Recovery and Broadway

The two are not connected, except maybe in one way. I am physically and in some ways mentally feeling almost all healed. That means not exhausted every waking moment. That means that when I ride my bicycle it's no longer just 80 year old women and 6 year olds with training wheels that I pass. That means, might have written this before, instead of considering all the exercises central to getting better, I hate doing them again. That means tapering off the anti-seizure medication and ending it December 11. That means, most fundamentally, that when I go to sleep at night, I expect to wake up in the morning.

And not being exhausted every waking moment means interest in doing things, like Broadway shows. More than a year since we had gone and specifically triggered by reading that In the Heights would be closing in January after a two year plus run. So twice in the lovely warm latter part of last week, I made it down to South Street Seaport and got in the TKTS line there. Wednesday it was Fela! and Friday it was In the Heights, our two top choices. Both are excellent, filled with believable characters imbued with good and bad qualities; and energetic, talented young casts, although one of the leads in Heights had voice cracking issues in his songs during the performance we saw. But Heights, while set in the immediate present, feels like a period piece while Fela!, although set in 1970's Nigeria, feels completely of the moment and of any moment. Add to that its amazing multi-person choreography and Fela may be the best thing I've ever seen on Broadway.

The Glow Continues

Well, it has been eight days or so now since the Giants won the World Series and I'm still floating. Also thinking about the other years since moving to SF that they made the Series and lost, and the people, events, and person I was that went with all of them.

1962, high school, smuggling transistor radios into class to follow the games, my parents only 40 and 41 years old, Chuck Hiller (an even more improbable personage than Edgar Renteria) hitting a grand slam to win game 4 in New York, the deluge that postponed game six for three days, scarcely aware of the Cuban missile crisis building, so intent was I on the Giants, and then the heartbreak of game seven captured best in the Peanuts strip where Charlie Brown laments, "Why couldn't McCovey have hit the ball just three feet higher?", or to the right or left of Bobby Richardson.

1989, after two games in which the offense produced all of 1 run in Oakland, I was watching the start of game 3 in our den in VA when the earthquake hit, the kids were 14, 11 and 4, we'd been back from Argentina for just over a year. The Giants never had a chance. Everyone else remembers it as the Earthquake Series, for Dana Dee it was the Series when I tried to kill her. Game 1 was on her birthday and instead of watching, my priorities right at least, I took her to dinner to a Thai place that came highly reviewed by the Washington Post and she ordered lemon grass chicken, which turned out to be the most fiery dish of her life (and hotter than any lemon grass chicken since).

1993, doesn't really count since they lost the pennant to the Braves by one game on the final game of the season, but still, the heartbreak element was huge. I watched in San Salvador as Salomon Torres put them in an immediate early hole from which they never came close to recovering, 12-1 final. I turned it off and jumped in the swimming pool. They'd swept the first three games of a four game season finale in LA. But would it have been too much to ask for the newly minted Colorado Rockies to win one, one, one frigging game from the Braves in the course of the whole season. Apparently so, you can look it up. The last true pennant race, the last season before wild card.

2002, the real killer. I flew to Brazil on the night of game 4 and asked the Embassy to have the result for me as soon as I arrived. 4-3 Giants tie the series and then I ended my working dinner early the next night to go back to the hotel room in Brasilia to revel in the 16-5 rout. Day off, flew home, dear Annie calls in the midst of the 7th inning of game 6, saying, "They're finally going to do it." I parried, feeling jinxed, Dusty gave Ortiz the game ball in removing him and minutes later Scott Spiezio hits the 3 run shot and the Angles are off. Larry M. invites me to watch game 7 with him, but Livan is pitching so the result is preordained. I tell him I have no intention of watching. 4-1 Angels. Livan is still around, thankfully not with the Giants.

All that is gone now in the sweet November of 2010.

I See A Coelacanth

More than one, in fact. And, it turned out, in more than one place. Not quite as rare as "I see dead people," in The Sixth Sense, but it probably would have felt that way on Christmas Eve in Port Elizabeth, South Africa seventy-two years ago when a fisherman showed a drawing of a fish his ship had netted earlier that day to the curator of a small natural history museum. She knew it was something special because she had never seen such a fish before, so she did a free-hand drawing of it and sent the drawing to a fellow curator of a larger museum. He confirmed that what she had drawn and the ship had caught was a fish that until that moment scientists had believed had gone extinct around 75 million years ago, or about the time of the fifth great extinction on the planet which also killed -- among many other species -- all the non-avian dinosaurs.

And then after that narration, the curator at the American Museum of Natural History who was conducting this "Behind the Scenes" tour unfastened a couple latches on what looked to be the sort of container that a hunter would use to deep-freeze his moose meat and opened it to show us two coelacanths preserved in alcohol that the museum had obtained some years before. Their color had gone and they were a darkish gray rather than blue, but there they were, with four lobed fins that made them, as ancestors to tetrapods, more closely related to us than to all other fish alive today. Every once in a while the word "awestruck" really does apply.

Not even three weeks later, we stopped for a couple of very rainy days in San Francisco on our way back from Hawaii and went on a Sunday afternoon -- one day after the Giants won the NL pennant from the Phillies -- to the aquarium of the California Academy of Sciences. They have a Staff Favorites section in the aquarium and there I found yet another preserved coelacanth.

Populations have now been found off the Comoros, Mozambique, Madagascar, Indonesia and, most recently, in relatively shallow water off South Africa. How they managed to elude extinction remains unknown.

The Giants are Always the Giants....

until one year, 56 years after the last time, 52 years after they first moved to San Francisco, they aren't. What they are is World Series winners -- what a sweet thing it is!