Nope, not slacking even more than usual -- I'm on vacation. Due back at my post Tuesday, July 7, but I'll probably crank out a column or two before then given that Maine has apparently switched climates with Seattle.

This may come as breaking news to certain newbie fans, but Jerry Remy hasn't always been affiliated with the Red Sox.

While today it seems like the Massachusetts native, ex-player, and ubiquitous broadcaster is positioned to be the successor to Johnny Pesky as Mr. Red Sox -- meaning, I suppose, that he'll be freezing his RemDawg biscuits off for a silly photo op come Truck Day 2035 -- he actually spent the first three years of his major-league life as an Angel (1975-77).

I suppose it's easy to overlook, since the Angels were historically inept when Remy was there, and he didn't stick around long, coming to the Sox in a trade for pitcher Don Aase in December 1977.

Maybe it's a case of fiction mimicking reality, but Remy didn't last long with my inept Angels, either. Let me explain.

(Here's where I put the disclaimer: If no one wants to hear a way-too-long tale about the team I'm running -- and ruining -- in a simulated baseball game, no worries. Check back in Monday for the obligatory A-Rod hatchet job.)

The back story: A few months ago, Mike Lynch, an author and the founder of Seamheads.com, invited a group of baseball writers, broadcasters, bloggers, and even a certain computer-savvy ex-pitcher to participate in his Historical Simulation Baseball League.

The list of "owners" includes Bill James (Red Sox), Joe Posnanski (Indians), Jonah Keri (Les Expos), Roy Firestone (Orioles), and Curt Schilling (Pirates). Oh, and me -- I've got the California/Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels. I'm not sure how I ended up among this formidable and famous crew, though I suspect it might have to do with Lynch being a Red Sox fan. Frankly, I'm just hoping to get through the season without Firestone making me cry.

The ground rules: The league is made up of 28 teams, with the fledgling Rockies and Diamondbacks merged into one franchise, as are the Marlins and Rays. Each participant put together a 40-man roster from the entire history of the team they chose to oversee. A computer game then simulates a 162-game season (plus playoffs and World Series), with each team's owner (or general manager or whatever you want to call it) making the appropriate personnel and lineup moves along the way.

Performance is based only on what the players did for that franchise -- so my Angels have the creaky but still useful late-career Frank Robinson, not the Triple-Crown-in-'66 F-Robby. Also, players' stats are put in a historically neutral context -- meaning, say, 'roided-up sluggers who put up sick numbers in 1998 are actually human -- which is why I strongly considered adjusted ERA and OPS+ in determining the roster.

With my head hanging in mock shame, I apologize for the lack of wild blogging action in this space the past few days. The wonderful (and to me, somewhat unexpected) news about Mr. Rice, a superhero of my youth, kept me crazy-busy Monday. Tuesday is the day I peck out my weekly "OT" piece (only 50 cents at a newsstand near you!), and I'm mysteriously out of the office today. (TMZ is reporting I'm being treated for "exhaustion" at Betty Ford, but it's really just another step in my ongoing recovery from eating too much Elmer's Glue as a child. Okay, and Play-Doh. And the occasional No. 2 pencil. We all have our vices, people.)

Anyway, either tonight or tomorrow I'm going to try to pull together my first mailbag since . . . well, I'm not sure how long it's been, but it's definitely the first one since I left the old Blogger neighborhood and settled in to Boston.com in April. I've got a decent amount of questions queued up already, but I'd love to have more, so send them via my e-mail address in the right column, post them in the comments here, or even drop me a note on Facebook, and I'll answer the best of the lot. And probably a few of the worst as well.

The bylines of many of the sportswriters I admired long before I was fortunate enough to make this my career surely are familiar to you. Fitzgerald and Montville, Gammons and Ryan -- in New England and beyond, their surnames are nearly as recognizable as those of the athletes they covered.

Today, I want to take a moment to pay tribute to another wonderful sportswriter, one you probably do not know unless you are from a certain corner of Maine, but one who had a more profound impact on my life and career than any of those more famous men.

Dave Bourque, a sportswriter and editor at the Times Record newspaper in Maine for nearly 40 years, died last Friday at age 70. The cause was congestive heart failure, a particularly cruel irony given that, by all accounts, his heart never failed anyone else.

Every small town has someone like Dave, and if it doesn't, well, it damn well should. In the little coastal community of Bath where I grew up, local sports were a community social event, and the games mattered. Dave was the documenter of record, the institutional memory and one-man archive of local sports knowledge. He seemed to know everyone and everyone certainly knew him, and I'd bet a good majority of them would agree he was among the genuinely funniest people they ever met, quick, sarcastic, and gruff in that endearing way. (A friend remembers him greeting a coach immediately after a less-than-aesthetically-classic game with this opening line: "I've been watching these Morse-Brunswick games for years, and I can say that was the worst half of basketball I have ever seen.")

He fit the stereotypes of an old-school newspaperman, with ink on his hands, worn soles on his shoes, and a wisecrack always at the ready. I always thought he looked like an obscure character from the comic strip "Shoe." He would have fit in with that cigar-chomping Chicago crew from "Sportswriters on TV." Yeah, you could say he looked the part.

But my personal admiration of him comes from more than his ability to write a game story, craft a feature, or pry a decent quote from a self-important coach, for Dave was a kind and generous friend to my family, playing a supporting role in my earliest memories, and in some of my best ones.

When I was a toddler, the local Babe Ruth League ball field was just a long fly ball from my family's front door, and a few seasons before I fell for the Red Sox, I can remember watching his teams play. He coached in the Bath Babe Ruth league for 25 years, and the legend is that he never had a losing season, though I'm not sure I buy it. After all, you'd think someone who had built a local dynasty of that proportion would have alienated someone along the way. If he did, it's front-page news to me.

When I played for my high school's powerhouse basketball team -- and by "played," I mean clapped for my superior teammates at all the appropriate times -- he was there just about every Tuesday and Friday game night, holding his notepad and and camera at his usual spot near the baseline, covering the latest Morse High victory and taking photos for the newspaper. On occasion -- or perhaps more often than that -- my mom would ask him if he had snapped any pictures of her son, and his standard bone-dry reply went something like this: "I would, Pat, if I could just get one of him shooting with his eyes open."

Dave always could make my mom laugh -- they had worked together at the newspaper decades before, and even in recent years, when his health deteriorated, every now and again he'd take a moment to call her just to check in and catch up. Often, he'd tell her he'd heard from his son Matt, now an associate commissioner of America East, that I was doing well. I wish I'd taken a moment to tell him how much I appreciated that.

I had intended to write about Dave when I got the sad news a week ago, but as usual, the clock refused to cooperate. It's been a hectic week here at the office, chasing news about contract extensions for adored MVPs and trying to get the story straight about the ancient linebacker's unlikely comeback. They are wildly enjoyable days, though sometimes it's frustrating when the never-ending news cycle leaves you with little opportunity for reflection. I take solace in knowing that a lifer like Dave would understand -- though I suspect he'd also give me hell for missing deadline.

Amidst the sadness, the thought keeps coming to me that his must have been a remarkably rewarding and fulfulling life. The luckiest among us find their calling early, and Dave certainly fit in that category. I too have been so fortunate, having wanted to be a sportswriter from the moment it dawned on me that I probably was not going to replace Danny Ainge in the Celtics starting lineup. In high school, Dave was the only sportswriter I knew personally, and so I watched and observed how he approached his job. It was one of the smartest things I've ever done.

Dave was not a particularly flashy writer, and his copy never read like he was auditioning for "Around The Horn: Midcoast Maine Edition." He worked with a more honest purpose -- to be fair and accurate, to tell a worthwhile story.

For nearly 40 years, Dave Bourque wrote about good and unsung people who deserved recognition, but didn't seek it.

Today, I'm proud to do the same.

When you're a father, especially of a little girl, you change as a man. It's true. You become softer, more sentimental. Maybe you even start listening to Coldplay.

In those whirlwind first moments as a parent, you recognize your wife - the entire gender, actually - as impossibly heroic and strong. That is, unless you happen to be A-Rod. Then you black out and go all fetal until a less-than-impressed nurse meets your demands of a cold compress, some lip gloss, and a glass of Sunny Delight.

When you're a father, you fret more about the ominous condition of the world and its maelstrom of a future. You worry about failing those who depend on you, in ways both small and significant. The blunt humor in Chris Rock's famous "A father's only duty is to keep his daughter off the pole!" routine suddenly applies you, and you shiver when you realize your darling and innocent 4-year-old is but a decade away from being hit on by Roger Clemens.

When you're a father, you realize how crucial it is to cement those lifelong bonds early - you show me tonight's featured performer at the Golden Banana, and I'll show you someone with a long and heartbreaking history of daddy issues. But I must admit, there's also an air of selfishness to my intentions: I desperately want my daughter to love the same things I do. Which, you might have suspected, pretty much begins with the Red Sox.

My complex and intensive program of brainwashing began in October, '04, when Leah was eight months old and plucked out of a rare deep sleep in her crib just so her daddy could someday tell her she was "watching" as Edgar Renteria grounded to Keith Foulke and all heaven broke loose in New England. To this day, it remains the only time I've held her since her day of birth where I was the one with welling eyes.

I'm sure similar scenes played out in living rooms all over New England that glorious night (man, how I regret not honoring her on SoSH's legendary "Win It For . . ." thread) but I must report that, 3 1/2 years later, she's not yet a candidate for the Red Sox Nation early admissions program.

Oh, she'll watch with me from time to time, mostly to avoid being sentenced to an early bedtime, and she'll gleefully identify Manny and Papi, though I think she looks at them as cartoon characters, daddy's personal versions of Max and Ruby. (Which, in a sense, is exactly what they are.) But mostly, the Red Sox remain my thing; she sees herself as a big girl, and she has her own business to keep herself occupied.

Leah never fails to amaze and amuse us with her uncommon independence; she was born with a mind of her own, and she sure is determined to use it. She enjoys being a girly-girl, loves wearing dresses and mothering her dollies, but she's not all sugar and spice; her daily to-do list includes digging for worms in the backyard, and just yesterday she informed me that her new pink bike really could use an oil change. If she's going to care about the Red Sox, she will do it in her own time. Right now, she has worms to accidentally dismember.

Maybe the notion of taking her to a Red Sox game was a season or two premature. Sure it was. But dammit, I just couldn't wait. My parents first brought me to Fenway at age 8 in 1978, and you longtime readers are well aware of my sepia-toned odes to that enduring memory from my childhood; hell, I still remember thinking, "Holy crap! That's Butch Hobson!" as he took his position not too far in front of us at third base. For some reason, I also remember that his neck looked really red. In retrospect, I suppose that was an oddly appropriate impression of 'Bama Butch.

As it worked out, a homestand or two ago, I came into some tickets, and we decided it would be the right time for Leah's big-league debut. When the night arrived, I hoped all the usual cliches would apply, the same ones that applied to me 30 years ago and still linger today. I wanted her to be awed by the sprawling emerald grass and the enormity of the Green Monster, to marvel at the Prudential building in the distance and the players so close that they can hear your cheers. I wanted her to fall in love with Fenway, baseball, the Red Sox, and I wanted it to happen for her the exact same way it happened for me.

As strolled up the ramp and the Fenway scene unfurled before us, her jaw dropped ever so slightly and her eyes widened like Manny's when he spies a fat slider coming his way. But she was not overwhelmed, or even especially awed. She was almost immediately comfortable, whether it was chattering at our companions for the game, my good friend Yuri and his sweet and lovely almost-7-year-old daughter, Grace, or yelling "GOPAPI! GOPAPI! GOPAPI! as he chugged into third base, or angling for position to high-five Wally the Green Monster, or systematically devouring one of the great inventions of modern times, an ice-cream sundae in a mini batting helmet.

It was wonderful and sweet and easy, though that's not to suggest we were without a tense moment. Sometime in the middle innings, she turned to me with a concerned look on her face and uttered those words every dad in a public place with his daughter dreads hearing: "Daddy . . . I gotta pee. Bad." I'll tell you that I did cover her eyes as I guided her to a stall in the gruesome men's room, though I can't help but wonder what the occupant in the neighboring stall thought when he heard a little girl's voice blurt, "Daddy, I think there's a guy poopin' in the next one over." We washed up and zipped out of there before she could find out for sure. I only wish I could have hosed her down with Lysol afterward.

Our foursome made it through seven innings, one fewer than Josh Beckett threw in victory that night, and I'm pretty sure she could have gone the distance had we not decided it was prudent to be back in our beds in Maine before mommy broke out the Worry-O-Meter.

As we made our way home, with Leah fighting a losing battle to stay awake in her car seat, I realized that for her, the fun was in the adventure - getting to stay up much later than her little brother (who you know is pre-booked for his first Fenway trek in two years), riding in the car to go to faraway Boston where daddy works, seeing those twin shrines to tackiness on Rt. 1, soaring high into the city on the Tobin ("the biggest bridge EVER!"), and getting to feel like a big girl in the big city.

I hope the details stay with her as she grows older and up . . . well, except for that one about the rancid potty. If they don't, I'll be there to retell the tales.

Because when you're a father, your sentimental heart doesn't let you forget.