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thorntonkrell-blog-blog · 5 years

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MIDDLE OF THE BOOK

OUT OF HERE

Sitting in the Merchant's Bar and Grill at last call. Dino, the bar tended, has changed his shoes. He's ready to go home which means we are as well. I’m with Al my long time pal.

Five hours from now, we'll be heading to a job that we both hate.

We'll arrive at the shack on Jay Street in a dirty old part of the city. Some old fart will tell us what tools we need and how much feritlizer, mulch or whatever penance we had to load on the truck in fifty pound bags. Everything we loaded, we knew we'd have to unload. It was like picking out the whip that somebody was going to beat you with.

Then we got in the dump truck, in the back, with the penance.

Usually, the bosses would stop off at a bar and grab a couple of shots of whiskey before taking us to the worksite.

The level of the work depended on the mood of the field boss who was usually in fear of the master of the work domain who we used to call the janitor but now we called the custodian and he/they didn't like us because they suspected we were colllege kids/lazy long haired assholes.

We worked all day with a couple of breaks. One time we took a break and went down to the beach where Richard, a fellow sinner, lost his shoes. It did not go well with Richard when we returned to work. Old Joe was our boss that day and he hated Richard. Richard tried to get out of work on the basis of having no shoes. Old Joe wouldn't have anything to do with that. He went deep into a shed and came out with a gigantic pair of ancient rubber galoshes and some twine. He made Richard twine the galoshes onto his feet and get on with the job.

After declaring that he wasn’t gonna wear “these fucking things”, Richard disappeared somewhere and he took his spade with him. Nobody knew where he was until suddenly he emerged, staggering at galosh speed, whooping and brandishing his spade like a spear. He was chasing a giant rat and sure enough, he launched the spade into the air ahead of the rat who ran into it with its face and then ran eyeless and noseless into some bushes. When we got to the spade, imbedded in the mud, it was full of ratface.

Eventually, our work was finished and we got back in the truck and drove to the dump. Going to the dump was the highlight of the day because it meant our work was more or less over.

From the dump we went back to the shed, where we told the story of the galoshes and the ratface spade. We went home and cleaned up. Went back to the Merch where Dino would always say "Two fer you?" when we walked in knowing that we weren't going to get just one draft at a time, we were going to order two which we did and before long we started to dread the next day and hope that our bosses for the next day would be the black guys who instead of stopping off at the bar for a whiskey, took the truck into the ghetto and used the equipment on the lawns of their neighbors. When that happened we would sit in the dump truck and sleep it off as best we could. The riots in Rochester had ignited in this very hood.

Then it would be back at the Merch. Sometimes we'd put a buck in the jukebox and play "We Gotta Get Outta This Place" ten times in a row. .

Eventually, somehow, we did.

LAST GAME OF NUMBERS

Towards the end of sandlot days, we had trouble getting eighteen guys on the field for pick up baseball games. We invented a truncated baseball game called Numbers. We played Numbers with four guys on a team. A team would take the field with two infielders and two outfielders. The batting team supplied its own pitcher.

A swing and a miss counted as an out as did two foul balls. A ground ball, pop up or line drive gloved by an infielder counted as an out. Anything hit to right field was an out. Anytime an outfielder caught a ball in the air, that too was an out. Nobody ran the bases, too hot and dusty for that crap. We assigned numbers to all non-outs. A fielding error or single was one point, a double was two points, a triple three and a home run four. The numbers were judgment calls as nobody was running bases. In the field we had a way of erasing Numbers from the score. If somone made a "nice" play in the field, it subtracted a point. If someone made a "great " play it erased two points. If someone made a "sensational" play,known as a "sensay", it would erase three points and automatically bring the fielding team to the plate.

I can still see Rick Cicatta charging in from the outfield claiming "sensay,sensay" after a making a sliding diving grab in shallow left field. Of course, Frog, on the hitting team would claim "no sensay" and the game would slow down for awhile until a consensus was reached.

We kept track of the numbers. Higher number after seven innings wins.

The only 5 point number was a ball hit against or over the fence into the cornfield. The fence was three hundred feet from home plate, guarded by an apple tree and about ten feet tall. Some of us, were able to reach the fence but no one had gone over it. If a batter hit a home run, not only did he get four points but he immediately got another at bat.

Late August heat was upon us. We had been playing baseball, not only all that summer but also what seemed like our entire boyhoods. We were tired of being boys. Baseball was beginning to slow down and wear out. Cars were appearing. We were starting to get around.

On that day, we had only one playable ball left. We had either lost or beat the life out of all the rest.

The Numbers game proceeded as usual. One side up, one side down with only the occasional arguments about a number. Precedents had been set and were referred to. "That's not a 'great' play, Feeb made a much better play than that last week and it was only 'nice' etc." As the summer grew more heated, the arguments grew less heated. We had other things on our mind and we were just trying to play the game and get off the field. We were finding new places where the kids were hip.

Efficiency was the beauty of Numbers. A seven inning game took only about an hour and a half at the most.

On that day, it was the bottom of the fourth inning when Jake came to the plate. Over the course of the summer, Jake had made the the most dramatic progress with his swing.

Jake had three nicknames besides Jake, which itself was a nickname for Jeff. Jake was called Crocodile or Crock because his nose came to a pointed snout. He was also called Cement Mixer or Mix for his mix of muscle and determination along with his complete absence of behavioraland/or linguistic subtlety. He was also called Chim..short for Chimney because he smoked like one.

Jake signalled to Big Joe, where he wanted the pitch. Joe threw it right there and Jake went yard. Easily clearing the fence.

Everybody on both teams appreciated the shot. Jake asked for priase and he got it.

The blast broke up the momentum of the game. We had to climb the fence and search for the ball. Everbody on Jake's team lit up while my team trudged to the fence, climbed over it and searched for the ball. This took about fifteen minutes.

Dogs Drexel finally found the ball.

The game resumed.

Jake was still at bat.

He signalled. Big Joe delivered.

Jake blasted another one outta here.

Everybody oohed and aahed. We climbed the fence again. The hunt for the ball in the cornfield recommenced. More sun. More cigarettes and in the corn on the bench. Another fifteen minute search

Somebody found the ball.

The game resumed.

Jake still at bat.

KEERAK

Another one.

At this point appreciation turned into irritation and irritation was approaching awareness and contempt. Everybody started yelling at Jake. Instead of praise, Jake started getting blame and venom. "You big muscle bound asshole. You're ruining the game with this shit. C'mon Mix, let's get this shit over with."

Jake was in unchartered territory and he had taken all of us with him. The suspicion started to grow that the field was too small for Jake and he could go yard at will. We were starting to get too old and too strong for Numbers.

The search for the ball took even longer this time. The game had been decided. What was the point of the search? What was the point of continuing? What was the point of hanging around every day at a baseball field?

So hot.

Sun so relentless.

Jake still at bat.

The whole afternoon was starting to feel like Hell.

Like eternity.

Finally the ball was retrieved.

As Jake dug in at the plate, everybody on both teams was swearing at him. He was a muscle bound, lame brained, crocodile faced, cement headed, goofy, queer, cock sucking walkin cancer factory etc. He had ruined our afternoon. He was in the process of destroying the game of Numbers which was our last link to sandlot baseball, in many ways our last link to boyhood.

Jake didn' give two shits. Guys like Jake love pressure as much as they love pissing people off. I'll never forget watching Jake at that moment. He didn't care about anything that anybody was saying. He didn't even care about the end of boyhood or for that matter, the ash dangling from his Marlboro as he dug in at the dish. Those kind of distractions were for sinlgles hitters like me. Power don't go there.

Big Joe was tired of lobbig the ball where Jake wanted it. This time he reared back and put all of his mustard on a fastball, inside corner. Joe had plenty of mustard. He was 16, six foot two, two hundred thirty pounds.

Jake got around on it.

I never had and never will see a ball hit that far on that field. That last shot went fify feet further back into the bushes surrounding the cornfield, into zone unknown, out of boy's town into manland. Jake's blast lost the last ball on the last pitch of the summer........

Everbody stopped mocking Jake. We were all pals again. We gave Jake the praise he deserved but we realized the game was over.

We went home

We had changed

No one bothered to find the ball or even look for it.

We never played Numbers again.

Summer ended.

Two weeks later

Dogs was driving

Soon, my buddies and me would be real well known. We were going to college and/or getting drafted.

PIZZA MIND

First day in college......

I got to my dorm room before my other roomies. The room had a bunkbed and a single bed. I didn't know which bed to take or whether I should wait for my roomies to arrive and we'd decide together. My mother gave me her last bit of pre-college advice.

"Take the single bed. We’re here first.

That's some great advice.

I took the single. She helped me make it.

They said goodbye.

I was on my own.

I lit up a Newport and realized nobody was going to stop me. Smoking was still a big deal in 1964. I exhaled and the smoke never looked more beautiful. I blew exquisite smoke rings and rings through rings.

Eventually, my two roomies showed up. They were both big guys. Rob was from Utica and Louie was from Auburn.I left the room while they got unpacked. I explored the rest of the dorm. When I returned, me and my roomies began to feel each other out. They had settled in the bunkbed...Rob on top...Louie below. Louie was a basketball player and Rob had left his girl back in Utica.

We decided to take a walk uptown, into the village and get a pizza. I had never had a pizza before in my life. First day in college, first day with new roomates and about to have my first pizza.

We walked up the hill to Main Street past the fountain of the bear and made our way to Pontillo's pizza. I was pretending that I'd done this many times.

We sat down and Rob ordered for us.

While we waited for the pizza, we talked about why we chose Geneseo State and why we wanted to become teachers. We were so young and so earnest. They had a juke box in the pizza joint. I played two songs. “Pretty Woman” and “Baby, I Need Your Loving”.

I told Rob that I played “ Baby I Need Your Loving” out of respect for the girls we had left behind and “Pretty Woman ‘ for the girls we would meet.

“Baby, I Need Your Loving” came on first and it arrived as our pizza was served. I had no idea how to eat a pizza so I watched as Rob expertly spun the pizza around and separated the pieces.We were in semi-formal mode. We hadn't laughed or cursed at each other yet.

Rob removed the first piece of pizza abd put it in his mouth just as the Four Tops were singing “OOh Ooh Ooh Ooh, Oouh Ooh, Oooh Ooh”

The piece was too hot and Rob stated going "Ooh ooh ooh" in pain just as the Tops were singing Baby I need Your Loving."

While he was oohing and aahing in pain a big gobby string of cheese ahd slipped off the pizza and was stuck to his chin all the way to the pizza which he had pulled away from his face.

He looked hilarious. I tried not to laugh at his pain but couldn't help myself.

He didn't mind. He laughed too and so did Louie.

Louie and I decided to wait a little bit before we took our slices.

I was very careful with my first bite of my first slice of pizza.

I've eaten a lot of pizza since then and not always as carefully.

Soon, I would meet a pretty woman but that's another story.

Whenever I hear either of those songs, I think of that day and that pizza.

SKY CATCH

We played catch constantly on the Avenue and in the field.

If you're gonna play baseball, you've got to be able to catch the ball.

We all loved out mitts.My favorite mitt was a Rawling's six fingered, Eddie Matthews model. Partly because of that glove, I earned another nickname. They called me Raw.

Catch came in many varieties.

At first we just tossed the ball back and forth, over and over again. This of course required a partner. When we were alone, we learned to throw the ball against porch steps and catch it when it bounced back.

Eventually, when we had a partner, we'd play pitch and catch. In pitch and catch...one of us was the pitcher and one of us the catcher. The "pitcher" would do the full windup and throw the ball to the “catcher” who was in the crouching position. Occasionally, the catcher would call balls and strikes would make a clicking sound upon catching a "strike". The click meant the ball was in play. The throwback would be a pop fly or a hard hit ground ball. The pitcher had to be prepared for the click. If he fielded the ground ball, for instance, he would become a momentary infielder and fire the ball back to the catcher who had become a momentary first basemen. Every three "outs" we would change position...the pitcher would become the catcher and the catcher would become the pitcher.

Me and my buddy Al played the most pitch and catch.

Then there was "pepper" which involved a bat. Pepper was played in close range, maybe three feet apart. The fielder would underhand the ball to the guy with the bat and the batter would tap it back. Pepper was all about reflex and bat control and trust. Once again, Al was my best partner for pepper. He had great bat control so his tap backs were hard but not too hard. We weren't trying to kill each other. I trusted Al.

Two of my crazier friends, X the Known and King, invented a game called wipe catch where they would fire the ball back at each other as hard as they could while decreasing the distance between them. That game usually ended with either King or Known getting wiped out by a return throw that came in way too fast and too hard and ricocheted off their bodies.

Nobody wanted to play wipe catch with either of them. They were trying to kill each other.

I kept playing baseball all the way into college. I played on a great intramural fast pitch softball team. We were great because we had the "fastest" picher in the league...a guy named Don Peterson. We called Peterson Cougar because of the word and insignia on the Zippo lighter that he always carried which had Cougar written on it. He could care less if he killed the batter or not. Nobody dug in against him. Nobody even wanted to bat against him. One guy I knew got hit in the ass by a Peterson fast pitch and didn't go to class for the next week. I'm not saying that his bruised ass was the only reason he cut all his classes but he used his ass as an excuse.

My freshman year, I lived in Blake Hall which was a temporary residence while the new dorms were being built. My sophomore year, the new dorms were available. The new dorms had suites of three rooms surrounding a common room. My suite was B1d on the ground floor of spanking new Wyoming dorm.

In freshman year, we had no choice of room mates but by sophomore year, we were able to choose and be chosen. Six guys in a suite. Six all stars. My suite mates were Paul, Butsh, Cat, Beast, and Murph. All of us were ballplayers and some of us, like Paul, Butsh, Cat and Beast were varsity players in thier freshman year.

All of them were great guys. Murph, Cat, Butsh and I came from Blake Hall so we were already friends. Paul and Beast were from Sturges hall where they had been roomies. I didn't know Paul that well but I knew he was a tremendous athlete.

On moving in day, Paul and I settled in first. We had a few moments so we decided to play catch. Catch measures trust as well as skill.

It was a different kind of catch. Paul didn't have his glove so he threw and I caught. Paul had a formidable arm. He started throwing the ball high, frighteningly high, up into the air. It was wipe catch except the ball speed was based on the velocity of its descent. The first couple of throws he made got my attention. I'd never seen a guy throw a ball that high.

I was in a space between the dorms that was still scarred by construction. There wasn't a lot of room and the area that was available was loaded with ditches and rocks.

After I caught the first couple of throws, I could tell that Paul was impressed. I was getting a little nervous. I raised my index finger to signal "one more".

Paul realized this was the last throw and put everything he had into it, the highest fly of them all. I circled around trying to avoid the obstacles. I got under the ball when I stepped into a ditch and lost my balance. I fell to the ground. While on the ground, I remember thinking "damn, I was right under that ball".

An instant later I realized how "under the ball" I was as the ball, picking up speed all the way, hit me right on the top of the head.

I'm told that the ball bounced fifteen feet in the air directly off my dome.

Momentary visions of Willie Mays and the sound of Buddy Holly took over my brain. I must have been "out" for a few seconds.

When I regained my consciousness, I realized that most of my new suitemates had gathered just as Paul threw the ball. Everybody saw what happened and everybody froze. When I focused on them, they all had an expression of horror and humor on their faces, especially Paul.

Somebody yelled, "Are you allright, Raw."

I didn't know if I was or not but I managed to say "Yeah, I'm good."

With that everybody broke out into relieved, raucous laughter.

I picked myself up and joined them at the entrance to the dorm.

I didn't know exactly what to say but I remember uttering these words: "I knew I was under it."

"Yes, you were" they all agreed while stifling their laughter.

Thus began the daze that I lived in throughout my sophomore year, a year that played out like some kind of radio dream, full of music and surprise.

CLASS of 1917 REUNION

1967 was a very good year for Sinatra. I was a junior in college and at the top of my undergrad game. I was still young enough to rock and roll. I was a drummer in a band that had gone from garbage to garage to bar to cover to dance. Everybody on campus knew me. I had a beautiful, blonde girlfriend. We were in love… “Oh How Happy” she had made me.

Viet Nam and LBJ were concerns but the shitstorm that was 1968 was still obscured by clouds over the horizon. I attended summer school, mostly to play in the band. The beginning of the summer sessions were fun because that’s when reunions were going on. I remember one reunion in particular; a 50 year reunion. I couldn’t believe what a bunch of old, out of it fogies were in attendance. Right then and there, I hoped I’d die before I got old.

They had no idea how to party so aside from freaking out, I avoided involvement with them.

I never bothered to subtract the 50 years so I didn’t realize that these were folks who graduated in 19freakin17. When these folks were my age, they were raggin’ out to “Darktown Strutter’s Ball”, “Tiger Rag” and the most popular recording artists of the year The American Quartet who had made the charts consistently with numbers like “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh”….”Goodbye Broadway Hello France”….”Sailin’ Away on the Henry Clay” and the number one song of the year…. “Over There”.

If they were 21 when they graduated, that meant that these old farts were born in the nineteenth century…right at the turn of the century when, according to BeeGee rumor everything was happening.

I failed to realize that these folks had lived through the first selective service draft and had lost friends and relatives in WWI. They had lived through, among other things, Prohibition, Depression, Two World Wars, the Korean War and were now living through the Viet Nam “conflict” They didn’t show a lot of empathy towards the long hairs and filthy hippies who were as usual trying to do the impossible and “shocked” when the impossible failed to be realized. All we were sayin’ was “give peace a chance” like a bunch of pansies.

Unlike the oldies, most of us had no real concept of war but we knew it wasn’t righteous, brother.To me, the 50 year reunion folks seemed to be more about remembering the dead than celebrating life.

I attended a keg party. The highlight of the party was a piano player who hammered out the traditional, fraternity drinking songs like “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” “The Sheik of Araby”, “Give My Regards to Broadway”, “Rock a Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody” etc. To me these songs were the height of camp….it’s taken me all these years to realize that to the fifty year fogies, these were the anthems of their lives.

I might have connected but chose to dis, aloof as I was..

I didn’t want to imagine my fiftieth reunion. First of all, as a rock and roller, I didn’t want to live that long and as a fool, I never wanted to be uncool.

A few months later, 1968 arrived. I sold my drums. I started my career. I got blindsided by a buddy who stole my girl. I earned the blues the hard way, I suffered for them. I was starting to grow up. The draft was devouring boys/men of my age. We learned about war. I didn' want to die. Most of my cool disappeared replaced by anxiety, beer, cynicism, incapability and the ferocious shadow of going over there.

I attended my 50th reunion last year. We were still rockin’. I got a chance to play the drums for the first time in forty years. I chose Gloria for my number. Before I got my chance on the skins, the dance floor was pretty quiet even though Mike Woods and his band Easy Money were killing it. Then, while Money was playing “Memphis”, some of my brothers and buddies showed up. Linda Miller and I started air guitaring in the aisle and singing all about “long distance information” as if we were twenty again. The music stopped for a second and I spotted Wild Bill coming in the door. The dance floor was still pretty empty.

I said “c’mon Bill” and we went down to the floor and started our crazy dancing. Before long, the floor was full and we old farts were dancing furiously and foolishly. I noticed two young girls, maybe even students, gather around Bill trying to imitate his moves as he nodded and grinned, feeling every note and beat. Beautiful. Nobody feels music like Wild Bill.

Soon I got my chance on the drums. I had forgotten a couple of things about high hat use but got into the groove. G L O R I A. It was the first time and probably the last time that Lynn watched me play the drums. She liked it. She was dancing with Wild Bill both of them responding to my beat.

When we finished the song, I thanked Mike for convincing his drummer to let me sit iin. It was the Friday of the weekend celebration. I realized that the weekend had peaked plus we were homeless, Lynn and I. We had closed on our Rochester home that morniing and we were on our way to close on our new home in Carolina.

I closed the book on Geneseo and went out kickin’ ass.

That night we headed South and I felt like a rock and roll star.

Redeemed.

REDEMPTION DIMENSION

Redemption is a refocusing, a relief and a release.

Once we got glasses as kids, the BIGGEST fear of them all was losing those glasses. The remedy for this childhood fear was simple....DO NOT TAKE THEM OFF until you go to bed and when you go to bed put them next to your bed so you can PUT THEM ON as soon as you wake up.

I had glasses before any of my gang. Al was the youngest kid in our gang. He was already a Parsells Avenue legend because one day after the milkman delivered a dozen eggs to his house, we talked Al into dropping an egg off his concrete front steps onto the asphalt driveway that was his sideyard. The egg splattered to the delight of everyone, most particularly Albert who was thoroughly enjoying the attention of us older kids. I'm thinking Al was maybe four years old. The oldest kids were eight. I was six.

After the first egg shattered, all the kids started yelling "Drop another one, Al."

Al dropped another one to the cheering of the gang. Al kept getting more cheers and kept smashing more eggs until the entire dozen was yolking and scrambling on the summer asphalt. We all knew it was funny but we all sensed it was kinda wrong. Al's Dad, a WW 2 Marine who made his living driving a Coke truck and who drove a Buick when not driving the truck would be home soon. We all took off after the last egg was smashed and before the Coke truck appeared. Al was alone on his steps, kinda proud but kinda worried.

There are a lot of rumors about what happened when his Dad got home. All I know for sure is we didn't see Al again for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile we played baseball in my backyard. The lilac bush was first base. The cherry tree was second base. The bench was third and the bottom of the hill was home plate. Anything hit over the barbed wire adjoining the lilac bush was the end of the game until somebody gathered the gumption to ask Mrs. Goode our next door neighbor if we could “please” get the ball from her yards. She never refused anybody who said “please” but she watched each interloper with an eagle eye.

Eventually, Al joined us and to the surprise of everybody, he had a talent for baseball. Kid could hit, throw and run.

Summers passed and by the time he was eight, Al was a full fledged member of the gang. He was good at everything...Baseball...football...king of the hill...Cowboys and Indians.... Hide and Seek....Tag....Green Arrow.....Soldiers....Snowball fights. He became my best pal as the other kids abandoned the Avenue for the suburbs or California.

Then one December day, Al showed up with glasses. I explained the rule DO NOT TAKE THEM OFF. Al said that his Dad had already made that rule VERY clear.

The next day was my birthday. My father took five of us downtown to the movies. We went to see Hondo starring John Wayne. I don't think that Al had been to a lot of movies in his life but as an expert Cowboys and Indians player, he was blown away by Hondo. So were we all. It's still one of my favorite movies because of that day. The cinematography was full of blue sky and white cloud and they really popped. Today, as a photographer I am a confirmed cloudman always looking to pop. That's part of the reason we moved South, for the sake of the popping clouds and blue, blue sky.

After the movie, we started to drive home when somebody noticed that Al's glasses were not on his face. Everybody panicked. We headed back to the theater which had refilled. We looked for the glasses but couldn't find them.

My Dad felt terrible worse than anybody but Al. He went across the street with Al when Al had to report the loss. The hope of course was that they would turn up at "lost and found." Al's Mom took the news in fake stride knowing that the shit would hit the fan when the Coke truck pulled up. We all knew that Al was gonna get it.

Apparently he got it because once again we didn't see him for a couple of weeks.

He didn't have glasses when he showed up.

He didn't get another pair for about a year and he heard about the lost pair every day of that year along with an extra emphatic WE TOLD YOU NOT TO TAKE THEM OFF OF YOUR GODDAMNED FACE every time he heard about the loss. When he finally got this new pair, he followed the rules and kept them on his face. By this time, I was only wearing my glasses part time.

Still Al carried, for the next fifty years,a shade of insecurity and paranoia that comes with losing something valuable as a young kid. Plus he couldn't figure out why in hell he had taken the goddamned glasses off in the first place. Why had he disobeyed such an essential commandment? He definitely knew better. We often wondered about that over the next couple decades as we encountered the mysteries of rules and obedience.

It always bothered him.

Why had he done it?

One day a couple of years ago, Hondo came on Turner Classic Movies. I watched it again for the first time since the day of the lost glasses. I still loved it. At the conclusion of the movie, the TCM host provided a few tidbits about the movie. He explained that Hondo was one of the first 3D movies.

Ah Ha.

I called Al. We hadn't spoke in years. I told him I had figured out how and why he had lost his glasses.

"Al, Hondo was in 3D!. You took your glasses OFF to put the 3D glasses ON. You forgot to put your glasses back ON after you took the 3d glasses OFF. You had only been wearing your real glasses for a day or two so it's perfectly understandable that you didn't realize that you weren't wearing them until we were almost home."

"Holy shit, you're right", Al responded. "That's exactly what happened. Thank God Almighty. I'm not as big an asshole as I thought I was." We talked for another couple of hours, comparing notes on Parsells Avenue, Buddy Holly, bus trips downtown and Red Wing games.

The next call I made was to Vin.I repeated my insight. He knew exactly what I was talking about. He remembered the day well. He too felt relieved.

When we take our glasses off in exchange for artificial viewers to get a better vision of a temporarily manifested illusion, we've got to remember to put them back on when the illusion fades into reality

Never too late for redemption, no matter the dimension.

VIN

Yesterday was my father's 93rd birthday.

Of course, he wasn't around to enjoy it; that is if you consider these mortal coils by which we're bound a condition to celebrate rather than tolerate.

Pretty sure he's in a better place and celebrating in the way they celebrate in better places. He shuffled off four years ago. He was sick and tired of being sick and tired. He worked his ass off to gain release from the nursing facility/rehabilitation center that wouldn't let him out until he proved that he could walk.

He proved it. They let him out. Three days later, he woke early went to the bathroom, told my mother "Today's the day. I feel great" While in the bathroom, he collapsed and shuffled off.

It became clear that all the work that he did to get out was motivated by his desire to die at home which he pulled off.

I talked to him the day before. His last words to me were "keep busy".

He had a top hat.

Fifteen years before all of this, when all of this was more than any of us could have imagined, he bought the tombstones for him and my mother. He took a picture of those tombstones, engraved with every thing but the dates. He proudly brought the pictures over to my house one day.

This was the first time I ever thought he could die.

"At my funeral, wear my top hat, will ya?", he asked.

I said I would.

I did.

Just before we put him into the ground, just after we launched the balloons, I put his top hat on on top of his urn and snapped. So long, Vin.

He was a firefighter, a captain.

He was a Veteran of Foreign War... WW2...the Phillipines.

He decided he wanted to be cremated.

He knew a lot about fire.

We picked out the urn that we thought he would have liked. Not real expensive...black and gold. We all got to carry the urn around at the funeral. We took our last picture with him. No relative of mine had ever been cremated before unless you count my Uncle Sam who drank a couple of pints of bourbon every day of his life and when he was cremated, they couldn't put out the fire.

That last part about Uncle Sam was a joke.

Let's get back to my father. For the preceeding decades, I called him Vin. We all did. He could have been Captain or Dad or Pop or Daddy or Father. Captain was way too formal. Pop was a Coke. Father sounded a little too Catholic. Daddy was for infants.

Why not Dad?

All of my buddies had a Dad. Their Dad did this and their Dad did that. My Dad was so much braver, so much funnier, so much smarter, so much more willing to get out in the backyard and throw the football around. My Dad was something other than what I perceived everybody else’s Dad to be.

He was someone else. Everybody had a Dad.

I had a Vin.

His middle name was Vincent.

Yesterday was his birthday.

52 YEARS BETWEEN AVALONS

My life changed in 1958. I was a kid.

Clarabell on Howdy Doody had said his only two, the last two words of Doodyville. He said “goodbye kids.”

Elvis had said hello.

Davey Crockett had died at the Alamo.

I had never heard an electric guitar.

Then a rock and roll show came through town into our sparkling new War Memorial. Al’s 18 year old aunt Carol bought three tickets. They took me along.

Clyde McPhatter, The Elegants, Jimmy Clanton, Johnny Tillotson, the Olympics, the Danleers, the Coasters, Dion and the Belmonts

I was sitting in the third row in a packed and screaming house.

I was changing fast.

Then Bobby Darin came out

Splish Splash

Queen of the Hop

More change for me, contractions coming quicker and each more intense

Then Duane Eddy

Yup

Cannonball

Rebel Rouser

Twangy, super amplified twangy guitar.

In some ways, I lost my virginity right there.

Then Buddy Holly and the Crickets

Oh Boy

More guitar

every day

Peggy Sue

And the last act

The star of stars

The teen idol

The heart throb

Frankie Avalon.

I wasn't even a teenager yet but I found a teenage girl sitting on my lap calling me "honey" and screaming "Frankie".

Dee Dee Dinah

Gingerbread

Venus

When I left that night, I was an authentic rock and roller...not just a kid anymore. I still am and clearly am not.

Next came the sixties.

Fit hit the shan...........I graduated from grammar school. I graduarted from hish school. I graduated from college. I started my profession all in the fitshan of the sixties between assassinations, Cuban Missile Crisis, Mississippi burning, Beatle invasions, Viet Nam, the draft, Manson, Muhammad Ali, Woodstock etc.

Fifty two years later I went to Seneca Casino and saw Frankie Avalon once again.

Frankie was seventy now.

He has eight kids.

Phil Everley's son is the lead guitarist in Frankie's touring band. Annette Funicello was long gone.

Frankie's forty seven year old son is the drummer and he is damned good at it

Frankie looked like a happy man.

From what I'm told, so did I.

And so, at last I am.

Today anyways.

TWO MEN IN TEXAS

Shelley Seton was expecting, expecting. Shelley Seton was expecting twins. Why wouldn't she be?

Shelley had an identical twin named Kelley. Kelley and Shelley grew up dressing alike. They were so identical that nobody even bothered to try and tell them apart. They were known individually and collectively as Kelleyandshelley or, depending upon the suspicion, Shelleyandkelley. Or the Macdonald twins.

One fine day, Kelleyand shelley met Ronaldandonald. Ronaldandonald or Donaldandronald, depending upon the suspicion, were the Seton twins.

The attraction was immediate, intense and opposite. The only difference between Kelley and Shelley was that Shelley was left handed and Kelley right. The only difference between Ronald and Donald is that Donald was right handed and Ronald left.

The twins began double dating and in so doing gave new dimension to the term double dating; doubles dating double dating. Opposites do tend to attract. Left handed Shelley was attracted to right handed Donald. Right handed Kelley fell in love with left handed Ronald. World War two was raging.

All over the country, young couples were getting hitched just before the males were shipped overseas. Ronald was drafted and headed for war with boot camp in Texas.

The two couples decided to get married.

They gave new dimension to the term double marriage.

They got married in Texarkana. Before the marriage, the couples thought how neat it would be if they were to take the girl's last names. Then the boys could be Donaldandronald Macdonald or Ronaldandonald Macdonald based upon suspicion. After a few laughs, the couples decided to stick with tradition. Shelley MacDonald became Shelley Seton.

After the marriage, the boys went over to the line separating Texas from Arkansas. They got into position like two centers ready to hike two footballs with the line of scrimmage being the state line. Shelley snapped the picture.

Two men in Texas, two asses in Arkansas.

A year before the two asses squatted in Arkansas, Shelleyandkelley and Donaldandronald realized that they had a problem. The old twin switcheroo.

Except this time, the possibility existed for the almost impossible to comprehend double twin switcheroo. Vertently or inadvertently,it was possible on any given night for left handed Shelley to wind up with left handed Ronald and/or for right handed Donald to end up with right handed Kelley.

The couples decided that one way to prevent this problem was a sign-in sheet. The sets of twins could and should demand a writing sample before every date and even during some of those dates, particularly the double dates, before moments of intimacy, after arguments at any time of doubt or joy, of hope or faith.

A request for a writing sample, it was agreed should never be turned down. Obviously, it wasn't the content of the note that was important, it was the hand that was used to write the note. If anybody was ambidextrous, he/she kept it a secret.

Donald would make sure that the twin from whom he was getting a writing sample was writing with her left hand and that would prove it was Shelley. Then Shelley in turn would make sure that the guy writing the note to her was writing the note with his right hand and was indeed Donald. Even though the content of the note wasn't critical, the foursome decided to come up with a note that would unite them while simultaneously dividing them.

The note had to be long enough to test writing skills but short enough to not take up much time particularly before moments of passion. This is the note they decided on.

Ronaldand donald would write: “i am who i am and that's all that i am, I'm Ronald (or Donald) the Seton twin”.

Shelleyandkelley would write: “i am who i am and that's all that i am, I'm Shelley (or Kelley) the Mackdee twin”.

Let's hope it worked because as mentioned earlier, Shelly was preggers.

Shelley had the names picked out for the twins she was expecting, expecting.

If they were girls they would be Helen and Ellen in honor of Shelley's mother Ellen and her identical, dress alike sister Helen, formerly the Tower Twins Helenandellen or Ellenandhelen Tower.

If the expected twins were boys they would be named Merle and Earl in honor of Donald's father Merle and Merle's identical dress alike twin brother, Uncle Earl, formerly Merleandearl or Earlandmerle Seton.

If they were a boy and a girl, the twins would be named Merle and Pearl in honor of Donald's father Merle and his wife, Donald's mother, Pearl.His parents were known as merlandperl.

Around the sixth week of her pregnancy, Shelley experienced some unusually heavy bleeding without much pain or cramping and was alarmed until she visited her obstetrician and was assured that the pregnancy was still viable. The heavy bleeding was nothing out of the ordinary at that stage of pregnancy according to Dr. Rudolph.

This was way back in 1946, well before the advent of sonograms, ultrasound and amnioscentisis. No one knew then what we know now.

This is what we know now.

Women have always carried twins with far greater frequency than imagined. In the old days, those twins were never captured on sonogram so most women never knew they were carrying twins and when they experienced heavy bleeding around the sixth week of their pregnancy, they were unaware that they were actually miscarrying one of the twins. They would go to the doctor the next day and the doctor would say what Doctor Rudolph said to Shelley. "This is nothing out of the ordinary" Which was true.

Sorta.

So the expectant mother would go home assured that her unborn child was still developing according to plan and totally unaware that one half of the in utero twins had already left the building with very little fanfare.

Earl was gone and forgotten not only as a has been but a never was and never even had been.

Merle went full term and was born alone. The only evidence that Earl existed in the first place is the evidence that Merle brought with him. Surviving twin babies have one consistent characterstic. They are overwhelmingly left handed.

As was Merle.

Six years later, half-twin Merle Seton Fell out of the bunk bed.

Bunk beds had quite a history In the Seton family. Merle’s mother and her twin sister had both slept in bunk beds As had Merle’s father and his twin brother. Merle’s grandmothers and grandfathers had also slept in bunk beds. All four of ‘em, always two per bed.

None of them had ever fallen out of a bunk bed before.

Of course, all of them had lived in Dubuque.

Merle and his Mom and Dad were sleeping in Nevada.

His Dad had done his war time stint working on the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan project was only the beginning. The experimenting continued.The war was over but the Reds weren’t.They were all over the place. Some were in Nevada. “Spying”, Merle’s Dad said.

Merle’s Dad never said much else ‘bout his work even the morning after the night That Merle fell out of the bunk bed. The top bunk of the bunk bed. Thank God, it wa a low top.

Merle Seton was a dreamin' bout sittin' on a dock three above soft rocks that were covered with warm Lake Water. Merle slipped gently off the dock, feet headed for the rocks but found only air and instead of warm crystal clear water his bare feet found nuthin but floor beneath his six year old soles.

Somehow he landed on his legs before he fell on his ass which was the cause of the crash which woke Merle up uninjured. Merle climbed back up the ladder, no wiser and no sadder, to the bunk not the dock. He took a look at the clock which was pointing to midnight. He fell asleep in atomic fright Feeling kinda sore and sad. Where the heck were Mom and Dad?

See, the Setons lived in Nevada as close as anybody to the atomic bomb testing grounds and were in the forefront of American fifties families who learned to love the bomb. Merle's father was involved emotionally and economically with the atomic arming of the Cold war. His great triumph occurred with his contribution to the Manhattan Project which probably saved the life of his twin brother who was stationed in Manila and warming up to be cannon fodder during the inevitable horrific invasion of Japan that would make Iwo Jima look like Ding-Dong school but then we dropped the bomb on 'em and all the living brothers came home.

Since then Merle's Dad had labored on various sidetrips, brilliant defense measures that ended up being expensive dead ends. These dead ends included the nuclear bazooka, the F3H jet, the atomic artillery shell and the various pills and nostrums the atomic alchemists devised to cure radiation poisoning including what would become LSD. Yeah, Merle's Dad was convinced that the bomb was his friend and the guardian of his family.

Shelley had her doubts but had learned how to be married as the forties turned into the fifties. She kept her big trap shut.

The Setons were used to seeing flashes and minutes later feeling their house rock. Shelley heard the crash from the bunk room. She opened her trap, nudged her husband and whispered, "what's that" Merle's father, worn out from a hard day's night at the plant sleepily replied "Jezzuz, go back to sleep, it's only an atomic bomb . I gotta be at work early tomorrow."

Before shutting her trap and settling back in bed, Shelley whispered to her husband "All right. I was afraid that maybe Merle had fallen out of the bunk".

A GUY IN A HURRY

My mother was an independent and self-sufficient person. She was my transportation for many years. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I so vividly recall the last time that we were in a car and I was driving.

It was the fifth of July. We were returning to Rochester from Crystal Beach after a fabulous fourth.

Apparently, a lot of other people had the same idea as East Lake Road was one big traffic jam.

The day was beautiful and neither one of us had any particular place to go so we were having one of those mother son chats that have been missing from my life now for the last few years. Those conversations don't seem all that important at the time you're having them because they always were and they always would be. Death was far from our minds on that Independence Day.

Except, it wasn't.

Whatever we were talking about, my mother's words ended with "well, we're in no hurry".

At that moment I looked into my rearview mirror and saw a guy on a motorcycle hauling ass in a white line fever, speeding by dozens of cars in the jam.

I said to my mother "well here comes a guy who's in a hurry to die."

By the time I got the words out of my mouth, the guy was dead.

Four car lengths ahead of me, somebody had decided to turn off the road into a beach parking lot which was directly to the left of his car not more than five yards away from his steering wheel.

He started to make his turn, signal on and the guy on the bike drove right into it.

I heard this clicking sound and saw the bike hit the car and saw the rider go flying off the bike about fifty feet and smash directly into a stone wall that separated the beach from private property on East Lake Road. When he hit the wall, he broke.

There were four cars in front of me.

The first three pulled off the road and headed for the guy.

I had a decision to make.

I drove right by as did the guy behind me and the cars behind him.

I knew the biker was dead so there was nothing I could do for the dude other than clog up the Road and maybe cause another accident.Four cars, I figured was enough and maybe two too many.

Stunned, my mother and I had one more mother-son chat after the death on our way home. That chat concerned God, fate, speed, space, death, responsibility, haste, destiny, empathy, sympathy, reflection, vulnerability, infinity and eternity. The kind of chat I will never have again but the kind of chat that helped make me the man that I am.

LEAVING QUEENS WITH HOPE

The car was packed. The lights of Citi-Field burned fresh in my memory. Deke and I were ready to cross some bridges and take 17 all the way upstate. All that remained was one last goodbye. Kevin had put us up for the night at his place in Queens and we had taken Kev and his friend to a Mets game.

I started walking up the driveway to the backyard where Kev and DeLord were waiting to say goodbye. That’s when I spotted a little piece of yellow paper resting on the asphalt.

I picked it up as if it were a twenty dollar bill.

I turned it over and saw a message written in green ink. The handwriting had the clarity and innocence of someone just learning penmanship. The letters were formed with care and precision. I guessed the writer to be a little girl of about 11.

This is what the note said. “My favorite color is magic. Fairy colors are different than the colors you see. Fairies are responsible for all of nature’s colors. Look for rainbows.”

I carried the little note with me to the backyard. I showed the note to Kevin and DeLord. They couldn’t identify the writing. As far as they knew, there were no 11 year old girls living in the neighborhood. We passed the note around in wonder with the feeling that there was cryptic magical meaning in it for all of us.

It was time to say goodbye.

I had just met DeLord the previous night. I wished I had known her forty years and felt as if I did.

I had known Kevin for 55 years but we hadn’t seen each other in 40, not since the “two for you” at the Merch with Dino behind the bar. Kevin was the guy who got us the tickets for the second Ali-Frazier fight. The last time that I had seen Kev, four decades ago, was when he visited me upstate and was amazed when our friend Beth showed up with her pet boa and started doing her Salome snake dance.

“It’s as if no time has passed,” Kev said. “we started up right where we left off so many years ago.”

I knew he was still thinking about the snake dance.

I agreed and we shook hands. The costumes of weight and wrinkles had disappeared as we looked at one another and saw the youths we were when we were brave and drunk at Dino’s.

I said what I always say in situations where I know there is a possibility that I may never see the person again.“see you tomorrow”

I headed for the car. I turned back for one last look and as one we said “Look for rainbows”

MOTHERS DIE

Mary was born on Christmas.I was her first born son, 25 years and five days later. Mary's father died when she was sixteen.She raised her two younger sisters and younger brother.

She was with them all on their death beds after they had lived interesting, productive and full lives.

Mary was married to my father for nearly seventy years. We called my mother Red like we called my father Vin. Everybody had a ma or mom or mother. We had Red, more beautiful, more spirited, more reliable, more essential than the rest in our eyes,

She was at Vin’s deathbed as well, which in fact was the bed they slept in as he was determined to make it home to die. He did so in her arms.

My brother, my sister, my wife and my children were at her death bed. She was spared the opposite. She wouldn't have to sit at ours.

The lessons at her bed were profound as her death was so much the opposite of her life. She was diminished, dementiated, starving and morphine ridden.Yet she held on even while muttering over and over again;

"I can't breathe"

"I can't help you"

While she breathed and helped us all to confront death and learn its lessons.

Each time I visited, I was pretty sure this would be the last time.

The last time, I was sure it was the last time because her physical resemblance to the fierce, funny, reliable, self sufficient,woman she had always been had all but disappeared. Still she hung on.

In what I thought was going to be my last moments with her, I told her the story of California. When I was young, many of my friends moved to California.Little did we suspect at the time, that we would never see one another again. Going to California might as well have been death.I named those friends to her, Richard, Mike, Pam, Ann those kids we never saw again. She remained silent, eyes closed. I like to think she was remembering

Now was the time for me to do the thing that the oldest child is supposed to do.Give her permission and encouragement to go.I tried my best.I told her that she would be going to California in my mind where she would see her Mom, her Dad, her brothers and my father and all of our friends.I said We would be fine, my brother, my sister and our families. She had done a great job.Then I said "You can go, we don't need you anymore".

She opened her eyes and said "Oh yes, you do"

Then she shut them.

We were all astounded.

We went home as the vigil continued.

That night, she died.

Those were her final words to me.

She was right. She was right and she was wrong. We did need her and continue to need her forever. She was right about that.

She had said she couldn't help us. She was wrong about that. She got me through this essay and my struggle with cancer.

END OF THE BOOK

URGENT MIRRORS

Hello friends. It’s nice to be back. I’ve been stealing mirrors and seeing men about horses for the last 10 days. I subscribe to the Vonnegutian concept that a mirror is a leak to another, parallel universe. The image that we see when we look into a mirror is the image of ourselves in another realm which is momentarily in synch with our own. We just show up at the same time and take a gander at each other. Thus a mirror is a leak into another world. So whenever someone says “I’ve got to take a leak” what they are literally saying according to Vonnegut is “I’ve got to steal a mirror” I’ve stolen so many mirrors in the last ten days that even my image in the parallel universe is freaking out and looks very tired. I don’t know exactly what’s causing the guy in the mirror to show up 50 or 60 times a day but “I” know why I’m there. I’m stealing mirrors as an after effect of the radiation treatment that I have been receiving for the past sixteen days. I knew beforehand that one of the after effects of radiation is increased, urgent urination. Still you never really know about an after effect until after it affects you after.

I haven’t slept now in five days because of the “urgency”. I go to bed. I’m there for ten minutes then I have to steal a mirror. I come back to the bed and the urgency comes back with me. I tell the urgency “look I know you’re just some spasmic bladder because I just stole a mirror and there’s no way I need to steal another one so soon.” Then the urgency goes away for maybe 10 minutes at which time I try to catch a few winks because I know the urgency will be back and that will wake me up. 10 minutes later, the urgency is back. 10 minutes after that I’m stealing another mirror. And then the whole thing starts all over again

This goes on all day and all of the night. I remember what it used to be like 20 days prior and what I took for granted.

A few times a day I’d get that urgency but the vast majority of the day and the night, the urgency disappeared. I thought nothing of it. We get used to normal until it disappears and then we crave it like we crave yesterday. But yesterday’s gone. The after effect flips the script. Instead of non urgency leading to a mirror steal seven or eight times a day now the urgency is continual with 60 or 70 mirror steals within every 24 hours. Yesterday, my doctor prescribed some new medication. I won’t even tell you all the rare and catastrophic potential effects of the prescription, they are too humiliating and horrifying to even think about.

My pharmacist tells me that they have to put those warnings on the label if it comes to their knowledge that any one at any time had ever come up with the particular after effect. If someone has, then it must be included on the label. This is supposed to be comforting information. Don’t worry about the after effects because they are rare but if you start getting one or more contact your doctor immediately etc.

The new medicine is supposed to reduce the urgency and thus reduce the mirror stealing. However, for some people it has a paradoxical effect which not only reduces the urgency but also makes urination impossible. If that’s the case, contact your doctor immediately becasuse you will need to be catheterized

I really don’t want that. As of this instant, the urgency has lessened. That is why I can stop back here and say hello. But now I’m kinda worried about my flow. I want no more after effects, that, my friends is for goddamn sure Not cured from what I’m suffering with but suffering from the cure.

THE ART OF GLOVE

A guy named Arthur Gregor walked out of the classroom, apparently on his way to the john. The boy on the way to the john, Arthur Gregor Junior, almost always suspected that he had a sex problem.

The reason Arthur Gregor suspected he had a sex problem was because his father, Arthur Gregor, suspected that he, the father, had a sex problem. Arthur Gregor Junior’s mother Sara knew that her husband had a sex problem but she didn’t know exactly what it was nor how to describe it which led Arthur Gregor Senior to have even greater suspicion about the sex problems of his son etc. So one day when Junior was eight, his parents took him to a psychiatrist named Dr. Schinetzki. Schinetzki suspected that he himself might have an undefined sex problem, that is why he specialized in detecting sex problems in others.

When Junior walked into Schinetzki’s office, he had no suspicion that he might have a problem with sex. He was eight years old. He didn’t have any idea what sex was. So Schinetski started showing Junior some pictures and asked him to identify the pictures. The pictures were very concrete; an apple, a desk, a lamp, a shirt, a dog and then a bra.

Junior nailed the first five and then the trouble began.

Junior hesitated when he saw the bra. He knew what the name of the item was but he didn’t want Dr. Schinetski to know that he knew what it was for fear that Schnitetski would tell his parents that their child knew what a bra was which of course he would have and that would have been considered normal and that might have eased the suspicion that Senior had about Junior which might have eased the suspicion that Senior had about himself which may or may not have dented the wall of certainty that Sara had constructed about her husband and hence her son.

Tragically, Junior chose to overthink the situation. He figured that no “normal” kid his age should know what a bra is or where it goes or what it does.

Junior decided that he either had to continue in silence as he contemplated the picture which he figured would be suspicious or he could mis-identify the picture. Junior chose option two. “Well, Arthur, can you name this picture?” asked the good Doctor with an edge of impatience in his voice. “ Oh yes, Doctor. That’s a glove” “Very good young man” said the doctor and moved on to a picture of a goat, and then a telephone and then a piggy bank all of which Arthur identified. From that day on, the suspicion of Arthur Senior about Arthur Junior began to grow and then one day that suspicion appeared within Arthur Junior and it started to grow. That day was a Sunday in January

The next day, the day after sexual suspicion started within his son, Senior uncomfortably explained the birds and the bees to his boy and Arthur began to believe that bees were having sex with birds and if he got stung by a bee, he could get pregnant. When Senior got the report from Schinetzki, which indeed cast suspicion upon the sexual inclinations of his son, he did what any other father who is suspected of unusual sexual inclinations by his wife would do. He over-reacted. Senior figured that if he could ease his suspicion about his son which would enable him to ease his suspicion about himself which would lessen the infuriating certainty of his wife which somehow had become the deciding vote in every domestic disagreement. Senior bought Junior a pair of gloves. When he gave Junior the gloves, he said “these are gloves, son . Do you understand me? These are gloves. They keep your hands warm. They protect your hands". This was the beginning of Arthur Junior’s compulsive, lifelong search for definition and overstanding. And gloves

It was May. Junior’s hands were already warm. Still, his father insisted that Junior put on the gloves immediately.When Junior put on the gloves he remembered his session with Schinetzki. The gloves made him feel guilty. Eventually that guilt would transform into suspicion of sexual abnormality. Every time Junior put on a glove of any variety, for the rest of his life, the whirlwind of self-doubt reared its furious head and reaped its own devastating harvest. The wearing of the glove would both cause and ease the internal whirlwind. Senior insisted that Junior always have a supply of new gloves. Senior insisted that Junior concentrate on three sports, baseball, hockey and golf. All three sports required a glove. The incidents with the baseball glove were particularly painful. Senior bought Junior the most expensive ball glove that he could find which amounted to three hundred plus dollars. Junior wasn’t any good at baseball but he had the best glove so he made the major leagues in his local Little League. When the manager asked him what position he played Junior said “shortstop” Junior had no idea what a shortstop was or where on the field the shortstop played. He knew the word and he liked the word so that was the word he said when his manager, Otto Dingfeldt, while eyeing the expensive glove asked him what position he played. At the first practice Dingfeldt said “ Okay Junior, You’re my shortstop.” Junior, overcoming the urge to ask his coach to “define shortstop” instead asked Dingfeldt “where do I play” Dingfeldt assumed that Junior was asking a subtle question about shading the hitter toward third or second depending upon whether or not the hitter could get around on the inside fastball. “Shade over towards third” said Otto. Junior walked on to the field and stood right next to the third baseman, a veteran eleven year old named Jake Genovese. “What the hell are you doing here, kid” Genovese asked. “The manager told me to shade towards third” said Junior. “Could you please define ‘shade’ “Well for Christ sake move halfway between third and second and that’s good enough but get the hell away from me before I kick your ass” replied Jake. Arthur moved to the spot indicated. The first three batters hit rockets right at and through Junior. After the third rocket Arthur fell to the ground, faking an injury. When Dingfeldt came out to see ‘what the fuck* is wrong with the ‘fruit with the glove’. Arthur said “Mister Dingfeldt, I don’t like shortstop”. And with that, Junior was benched. He would remain benched for the rest of his Little League career which itself would end later that year. Every moment that he sat on the bench while the others kids played the game, Arthur grew more suspicious of himself. If you added up the price tags of all the gloves on Junior’s team, it’s likely the sum would be less than the one glove on Junior’s hand, uselss on the bench. Bobby Lowmeyer took Junior’s spot at shortstop. Bobby had perhaps the worst glove on the team. Bobby’s glove had been passed on to him by his older brother, Whitey, who gave up baseball while waiting for the bass player in his band to get an amp. Whitey got the glove as a hand me down from his Dad, Norbert who had gotten the glove from his Dad, Karl, whose favorite player wasn’t Babe Ruth but a nobody named named Chuck Klein. To Karl, baseball was the national pasttime.To Whitey,the few times that he thought about it while making noise in the garage, baseball was the national past its time.

All of the other gloves on the team were either hand me downs or K mart ten dollar specials. Arthur and his glove stood out on this team like a sore thumb which everybody on the team had because of their lousy mitts except for Arthur who had the good mitt and the permanent seat on the pine.Arthur Senior told Arthur Junior to never loan out his glove. Senior came to the first few of Junior’s games but lost interest when he realized that Junior was not going to get into the game. Senior stopped showing up. Before Senior stopped showing up, it became clear that the other players on the team hated Junior’s guts because of the glove disparity. Bob Lowmeyer particularly resented Arthur. Bobby had the quickness and coordination to handle the shortstop position but his crappy glove prevented him from cleanly fielding the grounders hit his way. With every error, his antipathy towards Arthur increased. He started calling Arthur “Glove” and pretty soon everybody on the team began to follow suit. The nickname spread from the ball field to the neighborhood to the school. Before long, everywhere he went, Arthur was called Glove. In Arthur’s mind, they might as well have been calling him “Bra” which might as well have been “Oddball,” “Weirdo,” or “ “Dipshit” One day Coach Dingfeldt approached Arthur and said “Glove, if you lend Bobby your mitt for the rest of the season, I’ll give you a new position” Glove, a team player, was always eager to please.He also wanted to stay clear of the rocket shots smashed at the shortstop. Since it was clear that his Father had abandoned the team and wouldn’t know or care one way or the other, Glove decided to lend his mitt to Bobby. Coach Dingfeldt, true to his word, gave Junior his new position…..statstop. As statstop, Junior had the important job of keeping score during the games and then turning his scorecard into a stat sheet. Dingfeldt turned the job of teaching Junior how to keep score over to his assistant coach, an alcoholic named Clyde Starks. Starks taught Junior the numbers for the positions; 1 for pitcher, 2 for catcher, 3 for fist base, 4 for second base, 5 for third base ,6 for shortstop, 7 for left field, 8 for center field and 9 for right field. Any time anyone in those positions touched the ball, it was to be recorded in the “official” scorebook by the team statstop. A ground out to the second baseman was recorded as a 4-3. A flyball caught by the center fielder was recorded as an 8. Et feakin cetera. Arthur caught on quickly. With Bobby at shortstop hoovering anything hit near him and with Arthur at statstop recording every play, the Pirates began a winning streak. After one particularly unbelievable play, Bobby came back to the bench and when the rest of the team congratulated him, Bobby said, “it wasn’t me…it was Art.” For a split second Junior felt like he was getting some credit for the success of the team. Then he realized that Bobby was giving credit not to Junior but to Junior’s glove which was now known as Art. The boy was now named after the glove and the glove was named after the boy. In the mind of the boy, the glove was getting the better deal. With Bobby installed at shortstop with Art installed on his hand and with Glove installed on the bench with a scorecard and pencil in his hand, the Pirates began to win and win big.

Kippy Fiore, the Timpani brothers Sal and Bob, Sandy Granada, Tony Giambrone and Bow Aqualina, despite their mediocre mitts could all field, run and hit. Nick Sellmer could pitch. The only weakness had been shortstop. Bobby and Art took care of that problem. The Pirates reached the championship game. Arthur Junior never breathed a word about the teams success to his father for fear that his father would show up and demand that Arthur a) get his ass on the field and b) get his glove back from the zitface at shortstop. The night before the game, Arthur could imagine the whole house of cards collapsing. He, in fact, did visualize the entire humiliation and when he did so he fell asleep. He slept the sleep of the innocent who somehow suspect that they may not be innocent after all for reasons undetermined. Arthur’s father didn’t show up for the game. The Pirates were playing the Braves. For years, the Braves had been the best team in the League. The guys on the Braves had real good gloves and their gloves were in proportion to their skills. Still, Art, on the hand of Bobby was the best mitt on the field and both teams knew it. Art had become the talk of the league. The pitcher for the Braves was a guy named Chico. Word had it that Chico was at least fifteen years old. Chico threw hard and seemed to enjoy hitting kids. Everybody was afraid of Chico. Nobody wanted to dig in at the plate. The game turned into a pitcher’s battle between Chico and Nick. After a short delay because of threatening weather, the game moved quickly until the sixth inning, with both teams scoreless. In the last at bat of the season, the Pirates dug in. Kippy singled. Sal doubled. Kippy scored. The Pirates took the lead. Sandy hit a fly ball over the barbed wire into the power plant in right field for a two run homer. Mr Jordan, the coach of the Braves argued that the ball was foul. The argument got ugly. Several parents got involved. The umpire held his ground. The parents headed back to their seats. Tony Giambrone struck out for out number two after Chico threw a couple of pitches behind him. Bow, the next batter did exactly the same thing that Sandy did, smashing the ball to nearly the exact same spot over the exact same stretch of barbed wire for yet another debatable homerun. Out came Jordan. Ten more minutes of screaming, finger pointing, , spitting, swearing name-calling and threatening ensued before peace was restored. The home run counted. The score was 4-0 Pirates. Bobby struck out to end the inning. The Pirates needed three more outs. It was nearly nine oclock when the Braves came up to the plate. Darkness Falling An inning is not supposed to start after 8:30. Even with the rain delay, the sixth inning of the Pirates versus Braves championship game began at 8:18. Glove kept meticulous track of such arcana. In this regard Glove was particularly superfluous. Ya don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows and you don’t need a statstop to tell ya that it’s dark. By the time the top of the sixth ended; after the offensive outburst, after the two disputed home runs, after the the near riots that ensued after each home run, after the time spent after the riots clearing the field of debris and derelicts, the time was 8:50

Nick Sellmer took the mound and began his warm-up pitches. Glove consulted his trusty scorebook. Glove noticed that Nick had pitched two innings in the must-win game prior to the championship game. The league had a rule that no pitcher could pitch more than seven inning within the space of a week.When Nick threw his first pitch of the sixth inning, his performance would be against league legislation. Glove figured that the penalty for breaking this rule would be forfeiture. Coach Dingfeldt was not only aware of the rule but also aware of the fact that if he took Nick out of the game now, all the parents would be on his case for the rest of his life, not so much for taking Nick out tonight but for bringing him in a couple of nights before. Coach Dingfeldt decided that he would leave Nick in the game and if the fit hit the shan, he could always blame the little twerp on the end of the bench, the “statstop” named Glove. And if Glove approached him, the coach, he would pretend he was doing something else. Dingfeldt would determine Glove’s honesty by the urgencey of Glove’s interruption. Glove was polite. Glove hated to interrupt anyone, particularly figures of authority. Glove didn’t know if Coach Dingfeldt knew what Glove knew. The inning which defined the entire season might depend upon Glove getting through to Coach. The Pirates did have an alternative, a chinless boy named Steve Kaul who everybody called Froggy. Froggy threw the ball in a combinatin submarine/sidearm style that lost all of it idiosyncracy by the time it reached the plate. This imminently hittable pitch was called “the Swamp Ball”. As the othe Pirates took the field for the last time, Glove walked from the far end of the bench to where Coach Dingfeldt was speaking to Coach Starks. Glove cleared his throat “Ummm, Coach?” Nick had already thrown the first of his allotted six warm-up pitches by the time Glove got to Dingfeldt. “Coach, ummm, I’m afraid that if Nick throws one more pitch to one more batter…….” POP. Warm-up pitch number two. Dingfeldt interrupted Glove.“Are you afraid, Glove ?” Dingfeldt asked as he turned his back to Glove and for the last time rearranged the bats in the bat rack. Looking at Dingfeldt’s back, Glove realized what a gigantic man his Coach was. “Yes, Coach. I am” Dingfeldt turned and faced the boy. Looking at his front instead of his back, Glove realized what a determined man his coach was. SMACK. Warm up pitch number three exploded into the catcher’s mitt on the darkened field. At this stage of the night, the pitches were more audible than visible. “Do you know what courage is Glove?” “Courage is facing your fears, Coach” “Not bad, Glove” PMACK. Warm up pitch number four. “Courage, son, is knowing what not to fear. Do you understand me? ” “But, Coach……” SMAP. Warm up pitch number five. “Listen, Arthur. Go back to the end of the bench. Take out your pencil. Keep a record of the action on the field. You be the statstop. I’ll be the coach. Aside from my advice about courage, forget the rest of this conversation. Know what to fear and what not to fear.Be courageous. Is that clear, Glove. ” “Yes, Coach” For a split second Glove realized what he should do. He should run out to the mound and explain the situation to Nick. Nick could do whatever he wanted to do and at the same time bear witness that Glove had done the right thing. In the next split second, he visualized how absurd that scene would be, how inappropriate to the trappings of the game. The benchwarmer taking over as manager and advising the star pitcher what to do. Nick barely talked to him anyway. That wasn’t going to fly. Glove took his place on the bench. Nick fired his last warm up pitch. The umpire, a Greek guy named Dee who ran a delicatessen in which there was a horrifying barrel of gherkins, yelled “batter up”. By the time Nick threw the first pitch in the last inning, Glove realized there was only one way out. The Pirates, his team, had to lose. Glove started pulling for the Braves even as he felt his heart breaking with the abandonment of loyalty. Meanwhwile in the dark on the bench between the top and the bottom of the sixth inning, Mr Jordan had a few ideas of his own. He hoped that Dingfeldt didn’t know that if Nick pitched one more pitch that action would be in violation of league rules and the outcome of the game would be, after the official protest was filed, either a forfeiture or a disqualification. Either way, the Pirates would be walking the plank. Jordan’s only fear was that someone would clue in the clueless Coach. When Jordan looked over at the bench and noticed some little kid with a too big uniform trying to get the attention of Otto, he thought that Froggy might be coming into the game and the protest win/win plan would be erased. Whatever the kid said to the coach and whatever the coach said to the kid before the little jerk walked back to his place on the bench, Nick had completed his warm up pitches. Dee, the Greek umpire, trying to hurry the game along yelled “batter up”. Before the leadoff batter, Stash Malloy, walked to the plate, Mr Jordan took him aside and revealed idea number two. “Do not take that bat off your shoulder, Stash. Take every pitch. Take, take all the way. Do not swing” Stash nodded and headed for the plate. Jordan’s plan was this, he wasn’t going to protest until after the conclusion of the game. The evening was growing too dark to play ball. The whitest balls in the ball bag were already parked in the power plant somewhere. Whatever balls that Nick pitched would be scuffed from a season of sandlot. They would add an extra level of difficulty not only to the batters but also to the fielders and the umpire. Nick threw hard but he didn’t have great control. Dee’s delicatessen owed the Jordan Trucking Company (whose motto was “we deliver the goods”) a favor or two. The Brave’s fans were all up in arms about the two home runs that they thought were foul balls. Dee owed them a couple of calls as well. If the Braves managed to score five runs in their last at bat, the protest would be moot. Jordan loved his chances. Fourteen pitches later, the bases were loaded with Braves and there were no outs. None of the first three batters had swung at a single pitch. The only reason no runs had been scored was the rule that a run could not be scored as the result of a passed ball. Chico was coming to the plate. In its essence, baseball is a game of catch between two people. While the game of catch is proceeding, a series of other people try to interrupt that game of catch, one at a time, by swinging a piece of wood at the thrown ball and then running home before the game of catch can be resumed. In professional baseball, the game of catch must be played perfectly. If the ball gets by the catcher, blame must be found and assigned. If the blame falls on the catcher,if he should have caught the ball but failed to, the transgression is called a passed ball. If the blame is on the pitcher, if his throw was so errant as to be un-catchable, that transgression is known as a wild pitch. In professional baseball, a penalty exists for passed balls and wild pitches. If, after a third strike, a passed ball occurs; the batter can try to run to first base before the catcher can retrieve the ball and either touch the batter or throw to first base. If humans are on base at the time of the wild pitch or the passed ball, the runners may advance to the next base or bases but they do so at their own risk. Little League baseball is far from professional so some of these penalties are waived depending upon jurisdiction of the league. The East Side Little League, whose championship game was being decided by the Braves and the Pirates, allowed baserunners to advance after wild pitches or passed balls but forbade any runner on third from scoring a run in such a manner. The reason this rule was instituted in the first place was the location of the backstop at the main field. The backstop was only fifteen feet from home plate which meant that a pitched ball could get past the catcher, hit the backstop and bounce right back into play. This factor made the backstop too much “in play”. Several injuries had occurred when the ball bounced off the backstop so randomly that a collision at the plate involved not only the catcher and the runner but also the pitcher, the umpire and the batter who still carried his stick in his hand. So the rule was waived. That’s why, in the bottom of the sixth, the bases were loaded with Braves. Nobody was swinging and there was no base eligible for any runner to advance even though wild pitches/passed balls had been occurring on nearly every pitch. As Chico strode to the plate, the situation was this and had been thus for awhile:the batter couldn’t see the pitch to hit it, the umpire couldn’t glimpse the pitch to call it and the catcher couldn’t track the pitch to catch it. And it was getting darker by the minute. Dingfeldt, like most men, had two matters foremost in his mind….victory and justification. The fact that the kid had confronted him about Nick’s eligibility to pitch the ninth inning irritated his justification module. The fact that the Braves had the bases loaded with nobody out and the best player in the league coming to the plate, threatened his victory module. Otto had to come up with something quick. He decided to take a walk out to the mound. On the way to the mound, Dingfeldt realized that only two of the pitches thrown in the inning had been cleanly caught. Both of those pitches were called strikes by Dee, the delicatessen umpire. Hmmmm. Dee couldn’t see the pitches either. Dee was assuming that if the catcher caught it, it had to be a strike and if it got by the catcher, the pitch must have been out of the strike zone in the first place which resulted in a call of “ball” As fast as he was, Nick was not the easiest pitcher to catch. To make matters worse, the catcher, Skip Mancuso was not the first string catcher on the team. The best catcher on the team happened to be the best player on the team who happened to be the best pitcher on the team who happened to be the guy on the mound that Dingfeldt was heading towards. By the time he got to the mound, Dingfeldt had his mind made up. He was going to make a change. His change was not going to be so much a change of pitchers as it was a change of catchers. “Skip, go on out to right field and bring Frog in from the swamp. Nick, you’re gonna catch the rest of the game. You pitched a helluva game, now I need you to catch one helluva inning.” Frog came in from right field, replaced by Skip. Nick put on the catcher’s gear. Otto gave the ball to Frog with the age old advice “Just throw this godamned thing over the plate. Throw it to Nick” And with the changes made, Dingfeldt headed back to the bench. And it got darker

Six hours earlier Aristotle Legeer had just slapped down his last buck for a scratch off card at Dee’s Delicatessen. Ari had bought the card with four quarters so he chose the Scratch Off called Loose Change. Loose Change is a scratch off card that shows six coins. If you scratch all six coins and they total more than a dollar, then the scratcher wins whatever prize is on the card which must be scratched to be revealed. Ari scratched the first five coins…..96 cents. Then he scratched the prize amount figuring with his luck it would be a buck or two. The prize was $500. Ari felt good about the next scratch. He had certainly lost enough to justify the winning. He took a minute before scratching and then scratched……. A penny. A stinken Lincoln One hundredth of a dollar. One gazillionth of a phantom five hundred dollars. Several bottles of ouzo disappeared from Ari’s brainpan, along with a dozen roses for his patient, long suffering wife Diana and a trip to the Casino to feed Cleopatra’s slot fifteen lines of nickels at a time as the Queen of the Nile whispers "Explore your fantasy. Enjoy your rewards". A rent payment and a tank full of gas also vanished. What appeared was the usual, rage, self-pity and persecution complex. Also appearing was the reality that Ari had no gas in his car, no pay check for two days, no beer in the fridge and maxed out plastic in the wallet. “I just lost five hundred bucks Dee” “How could you lose five hundred bucks on a one dollar scratch off card?” Ari told Dee the whole story. Dee understood, sort of. “When will I ever learn, Dee?” “My friend, what we have to learn to do, we learn by doing” answered the owner of the deli. “Can you lend me twenty bucks for two days?” asked the erstwhile coin scratcher. “I can do better than that” said Dee. “I can pay you twenty five bucks right now if you’ll do a job for me tonight. I need an umpire for a Little league game over at the field” “I wouldn’t call the pitches at that nuthouse for fifty bucks, even as busted as I am” declared Legeer. “I’ll be the one working the plate. I need somebody to ump the bases. You want the job? I’ll even throw in a forty ounce Bud and gyros after the game” Dee’s offer was too good for the desperate, deflated Legeer to refuse. “Why not ?” asked Legeer. Dee reached into the cash register. He grabbed two tens and a five. He slipped the three bills over the counter. The old friends shook hands. They both grabbed gherkins.

Six hundred thirty minutes later, as Dingfeldt was bringing Frog into the game, Mr. Jordan wasn’t exactly whistlin’ Dixie while waiting for the bus. Jordan had ideas of his own, equal and opposite. Jordan was no longer concerned with victory, he had that in the bag. Jordan was concerned with style, a notion that appeals to most men only after victory and justification have been insured.. Jordan knew he had the game wrapped up if he wanted to go the paper tiger forfeit route. He also knew that if he told the rest of the batters (like he had instructed the three already on base) to “take all the way” and never move the bat from their shoulders, the inevitable parade of free passes in the dark would spell passive-aggressive victory. Passive victory was not the style of the Braves. The Braves were not paper tigers. The Braves were a championship team who won the old fashioned way. They ran. They threw. They fielded their positions. They hit. They hit with power. They executed the fundamentals. They sacrificed. They played as a team. They took advantage of opportunities. They had great mitts. They swung their bats. In Jordan’s mind, Little League was, above and beyond anything else, an opportunity for a series of life lessons. If the Braves were going to win and they were going to win, it was important that they won in a fashion that would stay with the young boys for the rest of their lives and help them to become better men. Nobility so often hinges upon guaranteed triumph. Jordan went to every baserunner, all three of them. “On the first pitch that Frog throws, I want you to take off to the next base You got that? As soon as he goes into his windup, you run like hell” The runner at first, Glenn French asked “What if he throws over to first base Coach. I don’ want to get picked off” “Throw to first, Glenn? He can barely see first base and the first basemen can barely see him. Do what you’re told. Run your ass off” With the hit and run in place, Jordan coached Chico. “Chico, You’re gonna swing at the first pitch. It’s gonna be over the plate somewhere. It’s not gonna get any lighter. If we’re gonna swing, we gotta swing now. We’re gonna swing. You’re gonna swing. You’re gonna tie up this ballgame with a grand salami. You got me, son? First pitch. Take a rip. You’re the best hitter in this league. We gotta shine the light where the money is” “Gotcha, Coach” said Chico as he stepped to the plate. Frog toed the rubber. Chico dug in and tapped his bat on the outside corner. Nick got in his crouch behind the plate.He didn’t bother to send a signal to the mound. The signal would have been invisible anyway. Everybody knew what was coming. The Swampball. With the bases loaded, Frog went into his full wind up as there was no need to use the stretch. As he reached back and down to load some nasty swamp shit on his swamp ball, all the runners took off. Five minutes earlier, when Dingfeldt was leaving the mound after replacing Nick with Frog and Skip with Nick, Otto realized he still had a dog in the forfeiture fight and his dog might have some bite if it came to red tape. Since Nick had walked the first three men that he faced in the sixth inning, which means he didn’t get anybody out, he would only be credited with pitching five innings according to the official scoring rules of baseball. Furthermore, the runners on base had all walked and according to the scoring rules of baseball a walk does not count as an offical at bat. In other words the current situation was based on the statistical abnormality of the bases being loaded with three hitters none of whom had officially been at bat who got on base because of the free passes issued to them by a pitcher who had not statistically pitched in the inning. Nick couldn’t lose the game. If the Pirates won, Nick would get the win not because of his pitching in the sixth, he officially had not appeared in that inning, but rather because he had pitched the fifth and was the pitcher of record when the Pirates went ahead in their half of the inning. If the Pirates lost the game, the loss would be charged to Frog because the three runners on the base would be charged to Nick if they scored. Chico was the tying run and he was Frog’s responsibility. Otto had found his justification. If Jordan wanted to argue this one out, Dingfeldt thought to himself, let’s have at it. In some ways, the statstop, the weird little Glove, had got through to the Coach. As he returned to the bench, Dingfeldt fired an appreciative vibe down the bench to Glove, who immersed in loyalty abandonment, contemplation of courage and the difference between resignation and faith, missed the vibe entirely. Glove was occupied in hoping that Chico would come through for the Braves like he always did. Glove had played a whole season for the Pirates and hadn’t made a single friend. The only time that he might have contributed to the team, he was ignored by the Coach who Arthur knew that he would blame for the loss. Arthur had never prayed before, never learned how, but this was getting close. He was trying to make a bargain with somebody or something somewhere. If the Braves won, he would never again play on a team that didn’t respect him or love anyone that didn’t love him or back down from a boss who was cheating. Dingfeldt looked out at the field as Frog delivered the first pitch to Chico. As the pitch left Frog’s hand, Dingfedlt yelled "Courage" to his Pirates who couldn’t see him but could damn well hear him. Nick held out a target that he knew Frog couldn’t see. Bobby at shortstop heard someone yell “Courage”. Aristotle Legeer, the umpire, stood motionless in shallow left field five steps behind Bobby. The runners; Coin Gedman at third, Tony Joy at second and Glenn French at first were all off and running with the invisible pitch. Chico swung. He could feel by the sensation in his hands at contact that if he hadn’t got all of the pitch, he sure got a big chunk of it. He knew what a four bagger felt like. He’d been there before but never in the dark, never in the last inning of the championship game with the bases loaded with Braves. Never on the threshold of neighborhood legend. When the shortstop sensed Joy breaking towards third, Bobby instinctively broke towards second. That’s when he heard the sound of aluminum smashing into cowhide. Then he felt a stinging in his left hand. The ball had found Art. The ball was in Art. All Bobby had to do was hold on to the ball and the moment and the legend. Legeer saw the line drive disappear into the shortstop’s glove. Legeer saw that the kid held on to the ball. One out. As Bobby pocketed the rocket, Tony Joy going from second to third was passing right in front of him. Bobby touched Tony with Art. The touch was so light and so fast that Tony kept right on running, right past Jordan who was coaching third and screaming for Tony to keep on running for home. Legeer saw the touch. Two outs. Double play. French going from first to second had no idea where the ball was so he did the prudent thing. He slid into second base. Glenn’s slide was a thing of beauty although it was beheld only by Legeer and Bobby. Bobby slapped Art on the shoulder of French. Legeer saw the slap. Three outs. Triple play. Unassisted. Game over. Championship for the Pirates. There was no doubt in Ari’s mind. He had clearly seen the whole play. Dee got to Ari before Jordan did. Ari explained his ruling to Dee. Dee said that from his place behind the plate he hadn’t seen anything other than hearing Chico hit the pitch. Ari assured Dee that he had seen it all. The game was over, regardless of what Jordan might say, think or do.. Dee yelled out “Thank God for Aristotle” Bobby was the second person within fifteen feet to realize that an unassisted triple play had ended the game. Bobby was the first person to realize that aside from tagging the two runners, he had very little to do with the play. Chico’s line smash had simply gone into his glove. Bobby never saw the drive. He barely felt it when the shot smacked into his pocket just below the webbing. Even before the rest of the team knew what had happened, Bobby was already jumping up and down and yelling "Art, Art, Art.“ The leaping and the crying of ” ART ART ART" had worked its way through the infield half of the Pirates by the time Dee made it official by yelling “Triple Play, Game Over” and started heading for his car next to the power plant. At this point, the whole team started running around the infield screaming ARTARTARTARTARTART. In the midst of this sudden outbreak of Art. Mr Jordan got in the face of Ari Legeer. Legeer told Jordan exactly what he had seen. On the bench, Glove, formerly Art had received the news that the game was over. He didn’t know how to record the play in his scorebook whether it was 6 which means the ball was hit to the shortstop and he caught it or whether it was 6 6 6 which meant the ball was hit to the shop and he caught it and he tagged two runners. While wrestling with this administrivia, Art realized that the Pirates the team that from which he had abandoned loyalty only a few minutes earlier were all chanting his name. Except they weren’t. They were chanting the name of his glove. He wrote a six into the scorebook. And then Bobby understood that they wouldn’t be chanting ARTARTART and they wouldn’t be champions and he himself wouldn’t be on the threshold between legend and myth if the statstop hadn’t lent him the glove in the first place. As the whole team reached the bench, Bobby started yelling GLOVE GLOVE GLOVE GLOVE. The rest of the guys followed suit…even Dingfeldt. They hoisted the statstop on their shoulders and began carrying him around the infield screaming GLOVE GLOVE GLOVE. The scorebook fell to the ground. On their shoulders in the dark, the boy who kept score, the momentary traitor to his own team, felt tears of shame and joy pouring down his face as they took him from base to base. Every time he heard them yell Glove…..he understood that word to mean traitor loser pinerider Nimrod who don’t know a bra from a glove. The Pirates didn’t know the kid on their shoulders was bawling. They were champs and so was he. They couldn’t have done it without Art and that means they couldn’t have won it without Glove. ARTGLOVEARTGLOVEARTGLOVE Good thing it was dark. A passerby would have seen a bunch of boys yelling about art and love in the dark with one small boy on their shoulders. That passerby would have misunderstood. Especially if the passerby was Glove’s father.

WOW INDEED

Thirty years later.

Aaron was our rightfielder. Aaron was a dead ringer for Daniel Day Lewis in the Last of the Mohicans. Tall, lanky, long dark hair, all around attractive hippie, carpenter type guy but not much of a baseball player. Plus on this day, he was on acid.

Aaron had a magnificent German shepherd dog, named Jeremiah who went out to rightfield with Aaron when our team took the field. As you might imagine, this league was pretty damned low key with far more ale than anxiety.

Somewhere in the middle innings, the word got around that Aaron was tripping on acid. This information added to the appreciation of the game that Aaron was playing in the outfield. Let’s face it, most of the time in baseball is spent just standing around and nobody spends more time standing around than a rightfielder in a slow pitch softball game where almost everything is hit to the left side and nobody stands around better than a guy on acid whose got control of his trip and is with his loyal dog in a field of flowers.

As the inning began, Aaron was sitting on his haunches whispering to Jeremiah, seemingly about the dandelions that were growing around them in rightfield. Nobody was paying too much attention, when a left handed batter, the only lefty on the opposing team, smashed a line shot into right.This is when the change began for everyone. Aaron’s hallucination had become so vivid that it started to spread like wildfire and in the spreading convert itself into observable reality.

Time slowed down.

Space altered.

Aaron physically and visually shared his trip with everyone who was paying attention. He was still on his haunches when the ball was struck. The people in the know started laughing and saying…that’s a home run….Aaron’s on acid.

That’s when everything slipped into slow motion.

Aaron rose to his feet.

The ball seemingly over his head.

He started moving back, back, back….

It didn’t look like running….it looked more like flying or pathfinding or deerslaying. Aaron had big feet to begin with but as he flew back…back…back…his size 11 sandals looked like they had become size eighteen. Jeremiah was nipping at Aaron’s fluttering bell bottoms.

The ball which had rocketed over his head, seemed to hesitate as Aaron began to glide, covering more ground with each step than humanly possible. Everybody on the bench suddenly realized that we were seeing things through the altered consciousness of Aaron.

After seven or eight giant steps with the ball still past him, Aaron reached out his now giant sized glove. The ball had seemingly stopped and as the giant glove stretched out a few more inches on is own, the ball gently fell into the seemingly elastic glove.

Aaron caught the ball and went into a slow motion forward roll with Jeremiah who had been at his heels during the whole pursuit, virtually rolling with him in a six legged, barking blur. In the midst of the barking and the blurring, Aaron held on to the ball and waved it in the air.

Everything seemed absolutely right with the planet.

Time regained its composure as Aaron made his way to our bench.

When he got to the bench after making the greatest catch in the history of baseball, Aaron said “Wow”.

Wow indeed

TO SLEEP PERCHANCE TO SNORE

To begin with, I spend more time thinking about sleeping than I spend time thinking about any other subject. Some people might call that process insomnia.I call it another skirmish in the war between the sexes.

Snoring is the battle line. The only person who doesn’t snore is the person who’s awake. I am that person, awake and listening to my wife snore.The secret is to be the second one to sleep.

My wife Julia doesn’t think that she snores.

I didn’t think that I snored until my wife mentioned it to me.

Over time, the mentions grew more frequent and less gentle. Eventually, the mentions turned into motions and the motions turned into pokes and jabs.

Ya know what really sucks? Being fast asleep….getting jabbed into wakefulness and upon awakening hearing this:

“Stop snoring Ovid, God damn it.”

Apparently I start to snore when I’m first falling asleep so when rudely interrupted my defense usually goes like this: “How could I be snoring, I wasn’t even asleep” Even as I’m saying this, I’m coming to the realization that I must have been asleep because the poke woke me up.

“Well, you must have been asleep because you’re snoring your ass off. Stop the goddamned snoring!.”

“Hey, I know the difference between being awake and being asleep. If I were asleep now, this would be a nightmare but because I’m awake, it’s just a pain in the ass.”

“Yeah, well the next time you snore and wake me up, you’re going out to the couch.” For some reason, the reward of sleeping comfortably on the couch seems like some kind of punishment that must be resisted. So I try to fall back asleep and realize that I can’t sleep. Furthermore, I must really be not sleeping because nobody is telling me to stop snoring.

Meanwhile, in this embryonic, insomniatic state…..Julia falls asleep and starts to snore. Her snoring is a good sign because that means she’s actually asleep and it is now safe for me to go to sleep and not have to worry about snoring.

So I go through my usual thinking about sleeping and trying to figure out how to bring it on. Most of those methods are unclear to me now because instead of trying to fall asleep, I’m currently trying to stay awake but here are a couple of techniques that I think I use. 1) I recite and re-recite the Presidents of the United States in chronological order and then in reverse order. Madison always surprises me with how quickly he shows up chronologically and Rutherford B. Hayes surprises me with how clearly he arrives at all.2) I try to think of people who I know who couldn’t possibly have been thinking of me during this day. Then I think of the people that I always think of and try to estimate how many times I thought about them during the day. I’ve been told that we have 8 or 80 or 800 billion brain cells. I can’t remember what the figure is (8 billion or 800 billion…what’s the diff?) That’s plenty of room to think about people.

I figure that go through about 8 separate conscious thoughts per second not including what’s disappearing into my subconscious. I might for example of 8 thoughts of Julia in one second.

I’m talking about brain cells igniting in nano seconds. I would guess that I think of my Julia 20,000 times a day, the Beatles 2000, Muhammad Ali 1000, our dog Ranger 1000,Krell 50, MCC 30, Haylen 20 all the way down to the guy who was sitting on the sidewalk in Charlotte a couple of days ago….playing his guitar real good for free. I thought of him maybe 5 times today and pretty soon he will be in the memory cemetery only to be exhumed for an eighth of a second some night when I’m unable to sleep and am absolutely sure that he has not thought of me which, I’m pretty sure is and always will be the case.

If I’m still awake, I start thinking about stories that I might write. This very story is a story I was thinking about writing last night shortly after I finished thinking about a guy who punched me in the mouth fifty years ago.

By this time, it’s usually about four in the morning. I’ve changed my position in bed at least five times and I’m starting to forget about the pain in my shoulder and then I start to catch a dream and run with it and lose it and re-catch it until I reluctantly wake up in an empty bed. Julia always gets up, a couple hours before me almost exactly at the moment that I start to get control of whatever dream I’m enjoying at the moment.

Usually, I “sleep” for maybe four hours a night.

I come to the kitchen as the daily routine begins and ask Julia how she slept last night.

She says “Fine. How bout you. You didn’t snore.”

A BIG DEAL OUT OF NOTHING

Many years ago, in a far less enlightened time, I was nearing the end of my incarnation as a single Iron John kinda guy. I attended a lecture by Thornton Krell addressing itself to the status of masculinity under the emerging onslaught/influence of feminism.

Krell addressed the feminist perception of masculinity as “immaturity” and predicted an increase in the use of that characterization as feminism continued to take root. Men, in response, should be prepared to hear the descriptor “immature” regularly attached to their behavior, at least as interpreted through the eyes of the female interpreter.

The masculine reaction to this accusation, according to the speaker, is to confront it with the articulation, dignity and courageous immediacy used in response to any racist, sexist comment.

Krell provided this dialogue as an example.

She: Sometimes I feel as if I’m raising another child around here.

He: Excuse me!?

She: You heard me. I said that I’m tired of your immaturity.

He: Are you calling me immature?

She: Yes I am.

He: Aha. Well I recognize and reject your faulty characterization as an attempt to exercise sexist, feminine intimidation. (disengage from conversation and walk away).

“Damn”, I thought, “Krell nailed it.”

Forewarned, I looked ahead to the next time that a woman dropped the “I” word on me. I didn’t have to wait long.I was making a big deal out of nothing one day when a female colleague observed:

“You guys, always making a big deal out of nothing. It’s so immature.”

BAM. I was ready. The Venus flytrap was prepared for the fly.

I followed the Krell script word for word, tude for tude until (walk away)

Before I could get one small step for a man away from the return fire, she dismissed me with these two little withering words……

“Grow up.”

Then SHE turned her pretty head and walked away.

Apparently, the theory of male immaturity as a sexist prefabrication was in itself, an “immature” theory probably peddled by some lecturer somewhere trying to make a big deal out of nothing. As a result of subsequent, enlightening conversations with several female experts on male behavior, I have decided to articulate further and more closely scrutinize the behavior of married men of which I am now one.

Unmarried men, that is men living outside the realm of legalized marital microscopy, are obviously immature to begin with so it becomes a question of superfluosity to concern ourselves with sexist prefabrication on their behalf.

Married men, according to a recently convened blue ribbon panel of married women, are not immature when compared to single men. Married men according to the panel can be best characterized as either annoying or aggravating.

What is the difference between immature, annoying and aggravating other than the presence of a wedding band and a recital of vows? According to our panel, at least the married men were mature enough to make a decision but having made that decision they almost immediately descended into a perpetual state of “annoying” and upon too frequent occasion, push the edge of the envelope of annoyance into “aggravation”. In mathematical terms, annoyance is a constant, aggravation a variable. Aggravation is a more active, more masculine version of annoyance.

Let me illustrate.

A husband returns home from work, kisses his wife and lies down on the couch. He turns on the teevee and relaxes after another soul draining day of back breaking number crunching amidst soul crushing office politics. The hunter is home. The gatherer has gathered.

The wife is too familiar with her husband’s inner visual so EVERYTHING about the example above is annoying except for the kiss and sometimes even the kiss if delivered too perfunctorily is also annoying.

Now, if the woman comes into the living room with her husband and the husband is checking the scores on his fantasy team or doing a crossword puzzle or drinking a beer or watching some sport shit on teevee, well any of those activities move the husband into the arena of “aggravation”. Notice, that in each of these areas, the man is actually DOING something….gambling, crosswording, drinking, remote controlling. The fantasy teams, the puzzle, the beer, the remote are all variables that add up to ANNOYING.

This is in the first minute of coming home to the castle.

Many wives at this juncture, always vigilant and reluctant to enable escapism/isolation, will take the opportunity to articulately point out the variables of aggravation currently on exhibit in the husband’s behavior. This articulation, depending upon the variable, can and does often result in the “broken record” which transmogrifies into an escalation into an examination of past trespasses, usually including the old reliable “It’s all about you, isn’t it?”

The mate can respond defensively, which is aggravating and a guarantee of escalation or passivity which is annoying which keeps the broken record groovin’. Men being the gentlemen that we, er they are, will generally opt for annoying over aggravating so we, er they, will put our heads down on the couch and zone out in the annoying dormant stage recognized by women as a “pout.”

When men are in the dormant stage, pouting on the couch, we are in our own way extending an olive branch to our mates. We are saying, in effect. “I know that you find me annoying honey but I love you so much and need you so desperately that I don’t want to aggravate you, so I’ll just lie here in the mud with a bird on my head while you go about your, purposeful, productive, perky, pretty little life.” Please forget the three four ‘p’ words in the last alliteration if you’re a woman reading this foolishness because I imagine you will find them aggravating in a typical mansplaining, patronizing, sexist way way so, sorry..sorry, really sorry. Whoops, I forgot, you’re annoyed by apologies. Well whaddya want me to say? Why don’t you write it out and I’ll say it for God sake. Whoops, I’m getting aggravating again. At this point men usually leap into action. “Uh, honey, I’m going into the garage and put some water in the radiator or one of the tasks that have been sanctioned as legitimate but if repeated too often become annoying and if performed with the slightest bit of attitude may become aggravating enough for an escalation. I hope in this rant, I have more articulately descibed the conundrum of masculinity as percieved through the intuitive, sensitive, down to earth, intelligent, lovely even without makeup feminine point of view. What’s that? Too many adjectives at the end? Stop dicking around on the computer? Okay, Okay Sorry etc.

FULL OF POISON

I’m about as full of poison as I’m going to get. I’m twenty five blasts in with three to go. Lethargic guilt is such a pitiful condition. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a friend of mine a few months before I got diagnosed.

My lifelong pal John Crown had been clobbered by heart attack, heart surgery, cancer, colostomy and blinding cataracts.

On his most recent trip to the hospital, Dr. Somebody asked Crown if he was depressed. Crown knew that the doctor was very aware of how many health concerns he had on his plate.

“Of course I’m depressed, Doctor. Wouldn’t you be if you were I?”

The doctor shrugged as if to say “uhyayuh”

The doctor asked Crown if he wanted something for the depression.

Crown said “No thank you. My depression is the only thing I give a shit about”

That’s how I was feeling all day today. The only thing that interested me was my lack of interest and the guilt that came with not giving a shit which is even more interesting and paralyzing than the lethargy itself. At the radiation center, they warned me that 95% of the people having the treatment that I’m having experience fatigue.

I wondered if they had a reason for that amazing percentage. They said it’s our bodies reaction to the poison that is introduced into our systems with poison being another word for radiation.

I had been operating under a false impression. I thought that every day when I get zapped by the rays I was equating the rays with a ray gun which fired at my cancerous cells for about five minutes. Then after the volley, the smoke cleared.

Not really

Radiation is more like pouring poison in to a container until the container is full and then letting the poison invade the environment in which the deadly cells are trying to multiply.The battle goes on for more than a volley of five minutes. The battle is continuous 24/7

In other words, every day my container gets filled with more poison. It’s gonna linger in the neighborhood for a month and when it starts to dissipate, we’ll look at the environment again and see what damage has been done to the invading cells.

So that’s why I’m worn out and going to the bathroom 3 times an hour.

And the whole thing is becoming routine.

Routine tends to normalize even the most extraordinary circumstances.

It’s comforting to know that all of this is normal and there’s no reason to feel guilty. A reduction in guilt takes the edge off the lethargy.

So I’m gonna feel good about all the time I spend rotting on the couch.

My body earns it every day.

Soon I’ll be as full of poison as I’m gonna get and from that point on, I’m gonna get better.

The Carcass of Martha

Andy and his brother Pete heard the word through telegraph, a modern marvel in 1898.

The final flock of carrier pigeons, 250,000 of them were approaching.Andy, who knew a lot more but said a lot less than younger brother Pete, had already witnessed and assisted in one major devastation. He had already spent an entire September day among the dead, the dying and the mangled; picking up perforated pigeons and heaping them into piles. Andy had watched eagles, hawks and vultures arrive to share in the spoil of pigeon piles. Only a comparative few of those scavengers were shot for their carrion on but the pigeon corpses were everywhere.

Andy gathered and stashed five lifetime’s worth of pigeon feathers, bones and birdmeat and drove a horse drawn carriage full of dead passengers home to his hogs. At one time, a single flock of passenger pigeons contained more than 2 billion birds. As the most common bird in America, many flocks and colonies existed. The passenger population appeared not only inexhaustible and invulnerable but also territorially threatening. One flocking colony, known in Wisconsin as Endeavor, spread over 750 square miles. Endeavor could and did obscure the sun. People of Wisconsin, future Cheeseheads, were not about to surrender that much tundra neither frozen nor thawed. Andy and Pete were riflemen in the gaggle of hunter/soldier/patriots about to converge on that flocking colony from below. As the targets approached, Andy could feel a surprising current of air. He heard a sound that reminded him of a tempest at sea. The passengers were overhead. The sky was dark. The brothers and the gang of hunters opened fire, reloaded and opened fire again and again and again and again. The not clay pigeons dropped from the sky like bleeding, bleating hailstones. Children on the ground, fortified with poles and clubs were waiting. Andy was in such a frenzy that he didn’t hear the cursing and thudding that surrounded him. Andy barely noticed the dozen passengers that fell on or near him while he was pulling and reloading. He didn’t hear the thousands of gun reports coming from each side. Each unheard report bore mute witness to a load of scatter shot that could and did take down as many as ten passengers per blast. A certain amount of time passed although the exact amount of minutes/hours is unclear. Some have speculated that it took a bit longer than did the massacre at Little Big Horn with each blast the equivalent of ten arrows. And then the flock passed. And then there was silence. Andy, with gun barrel still smoking, turned to Pete and said “that telegraph’s a pretty damn good idea.” Ten thousand of a quarter million passengers flew away. Twenty years later only ONE passenger pigeon, a bird named Martha, remained alive. When Martha finally died, her body was suspended in a tank of water then freeze framed into a three hundred pound block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian Institute. Martha’s carcass. Martha’s carcass is still around. Andy and Pete are long gone now but their great, great grandsons hold season tickets on the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field. They wear cheeseheads and feathers as they back the Pack. Right before the kickoff of the opening game at Lambeau Field, a tremendous roar emerges from the crowd. Dozens of people in the crowd, including all those related to Andy or Pete always turn to each other and remark that the roar sounds like “a thunderstorm of bloody passengers”. Great, great, grandson Andrew didn’t have a clue where that odd expression originated only that it had been in his family for more than a century.

ATTEMPTING TO TAKE A KNEE

Okay, I got this. It took awhile but I got it. Last Sunday I left the teevee off while the national anthem was playing. I went into the kitchen and began by locking my arms together in unity with the NFL, myself, Tom Brady and I guess Trump. Normally when I fold my arms, I have my right hand on my left bicep and my left hand under my right bicep. Today in honor of awkwardness and OCD awareness, I reversed that position. Now I knew how the other folks lived. Next I dropped to one knee, in honor of Kaepernick and everything that he was protesting and in recognition of Tim Tebow and the values that he projected. Then I dropped to two knees in remembrance of my altar boy days in gratitude that I don’t have any of those sexual abuse experiences that I can remember. While on both knees, I said a quick Our Father in honor of the patriarchy that is the NFL. I threw in a Hail Mary just in case the Bills needed one. I bowed my head made a sign of the cross and whispered “offense. defense. special teams, coaching”. I raised my head and said aloud “Go Bills”. Then I went to stand up and realized there was no way that I could get up: an homage to being overweight, out of shape with bad knees, shattered sense of balance, bad hipped Baby Boomer. I dropped to all fours in honor of dogs everywhere and did a reverse evolutionary crawl as I headed Towards and into the water instead of out of and away from it. I reached the base of the kitchen sink. I threw one arm up towards the granite countertop. With my arm upraised, I made a fist in honor of black power and then I gave a peace sign in honor of John Lennon. Then I put my other hand up making at one and the same time the gesture for “touchdown” and the “I am powerless sign” in recognition of everybody suffering from an addiction. I grasped the counter top and pulled myself up in tribute to the concept that “we will rise” as well as the Horatio Alger vision of “pluck not luck”. I stood on my own two feet in homage to the Revolutionary War. I tapped a glass of water from the kitchen sink and poured it over my head as a form of baptism as well as a reminder of whatever we were pouring water over our heads for a few years past. I dried my hair in reminiscence of the “wethead is dead” commercials that were prevalent during NFL telecasts before erectile dysfunction took over. I grabbed an ice cold Coors.I went into the great room/living room/living great room with our vaulted ceiling and open concept. I said a quick “welcome home” to our veterans of foreign war I hit the remote. I opened the beer from Golden Colorado.

Thank God the anthem was over. The game was on.

Prodigious Piles of Penguin Poop

Is this a change? Yes, yes it is. This IS a change if you don’t believe in recurring cycles.This is the first time I’ve put a title on a essay before writing the essay. In the past I have put hundreds of titles on hundred of “posts” and called them “essays” or “stories” or “opinions” or “obscure art” or “poems”. That recurring cycle is known as “writing”. So the fact that this “essay” is title driven is not so much a change as it is a cyclical recurrence and a tabooo shattering use of alliteration in a title.

I am currently interested in another little know cyclical recurrence, namely, that every dozen years or so, way up North and in New Zealand, unexpected piles of penguin poop suddenly appear. The piles are concentrated in a circular area and they have been puzzling poopoligists for a while now since they have not yet been identified as part of a cycle rather than a random series of evacuations. My conjecture is that every dozen years for the past few centuries, what with the global warming and all, penguins have realized that they need to fly because pretty soon the ice will be gone and things will get might awkward or heaven forbid even might become aukward like the extinction of the once great auk.

So every dozen years, the penguins gather around in a circle and try like hell to start flying. They just stand there and strain their minds to imagine themselves flying and the strain mimics the strain of bowel movement which produces the prodigious piles as the penguins will stand in one spot for a couple of days, straining, imagining, willing, and pooping.To the objective observer, (of which there aren’t any as this effort is always made in secret and in fact will not even be attempted unless complete absolute privacy is assured) it would appear that the penguins are just standing there pooping but my conjecture is that much more is happening.

Penguins, through imagination, are attempting to speed up the evolutionary process. Whenever a non-flying organism is trying to will itself into flight, that organism typically has the appearance of just standing there or just sitting there in a private lotus position; Mike Love for example before Beach Boy concerts in the seventies. Unfortunately for Love, however, his concentration and privacy were regularly interrupted pre-flight by the sudden, cursing, drunken appearance of band mate Dennis Wilson who seemed to take delight in the act of vomiting on the head of Love when Love was at the height of astral concentration. This violation left Love as earthbound as a pooping penguin.

After about a week or so of straining, the penguins give up and banish the thought of flying from their minds entirely and focus on the hope of being captured and taken to zoos where they are in great demand simply because they are the rare birds that can not fly away and escape. Eventually, penguins must learn to fly or become extinct. Thus is the nature of cycles and the constant need for change.

It is possible to change without improving but impossible to improve without changing. Like the change in the appearance of this essay what with the title and all. But it’s not just the appearance of the title that marks the change.

Usually when I write, the title is the last thing that I come up with as it is a way of pretending that I had a controlling concept to begin the piece rather than just a flow of ideas that when completed I need to read to grasp and when read suggests a “concept” which can be fortified by taking a few words from the discovered “concept” and putting those words at the top of the piece and calling those words a “title”. In this case, the title, an actual controlling thought, came first and everything else has strainlessly evolved from that thought and will lead to the precise, alliterative, feathery ending which will be missed by some readers because they shook their heads and stopped reading a few paragraphs back but not by you the truly intelligent, patient and charming few who have read this far and only have thirty four words to go.

Thank you for getting this far with this essay or whatever and I hope that these paragraphs have been worth your attention and are not merely prodigious piles of penguin poop.

LIPSTICK LAND ?!?

We don’t know where we came from. We don’t know where we’re going to. But in between, we think we know where we are and "we” try like hell to hold on to the mortal interlude, to enjoy it, to understand “it”. Two of the three are impossible. Although sometimes “enjoyable”, the incomprehendible interlude, the mortal coil, will always slip away.

So we have a question mark at the beginning of our lives and a question mark at the end but in the middle we have an exclamation point. Some of us, I suppose have an additional asterisk in the middle…see Roger Maris. Some of us, I suppose have an additional dollar sign in the middle….see the Donald Trump (?!$?). Some of us have an additional + in the middle…..see Meryl Streep or Wilt Chamberlain ( ?!+?) but all of us have the ! point in the middle and the question marks that surround the ! Because we don’t know where we come from and we don’t know where we’re going to.

Some of us know and love the “parents” that we come from but where did they come from etc and where did all those people go..long time passing. Were they ever here?

One of the rules of a dream is that within the dream, you can not remember how you got into the “dream”. A dream always occurs “in media res”, in the middle of things. Things, in this case being question marks. Middle in this case being exclamation points. Therefore in the middle of the dream of question marks is the dream of exclamation marks.

A dream within a dream.

The guy I Invented named Poe was right, almost.

He forgot about the airquotes. In lipstick land “everything” needs an airquote. “ ? ! ? ” is a dream within a dream within a dream. “ ? ! ? ” is everything that you’ve just read and everything that you will ever read. “ ? ! ? ” is “Thornton Krell”. And “I” am he as “you” are me and we are all together.

It’ has frequently been argued that there are too many “air quotes” at work in written renditions of “lipstick land”.

“Lipstick land” is, of course, “shorthand” for the “realization” that the box in space created by “our” collective and individual “minds” is nothing more than a mass “hallucination” in which “mass” refers not to many more than one but rather “one” subdivided infinite times.

The “inhabitants” of lipstick land are those who have come to “embrace” the fragmentary, figmentary, fictitous essence of “their” own “existence” and who in their everlasting “introspection” continually ask themselves “what’s wrong with 'me’” only to be answered with the wordless, soundless refrain “What’s wrong with you is none of your goddamned business”.

To these inhabitants, “everything” is surrounded by “air quotes” so whenever paragraphs are composed with “words” to describe lipstick land, tremendous “restraint” must be used in order that every single “word” not contain air quotes or rather be “contained” by air quotes.

This form of “punctuation” is needed to “convey” the essential “authenticity” of lipstick land but since its practice runs against the “norm” of the aforementioned hallucination, the air quote “punctuation” method is minimized almost to the point of non-existence in traditional “everyday” non-lipstick land “writing”.

Every so often in that non-existant realm, a “comedian” will use “air quotes” and usually get a lot of “laughs” because the audience “perceives” a secret glimpse into lipstick land which makes their actual non-existence seem somehow “funny”. Of course all of “this” is “superfluous” and could be summed up by the all inclusive expression “?!?” which is as “succinct” and “truthful” a description of all “things"as "possible”.

I and we all are the “artists” formerly and currently known known as ?!?.

TOP DRAWER

The old wallet died characteristically as a hero.

Ice had walked the four rows down from his VIP seats at Citi-field in order to snap a shot of Aaron Judge. Taking a great photo is all about figuring out where to stand or in this case kneel. As soon as Ice got into perfect position, not a moment sooner or later, Judge unleashed a ferocious swing. The sound of collision between bat and ball was startling. Ice, startled, snapped. The slight movement caused by the startling sound and the ferocity of the swing would cause a bit of a blur for sure.

The ball landed 450 feet later in the left field stands.

Ice dropped the camera to take a look. The stadium roared in awe as fans realized where the shot had landed. Ice recovered in time to get a picture of Judge getting ready to touch home plate. Aaron pointed to the heavens in gratitude as the fans pointed towards left field and released a collective “Holy Shit”.

Ice retreated from the position that he had held for maybe twelve seconds.As he returned to his seat, he whispered “I got it”. Then automatically he reached for his wallet and realized “I don’t have it” The wallet was missing. In near panic, Ice sorted through the camera equipment that was now in his seat. He had gotten up in a hurry. He looked through the equipment and couldn’t see the wallet.

He looked behind the seat and there it was….covered in beer. The covering was the result of a fan jumping up and dropping his beer on the wallet. Beer combined with 30 plus years of service had put an end to the wallet as a functioning billfold.

Ice was relieved to find the damp thing. Everything in it was soaked.

Ice carried the wounded wallet for the next two days but realized it was time to throw in the towel.

When he got home. He took everything out of the drowned billfold. He retrieved the replacement from where it had been waiting for thirty years in the top drawer to get into the game. The replacement wallet was a Christmas gift from his mother-in-law. He left the pictures of Allan Ladd and Virginia Mayo in the new/old wallet. He added his driver’s license, his library card and his Dylan ticket.

Everything else remained in the old wallet. Ice placed the old wallet in the top drawer underneath a framed picture/poem that his parents had given him mny years ago.

The writing on the picture said;

“To Our First Born

We’ve always loved you best because you were our first miracle. You were the genesis of our marriage and the fulfillment of young love. You sustained us through the hamburger years, the first apartment (furnished in Early Poverty) and our first mode of transportation (1946 feet) and the seven inch TV set that we paid on for 36 months. You were new, had unused grandparents and enough clothes for triplets. You were the original model for a Mom and Dad who were trying to work the bugs out. You got the strained lamb, the open safety pins and the three hour naps. You were the beginning.”

Underneath the writing was Ice in his white dinner jacket and bow tie smiling for this senior portrait. Next to the senior picture was a smaller picture of the family dog, a mutt named Lassie who could not have looked less like the Lassie on teevee.

Above the mutt

Love Always

Mom and Dad.

This is the stuff that was in Ice’s wallet on the wallet’s last day. All of them stories. Some of the stories written others to be written.

Some of this stuff was not gonna make the transfer.

His library card.

a photo id card for radiology treatment

a photo id card from second year year at college

a current New York state drivers license

An AARP id card

a funeral card for his father-in-law

a guest pass for Artisan Works

a ticket stub from Bob Dylan concert at RIT

A funeral card for his mother

A laminated Buffalo Bills schedule from 2015

a laminated country club membership card

A ticket stub for Chuvalo banquet.

A medicare registration Card

A business card for Tasty Parker

A business card for Mike the Clown

a $2 win ticket on Secretariat from Belmont Park

An amusement park photo machine photo of him and Lynn on their first date.

The last thing Ice noticed as he shut the drawer was that somehow the ticket for Bob Dylan at RIT had broken loose from the sacred discards.

DYLAN AT RIT

Dylan failed last night to resolve one of my longest standing differences of opinion with my wife Lynn. Lynn is from the “Dylan is an icon of the sixties who writes great lyrics but who has a lousy voice and arrogant personality” point of view.

I’m from the “authentic cultural spokesperson whose unique voice and enigmatic personality are as inseparable from his lyrics as the lyrics are inseparable from the music and the message” point of view.

I resist “the icon from the sixties” point of view because it turns Dylan’s timeless compositions into nostalgia acts. I agree with the “great lyrics” observation but always feel like Lynn is setting up the polite quid pro quo of devastating criticism with faint praise followed by the real message…“his voice sucks and he’s an a-hole“, which she unfailingly does.

I had seen Dylan perform live four times ( including the amazing Rolling Thunder Review)before Lynn agreed to go with me to see him about ten years ago at the Finger Lakes Performance Center. That night, Dylan seemed angry at the audience and infuriated with his own songs, so his performance was brusque and furious. Lynn who believes that an entertainers first job is to entertain, (which means as the song goes to smile when they are low )was put off by the moody seemingly indulgent performance which fueled her original biases especially the A-Hole part.

“He never even talked to the audience. He never connected. Why didn’t he at least tell a joke or something,” Lynn wondered and would continue to wonder until last night.

I said “the guys not a comedian and he’s not a lets all get together by the campfire and sing cumbaya type of guy. He is what he’s always been which is exactly what he is at any particular moment and what he was that night was pissed off for whatever reason and that’s good enough for me” and it was until last night.

Last night we took the tie-breaker with us, our thirteen year old daughter Mary. Point of reference, Mary attended her first concert of her young life a week before, Green Day at the Blue Cross Arena. She loved it. Mary plays guitar herself and blew us all away last week when she brought home the self-portrait in pencil she had been working on in her advanced art class.

Dylan played at a much smaller venue, one of my several alma maters, the Rochester Institute of Technology. The choice of venue in itself is interesting. Is Dylan playing to smaller houses because he seeks the intimacy of smaller crowds having exhausted himself on the stadium circuit or does he no longer have the drawing power to book larger spaces ?

The main reason we got the tickets in the first place was to expose Mary to Dylan as well as to RIT. We tried to get two tickets for just me and the Mare but since we had to buy a group of three minimum, Lynn went along for the ride.

Whatever, twenty minutes after the scheduled starting time of 8:00 at 8:22 to be precise the sound system crackled to life with a rapid fire minimalist introduction apparently pre-recorded by an invisible emcee featuring garbled clauses like “The poet laureate of rock music and his generation……..thought to be washed up in the eighties……. His last two albums are two of the most critically acclaimed albums of his career thus the history of American recordings….the author of a currently best selling auto -biography…..Bob Dylan and his band”.

Dylan came out in his black outfit with black Stetson. The members of his band, two guitarists a bass player and a drummer were also dressed in black, two of the four in cowboy hats kinda like Dylan’s. Dylan went to the piano on the left side of the stage and the group broke into “Maggie’s Farm”.

Blistering.

Bitter

Pertinent

All of the elements of working on “Maggie’s Farm” intact and primal. Lyrics mostly clear and decipherable. Off to a raucous start. Mary applauded. So did Lynn. I felt not only renewed but also partially redeemed.

Just before Dylan hit the stage, a friend of mine came over and told me that he had researched the set list. There were fourteen songs plus an encore of two. This would be a sixteen round contest. Round one was a winner.

My favorite fighters were guys like the Sugars Rays Robinson and Leonard, Alexis Arguello, Jerry Quarry, George Chuvalo and of course Muhammad Ali. As these guys got older, I used to count of each off their rounds one by one hoping that somehow they’d win each round but with equal fervor that they would at least survive the round. Then I get into the minutes per round, hoping that somehow they could win ninety five seconds of each round and keeping score in my mind as they neared the magic number of eight which would win them a decision if they didn’t get knocked out. I found myself using the same accounting system with Zimmerman on this night.

Round two was “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”. Dylanologists remember this song as the response Dylan used so many years ago when he was booed off the stage at the Newport Folk festival for committing the unforgivable sin of going electric. Since then, it’s always been one of my favorites. An anthem I use to chart my own changes and willingness to leave behind whatever is/was no longer needed.Dylan remained to the side and guitar less as the first words hit the air.

“You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last. But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast“

Unfortunately it sounded more like this

Ulleeenowuneeulas, whatchoo wishookeegrafaaaaaaaa.

Dylan hunched over the mike, growling, confronting the mike like a gambler keeping his cards close to his vest because he’s got such a bluff goin’ that if anybody sees the pasteboards he’s screwed for the whole ante. I could see Lynn frowning and Mary following suit I could not give Dylan round two even though I wanted to.

Round three was another of my favorite songs, the haunting and magically melancholic Visions of Johanna whose first line is:

“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?”

The only word I could make out was night. Through the entire song, the only words I could understand were “Visions of Johanna” and I knew the song well.

For any of you like Mary and Lynn who don’t know the actual words, let me quote the first verse as Dylan wrote and published . Read them and weep because last night they disappeared completely into incomprehensibility.

“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet? We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it Lights flicker from the opposite loft In this room the heat pipes just cough The country music station plays soft But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off Just Louise and her lover so entwined And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind”

Whoops, I made a mistake. I forgot that between “Baby Blue” and “Johanna”, Dylan sang “Lonesome Day Blues”. The fact that I forgot about it, tells me all I want to know about the effort.

Next came a song I won’t forget for a long time, no matter how hard I try. “Dignity”, another one of my favorites. If Dignity is clarity than this rendering was particularly undignified. If Dignity is plunging into a compost pile and emerging as if from a Halloween hayride with the ghost of Aunt Helen then the effort had some saving grace. Once again Dylan’s verbal articulation was puddle muddy and he continued to hover by the keyboard still not strapped in to his axe. I got the feeling that he might not be strumming’ at all on this evening. Still when he gave his howling a break and hurled his oxygen into his harp, some of the magic returned. The band, minus one geetar was carrying the weight of this concert as if it had just pulled into Nazareth which seemed allright with everybody especially the integrationists amongst us who knew deep inside that there could be no segregation of lyrics and voice from music. The music in spite of the singer continued to soar even as the lyrics because of the poet continued to disappear.

At this point thirteen year old Mary turned to Lynn and commented “everything sounds the same” . Lynn nodded in ‘I told ya so’ acquiescence. The show went on as it must.

I recognized “Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee” immediately which nudged it/them towards the win column even as it/they lurched and lumbered fitfully amidst the graceful thundering wonder of the musicians.

I grabbed Mary by the hand and with the approval of Lynn, we headed to the floor for a closer look. One of my weird aptitudes is my ability to wade through a crowd. When Dylan had played with Petty and the Dead at then Rich Stadium before a crowd thirty times this large, I had managed to work my way to the edge of the stage. The secret of getting through a crowd is knowing how to dance with it rather than shove against it. When ya dance the crowd dance, openings appear.

Of course, I was so much younger than I’m older than that now.

The closest we could get was about fifteen rows back as this crowd was much less fluid, hardly any dancing or even movement to make advancing through it amenable. A calm brick wall.

It was from here that we heard and saw Dylan sing three slower numbers in which he had more control of the lyrics as if he actually knew the words and was going to sing them. “Po’ Boy”, “High Water (For Charley Patton)” and “Girl Of The North Country”. I could see Zimmy pretty well but Mary was being blocked by taller folks in front of her. I lifted my little girl up as high as I could for as long as I could so she might get a glimpse of the great man. With the way she’s growing and the way I’m deteriorating physically, maybe that was the last time I’d lift her up like this. Made me kind of sad but kind of proud as well.

I started to believe that maybe the reason we couldn’t hear Dylan clearly for the first half-dozen songs was the fact that we couldn’t see him. Ya know, that weird reflex that confronts us when we feel the need to shout at a blind man.

By the time Liddy and I got back to Beatrice , we were already learning the illusion behind that reflexive truth. I’m no longer a thin man but there was definitely something going on here and I didn’t know what it was. I started wondering if Dylan did.

The last five songs of the show , “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again”, “Ballad Of Hollis Brown”, “Honest With Me”, “Standing In The Doorway” and “Summer Days” proved to be a split decision. Three of the songs I was relatively unfamiliar with so I couldn’t very well be disappointed with them. As a matter of fact one of the songs that I never heard before, Standing In The Doorway, sounded more familiar than most of the songs that I knew by heart based on the rate of decipherable words per lyric.

One of my favorite songs, “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues” Again was even more deconstructed then any of the previous numbers. I even resorted to whispering the chorus lyric into Mary’s ear in the hopes of convincing her that these songs actually had words which meant I kept repeating “Oh Mama can this really be the end” over and over which I think is exactly what Mary was thinking when she was looking at Lynn and wishing she were somewhere else, wondering when the growling would cease. Of the final songs, “Summer Days” was by far the best. It sounded world class and indicated a rally in progress.

The band left the stage and I wondered if they would bother with an encore.I also wondered whether there was going to be enough applause to merit a return that could be anything more than hypocritical. Amazingly enough, the crowd didn’t move and began to applaud some even igniting about two dozen of the traditional lighters. Sho nuff, it worked. The band re-appeared.

The encore consisted of “Like A Rolling Stone” and “All Along The Watchtower.” These two turned out to be the best efforts of the evening. I later found out that the band had been encoring with these numbers through the entirety of the tour. It sounded like they had played them before and everybody knew the words and the music.

In the past when I’ve heard Dylan howl the anthemic “Like A Rolling Stone” he would stretch out the line “how does it feeeeeeel” and the audience would sing along with him. This time all but the required two e’s were missing as was the audience participation. More stenography. Between the two numbers Dylan, as if sensing the tension between me and Lynn, did the unthinkable. He told a joke. The joke went like this, as he introduced one of the band members Dylan said . “He comes from Louisiana so he stretches rattlesnakes across the front of his car. Calls ‘em windhsield vipers”

He introduced another band member by saying the guy was “so tough he shaves with a chain saw”. Then a magnificent version of “All Along the Watchtower” prologued by what sounded like an electirc version of Exodus turned everything over, under and upside down. Like all champs Zimmy came through in the end.

A little before the encore, I realized that I had been listening to the music through the ears of Mary and watching the performance through the eyes of Lynn. During Watchtower I watched and listened for myself and what I saw and heard was exactly what I wanted to see and hear other than the fact that Dylan never touched a guitar.

The concert reminded me of the Ali-Bonavena fight in which Ali looked listless and distracted throughout the fight until he finished off his clumsy, lumbering foe with a sudden knockout in the final round which removed from the judges the task of ruling in favor of the clearly inferior fighter.

That’s the task that the last song removed frrom my critique. I didn’t have to rip Dylan any further. The final song of the encore gave me everything I could have wanted.

On the way back to the car Mary said, “I expected more” which pretty much sums up most people’s feeling about Dylan even as we forget how much we already have.

Lynn said to Mary “ I want you to keep this ticket stub because someday, you’ll be telling someone that you saw Dylan and they’re going to want proof”. From Beatrice, that’s high praise. I guess the joke worked and there are many here among us along the watch tower who think that life itself is but a joke.

As for me, well it had been ten years since the last time I was in the same room with Dylan. Ten years from now he’ll be 73. I’ll go again but I won’t expect to get real close to the stage even though the crowd will be less than half a thousand. I suspect Mary will be amongst them. She might even be holding me up next time. Lynn and I will still be arguing.

Some times I’m a tick or two slow on the uptake. Sometimes I forget where I am and with whom I’m with wherever I am.

We in Rochester are fortunate to have the National Technical Institute for the Deaf as part of our Rochester Institute of Technology. RIT is where Bob Dylan played in the concert that I have just reviewed. When Dylan was leaving after completing his first fourteen songs, he paused in the middle of the stage raised his hands to chest level , palms out, fingers extended as if he were signaling “ten” while simultaneously wiping an invisible windshield using both hands.

From my distant seat, the gesture looked oddly quaint.

From where I sit now, I begin to understand. Dylan was using the universally accepted gesture of silent applause used by deaf folks, waving ten fingers. I bet the people in front of Dylan, part of the under whelming audible applause, were returning his gesture. The crowd on the floor nearest the stage and the performer were silently validating one another. A conversation was happening. Thus the non-hypocritical encore that followed.

Because we have so many deaf folks in Rochester, particularly in Henrietta; the community where RIT is located, I have become accustomed to interpreters speaking sign language at most large gatherings. At the time, I didn’t think it was unusual that to the left of Dylan, off stage, a woman was interpreting the concert. As I’ve mentioned in this review, up until the moment that Dylan silently applauded, he positioned himself to the far left of the stage. In fact, Dylan was as close to the interpreter on his left as he was to the lead guitar player on his right. If you count the interpreter as a member of the band, then there was Zimmy right smack dab in the middle of things. I make a practice whenever an interpreter is present to observe the sign language she is providing. I’m amazed at how quickly they can take complex ideas and instantaneously turn those into a lovely, commanding body language just beyond the reach of my intellect.

Now before me, I was watching a woman trying to signal lyrics like “You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last. But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast“ which as I mentioned in my review sounded more like this“Ulleeenowuneeulas, whatchoo wishookeegrafaaaaaaaa“.

Ulleeenowuneeulas, whatchoo wishookeegrafaaaaaaaa“.

Imagine the problem of trying to turn THAT into sign and body language.

But by God, she was doing it. Maybe she had the written lyrics in front of her or maybe she was doing the best with what she thought she heard or maybe because she was so much closer to Zimmy she actually heard what none of the rest of the audience sitting in the seats could hear. Her interpretation sort of resembled a hula set to rock music. It was thing of beauty to observe, very sensual, very seductive.

I’ve heard it said that hula is all about the stories being told by the hands of the dancer and that some times the stories are so risqué that at the end of the dance, the dancer has to go and wash her hands out with soap. None of Dylan’s lyrics needed that kind of sanitization unless she was hearing something different than I was which she most assuredly was.

Later, Lynn commented that this was the first and only time that she ever wished that she were deaf and understood sign language. “I would have been spared Dylan’s ghastly croaking and would have been able to understand the words.”

Ouch.

I ,of course took it one step further in defense of Dylan. Is it possible that Dylan was actually singing in deaf speak. If you’ve ever listened to a deaf person speak, it has it’s own unique sound and actually doesn’t sound a whole lot different from

“Ulleeenowuneeulas, whatchoo wishookeegrafaaaaaaaa“.

Could Dylan possibly be this aware and sensitive?Something had in fact happened there and until now I didn’t know what, had Dylan known all along?

Why not. He’s Dylan, I’m Rivers. There’s a difference. Big difference.

I ran these ideas past Lynn who assured me that I was getting a little carried away.From Lynn, that’s high praise.

Lynn had one further idea. Rochester is the home of Mitch Miller, the originator of the famous sing along with Mitch concept of fifties teevee. Mitch and his crew would sing a song and invite viewers to sing along by following a bouncing ball that danced over lyrics to the song which appeared at the bottom of the teevee screen. When Dylan performed at RIT he played in front of a backdrop upon which were projected different images during the show. Beatrice suggested that next time, the words of his lyrics should be projected on the screen with the bouncing ball so that everyone, not just the deaf could understand the words and sing along.

I think she’s got something. I can see it now. Network teevee. Right After Desperate Housewives. Sing along with Bob Dylan. Might catch on.

You read it here first.

I took the advice that Lynn had given Mary. I put the ticket stub in my wallet and carried it to the end.

Water Brigade Parade

When we re-learn how to sleep, the difference between night and day becomes negligible as the water brigade parade activates.

Here’s how it works.

I’m peeing about every seventy minutes 24/7. That’s an improvement from once every fifty minutes a couple of days ago, once every fifteen minutes two weeks ago. I’ve passed so much water, it’s as if I’ve walked half way around Lake Ontario which means there’s still a lot of water to pass.

Five minutes after every water pass, the urgency to pass, diminishes. Herein lies my opportunity to sleep. I’ve got to catch the winks when I can and I’m getting better at it. I hit a snooze button which I have just invented. Sometimes I drop off within 10 mintes. About one in three drop offs will result in a dream. I like that because I know I must be sleeping if I’m dreaming. Then after about a half hour I am urgently awake. I rest in the bed for 10-12 minutes and then I steal myself another mirror.

Repeat ad absurdium All day and all of the night with two breaks in between.

First break in the “morning” when I have my toast and my Ensure. I usually think about writing at this time but decide against it and go back to bed.

Repeat brigade all “afternoon” until “national news time”. I get up. Fix something to eat. Find out what kind of outrage Trump is manifesting. Turn on a Yankee game. Sit in my chair. Watch the game. Stay awake. Think about writing. Pass water. Sit back down. Watch. Think. Pass.

The game ends about “midnight”.

Head back into the eternal bedroom. Back to the same book. Urgency. Walk around Ontario. Back to the book. Pass out Sometimes talk to “someone” about “something” in my sleep. Wake up at the sound of my own voice.Realize I’m talking, pretty sure I was sleep talking because there’s nobody else in the room. Once, I remember asking a phantom DeNiro “ why do you make so many shitty movies?" Of course there was no response.And the beat goes on.The re-learning continues. The battle is joined. I think we’re winning. I’m getting my eight hours of sleep. sixteen half hours at a time. Good for us Repeat etc.

Fatigue is the enemy of both urgency and connectivity.

Urgency and connectivity are essential elements of writing. We have an idea, we’ve got to capture it and we’ve got to capture it NOW. We know how ideas appear and disappear like butterflies. They are eager to flutter by and demand immediate attention. Attention requires energy. Energy is gored by fatigue just as fatigue is bored by energy. The idea flutters away and fatigue assures us that it will be back someday..just not today. Don’ worry bout it. It’s cool. Lie down. Who cares? You think you got people out there who care if you captured that idea or not. They don’t. They wouldn’t appreciate it even if you had caught it and attempted to connect with it. Definitely would misunderstand it, if you captured it correctly.

You wanna know what you need to connect with? You need to connect with your dreams. Just rest. Go to sleep. So what if you don’t remember your dreams. Your dreams are just another set of butterflies that are not meant to be captured and lepodoptorized. Don’t tell anybody about your dreams except maybe your shrink who has made a living listening to non-sense and reflecting it back to no-one except you. There is no one except you so if you can connect with yourself that’s pretty goddamned good and what you should be spending all your time doing and you’ve got plenty of time when you’re sleeping. No need to rush until you’ve got to get up and pee.

That urge to urinate is the only urgency you need to worry about. It is the only alarm clock. And if you are lucky and quick enough to connect that urge with consciousness and the nearest water closet, then you’ve realized all the urgency and connectivity that you’ll need for this afternoon.

Mission accomplished.

Time for a nap.

Krell Loses His Wallet

Last month, my granddaughter Eva saw a woman right after the lady had been struck by a hit and run driver while jogging on Washington Street in Duxbury. Soon, other people began to crowd around this traumatizing sight.

The woman had been killed, her crumpled body on full display.

Soon it was discovered that the woman didn’t have her wallet with her when she started her fatal run so for several hours after the body had been removed, nobody had any idea who the victim was. She had no identity. A broken Jane Doe carted off in an ambulance.

This brings me to one of my greatest, secret fears; losing my wallet.

I am so afraid of losing my wallet that I never carry more than 20 bucks in my wallet at one time. I don’t carry an ATM card or any credit cards because I’m scared to death of losing them. Whatever beer money I have, I carry in my pocket.

So, two nights ago, I lost my wallet.

I was staying with the Peets, Ovid and Julia. Everything was going perfectly. We were on our way to Birkdale Village for some music and ice cream. I got out of the shower and reached in my dresser to grab my wallet, fully expecting it to be there, it wasn’t there.

Next began the too familiar, furious search around their house to find my wallet. We had been all around Huntersville that day. We ate at a Lake Norman restaurant. We walked through the campus of Davidson University. We had a beer at our local Bistro, a place named Harvey’s. I changed my clothes at least three times always feeling good about my wallet.

We checked all of those places too no avail. “Did anyone turn in a wallet today to lost and found.” At the pool someone had in fact found a wallet and it was in lost and found. The lifeguard took me to it. It wasn’t mine.

Mine was still gone.

My great fear had come true. I was in a state of panic. Everyone was concerned, not so much about the wallet…which had nothing in it….but rather my propensity to brood and throw a black cloud over the rest of the visit.

I sat in the guest bedroom hyperventilating, two clicks away from a full fledged panic attack. I took many deep breaths and made up my mind that the lost wallet wasn’t going to ruin the rest of the evening. To my amazement, I found that metaphysiction compartment and we proceeded to Birkdale. The compartment was my usual escape, comparing singers and bands. Elvis or Sinatra etc

We arrived in the village. We listened to some music and had some ice cream. While we were people watching in the village, it occurred to me that every single person that we saw had THEIR wallet. I was the only man without a wallet.

I had no identity. I was nobody. You know who else doesn’t have a wallet. Broken joggers

Victims of serial killers

Kids under the age of 12.

Those whose pockets have been picked.

Jane and John Doe

A bad crowd to be in for a “responsible” man.The overwhelming humiliation of irresponsibility was calling and all I had to do was pick up the phone to ruin the night. I didn’t pick up but the phone kept ringing.

Moody Blues or Pink Floyd.

Jim or Van Morrison

Johnny or Edgar Winters

If somehow a cop or a store owner asked me if I had my “license”, I would have to say that I didn’t. If they asked me why, I’d have to say that I had lost my wallet. We are so connected to our wallets that when we don’t have them we begin to question our entire existence ,at least that’s what the ringing phone was calling me to do.

Somehow the conversation drifted over to a discussion of the Sopranos. I got a visual of Tony and asked myself “in this visual” does Tony have a wallet. Of course Tony has his wallet. He’s Tony Soprano. He ALWAYS has his wallet. What kid of MAN, doesn’t have his wallet.

RING, RING, RING went my unanswered inner phone. We got through the night. I congratulated myself, whoever I was, which I wouldn’t be able to prove if anybody asked me, on my composure based on the way that I was handling an overwhelming secret fear. My secret fear is that I am an irresponsible, immature, unfocused airhead, literally a loser. We all have our secrets. Now you know mine. Without my wallet, I’m not Thornton Krell. I’m John Doe I don’t exist.

John Doe Walking

John Lennon/Paul McCartney

James Brown/Bob Marley

Tom Petty/George Harrison

Heart/Pretenders

The Band/Led Zep

Roy Buchanan/Stevie Ray

Eagles/Credence

John Coltraine/Miles Davis

Rascals/Lovin’Spoonful

It was the fourth of July and it was so hot that the lizards were not only crawling on front porches but they were turning colors as they scampered.

Thornton Krell was in another new town preparing for another mini-brewery performance. As he walked up the hill on Serenity Street, he passed by a house displaying the stars and stripes. He said “Happy Holiday” to the scowling woman standing beneath the flag.

The woman responded by asking “where do you live”.

Her background music sounded like the music playing when someone is so suspicious that they are ready to call the cops. Background music that suggested a fear of strangers. Background music that hinted “what’s a person like You doing on a street like THIS walking in the sun on such a fucking hot day in MY neighborhood. Krell answered, “I’m from Centerville. It’s a real nice place.” and he continued his stroll. Zappa/Beefhart Harrison/Petty Krell was a walker. He had become a walker during his time in Viet Nam. He kept the habit upon returning home. If his destination was in walking distance, he left his car and bike behind. Walking distance was ten miles….five miles out and five miles back. As he walked, Krell was in the habit of mentally comparing two random musical groups. If he had tickets for both and they were playing at the same time which one would he choose to see? Animals/Byrds Paul Revere and Raiders/Jay and the Americans Jerry Lee Lewis/Fats Domino Little Richard/Chuck Berry Krell walked a lot even before Nam. He was one of those kids who didn’t take the bus and did walked a mile and a half to school every day as well as a mile and a half back from school. Exactly halfway through his walk there was a four way stop, patrolled by Mrs. Johnson who said hello and goodbye to Krell at least four times a day. Johnny Rivers/Rick Nelson James Gang/New Riders Jefferson Airplane/Buffalo Springfield Kinks/Hollies At the stop was a corner grocery store owned by a guy named Red Burns who had run the store when Krell’s father was a kid. Everybody who stopped at the store called him “Red” or “Burnsie”. Krell was too polite for such casual language with an elder. Krell always called him Mr. Burns. Red appreciated that pleasantry and usually gave Krell an extra piece of bubble gum for being a “good kid”. Cars/Doors King Crimson/Yes

Streissand/ Fitzgerald

Grace Slick/St. Vincent

U2/Metallica Blood Sweat and Tears/Chicago Krell learned that good manners have rewards. Also outside of Burnsie’s, Krell would run into Wilson. Wilson was beloved in the neighborhood. Nowadays, Wilson would probably be described as “special”. He was a tall guy who wore an Elmer Fudd hat regardless of the weather. Krell only knew Wilson to speak two words. Those two words were these: “Hey Boy

Johnny Cash/Willie Nelson

Stevie Wonder/Ray Charles ABBA/Fleetwood Mac Dionne Warwick/Dianna Ross Diana Krall/Norah Jones And Wilson didn’t say those words to everybody but he said them to Krell every time that they met at the for corner cross walk. Wilson “helped” Mrs. Johnson and it was rumored that Wilson was her cousin who had been shell shocked in WW2. Everybody called Wilson Wilson except Krell. Whenever Wilson said “hey boy” to Krell, Krell would respond…”Hey Mr. Wilson” And Wilson would laugh, his too loud laugh. Krell never knew if Wilson was his first name or his last name. It took Krell a few months to realize that Wilson disappeared. Upon the realization, Krell asked Mrs Johnson “where’s Wilson” to which Mrs. Johnson simply said “he lives somewhere else now.” This was good enough for Krell. Billy Joel/Elton John Steve Miller/Bob Segar Allman Brothers/CSNY REM/Police Michael Jackson/Bruce Springsteen Hollies/Kinks

Blasters/X Buddy Holly/Kurt Cobain Dave Clark 5/Monkees Glen Campbell/James Taylor Pat Benatar/Joan Jett Joni Mitchell/Bonnie Raitt Lost in thought, heat and reminiscence, Krell never saw, heard or felt it coming as he walked through a red light on speed trap corner, twenty yards from the burned out shell of what once was a coven.

The Final Factoid

My name is Jem Masters.

Here’s some things you should know about me before you decide upon my reliability as a narrator or as a hero or as witness or life saver. I’m the final factoid. I’m Caucasian but my skin tone is more like a paper bag than a peeled potato. I take my glasses off with one hand rather than two. As a result, my glasses are either tilted or down too far on my nose. I’ve recently learned that long time spectacle wearers, who use both hands to remove their glasses, regard both the tilt and the nose drop with rage and judgment. I have a large head according to my last visit to the optometrist who after taking one look at me suggested that “larger” men often need a special kind of frame to fit the special frame of their body. My glasses were “way” too small. I took his advice and went to the larger size. This remedy only further accentuated both the tilt and the nose drop but lessened the likelihood of having to purchase new frames every year as the larger size would naturally relieve the pressure that my gigantic head was putting on the vulnerable hinging. Another thing that you should know about me is that I have achieved perfect buoyancy in a swimming pool. I can lie on my back and just float all afternoon without moving a muscle. I love that especially down here in North Carolina where between tropical storms and hurricanes, it’s usually around 100 degrees. I spend a lot of time in my pool, looking up at the famous Carolina blue sky and the surreal clouding……perfect for optimism. Also if anybody’s drowning and I’m floating by, I make a great inner tube…all ya gotta do is grab and hold on until help arrives. I’ve come to understand that almost every man who is buoyant is also portly. I’ve recently become portly which is great because it makes it that much easier to buy a suit. I hadn’t bought a suit in 10 years. Last time I bought one, it was a struggle to stay afloat. Now, I float. I’m portly. And just in case you confront a man versus nature situation, remember; any portly in a storm. Portly, big head, tilted glasses on my nose, optimistic and wearing the polyester suit that I recently bought on line from Kohl’s to go along with the xxx sweater vest and Escher tie that I decided to put on in order to introduce myself. Yeah, that’s me now. I’m in the house and the aircon is on big time. Four days ago, it was the 4th of July. Stars and Stripes and humidity and lizards on the porch.I had just come out of Slice of Life, our neighborhood pizza shop. The Slice of Life had survived a fire and had just reopened. The damage was relatively minor. Next door to the Slice at the Laughing Brook Spell Casting and Ancestral Arts, where the witch was always “in”, the damage was far more extensive. Laughing Brook was on the move anyways.The PERFECT location had presented itself the very same week the shop burnt the roof off the building that caged it, very large forces were acting directly upon the street corner.

I had always felt good that we had a Spell Casting shop in the middle of our downtown. God knows we had a speed trap. Approaching that corner the speed limit dipped from 35 to 20 in about 100 yards and a cop was always sitting right there. This produced a lot of revenue for our town attorneys.

After devouring two Slice of Life pizza slices, I was looking forward to a float in the pool when I saw this old guy approaching the corner. He was tall. He was tan. He was not from here nor from Impanema. He was pre-occupied. He didn’t look right almost as if he were under a self induced trance. I was gonna say hello but I was pretty sure he wasn’t gonna hear me unless I said it too loud which it was too hot to do and which I wouldn’t have done anyways as we portly, paper bag guys don’t usually start up conversations with tall, tan, trance driven older guys.

He started to enter the crosswalk and then he was on the ground.

It was happening right NOW, right in front of me.

I called 911 a split second after tall, tan guy hit the ground.

911 called the speed trap cop who showed up immediately from a few yards away and started with the CPR.

The ambulance was there in a flash and the EMT’s took over from the cop. After a bit of shirt tearing and chestpounding and pincushioning, the ambulance took off with the tall guy inside and the cop alongside and the sirens blasting. Before he left, the cop took my name.“If this guy survives, you saved his life”, the cop named Officer Wilson, told me before he tore off to the hospital.

I removed my glasses from my giant head and wiped them with my Panthers tee shirt.

I still haven’t heard anything from the cop or the guy. If I had her number, I’d call the witch.

EARLY BOOMER, LATE BLOOMER

I chose my Christmas gift 25 years before I was born. I chose wisely. On that day, Mary Keenan, who had just arrived bag and baggage in Rochester, New York from County Cork Ireland, gave birth to her first child…and named her Mary.

I sent that child the twinkle in her Irish eyes. Young Mary went on to celebrate another 91 Christmas birthdays. I was around for 67 of them as she was glad to see my father and her husband who saw my twinkle when he returned from the Philipines at the end of WW2 which made me part of a significant demographic excess known as the Baby Boom. When my father was in the Phillipines and during his entire time in the service, my mother wrote him a letter every day.

 I am an early Boomer and a late bloomer. When she was child, she raised her brother and two sisters as her father died suddenly when she was in high school. She lived to be near the bedside of all of ‘em when they passed. Same with my father, she comforted him till he died in her arms.  I was the oldest of her three children. She loved me and supported us, every day of our lives.

 I never bothered to ask her to thank me for choosing her above millions of candidates to be my mother while I was in my first infinity before my vacation before my next and final infinity. And I know I’ll see her again. 

The stars twinkle.

 Mary’s granddaughter is our youngest child. Of course we named her Mary. Yes, Mary Dear. Your twinkle brought your Mom and I together thirty years ago. Thank you for that. 

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. 

Yes, there’s ANOTHER theory that this has already happened. I have a theory that it happens over 300 millions times every day in the United States alone.  The initial discovery is called death and the something even more bizarre and wonderful is called birth. The vacation in between is called life or some say “lipstick land.” All of us on earth at this moment share a common state of inexplicability which we project as the “universe” or “reality”. We create this reality as we go along living our lives in a state of mass hypnosis, love and wonder. Eventually we straighten things out, kick the bucket and re-awaken with only a vague memory of what we knew before. This vague memory is called our subconscious. With each awakening we discover a brand new universal puzzle to contemplate along with a brand new set of people also contemplating the same puzzle with slightly different kaleidoscopes. The most immediate, influential people we call our parents. 

And you, dear Mary, call me Dad. The tools that worked best the last time, even though we don’t remember them, are called aptitudes. When we discover them, we use them to explain the universe to ourselves and others particularly our children. I get the feeling I’ve written this before. I get the feeling this is what all writers are writing about all the time. All singers singing about all the time etc. I get the feeling you’ve read this before, Mary. Of course it’s all just a theory. I am still alive, honey.  Aren’t I ? 

MIDNIGHT MARY

Today is the first day in Rochester that we can all wear shorts. Thank God.

Today is also the 25th birthday of my youngest daughter Mary.

Mary was born at midnight so it’s always hard for me to figure out which day that was as midnight I can go either way so I celebrate for two days and even that is nowhere near enough. The celebration should be continuous.

The hospital listed her birth at 11:58 but I noticed that the clock in the delivery room was a few seconds past midnight when the antenna emerged. I joked to the delivery doctor that we just made it for the extra day in the hospital. About an hour later, I discovered that they had declared her birth at 11:58. Around here, you get two days in the hospital for a birth. Because they listed the birth at 11:58, they counted that whole day as a birth day which meant in reality we got one day and two minutes of hospital service.

Bastards

Health Care

Two minutes which weren’t legitimate in the first place. I know she was born at midnight. I have video to prove it but didn’t bother to fight the bureuacracy in the midst of such joy. So Midnight Mary came into being wearing an antenna on her head. The doctors were monitoring her heartbeat in the womb and had attached a heart beat monitor to her head which looked like an antenna when she emerged at Midnight.

Yeah

25 years ago.

Now flash back four months ago right after the biopsy. I learned I had cancer and bone scans would determine how far it had spread. The interim of waiting for the bone scan results was the most "spirtitual” time of my life. I was ready to go if go I must but I prayed to be around to celebrate the birthday of Midnight Mary and to be wearing shorts while celebrating.

I prayed for this day right here My prayers were sincere So pardon me while I celebrate And forget all sorrow Today is worth the wait And so is tomorrow.

AVA’S SHOWER

When we moved to Tumbleweed, we had to enroll Mary in a brand new school. She was in third grade and had a broken leg. She arrived in time for school pictures. When the class pictures came out, I noticed this little girl with big glasses. Her name was Ava. I pointed her out to Mary and said “She looks like she’d be a good friend.” Sure enough, they became besties and remain so to this day almost 30 years later.

 This is the story of Ava’s shower.  I know this wasn’t a dream because when I dream I always try to snap in the dream the picture but the camera never works. It was my first bridal shower. My gender had always rendered me ineligible for such celebrations but this shower was co-ed. We were enjoying our drinks and conversation downstairs when I noticed that the main female stars were missing.  Ava was trying on her wedding gown upstairs.

I’m not sure who invited me but somehow through the grapevine I came too know that I would be welcome in this room and so would my camera. This happens often in my dreams but in my dreams, the camera she don’t work. I walked up the stairs and entered the room. I was the only male but everyone seemed to welcome me.  Everyone was admiring Ava in her dress. Ava was radiating joy and reflecting the admiring glances that were coming her way. The dress was perfect. Everybody knew it.

 I’ve been taking Ava’s picture ever since she was a little girl. I wanted to get a great picture of Ava at this moment. All of my years of photography had led to this moment. It wasn’t gonna come again. Ava noticed me. She looked into the camera. I snapped. The camera worked. This was no dream.  Mine wasn’t the only camera in the room. Ava seemingly picked up on all of the lenses by not concentrating on any of them but rather enjoying her moment of celebration. A model of decorum. I got my pictures. Everybody got their pictures. The cameras disappeared. I lingered with my lens. 

At that moment, at that second, in about the time it takes a car to swerve a deadly swerve, Ava’s expression changed. For an instant.. memory, vulnerability and sorrow flashed through her entire being in a collision of joy and pain. I imagine she was thinking of her older sister who was not in the room.

The older sister Abby who ended up on the deadly end of an unsignalled swerve on a dark Halloween night almost 10 years ago. A tragedy that changed everyone. Suddenly Abby was in the room.  I didn’t see Abby but I did see Ava seeing Abby as did my camera. For one split second grief and recognition flashed across Ava’s glowing face. In that split second I had to make the decision whether or not to snap the picture and “capture” this exceedingly private, candid, personal and vulnerable moment. I was almost certain that the camera was going to malfunction revealing the entire scene as one more dream forever undocumented. I snapped. 

The camera worked.  Ava’s expression returned to joy. A few weeks later, I told Ava about the picture. I told her this story. I told her I wanted to write about it but couldn’t do that unless she approved. She said it would be an honor. The wedding is this weekend. This writing is in honor of Ava and of Abby.

   HEADING FOR FRONTIER AT LAST

  Today’s the day. Last night was the night. I only had to steal one mirror last night so I got my first half way decent shuteye in months. At this moment I am resisting the urge to hit the sack and indulge in fatigue.

 I’m thinking about the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Nightmare on Elm Street. In both of those flicks, sleep was to be avoided unless you wanted Freddy to slash through your walls or wake up as a pod, a poisoned pod. 

Those movies always bothered me.  I hate the feeling of falling asleep when I don’t want to fall asleep. This used to happen to me all the time, particularly on Wednesday nights when I was young.  Because I was big fan of horror films, my parents used to let me stay up “late” to watch Shock Theater which played all of the Lugosi, Karloff and Chaney films. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Raven, the Mummy, the Black Cat, The Invisible Ray,The Ghoul,The Werewolf of London etc. The show came on came on past my bedtime so it was quite a privilege and quite a challenge.  Plus, I was actually scared by the movies or at least I expected to be. 

I would take my position on the carpet in front of our timy teevee set. The movie would start and before too long, I would realize that I was falling asleep. I learned to recognize the feeling and the “oh no” that accompanied it. I would invariably choose to “rest my eyes” for just a minute during a commercial. I learned after awhile that once I started to rest my eyes, the rest periods would increase in frequency and duration until at last I was asleep on the floor and had to be carted of to bed all the time insisting “I’m awake, I’m awake”

 The morning came and I awoke with a sense of failure and a determination to make it all the way through the next week. I realized that once I started to “rest my eyes”, it was all over. I would make a conscious effort to “resist the rest” but week after week I failed. I wasn’t used to failure back in those days and it frightened me more than the movies did.

I was learning about temptation and my inability to resist it. This was my first previews of fatigue but I really didn’t know what fatigue was until a few months ago. There’s a difference between fatigue and being tired, passing out, blacking out, dozing off or being exhausted. For the past few months, I’ve suffered fatigue and it’s a lot different from “resting my eyes” because in fatigue I’m not even interested in the “movie” that is my life. All I want to do is sleep, well not exactly sleep but more like escape but even in the escaping there is the over-riding sense of failure and guilt as days melt away and merge with nights. Fatigue sucks. 

So as I write these words, I am resisting the urge to “rest my eyes” and to go downstairs to my cave/pit. The urge is strong but not as strong as yesterday and yesterday wasn’t as strong as the day before. They told me after my last blast of radiation that sometimes the fatigue starts to go away after a week and a half but sometimes it can continue for three or four months or in some cases forever. 

Today is exactly a week and a half since my last blast. I’m gonna go the distance. I’m not goin’ downstairs. I’m not gonna turn into a pod person again today. No way. I’ve charged up my camera. I’m snapping flowers. I’ll be leaving for the ballpark in three hours. I’m gonna look good. This is the day I marked down on my calendar for the beginning of my comeback and I’m not gonna rest my eyes until I get back from Frontier Field. My brother is my best friend and I haven’t seen him during this whole situation. I want to see him now. I want him to see me snapping pictures, keeping score, drinking a beer and rooting for the old home team. Freddy Fatigue can’t get me at Frontier Field if I keep my eyes on the ball. 

THE OLD BALLGAME 

One of my colleagues, a guy named Fred, got into as much trouble as I did for having classrooms that were not quiet. Neither Fred nor I thought the criticism and penalization were justified but we did have “long hair” at the time and we were considered “popular” by the students. 

 Eventually, thank God, the concept of beautiful noise in the classroom began to take hold. Beautiful noise means the kids were buzzing and working with each other and with the teacher. Nothing on earth sounds like productive buzzing.  It was a far cry from the spray and pray method formerly preferred by the fearful badgers of the ruling realm and their supportive administrators. Quiet in the classroom was no longer a guaranteed good thing. 

Suddenly, Fred and I were seen as “innovators”. People started imitating us and when they got good at it, they began to instruct us on how to do what we had been doing all along, since we had already moved on to the next thing which they were currently against but soon would be imitating and then instructing. On and on and on and on etc.

 Meanwhile, my classes were getting busier and buzzier so I was headed for trouble. Quiet is so much quieter when it’s surrounded by buzz.  One day Fred and I and about fifty teachers were at a workshop run by a consultant who hadn’t taught a public school class in years but who was paid more than we were to look at our watches and tell us what time it was. The consultant was also on the lookout for new ideas which he could steal and profit from when he took his carnival on the road., always searching for a new parade to jump in front of and declare himself the leader etc.

 So the consultant called on teachers to “share” new ideas that they had. Most of the “sharing” consisted of ideas that people like Fred and I had been criticized for by the same people who were now “experts” at whatever “technique” they were sharing. The consultant gushed over every “insight” no matter how unremarkable.

 Meanwhile, Fred was in the back of the room trying to stay serious. Fred was a big, dark haired dark eyed handsome guy who wasn’t lacking in self confidence and didn’t need or want to be drawn into this festival of self congratulation. Even though Fred hadn’t raised his hand to volunteer a response, the consultant decided to call on him. “Do you have a technique, Fred, that you’d like to share?”, the consultant asked in an overly friendly way. 

Fred said “Well, I guess I could share what I call 'the old ball game’.

  The consultant perked up. “I’ve never heard of that technique, Fred. It sounds very interesting. How does it work?”

  Possibly a new parade was forming. 

“Well” said Fred, “if I see a kid’s not paying attention, I throw a tennis ball at him/her. That usually gets their attention.” 

Fred was serious. I looked at Fred’s face. Fred was looking at the consultant’s face. The consultant had no idea what to say. Nobody ooohed or aaahed. I burst out laughing which broke the silence.(I had used the same “technique” myself” on quite a few occasions except I didn’t use a tennis ball. I used a bunch of tinfoil that I had rolled up in a ball for my version of “the old ball game”. I called my tin foil ball “the egg of unexpected courage”. The kids called it THE EGG.) 

Back to the seminar…… Fred started laughing. The consultant sorta smiled Once again, Fred and I were operating on the same page even though we weren’t aware that we were until Fred answered the consultant. I had no idea that Fred also used “the old ball game”. This is one of my fondest moments because “the old ball game be it tennis or tinfoil” actually worked and probably still does today. I am afraid, however, that a few months after this moment…..some consultant somewhere was instructing teachers on the effective use of what has become known as “the old ball game”. 

Beautiful.

CROSSWORDS

  Way back in another lifetime, when I was teaching kids how to write, my class used to do the New York Times crossword puzzle together every other Monday. The puzzle gets more cryptic, arcane and oblique as the week continues. Monday is fair game for high schoolers working in tandem. Tuesday’s puzzle maybe. Saturday’s forget about it. Maybe that’s why we don’t have school on Saturdays except for Breakfast Clubbers who are puzzled and puzzling enough with or without crosswords.

 I always told my writing students that writers need to know something about everything and then need the vocabulary to articulate what they know by choosing the exact right word for the right place. Close is good but no cigar.

Crossword puzzles serve as an exercise not only in vocabulary and exactitude but also in breadth of knowledge. Crossword puzzles are to writers what shadow boxing is to boxers or what ping pong is to tennis players or driving ranges to golfers, a truncated version of a more pervasive obsession.

Aside from their value as literary barbells, crosswords teach one of life’s most valuable lessons. If you have one wrong word or a right word in the wrong place, it screws up the rest of the puzzle. We can’t insist that a word is right if it is wrong. Will power only extends so far. It can’t be right simply because we want it to be right and we’re good people. That’s called willfullness. In the words of Johnny C, “if it don’t fit, you must acquit”.

Somewhere in all puzzles, before we abandon original thinking or stick with our misconceptions, we confront wavering allegiance to a shady word choice. Since most of our lives are spent re-inforcing our own biases, wavering allegiance is a frightening flourish of vulnerability. In America, especially in politics, it’s all about being “right” first and then sticking with that righteousness in the face of hell or high water, fire and fury. Wavering allegiance is a forerunner to change. All change includes loss and all loss requires mourning. Who wants to mourn? Who wants to admit a mistake?

In politics, to flip is to flop. So when we stick with wrong words in Crosswords, we never solve the puzzle or the problem contained within the puzzle, a problem that grows more pressing with every passing day. Usually national problems come in the form of dollars and cents, bread and butter, black and white , war and peace, red and blue. Hey if we come to a cross roads where we should turn right and instead turn left, don’t worry if we drive completely around the world we’ll end up going the right, right way. Once upon a time on my way to Iowa from South Dakota, I made a wrong turn and drove halfway through Minnesota. With a crossword puzzle, we can just take out an eraser. With a war, with poverty, with racism, with recession, with division we need something more than rubber at the forgiveness end of a pointed stick of lead. Every day seems like a Saturday crossword.   

ALI, FRAZIER, CHUVALO AND EVELYN 

Slides. Remember slides? You’d throw your slides into a Kodak Carousel and voila…a light show up against the wall. Needless to say I threw quite a few slides against quite a few walls over the years as I told my Ali stories. I liked one of the slides in particular.

 I made a nice 11 by 14 print from that slide . Ali and Joe exchanging punches during their second fight at Madison Square Garden. 

We all got older as the years passed. It seemed like Ali and Joe got older faster than everybody else. What else could we have expected?

 During this time of great decline, George Chuvalo added to the pugilistic tragedy.  George Chuvalo The Croatian Crusader. The Heavyweight Champion of Canada. The human punching bag and common opponent for the vastly more talented Ali and Frazier. The man who could not be knocked down. The man whose face had launched a thousand fists. George Chuvalo had a face that had been sculpted by other fists into the face of a fist  And then after George retired, life stepped in and continued the battering. He lost his wife and sons to suicide. Heroin was very involved. Still George refused to hit the canvas. Word got through to his old opponents, Ali and Joe, that George was hurt and staggering but that he refused to go down. A boxing organization in Rochester decided to throw a benefit dinner for George. Yeah it was a band aid on a shotgun wound but every little bit helps. 

Joe Frazier decided to attend and waive any fee. So did another wounded warrior name of Muhammad Ali. Ali was shaking from Parkinsons and Joe could barely see. Joe and Ali didn’t usually appear together. Bad blood existed. People wondered why after all these years bad blood still existed between Ali and Frazier. The answer is simple. These guys tried to kill each other three times in front of the whole world and they damned near succeeded. He jest at scars who’s never felt a wound.

 There was a lot of laughter that night but nobody was laughing at the scars. I was there too. The Chuvalo benefit cost a hundred bucks to attend. My ringside seat at Ali-Frazier fight also cost $100. So much had changed. One thing hadn’t changed. The 11 by 14 photograph that I took at Ali Frazier 2 looked exactly the same. The two of them stalking each other in the middle of the ring, young and heallthy and with all the lights shining on them. I brought the picture to the benefit.

 I had met Muhammad, Joe and George individually but I never thought that I’d see all three of them in the same room at the same time. Yet, here we were for the common good of Chuvalo In the lobby, I got a chance to visit with boxing expert Burt Sugar and HBO analyst Larry Merchant. They both reacted to me as if I had pissed myself while wearing a white suit.. Arrogant and a million miles away from Ali in terms of engagement and humility, these two celebrities brushed off my questions about the sweet science with an insolence worth mentioning here. Vampires I left those “famous guys”. I was relieved to leave. I entered the main room.

Carmen Basilio was much more approachable. I had met Carmen a couple of times before. I didn’t want to ask him the same old questions that he’s been asked a million times about Sugar Ray Robinson. I asked him about one of his lessd famous victories. “Hey Champ, do you ever see Johnny Saxton anymore?”

Carmen answered “No, he’s all fucked up.”

“What got him Carmen”, I followed up,“ drugs, booze, women, gambling?”

“No” said Carmen, “I fucked him up.”

Carmen was a tough man.

I found my table. My name was still not Sinatra nor for that matter Sugar or Merchant so my $100 dollar table resembled my “ringside” seat in terms of physical distance from the action. And I wasn’t even at the same table as the Son of Sanford.  I shared a “way in the back” table with another human who also had connection/complexion problems; a stunning middle aged African American woman named Evelyn. We had the only two seat table in the place.

Evelyn and I chatted for awhile about the value of our $100 as compared to the $100 spent by the more connected, very Caucasian, very male attendees flaunting upfront and uptight. We figured we were outsiders. We bonded. I showed her my 11 by 14 photo. She liked it and said “be careful with that. It’s valuable”.

 Evelyn had a mission of her own. Evelyn told me that she knew Joe Frazier and the last time Joe was in town, she really got to know him and he got to know her. She planned on having a little chat with Joe later in the evening about his previous method of leaving town. She assured me that Joe would be paying attention.

 All the stars were already seated miles away at the main table. All the stars that is except for Ali.  It’s only fitting that the champ enters last. All of the other guys had entered from the front of the venue. When Ali and his entourage entered the room, they came in from the back. As soon as he entered the room, the whole environment changed for the better. He walked very, very slowly. Since he came in from the back, the first table he passed was the distant table for two.

He stopped at our table. He looked right at me and although it seemed impossible, I got the distinct feeling that he remembered me from our morning at Deer Lake decades before.  Evelyn noticed the look and asked me after Ali had passed us, “does he know you”.  I told Evelyn that I had spent some time with him a long time ago. Whether he recognized me or not, he once again gave me that wonderful feeling that I was cool with him and that our table was the best table in the house. and that, once again, made me feel cool with myself  although he couldn’t possibly have remembered. I guess that’s what charisma is all about.

 Like I said, I had met Sugar and Merchant, ten minutes before they took their upfront seats. I’m sure they had already forgotten about me and their vibe would have amplified that disregard. Not with Ali. I started feeling great.  Important The whole room turned back to see the old champ. I got the feeling that everybody in the room started feeling great for different reasons. Uplifiting Transcendent . Eliciting smiles and cheers with every step, the Champ caned his way to the front. Everybody in the place was experiencing rampant, contact joy. I don’t think that Frazier was feeling that joy although he probably remembered feeling a lot of contact. It was obvious that Joe was feeling pretty dang great before he even entered the place, if ya know what I mean.

 Obviously, a lot of feelings fly around a room when Ali enters that room and walks toward a partying Joe Frazier.  The dinner began. Neither Ali nor Frazier addressed the audience; for different reasons. Chuvalo expressed his gratitude towards both men for showing up and making his benefit such a success. Weirdly enough if a three man boxing match broke out, Chuvalo would probaly win even though both Joe and Ali had batterred him in the past. 

Merchant and Sugar blabbed some and sucked a bit of energy from the room although their wisdom has slipped beneath the radar screen of both my memory and contempt. When the program concluded, the master of ceremonies, a born bullshitter named Jerry Flynn announced that for a half an hour the head table participants would be willing to sign autographs. 

Immediately the rush to the front began led by the people sitting in the front. 

From the way back table, we watched the crowd in front gain full advantage. We only had a half hour and it looked as if there were two hours of people in front of us. We did a little spontaneous human calculus. Evelyn headed towards Joe. She had more than an autograph in mind. She had a piece of her mind in mind and she was about to give that to Joe.

 I headed for Ali, by far the longer of the two lines. Somehow, my 11 by 14 print caught the eye of somone in Ali’s entourage. He asked me to identify the picture. “Ringside, Madison Square Garden, Ali-Frazier II” “Diju take dat picture?” “Yes I did” “Champ prolly like to see it. C'mon” 

He escorted me towards the front of the line, not the very front but a definite improvement on my table rank. Ali and I were in the same force field. I knew he’d have time for me even as the minutes ticked away. With about 10 minutes left in the opportunity, our chance came. I put my picture in front of the Champ. He considered it carefully. He was in no rush whatsoever. Then the familiar whisper that he either said or sent. I’ll never know which but the message was clear…“choo take this?” “Yeah Champ I did’ Another whisper/send “it’s good” Then the eye contact. Ali and me eyeball to eyeball again. Same eyeballs that had been eyeball to eyeball with Martin King, John Lennon, Sonny Liston, Elvis Presley, Nelson Mandella, Joe Louis, James Brown, Stallone, Duvall, Carson, Borgnine, Malcolm X, Ross, Chamberlain and infinite others were inviting me to come on in and stay a minute. Make yourself comfortable Join the crowd. Maybe u been here before He gave me his beautiful Parkinson’s signature. Very slow, very painful, looking up every few seconds directly in my eyes as if this were the first signature of his career given to his best friend. Ali had signed another piece for me at Deer Lake decades before. Like the man himself, Ali’s signature had changed dramatically over the years. His Parkinson’s signature took a good twenty seconds to make with five separate lookups and included only the fragments of four letters….. M…a…l….i. Ironically he made his mark over Joe Frazier’s image in the ring in my picture. He hit me with the feint again although this feint was very faint yet still overwhelming. I thanked the champ. Again the eyes. Again the illusion of recognition. Again the electricity. So long champ. 

Still five minutes of the half hour remained. Wow Pause Shift Recalculate I got a shot at Joe. Where’s Evelyn. There she be. Evelyn chillin’ with Joe “Hey Evelyn” from fity feet away with four minutes left. “Hey Ice, c'mon up here and meet Joe.” Once again the Red Sea miraculoulsy parted. The Red Sea thought Evelyn was Joe’s wife and I was a friend of Joe’s family. I got to the table with time to spare. Evelyn said “Joe, this is my friend. Sign his picture” I put my picture in front of Joe. Joe looked at my picture. “dijoo take this picture”

“Yeah I did, Champ” “good picture” Ironically, Joe signed over the image of Ali in the ring in the light at Madison Square Garden, young and beautiful. Floating Getting ready to sting forever. Evelyn gave Joe a peck on the cheek. Joe took a sip from his beer. I gave Evelyn a peck on her cheek. It was the last time that I ever saw any of them. Time was up. Ring the bell. 

   FAMOUS MIKE CAN DRAW

 Some stories are so lovely that I hesitate to write them. Some legends are so fragile and delicate that I’m reluctant to reveal them. Here’s a lovely story and a delicate legend all in one.

 I’ll try to do them justice before the memories fade completely as the blur increases every day. I remember his first day in class. He was fresh off the boat. I mean that literally. He was a boat person from Viet Nam. He was in my English class. He didn’t speak a word of English. I didn’t know what to do with him that first day so I somehow signalled/sent him to the main office to pick up an attendance sheet. 

The secretary at the main office was expecting a student from another class named Mike. When my student arrived, whatever his name was, it wasn’t Mike. Helen asked my new student if his name was Mike. He didn’t know what Helen was saying but he knew a question when he heard one. He nodded his head up and down. Helen said “Here, Mike”, and gave him the papers. He returned to my classroom a few minutes later without the attendance sheet but with whatever administrivia Helen was supposed to give to “Mike”.

I took the paper from him. I said thanks and asked him what his name was.

He said “Mike”

 I said “Hi, Mike”

 That’s how Mike got his name. Aside from the single word “Mike”, Mike spoke no English. We were a pair, Mike and I.  Mike would come into class, take his seat and listen with great patience and attention to the academic tumult engulfing him. I knew something of the concept of linguistic immersion wherein a person learns a foreign language more quickly by surrounding himself with it. I believed this was happening with Mike although I didn’t know for certain. I did know that in this case English was the “foreign” language to Mike and he was surrounded. 

One day after a couple of weeks, I noticed that Mike was taking “notes” of what I was saying. I couldn’t imagine what Mike’s notes looked like so I casually made my way to his desk to sneak a peek. Mike’s “note” was a surreal and photographic drawing of a rose. As I looked at the rose, I was amazed as much by its sensitivity of rendering as I was by its virtousity. Near the drawing, I wrote the word “rose.” Then I said the word “rose” I spelled the word “R..O..S..E”

 Mike smiled and said “rose”

 I took a risk. I had a feeling the risk would be approved by Mike. I announced to the class. “Check this out, everybody. Mike can draw.” Everybody crowded around Mike’s desk. Everybody look at the rose. Everybody flipped out. 

Everybody started saying “Mike can draw” Eventually Mike got the message. He spoke his first English sentence in English class. This is what he said. “Mike can draw” He smiled. Time stood still. I’m here to tell you, Mike could draw. Many scholars praise the efficient linguistic style of Julius Caesar, how much he could say with how few words. All of France is divided into three parts. Has anyone ever said more with fewer words at the beginning of his story. This is the beginning of Mike’s story.

 Mike not only continued to draw but he also continued to listen with purpose and intention. Mike observed not only with his eyes but also with his heart and mind. Mike’s vocabulary began to grow as he listened and observed. Nouns first then verbs then adjectives. Here’s the story of the first adjective I can remember. One day, I walked over to Mike’s desk and noticed that he had been sketching a portrait of himself. On his portrait, I wrote a bunch of nouns with arrows like “mike” and "nose” and “eyes” and “ears"and “head” and “neck” and “body”. I pointed to each word and said it. Mike repeated the word with me. Then I added the adjective. I wrote “famous”; drew an arrow to the picture of Mike and said the word. 

Mike hesitated a second and then asked “Mike famous?”

 I said “Yes, Mike is famous” Mike startled me with his reply.

 “No, Mike not famous. You, Mr. Rivers…you famous.”

  I realized that Mike’s language skills were blossoming with as much beauty as his drawing skills. From that day on, every time I saw Mike I would always say. “Here’s the famous Mike.” And Mike would always say, “Mike not famous. Mr. Rivers famous.” We would laugh. We were connected. Sure enough, Mike WAS becoming famous, at least in my class.

I was running the school newspaper at the time. I asked Mike, still using arrows, objects and printed words if he would draw a comic strip for the paper. He drew the strip. The school read Mike’s comic. His character was a lion, The school loved it. Mike’s fame grew. His audience expanded. By this time, everybody in my class knew something rare was happening with Mike and his art, kids were always crowding around his desk to see what new drawings were coming alive

. About this time, I suspected that had Mike developed a crush on Kathy.  I discovered this when Mike showed me a picture of Kathy that he had been drawing. Mike was stylizing Kathy rather than photographing her with his rendering. I immediately recognized Kathy even with her stylized, over sized Disney girl eyes. I wrote “Kathy” on Mike’s paper and drew an arrow. Mike blushed and smiled. I could tell Mike wanted another word from me, an adjective perhaps so under Kathy, I wrote “beautiful” and drew another arrow. Mike put the drawing away. His portrait of Kathy was not an image that he intended to show to the class. Not only were we connected; we had a secret.

 A couple of weeks passed and Mike’s language skills kept growing. One day, he took out the picture of Kathy and showed me something new that he had added. He showed me that he knew how to change and adjective into a noun. Under my printing of “beautiful”, Mike had printed a word of his own. This is the word that Mike had printed in painstaking calligraphy.

 Beauty 

Beauty is truth and truth is beautiful. I was facing a beautiful truth in my professional life as well as a crossroads. I was given the opportunity to write a grant under the auspices of the Federal Career Education Incentive Act Grant Program, the purpose of which, as the name suggests, was to help secondary education become a better link to careers.  I proposed my very first grant. The proposal was funded for $500,000. In my proposal I visualized the creation of an intern program. The idea was radical at the time. I was chosen to be the administrator for the project. I would have to leave the classroom. Leaving the classroom was the crossroads and a difficult factor in the decision. When the kids heard what I had done. They were proud of me.

Mike came to me and said “Mike not famous, Mr. Rivers famous.”

 I left the classroom.  I left Mike in the capable hands of the Art. Dept particularly Larry Pace. Larry had served his country as a Marine in Viet Nam.

The day that I left, Mike showed me his private sketchbook. In his sketchbook were dozens of drawing of Kathy.  Underneath each sketch; a single printed word: Beauty.  

By the time I got the Intern Program running smoothly, moving it from dream to imagination to realization, Mike was back in my life. Mike had made breathtaking progress in language and art and had begun to crystallize his dreams. Mike had grown to love classic Walt Disney cartoons and wanted to become an animator.  I had heard that fantasy from other students before and I would hear it again but with Mike…well he had a dream, spectacular discipline and dedication. I had an intern program. Uh, let’s put two and two together and see if it comes out four, twenty two or five.

 I contacted the only artist in town who specialized in 16 millimeter matte animation, a guy by the name of Brian. I told Brian about Mike. I told Mike about Brian. I brought the two of them together at Brian’s downtown studio. With Brian’s encouragement and equipment along with the ongoing help of the high school Art Dept, Mike created his first animated cartoon. He had even learned to play the guitar well enough to supply his own music to the animation. In Mike’s cartoon one of the characters was a lion. Mike asked me, because I was “famous” to provide the voice for the lion. Mike’s cartoon was eventually selected in an extremely competitive national cartoon contest to be shown on Nickelodeon. Mike’s cartoon was one of the best student cartoons in the country. Little ol’ famous lion voice me was roaring on television sets across America. 

Mike was only a sophomore in high school but he was already thinking about college and colleges were thinking about him.  Anything was possible including truth , beauty and fame. Mike was most interested in beauty. He had discovered that the Disney studios regularly hired interns from the California Institute of the Arts. Mike knew about internships. He had completed four of them in high school.  In the meantime Mike had taken all the art courses at the school plus four more at Rochester Institute of Technology and had aced them all. Mike spoke a lovely version of the English language, the direct, clear, soft and kind version rarely used by native speakers. Mike could draw.  Mike could talk. Mike could write, words and music. Mike could play the guitar. Mike had a resume full of A’s, internships, art work, awards and a cartoon that had played nationally on Nickelodeon. Mike applied to the California Institute of the Arts. We were all happy but not surprised when Mike was accepted and scholarshipped.

 Mike was ready for another journey. I was on a bit of a journey myself. My first marriage was breaking up although I didn’t realize it or perhaps was denying the realization. Mike had never been to a rock concert in his life so at the end of the school year, the night after his graduation I invited Mike as our family guest to see the Moody Blues at the Canandaigua Performing Arts Center. Mike accepted the invitation. You’ll hear more about THAT later. After the concert, Mike left for California.

I haven’t seen him since. Here’s the last few things I heard about Mike. In college, his skill and interest continued to blossom. As an undergraduate, he applied for and completed an internship at Disney Studios. Upon graduation from college, Mike was hired as an animator by Disney. His first screen credit appeared at the end of the Little Mermaid, listing Mike as an animator of Ariel.

Apparently Disney liked Mike because his next assignment was a substantial promotion. Mike would be one of the main designers for Beauty and the Beast Mike was helping to create Belle.  By now, everybody knows WHAT Belle looks like. Only a few of us know WHO Belle looks like.

Beauty, if you will, looks exactly like the sketches of Kathy that Mike labored over so mightily, so beautifully, so passionately, so innocently and so truthfully during his junior high days. Kathy is Belle. Kathy is  Beauty. 

Some stories are so lovely that I hesitate to write them. Some legends are so fragile and delicate that I am afraid to relate or reveal them.  Remember? Well, I tried. As I tried, I kept flashing back to the writers who brought us the legends of the Old west, those scribes who turned big nosed, shiftless, violent, alcoholic William Hickock into the great Wild Bill, the handsome hero who died, shot in the back while playing poker and holding the deadman’s hand…a pair of aces and a pair of eight . A cardinal rule for those writers was, according to John Ford in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “if you come to a crossroads between truth and legend, write the legend.”

 The legend of Mike and Kathy is the loveliest local legend, I’ve ever personally encountered. I’m part of it; a small part but yes I was there in the very beginning. I can vouch for everything until Mike left for California. I can vouch for the similarities between Mike’s sketches of Kathy and the rendering of Beauty.  Every once in awhile, when I reminisce about my teaching days, I like to think that I was the guy who had something to do with the inspiration for the creation of Beauty. And ya know what?  It’s a beautiful feeling.  Maybe even true. Next time somebody you know mentions truth, beauty or Beauty and the Beast tell 'em this story. That’s how legends grow. 

AFTERNOON ANGEL

I know for sure it was a Tuesday afternoon. I don’t know if it was the first time I smoked weed, such moments are hard to pinpoint.

Today is also a Tuesday afternoon. Today I found out that Ray Thomas, the flautist for the Moody Blues had passed away from prostate cancer. I know something about cancer. The beauty of metaphysiction is its ability to go flash forward and backward at the same time while flirting with the eternal and the imaginary. 

The Tuesday afternoon that begins this story happened fifty years ago. I was shooting footage for a film that I was making in graduate school. My idea was to simply walk around and shoot whatever came into my lens on this Tuesday afternoon and call whatever came out “Tuesday Afternoon” It was during this activity that I might or might not have smoked a joint because I know the guy with me was a “weirdo” at the time who definitely smoked the rope. I had shot enough weird footage so I was confident that within the images, I could find 10 solid minutes that would represent what a Tuesday afternoon looked and sounded like and that it would probably be interesting to watch in say 50 years so that I could clearly remember what fifty years ago looked and sounded like. 

Yeah, maybe I was loaded as I recall that thought process. 

We were driving back to campus. We turned on an FM station. By this time I was an album guy and FM was the album station. I was trying to figure out what music I would use in the background of the film when on the radio came “Tuesday Afternoon”. I had never heard anything like it before. When the song was over, the announcer said “that was Tuesday Afternoon by the Moody Blues from their new album Days of Future Passed” 

Days of Future Passed might as well have been the name of my mind set on that Tuesday afternoon with Tuesday afternoon playing. I hoped that I would see the Moody Blues in the Future and at that time, remember the past which would naturally include the moment I was living.  I knew the Moody Blues. I knew of their hit “Go Now” which I wasn’t crazy about. I didn’t know that the personnel of the band had changed and they had gone from THAT to THIS. Ray Thomas was in both versions, I learned later.  Shocked, stoned and stunned by synchronicity, I became a Moody Blues fan. In other words, I too was a weirdo. At the time you had to be a little weird to like the Blues. They were hanging with LSD guru Timothy Leary and proud of it. I couldn’t believe that “drug music” could be so beautiful or that a simple Tuesday afternoon could be so profound . 

I had the music for my film. I found my film in the music. 

Now let’s fast forward 15 years. My first marriage was breaking up although I didn’t realize it or perhaps was denying the realization. I know I felt like I had a ton of bricks on my back. The “famous” Mike had never been to a concert before and he loved the Moody Blues. I invited Mike and a couple of friends to join my family at the Moody Blues concert at the Canandaigua Performing Arts Center. Mike accepted my invitation.

 The night of the Moody Blues arrived. I had purchased a dozen tickets for the show.  The day of the night of the Blues was very hot. I ran ten miles that afternoon trying to lighten my load. My brother, my sister, my wife, a few of our friends, my son Beau, Mike and I made the short trip. We walked to the gates. I took out the tickets. I only had eleven tickets. Everybody was looking at me. I counted the tickets only eleven again. I was going to have to exclude someone from the concert. I looked around at the faces. I knew I would exclude myself.

I looked at the tickets again. I counted the tickets. I looked at Mike. My marriage was falling apart. Mike was on his way to California. I had screwed up the tickets. I had ruined Mike’s first concert. I could feel the earth spinning. I said something incoherent to my brother. He looked at me with concern and said “whaaa?” I spoke again and once again sounded like Gregor Samsa after his metamorphosis. I started to stumble. The tickets fell out of my grasp. I looked directly into my son’s eyes as the weight on my shoulders flew off and I fell in slow motion towards the ground. As I looked into his eyes, I realized that I was watching a son watch the death of his father. I wondered how this would affect him him. I heard my wife scream “he didn’t go to his physical”

 I hit the ground I knew I was dead. When I opened my eyes some time later to see what heaven was like I saw two faces. One face was of a beautiful, elderly woman. The other was Mike. This was Mike’s first minute at his first concert. In the background Moody Blues music was playing. The elderly woman whispered her phone number in my ear. It went right into my permanent memory She told me to call anytime and that the more I called, the more I would want to call. Eventually I wouldn’t even need a phone. I still remember the number. I call it everyday. The number is/was a prayer. I called it before I started writing this, seeking help to get this right. Phone? I don’t need no stinken phone. 

They wanted to call an ambulance. I didn’t want that I wanted to go where the music was, where the angel was. Somebody picked up the tickets and found all twelve. We went inside the Shell and heard the Blues. The woman had disappeared once it became clear that I was going to live. The last time I saw her, she was listening to the show. The Blues may or may not have been playing Tuesday afternoon when our eyes met. 

Flash forward Today, Tuesday, I learned that Ray Thomas had died. Ray was 76 years old. I’m 71. How could all of those future days have passed. 

I’m calling the number.  The number is a prayer.

 IN THE PACKAGE 

Mr. Baseball remained in his coma for months. It was the bottom of the ninth and his team was behind by 100 runs and there were two out and two strikes on Mr. Baseball. One more strike and he was out. Game over. That was the situation the last time that I visited him at the Community hospital. 

Time passed. Mr. Baseball kept fouling off pitches, his faithful loving wife Rosie by his side. Rosie figured that maybe things would improve if they moved Baseball to his home ball park. Still in his coma, Mr. Baseball was transported to his home. 

Home plate. 

His home plate was far away from my homeplate. We didn’t visit in person, overwhelmed as were with our own ballgame. 

When he got home, minus a few tubes and some drugs that hadn’t worked, Mr Baseball out of nowhere, hit a homerun. He came out of the coma but remained bedridden. We didn’t know about the rally, we had left the game a little early. We knew that he was home and we had his phone number.

One day, Lynn called the number and Rosie answered. The rally was still going on. Therapists were pitching now and Mr. Baseball continued to swing away always bolstered by Rosie who was as encouraged as she was encouraging. She told Lynn that a speech therapist was pitching at the moment. She whispered to Mr. Baseball that Lynn was on the phone. He understood; another base hit.

Rosie put the phone up to Mr. Baseball’s face.

Lynn said “Hello, Mr. Baseball.”

  Lynn’s 'hello’ was like a hanging curve ball. Mr. Baseball took a mighty swing and said in a slow, soft, labored voice “Hi Lynn.” Home run. Grand slam.  

Rosie took the phone back and explained the progress Baseball had been making. He was scoring on the coma. His therapists were amazed.  He scored 200 runs and beat the stroke.

 Meanwhile he had developed cancer. It was the cancer, not the coma that finally ended the incredible rally. 

We went to the funeral. Mr. Baseball looked good almost as good as he looked the time he caught a foul ball barehanded at Frontier Field. In my dreams, he shows up at his funeral and he, Rosie, Lynn and I go off to dinner as if nuthin’ had happened. He even makes fun of me for imagining that everything wasn’t perfect. We paid our condolences to Rosie.  

A week later, we got a package in the mail with Mr. Baseball’s address as the return.

 In the package was the fiber optic bear.   

 NON-FICTION IS THE NEW FACTION

In my dreams, my camera is always broken at times like this.  My camera was shattered. That suggested, I might wake up so I decided to go with the dream a little further to see what would happen. I went to my video camera. It seemed to be working. Uh Oh. This might not be a dream. 

Whatever it was, if I could tape it…it might help. I turned on the camera. It worked. The semi had come to a stop about 150 yards in front of us. The driver was still in the cab.  I pointed the camera in the other direction and noticed a person coming towards us. I kept the camera aimed at his face so I got a closer up look than I would have without the camera. I focused on his eyes. His eyes told me that he thought he was looking at a couple of ghosts. When he got within speaking distance, I put down the camera. “I saw the whole thing. I thought you guys were goners? Are you okay?”

 I wasn’t sure. We walked around to the side of the van. Lynn was leaning up against it. I kept the video running.  The tape would later be seen at least three times on national teevee.  Moments later, the police arrived. Lynn explained the collision with astounding calm and clarity. I was no longer taping. They arranged for our totaled van to be removed from the median. They gave us a ride to a nearby hotel. They explained our situation to the folks at the front desk who set us up with a room although all of our belongings were still in the van.They lent us a room pro-bono. Everybody told us not to worry.

 We found out that we were in La Grange, Indiana.  All we had was the clothes on our backs. And the aid of better angels.

 I was teaching summer school. I was a teacher all the way. I taught twelve months a year. No house painting for me. I had been going twelve months a year for ten years with only one break in between. I didn’t teach in the summer of 87, the year that I met Lynn. Lynn was a single Mom when we met. She was raising three daughters. I was a single Dad raising a son and a daughter. Her kids liked me and my kids liked her. We spent a lot of time together especially on the weekends when I had custody of my two. Lynnn was working part time at First Federal Bank. She was good with change. She balanced every day. She could find the errors when someone else failed to balance. She didn’t stand for a lot of bullshit that’s why she was checking the boat when I suggested a road trip test. 

My prior experience as a road warrior had convinced me that you don’t really know a person until you’ve been on the road with them. I had made the trip from ocean to ocean three times before I got married the first time. I regretted the fact that I hadn’t road tripped with my first wife before we got married. Although two children had to be born, we might have saved ourselves some nightmares. I had rushed into that first one and wasn’t gonna rush into this one. Two years had already passed with Lynn and me….our bodies were at rest and would tend to stay at rest unless acted upon. Times of indecision. We had both already been married. We both carried the scars. 

We had met one enchanted evening when she walked up to me and asked me if I wanted to dance. The first song we danced to was “Hurt so Good”….John Mellencamp. The second was “Loving You” by Elvis. The third was “It’s All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards. When Tommy was about to sing the words “then he’ll kiss your lips” I decided to take the chance. I kissed her lips. She kissed me back.  We had been together every day since and it was going on two years. Two wonderful years.

Time to clarify.  Lynn made a decision. She said we should get married at the local justice of the peace. She called it to question one afternoon when we were having lunch at Mario’s on East Avenue our favorite Italian restaurant.

 Justice of the peace was no place for me or for us as far as I was concerned. She took it as a rejection of her love which was the opposite of my intention.  For the first time, we began to wonder about the future of the relationship. Yet, we had booked a trailer for a weekend at Darien Lake. We decided to make the trip.  We had a couple of our kids with us. They were having a lot more fun than we were. They were outside the trailer when Lynn handed me a tiny article from the Democrat and Chronicle. The article said “The Field of Dreams is a real place.” 

All of a sudden it was clear to me. I am a person of intuition which means I have a tendency to say out loud exactly what is flashing through my mind at the exact time that it flashes. The flash came on. “ Hey Lynn, If we were ever to get married, it would have to be at the most beautiful place in America. Our love deserves it. If you’re willing to travel to Iowa and if we can find this place and if it’s real we could get married on the spot….right at home plate.” 

She made a face that I couldn’t decipher so I didn’t take it as a rejection. Then she said “Great idea. I’ll call up Iowa and tell them we need a marriage license to get married at an imaginary place at an undetermined time.”

 I found out later that she thought I was nuts and bullshitting her at the same time. We had seen the movie together earlier in the year. we both thought it was great. In one scene, Kevin Costner (Ray Kinsella) asked his wife Amy Madigan “is this heaven or is this Iowa” as they relaxed one starry evening on the diamond that he had carved into his cornfield. The location was so exquisite that I thought perhaps it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. This was the place for us. Plus we would give the relationship the test….a test that I firmly believed had to be taken by any couple in the tentative situation that we occupied.

I enjoyed teaching summer school because I got a chance to pay attention to the kids who had been lost along the way during the regular school year. I was always amazed with the progress they made when given that second chance. So the question lingered, if we were going to take a road trip when would it be. Lynn had her schedule at the bank and I had mine at the high school.

During the regular school year, I taught twelfth grade English as well as Creative Writing. I also taught an elective called Cinematic Literacy. I created that one myself and it was a great success. I was approaching the peak of my teaching career. I had ten days at the end of August, beginning of September. 

Lynn had a week of undefined vacation saved up. We had originally met on July eleventh 1987 or as we called it 7/11.

On our two year anniversary, we went out to dinner at the very restaurant where Lynn had made her first proposal a month before. Midway through the meal she said “I sent away for a marriage license in Iowa. The field is located in Dyersville which is near Dubuque. We have a license waiting for us in Dubuque.” Of course I was surprised but since I hadn’t been bullshitting her about the road trip idea, I said “that’s great. Good job.”

 I didn’t know if she had actually procured a license or if she was reality testing . I was mystified when she said “so if we break up this summer at least we can always say that at one time we had a marriage license in Iowa when we tell our story”. 

All through the month of August, we came up with reasons to take the trip and those reasons were roadblocked by objections, obstacles and realities. If Lynn wasn’t exactly rocking the boat during those weeks, she was damned sure checking for leaks.

 One night, we watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We loved the flick and mixed it into our plan. If we headed west we would go as far as Devil’s Tower in Wyoming and if we hadn’t made up our mind to get married by that time, we would head back and know that we had tried goddamn it, we had tried and we had a Iowa Marriage license to prove it. 

It was also becoming clear that if we hadn’t made up our mind to try the road trip before school started, it meant that we probably should wrap up the relationship as painlessly as possible. On August 25th, I called Lynn from my apartment and said “I was ready to go if she was”. 

She wasn’t ready and she hung up sorta pissed off. This was the last possible day to make the trip and be back in time for school. A couple hours later, I heard a knock on the door. It was Lynn. She told me the van was in the parking lot, packed and ready to go if I was serious. I ran into my house, packed a few things. I climbed into the van. “Let’s go”.

I said. “I’ll drive” I drove the first leg. We found a rest area deep in Ohio. We napped for a few hours. Then we went into the rest area and washed up. Lynn came out first and went behind the wheel. I started to climb into the van when an impulse struck me. As I was leaving the rest area, I saw a machine selling bio-rhythm cards. I decided what the hell…I went back and bought a card for that day. It only took maybe an extra thirty seconds. I didn’t like what the card said so I threw it out. That thirty seconds would be crucial as we were headed for a blind spot that we might have missed if not for the card.  We managed to arrive at the blind spot exactly on time. Yeah, the whole crazy pilgrimage was my idea. I talked her into it, yet it was her van that was smashed to bits.  

One way or another, the journey was over. We were alone together in a motel in LaGrange, Indiana not far from Touchdown Jesus and the Golden Dome of Notre Dame. I was beginning to get a grip on death. As we traveled from the wreckage to the hotel, I asked what time it was. When we got to the hotel, it was a half hour before the time it was when we were on our way to the hotel. Someone explained that we had crossed the line separating one time zone from another. We had left Eastern Daylight Savings Time. That’s when I began to realize what death is/was. This was eternity. When you’re dead, you’re in Indiana and you keep crossing between time zones and Touchdown Jesus forever. 

Time stabilized for awhile in the hotel. I was expecting hysterics, blame or disassociation from Lynn. Instead, I got calm, composed, courageous capability.She started working the phones. She had a handle on what happened. She called her auto insurance company back in New York. She explained the situation…..car totaled, hotel in Indiana, etc. They wanted to know what her plan was. To my astonishment, Lynn told them that she wanted to continue on with her journey. She outlined what she needed and what she expected to make that continuation possible. Following that she called the American Automobile Association and got from them what we needed to continue the journey. A few minutes later, a rental car appeared at the motel. We drove around a bit, looking for a place to eat. We lost and gained two or three hours in that fifteen minute search.  

After “lunch” we made our way to the junkyard to take a look at the van. “Yep, it’s totaled”, the junkman asserted. We gathered our belongings from the van and loaded them in the rental. I could not have been more impressed by any companion. Even though I wasn’t sure whether we were alive or not, it was clear that we were inhabiting the same realm. It was a realm, I wanted to remain in for the rest of my life/death.

I got down on one knee in that junkyard and asked Lynn to marry me. She accepted. August 26, 1989. What a day. What an eternity. And the pilgrimage was still on. We didn’t know if we were dead or alive but we knew we were getting married. We didn’t know where. We had a marriage license in Iowa. We had been looking for the Field of Dreams which we heard was in Dyersville.

We drove through that town. There’s a lot of farms in Dyersville and a lot of corn. We couldn’t find the farm that we were looking for. We were hungry, tired, not sure if we were alive and headed for a place that might not exist. We were in a rented van.

 We saw the driveway to yet another farm and turned into it, past yet another corn field. When we got to the farm itself, it was most definitely not the Field of Dreams farm, it looked more like the Cujo farm. We got the hell out of there but not before some giant thing flew out of the corn, through my open window and onto my chest. I don’t know what the hell it was a bird, a locust, a demon grasshopper? I don’t know, I just grabbed whatever it was and threw it out the window toward the cornfield or the hell from whence it came.

  When we reached the end of the driveway safe from Cujo and the flying thing, I pulled the van off the road. I realized that I had gone crazy. Here we were in the middle of Iowa for God sake. We were lost. We might be as totaled as was our original van. All my fault, all part of yet another crazy dream that I had dragged Lynn into.

 We turned right at the end of the driveway. We drove about a hundred yards.

And then…we saw a paper plate…..nailed to a tree….on the plate two words and an arrow…..Movie site….arrow pointed right. 

We took another right turn and a half mile down the road, there it was….The Field of Dreams. No doubt. Right exactly out of the film and out of my dreams. Perfect. We drove down that long driveway and met a man who was working in the yard. I asked him if he was the owner of the place. He said that he wasn’t but that the owner was out in the cornfield on his tractor. I saw the man on the tractor in the corn and walked towards him. He turned his tractor to meet me.  When we were about ten feet apart, he shut off the tractor and focused his blue eyes on me. “Can I help you?” asked the man on the tractor.

 I said, “I believe you can. We’ve traveled from Rochester, New York. We had a terrible automobile accident yesterday. I’m not sure if we’re alive or dead so tell me, is this heaven or is this Iowa?”

 He looked at me and realized that there was something going on here and he wasn’t sure what it was. Then he answered in the most perplexing way possible. “It’s whatever you want it to be.’

  I said, “whatever it is, it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. I want it to be the place where we get married.”

 He said “You can do that.”

 I asked “Would Friday be all right.”

 He said “that would be fine.” 

We shook hands.  On that Friday, he would be our best man. His name was Don Lansing. I told Lynn the great news. We got in our car and drove to Devil’s Tower. We had originally said that we would go as far West as Devil’s Tower in honor of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and if we hadn’t made up our minds by then, well we’d head back home and take a break. Of course, we had already made up our minds thanks to the junkyard proposal. 

That night, we stopped in Sioux Falls. A year earlier Sioux Falls had been the site of a horrifying tragedy. A plane crashed and there were no survivors. The plane crashed in a cornfield. We trucked through the Black Hills and the Badlands of South Dakota.We stopped at Mt. Rushmore where I almost lost my wallet. We made a late night stop in Deadwood. We wanted to check and see if we were really still alive. They dropped fluorescent eye drops into Lynn’s eyes and checked to see if hemorrhaging had occurred. I’ll never forget looking at Lynn in that darkened emergency room with her glowing, green fluorescent eyes. The eyes were by far the brightest objects in the room.In that eerie light, I wondered about the ghost of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane.

The doctors cleared us from the journey as if anything could stop us now.

We stayed the night in Spearfish after spending some afternoon time wading through a few crystal clear South Dakota cascades, getting our feet wet, so to speak.

We returned to Iowa on Thursday night. Don greeted us warmly and invited us into the house. Yeah, the house in the movie. Don wanted to know what we were going to wear. All we had left were our jeans. Don went to the phone and called the local tux shop. They had one tux left. Don asked if we wanted a cake. We said yeah. He got on the phone and called the local bakery. He asked Lynn how big the cake should be. She said big enough for fifty. I laughed out loud. We didn’t know a single person in Iowa aside from Don and the guy who originally greeted us, a guy named Butch who was a caretaker for the field and his wife Annie. 

Then he asked Lynn if she needed a wedding gown. He knew a dressmaker in town. He called Anne Steffen, the local dressmaker. He described our dream and asked Ann if she could help out. She said that she could.

 That evening, we drove into town. The only tux in town fit me perfectly. Next we met Anne. She and Lynn got together and designed a wedding dress. That night we slept at Butch and Annie’s house and the rain poured down ending a crop wounding drought.

 The next day, we went back into town. The dress was made. Beautiful like in a dream. We drove to the town office to pick up our wedding license that Lynn had sent away before we left on our pilgrimage. By the time we got to the office the word had already spread. We got our license. They told us that they had heard all about the plan and so had the local television station. The station wanted to interview us.  We met the reporter and she seemed very interested in our story. She had a full camera crew with her.

We told them that we had arranged for a magistrate to do the honors. We told them about the car crash. The town barber had heard about all of this and volunteered to give me a haircut while Lynn tried on her dress.  By that time it was getting late. We stopped at a restaurant to have our last meal as single people. We looked up at the teevee and there we were on the local news. We watched ourselves telling our story. 

We made it back to the house. By this time, a bunch of neighbors had gathered. I went into the room where in the movie Ray’s daughter looks out the window and says “something’s gonna happen out there.”just before the ghost shows up. I had the same view of the field and I knew that indeed something was gonna happen out there. We were gonna get married. The ghosts were gonna show up.

 I made sure I had the wedding ring which we had bought at Wall Drugs in South Dakota. The rings were made from genuine Black Hills gold. By this time about fifty people had gathered. I left the house and walked into the corn in left field. I figured that since I still wasn’t sure that I was alive that I should come out of the corn like the ghosts did.  I made my way to the pitchers mound where I met Don. I was on the mound for a few moments when the fifty people started to ooh and ahh as Lynn emerged from the house. Suddenly everything was in transcendent five dimension. I couldn’t have dreamed of a more beautiful bride. 

She made the long walk past the bleachers and crossed the magical first base line. She didn’t disappear. She met me on the mound and we walked together to home plate where the magistrate awaited. We took our vows with Don standing right behind us. The witnesses cheered. After the ceremony, we went back to the porch. The towns folk had brought fixings. We ate the cake together. They all wanted pictures so we posed for awhile. We drank some champagne that somebody had provided. We bid them farewell. The next day we were home. On the flight back, we told the stewardess our story and she put us in first class. Sitting right next to us was Maury Wills, the ex-Dodger shortstop who had once stole a hundred bases in a season. She told Maury the story and he congratulated us. We made it home in time for the Ring of Fire around Canadaigua Lake. We’re going to be celebrating our thirtieth anniversary next week.

Thirty years later,  we’re still going the distance and easing each other’s pain, enduring, surviving and destined for happily ever after.

Doot Doo

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