Point of View: Looking Forward

    Of course when I said, on my return from San Pancho, Mexico, “Let the games begin,” I didn’t know a blizzard was imminent, which caused the cancellation of just about everything over this past week, except for the skating at Buckskill and the Gin Rummy games which Mary seems to invariably win, even as she says I am an astute card player.

    An article on the winter club at Buckskill and an interview that arose from a serendipitous meeting with Paul and Frenee Frediani at the Polar Bear Plunge at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach allayed my anxiety somewhat, though a third story remained elusive until Mary reminded me, on awakening Saturday morning, that it was 25 years ago that East Hampton High’s boys basketball team won a state championship. 

    While Kathy, who makes me look good every week, said that putting a “25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports” column on the front sports page smacked of “desperation,” I, who had a photo of Kenny Wood to go with it, demurred.

    It’s all one to me, inasmuch as my sports writing style remains as convoluted as it ever was. I can’t go quite as far as Janis Joplin, but at times it almost seems as if it’s all the same fuckin’ day, man.

    Which, of course, is delightful inasmuch as I am a great devotee of my meandering prose, a self-love that’s probably more inherited than merited.

    Terminal alliteration may, indeed, be my fate. I fear it as much as Alzheimer’s. Meanwhile, full speed ahead, and damn the peccadillos.

    Mary has lately been saying — after I’ve performed a service that in more able men would go unremarked upon, such as closing the chimney flue — that I’m “a god.”

    Though — again, as with Kathy — I demur. “I’m not a god,” I say, in all seriousness. “Just a demigod.”

    “Or a dummy-god,” she says.

    Anyway, it all came together this week, as it always seems to do. Kathy held back my 30 inches of nostalgia in favor of a piece Rusty Drumm did on Johnny Rade, a savvy commercial fisherman who’s no less avid in discussing things avian.

    So, I can look forward to looking back next week. By which time, I hope, the games really will have begun.