Vengeance

The other day I watched a couple of baseball games for the first time in ten years, maybe much longer than that. I watched the Boston team outscore the Colorado team.  I had nothing on the result, no bets down, no regional loyalty, no knowledge of the game to influence me, just the fun of watching hugely skilled ballplayers doing their lucrative thing.

Sports writers across the country had other nuts to crack. Some were quoted in the LA Times, including their own sorehead who announced, much to my astonishment, that Boston bought, paid for, the World Series. Gee, I had no idea. A Chicago sports writer announced that Boston players had used trickery. I must have missed that part. I'll tell you what I did notice and that was how fair, and how enthusiastic were the Denver/Colorado fans who seemed to my uneducated eyes appreciative of all the fine plays by both teams. Made me rethink living in Denver. Splendid people in Denver I figure, Fair especially, in spite of the altitude. And it's so beautiful.

I was in Denver once, passed through while hitchhiking. In High School in San Francisco on a Friday after school I walked North across the Golden Gate Bridge and hitchhiked to Seattle, then hitched East to Wyoming, and back West to San Francisco. 

Madness, right? I was 16. I lived alone, but kind people, including truck drivers, helped me. Drivers must not fear picking up a child. Today my antics would get me killed, and probably very fast.

On Monday morning I was back in school missing not an hour of class time. I was accepted at all three of the colleges I applied to.

Have I paid back the blessings I received? I have not. Maybe an opportunity will show up, or I'll get ambition and create an opportunity.

Love it, love it all.....it's not forever....right?

Barry

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• #1 Comment from bgilmore725 
  11/4/07 12:37 PM | Permalink

  Barry, that was some daring adventure you took that weekend back when you were 16... how many of us thought of doing such a thing, but didn't act on it. My parents wouldn't let me trek to Woodstock... I was only 16. I understand their fears back then. Glad they didn't let me go... glad I didn't go in retrospect. Certainly wasn't my crowd. You were a restless soul... what did you learn from it? You must have been excited, afraid, ... I can imagine a sixteen year old boy taking a trip like that... and I wonder what thoughts were going through his head as he walked the road, waiting, hoping for a ride. Not really knowing where he would be at day's end. Still, you seemed to know when to turn back to get back home in time for school. Or perhaps there was the thought of not returning home to school. The people you met along the way, the discussions that must have followed... kindly parental advice, I imagine, or encouragement to be safe, and to do the right thing. But what is the right thing for a kid living on his own? I'd read the book if you wrote it, for surely there is a valuable story to be told here. Would you recount it to your kids? bea
  
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