Meet Fran

Sometimes I tell my husband, there's three of us in this marriage: you, me and The Mets. It helped draw us together; it drives us crazy and at times, it drives us apart.
Let me explain. My husband Gary and I met in college. One of our first dates was to a Met game. He's Catholic, I'm Jewish but that didn't bother him. One of his first questions to me was, Mets or Yankees? Mets, I said, incredulous. As long as you root for the Mets, he said, we are not a mixed marriage.
Of course I'm a Met fan. My parents are old Brooklyn Dodger fans who like so many refugees from Ebbets Field fell in love with the lovable losers when their team left to play on the other side of the world. Growing up, I can remember getting out of kindergarten early because the Mets were in the World Series and the teachers wanted to go home and see the game. I remember Tug McGraw blowing wads of bubble gum bubbles when the Mets went to the seventh game of the the 1973 World Series. Or the times my brother and I sat in an empty Shea excitedly watching Dave Kingman hit one out of the park.
And then came 1986. Gary and I were dating. We watched the Series at his parent's house and my parent's house. They won. We were in love. Life was good. I was so into the team I read Keith Hernandez's book, "If at First" cover to cover. I went to see him speak in New York with a friend, waiting in a long line to have him sign the book. I wanted to tell him what an intelligent book it was, but instead, face to face with the adorable Keith, all I could utter was: "I just love you." I'm still embarrassed about that.
In 1988, we watched the series again, on our honeymoon in Key West. Secretly, I was glad when they lost. I was tired of having to hang out at Sloppy Joe's every night to watch the game.
I mean, it was our honeymoon. It was the first time I can remember the Mets annoying me for reasons other than their heartbreaking play.
The second time was in 2000, the Subway Series. My first born son, Corey, was seven at the time, my daughter 4. And I was pregnant with our third child. I could hardly stay up through the series but I was writing a nightly column for the daily newspaper I worked for at the time, The Hartford Courant, which ran adjacent to a Yankees series column written by a co-worker. We had fun exchanging barbs and I knew every statistic, pitcher's record and nuance of each game. But the Mets lost that year, and I had to bow to my Yankees colleague. But that was nothing compared to my son's broken heart. Corey told me he didn't want to go to school the next day because of the punky classmate that would brag about the Yankees. I walked him to class, leaned down and told him to the only thing I could think of that would help: "You tell that kid we'll get them next year." It was lame, but it seemed to help my son who shuffled off to class.
But life got very hectic. As hard as I tried to be enmeshed in the team's ups and downs, I was just too busy. But in 2006, we, now a family of five, gathered around the television again during the Cardinal series. We watched Endy Chavez's amazing catch. This would be the year my kids would see them win the series, I thought, only to watch the faces of my children drop in despair when Beltran didn't even attempt to swing at a curve ball for the last out. (It's become a saying in our family, that non-swing. Whenever one of the kids is too tired or scared to try something, "Swing, Beltran, Swing,'' we tell them.)My sister was at the game, and when we called her there, she could barely talk. The stadium was in despair.
And then of course, there was last year, last year! A history making swan dive. The Mets, I told a friend, are like an abusive boyfriend who draws you back into a relationship only to give you a black eye in the end. I'm not going back, I told my friends. But that's just a silly thought. There's no way around them. Mets mania started gearing up around here in January with my son giving daily updates on the Santana trade and grabbing the phone from my hand each day to talk with his dad about their prospects after trolling the Internet for Mets news each day for hours.
But so far, since the season started, my husband has been in a perpetual bad mood. What's wrong, I ask, seriously worried it's his job, his health, the state of our marriage on his mind. "The Mets lost again,'' he says. The Mets? I say incredulous. Oh them.