Two Things I Swear I Won't Forget

I'll start with the less important one first, if that's all right with y'all.

I mentioned just a few posts ago that baseball came to my consciousness in 1975, when the Red Sox made the playoffs for the first time in my young life.  My brother and I recorded game 1 of the ALCS between the Red Sox and the A's (this was before VCR's; we tape-recorded the audio), and we listened to the play by play of the end of the gane over and over again.  Dick Stockton, who'd go on to careers and CBS and Fox, and Ken Harrelson, who would be the nauseating homer for the ChiSox, were behind the mic.  The last play was a "soft pop-up" to foul territory near third base. Petrocelli made the easy play and Stockton boomed "and he...MAKES THE CATCH! And the Red Sox have won the first one in this..." Unfortunately that's where we stopped recording, so that's the only snippet of the play by play that is in my memory. The world probably knows his call of Carlton Fisk's extra-innings home run clanking off the left-field foul pole in the 1975 World Series. But I'll always have that little stupid memory of the very end of game one of the LCS, and I bet my brother and I are the only ones who do.

But to this day I have a soft spot for Dick Stockton.  Yesterday he called the Fox game between the Red Sox and the Rays.  Jarrod Saltalamacchia hit a walk-off home run and I got chills listening to his call.  After all these years it still is good to hear Stockton announce a Sox win.

The other thing I won't forget is that it's Memorial Day.  You know, I personally think that people give a gravity to Veteran's Day that they don't give Memorial Day, and I think that's a shame.  Because Memorial Day commemorates not "just" those who served and fought, but those who fought and fell for their country. Hordes of draftees, almost against their will serving their country but doing it with courage, wide-eyed, knowing their peril.  And, you know, in World War II at least, there were lots of mmissions that were designed to delay the enemy with no real expectation of actually stopping them.  A company of soldiers being told, for example, to hold a bridge as long as they can to give the larger batallion time to move.  Basically a suicide mission; don't get killed unless you have to.

And killed they were, by the hundreds of thousands.  Half a million men - the future of the USA - died in places they'd never heard of before, like Okinawa, Midway, the Ardennes forest, El-Alamein, and Normandy.  And they should be remembered with reverence, and honor, not necessarily with a barbeque.

Remember these men and women. They served their country and paid the ultimate price for it.