When I completed my blog installment last week, I had some leftover memorabilia items I figured I’d save for this week. Mostly baseball stuff I had found online, including an incredible letter to my father from Mr. Ford Frick, then President of the National League, about the 1948 All Star Game that, as far as I know, nobody in our family knew anything about. It was just going to be another one of those blogs. And then everything changed on Friday.
Very early on in my autobiography “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” I brought up the musty old adage about the fact you “can’t pick your parents.” That truism is a key part of the entire book, as is the line I used more than once that I am “the luckiest kid in the world” to have been born to Del and Taffy Wilber. I didn’t pick them. It just happened. It’s science, it’s random, and DNA is involved. I’ve heard people also claim that “you can’t pick your neighbors” but I don’t think that’s 100% true. If you’re super-wealthy enough, you can buy up all the property around you and not have any pesky neighbors, but of course we’re talking about Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates super-wealthy. Hence my claim that the neighbors adage is not 100% true. It’s also good fortune that we’ve had so many great neighbors over the years. We didn’t pick them. They already lived there!
Whew! It’s been a crazy couple of weeks but I’m back to work and have fingers on the keyboard to create some new nonsense today. I’m a little late, in that it’s now almost 4:00 on an overcast Minnesota Thursday, but the thermometer is on our side and a lot of our accumulated snow is melting. It’s kind of been that way to this point in the winter season. Big snowfalls followed by warmups. That’s not a bad thing.
Greetings blog faithful, and thank you once again for being so supportive and interested in the rambling nonsense I so often provide. This week, however, I shall leave you with a few photos (only fair, since I provided none last week) and word that this week’s blog will be nothing more than this explanation of said photos and next week’s will likely (almost surely, but don’t call me Shirley) not exist at all. It’s that time of the year, and here in Wilber/Doyle Land that means travel.