Michael Joseph O’Brien’s grave in St. Joseph’s cemetery, West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Bill Nemitz/Staff Writer
Dear Gramp,
I never thought I’d get the chance to do this. But here I am, standing over your grave in Section G of St. Joseph Cemetery in West Roxbury, six miles as the baseball flies from Fenway Park, to tell you something I’m sure you already know.
They did it. For the first time in 86 years, the Boston Red Sox are champions of the world.
So why, you must wonder, did I drive all the way down from Maine to stand in the middle of this cemetery with a Red Sox balloon in my hand and this dumb grin on my face?
Because for so many years, Gramp, when people have asked me to explain my undying love for the Boston Red Sox, I’ve ended up talking about you.
I tell them that Michael Joseph O’Brien was my beloved grandfather, that he worked for years as a Boston police officer, that he did his job so well that the good people of Chinatown once named him their honorary mayor.
I tell them how, after Grandma died and you moved into the Elks Club in Quincy, you’d drive up to Needham in your big black Buick – the one with the big fins on the back – to spend your Saturdays with your daughter, her husband and your four, five, six, seven . . . make that eight grandchildren.
I tell them how even before you got out of your car, the neighborhood kids would come running because they knew your pockets would be stuffed with Bazooka bubble gum – and you always brought enough for everyone. How you’d rub my fresh crew cut and say “Hi, Smiley!” while my friends looked on with unabashed envy.
I tell them how, on those sweltering summer afternoons, we’d sit and watch the Sox while Curt Gowdy did his best to make a horrible team sound good. How you’d chuckle one minute, swear under your breath the next and wonder if you’d ever again see the likes of the 1946 team that won the pennant but lost the World Series, or the 1918 team that won it all. How old were you back then . . . 19?
But most of all, I tell people how you were the filter through which I came to know the Red Sox. How I worshipped Eddie Bressoud not because he’d ever be a Hall of Fame shortstop, but because Gramp liked him and that, at the tender age of 10, was good enough for me.
I remember how I used to brag that when you went south for the winter – first to Scottsdale and later to Florida – you not only watched the Red Sox train but actually talked with them! “My Gramp knows the Red Sox,” I’d boast to my classmates at St. Joseph’s School. “He actually knows them!”
I also remember that terrible day in February of 1965 when Dad woke me for school and, as gently as he could, told me that you’d been out visiting friends in Florida the night before, that you got up to get pictures of your grandchildren, that you suddenly collapsed, that the ambulance came and took you to the hospital . . . but it was too late. I remember dropping my school clothes on the floor and managing to get out only one word: “No!”
As you know, Gramp, Billy Herman’s Red Sox went 62-100 that year – one of their worst seasons ever. But I kept watching. Win or lose, it didn’t matter. The more I chewed on my bubble gum, the more I heard Curt Gowdy say, “Hi, neighbor! Have a ‘Gansett,” the closer I felt to you.
So many times since those days I’ve found myself in the bleachers at Fenway or in front of a television, imploring you to use whatever clout you have up there to turn our Sox from lovable losers into lasting champions.
Did you see me in 1967, blinking back the tears as Bob Gibson and the Cardinals mowed us down in Game 7?
Were you as stunned as I was in 1975, when we won Game 6 heroically against Pete Rose and the Reds, only to lose another Game 7?
And where in heaven were you in 1986, Gramp, when Mookie Wilson hit that grounder to Bill Buckner and . . . well, you know the rest. Did you wince and mutter under your breath one of those words you thought I couldn’t hear? Or did you just shake your head and, with that ever-present twinkle in your eye, say, “Here we go again, Smiley. Here we go again . . .”
I’ve tried to explain to your great-grandchildren over the years that loving the Red Sox is not, as many non-believers insist, an exercise in self-flagellation. Rather, I’ve told them, it’s an affirmation of hope, a belief that the past, no matter how dark and deeply rooted, need not dictate the future.
I’ve told them, as you so often told me, that we love the Sox because there’s always next year.
Well, Gramp, next year finally arrived.
I thought about you the other night when they showed the blood seeping through Curt Schilling’s sock – living proof that they’d actually sutured the guy’s tendon to his skin so he could pitch on his gimpy ankle. I remembered how you used to say, “Pitchers are cream puffs! A hockey player gets cut, gets stitched up and goes back out on the ice. But a pitcher gets a hangnail and he has to come out of the game!”
What do you think now, Gramp? Is this what we needed all along to win the big one – the shedding of real human blood on the altar we call Fenway?
You’re going to hear a lot of noise a few miles to the east this morning – some say it will be loud enough to wake the dead. They expect three million people to come to Boston to celebrate the first Red Sox world championship in 86 years. (I suspect many more are already celebrating where you are.)
After that, who knows? Already I hear some Sox fans worrying that life around Fenway Park will never be the same. They’ve wrapped themselves in The Curse for so long that they now cling to it like some kind of threadbare security blanket.
Not me, Gramp. I’m loving it. The more I see that final out replayed over and over and over, the more I hear you promising that someday . . . someday . . . someday . . . the Sox will give us something to cheer about.
Standing here in the late October chill, I realize like never before that this whole Red Sox thing is about a lot more than what goes on between the foul lines. It has been all along.
It’s about grandfathers and grandsons.
It’s about bubble gum and Buicks.
It’s about time passing and, every once in awhile, time standing still.
Nice visiting with you, Gramp. At long last, may you rest in peace.
Love,
Smiley
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
