Steve Buckley: Welcome To My Coming-Out Party
Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2011 8:01 am
Not really a sports story, but he is a sports writer for the Boston Herald
A candid admission: There was a time when I hated it when my mother would call with an urgent request that I drop everything to take her shopping.
These trips often involved the pursuit of trivial items — shoes, a table lamp, frozen strawberries. Or scatter rugs: In any given year, my mother would acquire enough scatter rugs to cover every inch of the playing field at Fenway Park [map], including the bullpens.
I, on the other hand, had much more important things to do — such as go on the radio to share my concerns about the depth of the Patriots [team stats]’ special teams, or take Dan Duquette to task over his stated belief that Jose Offerman was going to replace Mo Vaughn’s on-base capabilities.
But my mother’s calls were not really about shopping, of course, but about enjoying life — getting out of the house, hearing news about what’s going on with the family, maybe even quizzing me about my job, though she was no sports fan at all and didn’t know Johnny Damon from Johnny McKenzie.
And the truth of the matter is that, as my mother aged, even as she was being treated for cancer, she had become wonderfully anecdotal, using her sharp mind to share stories about her younger days that might otherwise have been lost to the passage of time were it not for these midweek Scatter Rug Adventures.
Just over seven years ago, before Thanksgiving, we were getting into the car outside of a CVS when my mother said, “I think you should go ahead and do that story you’ve been talking about.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” she said. “Just go ahead and do it. And then we’ll have a party.”
She was talking about the story in which I would say that I am gay.
(I guess I’ve kind of buried the lead here, which, I admit, has been a common complaint about my writing over the years. But what the heck: The headline has already given away the story, and, anyway, what happened that day seven years ago is central to why I am writing today.)
http://bostonherald.com/sports/columnis ... ormat=text" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
A candid admission: There was a time when I hated it when my mother would call with an urgent request that I drop everything to take her shopping.
These trips often involved the pursuit of trivial items — shoes, a table lamp, frozen strawberries. Or scatter rugs: In any given year, my mother would acquire enough scatter rugs to cover every inch of the playing field at Fenway Park [map], including the bullpens.
I, on the other hand, had much more important things to do — such as go on the radio to share my concerns about the depth of the Patriots [team stats]’ special teams, or take Dan Duquette to task over his stated belief that Jose Offerman was going to replace Mo Vaughn’s on-base capabilities.
But my mother’s calls were not really about shopping, of course, but about enjoying life — getting out of the house, hearing news about what’s going on with the family, maybe even quizzing me about my job, though she was no sports fan at all and didn’t know Johnny Damon from Johnny McKenzie.
And the truth of the matter is that, as my mother aged, even as she was being treated for cancer, she had become wonderfully anecdotal, using her sharp mind to share stories about her younger days that might otherwise have been lost to the passage of time were it not for these midweek Scatter Rug Adventures.
Just over seven years ago, before Thanksgiving, we were getting into the car outside of a CVS when my mother said, “I think you should go ahead and do that story you’ve been talking about.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” she said. “Just go ahead and do it. And then we’ll have a party.”
She was talking about the story in which I would say that I am gay.
(I guess I’ve kind of buried the lead here, which, I admit, has been a common complaint about my writing over the years. But what the heck: The headline has already given away the story, and, anyway, what happened that day seven years ago is central to why I am writing today.)
http://bostonherald.com/sports/columnis ... ormat=text" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;