This is a story about a job and a soldier and how one Michigan woman had to say good-bye to both.Suzette and Jerry Boler have been married 22 years. They have children and grandchildren. As a member of the National Guard, Jerry, a mechanic, recently was called up to serve in Iraq. Suzette wanted to be with him before he left. So she notified her employer, Benefit Management Administrators, in Caledonia. Boler, 40, worked part-time as a receptionist, answering phones and opening mail. She was paid, she says, $9 an hour, to work Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
"Where you going?"It was manager Jim Leyland yelling from his small office in the visitors' clubhouse. This was late Friday night, after his team had lost the World Series in a sometimes embarrassing fashion, throwing balls over players' heads, getting caught in rundowns, losing wild pitches. It had been a great ride but a bumpy finish, and Leyland was sitting silently now in the office with several coaches staring at the floor or the walls, so I continued past, out of respect."Where you going?"I stepped back to the door frame.
I witnessed something recently that said a lot about who we are in America. It took place not on a big stage on a Saturday night in New York, but on a daytime talk show in the middle of the week. I was to be a guest on that TV show. It was one of those shows liable to have a cooking segment, followed by a pets segment, then a segment on sexy Halloween costumes.
They were supposed to be different. Not the same old Fab Four. Either Chauncey or Tayshaun, maybe Rasheed, maybe Rip. Someone was going. That's what fans figured this summer. Joe Dumars, the team president, said it publicly and loudly - after the Pistons fell short of the NBA Finals yet again - he would trade one or more of his Mt. Rushmore faces if the right deal came along.What happened?"It didn't come along," he says.
Ten years ago, I sat with a literary agent and wondered whether a little book called "Tuesdays With Morrie" was going to hurt my sportswriting career."What do you mean hurt'?" he said."Well," I said, "it's about a dying professor and the meaning of life. What if I go into locker rooms now and athletes start making fun of me, calling me soft?"He thought for a second then waved a dismissive hand. "Don't worry," he said, "nobody's gonna read it."Ten years ago. I was a sportswriter then. I am a sportswriter now. But everything else has changed.
When did adults start dressing for Halloween? Last thing I knew, Halloween was for kids and it was mostly about candy. Check that. It was all about candy. I honestly didn't care if I went as a pirate, Scooby-Doo or a bedsheet, as long as my bag was filled with Milky Ways.As for my parents? Their job was not to dress up. Their job was to go through our candy like airport security and remove all apples, marshmallows, anything that might have a razor blade in it or anything that might have been cooked by this weird woman up the street who never came out of her house.
ST. LOUIS - In the end, they only could watch: watch balls go flying past their gloves, watch pitches go zipping past their bats, watch another team do the infield dance they had dreamed of doing once upon a time, when they were a hot team.You remember. A week ago?
Manny Legace never held an NHL record. Not unless they keep records for sitting, or biting your lip, or rooting for the guy who took your job.Legace could lead the league in those categories. When it comes to accepting being benched, Manny Legace makes Joey Harrington look rude. But when it comes to career numbers as a starter, Legace is still considered "budding" at 32 years old, which is as weird in hockey as it is in a forest.And until Thursday night, the closest he came to the NHL record book was sitting next to Dominik Hasek.
Mitch Albom writes about running an orphanage in impoverished Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his kids, their hardships, laughs and challenges, and the life lessons he’s learned there every day.
