The First Day of Spring

Yes, Boston got two feet of snow yesterday, and New York got its 2nd highest snowfall ever from one storm, but today is the first day of Spring. How, you ask, could that be? Well, today the truck carrying the Boston Red Sox Spring Training equipment pulled out from Fenway Park and headed for Florida.

Yes, later on pitchers and catchers will report, and there will be the first Spring Training game, and then Opening Day, and so on, but Today was the start of Spring for Red Sox fans. My Grandpa Cole was a Red Sox fan, and passed the gene on to me. He and my grandmother had season tickets to Spring Training every year back when Spring Training wasn’t cool. They had cable tv at their summer house in New Hampshire back when nobody had even heard of cable, but that was the only way to get the weekend Red Sox games on tv. I bought my first copy of the book “Yaz” at age 6 and was listening to games on my radio by age 7.

A year and a half ago, the week after the Sox won “It All” for the first time since 1918, our family took a morning off to raise a toast at my grandfather’s grave-



Left to right: yours truly, my mother Betty, her sister Pat, her brother Bill, Pat’s son (my cousin) Matt, and Pat’s husband Charlie.

So, I’m not sure what all this has to do with anything, but amidst the snow and cold, the relentless journey towards Spring has really started, and I can hear my Grandfather complaining about Red Sox pitching even before they have thrown a ball...