Monday Mug Shot

I hope everyone had a nice Sunday. In our house, we observed Easter Sunday, which includes me biting the ears first off my chocolate bunny! David and I trade candy gifts for Easter, nurturing the inner children in our home. I picked up the plastic bunny with Ferrero Rochers in it in an after Easter sale last year. Rochers are one of David’s favorites and the plastic bunnies make an expensive candy even more expensive! Buying the bunny after Easter was a savings, even though the only box left had a crack in it. We saved that box and for this year I did a little “work” on the front, using the cardboard from the bottom to cover the top, added some tulips and a few PG-13 comments and filled the bunny with Rochers, Lindt truffles, Cadbury mini cream eggs and jelly beans. It was a nice presentation.

We watched MLB’s 20 Greatest Games on MLB Network before moving to ESPN to join the Reds game. It was greatest game #4, Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS between the Braves and Pirates with Andy VanSlyke, Sid Bream and Mark Lemke joining in for their first-account recollections of the game. It was a very cool show and it prompted my choice for today's mug!



This mug is not a “special mug,” in that it’s not a tourist souvenir or a special gift that was bought for me or even something I bought to commemorate something. I bought this mug at Big Lots, a mile away from home, when I lived in Michigan. I was shopping with Mom and she pointed it out to me, knowing full and well I’d spend the $1.50 to have it.

Why wouldn’t I spend it? I was working a decent job at the time and still living at home. Okay, honestly, my Dad had always said that I could stay there until I got married. Mom added the “or for good if you want and don’t bother getting married.” That’s the traditional Italian way and I don’t regret that I never had to put a $1.50 mug down because of its value in toilet paper. It’s one of those cool mugs with a spinning baseball that you can flick with your thumb while you’re holding it and it’s a BASEBALL MUG! I might have tried to conserve TP for it if I’d had to.

It’s a combination of this mug and last night’s show that brought back a fun but sweet memory. All of my fond memories of my Mom are sweet treasures. I watched that Game 7 in our living room with Mom. She wore her Pirates t-shirt and I was chanting at the TV with a tomahawk chop. Dad, a true sports homer, wasn’t interested in the baseball post season that year because the Tigers weren’t in it and he could have the Red Wings and the TV in the other room all to himself. Okay, I don’t remember if there was a Red Wings game that night, but it was usually the Wings or the Western Channel when he was in the room he claimed as his man-cave.

When David and I were watching last night, I swear the memory of my Mom’s voice was so clear, I could almost hear it when Orlando Merced was tagged out at home in the top of the 8th inning, “We’d better not need that run!” As much as Mom loved her Pirates, she’d had a season-long dislike for Merced because of some botched plays in the beginning of the season.

Well, in the bottom of the ninth Mom got to officially blame it all on Merced when Francisco Cabrera hit the single that drove in David Justice to tie the game and then Sid Bream, in dramatic play-at-the-plate fashion, to win it. My team, not Mom’s, was going to the World Series.

It never was a mean-spirited game when Mom and I were on rival sides, but if the Reds or Braves were playing the Cubs or Pirates, it was on! After that Game 7, Mom bought the coffee when we went out the next night.