>>>>Tamar advised me to set aside an hour a day to grieve for him. She has given me lots of good advice but I passed on that one. I am grieving for him plenty already without going out of my way to do so.
>>>
>>>Actually that wasn't quite what I said. I mentioned that I'd found the Jewish tradition of going to a service to say the kaddish helpful, in that it gave me a place and time that I could focus on my grief. It made it easier to put it away at other times when I needed to get things done.
>>>
>>>But fwiw, it's more than 2.5 years since my mother died, and I still often walk into the house, look at the answering machine, and expect to find a message from her.
>>>
>>
>>I just double checked the email and you're right, you did not come right out and suggest I do that. You described the tradition and left me to draw my own conclusions.
>
>And apparently, you drew a different conclusion than I intended. All I meant to suggest was that giving yourself a time and space devoted to grief might help you manage it.
>

Now here is a baseball oddity. Just when you think you've seen everything....

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/8140869/milwaukee-brewers-zack-greinke-start-day-fast-ejection

Greinke is an oddity in himself. He has a phobia where you get the heebie jeebies in crowds. You'd think that would rule out being a pro athlete but somehow he has been managing. With his contract expiring and the Brewers going nowhere it is widely believed the Brewers will trade him this month before the trading deadline. One of the rumored suitors (as always) are the Yankees. There is a thought to ponder, Zack pitching in front of New York crowds. And Boston crowds.

The Brewers don't come in on TV here and there isn't much point watching the Cubs, other than Anthony Rizzo, so I have been watching some White Sox. Even without Ozzie they are a fun team to watch. Very loose, not to mention leading their division. I don't know if you caught any of this but they had a hilarious "Take Jake" ad campaign to get Jake Peavy elected to the last spot on the AL all star team in the write-in fan vote. Sox stalwart Paul Konerko was right in the middle of it and even Jerry Reinsdorf, not known as a comic, got involved. My favorite was a pregame interview in which secondbaseman Gordon Beckham did a hilarious impresonation of Peavy.

http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=22841869&topic_id=33691106&c_id=cws&v=3&tcid=tw_video_22841869

Plus their TV announcers are Hawk Harrelson and Steve Stone, whose amiable styles should not lead anyone to believe they don't know what they're talking about. It's like a master class in inside baseball.

UPDATE: I am so ancient (you can just ask my daughters) that I remember him as a slugger with the Red Sox when I was a kid. His signature phrase is ritually delivered after a White Sox pitcher strikes out an opposing batter: "He gone." You can count on him saying it, like Marv Albert saying "Yesssss." The difference is he knows a lot more about baseball than Marv knows about basketball.