Creeps to Come
Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under marriage, kids, parenting, advice, red sox, G's marriage to Manny |
If you live in Red Sox nation your eyes are bleeding right now and your head feels as if it’s just lightly stapled to your wobbly, exhausted, wrung out neck. It is, after all, as the nice young man with the overly gel-ed hair on Fox Television commercials tells us, October. And October is post season baseball and the Red Sox have kicked and scratched their way to a World Series despite a series of dangerously anemic post-season games. And finally, finally, Dice-K can pitch again and Dustin and Youk can hit and I have stayed up way past my bedtime over and over again to watch them do it. 
And all would be well (despite the yawning and the overwhelming urge to curl up on the cool linoleum of the dairy isle and take a nap), if it weren’t for G’s announcement that she thinks she’ll marry Manny Ramirez. Don’t get me wrong, I like Manny. Manny is a curiosity, a sort of goofy and unlikely sports hero who, if nothing else, is the source of great entertainment. But Manny, with his suspicious trips behind the left field wall between pitching changes and his baggy trousers and his shimmering blue hair net that harnesses the ropey dreads beneath his batting helmet is not exactly who I had in mind when I conjure my future son-in-law.
While Jacoby Ellsbury or Dustin Pedroia would make fine additions to the Madmarriage family, all hustle and earnestness and clean cut good looks, I am tad concerned about G’s affections for Manny. She has his mug taped to the back of her little girl door, his dread locks swinging around thick shoulders, his gaze off to right field as he watches the ball he just hit arc up and away, his signature finish, arms extended, fingers splayed as he forgets to run to first base. It strikes such a dissonant chord, that photo of the notoriously flaky, suspiciously sloppy ball player, who has been called a ‘crazy motherfucker’ by his own teammates, among the Webkinz and the unicorns and the collection of kitty cats on the windowsill. There he is, Manny being Manny, in my six year old daughter’s room. I am disturbed.
While Ramirez has been called the “greatest right hand hitter of his generation,” he has also been called: affably apathetic, a sloppy wayward teenager, a space ranger, a holy fool and an idiot savant. (See The New Yorker article, Waiting for Manny for additional accolades.) G’s affections for the baggy pants wearing, thuggish, distracted Ramirez is frightening in that it is a harbinger of creeps to come.
So if she’s going to love the bad boys then there will have to be strict rules.
We, as parents, must start laying the ground work early, “G, you will date no one who, reportedly, has multiple licenses and social security numbers, an arrest record, has failed to graduate from high school or drives a 1967 Lincoln Continentals with illegal tints, ostrich upholstered seats and a pimped out sound system, unless, he also sports a $160 million dollar baseball contract. And that’s that.”
(Manny driver’s license courtesy of The Onion. So sue me.)
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