So, my Tigers will be sitting out the playoffs, after having led their division since the middle of May (OK, so it was a lousy division; so what?), having had a 7-game lead with 21 to play, and a three-game lead with four to play. It ain't quite the '64 Phillies, or the '87 Blue Jays, but it'll join the list of egregious late-season chokes, for sure. Take nothing away from the Twins, though - they were relentless, and finishing 17-4 in their last 21 games is simply astonishing.
But, aside from being a Tiger fan, that was an amazing 12-inning game last night, with Never-Say-Die heroics on both sides, from the 7th inning through to the end. But come on, guys - twice, you had a runner on third with less than two out, and didn't score (and Curtis Granderson, what were you thinking, getting doubled off first base on a one-out liner in the 9th, when the lead run was on third in front of you? That was horrible. . .). But Rick Porcello pitched like a veteran, not a 20-year-old rookie (and since when are major-league ballplayers younger than my own sons, anyway?); and Ryan Rayburn throwing out the winning run at the plate in the 10th. . . that was take-your-breath-away dramatic.
(*sigh*) Maybe next year. . .
But hey, at least my Spartans beat the hated Wolverines last weekend (and you can trust me when I say that the Wolverines are hated in these parts); so we've finally beaten them in consecutive years for the first time since I was eleven years old. . .
And Molly left a monkey in my lunch today. . .
Showing posts with label Detroit Tigers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Detroit Tigers. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Growing Up In the 60s
I was born in 1956, the last year of President Eisenhower’s first term, and my adoption was final a few weeks after his second inaugural. I have vague memories of Elvis from when I was a small child. I was seven when President Kennedy was assassinated, the same weekend that our family moved Up North. The Viet Nam war, and the anti-war protests, dominated the headlines for most of my junior-high and high school years; my first campus visit to the mega-university which today is my alma mater had to be re-routed due to a massive sit-in which closed the main avenue through town.
But, for me personally, in my own young life, three things captured my imagination during the Sixties – the Beatles and their music, the space program, and the Detroit Tigers. . .
-------------------------
I was a month or so shy of my eighth birthday when the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. I really couldn’t tell you what it was that so struck my young fancy, but I was instantly smitten. The next day, I, along with most of the boys in my 2nd-grade class, collected such length of hair as we had available, and combed it forward, imitating, as best we could manage, their ‘long’ hair (and it is a source of considerable amusement to me, in retrospect, how really tame those 1964-vintage haircuts were, especially considering our parents’ reactions to them; to say nothing of what came to be considered ‘long hair’ in subsequent years).
I talked my mom into taking me to see ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (and ‘Help!’ a year later), and I turned such disposable cash as I could scrape together into 45rpm records (the ones with the huge center-hole, containing one song on each side; for my birthday, or other occasions where I might have a bit more available cash, I could afford a whole album!), which I played until they were too scratchy to hear anymore. One of my cousins actually went to one of their concerts, at the Olympia in Detroit, which made me quite envious, and miffed at my own parents that they wouldn’t take me (the five-hour drive notwithstanding).
The Beatles’ musical development seemed to track perfectly my own growth process - I was 10 when ‘Revolver’ came out, 11 for ‘Sgt. Pepper’, 12 for the White Album, and 13 for ‘Abbey Road’ – and their songs, like ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Get Back’, ‘Something’, ‘Let It Be’, etc, etc, became the soundtrack for my adolescence. I memorized entire albums, and I can still sing dozens of their songs, by memory, from beginning to end.
I’d be hard-pressed to tell you why the Beatles captured my imagination the way they did. I suppose their music was just interesting (at a time I was learning to play) and a lot of fun.
I was 14 when Paul McCartney put out his first solo album, effectively announcing the breakup of the Beatles. But their music remained popular all through my college years, and beyond. I followed their solo careers, and some of the music was still very good (I still regret not at least trying to get tickets when Wings came to Detroit in ’76, but I was a poor college student at the time), but it wasn’t quite the same. And when John Lennon was murdered a few months after my wedding, it just put the final ending to all the hopes of a Reunion Tour (which, c’mon, wouldn’t have been the same, either; but it would’ve been a hell of a lot of fun), and the Beatles passed definitively, once-and-for-all, into history. . .
-------------------------
I was within a week or two of my sixth birthday (maybe it’s a February thing) when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and that was the beginning of what has become a lifelong fascination with space and space exploration, and other worlds. . .
Especially when I was in 5th grade, during the heyday of Project Gemini, my teacher would bring a TV set into our classroom, to watch the launches and splashdowns, and all the talking heads playing with the models of rockets and space capsules, and it was all very cool, thinking about being in outer space, where the sky was black, and there was no air, and no gravity. Such a strange, exotic place!
But the real kicker came over Christmas of ’68, when I was in 8th grade, and Apollo 8 orbited the moon. That was just the most incredible thing – three men in what was really a tiny little can were a quarter-million miles from earth, orbiting another heavenly body! I was glued to the TV set watching the pictures that Christmas Eve, of the lunar surface passing below the Apollo spacecraft. And the Earthrise photograph that came back from Apollo 8 was one of the great paradigm-shifting images of all time – suddenly, the earth didn’t seem quite so huge – just the notion that those three men in their tin can could look out their window, and see the earth whole and entire, rising above the surface of the moon, and really kinda small against the backdrop of space, was a revolutionary shift of perspective.
And I was advancing in my own education to the point where I could begin to have some understanding of just what the physics of space flight were, and how the machines worked. (It was maybe 15 years or so ago, that young engineers started coming into the work force, who were born after the moon landings; I remember asking one of them, “Without the space program, whatever inspired you to become an engineer?” Because so many of the engineers of my generation grew up watching the moon shots on TV).
The following summer, when I was 13, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I, and my whole family, along with most of the United States, and a large proportion of the entire world, watched in awe as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually walked on the surface of the moon – another world, entirely separate from the earth! I was utterly, completely fascinated, and I spent hours reading all I could get my hands on about it, and imagining what it was like to be there, on another world, and fly in a spaceship, and all that stuff.
The moon landings continued, roughly two a year, for four more years, ending in December 1972, my senior year of high school. And I was glued to the TV set for every one of them. At the time, Apollo 13 was a huge disappointment to me, but I have since come to understand the magnitude of the accomplishment of simply bringing three men home safely, whose spacecraft had exploded 200,000 miles from home. But once the moon landings resumed, the TV images of lunar mountains, and astronauts driving moon-buggies across the moon, just never got old for me.
Once I was in college, though, the moon landings were securely in the past. The Skylab missions were interesting, in their way, for a year or so more, but earth orbit seemed like a tame retreat, after the exotic glory of seeing men walk on another world. But some of the engineers who helped put those men on the moon became my professors, and even if I never got close to the space program myself, it left an indelible mark on my psyche and my intellect. . .
-------------------------
It’s funny, but even growing up in Michigan, I really didn’t follow the Tigers until 1965, when I was nine years old. Until then, I’d been pretty much of a bookish little nerd. I had vague memories of Rocky Colavito (all the little kids tried to imitate his ‘stretching exercises’ with the bat in the on-deck circle) and Jim Bunning, and the ’61 Tigers who chased the Yankees into September. But, my dad had to force me to go out for my first baseball team; physical activity just wasn’t my first choice of activities, at that age.
But, in ’65, my ‘first mother’ left, and Dad started dating the woman who would eventually become my ‘new mother’. She had a son who was my age, and he was a complete sports nut. So, at least partly out of self-defense, and partly just so I could have something to talk with him about, I started to follow the Tigers, who were an average-to-above-average team that year, with a promising crop of young players like Bill Freehan, Willie Horton, Mickey Lolich and Denny McLain, to go along with established veterans like Al Kaline and Norm Cash.
Kaline, especially, grabbed my imagination – something about the quiet, elegant way he played the game, at such a level of excellence, just compelled my attention. Because of him, I think, to this day, my favorite play in baseball is the right-fielder throwing to third base, to keep the runner on first from advancing two bases on a single (or even better, to throw the runner out on the attempt).
And in 1968, it all came together for my Tigers. They got on this incredible roll, and just never looked back. Denny McLain (one of the great assholes in sports history, by the way) won 31 games (the only 30-game winner between 1934 and the present day); Jim Northrup hit four grand slams (three of them in a week, and two in one game); and something like 40 times, the Tigers won a game in which they were behind after the 7th inning. My dad took us to a game in August, against the Chicago White Sox; Mickey Stanley tied the game on a home run in the 8th inning, and Jim Price (go to the head of the class if you remember Jim Price) won it with a homer in the 10th.
The ’68 Tigers won the American League pennant going away, and played the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. After falling behind three games to one (and with Denny McLain being thoroughly outclassed by Bob Gibson), the Tigers came back (in typical fashion) to win the Series, largely on the left arm of Mickey Lolich. I still look back on Game 5, when Mayo Smith left Lolich in to hit in the seventh inning, trailing by a run, and Al Kaline drove in the go-ahead run in the pivotal game of the Series. The Tigers won Game 6 behind Denny McLain (finally not matched up against Bob Gibson) and a 10-run inning (featuring another Jim Northrup grand slam), and then Lolich beat Gibson in a tense Game 7, when Northrup’s triple flew over Curt Flood’s head. For a 12-year-old Tiger fan, there could not have been anything closer to heaven – the Tigers were World Champions!
The Tigers stayed decent for a few more years, winning their division in ’72, before losing the ALCS to the Oakland A’s. But by the time I was in college, all the players I’d grown up watching were getting old, and the team was rebuilding, toward another eventual championship in ’84, which was very cool in its own right, but by then, I was married and a father, and the Tigers didn’t absorb my attention like they did when I was 12. . .
-------------------------
The Sixties, as such, at least in terms of the popular imagination, really ran from 1964 or so (they could be considered as starting with the Kennedy assassination, or the Beatles on Ed Sullivan) and ending roughly 10 years later (roughly with Watergate and the Nixon resignation, or the final pullout from Viet Nam). The headlines were filled with Viet Nam, and the anti-war movement; the popular culture suddenly became ‘druggier’ than it had been before; hair got longer – a LOT longer – and the sexual revolution took hold. All of those things were the cultural backdrop of my growing-up years.
But the things that most caught my youthful imagination were the Beatles, the moon landings, and the Detroit Tigers. . .
But, for me personally, in my own young life, three things captured my imagination during the Sixties – the Beatles and their music, the space program, and the Detroit Tigers. . .
-------------------------
I was a month or so shy of my eighth birthday when the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. I really couldn’t tell you what it was that so struck my young fancy, but I was instantly smitten. The next day, I, along with most of the boys in my 2nd-grade class, collected such length of hair as we had available, and combed it forward, imitating, as best we could manage, their ‘long’ hair (and it is a source of considerable amusement to me, in retrospect, how really tame those 1964-vintage haircuts were, especially considering our parents’ reactions to them; to say nothing of what came to be considered ‘long hair’ in subsequent years).
I talked my mom into taking me to see ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (and ‘Help!’ a year later), and I turned such disposable cash as I could scrape together into 45rpm records (the ones with the huge center-hole, containing one song on each side; for my birthday, or other occasions where I might have a bit more available cash, I could afford a whole album!), which I played until they were too scratchy to hear anymore. One of my cousins actually went to one of their concerts, at the Olympia in Detroit, which made me quite envious, and miffed at my own parents that they wouldn’t take me (the five-hour drive notwithstanding).
The Beatles’ musical development seemed to track perfectly my own growth process - I was 10 when ‘Revolver’ came out, 11 for ‘Sgt. Pepper’, 12 for the White Album, and 13 for ‘Abbey Road’ – and their songs, like ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Get Back’, ‘Something’, ‘Let It Be’, etc, etc, became the soundtrack for my adolescence. I memorized entire albums, and I can still sing dozens of their songs, by memory, from beginning to end.
I’d be hard-pressed to tell you why the Beatles captured my imagination the way they did. I suppose their music was just interesting (at a time I was learning to play) and a lot of fun.
I was 14 when Paul McCartney put out his first solo album, effectively announcing the breakup of the Beatles. But their music remained popular all through my college years, and beyond. I followed their solo careers, and some of the music was still very good (I still regret not at least trying to get tickets when Wings came to Detroit in ’76, but I was a poor college student at the time), but it wasn’t quite the same. And when John Lennon was murdered a few months after my wedding, it just put the final ending to all the hopes of a Reunion Tour (which, c’mon, wouldn’t have been the same, either; but it would’ve been a hell of a lot of fun), and the Beatles passed definitively, once-and-for-all, into history. . .
-------------------------
I was within a week or two of my sixth birthday (maybe it’s a February thing) when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and that was the beginning of what has become a lifelong fascination with space and space exploration, and other worlds. . .
Especially when I was in 5th grade, during the heyday of Project Gemini, my teacher would bring a TV set into our classroom, to watch the launches and splashdowns, and all the talking heads playing with the models of rockets and space capsules, and it was all very cool, thinking about being in outer space, where the sky was black, and there was no air, and no gravity. Such a strange, exotic place!
But the real kicker came over Christmas of ’68, when I was in 8th grade, and Apollo 8 orbited the moon. That was just the most incredible thing – three men in what was really a tiny little can were a quarter-million miles from earth, orbiting another heavenly body! I was glued to the TV set watching the pictures that Christmas Eve, of the lunar surface passing below the Apollo spacecraft. And the Earthrise photograph that came back from Apollo 8 was one of the great paradigm-shifting images of all time – suddenly, the earth didn’t seem quite so huge – just the notion that those three men in their tin can could look out their window, and see the earth whole and entire, rising above the surface of the moon, and really kinda small against the backdrop of space, was a revolutionary shift of perspective.
And I was advancing in my own education to the point where I could begin to have some understanding of just what the physics of space flight were, and how the machines worked. (It was maybe 15 years or so ago, that young engineers started coming into the work force, who were born after the moon landings; I remember asking one of them, “Without the space program, whatever inspired you to become an engineer?” Because so many of the engineers of my generation grew up watching the moon shots on TV).
The following summer, when I was 13, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I, and my whole family, along with most of the United States, and a large proportion of the entire world, watched in awe as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually walked on the surface of the moon – another world, entirely separate from the earth! I was utterly, completely fascinated, and I spent hours reading all I could get my hands on about it, and imagining what it was like to be there, on another world, and fly in a spaceship, and all that stuff.
The moon landings continued, roughly two a year, for four more years, ending in December 1972, my senior year of high school. And I was glued to the TV set for every one of them. At the time, Apollo 13 was a huge disappointment to me, but I have since come to understand the magnitude of the accomplishment of simply bringing three men home safely, whose spacecraft had exploded 200,000 miles from home. But once the moon landings resumed, the TV images of lunar mountains, and astronauts driving moon-buggies across the moon, just never got old for me.
Once I was in college, though, the moon landings were securely in the past. The Skylab missions were interesting, in their way, for a year or so more, but earth orbit seemed like a tame retreat, after the exotic glory of seeing men walk on another world. But some of the engineers who helped put those men on the moon became my professors, and even if I never got close to the space program myself, it left an indelible mark on my psyche and my intellect. . .
-------------------------
It’s funny, but even growing up in Michigan, I really didn’t follow the Tigers until 1965, when I was nine years old. Until then, I’d been pretty much of a bookish little nerd. I had vague memories of Rocky Colavito (all the little kids tried to imitate his ‘stretching exercises’ with the bat in the on-deck circle) and Jim Bunning, and the ’61 Tigers who chased the Yankees into September. But, my dad had to force me to go out for my first baseball team; physical activity just wasn’t my first choice of activities, at that age.
But, in ’65, my ‘first mother’ left, and Dad started dating the woman who would eventually become my ‘new mother’. She had a son who was my age, and he was a complete sports nut. So, at least partly out of self-defense, and partly just so I could have something to talk with him about, I started to follow the Tigers, who were an average-to-above-average team that year, with a promising crop of young players like Bill Freehan, Willie Horton, Mickey Lolich and Denny McLain, to go along with established veterans like Al Kaline and Norm Cash.
Kaline, especially, grabbed my imagination – something about the quiet, elegant way he played the game, at such a level of excellence, just compelled my attention. Because of him, I think, to this day, my favorite play in baseball is the right-fielder throwing to third base, to keep the runner on first from advancing two bases on a single (or even better, to throw the runner out on the attempt).
And in 1968, it all came together for my Tigers. They got on this incredible roll, and just never looked back. Denny McLain (one of the great assholes in sports history, by the way) won 31 games (the only 30-game winner between 1934 and the present day); Jim Northrup hit four grand slams (three of them in a week, and two in one game); and something like 40 times, the Tigers won a game in which they were behind after the 7th inning. My dad took us to a game in August, against the Chicago White Sox; Mickey Stanley tied the game on a home run in the 8th inning, and Jim Price (go to the head of the class if you remember Jim Price) won it with a homer in the 10th.
The ’68 Tigers won the American League pennant going away, and played the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. After falling behind three games to one (and with Denny McLain being thoroughly outclassed by Bob Gibson), the Tigers came back (in typical fashion) to win the Series, largely on the left arm of Mickey Lolich. I still look back on Game 5, when Mayo Smith left Lolich in to hit in the seventh inning, trailing by a run, and Al Kaline drove in the go-ahead run in the pivotal game of the Series. The Tigers won Game 6 behind Denny McLain (finally not matched up against Bob Gibson) and a 10-run inning (featuring another Jim Northrup grand slam), and then Lolich beat Gibson in a tense Game 7, when Northrup’s triple flew over Curt Flood’s head. For a 12-year-old Tiger fan, there could not have been anything closer to heaven – the Tigers were World Champions!
The Tigers stayed decent for a few more years, winning their division in ’72, before losing the ALCS to the Oakland A’s. But by the time I was in college, all the players I’d grown up watching were getting old, and the team was rebuilding, toward another eventual championship in ’84, which was very cool in its own right, but by then, I was married and a father, and the Tigers didn’t absorb my attention like they did when I was 12. . .
-------------------------
The Sixties, as such, at least in terms of the popular imagination, really ran from 1964 or so (they could be considered as starting with the Kennedy assassination, or the Beatles on Ed Sullivan) and ending roughly 10 years later (roughly with Watergate and the Nixon resignation, or the final pullout from Viet Nam). The headlines were filled with Viet Nam, and the anti-war movement; the popular culture suddenly became ‘druggier’ than it had been before; hair got longer – a LOT longer – and the sexual revolution took hold. All of those things were the cultural backdrop of my growing-up years.
But the things that most caught my youthful imagination were the Beatles, the moon landings, and the Detroit Tigers. . .
Monday, October 30, 2006
Love Languages
Emily posted recently about Love Languages, specifically referencing Gary Chapman’s book. In recent years, I’ve had numerous conversations with Molly on that topic, and also several e-mail conversations, with FTN among others, in recent months.
Molly and I were discussing it the other night, and we came to an interesting conclusion, I think. As with all communication, there is both the sending and the receiving of messages in our ‘love-languages’. Thus, the wise lover needs to know his spouse’s love-language in both its sending and receiving modes.
That is, he needs to know what his spouse’s love-language is, (a) so he can speak it to her, but also (b) so that, when she speaks it to him, he can recognize and understand what she’s ‘saying’ to him. If I speak English, say, and Molly speaks Chinese (a not-entirely-inapt comparison), I need to understand Chinese so I can speak it to Molly, but also so that, when she speaks Chinese to me, I can understand what she’s saying. If I can speak Chinese to her, but can't understand when she speaks it to me, my understanding of Chinese is incomplete, at best.
Many years ago, there was a joint space mission between the US and the Soviet Union; in order to solve the 'communications problem', whenever the two crews were together, the Americans spoke Russian, and the Soviets spoke English. That kept things on a simple enough level; by placing the burden on the 'speakers', the strategy biased things in favor of the 'hearers' of the message. And, I suppose, that is similar to what we want to be doing with 'love-languages' - sending our love-messages in a language that we ourselves might speak imperfectly, but which the 'receivers' of our messages will easily understand. .
.
Alas, egocentric creatures that we are, we all tend to operate out of our own love-languages in both the sending and receiving modes. My love-language is ‘physical touch’; Molly’s is ‘acts of service’. Thus, my tendency is to express my love for Molly in lots of physical affection, but she’s inclined to receive love more easily if I give it to her by, say, sweeping the kitchen floor. Likewise, she shows her love for me by cooking for me and doing my laundry, whereas I would most easily recognize her love if she would initiate some steamy sex. So both of us have a ‘double-challenge’ – I need to learn how to give her ‘acts of service’, realizing that that’s how she’ll most easily receive the message, “I love you” from me, but it’s also extremely helpful if I understand that the cooking, cleaning, etc, that she does for me is directly expressing her love for me. Conversely, Molly needs to learn to give me the ‘physical’ messages that I easily understand, but it’s also helpful for her to recognize that the ‘physical’ messages I send her are a way that I show my love to her. We need to be sort of ‘bi-directionally bilingual’.
We can fail to communicate love in either way – by failing (or refusing) to ‘send’ messages to our spouse in the language they understand, or by failing to understand the messages our spouse sends us in their own language.
We have two friend-couples who illustrate the two sides of this. In Couple A, the husband’s ‘love-language’ is ‘words of affirmation’, but his wife is a fairly reticent woman, who, when she and her husband went through the book and he told her how he’d like her to treat him, said, “I can’t do that; it’s not natural for me.” So, she fails (refuses, really) to send her love-messages to her husband, because she won’t learn to speak his ‘language’. In Couple B, the husband loves to give his wife gifts – throw her elaborate parties, take her on exotic vacations, etc – but his wife wants no part of it, and is vocally critical of the waste of time, money, etc. So, while he is sending out love-messages in his own ‘love-language’, he might as well be speaking Swahili, because she doesn’t ‘get it’. (Now, I’m not meaning to imply here that these ‘failures to communicate’ are always the wife’s fault; those are just the two examples that came up in our conversation. I’m sure that the failures are sufficiently reciprocal; or, if anything, that men are more clueless than women – that would hardly be surprising, would it?)
So, at the end of the day, my point is this: when we learn about the concept of ‘love-languages’, it’s easy to complain that “my spouse can’t/won’t speak my love-language”; but we can mitigate the problem, at least to some extent, by recognizing our spouse’s love-language when they speak it to us. Even if it’s not the ‘language’ we prefer to hear. It’s nice to hear “I love you” in Italian or French, but if our spouse says it to us in German or Russian, it helps if we can understand what she’s saying.
And even Germans and Russians can figure out how to be happily married, can't they?
-------------------------
And, in a couple days, I'm sure I'll be able to step back and appreciate the wonderful season my Tigers had. But, for cryin' out loud - HOW FREAKIN' HARD IS IT TO THROW THE DAMN BALL TO THIRD BASE?!?
OK, I'm better now. . . I think. . .check back with me in a couple days. . .
(12 comments)
Molly and I were discussing it the other night, and we came to an interesting conclusion, I think. As with all communication, there is both the sending and the receiving of messages in our ‘love-languages’. Thus, the wise lover needs to know his spouse’s love-language in both its sending and receiving modes.
That is, he needs to know what his spouse’s love-language is, (a) so he can speak it to her, but also (b) so that, when she speaks it to him, he can recognize and understand what she’s ‘saying’ to him. If I speak English, say, and Molly speaks Chinese (a not-entirely-inapt comparison), I need to understand Chinese so I can speak it to Molly, but also so that, when she speaks Chinese to me, I can understand what she’s saying. If I can speak Chinese to her, but can't understand when she speaks it to me, my understanding of Chinese is incomplete, at best.
Many years ago, there was a joint space mission between the US and the Soviet Union; in order to solve the 'communications problem', whenever the two crews were together, the Americans spoke Russian, and the Soviets spoke English. That kept things on a simple enough level; by placing the burden on the 'speakers', the strategy biased things in favor of the 'hearers' of the message. And, I suppose, that is similar to what we want to be doing with 'love-languages' - sending our love-messages in a language that we ourselves might speak imperfectly, but which the 'receivers' of our messages will easily understand. .
.
Alas, egocentric creatures that we are, we all tend to operate out of our own love-languages in both the sending and receiving modes. My love-language is ‘physical touch’; Molly’s is ‘acts of service’. Thus, my tendency is to express my love for Molly in lots of physical affection, but she’s inclined to receive love more easily if I give it to her by, say, sweeping the kitchen floor. Likewise, she shows her love for me by cooking for me and doing my laundry, whereas I would most easily recognize her love if she would initiate some steamy sex. So both of us have a ‘double-challenge’ – I need to learn how to give her ‘acts of service’, realizing that that’s how she’ll most easily receive the message, “I love you” from me, but it’s also extremely helpful if I understand that the cooking, cleaning, etc, that she does for me is directly expressing her love for me. Conversely, Molly needs to learn to give me the ‘physical’ messages that I easily understand, but it’s also helpful for her to recognize that the ‘physical’ messages I send her are a way that I show my love to her. We need to be sort of ‘bi-directionally bilingual’.
We can fail to communicate love in either way – by failing (or refusing) to ‘send’ messages to our spouse in the language they understand, or by failing to understand the messages our spouse sends us in their own language.
We have two friend-couples who illustrate the two sides of this. In Couple A, the husband’s ‘love-language’ is ‘words of affirmation’, but his wife is a fairly reticent woman, who, when she and her husband went through the book and he told her how he’d like her to treat him, said, “I can’t do that; it’s not natural for me.” So, she fails (refuses, really) to send her love-messages to her husband, because she won’t learn to speak his ‘language’. In Couple B, the husband loves to give his wife gifts – throw her elaborate parties, take her on exotic vacations, etc – but his wife wants no part of it, and is vocally critical of the waste of time, money, etc. So, while he is sending out love-messages in his own ‘love-language’, he might as well be speaking Swahili, because she doesn’t ‘get it’. (Now, I’m not meaning to imply here that these ‘failures to communicate’ are always the wife’s fault; those are just the two examples that came up in our conversation. I’m sure that the failures are sufficiently reciprocal; or, if anything, that men are more clueless than women – that would hardly be surprising, would it?)
So, at the end of the day, my point is this: when we learn about the concept of ‘love-languages’, it’s easy to complain that “my spouse can’t/won’t speak my love-language”; but we can mitigate the problem, at least to some extent, by recognizing our spouse’s love-language when they speak it to us. Even if it’s not the ‘language’ we prefer to hear. It’s nice to hear “I love you” in Italian or French, but if our spouse says it to us in German or Russian, it helps if we can understand what she’s saying.
And even Germans and Russians can figure out how to be happily married, can't they?
-------------------------
And, in a couple days, I'm sure I'll be able to step back and appreciate the wonderful season my Tigers had. But, for cryin' out loud - HOW FREAKIN' HARD IS IT TO THROW THE DAMN BALL TO THIRD BASE?!?
OK, I'm better now. . . I think. . .check back with me in a couple days. . .
(12 comments)
Monday, October 9, 2006
And Now For Something Completely Different. . .
I've generally organized this blog around the general themes of marriage and family life. But today, partly in the interest of full disclosure, and partly because I'm just so giddy about it, I'm going to do a 'sports post'. With apologies in advance to those of you who are wondering, "What the heck is up with that?"
Mr. Husbland has been posting in recent days about the Detroit Tigers and how exciting this baseball season has been in Tigertown (I've already told you all that I live in Michigan, so I don't suppose that I'm 'blowing my cover' by admitting this). But, I thought a more, uh, seasoned treatment of the subject might be helpful for you all (ie, I'm a whole lot older than he is).
I started following the Tigers when I was a little kid - we used to try to imitate Rocky Colavito's stretching exercises when we played pickup games. I was 12 when the Tigers won the World Series in '68, which I think is just about the perfect age to take on a passionate, lifelong commitment to a favorite sports team. Al Kaline was my boyhood hero, and I've come to learn that a boy could do a whole lot worse than emulating Al Kaline (in all sorts of ways). Willie Horton, Norm Cash, Bill Freehan, Mickey Lolich, Denny McLain (well, OK, a boy could do a whole lot better, but come on, he went 31-6 in '68) - these were the ballplayers who were at the very front of my youthful consciousness.
I was older (married, with one daughter and another 'in the oven') when the Tigers won in '84, but I had been a college classmate of Kirk Gibson, and that whole group of guys - Lou Whitaker, Alan Trammell, Lance Parrish, Jack Morris - were all about my age, so I had a certain, more 'peer-ish' identification with them.
After the World Series that year, a buddy of mine came over to my house and handed me a baggie with a small hunk of sod in it. "Thought you might appreciate this," he said. I looked at it, thinking, what the heck? until it slowly dawned on me what it was - he had been down to the stadium for the final game of the Series, and afterward, had torn up a hunk of sod, which he divided into smaller chunks and gave them out to his buddies. And that little piece of sod - about three inches square - grows in my back yard to this day.
The thing that's so cool about this year's Tigers is how they just absolutely came out of nowhere. Three years ago, they set the American League record for losses (and ten guys from that season are still on the team!). We were hoping that this year they'd be better than they had been, but nobody expected them to be anywhere near this good. So it's been just an astounding baseball season. I've just been shaking my head all season - they can't really be this good, can they?
Saturday, I was with a group of 20 or so guys at a buddy's house, ostensibly to watch our alma mater play a football game against our hated in-state rival, but before the first quarter was over, we had switched over to the Tigers game. Jeremy Bonderman is getting a special place ready for himself in all-time Tigers lore (and, I'm not gonna lie - it was all the cooler for beating the Yankees). When the game ended, and the players were running along the stands, spraying champagne on the fans, it was one of the most incredible moments I've ever seen at a sporting event - you don't see players and fans bonding like that very much these days. It was very cool.
There is a cool, trans-generational thing that baseball has that none of the other sports can quite duplicate. I can talk about Al Kaline and Willie Horton, or Jack Morris and Kirk Gibson, and my kids can talk about Justin Verlander and Pudge Rodriguez, but my dad can also talk about Charley Gehringer and Tommy Bridges and Schoolboy Rowe, and you've got 70 years of Tigers history spanned by three generations of our family.
So, thanks for induging my bliss for the moment - I promise we'll get back to our 'normal' topics as soon as possible. And I do realize that we've still got to play the A's, whose pitching is just about as good as ours, and even if we beat the A's, then we have the World Series. But in the context of recent years, it's all a gratuitous gift.
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Also, the other day Emily was asking for our favorite jokes, and this seemed a fitting time to tell my own personal favorite:
Two guys in the men's room do their business at the urinals. When they finish, one guy goes to the sink, while the other guy heads for the door.
The guy at the sink calls over his shoulder, "I see you went to Michigan State."
The guy at the door stops, and says, "Why, yes I did. How did you know?"
Sink-guy says (in telling the joke, it really helps if you can affect a Thurston-Howell-type accent at this point), "Well I went to the University of Michigan, and we were taught to always wash our hands after urinating."
Door-guy says, "Oh; that's a really good idea. But at Michigan State they taught us not to piss on our hands."
And with that, I will leave you until next time. . .
(8 comments)
Mr. Husbland has been posting in recent days about the Detroit Tigers and how exciting this baseball season has been in Tigertown (I've already told you all that I live in Michigan, so I don't suppose that I'm 'blowing my cover' by admitting this). But, I thought a more, uh, seasoned treatment of the subject might be helpful for you all (ie, I'm a whole lot older than he is).
I started following the Tigers when I was a little kid - we used to try to imitate Rocky Colavito's stretching exercises when we played pickup games. I was 12 when the Tigers won the World Series in '68, which I think is just about the perfect age to take on a passionate, lifelong commitment to a favorite sports team. Al Kaline was my boyhood hero, and I've come to learn that a boy could do a whole lot worse than emulating Al Kaline (in all sorts of ways). Willie Horton, Norm Cash, Bill Freehan, Mickey Lolich, Denny McLain (well, OK, a boy could do a whole lot better, but come on, he went 31-6 in '68) - these were the ballplayers who were at the very front of my youthful consciousness.
I was older (married, with one daughter and another 'in the oven') when the Tigers won in '84, but I had been a college classmate of Kirk Gibson, and that whole group of guys - Lou Whitaker, Alan Trammell, Lance Parrish, Jack Morris - were all about my age, so I had a certain, more 'peer-ish' identification with them.
After the World Series that year, a buddy of mine came over to my house and handed me a baggie with a small hunk of sod in it. "Thought you might appreciate this," he said. I looked at it, thinking, what the heck? until it slowly dawned on me what it was - he had been down to the stadium for the final game of the Series, and afterward, had torn up a hunk of sod, which he divided into smaller chunks and gave them out to his buddies. And that little piece of sod - about three inches square - grows in my back yard to this day.
The thing that's so cool about this year's Tigers is how they just absolutely came out of nowhere. Three years ago, they set the American League record for losses (and ten guys from that season are still on the team!). We were hoping that this year they'd be better than they had been, but nobody expected them to be anywhere near this good. So it's been just an astounding baseball season. I've just been shaking my head all season - they can't really be this good, can they?
Saturday, I was with a group of 20 or so guys at a buddy's house, ostensibly to watch our alma mater play a football game against our hated in-state rival, but before the first quarter was over, we had switched over to the Tigers game. Jeremy Bonderman is getting a special place ready for himself in all-time Tigers lore (and, I'm not gonna lie - it was all the cooler for beating the Yankees). When the game ended, and the players were running along the stands, spraying champagne on the fans, it was one of the most incredible moments I've ever seen at a sporting event - you don't see players and fans bonding like that very much these days. It was very cool.
There is a cool, trans-generational thing that baseball has that none of the other sports can quite duplicate. I can talk about Al Kaline and Willie Horton, or Jack Morris and Kirk Gibson, and my kids can talk about Justin Verlander and Pudge Rodriguez, but my dad can also talk about Charley Gehringer and Tommy Bridges and Schoolboy Rowe, and you've got 70 years of Tigers history spanned by three generations of our family.
So, thanks for induging my bliss for the moment - I promise we'll get back to our 'normal' topics as soon as possible. And I do realize that we've still got to play the A's, whose pitching is just about as good as ours, and even if we beat the A's, then we have the World Series. But in the context of recent years, it's all a gratuitous gift.
-------------------------
Also, the other day Emily was asking for our favorite jokes, and this seemed a fitting time to tell my own personal favorite:
Two guys in the men's room do their business at the urinals. When they finish, one guy goes to the sink, while the other guy heads for the door.
The guy at the sink calls over his shoulder, "I see you went to Michigan State."
The guy at the door stops, and says, "Why, yes I did. How did you know?"
Sink-guy says (in telling the joke, it really helps if you can affect a Thurston-Howell-type accent at this point), "Well I went to the University of Michigan, and we were taught to always wash our hands after urinating."
Door-guy says, "Oh; that's a really good idea. But at Michigan State they taught us not to piss on our hands."
And with that, I will leave you until next time. . .
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