A photo warms the heart during a brutal winter

Print copy by Globe photographer Jim O'Brien
 Umpire Mike Caira listens politely as Revere coach Al Blasi dramatizes his claim that Arlington’s Ron Valeri was out trying to steal third base during yesterday’s game. Blasi lost the argument and Revere lost the game, 2-1. This copy of the photo appeared on the front page of the sports section of the Boston Evening Globe dated Thursday, April 27, 1978.

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” 

                               
                                                                        ― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

AUBURN, Maine — Whenever I open the shades and peer through the window, blinding snow and howling winds obscure my vision of a disappearing landscape that lies beneath 100 inches of god damn snow.

I can’t speak for all New Englanders, but this has certainly been the winter of my discontent and February has been a complete whiteout. Weekly snowstorms drift in and I feel like I have been carpet bombed by Mother Nature.

Obscenities litter my white front lawn. A line of six-foot high hedges, which act as a barrier to outside world, are buried under seven feet of snow. Their branches protrude through the white powder, crying out for help. Trenches surround my home, making my yard look like the Battle of the Marne during World War I. I am expecting a sniper to take a shot at me as I burrow through snow to get to the oil pipe or the porch.

I feel like a freakin’ groundhog.

I have given up on shoveling my other driveway. The remains of a broken shovel rests against a wall on my deck in the freezing cold. It was good shovel that has become another casualty in the war against snow. I will miss it.

Old Man Winter has been merciless to this region of America. There has been talk that people on the West Coast are frustrated because the Northeast is hogging all the snow.

Really!

I have a few choice words for my fellow Americans in Washington and Oregon. So what’s stopping them from showing up in my neighborhood with huge dump trucks to haul away this white crap.

I don’t wear snowshoes and don’t enjoy trudging through six feet of snow. I remain huddled inside and have gone on a cleaning spree — again.

I have been going through my parents’ personal items since my father’s death last November. I feel like a ghoul as we divide up their belongings. I would do anything to avoid this grisly task.

My father would have despised this winter. He was the Revere High School baseball coach for 42 years. Spring and summer were his favorite seasons. Baseball was his thing and you can’t play America’s pastime in the snow. I can still hear him cuss with each shovel of snow. He hated the stuff.

My mother, who passed four years ago, kept all the clippings of his coaching career. This basket of hard copies from my past is a treasure trove to a son who was the team’s bat boy and had the opportunity to hang out with his dad on the diamond as a child.

As I sifted through the clips as another storm set down a new coat of — you guessed it — fresh snow, I discovered a copy of the photo and clipping that "Boston Globe" reporter Marvin Pave and I were hoping to find to run with a well-written feature story about my dad’s life that appeared last November in Boston’s largest daily. It was a remarkable tribute to a good man who gave a damn about the right things in life.

I pulled the front page of the "Boston Globe Evening’s" sports section dated Thursday, April 27, 1978 from the pile of clippings. My loving mother had saved the faded newspaper all these years.

Globe photographer Frank O’Brien took the photo of my father having words with an umpire during a Revere baseball game against the Arlington Spyponders. It was a banner photo of my dad coming to bat for his team.

The next day at Revere High School a couple of teachers called me into the history department’s room and pointed out the photo of my father. We all had a laugh. My father was amused and quite popular for a few days.

I have a print of the black-and-white photo. It was given to me by my sisters and apparently purchased by my mother nearly 36 years ago. These possessions have  become precious artifacts of my past.

Finding that photo of my father and the old sports front of the Boston Evening Globe made a winter’s gloomy day bearable to a son who still wishes he could spend one more hour on a baseball diamond with his father.