Opening day jitters

I think it was just after I'd left the area around the JFK/UMASS train station this morning that I decided driving into Boston for Opening Day was probably the worst idea I'd ever had.

It had sounded like such a great idea on Wednesday, when I'd fired off an e-mail suggestion to Bill. Both of us had Opening Day off, for the first and probably the only times in our working lives. We knew getting tickets at this point would be only slightly more difficult than convincing Sharon and Arafat to shake hands over a conference table, but part of being a Red Sox fan is convincing yourself that the impossible can happen on a
yearly basis.

With that in mind, I decided I'd beat the traffic heading into the city by taking the "T." I was late, as usual, leaving the apartment this morning, but I made good time getting to the Braintree "T" station. Unfortunately, the parking lot was full. No problem, I thought, and drove one highway exit over to the Quincy Adams station. Its parking lot was also full, as were the lots at Quincy Center and North Quincy. JFK/UMASS turned out not to even have a parking lot, which would have struck me as both cruel and unusual, had I not been driving like hell at that point to get to a little, out-of-the-way parking garage I know that's all the way over in Cambridge and always -- I mean always -- has spaces available.

Except today.

If my life was a movie -- and there's plenty of good evidence to suggest it might be -- the next sequence would show me cursing my way through the streets and packed parking garages of Boston, as neon "FULL" signs flashed above my head. I finally found a parking garage in Haymarket. (I don't even know where Haymarket is; I have no idea how I got there. I think it's mythical, like Brigadoon or Narnia or the alternate-universe Disney World they show in TV commercials where no one is spending their entire vacation in line: that may explain why a few parking
spaces were still available). The parking attendant assured me that one or two spaces could be found on the eighth floor. I thanked him and began the long, thankless climb to the sixth floor of the garage.

Yes, that's right, the sixth floor. Why the sixth floor? Because that's where the *@#$%^?! garage ends, or at least appears to end. As God is my witness, I circled the same cars at least three times before I realized that I wasn't leaving level 6. I knew there were levels of cars above me -- I could see them! -- but there was no way to get there. It was like being in one of those video games where you need to find the secret door so you can whack the little mushroom man with a turtle to make him spit out enough gold coins for you to advance to the next part of the
game. I should mention here that I don't like video games very much.

And then, just as I was about to aim my car for the space between the cement pilings, gun the engine, and plummet six levels while screaming "death from above!" I was there. On level eight. I hadn't done a single thing to get there -- I was just... there. It was as though the only way you could get there was by wanting to be there badly enough. This, in my opinion, made the Haymarket garage the most secure facility in which I'd ever parked, and I actually felt pretty good about leaving my car there while I crammed myself aboard the "T" for Fenway Park.

About the T: I've often wondered whether it would someday be interesting to participate in one of those mass journeys to bathe in the Ganges, or march around the walls of Mecca, or take part in any other pilgrimage that brought me close to hundreds of millions of my brothers and sisters, united in one purpose, brought together by a common bond. Interesting, I have now decided, is not what such a journey would be. Claustrophobic, foul-smelling, frustrating to the point of a seething rage -- those are better words to describe the pilgrimage experience. By the time the decrepit train chugged its way into Kenmore Station, I felt as
though I, personally, was ready to conduct a bloody purge of Red Sox Nation, beginning with everyone who tried to get on the already-full train while the doors were closing and ending with every idiot who roamed the streets asking for "just two" tickets fifteen minutes after the game had already started.

It's lucky, then, that I have a friend like Bill, for the following reasons:

1). Bill is probably the only person I know who is still glad to see me after I've shown up an hour late.

2). Bill turned down a chance to purchase a ticket to the game -- at only ten dollars above the regular outrageous price! --because there was only one ticket available.

3). Bill knows that the best response to any expression of grief, frustration, confusion or rage is "Have a drink," preferably followed by "It's on me." (He also uttered the immortal line: "Trying to understand women is like staring into a solar eclipse. You won't learn anything to your advantage, and you can really mess yourself up in the process.")

So we waited in line five minutes to get into the restaurant, and another five minutes to get one of those strange vibrating pagers that make me wonder what restaurant employees do in their off hours, and another five minutes for the bar, and another twenty minutes for a table, and in that time, Bill and I had managed to share with each other the miserable things that had happened in our lives during the past few weeks, and Pedro
Martinez managed to give up seven runs.

And then, at just about the moment I was prepared to trudge out of the restaurant and consign my stomach to an Italian sausage from a street vendor as a prelude to darker things -- the pager buzzed, we were seated, someone put a lot of food and drink in front of me, Tony Clark launched a baseball into the stratosphere and what seemed like the entire world around me launched into cheers you wouldn't have heard if the resurrected Elvis had just descended from the clouds with the cure for cancer in one hand and the results of the 2000 election in the other. Backs were slapped, glasses clinked, high-fives were high-fived, and the world's most cynical city exploded with shouts of "To-ny, To-ny, To-ny..." And for that one moment, I knew why I was there: why I'd come to Fenway, why I'd gotten up that morning, why God put me on earth to begin with, and why He'd seen fit to give me a
parking space, even if it took me a little while to find it. All was right with the world.