Safe at Sappy

There has been much written about baseball. Words about the intricacies of the game. The history, the drama, the characters. The swelling wins and crushing defeats. The memories that get seared into your brain with the hot iron of past experiences loving and hugging this game of all games.

Much has been recorded. Much has been talked about and pondered, argued and discussed. Fists have been thrown and hands have been held. Drinks have been tossed into the air and smashed against a wall. A beer soaked breath coming at your face as a friend comes in for a quick peck on the cheek after your team just got sent to the World Series, on the wings of some “did it really happen?!” heroic feat.

Soft, wet, late afternoon summer grass under your feet in the backyard with a fast-warming, sweaty beer in your lap and the game on the radio – simple, the way it’s been heard for 80, 90 years. No flashy graphics or replays, no cuts to exclusive interviews between pitches to keep the attention-deficit-addled viewer’s brain occupied.

Just the simple, steady voice of a professional, letting you know what is happening. Balls. Strikes. Base hits. Foul balls. Double play. Hit and run! This game is brought to you by’s. There’s a Boy Scout troop here from Ishpeming. Happy Birthday to So and So, in Section This or That. She’s from Flint. Kicks and deals.

The it could be’s. The it might be’s. The it is’s.

Gone.

These, and so many more, the announcer giving you the script over the airwaves and you are allowed to construct the play, make the movie, in your mind. How it looks, the players’ expressions, the glint of stadium lights on a plastic helmet. The smell of dogs and brats and kraut, smoking in the concourses, floating back memories that were just yesterdays, when it was just yesterday.  

Crack and chatters. Cracks and chatters. The thwack of a fastball landing in a glove of thick, stitched leather. I don’t know if a more beautiful sound exists in sports.

So today, on the eve of the playoff series between the Tigers and Yankees, I just want to say that the reason I love baseball the way I do is not because I am of the opinion that it is simply the most perfect and beautiful game ever devised – it’s because the same is the most sincere and organic game ever created.

And it’s that way because, I think, of the way we experience the game. We experience it in often visceral and heart-wrenching ways. On the edge of our seats ways. Looking through the space between our fingers, which are covering our face ways.

Baseball sucks you in because it’s hard to play well. It draws you in because you can see the faces of those you cheer for or against. You can tell how they’re feeling. You can feel the game and understand it, I think, because we also fail more than we succeed. But we keep stepping up to the plate.

You can’t see that emotion through football helmet.

Football, come to think of it, is just some vestigial tail leftover thing from the Roman Empire in my book. Watching it is really no different than taking your seat with the other plebes in the Coliseum to witness some poor fool get his intestines thrown about by some rabid wild animal that’s been beaten mean for three days.

Football appeals to our inner Neanderthal. It’s a telegraph cable back to the days when we would crush a skull with the nearest “Big Thing” just because. It riles people to tap into that undercurrent of ultra-violence that still seeps between our cells.

It is an uncivilized, undignified game.

Baseball is a game of class and dignity.

It is a gentleman’s game.

It is a game handed down through the generations like a super-special family heirloom, meant to be kept close and respected.

It is a game of unrivaled distinction, where the current players play against not only their opponents on the field, but the ghosts of those long past. Baseball respects its elders like no other sport.

But even more than all this, it’s just a whole lot of fun. Fun like crazy kids in the backyard fun. Fun like your ready to cry and explode with delight and laughter fun. Fun like hugging an old friend not seen for ages fun.

Just fun.

Go Tigers.

The Write Stuff?

This is more than I’ve done with this blog, consistently at least, in quite some time. But I’ve told myself that I need to get far, far away from the constant dribbling beat – easy, slow and methodical – of the 15 inch news piece. That shit’s easy for me now – too easy, really. Like putting in my contact lenses, which is done with the ease of the steady hand of habit.

I have next to no followers on this blog. What are there, nine of you? Hi! Wow, one of them is me! Some of you may know that I have intentions of writing a book about my uber-trip of this past summer. I have gotten intimidated over the past few days reading blogs and articles and summaries on Websites about how to get the book writing process off the ground. Most writers, I’ve learned, fail to get their books published for several reasons:

1)    Their story idea is too broad and, therefore, is unmarketable.

2)    Someone didn’t do their homework and, therefore, doesn’t know what they’re writing about.

3)    They just totally suck at writing.

But the sum of Nos. 1, 2 and 3 is usually splashed around somewhere in the book proposal, a dreadful but necessary document that can make or break your chances of getting to be a shitty writer in the first place. Well, not totally. I can do that here.

The book proposal sounds like taking chemotherapy. It really, really, really blows, but you have to do it. Make sure to bend over, too, ‘cause it's going up your ass. In 10 to 60 pages, you map out your entire book, or at least what it is generally going to look like. You describe the chapters, what motivated you to write the book, who your audience will be and how it will be marketed. And you have to answer the most important question of the entire before-you-even-think-about-writing-the-book process: “Why are you the only person in the world who could write this book?”

That’s the dumbest question ever, I think. No one is that important. Someone will always do it better, catchier, flashier and more thorough. There is always a circling hawk out there, waiting up in the thermals for a chance to dive down and sink its 4-inch talons into your lunch. Period.

I think you write the damn thing because something moves you to, because you felt something, because it’s the only way you feel like you can adequately express something powerful and meaningful and important. And that’s that. I just want a platform to say something, not a market plan.

Sueños de una mujer muy buena

Maria stood in a line of women, the sound of popping filling the greenhouse air as they dead-headed marigolds, when the whispers began, which grew into mumbled words and then slid over the palates of flowers so thick with health they looked like orange carpet. 

Maria shouldn’t have talked, they said. She should have kept her damn mouth shut. Everyone knew Jim, the owner, was a bastard, but what was worse, the way he would slide a bit too close to the women or the ICE detention facility in Battle Creek?

Maria had left her trailer that morning for the greenhouse, driving – as always – five miles below the speed limit, her head just poking over the top of the 1995 Dodge Shadow’s steering wheel as cars swooshed past her on Portage Road.  Her time bomb heart pounded in cadence with the sectioned concrete. The fat man’s laugh still hung over her like a saturated sin.

Since arriving in Michigan from a barrio outside Juarez, Maria had been honing a new life for herself, and Lorena and Carlos, her kids. Gone was the needly rain on the corrugated metal roof, the clouds of slow-death blowing over the trash-strewn streets, the slap of her husband’s open hand for reasons he’d never say.              

For cash and no questions, the woman tended to all matter of grown goods. And they all drank daily from the sour cup of anxiety, hoping foolishly that the glass walls of the greenhouse, opaque with millions of dirty droplets, would shield them from Immigración.

            The verbal jabs seemed to weave into the smoky sweet scent that grew after the careful pinch of each shrink-shriveled head. Rage rose in Maria’s gut.

They didn’t know how tight Jim would squeeze her hands to keep her from clawing at his eyes. How hard he’d push her against the edge of the Formica countertop as he’d close in to lick her cheek. His sick laugh as he’d walk out of her trailer and back into his life.

            Or how she would stand at the open door, bawling, the stenchy saliva from Jim’s tongue still stuck to her face, listening to him tell her: “don’t bother telling the police. They’ll never believe you.”

            But after two years of that, she did. And they did believe her.

            Last week, Maria sat in the courtroom with Carlos when the verdict was read. Guilty on all counts. Sentencing in 30 days.

            Unwilling to face prison, Jim soon split town. He left his wife, and their three kids, too. He had the cash and the means. He could build a life somewhere else. Like a snowflake, he’d quietly land on some Wonderbread ‘burg, and begin again.

            Maria saved her tears for the ride home. As she wiped them, they turned the orange on her fingers into a thin paste, which she rubbed into the rusty skin of her cheeks. It rooted quickly and then vanished. 

The next morning, milky light from a still high moon slid through the frayed curtains in the trailer’s one bedroom, where Maria slept with her kids, brightening plumes of dust that kicked-up as she crept silently across the carpet, toward Lorena, now captured by the deepest of dreams.

            She ran her fingers through Lorena’s straight, jet-black hair, laid hard and flat over the quilt Maria had brought from home. Maria laid down next to her, closed her eyes and tried to hitchhike onto the dream that was holding onto Lorena, firm and tight.

Mass Hysteria

I sat through the mass like a good Catholic should. More than most, I suppose, Catholics don’t really enjoy the mass, at least in the sense of deriving great personal pleasure from it. But we know that it’s good for us. We endure it more than embrace it – not unlike going to the dentist.

I entered St. Vincent de Paul five minutes after the start of the service, which is always a slightly embarrassing thing to do, what with all the looks from the parishioners and, possibly, the priest. So I slipped into the last pew to the left of the altar, just behind three screeching Hispanic toddlers, the children of children.

This was place of my baptism, of Fr. Bill, a large, burly man with hands the size of a small octopi, of eye-stinging incense pouring out of a bright brass orb with holes large enough to let loose the burning embers inside and set the whole damn place up in chomping holy spirit flames in seconds. Fr. Bill’s handshake could have turned coal into a diamond on demand, or split an atom, releasing enough energy to light Pontiac’s streets for a few nights, or bend the bars of a tormented man’s personal prison, and then reach in, grab him and pull him back to himself.

But he was also a man of such unearthly calm and kindness and, when speaking to him, one felt as though they were sinking slowly into the floor. He injected a buttery sureness and certainty into the eyes of everyone he came across, an undeniable dose of faith and love that became a part of people, and the people of it, like a benevolent symbiotic spirit-thing. 

I was 8-years-old at the baptism, or was it 9? It was late, for sure. The church likes to get its members in early, when God’s little creatures are soft and screaming, their cute pudgy-pink cheeks belying the fact that their brain is, at that point, nothing but warm marshmallow fluff. A drooling, shitting baby does not tend to protest this application of God’s good grace. They think they are taking a bath anyway and it’s just as well, for their dirty little souls need a thorough cleansing.

Like many things in my formative years, Mike got a bit of a late start on this one. But he managed to put down the bloody marys for one Sunday morning and haul me off to make it official. And it’s a good thing. God forbid that I should have died in some tragic biking accident, or by the evil hand of kid cancer, or by testing too much of Mike’s “patience potion.” There was nearly 10 years of sin clogging my spiritual circulatory system, blocking the efficient movement of the holy spirit throughout this make and model of God’s temple. Life after the baptism would be different, I was told, for if I was to die now, I wouldn’t go straight to hell. Yes, there was a chance for hell, for sure. But it wouldn’t be the express mine shft elevator ride toward white hot, stoked coals of fire and melting skin. One might descend deliberately, a speed along the lines of a walk along the beach at sunset or the gait of a disabled person or the shuffle of a senior citizen after a stroke. That slowly. 

Fr. Bill poured bucket after bucket of God-approved life-water on my head in what seemed like more of a carnival game than an initiation into the church, the first wade into the mystery of the sacraments. Then it was over and all I felt was wet and embarrassed, as the sound of Mike’s late-70s model .35 mm Minolta clicked and clicked and clicked at a time when nothing should have been...clicking. He took pictures of me like some kind of Vietnam-era photojournalist embedded with a backcountry outfit that was in the shit a lot. He knelt, he scampered, he stood on steps and climbed up to the lectern. All the movements could be seen in his polyester gray pants, which pulled and stretched as he contorted his legs into all the positions necessary to capture this moment. And then he started to direct people into the most advantageous pictoral positions – during the baptism – in a show of his personality that I had simply grown accustomed to. If he wasn’t anything, it was bashful. My father could convince anyone to do most anything. He was bold and brash and came off sometimes like a real sonofabitch. Which he was, God love him.

But here I was once more, older, in this sanctuary of old, dark wood and high stained glass windows, the names of the benefactors for each filter of God’s sunshine labeled on a section of glass at the window’s bottom. On a sunny day, like today, the sunlight would shine through the windows’ colored, paper mache glass in blood reds and deep purples and wheat-field yellows onto the worn rows of benches, the comfort of which was like a penance itself, a butt numbing endeavor that should be doled out by priests in the confessional as a punishment after a penitent purges their deepest and most embarrassing thoughts. No wonder we knelt so much.

The priest, a man in his early 40s, spent his time with his mass, like a mother breastfeeding her newborn or a farmer walking his land, reaching down to pick up a clump of earth and breaking it open, letting it slide slowly though his fingers. After the traditional back and forths, after the standing and kneeling and standing again and holding hands, after the time tested words and phrases – seared into the mind and able to be remembered after decades of roaming far from Rome – had been uttered, the priest laid into Stephen Hawking, about how he was anti-God and should be dismissed, shamed, ignored, I lost interest.

All the memories of this place – the hours that were so numerous they turned into weeks, maybe months – began to fade away. It wasn’t just that I’d been away from mass for so long, or that I’d been away from St. Vincent de Paul, on that lonely stretch of Wide Track Drive, by the abandoned office buildings and crack houses, for years. It was that I’d been away from this way of encountering God for so long. And for all the ways that I’d been moved by this faith for nearly a decade of my life, the mass ended with me not wanting to be there anymore.

There were so many times that I had felt truly embraced in that musty place by the spirit of God, of the Lord, of the Great Big Being Up There. And I can suppose one of the things I admire about this faith is that it’s often experienced in visceral ways, ways that you can touch and feel, see and smell.

The feel of the sanctified host on your tongue and how it dissolves and turns into a thick gummy mess of pure gluten, a warmth swelling inside me that I had no other explanation for expect to say that God had planted something in me that he intended on growing for a lifetime.

The sweet burn of the blood in the back of your throat, which, as a kid, feels something like rebellion if the child wasn’t so native to the meaning of it all. But is it even possible for anyone to fully understand how wine actually becomes blood, a process that just so happens to be one of my all time favorite English words, transubstantiation?  

Sitting across from a man, a familiar stranger, and divulging – puking out, really – all of the things that you are ashamed of, a litany that can stretch back days or years or decades, and crying or laughing or contemplating fully your life outside the closing click of the confession room door. And then leaving that place and feeling light and airy, like you just emerged from a tomb and into the light of newness and possibility. Feeling like you are floating on a puffy cloud to somewhere.

The time when I saw Mike – always in the second row – weeping as Betty, an aged woman of deep, dark ebony, sang Ave Maria after the Eucharist, swelling the sanctuary with the heart-spinning, contemplative sounds of that song to the point that I thought the slate sections on the roof might come loose and hurtle down the steep grade to the parking lot below.

Or the time as an “is-he-eating-enough?” skinny altar boy, when the robe hanging off me somehow drifted over the flame of a votive candle, setting my left arm aflame and seriously delaying the start of mass. From that point forward, I was put on crucifix duty, which made Mike proud because I was at the front of the procession every Sunday. He smiled at me every time I walked by him.  

I’d been moved there, that’s for sure. But I knew now that God could – and even should – be found and admired and felt in places and ways that were outside of the tight, rehearsed, fashioned framework of this church, this faith, this tradition. I left the church through the front door, past the priest before he readied himself for the post-mass hand-shakings and “Have a good Sunday’s.” The holy water that I crossed myself with dripped from my brow as I made my way back to the car. I didn’t wipe it off.