The Sounds of Safeco
It says at the top of this blog that these are "random musings on the summer game" - well, today's post has more of a random musing feel to it than a summer game feel, although it is vaguely baseball-related.
After a long and tiring day yesterday, I sat down at around 11.30pm to write an entry on the blog. I clicked on MLB.com and suddenly realised that there was a whole host of day games being played across the country, so I thought it might be nice to wind down by tuning in to a radio broadcast, just like I used to do in the 'goold old days' before MLB.TV. My curiosity led me out to Safeco to catch the Red Sox / Mariners game, because I figured that a victory for either team would give them some welcome temporary respite from their different brands of misfortune.
Every now and again, as the Mariners' broadcasters did their play-by-play, I could clearly hear, somewhere outside of Safeco, the sounds of passing trains blasting their horns. As much as we set store by our sensorial memories, we are often surprised by the hold those memories have over us, and last night that most ordinary of sounds managed to transport me 7,000 miles, from the suburbs of Paris to the state of Washington.
I don't know what it is about the sound of those big American freight trains that grabs me. I guess it's the fact that it's a quintessentially American sound, like the blaring horns of New York taxicabs - trains in France and the UK don't sound like that, and I suppose that it reinforces my childhood romantic, idealised image of the US and its Wide Open Spaces. It also took me back to a few years ago, when I spent endless hours talking to a friend in the US, and our conversations would be punctuated by the very same sound of trains going by. It was a tiny detail, but it was the one that always brought home to me the fact that I was talking to somebody on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
All in all, despite (or maybe because of) my state of advanced fatigue, it was a great late-night memory. I've never really understood what he meant when he sang it, but Paul Simon was right: "Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance"...
Apologies for the digression, but I just needed to share my 'Kodak moment'. More-or-less normal baseball blogging should resume tomorrow ;-)
After a long and tiring day yesterday, I sat down at around 11.30pm to write an entry on the blog. I clicked on MLB.com and suddenly realised that there was a whole host of day games being played across the country, so I thought it might be nice to wind down by tuning in to a radio broadcast, just like I used to do in the 'goold old days' before MLB.TV. My curiosity led me out to Safeco to catch the Red Sox / Mariners game, because I figured that a victory for either team would give them some welcome temporary respite from their different brands of misfortune.
Every now and again, as the Mariners' broadcasters did their play-by-play, I could clearly hear, somewhere outside of Safeco, the sounds of passing trains blasting their horns. As much as we set store by our sensorial memories, we are often surprised by the hold those memories have over us, and last night that most ordinary of sounds managed to transport me 7,000 miles, from the suburbs of Paris to the state of Washington.
I don't know what it is about the sound of those big American freight trains that grabs me. I guess it's the fact that it's a quintessentially American sound, like the blaring horns of New York taxicabs - trains in France and the UK don't sound like that, and I suppose that it reinforces my childhood romantic, idealised image of the US and its Wide Open Spaces. It also took me back to a few years ago, when I spent endless hours talking to a friend in the US, and our conversations would be punctuated by the very same sound of trains going by. It was a tiny detail, but it was the one that always brought home to me the fact that I was talking to somebody on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
All in all, despite (or maybe because of) my state of advanced fatigue, it was a great late-night memory. I've never really understood what he meant when he sang it, but Paul Simon was right: "Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance"...
Apologies for the digression, but I just needed to share my 'Kodak moment'. More-or-less normal baseball blogging should resume tomorrow ;-)
posted by Iain at
16:29
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