HELP! I Need A Home Run

How can an obituary cheer you up?

Well, for starters, the person who died is not you.  That’s a good thing. I know someone who reads them every day to make sure she’s not included. So far, so good.

But one recent obit in The New York Times really gave me a lift.

It was for Bobby Thompson, you know, the guy who fired “the shot heard round the world” — the homer that won the pennant for the Giants in 1951. It was a really big deal at the time, before our minds were occupied with the Three G’s: Lady Gaga, Google, and Glenn Beck.

Back then, it was a real Casey At The Bat moment: Bottom of the ninth, third game of a three-game playoff, Giants down by two, one strike against Thompson.

Actually, he had a lot of strikes against him, in a metaphorical sense, not that anyone was getting all metaphorical at the moment. But in retrospect, a person could be really inspired by this story.

Up until the ninth inning, Thomson’s game was in the toilet. He had a hit in the second, but tried to stretch it to a double even though someone was already on second base. Whoops. Don’t you just hate those embarrassing rundowns? Then he let the Dodgers get a 4-1 lead by missing two ground balls in the eighth inning. Ouch.

If he had lived in our current snarky age, someone (not me, course) would have dubbed him
“Booby”Thompson.

But of course, all was forgiven when he hit the historic homer, then sailed around the bases as the crowd went, predictably, wild. All that anyone remembers about him is the hit, not any of the misses.

So unless everything is going perfectly for you, and you’re on the cover of Time this week, or People at the very least, and you haven’t screwed up royally at least a few times in your life, there’s something really important here for you to think about. . .

All you have to do to fix everything in your life  (metaphorically speaking) is:
Hit a home run in the ninth.  

Not  impossible, although easier said than done. I’ve been trying to figure this out for myself, and it’s bit tricky since I don’t know an infield fly rule from a fruit fly (more about that later), but hey, we are talking metaphorically.

First I thought that I could just leave something in my will to someone who wasn’t expecting anything. Even something small could have an impact, and would make me a hero to at least one person. But then, everyone else who wasn’t expecting anything would be pissed, thereby sabotaging the whole scheme.

I could make a lot of people happy by baking Alice B. Toklas brownies and passing them out to everyone  my building (it’s a big building). But to be realistic, the buzz wouldn’t last long enough to make a lasting impression, and I could get evicted.

I did think of the absolutely perfect They’d-Hold-A-Parade-For-Me solution:

Find the cure for bedbugs.

Of  course, if I ever even saw a bed bug I’d go into
Analytic Shock:
Why can’t anyone get rid of these things?
Why did they virtually disappear from New York for 40 years and suddenly reappear? Are they coming in on visitors from other countries? Other planets? Is it because we banned DDT?

(Please note: This photo does not depict an actual bed bug, which is smaller but not as cute.)

So. I need your help.

Come up with some ideas for something that would make a person a hero (you or me)  — something that could wipe out a lifetime of My Bads. Even though, let’s face it, I personally have not been THAT bad.

IN OTHER WORDS:
WHAT WOULD CONSTITUTE A METAPHORIC “HOME RUN IN THE NINTH?“