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Comentario
'Yep,' Joe Castiglione agreed. 'He came to the Brewers right out of
high school, I think - he's been playing for them since 1974.'
I sat up so fast I nearly spilled a can of Pepsi-Cola all over myself.
Wait a minute!
I was thinking.
Wait just a goddam minute! I
published my first book in 1974! That wasn't so long ago! What's
this shit about helping Abner Doubleday Put down the first set of
foul lines?
Then it occurred to me that the perception of how time passes - a
subject which comes up again and again in the stories which
follow - is a highly individual thing. It's true that the publication of
Carrie
in the spring of 1974 (it was published, in fact, just two
days before the baseball season began and a teenager named Robin
Yount played his first game for the Milwaukee Brewers) doesn't
seem like a long time ago to me subjectively - just a quick glance
back over the shoulder, in fact - but there are other ways to count
the years, and some of them suggest that fifteen years can be a long
time, indeed.
In 1974 Gerald Ford was President and the Shah was still running
the show in Iran. John Lennon was alive, and so was Elvis Presley.
Donny Osmond was singing with his brothers and sisters in a high,
piping voice. Home video cassette recorders had been invented but
could be purchased in only a few test markets. Insiders predicted
that when they became widely available, Sony's Beta-format
machines would quickly stomp the rival format, known as VHS,
into the ground. The idea that people might soon be renting
popular movies as they had once rented popular novels at lending
libraries was still over the horizon. Gasoline prices had risen to
unthinkable highs: forty-eight cents a gallon for regular, fifty-five
cents for unleaded.
The first white hairs had yet to make their appearance on my head
and in my beard. My daughter, now a college sophomore, was
four. My oldest son, who is now taller than I am, plays the blues
harp, and sports luxuriant shoulder-length Sammy Hagar locks...
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