Mother's Day and No Baseball.

Today is Mother's Day. 

If you look at cards, advertisements for sales, store signs, etc., you may notice a variation of how this day is depicted. To wit:

Mother's Day
Mothers' Day
Mothers Day

The first two use the apostrophe to show the singular and plural possessive. The second merely refers to the plural nature of today being reserved for all mothers.

Today's lesson in grammar is that none of those uses matters. The lesson is that if you have a mother you damn well better wish her a happy one and probably buy her something nice.

Today is Mother's Day

We should be well into the second month of the MLB season, but this damn COVID-19 still has things shut down. There's baseball in South Korea, but no fans in the stands yet. There are people sparingly on golf courses, but no foursomes, and no PGA tournaments. The NBA and NHL should be in their end of season playoffs, but they're just now getting to allow players to practice and barely at that. And allow me to repeat NO BASEBALL!

There should be baseball if only to provide us with people of character like Lou Gehrig. You know that guy who gave us this speech:


The Gary Cooper film version touches all the high points of the original ends with those famous words, "today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." That line actually appears in the beginning of the speech. You can read the full text here.

As far as I know no films exist of the full speech, but some capture portions. This one talks a little about the difficulty of the day for Gehrig and captures a little of why the guy was important.





Suffice to say that Gehrig and the Cooper film, Pride of the Yankees, is one of the reasons I love baseball.

Today is Mother's Day

My first wife, Cathie, raised Jessica and and Josh. I had little to do with how they turned out other than their love of baseball. She was a good mom and I was just a lucky guy. I think she is somewhere smiling and proud of her work. She should be. 

My second wife, Susan, raised three daughters and a son. I had absolutely nothing to do with how they turned out, but I can see her handiwork in the adults they have become. She should be smiling and proud, too. She is a good mom, and I am still just a lucky guy.

How many guys can say they got to marry the woman of their dreams two times?  I can.

Lou Gehrig's got nothing on me.

A Viral Choice in a Leaderless Country

In 1972, Steve Goodman released his album, Somebody Else's Troubles.One of the tracks is “The Ballad of Penny Evans,” a tale of a widow of the Vietnam War.

Today, in three months, more people have died because of covid-19 related symptoms than died in ten years of Vietnam. More people have died from the virus than in car accidents all of last year.

Yet some people don’t think it’s that serious. Those people, simply, are wrong.

I just finished reading One Giant Leap, the book I mentioned about ten days ago. I urge people to read it, if only for the last chapter, “How Apollo Really Did Change the World.”

Charles Fishman writes:

“Americans like to be reminded of the best of their national character. And Americans want to be asked to do hard things. We want a mission, and we will do it. That’s part of the mythology we tell ourselves, of course, but it’s the reality as well. It is one of the invisible bonds, across education and wealth and opportunity. We rise to the occasion.”

And that much is true. Given the chance, we will come together.

Later in the chapter, Fishman also notes, “But we have to be asked. We have to be rallied to the cause.”

That is the problem with this virus thing. Our President hasn’t led. He hasn’t asked. Instead the administration’s steps have been chaotic and confusing with differing messages depending on the mood of the President or the whims of his sycophantic allies.

It should, then, come as no surprise that there are states that are closed and states that are open and people demanding to get haircuts.

If we had a focused message from a focused leader, this confusion wouldn’t be so blatantly apparent. No public official would be saying that, “well, okay, let the old people and the health-compromised people die, cuz, people want to go to the movies and restaurants.”

No one would be even considering that a certain number of deaths would be acceptable, let alone a moral choice to be made.

Without the coherent leadership we get no direction, no purpose, no consistent and universal desire to do what is right. Instead, we have people who won’t wear masks because it’s uncomfortable, or won’t get vaccinated if one becomes available, who think they have to get haircuts, or run around willy nilly because they want to.

We can accomplish great things as a nation. We have in the past. We can again. We must. This is not the time to think one way is better than another. This is the time to do the right thing whether we like it or not.

If we don’t, we might end up like a line in Steve Goodman’s song: “Tonight there’s 50000 gone in that forgotten land.” The choice is ours to make, not only for ourselves, but for our country. Will we be forgotten?