Shakespearean Baseball

It's so easy to assume that a person who shares one of your passionate interests also shares your other likes and dislikes. I try to keep in mind that this is not so. Nevertheless, I'm still floored each time I discover that an online quilting friend, for instance, is also an avid fisherman. I am less surprised when my bookish friends do not share my tastes in literature.

I can accept the fact that some of my fellow Tolkien fans do not also share my love of Anthony Trollope. Or that I will probably never share the intense love that my daughter has for T.S. Eliot, though our reading tastes are otherwise similar. And I can also appreciate the zest with which some of my biblio-friends approach fields which have little appeal to me such as statistics, or mathematics, or political science. But I was totally flabbergasted when I discovered that an old bookish friend, now living in another part of the country, had become an avid baseball fan when my back was turned. Baseball?

I don't actually hate sports -- as long as I don't have to play them or watch them. Or hear them. My brother, an otherwise sane bibilophagist, is a rabid sports fan. He had sports broadcasts playing All Day Long when we were teens, and it drove me up the wall. Though I was not yet sure whether I had a vocation to the married state, I was certain that I would never, ever even remotely consider marrying a man who who displayed any interest in sports whatsoever. Even now, the sound of sports on radio or TV causes me to twitch a little. But perhaps if those broadcasts had been a little more literary, things might have been different.