Death of a Child
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by IlliniEd
Today is a sad day. Not for the reasons that most of you list. Not because it was Barry Bonds who chased and caught Aaron. Not becasue of anything to do with expanding hat size nor chest size. It would not have mattered to me today if it was Barry Bonds that broke the record. Wouldnt have mattered to me if it was A-Rod, Ken Griffey, Sammy Sosa or even Jim Thome for that matter. Today, part of my childhood died. For all my life, the magic number in the game was always 755. When talking about the hallowed number in sports growing up, it was never DiMaggios hitting strak, Gehrigs iron man mark (since broken) or even the total number opf TDs in football history. I knew some of those numbers. Not all of them. Couldnt tell you what half the records are in baseball. One thing I could have told you was that THE number was 755. That died last night. And as a result part of my childhood died.
For the next couple of years the number is going to be in flux. Always changing. With every homerun that Bonds hits, the number will change. No one knows where it will settle. It might be 770. It could be 795. Hell, it might even creap over the 800 mark. But until it settles, we have no number. That number will always be changing. There is somethign a little unsettling to me about that. For the first almost 30 years of my life there was always that number. Now there is a bunch of numbers. I know it happened when Aaron hit 715 and for 40 more after that. But that was before me. That is before my youth. Last night, part of my youth died.
When I get older and have children, I will be able to tell him that yes, I was alive when Bonds broke Hank Aaron's record, but it wont mean much to me. It might to my child but to me it means nothing. That number isnt the one that I remember. It will always be 755. Seven hundred fifty five homeruns. Its magical how it almost seems to roll off the tongue even. But my child wont rever that number. Not like I revered 755. He will be revering some number that has yet to be determined. No matter what everyone things of the guy, remember that no matter what till it is broken, it will be THE number for someone. But not for me. Not for me. For me the number will always be 755 and I can say that I know for a fact where I was on the evening that Bonds broke the record on August 7th, 2007. I was in a cemetary burying part of my childhood.
