Transistor Love

When I was a young, media savant living on Sound Beach LI, my lullabies were serenades from a firetruck red transistor radio. They were crackled codes from a Gigantor-like transmitter up island to a ravenous nine-year old of the North Fork on the knife-edge.

Chock it up to loss of reception and the never well-received plain old loss. Every broadcast was a light tap of a the glove pocket. And in the webbing landing Lindsey "the full" Nelson or Marv Albert + (John Andariese or "Big Whistle" Bill Chadwick).

Baseball may have been my best math teacher. The broadcasting crew was my seasonal theater club. Marv was my voice coach and the sports desk at Newsday (Stan Isaacs, Steve Jacobson, Joe Gergen, Joe Donnelley, Tony Kornheiser etal...) formed my english department. But the jet age appliance that connected us in the days before Sports Phone and Federal Express was Little Met Radio "LMR"). (This was the pony express days of the pre-digital era when letters had a fighting chance of arriving without zip codes).

I wasn't going to touch LMR's nervous, straining dial unless a pop of static bolted from the pillow muffled between its mouth to my ears: "Sorry mom. I don't want to slump through another groggy tomorrow!" Little Met Radio couldn't promise that Agee could drive home Boswell in time to protect Koosman's complete game win. It couldn't even guarantee free and clear access into the New York media control tower. But it could toggle between AM and FM -- on and off switch included. It could deliver static in a whisper or blaring mono in glorious analog. It came with no camera, calculator, MP3 tunings, spell-check, or downloadable blow dryer -- a surefire killer app for this period in hero worship. No marketing organization could trace my antennae landing in the rims of their spyglasses. I was connected on the receiving end only.

This summer I returned to revel in its fist-sized brick of simplicity. I stumbled on this lost generation of handheld and heartfelt wireless in someone's showroom attic in Kittery, Maine. I bought a young solid state GE AFC. Its 4 volt EverReady heart was beating vigorously though the tunnels of antiquated formats,  relentless feature creep, and answers to trivia questions only a Met fan could endure.

But here's one other timeless truth embedded with free delivery. It's that I had as much choice over my programming as the materials used in the umbilical wiring of my own pregame show. True, I did switch allegiances from the Rangers to the Islanders before the expansion patsies were even a playoff threat. But for the most part all the requisite joys and sufferings were programmed for me:

• Every hush in the radio crowd


• Every refrain by our between period guest


• Every lead change in the out-of-town scoreboard

... was based on the time and space extending through the stations on that Little Met Radio. Songster Al Stewart ("You're on my Mind Like a Little Met Radio") informed us that "sadly, we can't choose who we fall in love with." We should have learned this lesson through our sports teams. Winning the last game of the season -- is that the perennial standard for relationship success?

I think my pal Garo summed up this sense of predestination best after the first of two epic Met collapses in '07 and '08:

"My life is great, everyone I love is happy and doing well and all my friends are in good places; why should the fortunes of men whom I do not know and might not even like matter to me any more than, say, the success of a community theater in Dayton? (The intensity of how their fortunes affect me is disturbing; I've been more upset over a given regular-season loss in the past ten years than I was when they got side-swiped by the Dodgers in 1988.)

I think it's because I've inexplicably developed stage mother syndrome where they're concerned. As in, maybe I've reached the end of my days of accomplishment, and I've decided to transfer all my hopes and dreams to them. As in, "Look! My team is in first place, and therefore their achievement accrues to me and I am not a failure!" Insane, I know, particularly since very few people in the world actually know I'm a Mets fan, and most of the people I know don't even follow sports at all.

I have absolutely no idea what the cure is."

Little Met Radio is not the cure for stage mother syndrome. But that baby monitor in vitro will continue to bark out the lurid details to impression-seeking, green ear buds. To fumble for the off switch would be to suffer -- in the vacuum of radio silence.