows
summer you’d hope the fortunes of the Sox would match the bliss of the season. It is not
so. For those who do not follow
the mighty Red Stockings let me sum it up: they suck.
Watching the pitchers is as fun as getting through a holiday meal in a
dysfunctional family – you don’t so much enjoy the experience as hold your
breath and hope the whole thing doesn’t blow up.
The batters are a tease – every now and then they show what
they can do. They then don’t do it for days and days. And when one or two of the mighty
sluggers start hitting well the manager is sure to say something stupid to put
the players off their stride, sending at least one of the greats not only into
a funk but actually to Chicago.
I
knew the season was a disaster on July 18. Nothing particularly bad happened that day, but when I
looked at the baseball app on my iPhone to see the score against the Yankees,
and I saw the date, the number 18, I thought it was the number of runs the
Yanks had put up. I thought we were losing. The game had not even started. When I figured it out I was not surprised.
Yes,
for Red Sox fans the glory days of 2004 and 2007 are a heady medicine but, five
seasons on, the dose is wearing off. It had been a long time since a World Series Win. No one told us about the wicked
hangover we’d have when we woke from the dream.
And
here are some pat clichés for our dear manager Bobby
Valentine: dead man walking; don’t
let the door hit you on your way out; here’s your hat what’s your hurry. Bobby Valentine makes Don “The Gerbil”
Zimmer’s time at the helm in Boston seem like a golden age.
And
on that sour note we need to close with the ugly.
The
outstanding weather has a dark side.
It is not normal in these climes to plant a garden in March and see that
the spinach wintered over in the fallow ground, to bake through May and June.
The
good side? Maybe rosemary will
start growing in Vermont like a weed the way it does in Italy. Maybe we’ll be able to grow artichokes
and eggplant without a hot house.
But the reality is this much change in the climate of our planet might
be fine for the planet but probably is not fine for humans or the world as we
know it.
Maybe
global warming is all just a conspiracy, but not the kind Fox News has told us it
is. Maybe climate change is
actually a move by the automotive-oil cabal to make diesel engines function
better in formerly cold climes, keeping us addicted to oil but allowing us to
go 800 miles on a tank before needing more. Or maybe it is just a nearly intractable problem we’ll have
to overcome our petty differences to confront.
And
maybe we’ll do that just after we all agree on the best way to
provide decent, meaningful and world-class publicly funded education to all
children, or provide people with meaningful work and income, or develop a rational immigration policy. Maybe.
So
there you have it: the good, a
summer for the books, one to cherish and remember and enjoy for a bit more; the
bad, my Red Sox, living through the worst hangover in the history of baseball;
and the ugly, the reality the great weather is a foreshadowing, if not of doom
than at least of maybe being able to grow figs and oranges in the hills of
Vermont.
David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio
