In case you haven't seen the news all over my personal Facebook page or on national (even international) news (and yes, it was broadcast so that my nephew in Brazil saw it), the KC Royals won the World Series. And there's something I've learned this year that solidified in these moments, these days: it is important to care and to celebrate.
I'll take it. There are so many excuses for people to not celebrate or to think that there are other times to celebrate things "more important." But somehow when my husband came home and said, "Let's find a place to watch the game," (which is in itself a miracle considering he doesn't care one bit about baseball), I felt this was a time to see those little things.
Have you ever been on YouTube and seen the Slo Mo guys? I like to check them out every now and then and I'm almost always reminded that we see things fly by too quickly as I watch the beauty of water fights and paint on speakers in slow motion. So I slowed down. We went to Outback Steakhouse, we watched part of the game and raced home between innings. I hyped Audrey up, got into a team I'd never really cared about other than I was starting to become a bit interested because they signed Ben Zobrist and he went to Olivet (where I went to college). As the game went on and I attempted to translate the vocabulary and technicalities so that Cesar could understand what was going on, I began to get really into it. I even hoped it would go into extra innings because I LOVED the drama, the camraderie, and the feeling that something great can happen at any moment.
And then it happened. And I knew the feeling couldn't just be a momentary burst of fireworks at midnight.
So two days later when the city united to celebrate the victory of this group of stand-up, great guys, I united with the city and Kansas City, after eight years of being here, truly became my city. We got t-shirts, we waded and pushed and almost suffocated through the crowds, we took pictures in front of the cutout players and didn't see a bit of the parade OR the rally. But we were there. In that moment of celebration, we were there. We made priceless memories and regardless of what we didn't see and who we didn't meet (my dad has been following Zobrist since his freshman year at ONU, so I guess I was irrationally hoping to meet him after all that my family has said about him), this moment meant something and we were there. The city gathered together and we were part of that unity and that community. And Audrey still will not stop shouting, "Let's go Royals!"
These men did something kids do every day-- they won a baseball game. And we need to celebrate these moments, lift these people up. My daughter is my hero(in), these guys are most definitely heroes. And I'm not afraid to say that. Because I think there's something important in acknowledging that little bit of heroic when we see it. It's important to notice when things are created and not destroyed. It's important to celebrate. It just is.