Black Berets and Sox Hats

It's funny how your outlook changes over the years.
Nearly five years ago I moved to Boston. I packed my meager possessions and hand-me-down hand-me-down futon, delighted that I would be living in a city with world-renowned art museums, a large amount of history and a great music scene. Since I'd be attending Emerson College, I imagined myself wearing bohemian clothes and attending poetry readings. I envisioned staying up all night with similarly artsy types, discussing the latest issue of the New Yorker or who the greatest American writer ever was, followed up by a greasy breakfast. The furthest thing from my new imagined life was staying up until 3am watching Kenmore Square being torn apart after the Sox beat the Yankees for the pennant, or wearing a Pat the Patriot knit cap around the office on the Friday before the Super Bowl. But here we are in 2005.
There are people in Boston who don't give a rat's ass about sports, but I don't know any of them. The clique of black-beret wearing serious types I imagined myself hanging with when I was nineteen has morphed into Sox and Brady hat wearing (never pink, God forbid) statistics-quoting, "what the hell do I do in February without football OR baseball?" hardcore sports fans. Kristen, who I spend so much time with even our friends mistake us for each other, has turned me into a major Sox fan. While I couldn't have named anyone on the Sox roster other than Nomar or Manny in 2002, by the playoffs of 2003 I was cursing the incompetence of Grady Little and could identify the players by sight. The playoff debacle of 2003 was trial-by-fire and I've gotten hooked on baseball.
It's the culture in Boston, especially at my office, which is surprising if you operate on stereotypes, since most of my coworkers are female bookish types. It's not just during the playoffs that we dragged ourselves in, bleary-eyed and jumpy from watching West coast games. Even in May, we worried and watched. The company Red Sox game in May was the one where Varitek came in to pinch-hit and we came from behind to win, and we cheered in our blue and red hats. Sports in Boston is like politics in DC or government corruption trials in Providence-- it's a passion, not a pastime.
Life doesn't always work out the way you plan. I didn't get my beret-wearing, avant-garde friends, but I now realize that's because I'm not that kind of girl. I'm not the full-fleged, statistics-quoting, remote-control throwing lifetime fan, but I'm getting there. On October 28, I had tickets to see David Sedaris that I'd purchased months before (when the Sox and the playoffs looked as likely as the Pope smoking a joint with Anna Nicole Smith) and after a day of agonizing over whether to scalp the tickets to a beret-wearing Sedaris groupie or suck it up and go, I went. I had several friends text messaging the score to me, and I could barely pay attention to the reading, which I'd usually find knee-slapping funny. At the question and answer period (during which most people got up and left since it was the 4th inning and things seemed to be going well) someone asked Mr. Sedaris if he liked baseball and was excited to be in Boston for game four of the World Series. Sedaris sighed, leaned against the podium as if he were about to confide a secret to hundreds of people, and said, "I've never seen an entire baseball game in my life." To which the majority of the crowd whooped and cheered, and I felt myself recoil in horror. As a book geek, writer and intelligent woman I can appreciate a love of the arts. But there's the Sox-hat wearing side of me that knows that the Red Sox are just as important to Boston as a visit from a respected author.
Sedaris won me back over. In the next breath, he said, "But I do like baseball player's butts in those pants." And I realized that you can have both the black-beret part of your personality, and the appreciation for sport, even if it's purely aesthetic.