It’s hard to know where to start. It has been a bit of lost period, thanks to the Mets and the damn World Series keeping me up to all hours. Fortunately, that looks like it may end tonight and, in any event will end soon. I will probably devote a future post to thoughts about this whole post-season, so I won’t say much about the Series here. But the Mets could as easily be up three games to one as down by that amount and arguably should be. It has been kind of a Series between old-time small ball strategy and more modern sabremetric thinking, with small ball winning, much to the delight of that antediluvian moron, Harold Reynolds. It will be a pleasure to stop listening to him. There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of baseball commentators, former players, sportswriters without newspapers anymore and random people off the street who would be so much better than him, that you have to wonder what it is that Fox sees in him. I actually tried to switch to the radio feed for the audio, but it is on a ten or more second delay, so it is too out of joint with the game action on the screen.

Regardless of the outcome and the lack of sleep which has left me “Met lagged”, it has been a wonderful run. A week ago, at the Unitarian Church, when I lit a candle to the Mets, I explained that I was really lighting it, not because they had won, but to reflect on the intergenerational ties that they formed in my family and countless others and to be thankful for the joy that they had brought to my son Alex, to my friends and, if you believe in an afterlife, to my father. It is really the interconnected joys, sorrows and frustrations that are what being a Mets fan is all about. It isn’t about winning. (This may be the essential difference between Mets fans and Yankees fans.) But Let’s Go Mets anyway. It’s not over until it’s over.

Last Sunday, after the Unitarian service, I went to a meeting of the “Sunday Gatherings Team” to see what it was like. It turned out that Rev. Andy likes to get a lot of input form people about what the services should be like and how the congregation could be better. One of the things he did is break us into small groups to brainstorm ideas on each of the upcoming services for the month. He had already chosen the topics and I chose the service that was today on the topic of friendship. It was fun and a few of my ideas found their way into his message (he doesn’t like the term sermon apparently). He also asked for readings and I found two readings from Winnie the Pooh, which I thought reflected on friendship. One was between Eeyore and Rabbit and was about how you have to have real conversations and go out of your way and make an effort to see others and the other was a wonderful excerpt in which Christopher Robin asks Pooh what he likes best in the world and Pooh says:

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best?” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have: and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, “What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘What about a little something?’ and Me saying,’ Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.”

I ended up actually reciting the the two readings (which brought back repeatedly reading these stories to my kids) and they were incorporated nicely into the message. The people in the congregation loved the readings and came up to me afterward to talk about them. One woman had been to the Hundred Acre Woods with her family in the prior week and played Pooh sticks there (which sounds like something I need to do). Another guy commented that he always thought of Winnie to Pooh as being read with a British accent and the hearing me read it was odd, but not unpleasant. He said that he pictured Pooh and Christopher Robin living somewhere like Vermont as he listened.

It was nice to get involved in this particular service because I have been thinking a lot about friendship in the past few weeks. I’ve realized that what I miss is not my house, or Montclair, or doing things in NYC, or going up to the country, or wine tastings or dinners, or our UU congregation, it is the people. And it isn’t anything big. It is just knowing them and what has happened to them over the years, watching their kids grow up, recalling special moments and just being able to start a conversation in the middle, without an introductory part. It is that sort of deep and regular personal connection that is missing from what is our delightful life here. It is the biggest reason we are going to the New Unity Congregation, which I think is our best hope for making connections of any depth.

I have been thinking about why it seems so difficult to make friends here. Have I been too much like Eeyore, waiting for people to come to me? Not really, although perhaps I could try to get out more to try to meet other people somehow, although I don’t think that mere proximity necessarily leads to any sort of significant friendship. It all seemed so much easier when we moved to Sydney so long ago. Was it because we were different then or that Aussies are friendlier than Brits? The answer to both of those questions is yes, but I think the real reason was Alex. Having a small child is an incredible lubricator in the creation of relationships. It gives you an instant and meaningful connection with other parents and also I think that walking about with a cute, verbal two-year old is a little like walking a puppy. It attracts people who want to come and talk to you and to him. Anyway, we are lacking that lubricator here and Judie working in a smallish branch of a law firm is not like working at American Express in Sydney.

Thinking about our friends in Sydney is a nice segue into the Rugby World Cup. As probably almost no one in America knows, New Zealand beat Australia in a really exciting final yesterday. They are two creative teams that do not play the smash-mouth, run-it-up-the-middle-and-kick-it-away type of game that most teams seem to play. New Zealand took a pretty big lead early in the second half and the game looked over, but Australia came roaring back, scoring 14 straight points, before New Zealand took control at the very end on some wonderful plays and won 34-17. One absolutely delightful discovery that came out of this World Cup was that our old friend Mair Lustig, the Welsh wife of my college roommate Rich, is a fanatical rugby fan. I never would have guessed it, but she followed it all and knows the history, especially of the Wales team. We’ve known Mair for close to forty years and never knew this about her, which I guess fits somewhere into these ruminations about friendship and seems like a reasonable place to conclude.