Time To Learn

Until last year, I had no idea what the T-C logo on the Minnesota Twins' hats stood for. I let it become part of the wallpaper of life, and since I did not live in Minnesota, there wan not a big reason for me to dwell on these specifics. There were so many other pressing matters to which I could attend. Like the whole A to Z deal in the Amazon logo. Or how to calculate standard deviation. Or what makes a good cherry pie. The last time the Twins appeared in the World Series was 1991, and back then it was a minor novelty to have a team that played in a domed stadium playing in the World Series. And it probably never really occurred to me to focus any attention on the boys of summer playing in the frozen tundra.
And then, it came to me, like a bolt out of the blue. The Twins play in Minneapolis, It's one of the Twin Cities. T-C. Suddenly, I was transported back to a much earlier version of myself, a little boy who wore pajamas. These pajamas had a bunch of baseball logos on them. I would be lying if I said that I remembered if they were all American League or National League or that there was any particular rhyme of reason for the way they were scattered across my jammies. But I do remember the logo for the Twins. Two baseball players leaning forward to shake hands with one another across a bridge. At the time it never would have occurred to me to notice that they were standing in front of the silhouette of the state of Minnesota, and on their shoulders were the letters M and StP: Minneapolis and Saint Paul. What did occur to me was the fact that had just been introduced to me about this time, my zodiac sign: Gemini. The whole Twin thing became a mild obsession for me each time I put on those pajamas. Forget the Dodgers. Never mind the Yankees. Where were those Twins?
Those pajamas were gone long before I began questioning that whole T-C thing. They might have been enough to shove my thought process into the conclusion sometime earlier than that.
Or maybe I was just destined to discover this at a much later date. Odd, since I was a big fan of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, set in the WJM-TV newsroom, located in the heart of those Twin Cities. Somewhere among those one hundred sixty-eight episodes, there must have been some reference or acknowledgement of the home team. She wore a Vikings jersey to wash her car, after all.