The Atlanta Braves won the World Series, and they were given a parade through downtown Atlanta and out to Truist Park in Cobb County. (I’m not going to add to the carping about what appeared to be their unseemly haste to get out of town to the suburbs.) I pulled for them through the last half of the season and through the playoffs and series. I was elated when they won the title. May they do it again and not take two decades to get there.

However, I do have a complaint (and this is not to take away in any way from the Brave’s accomplishments or their deserving whatever honors are heaped on them.) My complaint is that they got a parade, and I didn’t. Before you discard everything that follows as self-serving megalomania, let me make my case.

You will recall that the Braves spent the first half of the season wallowing in the depths of their division, trying to get to an even record. On June 1, when they lost to the Nationals, their record was 25-27 (.481), and they were four games out of first place.  They came to the playoffs with the fewest wins of any team there, a total of 88 on the season. But, despite the injuries and the occasional meltdown, they won.

But I started thinking about myself and the others who, like me, are at an age whose numbers would get you into super speeder territory if they showed up on your speedometer. Our season has been considerably longer than the Braves. We have suffered our own vicissitudes. And we’ve gotten to this point more or less intact and batting a pretty good average. We took our swings at the plate and were successful more than a third of the time. We had a good average, and defensively we held our own.

I suppose the fact that we drag this out over eight decades makes it less impressive than four-out-of-seven. And the fact that we grow up being taught that this is what responsible adults do, without looking for a reward or even a pat on the back, makes us accept our unrecognized state as normal, no more or less than what we deserve.

And, of course, there’s the fact that not everybody even wants a parade. Linda says that if they gave her one, she’d watch it from the curb. She just doesn’t see herself sitting in the back of a convertible doing an imperial wave. I don’t guess I do either, but it’s pleasant to think of all of us who have gotten up in the morning for 30,000 mornings or so and did the best we could for our families and our communities every day being recognized.

Sure, we lost some. We whiffed the occasional changeup. And we made some errors in the field. But after the National Anthem every game, we took the field and did what we were supposed to do. That,  I think, deserves some recognition.

So, here’s what I’m going to do,  and I recommend it to all of you who started out about when I did, back when you not only had to walk to the TV to change channels but didn’t even have a TV. I’m going to take a minute to recognize what I think are worthwhile accomplishments. be thankful for having been given the opportunity to do them,  and then focus on what else I can do while I’m still hanging out here.

My parade will be all in my head. But that’s okay. That’s where most everything else is.