Martins going to the World Series

My sister and brother-in-law live in Windsor, Ontario, which is just south (!) of Detroit. I’ve been following my sister’s posts about the Detroit Tigers for the last few months as she and Dale attended the last 22 games of the regular season, and now a game from each of the playoff series. Go Tigers!

Her blog post today about the being the first Martin to see a world series game, a game my grandfather loved and played exceptionally well, took me right back to watching the World Series in the small tv room at the farm back in 1979, when the Pirates beat the Orioles in 7 games. I don’t remember much more than the couch, the brown leather lazy bow with the calfskin over the back, the fiddle on the wall, and baseball on one of the two channels we could get out there. It must have been harvest time, or Thanksgiving, as I’m not sure why else we would have been there in the middle of the school year. With all that goes on here, I don’t get much time to watch hockey, let alone baseball. This year, though, I’ll be doing my best to watch the World Series and will be thinking about more than one Martin as I watch.

Here’s just a bit of what Heidi wrote today….

As a writer, it’s distressing when words aren’t there for you when you think they should be. But, I’m starting to think that maybe it’s ok that words fail to appear sometimes. Maybe there are things that you don’t need words for. My Dad once quoted his Dad (my grandfather), as saying: “God gave us two eyes, two ears and one mouth. Thus we should always spend twice as much time listening or looking as we do talking.” My dad then reflected: “When we miss him, we remember his words and we remember to look and listen.” Next Sunday when I’m at what I assume will be the first World Series game ever attended by a Saskatchewan Martin, I’ll be cheering our team on. But I’ll also be there for my grandfather, looking, listening and taking it all in as he would have done.