Clare's Dad

Whether the Red Sox can pull off winning the ALCS this weekend doesn’t really matter to me.  I’ve got other baseball issues on my mind.

When I was in high school, my Dad—who taught history at a different high school—was the school administrator for a program that brought kids to Washington, DC each year to learn about government.  One year, a friend and I tagged along and spent a few days checking out some of the museums and monuments in the capital.  At the National Portrait Gallery, I bought a poster that copied a photograph of Babe Ruth taken by baseball photographer Charles Conlon.

Back at home, I stuck the poster up with tacks on my bedroom wall.  When I left for college, I took Babe Ruth with me.  My roommate was a Red Sox fan from Boston, but he let me put it up.  In turn, I let him listen to Night Ranger and Falco which were the only two albums he brought to college.  Because we both obviously exuded class, we decided that all of our posters should be in frames.  I bought a cheap frame in downtown Worcester, Massachusettes and the Babe took his place on the wall of our ninety year-old dorm room which probably hadn’t seen a new coat of paint or a new mattress since the 1960s.

The rooms changed, but I stayed with the same roommate for all four years of college.  The Babe stayed with us too.  Babe was there sophomore year when Hot Dog: The Movie ran continuously on the VCR in our room.  Babe was there junior year for the party when someone batted a blue piñata named Seve the Party Llama out the window and the date of one of our friends jumped at the chance to go find it four floors below and get out of the room for a while.  And Babe was there senior year in a new suite of rooms I shared with five guys who are still good friends but don’t stay in touch nearly often enough.

When I left for graduate school, the Babe had a sort of homecoming as I took him with me to New York City.  The photo up above shows the Babe in my first apartment.  I moved to two other apartments in Manhattan before I was married and of course the Babe came with me each time.  He was around when I wrote my thesis, when I got my first job, when I went to law school and studied for the bar exam, and when Clare’s Mom and I decided to get married.

After Clare’s Mom and I were married, I think the Babe went up on a wall in a small office and storage room in our first apartment together.  Somewhere between there and our current home, the Babe came off the wall for good.  The poster still sits in the basement in the same frame that I bought over twenty years ago.

So, what’s the point of this story?  The point is I need your opinion.  How many years of cursed luck would I have if I let Clare pull the poster out of the frame and put Hannah Montana in its place?