THE QUESTION I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE ASKED

THE QUESTION I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE ASKED. It was 25 years ago in December, 1981 in a bar in Greenwich Village. I was with my wife Mary Jane. There was a lovely heavy snow falling and the bar had a fireplace. A stranger came up to me. He had a white beard which reached to his waist and was square cut. He asked me the question, “What do you think about baseball?” Of course, we talked for a long time. He told me he was a gestalt psychologist who had been hired by the Busch family (which owned and still owns the St. Louis Cardinals) to research people’s feelings about baseball. He drew circles on a piece of paper as we talked. I imagined this was because he was a gestalt psychologist. At the end of our talk, I asked him what he had concluded. He pointed out that I had talked about the long season and used words like “relaxing”, while Mary Jane had used words like “exciting” and “tense.” I told him I thought that this was because I was a White Sox fan who lived for the season and Mary Jane was a Yankee fan who looked forward to an exciting postseason every year.