My True War Story

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bandar ceme 99When I was a boy I used to make my father breakfast in bed every year on Veterans Day rather than on Fathers Day. No one seems to know when I began doing this or why, but every November 11, I would make my father a cup of coffee (yes, I learned how to make coffee by the age of eight) and then throw together some odd collection of foods for a makeshift breakfast. Cereal became a simple, successful solution, and when I got older I could make him his favorite—two sunny-side up eggs with rye toast, buttered. But when I was really young I would throw together things like a red delicious apple and some chopped walnuts I found in the cabinet.

My father was the fifth child in a family of ten. His father had not served during World War II, because he had such a large family to care for. (My father’s oldest brother, Bobby, was born in 1939 and there were three more boys before my dad came along in 1946). But my grandfather was a foreman at Winchester Repeating Arms in New Haven, which was a war time industry. My father graduated from Hillhouse in 1964. Two of his older brothers, Gordy and Red, attended college. Bobby had not graduated from high school. My father and his brother Buddy had high school degrees.

My dad was slicing meat in a deli at a local A&P in 1966, just as the US government was dramatically increasing the numbers of soldiers being sent to war, from just under 200,000 at the end of 1965 to nearly 400,000 by the end of 1966, about the time my father was sent to pembinaan camp in Georgia, where he made lieutenant, which was an entry level officer’s rank but also the rank with the highest casualty rate in Vietnam. He was sent overseas around June of 1967. He was lucky to be stationed in a supply depot just behind the front lines, and so never saw active combat. Years later, in one of the only instances I can recall of his talking to me about Vietnam, he told me that the scariest thing he ever had to do was night time guard duty. He said he never had to worry about falling asleep because he would be scared out of his mind the entire time.

My father was not the first in his family to go to war. Bobby was a paratrooper during the Korean War, and Gordy, the second oldest, had served in Vietnam already. Though none of the brothers seems to have had especially dangerous assignments, I honestly don’t know much about their service time because none of them ever talked about it.

For my father, I think the most difficult thing was not his experience in the war but his experience returning from the war. And I don’t mean getting spit on by protestors. I mean returning home to a familiar landscape that lacked people who should have been there, friends and acquaintances who, like him, had been drafted and sent to Vietnam, but who, unlike him, saw combat and either never returned or returned very changed men.

My father was too young to be a father. He was just 22 in the summer of 1968 when he got my mother pregnant. He just wasn’t ready for that, not by a long shot. He used to bring me around with him to softball games and basketball games, and invariably to the local bars for a few rounds afterwards. One time we were in this old Westville hangout called the Cape Codder when this red haired guy with a bushy moustache approached my father and greeted him with a sort of aggressive friendliness. My father, who was always gregarious and charming in social situations, became awkward, and quickly excused himself and got us out of there. Leaving, I noticed that the man had large bumps on his back, visible through his white t-shirt. In the car, my father told me how that guy had been a childhood acquaintance who’d come back from Vietnam remarkably changed. Where he’d once been shy and quiet, he returned loud, aggressive, and even violent. The bumps on his back were from exposure to napalm. Years later, I’d read about this guy in the New Haven Register. He had been charged with manslaughter for beating to death one of two homeless guys seeking shelter on a construction site where he was a foreman. Before my father’s friend could come to trial, the only witness, the other homeless guy who’d also been beaten but lived, died mysteriously in a violent attack witnessed by no one. Thus my father’s ‘friend’ avoided prosecution.

Now I know I probably don’t have all my facts right here. So much of this is second or even third hand, or relies on my memories from childhood. But this is my true war story. This is the story of war’s effects upon even the survivors and those who were lucky enough to endure war without combat. Of my father and his nine siblings, only Bobby, Gordy, and my father served. Bobby died at age 62. Gordy at 67. My father has largely been MIA since December 18, 2005. No direct causes, of course, but one has to wonder about intangibles such as fears that can only be witnessed in silences, concealed lumps beneath cotton shirts, or personalities intact but altered. My father returned from Vietnam safe and sound, unharmed in any visible way. He even went to college on the GI Bill and became, briefly, a high school biology teacher (though he lost that and almost every other job he ever held to alcohol). But how many years were lost to stress, to fear, to sadness? How much worse was his (or Bobby’s or Gordy’s) alcoholism made by the experience?

Friday is the 93rd year since the end of the War to End All Wars, and we’re no closer to the answers.

Notes From Chicago

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play bandarqThis week I’m in Chicago for the National Writing Project Annual Meeting and the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention. It’s sort of a bittersweet affair because the National Writing Project is trying to re-invent itself after the loss of direct federal funding, something they have enjoyed for the last twenty years, while the NCTE is celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary and its 101st annual convention. The first annual convention was held here in Chicago in 1911.

According to the convention program, the first meeting was a one and a half day affair attended by 65 teachers from twelve states. There were two meeting rooms, one shared meal, and the annual dues were $2. The charge for the banquet at the meeting was $1.50. A photo in the aktivitas shows just slightly more male members than female members.

This week, including the meetings of subsidiary groups within NCTE, the meeting spans a full week, fills two of Chicago’s largest hotels, and involves tens of thousands of teachers—the vast majority of them women. One of the most notable things to me when I walked into the headquarters hotel was the large number of teachers sprawled across the floor, on the stairs, and in every conceivable nook and cranny of the hotel. It reminded me of an infestation of ladybugs. There were teachers everywhere! I once had an acquaintance tell me that there is nothing more frightening than a high school English teacher (she clearly had some bad ones), and I kept imagining her reaction had she been here to see thousands of English and Language Arts teachers just swarming the place. I pictured her face looking something like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

For me, the first day was all Writing Project related functions and panels. And sadly, or frustratingly, we talked very little about teaching but mostly about fund raising, federal legislation, corporate giving, foundations, endowments, and advocacy. Necessary, but nothing that really stirs the passions. All I can say is that we at the CWP are fortunate to be such a long-standing, well established and well funded site. Many sites have already disappeared, and many more will struggle to sustain themselves through next year till various new sources of federal, private, and corporate funds become available to replace what was lost.

Today I would have liked to have spent the day in NCTE sessions, but mostly I worked on stuff from UConn, such as getting ready to take over and run a conference Monday for a colleague who had a heart attack. He’s all right, but of course unavailable for Monday, so I will fly in from Chicago Sunday evening, get the kids from my mother’s, unpack, lie down, get up, and go run a conference!

Tomorrow will be my day to attend sessions. I’m planning to attend panels on new research in the teaching of literacy, MA programs in English for educators, teacher-research, high school-college collaboration on college-level writing instruction, teaching literary criticism in high schools, and teaching creative writing in high schools. All of these in some way deal with collaborative efforts between high schools and colleges, which is perfect for me and informs me in my instruction of my undergraduate, pre-teaching and teaching majors.

I’ve seen several colleagues here, both from the school of education as well as from the composition aktivitas within the English department, and I brought three teachers with me, which is always cool. I love being able to provide this kind of professional opportunity to teachers (though I worry there might not be sufficient funds to do so next year). I was disappointed that I didn’t feel I could afford to bring any of the graduate students this year. I have brought two each of the last two years, and that’s always been great, to give them such a terrific professional opportunity at the start of their career and to see them interact with the veteran teachers who come. The students and the veterans always get so mutually energized by the shared experience.

And as much fun as the panels and workshops and roundtables are, it is at least as much fun to go out and socialize with different groups of teachers. We have a few drinks and a lot of fun, and we meet a lot of new people, teachers from other parts of the state and country, from other levels and other areas of the fields of English, Language Arts, and Rhetoric and Composition. And we also share ideas and hatch collaborative plans, pick each others’ brains, share successes, commiserate, and build or strengthen both personal and professional relationships.

Moving Day

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bandarqqTill I was three I lived with my parents in the basement of my maternal grandparents' house. About that time, with the help of my grandmother's sister, my folks bought a house three doors up the road from my grandparents. I don't remember much about living at my grandparents' house, though I do remember the renovations they did shortly after we moved. And I remember crying, even though we moved only 100 yards up the street and I came home to my grandparents' house every day after school.

We moved from that house when I was seven, just in time for second grade. My parents bought in Madison, where I went to school through eighth grade. But we moved within town a couple times—once only two years after we moved to the first house, for reasons I never knew, and then again when my parents separated. My father moved in with his brother, my mother moved in with her new boyfriend, and I moved back in with my grandparents, who had by that time also moved to the shoreline. I only stayed with them till my mother remarried and I moved into my step-father's duplex. They took the downstairs apartment and made a room for the new baby that was on the way. (That baby is now in the PhD aktivitas in Math at UConn and has dinner with us every Tuesday night!). I moved into the upstairs apartment and lived like a virtual emancipated minor. I spent one evening a week at my father and step-mother's and Sundays with the grandparents. My first semester of college, my mother and step-father moved again. So for me, that was seven or eight houses before I was twenty, and the longest I spent in any one home was six years.

Amy had a similarly peripatetic upbringing, moving from Dubuque, Iowa to Vernon, Connecticut when she was four, and then to Simsbury when she was seven, and then within Simsbury once before her parents divorced and so began a similar dual home existence. And she also never lived in any one place more than six years.

We just sold our house. It was our first home, and we lived there for twelve and a half years. Our kids, who are eight and five, have only known that house. Elsa is in a private pre-school, so she will stay put, but Cormac began a new elementary school this past Monday, and so today completes his first week in the new school. We're only renting for the time being, and likely will be for at least another year, but we plan to remain in Storrs, and hopefully can keep the kids in the same school till middle school begins, which in Mansfield is in fifth grade. I especially want Cormac to be able to stay in the same school next year and not have to change again. Elsa is more flexible, both because she's younger as well as because she's just that way constitutionally. She's happy and optimistic in some deep, genetic way, whereas Cormac is profoundly pensive and sensitive.

I joke that the next house we buy is the one I want to die in, and I say that because I just don't want to move again. Travel is nice, but moving is awful in almost every way. I want to buy a home that our kids can grow up in and know intimately, where there will be childhood friends, childhood memories, and eternally familiar streets.

So far, the transition has gone well. Cormac has been surprisingly adaptive, making new friends quickly. It helps that he likes his new teacher (especially since the one he left was awesome, and the first he liked in three years at his old school). And quite simply, he's getting more opportunities at his new school. He has regular art and music classes, and daily Spanish lessons. I asked him if he had learned any words in Spanish that he didn't already know, and he said no, but that he was learning to write in Spanish, which is new for him. Amy has spoken almost exclusively in Spanish to him since he was born, but we have only read to him a little in Spanish, and not required him to write at all.

Elsa, well, she can't wait till next year, but for her it's mostly because she wants to ride the bus. Actually, I think she wants to drive the bus, but that will have to wait.

Books!

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bandarqI've spent the better part of the last couple of weeks unpacking boxes and putting things on shelves. I've concluded that my family owns mostly books. We have ratty, hand-me-down furniture, old furniture, and damaged furniture; we have prints and children's art but no real art, unless it was painted by an uncle or my step-mother; we have really faded carpets we bought at Target about ten years ago. Our television is about twenty years old and it's enormous. Quite simply, we don't buy nice things for ourselves. I have more clothes from Kohl's than from Nordstrom's or anywhere else. Besides food and utilities, we spend our money on education, travel, and books.

The kids themselves have hundreds of books. When we go places, our kids, like everyone else's kids, ask for everything, and we usually say no, because they don't really need that tchotchke thing they'll forget about in an hour and also because my salary has been frozen for four of the last five years and therefore I have no disposable income. But books I always buy. I buy nice books at the UConn Coop and I buy ridiculous books at Stop and Shop. Elsa has a thing for Disney Princess books that make me roll my eyes, but I still let her buy them. Cormac has graduated to really expensive, hard bound nonfiction like the Guinness Book of World Records or Ripley’s Believe It Or Not books, but he's at least old enough to know I can’t buy those every time we go to Stop and Shop. So he keeps a running list that he hauls out at holiday season and around his birthday.

Honestly, though. Each kid has two book shelves in his or her room, and then four big shelves at the bottom of a large book case in the living room of our new house. And Cormac has a Kindle, too! Amy and I have two floor-to-ceiling book cases in the living room, another two in this odd foyer-like space, and a smaller one near the front door. There's a system of shelves that comprises the entire wall of one room in the new office (which doubles as a playroom!), and then we have a wall of shelving in our bedroom, along with another floor-to-ceiling shelf and two smaller ones. And all those shelves are packed to capacity, even though a bunch of older books are packed away in boxes in the garage, and over the last two years we have given away literally hundreds of books. Truckloads, I kid you not. (And this doesn't even include all the books in my office).

We have one whole large book case full of just books in Spanish (Amy's) and another of books translated into English from Spanish (mine), and at least one long shelf of books in Italian (also Amy's). I have one whole book case just dedicated to African and African-American authors. Nineteenth-century American authors. Twentieth-century American authors. Modernist poets. Contemporary poets. Modern novelists. Composition theory. Literary criticism. Religion and mysticism. Erotica. Anthologies. Collections of short stories. Books on baseball. Travel books. Protest literature.

It's like a disease.

Here's an indication of how bad it's gotten generationally. Cormac had his eighth birthday this past September. I told people that he didn't need things but to get him gift certificates to the movies or to a restaurant where we could go with the friend who gave the gift. So most people complied with this request but a couple gave Cormac gift certificates to Target or Toys R Us, and a couple just gave him cash. So one day I took him to the abomination that is the dreaded Buckland Hills Shopping area, but when we went to Toys R Us and Target, Cormac couldn't find anything he wanted. He settled for some art supplies at Target, but was hard pressed to locate toys he really cared for. But we took that cash and went to Barnes and Noble and he was in heaven.

Some day I hope to live in a house with a really cool library or office where there's ample space for books upon books, and of course I don't want to ever have to move from this place. I want lots of shelves, good natural light, a nice big wooden desk, and a good chair. (In my most indulgent fantasies I also throw in a fireplace, a small porch with French doors, and a wet bar, but that's probably asking too much).

Originality And Assignments

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ceme 99 onlineI had an unusually long time between my last class of the semester and the tamat exam. My students had over a week to prepare. I do not give a traditional sit-down tamat exam, especially since I teach a writing intensive course. Students spend the entire semester working hard on a full, fifteen-page term paper, so I don’t see the need for them to also come in and take a timed test with short answers to uniform questions. I’m not convinced that would be an accurate or useful assessment of anything in particular, and certainly no more rigorous than what I have already required them to do.

The last two regular class meetings were dedicated to response groups, supplemented by lots of one-on-one conferences with me. But since we had this long week and a day between the last class and the exam, I had many students in my office over the last few days, too, finishing up their drafts and working on bedeviling details like useful quotes, proper citation, or how to effectively conclude this paper they have been plugging away at for the past fourteen weeks.

During one conference that took place earlier today, a student remarked that professors must get tired of reading students’ essays, especially if they are all on the same topic and even more especially if they are poorly written. I agreed, but I also observed that many professors have none but themselves to blame for this situation when they give a uniform assignment to all the students. Of course they are all going to write similar papers if the topic is the same for all, and of course many of those are going to be poorly written, because there is only a small likelihood that many of the students will find such a canned topic of any direct interest to themselves.

My students might have to struggle with being given more independence and autonomy than they are used to or comfortable with, but most of them end up with interesting topics that, ultimately, they enjoy researching and writing about. And as for me, I get to read an incredibly varied set of essays.

This semester, I had twenty students. We read Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, Dickinson, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. Pretty straight-forward, canonical stuff. (It is a survey course, after all). But the students’ papers were anything but straight-forward or canonical. No discussion of the symbolism of Hester’s A. No discussion of the whiteness of the whale. No discussion of the personification of the House of Usher. No discussion of Thoreau, Whitman, or Dickinson’s embodiment of an Emersonian ideal.

Alana wrote about Joshua Komisarjevsky and the death penalty through the lens of Edgar Allan Poe. Andrew wrote about the entrapments of celebrity, focusing on Tiger Woods and Anthony Weiner, and in addition to Hester and Dimmesdale, discussed Don Draper from Mad Men. Liz wrote about female sexual repression in Poe and Hawthorne, but read additional texts by Henry James, Sigmund Freud, and William James. Brittany defended Harry Potter from attack by Harold Bloom using Emerson, Twain, and Joseph Campbell. Matt wrote about the importance of place in Whitman, Hawthorne, and various contemporary musical artists, such as Bruce Springsteen. Andrea wrote about educational leadership and read texts by Emerson, Twain, Paolo Freire, and other less well-known contemporary educational researchers. Alyssa wrote about abortion and gay rights, and cited texts as varied as the US Constitution, "Resistance to Civil Government," The Scarlet Letter, the New International Bible (used by Assemblies of God), and various abortion and gay rights rulings, including Roe v. Wade.

Bobby wrote about bullying. Spencer wrote about the sea. Kristina wrote about Casey Anthony. Mary wrote about theocracy and Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. She’s a science major and had 21 sources, mostly news articles but also Puritan texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Peter wrote about American History X. Alex is a psychology major who wrote about isolation using several relevant psychological studies on monkeys and humans. Mark designed a course on minority literature. Steve wrote about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Alyssa wrote about the Byronic Hero, and brought her discussion into the contemporary kurun using Dexter. Laura wrote about the American Federation of Teachers New York City chapter, and read educational theory going back to Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, and Elizabeth Peabody. Jessica wrote about Landscape Architecture, and Gina wrote about Charles Manson.

Now I can’t guarantee that all of these will be well written, but I certainly won’t be bored reading twenty dull, uninspired versions of essentially the same assignment.

The Snowy Day

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judi ceme terpercayaI was born eight years after Ezra Jack Keats first published The Snowy Day, which won the Caldecott Award in 1963. Today, that book is hailed as a landmark in children’s literature because of its simple, unassuming portrayal of a black child, named Peter, who goes out to play in the snow. The book is approaching its 50th anniversary, and has been featured in a number of news articles lately. Keats died in 1983, but a foundation named after him continues to promote his work, children’s literature in general, and libraries and teaching. In fact, this is the 24th year that the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation has awarded mini-grants to teachers and librarians (http://www.ezra-jack-keats.org/news/minigrant-program/).

I loved that book as a child. I don’t recall if I was at all aware of the fact that Peter’s skin color was significant. I grew up in a working class neighborhood just on the outskirts of New Haven, with black as well as white families. Later, my Catholic high school was mostly Irish and Italian Catholics (I was both) and African-Americans. All boys. And my father, in particular, always had a lot of black acquaintances from childhood. He and his nine siblings (or at least the first five of them!) grew up in a housing project called Brookside that had been made up of mostly Irish immigrants but at the time of his childhood was becoming increasingly African-American. So maybe at that age I was unaware of the significance.

I do recall, however, enjoying the fact that Peter was playing in the snow in an urban landscape that was familiar to me. There were sidewalks and apartment buildings and lamp posts and traffic signals. This was not the bucolic winter landscape I saw in most children’s stories. This looked like my neighborhood, off of State Street, where my friends and I could walk past the apartment buildings on our way to the A&P or East Rock Market, which still had wide board wooden floors from the previous century, and where my friend Gary’s mother worked the cash register.

Coincidentally, having just this weekend read about the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Snowy Day, it snowed Monday night (Martin Luther King Day, no less), and we woke to a 90 minute delay. I had watched the snowfall late at night with the porch light on, a jazz station tuned in on my laptop, and a glass of sangria left over from a dinner party we hosted on Sunday. My kids woke up full of excitement for the first real snow of the winter. I said to them, “If you want to play in the snow, go do it now while we have a 90 minute school delay, because by the time you get home this evening it will be almost dark and this snow will likely have turned to slush.”

Both kids were excited. Elsa, who just turned five, asked if she could put her snow clothes on right over her footed pajamas, and was elated when I told her yes. Cormac, who’s eight, just got new snow pants for Christmas, and so this was his first opportunity to try them out.

We just moved to this new place in Storrs last month. We are in a much less urban environment than when we were in Windham, but we also have children on our street here, which we did not in the old house. Our next door neighbors are colleagues of mine, and their youngest boy is only about ten months older than Cormac. I called and invited him to come over and sled in our yard before school. Not only was he excited to come join my kids, as it turns out, I ended up bringing him to school because the delay had caused some morning conflicts for his folks.

The three bundled up kids played in the snow for about three-quarters of an hour, till they got too wet and cold. I watched out the back windows as they sledded down the slight decline in our backyard, and when they disappeared from sight, I re-located them in the adjacent woods beneath some tall pines, shaking the snow from the low branches onto one another’s heads. When they came in, I threw all their stuff into the drier to be warm and toasty for school, and I made hot chocolate with marshmallows for them while they played upstairs till it was time to leave for school.

When I was reading about The Snowy Day in the Courant, Elsa noticed the cover art that accompanied the article, and said, “Hey, we have that book!” Cormac looked up to see what she was pointing at, and said, “Yeah, you used to read that to me when I was little. I loved that book.” So do I.

Football, Literature, And Murder

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ceme online terbaikFriends and acquaintances are often surprised to learn that I played football in high school. I guess I just don’t seem the type, somehow, but I did. I was a very mediocre linebacker on a very good football team that won three conference championships and lost two state championships in my four years there. My senior year, our team was ranked fifteenth in New England.

These days, I still subscribe to Sports Illustrated as well as to the English Journal and Poets and Writers. I watch Sports Center at the gym on the elliptical trainer and watch games late at night after I make myself stop working.

During the playoff games this past weekend, I noticed that my friends on Facebook seemed pretty evenly divided between being engaged in the playoffs or offended by the undue attention a couple of sporting events were getting in the media and on Facebook. A lot of my more artsy friends, for lack of a better descriptor, found the football frenzy annoying.

I suppose football just doesn’t have the literary credibility or literary tradition that, say, baseball does. Not that baseball players are all that literary themselves, but baseball certainly has a rich literary tradition. Think of The Natural by Bernard Malamud, Shoeless Joe by F. P. Kinsella, Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof, The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn, or Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam, just to name a few. These are not just good reads. Some are borderline classics. The Natural was on the sophomore curriculum at the school where I used to teach.

Football has George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, published in 1963, and the lesser known follow up, Mad Ducks and Bears, published in 1971. If you can name another good work of literature about football, please let me know. The only other strong connection I can think of between literature and football is Jack Kerouac, who spurned a scholarship to play football at Boston College to argue with the football coach at Columbia, spend most of his time riding the bench, and then break a leg. (I read an interesting article once about how Kerouac and Ken Kesey, who wrestled, were crucial figures in the cultural transition from the hyper-masculine literary culture of Ernest Hemingway to the more feminized literary culture of the 1960’s. But that’s for another blog post).

Anyway, I couldn’t help but think about the irony of the fact that football is so un-literary, and yet one of the four teams in the conference playoffs, the Baltimore Ravens, was named for a work of literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” This happened in 1996 when Art Modell proposed moving the Cleveland Browns from Cleveland to Baltimore. The Browns were charter members of the AAFL in 1946, which became part of the American Football Conference in 1960. The outcry of the fan base when Modell proposed a move, on the team’s fiftieth anniversary no less, was so great that a very unusual deal was struck that allowed Modell to relocate the team providing the NFL committed itself to replacing the team with a new team, and Modell vacated the team name, its history, and its records. Modell agreed to this unusual arrangement, and found himself with a nameless team. A fan contest was put in place to name the new team in Baltimore, and the three finalist names were Marauders, Americans, and Ravens. In a selesai go-round, Ravens won with more than 33,000 votes.

Most of you reading this probably know that Poe spent much of his life in Baltimore, died under odd circumstances in Baltimore, and is buried in Baltimore, where since as early as the 1930s, two or more generations of a family have maintained a mysterious yearly vigil of bringing three roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac to his grave on the anniversary of his birth. (The first written account of this visit is in a 1950 newspaper article, but apocryphal stories say visits may have begun as much as two decades earlier). This year was the third year in a row that no visitor attended, bring a mysterious end to a mysterious tradition.

What struck me as odd and interesting watching the AFC playoff game this past Sunday was that the Ravens were playing the New England Patriots, who were charter members of the AFL, but from 1960 till 1970 were known as the Boston Patriots. This was interesting to me because Poe, despite his association with Baltimore, was actually born in Boston in 1809, and even published his first book of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in Boston in 1827. And rather than use his name, Poe published the work as merely, “A Bostonian.”

So the Patriots’ victory over the Ravens, their sixth in seven meetings over the years, struck me as a blow for the more literary town of Boston against a team whose name is likely lost upon a collection of players best known for linebacker and alleged murderer Ray Lewis. Lewis was originally charged with murder following a party at a nightclub after the Ravens won Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. Ultimately, Lewis was convicted merely of obstruction of justice, even though the allegedly blood-splattered suit he wore on the night of the murders has never been found and no other suspects have ever been identified. Now that is a mystery worthy of the eminent Bostonian author.