Sports Pt 1

"Sports. Sports. Sports." -- Mitch Carver

Because I have heard the seemingly wide-spread generalization that women don't watch sports or know anything about sports, I will posit another grossly-unfounded generalization: old women watch sports. In fact, I believe that many spend most of their waking hours doing so.

Mitch's grandma will text him the scores of the various games she is watching. She watches all sports, but likes football in particular. It's hard for me to imagine what she thinks of all these fit men, so much her junior, running around and into each other and over things. (Unless it's baseball in which case she's watching men standing with the beginnings of what will someday be formidable beer guts and diabetes.) I guess I could ask her.

Donald Hall writes in this weeks's New Yorker (about the experience of getting old), "My mother heard baseball as it happened, from the small radio beneath her ear, next to the ashtray. (In another room, an enormous steam-powered television showed a continual blank screen; she did not want to move from her chair.) The radio games replaced her window of schoolchildren and birds. During the months between baseball seasons she spent her nights reading the Reader's Digest, Henry David Thoreau, Time, Robert Frost--and Agatha Christie. My summer nights are NESN and the Boston Red Sox."

My grandma will ask grandpa to put the game on for her. He'll wheel her into the living room and help her get into the brown corduroy chair. She likes basketball best, but then again, during the game, she is mostly sleeping.