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Joe Maddon’s name popped into my head sometime between 4:20 and 5 o’clock Friday morning while I was drifting in and out of sleep waiting for my 6:45 a.m. alarm. For some reason, I was wondering if he was still the manager of baseball’s Los Angeles Angels.
Why a fired baseball manager with no ties to Boston was in a dream remains a mystery.
Perhaps it was a chance meeting I had with Maddon at the Au Bon Pain in Copley Place more than a decade ago.
We had taken the train into Boston on a cold wet April morning for the Red Sox season opener against Maddon’s Tampa Bay Rays. The manager and his coaching staff were sitting down to breakfast at the table next to ours when one of the assistants noticed our Red Sox attire and told us that the game had been postponed to the next day.
That’s it. Why was he suddenly in my dream? I’ll never know.
Other thoughts that keep me awake or consume my dreams make more sense.
Filling Jared Ware’s position at North TV and sifting through the more than 50 applicants has been exhausting. We ultimately went with a candidate who has worked at a cable access station similar to ours and was only available to us because her hours had been cut because of the pandemic.
The state of the country is another topic that has been impacting my sleep. I’ve devoted enough space to the sins of our immediate past president and his followers, so I won’t go into detail why.
I still can’t understand, however, when I read letters from to the editor of this newspaper from otherwise intelligent people trying to downplay the events of Jan. 6.
The videos of armed rioters smashing through windows and barricades and then attacking men and women whose only duty was to secure the building and occupants was, and still is, disturbing.
It was the same day a woman with ties to this area was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer while the woman was trying to make her way through a smashed window and into one of the legislative chambers. The shooting occurred on a day the votes of a presidential election were being certified and some people still argue that the shooting wasn’t justified.
I worry that these people will someday be in power and columnists like myself will be imprisoned for writing the truth.
The weather is another major reason for concern.
Although I’m confident we’ll eventually receive enough rain to replenish the reservoirs and wells in this area, I do worry about what would happen if it continues for an extended period of time.
Those thoughts usually occur during the middle of the night after I’ve seen residents willfully ignoring regulations prohibiting watering their lawn. I love a green lawn as much as the next guy, but I would never be selfish enough to endanger my house or the homes of others by potentially impacting water flow in the event of a fire.
What really bothers me is a story that ran in this newspaper last month. It stated results from a recent poll in which only 35% of Americans consider themselves very concerned about climate change compared to 44% just three years ago. Those who were not very or not at all concerned jumped from 25% in 2019 to 32% in June.
Do these people not follow the news? Is it something in their water? That’s not, of course, the case in Jackson, Mississippi, where they can’t drink their water because of the effects of severe flooding.
There may be one positive in another story I read last week. Experts are now upping their prediction that the melting ice sheet in Greenland will eventually raise global sea levels by more than 10 inches, that’s double the expected five inches those same experts predicted years ago.
Why is that good news? It may finally push the wealthiest among us, those owning property along the coast, to use their money and influence climate change deniers to finally act.
Only then can we all get a good night’s rest.
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