For Posterity's Sake

Grandpa Franklin, do you remember the night the White Sox won the World Series?

Why, yes I do, Timmy. I remember it as though it were only yesterday.

Grandpa had been sick for several days but still had to work long hours at the office, so he was feeling pretty beat that night and tried to go to sleep early. He had just managed (after tossing and turning and coughing and hacking) to doze off, when the game ended.

Everybody in Chicago was filled with great joy. Everybody except Grandpa. You see, way back in first grade Tabitha Jenkins had hit Grandpa on the side of the head with a plastic shovel and knocked his "Appreciation of Sports" lobe out his left ear and into the sandbox. They never did find it.

So Grandpa, who usually is a pretty broad-minded guy, has ever since regarded a love of spectator sports as a pernicious illness that can infect even a stalwart intellectual like that nice Doris Kearns Goodwin. Doris is one smart cookie, but mention baseball in front of the woman and her brain turns to tapioca.

Anyhow, Grandpa didn't give a fig about the World Series and just tried to ignore it, but when the Sox made the final touchdown or whatever, every person in Chicago who owned a car decided the best way to celebrate was to head for Lake Shore Drive, which ran right by Grandpa's bedroom window.

For three, maybe four hours, the car-owning citizens of Chicago drove up and down the Drive, hooting their horns and screaming at the top of their beer-soaked lungs. Grandpa, who had to report to the office at 7 a.m. the next morning, could not sleep worth a damn.

So finally he arose from his bed and went over to the window. Out on the street, people were smiling and laughing and dancing and hooting their horns. You could feel the waves of love rising all the way to the fifteenth floor.

Grandpa looked out over all this, and then, drawing on super powers that had hitherto been completely unknown even to himself, shot a pair of powerful death rays from his eyes and reduced the entire teeming throng to a smoking, ruined pile of guts and car parts.

Then he went back to bed and got a whopping full hour of sleep before the alarm went off.

And that's how Grandpa Franklin celebrated the effing White Sox winning the effing World Series.

Now get the hell off my knee before I turn the death rays on you.