How the Seahawks made me come home for Christmas

With tonight’s big Monday Night Football game at CenturyLink Field, I can’t help but think back exactly 30 years to a similar game when the Seahawks made me come home for Christmas.

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I had moved to Boston for foolish reasons in the autumn of 1988, and found a room in an apartment in the North End, the city’s Italian neighborhood. In spite of the novelty of living in a new city just blocks from the famous Old North Church and zillions of other landmarks, I was lonely and homesick there. For the first time, I came to really appreciate how much I loved Seattle and my family.

That Thanksgiving, a Seattle friend visited from where she was working as a nanny in New York City. My roommate and I cooked a turkey and all the accouterments, and it was a fairly festive, if somewhat small scale, celebration. The next day, we all took the train to New York, and spent the weekend wandering around and taking in the big city sights.

Getting back to Boston via Amtrak was an exciting ordeal unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Penn Station was overflowing with travelers, and I was only able to find a seat in the dining car of a train headed north in the early hours of the Monday morning commute. I was late for work at the nautical and weather instrument shop on Boston Harbor where I’d found a job.

All this contact with a friend from back home, and all the excitement of New York in the late 1980s (when places like Times Square were a lot grittier and, well, just plain cooler), started to chip away at my feelings of loneliness and homesickness. With new confidence, I decided to stay in Boston for Christmas. I’d save my parents some money, and I’d have some time to rest, as well as to work and earn some unanticipated dollars before the end of the year.

The Monday I made it back to Boston from New York was November 28, 1988. I didn’t have a TV set, but somehow I knew that the Seahawks were playing that evening on Monday Night Football.

To watch the game, I went to a place called Café Pompeii on nearby Hanover Street (or, as I’d come to think of it on many foggy – mentally foggy – mornings, “Hangover Street”). The café was empty, so I ordered coffee and found a chair in the back near near the big mural of Mount Vesuvius. My seat had a perfect view of the television mounted in the corner, up near the ceiling. The familiar opening sequence of Monday Night Football started, describing the matchup and the action it promised. Then, it was time to showcase the city hosting the game, and soon came the obligatory blimp shots: Elliott Bay. The Space Needle. The Kingdome. In a word, home.

Talk about Blue Monday! That was it. Any resolve I’d had to fight the feelings of loneliness and homesickness were gone. Just like that, from a national TV broadcast beamed from Seattle to Hangover Street.

I had to look up online to see what team the Seahawks were even playing that night (the Raiders), and whether they won or lost (they won), but I remember vividly what I did as soon as I got back to my shabby apartment building a few blocks away on Endicott Street and walked up the stairs to the fourth floor.

Thankfully, my parents were home when I called. They were thrilled with my decision to come home for Christmas, and to pay for my airfare.

As it turned out, my dad didn’t have that many Christmases left, so I’m so glad I was there for that one. I was only back in Seattle (Kirkland, actually) for less than a week, but it was the best feeling to see my parents, my brothers and sisters, my friends and our dogs. And the question of whether or not I’d ever miss Christmas at home again was forgotten forever.

So, thank you, Seahawks, for bringing me home for Christmas 1988, and well, home for Christmas always.

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