We’ve got the venue, we’re deciding on music, I’ve got several appointments to buy a new suit, and she’s starting the wedding dress process. Now we’ve got to establish one of the most important things to insure any marriage stays strong: Baseball teams.
As you may know, I’m a pretty diehard Chicago Cubs fan. I considered buying a plot on the Wirgley Field cemetery, but realized no real rabbi would bury me in such an abomination. Where The Cubs and religion sometimes blur the lines in my family, she comes from a lineage of hardcore Boston Red Sox fans.
And I’m okay with that. I can dig the Red Sox. For a long time they were the Cubs of the American League, until they won the World Series after over 85 years of dealing with curses and failure after failure. Was I (along with every other Cubs fan) jealous? Absolutley. Could you imagine if there were two different sets of Jews trying in vain to get out of the Diaspora, and then one does, and the other group has to just smile and say “I’m so proud of the other group of Jews for getting into the Holy Land. It must be nice there.”
That’s the Cubs/Red Sox story in a nutshell.
With that said, this past weekend was the first time in our relationship that the Cubs and Red Sox met in a regular season interleague match-up, and I’m happy to say that we handled it really well. She didn’t make any cracks about the Cubs being total losers. I made no mentions of the fact that the last time I saw a game at Fenway, I counted over ten drunken Sox fans throwing up within 10 minutes of leaving the ballpark. (In their defense, Chicago Cubs fans are normally hammered.)
But it got me to thinking about one very serious question: Who will the kids root for?
I’m hoping that by the time we have kids, the Cubs will have turned their fortunes around (or their lack thereof), and that the Red Sox will continue to beat the Yankees (we both have a mutual dislike of the Bronx Bombers), and we can have a household that exists in the perfect state of baseball harmony, but I’m going to be honest, if her parents try and put a Red Sox hat on my child, that thing is going to find itself resting on a compost heap within five minutes of their leaving.
(I’m kidding. Sorta.)