Conversation Starters

Take a moment to listen to Cleveland baseball radio announcer Tom Hamilton ( here ). I had to miss yesterday's game because I was working, but I'd asked my baseball twitter friends to loop me into any great #HammyShade (as we call it), which a few of them did.  One of them encouraged me to find this final speech of the broadcast.  You can hear it in Hammy's voice when he talks about bringing kiddos to the ballpark -- and when he talks about Rajai Davis' soul-reviving game-tying home run in the bottom of the 8th in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series against the Chicago Cubs.  I will never, ever forget that moment.  Even thinking about it makes me tear up.  Even though Chicago ultimately won that game, that Rajai Davis moment proved what all Cleveland fans know: Goonies Never Say Die.  Down but not out, fighting for, earning , every single moment. You can see it in the faces of the fans how much this meant to them.  I remember pacing  in my Ball Squa...

I want to share a moment of my life from yesterday afternoon.  I was out walking through Lakeview Cemetery (per usual) when I noticed an old man with a long white beard and an orange bandana tied around his head puttering by me very slowly on a found-it-in-the- way -back-of-the-garage motorcycle.  He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, making him stand out as a possible ex-Hell's Angel, someone who valued life on the road and nonconformity in a way someone from the 60's or 70's would.  If he'd been listening to music, it would have absolutely been The Grateful Dead or CCR or the Rolling Stones.  But all that I heard as he motored past me was the strain of his motorcycle to stay upright at the slow speed he was traveling.  I watched him putter up the hill by the Haserot Angel and disappear around the bend where he was temporarily erased from my mind.  After all, I see colorful characters in the cemetery all the time -- there was no real reason for him to stand ...

  October 2016 was an exciting time to be a Cleveland Indians fan.  For the first time in nearly two decades (the last time being 1997), the team blazed its way through the postseason bracket to the World Series.  At the time, I was running a yoga and wellness center near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- right in the heart of Red Sox Nation -- but in the fourteen years I’d lived in Boston, I’d never stifled my loyalty to my hometown team.  That October, I proudly wore my Cleveland Indians gear to work every day. That came with its challenges. It wasn’t the razzing for cheering for a team other than the Red Sox -- it was because of the logo brandished on many of my hoodies and t-shirts: Chief Wahoo, the red-faced cartoon drawing of a Native American, the symbol of Cleveland baseball since the 1940’s.  There I was, striding through the studio, glowing from my team’s big win the night before, only to have students walk right up to me and say, “How can ...