As some of you may remember, the Woodchucks’ opponent this weekend is Savigny, my former team. Obviously, the teams are having two very different seasons. Savigny is battling Rouen and Toulouse for the league title, while the Woodchucks are battling to stay in the elite division. In fact, the only thing the two teams have […]
As some of you may remember, the Woodchucks’ opponent this weekend is Savigny, my former team. Obviously, the teams are having two very different seasons. Savigny is battling Rouen and Toulouse for the league title, while the Woodchucks are battling to stay in the elite division. In fact, the only thing the two teams have in common is… me. It’s a game I’ve had circled on my calendar ever since that strange string of events in early April sent me from Savigny to Bois-Guillaume.
And it’s a game that will be played without me, as I find myself back in the Bay Area this weekend, Stateside for a few more days before I return to France on Thursday. This quick trip back to the World was very last minute, as it came up just this past weekend. Without getting into details, sometimes you make mistakes, and sometimes you do things unintentionally, things that hurt other people you care about, and sometimes to make it up to those people, there’s no solution other than hopping on a plane and flying 9,000 miles to apologize in person, complete with stitches and a broken nose. This was one such time. Put differently, I suppose you could say that I had to go see about a girl.
In any case, I’ll miss out on this weekend’s games- not that big a deal as the doctors told me not to play anyway- but I’ll be back in time for next weekend’s games in Toulouse. While I’ve said before- and meant it- that I have no hard feelings towards anyone there, of course it would be nice to play well against my former team, not out of vengeance, but out of pride. However, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. I could go 4-4 with three crackerjacks, or I could go 0-4 with four ugly K’s, and it wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t change their opinion of me as a ballplayer, it wouldn’t change my opinion of Savigny, and it wouldn’t change what happened. Maybe it’s for the best.
In other news, I’m told we’ve also secured the keys to twin studios in Mont St. Aignan, student appartments with a shared kitchen. They sound tiny, and they’re outside of Rouen, but at this point I couldn’t care less, I just want to get off of Aldo’s floor, for his sake as much as for mine.
On Tuesday, we visited the D-Day beaches on the 62nd anniversary of the landing. I haven’t really had the chance to process it all, as the very next day I was on a flight through Amsterdam to San Francisco. One thing I will say is that it’s a place every American should visit before they die. Walking out on that beach, then turning and seeing the long sprint up the sand to the steep cliffs where the Germans lay waiting, gives you this incredible sense of good fortune. In my case, I felt overwhelmed with good luck to have been born in a time and a place such that my visit to Normandy involved baseball and not bombardment. The only foreigners I need to worry about are the occasional Venezuelan lefthanders, not German luftwaffe, and my elbow injury resulted from too many sliders, not schrapnel. It’s a different Normandy experience.
Cheers,
Ev
*Editor’s Note: To those who said I couldn’t start four straight posts with references to Biggie Smalls lyrics, you are clearly wrong.