“The Bat” sits prominently on the windowsill in the office of Middlebury College softball coach Kelly Bevere. It’s a crummy old bat really, not much good for anything now, worn out, pretty much out of hits, but assuming a deservedly honored spot.
I’m standing on the snow at Rikert next to my wife Deborah, clicking my cross-country ski boots into my bindings.
The image of a baseball scout in the popular mind is that of a wise and wizened veteran of the game, the way scouts are portrayed in “Money Ball,” for example, or like Clint Eastwood in the movie “Trouble with the Curve.” Well, the game has changed.
The same climate change that is dramatically shortening the season for outdoor skating across the north — including places like the Rideau Canal Skateway — is also opening up new habitat for Burmese pythons to move northward.
This weekend is the 100th Middlebury Winter Carnival and I find myself absorbed, perhaps ironically given the above, by Middlebury ski history and culture.
As soon as I hit “send” on last week’s column, I began pondering various works of literature that illustrated the virtues of walking and which have inspired me over the years to be more appreciative of the practice.
I love watching movies with my kids, now adults. These days, that usually means watching from home in a darkened living room on the big TV, without phones and other distractions.
My wife Deborah and I like to go walking. We are not interested in walking the Appalachian Trail. Nor even the Long Trail. Although we both find longer walks in new places enjoyable, most of our walks are just 20 minutes long on familiar trails in the woo … (read more)
If I were the impresario of the Middlebury Men’s Alumni Basketball Weekend, I would have done it up right, with great hoopla.
Even before stepping out onto the ice of Bryant Pond 30 minutes before dawn on New Year’s Day, I could tell it was going to be an unusual opening to Maine’s ice fishing season.
About 10 years ago, I got wind of a plan to initiate a Middlebury College Athletics Hall of Fame to coincide with the construction of the new field house. I thought this was a very bad idea and I wrote to the big shots at Middlebury and told them so.
It’s probably not accurate to say that fish taught me anything. Numerous fishing outings on which I failed to interact with any actual fish is evidence that I don’t even understand their language.
The natural world can be brutal.
Now, dear readers, what you may not know is “Voice of the Red Sox” Joe’s relationship to Middlebury and Middlebury College.
When it comes to films and works of fiction, we often think in terms of character development. Did the main characters change? If so, how and why? We don’t always ask that of non-fiction. But we ought to.
