For more information about this pumpkin and its carving, see the Notes section below.

(Sunday Paper, Year VI, Issue 44)

A month or so ago, after I watched that documentary on the 1986 Mets, I got to reminiscing about that fall of 1986.

I wanted to write about it, but the Boston Marathon obviously took over for a while.

So I’m going to tell you a little bit about that this week, but I know the baseball talk isn’t everybody’s cup of tea.

So know that I’ll be back to the Notes this week, so you can skip ahead to there if you’d like.

Also, it’s Halloween!

So there’s this year’s jack-o-lantern to see at the end of the post, along with links back to the pumpkins of Halloweens past.

That picture here is the before-carving pic.

OK. Let’s talk a little baseball.

I’ve mentioned this before: During my first year teaching, the Red Sox made it to the World Series. I gave the students a little extra credit writing assignment - keep a journal about the games so you’d have something to look back on for this possibly once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Haha. What an ignorant little Mets fan I was.

The Red Sox, for those of you scoring at home, went on to win that World Series…and then another one. And then another one. And then another one.

I gave the assignment one more time…actually maybe twice more. The 2013 one was right before I left teaching so I probably gave it again but much less enthusiastically.

But I came up with the assignment because I wish I had something like that from 1986. I wish I had been made to write down my thoughts.

Some of the kids did such a good job with the journal - a couple gave blow-by-blow game recaps, and a couple of kids who had no interest in baseball talked about how exciting it was to be in Boston with this going on. That’s a fun keepsake too.

That’s what I remember most about 1986 - the atmosphere around the games more than the actual games.

I have a pretty good memory that for Game 1, when Tim Teufel made a game-deciding error, we went to my friend’s house to watch.

He didn’t quite have the baseball-watching stamina that I did (read: he was a more normal 8-year-old in that respect than I probably was) and I remember we didn’t watch much of the game because we kept going to his room to play. (We played this extremely rough game of football in his small bedroom with a bed that had incredibly sharp edges and it’s a miracle we never got very hurt.)

Anyway, I remember at some point we came out and I have a pretty good memory of seeing the error. Looking back through the stats, Game 1 was on a Saturday night so it makes sense I guess that’s the game we watched the most of, since it wasn’t on a school night.

I wish I could say I remember Games 6 and 7 as well as Game 1, but the memories of those games have only been added to by watching them over and over again in the years since.

It’s the atmosphere, though, that I remember.

In the school yard in the mornings before school there were Daily News people handing out these scorebooks before the start of the National League Championship Series. I don't know why. Why were there newspaper people at an elementary school? Why were they giving kids these programs? But I still have it - I kept score of a couple of the NLCS games. More than one of them was in the afternoon back then.

I remember hoping they would give out the same programs for the World Series, but they didn’t.

I remember in September my dad waking me up to watch the Mets celebrate winning the division. I remember watching the last couple of outs of that game against the Cubs. I don’t remember him doing that again for the World Series. (The NLCS clincher was a day game that stretched into nighttime but wouldn’t have been that late. But I have pretty vivid memories of that game too - for some reason I remember watching the Billy Hatcher homer into the foul pole netting live more than I remember the bottom of the 16th inning.)

But, oh man. It was so exciting. That was the exciting part of that documentary for me - the feelings it brought back of being 8 years old and seeing my favorite team everywhere and being on top of the world.

It was still fresh when the Yankees got back to winning in 1996, and I was off at college in the city whose team the Mets beat.

It was hard to believe it had been 20 years when my dad and I went to the reunion at Shea Stadium in 2006…the year the Mets had probably the best team since 1986 but lost in Game 7 of the NLCS.

In 2000 and 2015 the Mets were back in the World Series but were overmatched both times.

And here we are 35 years on. Still nothing.

The Mets are often frustrating for me to watch. But I guess the thing that keeps me hanging on is how great they made me feel in 1986.

And I have to believe at some point they’ll figure it out and win another World Series.

And maybe it’ll make me feel like I did all those years ago.

Notes

*Last baseball note: Do I care about an Atlanta-Houston World Series? Not very much. It’s a new matchup, so I feel like it wasn’t a wasted season. I don’t particularly like either team but I very much like Dusty Baker and I very much like Freddie Freeman, so if either team wins I will be happy for one of those two individuals only.

*My Instagram account is fast becoming a running account. If you think I post a lot about my running on here or on Facebook (Like the page!) or on Twitter (Follow me!)…you should see my Instagram Stories. Anyway, I did a poll asking if I should apply for a spot in the lottery for a Team Framingham bib in 2022 and received 100% “yes”…but I was probably going to do it anyway, haha. So we’ll see what develops over the next month.

*Kathy and I started watching “Only Murders In The Building” the other night. 10-episode seasons are very manageable for us. There are a couple of other shows we intend to watch together…we’re getting there. I am making a case, now that our youngest is in 5th grade, for family “Bob’s Burgers” viewings. I loved that show when I watched it alone and I’ve tried a couple of times, unsuccessfully, to get others to watch it with me. Maybe this time is the charm.

*I love the fall, but this year has not been ideal. The clear days have almost been too cold, and then the actual fall weather days have almost all been rainy. I don’t feel like I’ve been able to enjoy October like I usually do. I haven’t even gotten around to the first rake of the season yet because it’s been too wet. Going to have to get on that soon.

*Hard to believe it’s going to be November here and we’re drawing to the end of another year of the Sunday Paper. I have been in a reading slump recently so I haven’t read anything in months - not sure a “What I Read” post this year is going to fly…might have to bring back the mailbag? That would be fun. Maybe I’ll make that an instagram Story poll question next.

*Another thing I remembered: I guess maybe it was a memory that came up on a social media feed - a few years ago I did “Sunday Paper Live!” and posted on the Facebook page throughout the day and then compiled all of that into a Sunday Paper post. That was fun. Maybe I’ll do that again if it seems like I have a somewhat exciting Sunday coming between now and the end of December.

*OK, below you can see this year’s pumpkin carving! This is Tom Nook from ‘Animal Crossing’. We were having trouble coming up with an idea this year and I came up with two thoughts - one was should I do an ‘Among Us’ character? The girls immediately shot that down. I guess ‘Among Us’ isn’t quite the draw it was a year ago. Then I said, OK, what about someone from Animal Crossing? And they immediately shouted “Tom Nook!” So here we are. If you don’t know who he is, look it up. This pumpkin turned out to be one of my finest pieces of work.

*And in what has become an annual tradition I will provide this link to last year’s Halloween post, which gives you last year’s pumpkin carving, but you have to do the work to go through each post’s links and link back to the previous year’s carving. (I got back to 2016. Not sure if it links back to more than that. I know in 2015 I did the Mets, that was also a good one.) [Oh. Follow up, because I forgot about this: I started the Sunday Paper in 2016. So there’s a link there to the 2013 one I did as part of ‘365 New Things In 2013’…but 2014 (Olaf from ‘Frozen’) and 2015 (Mets) are somewhere else on social media.]