Friday, July 23, 2010

Crystal and my character set.

I have shared with Crystal Newell eight of the sixteen characters in my set. Wednesday I showed her a sheet with them written on it and asked her to copy each one below it. She did so. Then I told her that there are eight more characters that I will give to her if we are married. She responded, "all right." This was a response along the line of her last two responses to my talk of marriage, which she greeted with wild laughter, the first, and mild laughter, the second. She's getting used to the idea.

Chicago sports championships

Having been content with my conduct during the course of the season when the Chicago White Sox won the world series, I expected that what I did at the time of the subsequent Super Bowl in which the Chicago Bears played would determine the winner.

Naturally, I wanted the Bears to win.

However, on January 23 of that year, before the Super Bowl, I was engaged in courting a ten year old girl at the Edgewater Branch of the Chicago Public Library, and this changed everything. At the time of the Super Bowl, I was still maintaining a belief in the possibility the girl would return to the library. If she did, I would try to make contact pursuant to her introducing me to her parents so I could plead my case for courtship to last until her entrance to adulthood.

I was walking on Clark Street at the time and it occurred to me that I was in no state to urge on the Bears to victory, being tied up in a relationship that, although it begged the greatest skepticism from any reasonable critic, certainly, given my own belief in it, required all I had to give, making support for the Bears, to the extent that would bring victory, impossible.

I realized somewhat after the talk got going about the Chicago Blackhawks' chances for winning the Stanley cup in 2010, that with my courtship of Crystal Newell having reached a certain realisticness I had every reason to engage myself in doing my part on behalf of the Blackhawks. I made this realization between games two and three of the finals.

I discovered in listening to the third game on my radio in my bedroom that radio was more exciting for hockey than television. The fact that I didn't know the names of the players made it impossible to gather the significance of the words of the broadcasters. The only way I had to tell whether the action was in favor of the Blackhawks or the Flyers was the tone of voice of the broadcasters, in particular the play by play announcer. This included the fact that any goal scored was known to me as Blackhawk or Flyer solely by the tone of voice of the announcer. Events prior to a goal were a confusing amalgam of evidence. In no way did this detract from the excitement I experienced listening to the games. In fact, it made them the most exciting games I had witnessed in professional sports, ever.

I carried my part throughout in keeping with the supposition that my actions were subject to conditions that were real time interelated with actions on the ice. This was not cause and effect. It was discovery of equal opportunity for delving into the possibilities present. Whatever place cause and effect had in such a situation depended solely on factors so arcane that it would be pointless to assume that I could reason my way into a Blackhawks win just by wanting one. Only by doing everything I could to follow the game with increasing understanding because of the power of logic--the same logic by which I had entered into the original relationship with the ten year old girl at the library--was there some possibility that I could bring about a victory in keeping with the Blackhawks being the rightful owners of the title.

So congratulations, Chicago Blackhawks! In my world, we both did it, and I surely will never minimalize your victory. As with Barack Obama, I would never minimalize his greatness or success in the election, but it would be hard to argue, from my point of view, against the suggestion that his greatness would never have emerged into the presidency without my affirmation just prior to my appointment as first of the Chicago Mafia that I wanted, as a prospective member of the Mafia, to harmonize black-white relations.

The fact that my father had played semi-pro hockey made this Blackhawk victory especially sweet, and something of a memorial to his memory, him having died in 1999, a companion memorial to the victory of Barack Obama as a memorial to my mother, a champion of racial equality and advocate, at least in word, of racial intermarriage.

The fact that I never told my father of my appointment as first in the Mafia in 1993, which he would have found thrilling if he had been able to believe it, perhaps makes my inability to tell my mother of it, since she died in 1986, something of an equal tragedy.