Sox are Toni Morrison’s ‘third beer’
Season’s left fans crying in their suds
The death this week of author Toni Morrison struck a poignant note, coming as it did in a season of Red Sox disappointment, though the prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning poet certainly didn’t lend her gifts to sports.
Words, however, can level the ground of any conversation, and a line she tossed out in 1977 grabbed this writer’s attention in 1981 when he read it on a red-eye flight from Houston to Boston carrying the jubilant Celtics who had just beaten the Rockets to pocket their 14th NBA championship.
As the ecstasy aboard that plane finally subsided, the players grabbed some shuteye, knowing a raucous reception awaited them back here.
It was the team’s third championship since the end of the legendary Bill Russell era (11 out of 13).
To be a Celtics fans in those days was to be spoiled rotten.
Meanwhile, it was early in a Red Sox season that gave every indication it was going to be another year of watching someone else have all the fun, sort of like what this season has become at Fenway Park.
It’s not that those Sox were dreadful; indeed, Ralph Houk’s club would finish 5949, fifth in the AL East in a strike-shortened season. In some towns that would be cause for celebration, but this is not one of those towns.
Mediocrity means miserable around here, a thought which made that plane ride with the Shamrocks all the sweeter.
That’s what was on this writer’s mind as he read “Song of Solomon,” Morrison’s third book in which Hagar, a young gal who longs for the affections of Milkman, the book’s carefree protagonist who has rejected her for a life of heavy drinking and debauchery.
This is where Morrison lowered her prodigious boom, saying of Hagar:
“She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?”
That’s sort of like rooting for the Red Sox now.
Having once been attractive, Hagar is reduced to being available.
Perhaps some would find it a stretch, but the thought that occurred here at the time, and occurs again this morning, is that an ardent Red Sox fan finds himself or herself in Hagar’s position, longing so hard for a team that doesn’t return the love.
Toni Morrison saw that not as sports, but as a matter of the heart, and she was so right, which is why she’ll be so missed.