A Day at Fenway Park: I Took My Wife to the Best Seats, She Brought Yarn.

(First published on Substack on April 24, 2025). Subscribe at papausedtosay.substack.com for notifications about new content!)

Baseball and Overcoming Grief:  Marriage, and Perspective from Behind Home Plate

Tuesday night was a wonderful evening in so many ways. Carrie and I went to a Red Sox game and sat in what are arguably among the best seats at Fenway, eight rows directly behind home plate. It doesn’t get much better than that.

My father, who passed away from Parkinson’s Disease this past December, used to get a small allotment of games each year from the season-ticket owners. A deeply rooted New Englander, my father was a lifelong Sox fan and loved going to games before the disease made it impossible.

It was the first game I’ve been to in a few years and the first since he passed away. There’s nothing like watching a game from that proximity, but it wasn’t just the proximity to the players that made it special; it was the proximity to my father, to one of the few extracurricular loves he allowed himself to indulge in. He mainly invested in making others happy. Trips to Fenway were an exception. Being there felt like a step forward in overcoming grief.

Despite being a bit cold, the game was great. I mean, sure, Carrie did sit in some of the most coveted seats in all of Major League Baseball and crochet throughout the game, but I let it slide…mostly.

On one hand, baseball indeed has plenty of downtime, and she is good enough at it that she can still watch the game. On the other hand, imagine the following:

You’re an avid fan, and you’re lucky enough to get some run-of-the-mill seats further back that still feel a bit like a splurge, but it’s Fenway. It’s worth it. As you’re enjoying the game, you find yourself longingly gazing down at the seats behind the plate, imagining how amazing it would be to one day find yourself there. Scanning the crowd, you happen to spot a person in the 8^th row, seats you could only dream about sitting in, doing what appears to be…arts and crafts?!

I’m just sayin’.

When presented with this thought experiment, Carrie countered by commenting on my tendency to check my phone, which I of course tried to explain away as categorically different in nature, but fine, point taken.

The truth is, in that moment, my phone was actually somewhat a source of sadness.

Had my father been alive, I most likely would have spoken to him once or twice during the game. We would have checked in with each other, a few words about the seats, the weather, the starting pitcher, the exorbitant cost of hot dogs…the little anecdotes that themselves are not intrinsically important but serve as the scaffolding for the priceless moments of meaningful interpersonal connections between father and son.

The topic of overcoming grief isn’t the direction I was headed in when I sat down to write. I was thinking more about what it means for Carrie and me to go out together, what it takes to do so as the parents of three children with a veritable potpourri of pediatric neurodivergence and mental health diagnoses. Sometimes you just have to go where the keyboard takes you. More on the parenting component another day…

In the meantime, just for fun, here’s a screenshot from a highlight reel where you can see clear evidence that Carrie and I both watched the game attentively despite the distractions of fiber arts and mobile technology. My dad would be very proud.

Go Sox!