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In my travels to nursing homes I have come to know many memorable people, perhaps none more so than Sean Hanrahan, a poor Irish kid from Southie in Boston.
When I met him, he was shortly to become one of the few humans alive to have had the personal enjoyment of the last two Red Sox baseball championships--1918 and 2004.
On my way to his room at rural Meldon Meadows, the nurse pulled me aside and warned me he was cranky, unfriendly, and in a world of pain. A fit ninety-six, he fell off a ladder while hanging a picture and broke his leg. At that age, a fracture is usually a one-way ticket to institutional confinement. But Sean was determined to get home.
Born in Boston, 1908, he wasn't at the 1918 World Series clincher. He was poor, plus there were only 36,000 seats. "I didn't even hear it on the radio. There was no radio. I heard the newsboys down the street hawking the late-edition extra."
I met Sean on my fifty-eighth birthday, October 27, 2004--almost old enough to cash in my IRA but still too young for Medicare. Sean and all the other residents provide me with--apologies to Wordsworth--intimations of my own mortality. I also remember that date because in the evening the Sox were to finish their four-game sweep of the Cardinals. Despite the nurse's warning, Sean was in a celebratory, talkative mood--wearing his Bosox hat.
"I'm a bit unhappy I can't be at the game. My grandson told me if they ever made it this bar, he'd take me. But I got my TV right here, and the nurse has a beer cooling for me in their fridge."
That night, stuffed with New Haven pizza, I'm sitting in front of my TV--birthday cake on my lap, more than a shot of single malt whisky in a goblet by my side. Long-suffering Mets fan that I am, at least it's not the Yankees, I think, as I watch the Red Sox get off their eighty-six-year-old schneid, completing their four-game sweep of the Cardinals--their first since their last championship over the forever hapless Cubs back in 1918.
The following week, I'm back, and Sean is gone. My heart skips a beat, but he's not dead. He's home. Even at ninety-six, life can go on.
If I live long enough--I would be ninety-six in 2042--I too will have a baseball story of the previous century for some eager whippersnapper. It will sound equally quaint to the ears of someone who will be long past computers, iPhones, and HDTV.
I was only eight (not ten like Hanrahan) when the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series. We took our baseball seriously in Brooklyn. No need to play hooky to follow the series. They wheeled those newfangled TVs right into the classrooms. I'm not sure if watching baseball fulfilled the TVs' purported educational role. Although I did have a TV by 1955, I belonged to the very last generation not to automatically have one as a birthright. We didn't get our Andrea TV in its beautiful mahogany cabinet until I was six. If the game wasn't over when the school bell rang, no problem--walking home we could follow the game from the radios and TVs through the open windows. The Bums--as we affectionately called them--clinched the series with a 2-0 complete game gem by Johnny Podres. Outside my house, a Yankee was hanged in effigy (good and evil clearly defined) from the street lamp, and who could sleep with all the firecrackers, cherry bombs, and ash cans--even guns--going off through the night.
Pete Hamill would write, "In Brooklyn that day, it was the Liberation of Paris, Vee Jay Day, New Year's Day all rolled into one."
I would go on to learn at the still young age of eleven that good and evil are not so easily defined when the Dodgers went west along with my naïveté in 1958, never to return, except as the enemy of my newfound love, the Mets. Even though I was able to give my heart, on the rebound, to another, my eyes were opened wide after the Dodgers helped plant the seeds of the cynical detachment with which I continue to live today.
I don't know if Sean lives today, but it's not a stretch to believe he lived to see the Sox win yet another championship in 2007--another four game sweep, this time about the eternally hapless Cubs--somewhere not in a nursing home and living without cynicism forever in the moment. His Sox never left him.
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My book, Nasty, Brutish, and Long: Adventures in Old Age and the World of Eldercare (Avery/Penguin) is born today after a gestation of only four years since I started looking for an agent--more than twice that of an elephant. I hope it's not a white one.
My op-ed in today's (March 19) LA Times: When it comes to dementia, forget the drugs.
