My Cito Gaston/Candy Cane Story

I don't follow baseball particularly closely but I heard that Cito Gaston managed his last game a few weeks ago. To commemorate the occasion I thought I'd share my Cito story.

I'm not entirely sure of the year but I'd guess that it was 1994. I was at Christmas Eve mass at St. James in Colgan, Ontario. Colgan was and is an extremely small town consisting of a church, a school (which was my elementary school) and a handful of houses. There had also been a gas station but for as long as could remember it didn't actually serve gas.

I used to get fairly excited about Christmas. I'm sure there are kids who were much worse than me but I had my fair share of sleepless Chrismas Eve's. I spent a bit too much time looking at, touching and resorting unopened gifts. As soon as the Christmas break started I'd more or less go into full time present watching mode and, as a result, time would move progressively slower each day until Christmas Eve when it nearly came to a standstill.

Now here's the funny thing to me about Christmas Eve mass – you take what for many children is the most exciting day of the year and the night before you schedule an extra long version of what, for many children, is the most excruciatingly slow paced event in their lives. Most parents know they wouldn't have a prayer of getting their children to sit through any event approaching two hours but for Church the rules and expectations change and the longest mass that most children might have to sit through just so happens to be scheduled on the night before the most anticipated date of the year.

So anyways I'm at Church, fighting the good fight, and it's hot because the place is packed and we might not even have had seats (and this was the only day of the year where this could have been the case). I'm trying unsuccessfully to pay attention to what the priest is saying but all of the sudden it gets a bit easier because he announces that they're about to give out candy canes (the only time, as far as I know, in the Roman Catholic Calendar where candy is given out at mass). This was always the highlight of the marathon ceremony but on this occasion he took it up a notch – this year, he says, the candy canes will be handed out by a special guest.

I didn't really even have time think about it. I suppose if someone had asked me to guess I would have maybe suggested that it would be Santa, a teacher from school, a fireman or something relatively unexciting like that. I never would have guessed that it would be, what in my mind, was one of the most famous and recognizable figures in the world.

You see, for a ten year old boy in Southern Ontario in 1994 the number of most famous people in the world broke down as follows-

Musicians:

Michael Jackson

MC Hammer

Vanilla Ice

Kriss Kross

Movie Stars:

Macaulay Culkin

Jim Carrey

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Athletes (and keep in mind I was a Blue Jays fan and a Habs fan):

Wayne Gretzky

Patrick Roy

Roberto Alomar

Kelly Gruber

Cito Gaston

So when he announced that Cito Gaston was going to be doing the job my first thought was "I've heard this man say a lot of crazy things and make some pretty outlandish promises in my day but this one really takes the cake." I mean Cito might not have topped my list but he was the General Manager of the what I thought was the greatest baseball team in history a team that contained at least two of the greatest athletes on the planet. This was also the first time, as far as I knew, that a famous person had actually visited Colgan or anywhere in the Greater Beeton Area.

When Cito actually revealed himself I was beyond shocked. I was immediately swept up in the mad rush of children frantically fighting their way up to the front to get a candy cane from Cito. A few unlucky altar boys were also trying to distribute candy canes and I'm guessing that at least one of them was trampled to death.

To this day I can't remember how the priest even knew Cito. I vaguely remember  something about a relative of his in the area spending Christmas with him, and I can't imagine what inspired the man to trek all the way up to Colgan to hand out candy canes to a church full of white people. In any event it was one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my childhood and, while I couldn't necessarily identify it because for some reason I've kept a handful of candy canes from my childhood, I never removed it from the plastic casing that Cito touched.