Growing Up Southern: October 16, 2017

Have you ever lain in bed at three o’clock in the morning and thought about some horrifically embarrassing thing you’ve done? I have. There are so many for me to visit.

I even worry that one of these dreadful incidences will define me forever. Will I be the one, for example, who proved to the world one Saturday morning when he was nine years old that he was the worst athlete that ever tried out for Little League Baseball in the entire history of the sport?

Or would I be known as the boy whom the class sissy beat up in front of the entire fifth grade, an embarrassment resulting from not knowing that the other kid’s mother had paid for boxing lessons designed to protect him from bullies like me?

Would my bona fides also mention that I once published a planning report recommending that a city pay more attention to its “pubic” spaces?

Or that I once almost caused an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to fall overboard while docking my Admiral’s Barge against a particularly violent current on Charleston's Cooper River?

Or what my best buddy and I got caught at when we were in Jr. High School?

I could go on but it would make you despondent as well.

If such memories ever plague you, try thinking of Fred Snodgrass, who had achieved every young boy’s dream of playing major league baseball. It fulfilled a dream, that is, until that awful incident 105 years ago today. As reported on This Day In History this morning:

“On October 16, 1912, New York Giants outfielder Fred Snodgrass drops an easy pop-up in the 10th inning of the tie breaking eighth game of the World Series against the Red Sox. His error led to a two-run Boston rally and cost the Giants the championship.

“The error—dubbed “the $30,000 muff” because that’s how much money the Giants stood to win from a Series championship—stuck with Snodgrass for his whole life. After he retired from baseball, the hapless outfielder moved to California and became a banker. He bought a ranch. The citizens of Oxnard elected him mayor. But still, when he died in 1974—62 years after that fateful World Series game—the New York Times headline blared: “Fred Snodgrass, 86, Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly.”

Well now, that’s having your entire life defined by only five seconds of it, isn’t it? I think I’ll just settle for being known as the young man who caught Brenda Cole’s eye one pleasant evening years ago in a lifetime far away.

A new day comes.