Just Ain't That Easy

I watched the Red Sox ring ceremony yesterday.

In fact we both did. The first home game of the season is a national holiday for Carol and especially so when they are celebrating a championship. She worked half a day and we settled in.

It got to me pretty good. It always does. PATS, Sox, Bruins, C's - doesn't matter - the celebrations blow me away.

I return to this theme time after time. Can't help myself.

I sat there and watched men who have been playing this game for their entire lives, standing side by side with big, sappy smiles on their faces. Checking out their rings, comparing them to the guy next to them, trying them on - they looked like little kids.

Men who have worked their asses off to make it to this level and been rewarded with the ultimate prize - a World Championship. Something that most athletes do not get to experience.

That is a feeling all of us want to experience and will never have. Most of us spend our entire lives working our asses off so we can afford to go out for pizza every other month. There is little or no reward for hard work in a small life, an average life.

That is why we crave success and recognition.

I do not begrudge these guys their happiness. I do not begrudge them their money. They earned it. They fucking earned it. I am happy for them. Tears well up in my eyes as I watch them celebrate.

Yesterday's celebration offered up both sides of the coin regarding that thing we call life.

Shortly before the celebration NESN showed a shot of the press box at Fenway. Specifically the seat Nick Cafardo used to sit in. There was a picture of him on the desk with roses sitting in front of it.

That really got to me.

Nick Cafardo was 62 years old when he died of an embolism at JetBlue Park, the Red Sox spring training home, on his day off on February 21. He was there because he loves the game.

Sixty fucking two.

He was a sports writer for the Boston Globe since 1989. He loved sports, especially loved baseball and supremely loved the Sox.

The guy was living his own dream when suddenly he gets cut down out of nowhere at an extremely unacceptable age.

On one side of the coin you have these young guys celebrating the greatest achievement of their lives in pure joy.  On the flip side of that coin you have a man whose life was ripped away from him, ending the career that he loved and no doubt destroying his family.

I could not get that dichotomy out of my head. Still can't.

The message to me (not that it will take) is this weird concept we call happiness. I think the most important choice a human can make is to find ways to be happy.

You ain't never going to be the world champion of anything. So you gotta figure out how to get happy, most likely in small doses, since life is diametrically opposed to a consistent state of happiness.

Knowing that you can get cut down by an embolism at the age of sixty two should inspire urgency in that quest.

Strangely enough, it just ain't that easy.