Final Truck Day Thoughts

Shiny (because they were wet!), Happy People

One more entry about Truck Day and then I promise I’ll stop!

The past month has the been month o’ suck for me personally. Just a lot of things, some big and some small, that have made this new year, so far, a bit on the suckish side.

Tuesday morning I woke up singing.  The sky was grey and my street was slushy and I couldn’t have cared less.  I left my house probably an hour earlier than I had to and got to Kenmore Square a good half an hour earlier than I told my friend Kelly I would be.

So I stood in Kenmore getting rained on and began to text Kelly to let her know I had arrived.  When I looked up from my phone, there was a guy looking at me and smiling a huge, genuine smile.  I went to smile back, realizing that I was already smiling and it hit me that he was smiling at me because of how big my smile was.  I was so happy for Truck Day that I was smiling without even knowing it.  And based on his reaction, it must have been quite a smile.

Now that all will seem silly to many people.  I promise you, every person at Fenway on Tuesday who wasn’t media-related understood how silly getting excited about a truck actually is.  Every fan I spoke to or who spoke to me acknowledged that it was a little crazy to stand in the freezing rain to watch men load cardboard boxes on to a truck.  We all knew it was annoying the locals who didn’t care about Truck Day and only cared about getting down Van Ness Street who had to wait for us to get out of the street because the truck took up most of the street and the sidewalk designated for us to stand on was covered in snow.  We knew that people in other cities (or who just don’t like baseball) would be mocking us.  We were sort of mocking ourselves.

See, the people who show up for Truck Day don’t show up because the Red Sox send out press releases about it.  They don’t go because they local news builds it up like there are thousands of crazy fans hanging at Fenway having a party.  We go because we want (and sometimes NEED) to see proof that the cold, dark days of winter will soon be behind us.  We want or need to remember that in a few weeks we’ll be watching ball played on green grass under blue skies and in a couple of months the green grass, blue skies and baseball players will be back in Boston.

The happiest I have been in all of 2011, so far, was this past Tuesday. Regardless of how “stupid” or “commercial” some folks deem it…it made me happy.  It made other people happy too.  Isn’t that the point?