I'm in Sweden this week visiting my good buddy, Nick Carter, whom I met 13 years ago on the MLB Road Show and the Brighton Bucs baseball team. In the meantime, Nick's had a pretty interesting run: he went to Leeds University in northern England to study PE, was tabbed as a talented dancer and pursued a career in ballet, moonlighting on the poker tournament circuit to make ends meet, then moved to Sweden for a beautiful girl and a teaching career.
Nick will always star in one of my most vivid memories: September 11th, 2001, my last day in England after a second year on the Road Show. We were spending the day together with Alex, burning James albums onto CDs for me to spread the word in the USA that they were more than just the song "Laid," which, ironically, is still his ring tone today. We were also playing poker, notable only because I had never really played before and was completely terrible at it, a fact that hasn't changed in the 12 years since despite the best efforts of my friends in San Francisco. Sometime in the early afternoon, just past 1:00, Nick's girlfriend called with dreadful news: something crazy was happening in New York. Al and I listened to Nick's half of the conversation, alarm creeping into our faces with each question out of his mouth.
"What was it, a kama sutra...er, a kamikaze?"
"How many people are dead?"
Al and I went to the living room and turned on the TV just in time to watch the second tower collapse. Word trickled out about other planes crashing in DC and Pennsylvania, and rumors spread that several more planes were headed for big cities like bombs in the sky. One thing was for sure: I wasn't going home the next day.
We all have a story like this; everybody remembers where they were when the towers collapsed.
Then came this week.
Monday night, Nick's roommates and I started playing poker around 9:00 PM in Stockholm, the second time in my life I've played cards with Nick Carter. The first strange thing to happen? I won most of the money. Even the worst poker player can have a good night, I guess. I offered to put the guys in touch with Colin, Gilbert, Rector, Jacob, and the rest of San Francisco to ensure I wasn't hustling. The second strange thing didn't come to my attention for 14 more hours: some miserable asshole(s) bombed the finish line at the Boston Marathon, killing three innocent people and maiming more than one hundred more. I spent two hours Tuesday stealing wifi in rainy Stockholm reading accounts from the finish line, the stories of heroism we've come to expect when miserable assholes do this kind of thing throughout the world. People running toward the blasts to see how they can help. Not away from the fire, but right into it. Charlie Pierce - more than just a great contestant on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me - put me right there in Copley Square, with the first of many chills-inducing accounts I've read this week. My mind drifted to the Bostonians I know; to my times walking through the Back Bay, on Boylston Street, the miniature books exhibit I saw in the Boston Public Library right on the Square. Then it drifted to the race itself, to my friends who've run The Marathon before, to that incredible achievement of crossing the finish line in the gold standard race; the one only the best runners are allowed to enter. I thought of the time when the explosions happened - four hours after it started - and my ego couldn't help but take me to the time I ran a marathon myself, crossing the line roughly four hours after starting, an emotional ball of exhilaration, exhaustion, and the kind of pride you can only feel when you've done something you didn't think you could. I thought of the people deprived of that achievement that day, mere hundreds of yards from grasping it, nothing like the tragedy happening around them but unacceptable nonetheless.
In one of life's strange coincidences, I've played poker with Nick Carter twice, and each time miserable assholes perpetrated a vicious attack on innocent people back home. Each time, I've been outside the country looking in, instantly uninterested in spending the day in another museum or ancient church, visiting with foreign friends and feeling very American at the same time, taken by a strong longing to be with fellow Yanks who can't explain why they, too, feel under attack, and choosing to ignore the cold, intellectual analysis of the assembled foreigners who implicitly blame the USA for exposing itself to such atrocity. Is America perfect? Of course not. But nobody asks for this.
And tonight, here in Stockholm - a gorgeous archipelago of endless bridges, cobblestone streets, spires, hills and waterways - thousands of miles away from the very real pain inflicted on hundreds of lives at home, completely insulated from the true loss experienced by those families in Massachusetts, I'm getting together with a band of expats and locals to spend my last night in Sweden together. Carter organized it, and it promises to be a great time with great people.
What's on the agenda? Poker, Round Three. Miserable assholes be damned.
No comments:
Post a Comment