Congratulations must be paid to the Colorado Rockies.

In particular, I must congratulate my friend Brian -- friend in the sense that I don't know him, but he is the host of my favorite podcast, "Coverville" http://www.coverville.com/. Yeah, I'd do that hidden text thing if I knew how.

Okay, so with that endearing talent I have for bringing nearly every topic you can think of back to me, myself and I --

so there I was, home from work about 1:15 (don't ask -- that thing I said about the RSS? And November? Not exaggerating). So when you're somewhere you don't want to be until that hour and you get home, do you scrub things and virtuously hit the hay? Not if you're too wired with outrage, man! So you turn on the t.v. And so it came to pass that I was probably the only woman on the East Coast of the United States independently and willingly watching the Rockies clinch the NLCS, which occured at 1:38 a.m. eastern time.

Funny thing -- my second novel, "Nobody On, Nobody Out" -- remember that one? No, of course you don't. My first one was published. My second one was not. It was the autobiographical one like the kind people wrote before they wrote memoirs instead, was about a night in the life of a teenage girl in an alcoholic, motherless, baseball-obsessed family of men. On the night in question, the longest game in the history of baseball is being played. The game is seen and heard on the radio as various degrees of teenage drama unfold.

This is based on a game large in the legend of my childhood, between the St. Louis Cardinals and (I think?) the New York Mets. It ended around 1:20 -- I remember it being a contest of wills among my stepsiblings and I. We all fought to stay awake and keep company my constantly Cardinal-enraged father, Job-like in his baseball sufferings. The next day, at breakfast, we confessed, shamefully, the exact hour of our capitulation to sleep. Dad, grim-jawed (if you want anything done right, you've got to do it your goddamn self!) , had stayed true to the end, alone in the kitchen, rattling his ice before the quavering dogs, snapping off the radio with his trademarked hand-grenade click of the dial. I don't remember how that game ended, only that the game seemed as though it would never end.

Later I learned that in the American League, it is possible to call a curfew if the game goes past a certain time (typical! pansies!) So in the unpublished novel (editors? agents? Bueller?), I made the game an American League game, and brought back to life the St. Louis Browns and created as their rival a team in Denver. The Rockies. The Denver Rockies.

And a year or so later, the Colorado Rockies. And for that reason, if not for their wholesome image and nice-seeming fans, I'm on their side.

Labels: Coverville, great never--published second novels, the Colorado Rockies

posted by Elizabeth at 1:05 AM