Any red-blooded New-Englander knows the sound the sound of Joe Castiglione’s voice, it’s probably burned onto a segment of your amygdala next to where the melodies of your mother’s voice are imprinted. I’d venture to guess that most of us can’t utter the phrase ‘Can you believe it’ without remembering, or perhaps vocally imitating, his historic 2004 call. Joe is the truest example of a living legend, a throwback to another time. A voice and style that reads as old timey, but somehow succeeds in making all the velvet-throated broadcasters of today sound like they’re all imitating each other.
With all the things that have changed in the years that I can easily call into memory, his voice stands above it all, like some historic cathedral that towers over the town that grew up around it. He has been calling Sox games since 1983, when I was 3 years old and hearing his voice has this amazing effect of making things seem like they’re still as simple as they were when his voice first etched itself into the foundation of my identity.
One of those things that has changed, is how I watch baseball games, relegated to purchasing the exorbitantly-priced NESN 360 streaming service, my ability to watch is dictated by blackouts thanks to occasional national broadcasts that I can’t see. And I don’t have a radio in my house, so, one summer afternoon, I found myself searching for an app where I could stream the radio broadcast. Like Trisha McFarland in Stephen King’s book, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I found myself connected by comfort as I listened to the game instead of watching it, instead of devouring stats and hypnotically consuming commercials, I was alone with my thoughts.
As is so often the case, my mind soon wandered away from the game, with Castiglione seasoning my daydreams, I found myself running home to a time when fishing seemed so much simpler. Memories flickered in the ether of my open-eyed stare. I wasn’t seeing the living room, I was seeing through time. Sitting shirtless in my canoe, alone at age 11, losing a giant bass when it straightened my snap. The last day of summer at age 14 fishing with my uncle and wishing the darkness of night would never come as we crushed largemouths and freshman year waited with the sunrise. The vision of my future wife walking down to the beach to find me fishing on the second day we lived together, she was 19, I was 22. The first blitz of big stripers I ever got into, my 25th birthday with one of the greatest friends of my entire life.
I started to see my fishing life as some kind of visual representation of string theory. My connections made through this sport, beginning as just ‘me’ traveling on a single strand and only connecting with those I could reach through interpersonal interaction. But then growing into a wider array of threads of information and friendship. As this vision progressed closer to the present, the organization began to fall apart. The influence of instant information and the breakdown of personal connection, covering the once manageable array with an impossibly tangled web.
It made me long for those simple days; as recently as 10 years ago, when there wasn’t this living, hyperventilating, information machine commanding our attention, bathing our brains in information and setting the bar of expectations for every aspect of life at the edge of the stratosphere. I liked it better when I had to figure it out on my own. I liked it better when it was okay to be bored. I like it better when it was possible to be alone with my thoughts. This thing in our hands, in our pockets, in the hands of our children and grandchildren, is insidious. It teaches us that we don’t have to remember anything and that we can get the answers to anything… just tap the screen and type it in. But worst of all, it has succeeded in imitating (and in some cases replacing) friendship and human interaction. (Spoiler alert: there is no replacement.)
It’s like we don’t want to learn anymore, as if we’re supposed to start any new chapter, already knowing. We’re supposed to learn and grow with our friends, with our families. But, like Joe Castiglione’s voice, that image has become something too many of us perceive as frozen in a Norman Rockwell painting. But it’s not some kitschy image from five generations back, it’s the actual juice the fuels a fulfilled life. And just like fishing techniques passed from fathers, grandfathers, mothers and uncles, or listening to baseball on the radio, it’s been lost… because we willingly set it down.
Can you believe it?
