Taking cover from a deadly pathogen

My wife and I walk down the church isle in Westbrook, Maine 30 years ago.

AUBURN, Maine — A deadly pathogen known as Covid-19 is knocking the hell out of humanity — and no nation is immune to this unrelenting scourge.

The United States, like many nations, is in the midst of a health crisis, which is an understatement.  Yeah, this is the big one and this worldwide pandemic has been in the making for 100 years, and now it has come to a theater near you. 

The Blasi family has been hunkering down at home, where we now both work. My wife is a teacher and I am sports journalist for several publications. It is has been a dark, cold spring, but it is difficult to look forward to the summer when people of all ages are dying around the planet.

We are lucky and safe — for the moment — and I don’t take that for granted.

There are 376 cases of Covid-19 in Maine and a handful of Pine Tree State residents have died. 

The sports world no longer exists and most of my stories have become Coronavirus-related. Read the column I wrote l about a sportswriter who longs to be back on the road covering high-school baseball, lacrosse and track. But my world has disappeared for a moment as fans across the planet mourn the loss of pro sports.

Here is the link: https://www.sunjournal.com/2020/04/01/timeout-missing-that-human-touch/

People in the U.S. are dying at an alarming rate, first responders are crying for relief and supplies, and millions of Americans are out of work as the world’s economy takes a nosedive into oblivion.

There is plenty of blame to go around after the U.S. appeared to ignore the warning sighs and got behind the eight ball. The people in charge should have understood the horrifying implications of what was transpiring in Wuhan, China. Other nations should have also mobilized instead of brushing off this deadly, infectious germ as a fluke. Back here, some leaders have called it hoax and have refused to order shelter in place.

Turn on the news in America and and your eyes will well up as nurses and doctors, who are also being infected, plead for masks and respirators as the body count continues to soar.

Everybody should understand to keep their distance and remain at home to stop this pathogen’s from jumping from host to host. This isn’t the common cold and the life you save may be your own — if you remain at home.

The three of us are going stir crazy and a trip to the gas station or grocery store is like a mini vacation. My heart goes out to all human beings around the globe.

Five days ago, Terri and I celebrated 30 years of a good, strong and health marriage.

I am still looking forward to another 30 years with my wife and son. So do the right thing and remain at home for the sake of all of humanity.

American writer and humorist Mark Twain had it right when he said: “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

It is OK to smile after reading Twain’s sage advice.

Holidays are a mixed picture

Albert John Blasi lifts his daughter Babs and me a long time ago.

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”

                                                                        – Karl Lagerfeld

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

                                                                               – Joan Miro

AUBURN, Maine — I took a sentimental and pictorial journey through the past 30 years of my life.

The pilgrimage began after I started poring over worn-out photo albums over the past five months. I viewed hundreds of vintage pictures during an odyssey filled with tears, laughter and revelations of an era where over a dozen Italian relatives lived on one block.

This Italian enclave endured for decades before families starting spreading out across the nation. I miss the food, home-made wine and the company of my relatives, who made each Christmas Eve a night to remember in Revere, Mass.

There was no Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter, which I now look upon as a blessing since I discovered life was pretty damn good without social media. I can't shake those wonderful moments, but memories also trigger a daily dose of longing — especially during the holidays. 

Closure is nonsense for those of us with common sense.

Way back when

It was hand-to-hand combat when discussing politics in the backyard of my grandfather’s home, which was right next door to our house. Gatherings were huge, the booze sometimes ran like water, and voices grew louder as grown-ups sparred with each other over sports, weather and politics on hot summer evenings. My favorite argument occurred one evening when my dad admonished adults that the Beatles were partially responsible eroding society in America. 

My father was young and already set in his ways, but I thought the four mop-tops — Paul, Ringo, George and John —were a smash and could do no wrong in the world of Rock and Roll. The British Invasion was a hit as bands like The Who and Rolling Stones took Americans out for a walk with their innovative sounds.

An obsession begins

For five years, over a half dozen of my mom’s photo albums sat buried under stuff in a packed closet. I sifted through plastic bags filled with old pictures and then inserted them into new albums.

I neglected the photos after my father passed away, and the four of us had the unenviable, melancholic task of cleaning out our parents’ home, which, sadly, was sold in 2015.

Being a witness to Alzheimer’s diabolical and unrelenting progression knocked the life out my soul. Perusing through those old photo albums became unbearable for me after we buried four immediate family members in four years.  

But the passing of time and a year’s worth of grief counseling gave me the courage to extricate those boxes filled with my past and examine over 500 photos, including some that were nearly 70 years old —without slipping into a mind-numbing depression.

Those pictures are slowly fading away just like aunts and uncles who are no longer with us. I knew these photos needed rescuing and tender, loving care.

A notion is born

Before I sifted through this jumble of photographs, I decided to give my three sisters hundreds of never-seen-before pictures of their children that we had taken for over the past two decades. I estimate that I have 3,000 pictures locked up in 70 albums that are stored upright on large, home-made Spruce book shelves. I needed to make room for more recent photos, and I eventually tossed out 500 after they were deemed as poor quality.

So I carefully dug through each book and extracted pictures of my sisters’ children.

I finished the project in two months, but I was on a tear and I set my sights on those priceless, abandoned photos in the back of the closet, knowing time is now at a premium in our lives. Each grizzled photo album featured pictures of my grandparents at a backyard barbecue, trips to Pennsylvania, Niagara Falls, Washington D.C. and visits to New England cemeteries to find lost relatives on my mother’s side of the family.

Before I began, I needed to delicately remove each photo from the wax paper that held them there for over four decades. Peeling away each photo was an arduous task, but I discovered a method to speed up the process on the Internet. Heating an iron-made spatula with a blow dryer allows the spatula to cut through the wax without damaging the photo.

There are 513 photos that needed to be scanned and developed so someday they will take the place of the originals. Let’s hope they come out OK after some serious enhancing on my computer.

I needed to complete this project, which became an unusual obsession for me, and now this endeavor has taken me to the holidays.

After all, T’s the season to speak of loved ones in the past tense as we all fend off those winter blues in New England.

Darkness comes quick in the hinterlands, and with the early winter twilight, depression is at its mightiest as it makes the rounds, jabbing away at your fragile soul like a feisty pugilist looking for an opportunity to land a devastating right hook.

Thanksgiving and Christmas double team and overwhelm us with the past. The Ghost of Christmas Past slips back into our deepest recesses, resurrecting fond memories.

So it is easy to lament the passing of time in the cold dark of winter and wishing you could have one more conversation with your parents. But you realize that people drift away like the melting spring snow and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

Picture this

I do a majority of my work as a sportswriter and photographer at home. One of my three bedrooms serves as an office and a pictorial history of my family fills the walls. There are at least 50 photographs of lives well lived that stare back at me.

This cavalcade of enlarged photographs is like taking H.G. Wells’ time machine out for a spin every day.

I look at them when I pause to come up with another original sentence or touch up an action shot. Sometimes, I wander off in the past for a few minutes before I return to the blank page.

It is a privilege to know where I come from, but there are people who have never been surrounded by loving and kind relatives and friends like I have. Few have lived in a neighborhood with relatives occupying one street.

That is why these old, knocked-around photos are important to all our children and the generations to come in our family tree.

The passing of time has a way of sorting out priorities in life — and it explains why those endearing photographs deserved my attention and soothed my longing for those I loved and lost over the decades.

A veteran and a fine father

Check out this link to a Boston Globe story about my father

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2014/11/26/blasi-longtime-revere-high-baseball-coach-formerly-led-state-coaches-association/xa7uUxaeyfa1jtsHodQ3DK/story.html

Imagine you are this kid from the Greater Boston area with your heart set on attending college when a letter suddenly arrives in the mail from Uncle Sam ordering you to report for duty in 1954.

Albert John Blasi was from an Italian family and grew up in Revere, Mass. He lived for baseball and grew up watching DiMaggio, Williams and Yaz at Fenway Park. He wanted to coach and teach history and loved betting on the ponies. Gambling is like a second sport in Revere, which featured Suffolk Downs thoroughbred racing and the Wonderland Dog Track.

Those two betting establishments were a haven for gamblers like my father, whose other passion was sports.

He and his wife, Louise, attended Ted Williams’ final game of his career on Sept. 28, 1960. I was about six months old. Years later, my mom mentioned their visit to Fenway in passing.

He was drafted by the United States Army in 1954 and was sent to occupied Germany to help the country’s denizens get back on their feet after a brutal war. He served with the Big Red One, which was also known as the First Infantry Division during peacetime. The Fighting First took hell in World War II, landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

My father missed serving in the Korean war by a year. I missed serving in Vietnam by a couple of years. We were both lucky but always honored those who picked up a gun in a war.

He became a sharpshooter, but he had no intention of making a career in the service.

His baseball dream came true in Germany. He was playing in a pick-up game on the base when he drove the ball out of the park. A colonel saw him and was so impressed with my father’s baseball skill that the officer instructed the leader of Blasi’s unit to relieve him of certain duties so he could play for the post teams.

I have a picture of him playing catch with his post team at Zeppelin Field in Germany. The field was a rallying point for Hitler's armies. Behind my father is a destroyed swastika.

For the next year, he was living the dream — playing baseball in Germany and skiing in Austria.

He enjoyed lugging around a bat and glove instead of a Browning automatic.

After his two-year stint, he resigned from the Army with great joy. He was a civilian and America’s pastime made him a prisoner of his passion for the game.

My father told me the story about his last day in the Army.

“Anthony, the sergeant said, ‘We all know Al Blasi is leaving us and will miss the army.’ Everyone laughed in my unit.”

He headed home and straight to Suffolk University where he majored in history on the G.I Bill’s dime. He became a devoted teacher and ended up coaching the Revere High School varsity baseball team for 42 years.

He was also devoted to his four children and wife. He was a coach known for his kindness and devotion to his players and community.

To me, he was my dad and somebody I could always count on.

Albert John Blasi died of Alzheimer’s (also known as The Long Goodbye) on Nov. 8, 2014. He served his country, but more importantly, he loved all of us.

There is not a day when I don’t think about my parents — many times with tears in my eyes from a heavy heart.

Missing in action — forever

Albert John Blasi through the years

"He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it."

                                   ~Clarence Budington Kelland

CAPE ELIZABETH — Lingering grief is like being buried alive in a shallow grave.

Melancholy is grief’s best friend, and if you immerse yourself in endless desolation, you will be consumed by your own sorrow — like a rotting corpse resting in the deep earth.

I won’t allow that kind of emptiness to rule my life. My father wouldn’t tolerate it, either. And I don’t have a choice — I have a family that still needs me despite my sadness.

My father, Albert John Blasi, died this weekend on Nov. 8, 2014 — another casualty of a cruel disease known as Alzheimer’s. He was buried with full military honors after serving a tour of duty during the occupation of Germany in 1954. Actually, he played baseball for the U.S. Army’s post teams. It was a good gig, and instead of lugging around an M-1 Garand rifle, he carried a bat and donned a glove on a baseball diamond somewhere in Europe.

I have this great picture of him playing catch at Zepplin Field where Hitler’s Nazis rallied during World War II. Behind my father is a destroyed, concrete swastika — remnants of the Third Reich.

There were hundreds of mourners at his wake and a police escort accompanied the hearse to the cemetery where he was buried in Peabody, Mass.

I still have the flag which was draped over his coffin on that cold day. It sits in a case that rests on top of a curio cabinet that I bought for my parents long ago. Call it a shrine, if you like, but it doesn’t alleviate the pain that goes along with my father’s loss.

That takes time, sometimes counseling, and a begrudging acceptance, and there is no closure — just a deep wound that never heals.

He was a teacher, coach and father whose integrity, loyalty and compassion made him a respected member in a city just outside Boston, and his reputation as the Revere High baseball skipper for 42 years extended well beyond the borders of the Greater Boston area. Boston Globe writer Martin Pave did a wonderful job with his half-page article about my dad.

It is an anniversary that no one in our family cares to celebrate. The memories are painful and his permanent absence has left us all with a sense of longing and sadness.

The new normal is impossible to get used to, and there is not a day I don’t think about him or my mother. The house at 17 McClure Street has been sold, and that’s a different kind of sadness.

I knew hanging around my home recalling his last moments on earth would trigger paralyzing grief and a strong bout of depression.

That wasn’t going to happen. I did that for four years as I watched his beautiful mind and precious memories slip away as the Alzheimer’s slowly progressed.

So I spent this weekend visiting the ocean and walking trails along the coast with my son who came home from college for the weekend. He made these past few days bearable.

I grew up in a seaside community and I have always found the turbulent waters of the Atlantic a calming force in my life. We are all connected to the sea. 

The late President John F Kennedy said, “We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came.”

Maybe that is why we headed south to visit one of our old stomping grounds — Fort Williams in Cape Elizabeth. It offers stunning views of the coastline and made me feel a helluva lot better to see the cold salt water lap against the shoreline and breath in the sea air on a chilly, windy November day.

For the next hour, I thought about my father, but in a positive way, avoiding the misery that accompanies grief.

Somedays are harder than others, but I have come to terms with his death, and although I miss him every day, I feel I was lucky to have parents who gave a damn about their four kids and put them first in their lives.

That feeling of loss never goes away as my grief subsides and acceptance takes a firm hold.

I see my father in my son and in my sisters’ children, too.

He lives on in all of us, but I still miss the man who stood for something good.

That will never change.

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.