Another bite at the apple
How often in life do you get another bite of the apple, a second chance?
How many relationships dissolve, how many business deals fail, how many everyday affairs run amok, only to have people muttering to themselves for weeks, months, or even years to come, ''If only I had that moment back."
They rarely do, which is life. Situations come, situations go, futures are dictated by rash and sometimes ill-thought decisions. The only power that people are left with is that of adaptation, and that's not really a power at all, just a necessity.
Wouldn't Michael Dukakis like to revise his answer at the 1988 debate to the question of whether he'd favor the death penalty for someone who raped and killed his wife? Wouldn't Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden like to have that episode back when O.J. Simpson tried squeezing his hand into a glove that didn't seem to fit? Wouldn't countless numbers of us wish that we bit our tongue, turned the other way, or said something that needed to be said at some crucial point in time?
Now, in the autumn of 2004, a baseball team and the city that loves it have the moment to relive. The Red Sox have given us another bite of what has been a very bitter apple, and that, for the next week, is the singular beauty and the majesty of being in Boston.
Novelist John Cheever once famously said, ''All literary men are Red Sox fans," and the series that begins tonight at Yankee Stadium is yet another reason why. It's almost too perfect, this rematch of last year's magical but disastrous showdown, mystically predetermined in its makeup, exquisitely undetermined in its likely outcome. Literary men may be Red Sox fans, but the literature they write is rarely as compelling as the story line of this team.
In perhaps the best baseball book of all time, ''The Natural," Bernard Malamud writes, ''We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that." Starting tonight, the Red Sox have the chance to merge the two.
So here we are, same time, new year, best rivalry in all of sports, but more than that, a chance for a self-proclaimed ''bunch of idiots" to make amends for the past, not just for themselves, but for us, to do what we so often find ourselves unable to do.
Boston, the city, has been hell-bent on righting wrongs of late. It was wrong for the area to be a bastion of racial segregation for so long, and now it's not. It was wrong for the Central Artery to create an ugly gash through most of downtown, and now it won't. It was wrong for us to be as provincial as we've always been, and now we aren't.
And it was wrong that Grady Little (otherwise, a damned good manager) left Pedro Martinez in the game for as long as he did, and now it might not matter so much. It might not matter so much because just one year later, we have another chance.
It's never simply about the game at hand with this team, but always something more.
Usually, it's futility. We long the most for that which we can't seem to have, which these days is a World Series appearance, let alone the actual title. Sometimes, it's vulnerability. Just when we are most confident, as we were in the late innings of Game 7 last year, is the point at which they let us down.
To be a lifelong Red Sox fan is to accept this fate to its godless core, then to cheer in groundless optimism.
But now there's something different at play: redemption. We have been given that rare gift of another bite at the apple, a true second chance.
Who among us wouldn't crave the same opportunity in our lives? Who isn't living vicariously through this team for having it now?
Malamud also wrote that ''Suffering is what brings us toward happiness." That being the case, this October should be nothing short of ecstatic all around town.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. His email is mcgrory@globe.com
