The Most Important Thing That Doesn't Matter

This Sunday, we stayed too long at a birthday party (there are a lot of kids in this town and they seem to have three or four birthdays each) and got home just before milking. We should've left earlier, but it was so nice to be like normal people, talking and laughing while the kids ran around in the afternoon sun. It didn't make the work any easier when we got home, but it was nice to forget about it for a little while.

We got home just at four and Earl still had a round bale to shred before he could start chores, so he set up the milkhouse and brought the cows in while I packed up Oliver and Harley and went up to start milking. Cliffy and Jackson were playing outside and I couldn't bring myself to make them come to the barn with me, even though it would have been nice to have their help.

I thought Harley could ride in the tractor with Earl, but the snow and ice is built up so high where it's fallen from the barn roof that the cab tractor doesn't fit in the barn anymore. The loader tractor doesn't have a seat for Harley, so he had to stay in the barn with me. He was a total trooper, drawing on the white board, singing his little songs to the calves, running up and down the feed aisle, saying to the cows, "Watch how fast I can run!" He fell and got his hands dirty, but he was so impressed when I washed him up like he was a cow's udder that he forgot to be sad about it. It's not really how I want to raise my kids, shooing them away from me while I'm working so they won't get kicked by a cow, but it's good to have a kid who can deal when we don't have a choice.

The towel holder had Stupid Towels again. I mixed up Popcorn and Bizkit and probably half of the other Jerseys who all look the same to me. And then I couldn't figure out why Neatha was kicking me and acting psychotic. Getting kicked with a baby on my back is on the list of things that strain my marriage, so I went and got Earl to hook her up. Turns out, the reason Neatha was acting weird is that she was actually Charlie, who is, in fact, psychotic. Charlie usually comes in at the end of milking, which explains why I hadn't milked her since I've only been starting milking lately. She's a quarter Angus, out of Charcoal, a Jersey/Angus cross that this lady we bought some cows from a few years ago sent along on the truck claiming she was a "Black Jersey." Black Jersey my ass. For years, when Charcoal came in the parlor, we wrote, "FBC" on the milking sheet. Yup. BC is for Beef Cow. Anyway, I don't like to be beat, but the counter-intuitive get-close-to-the-psycho-cow moves that milking Charlie required don't work with my precious baby on my back.

Earl went back to feeding and I slogged along through half the cows until Earl finished up and came to take over and Harley, Oliver and I went back to the house to start thinking of what we could possibly eat for supper that could be ready before ten o'clock at night. It wasn't exactly a recipe for a great afternoon, except for one thing--there was baseball on the barn radio.

The Red Sox were playing an exhibition game against the Dodgers. It wasn't going very well for the Sox. Coco made an error that should have been part of a tidy inning, but then Buckholtz started to fall apart, eventually walking in a run. He finally managed to piece three outs together to get out of it and the Sox, who can be so good at rallying behind their pitcher and getting those runs back, had nothing going at the plate. Zero. But it was baseball.

Here it is, the start of the season, and there are so many things to think about. Is Manny hitting third or fourth? How's Big Papi looking after the surgery? Ellsbury or Crisp in center field? If J.D. Drew has a great year, do I have to like him? What's Wakefield going to do without Mirabelli? Oh, the pitching. There's Beckett's back and Schilling's shoulder and whatever is going on with Stick Bug Buckholtz which hopefully will sort itself out before he starts against the Blue Jays in Toronto.

I don't have much use, or time, for basketball, football or hockey, let alone golf, tennis or soccer. I played rugby, but you'd have to tie me up to get me to watch it on television. But baseball is perfect. Three outs and nine innings and a full cast of characters to keep track of and fret over.

I was at the barn when Varitek stuffed his glove in A-Rod's pretty face and turned the 2004 season around. Earl hurt his back in the fall that year and I did all the milking for a week, seven months pregnant and it would have sucked, except that the Sox played a lot of afternoon games on their way to clinching the wild card and the morning radio world was full of news and speculation. As long as the barn radio is on WDEV, a milking's worth of radio will yield some interesting tidbit from spring training to September.

Baseball, someone told me, is the most important thing that doesn't matter. And in my life, with lots of big things that do matter to worry about, it's invaluable.