watching the game

Gone Too Soon

 

 

 

             The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

            Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

            Or other testimony of summer nights.  The nymphs are departed.

            And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;

            Departed, have left no addresses.”

 

                                                               T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

 

________

 

The Cape Cod Baseball League's 2011 season ended with the Harwich Mariners taking a three-game series from the Falmouth Commodores to win the championship.   Players from the Chatham A’s had packed their bags and left town long before that final victory.  Once the winningest team on the Cape, our hometown Anglers (formerly known as the Athletics until the MLB moved in and dictated change) didn’t even make the playoffs this year, and now they are gone.

The season is done.  The stats are in the books.   Field managers are already looking toward next summer’s rosters, considering elite pitchers and top prospects who might bring to the Cape their strong arms, big bats, and a winning season.

There’s still plenty of baseball to be played on other fields, in other small towns, and in big cities everywhere.  All the college boys whose wood bat seasons just ended will soon take the first swings of fall ball.  In many ways baseball never really ends; more and more it seems to me that this is true.  But our town has undergone a sea-change.  The field near my house doesn’t look the same.  Main Street doesn’t feel the same.  All our evenings play out so differently now, the rhythms of life substantially altered. 

Perhaps the end of a baseball season - especially a premature ending such as this - prepares us for other endings and losses; there’s a sadness in it.

The refrain of a country song has been echoing lately on the radio inside my head.  I don’t particularly like the song, but it keeps playing anyway, like a top-40 favorite on a local FM station:  "Gone like a freight train, gone like yesterday . . . ."

You'll likely hear this song if you visit minor league ballparks and college stadiums.   It's not an uncommon outburst after a home run ball travels over the wall.  The Montgomery Gentry ditty is an odd choice, though, because the song's sentiment is wistful, melancholy, and full of regret - hardly celebratory in tone.  The song isn't about a ball, of course; it's about a woman.

Gone like a '58 Cadillac . . . gone like all the good things that ain't ever coming back, she's gone.  Gone.  Gone.   Gone.

There are no more kids at baseball camp every weekday morning, boys and girls in t-shirts truly believing they'll make it to the big leagues someday.  No more college flags flying proudly in the gardens of families who opened their homes and refrigerators to young players, surrogate moms and dads who showed up faithfully at every single game.  No more pickup trucks and cars with decals and license plates from far away:  Baylor, NC State, Clemson, Tarheels, Gamecocks, Hogs, and the lone star of Texas in red, white, and blue.  No more relievers sitting on the crooked bench they call a bullpen; no more uniforms of royal blue and white.  They're gone.

In a few years, we’ll be watching television, my son and daughter and I, aunts and uncles and cousins, and we’ll see them again.  And so will you.   We’ll say we know them.   Danny Espinosa at spring training.   Evan Longoria at the All-Star game.  Andrew Miller on NESN.   Chris Getz playing second base, Matt LaPorta at first, David Huff in an Indians cap, taking a line drive in the face.  “Hey, I know him!”  At least we felt as if we knew him.  He played ping-pong with my son the batboy, once upon a summer evening, inside the VFW hall out near the town dump.

"We saw him play . . . I watched that kid pitch . . . We remember that win . . . I was there . . . .”    Almost every fan remembers baseball this way.  The achievements of others lend dignity and meaning to our own anonymous lives.  The human connection, however brief, resonates for years.  Hey, we knew him.

They’re here; then suddenly come August, they’re gone.   Gone like a freight train.  Playoffs or no playoffs, the abrupt ending always startles us.   It's enough to knock the wind out of you for a few seconds at unexpected and random moments.   Gone like yesterday.

The country song is playing again, this time in counterpoint with a Neil Diamond elegy dating back to my high school years.   

Jesus Christ, Fanny Brice, Wolfie Mozart and Humphrey Bogart and Genghis Khan and on to H. G. Wells.  Ho Chi Minh, Gunga Din, Henry Luce and John Wilkes Booth, and Alexanders King and Graham Bell.   Ramar Krishna, Mama Whistler, Patrice Lumumba and Russ Colombo, Karl and Chico Marx, Albert Camus.   E. A. Poe, Henri Rousseau, Sholom Aleichem and Caryl Chessman, Alan Freed and Buster Keaton too.

And each one there has one thing shared:  they have sweated beneath the same sun.   Looked up in wonder at the same moon, and wept when it was all done.  For bein’ done too soon.   For bein’ done too soon.   For bein’ done.”

Now obsolete, the Chatham A’s 2011 calendar is still visible in a sidebar on the team website. As my computer hums its dull sound, I’m looking at the early days of August, now gone, wondering at the ways in which we measure the passage of time.  Wareham @ Chatham.   Chatham @ Harwich.  Orleans @ Chatham.  Chatham @ Orleans.  Followed by a bunch of empty days that say:  Off.  Off.  Off.  Off.   Off.

Something tightens in my chest.

And then a few lines of poetry emerge from who knows where, bumping Neil Diamond out of the lineup:  “What will we do?  What will we ever do?”

"What shall I do now?  What shall I do? / I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street / With my hair down, so.  What shall we do to-morrow? / What shall we ever do?"   

The hot water at ten.  / And if it rains, a closed car at four. / And we shall play a game of chess, / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door."  *

All the summer people still crowd our resort town with Land Rovers and Volvos and gleaming black Escalades with plates from New York and Maryland and Vermont, but the field is empty of fans.   Ballplayers who were loaned to us have returned to their home fields, their lives at school and fall practices, their mothers’ kitchens, their apartments and girlfriends, homework and tailgate parties while we remain, trimming hedges, gathering bundles of clippings, sanding and painting the trim, then looking out at a changing sea.

The Cape League season winds down in rain and fog.   The boys of summer depart abruptly, their vehicles bound for Chapel Hill, Richmond, Plano, Memphis.   Their dugout is quiet, and we are left to gaze at an empty field.   Never will this same group of young men live in town together, play as the team they were for one brief season, when warm weather and long days felt permanent.

Two parking lots stand empty behind the Community Center and The Red Nun Bar and Grill.  Trees in full leaf near the snack bar quiver, but nothing is moving on the base paths nearby. 

I park on Depot Street across from the fire station and survey a quiet field.  The landscape is already altered, chalk lines stretching diagonally from infield to outfield, obtruding on the geometry and integrity of the diamond, defining boundaries for a soccer game, a sport that is played mostly without hands.   My eyes are growing weaker with age, but as I look toward home plate without my glasses, I see a man standing in the batter’s box, swinging an invisible bat. He has a strong grip and a decent swing.  His back foot pivots slightly in the dirt.   The announcer has just called his name for all to hear.    The hitter is a key player in the line-up, an athlete at the peak of his career in the prime of life, excited about a winning season and a promising future.

In truth, the person I see is a man alone.   He is well past his prime, and there is no team.   The field is empty but for him, the press box shut tight.  He holds an imaginary bat in a game that is not real.

 The team is gone, the season done, and so many players will never warm up on this field again.  There’s an ache in that thought. Something akin to sorrow and loss and emptiness, though I’m not sure that emptiness can actually ache.   

A couple days later, and I'm on the road again.   While running errands around town, I make a point of driving by the field as I often do during the off-season - just to see the place, pausing to remember and preparing to feel sad again.  But this time the ballpark isn't empty as I expected it would be. Nor is there a lone fellow protecting the plate.  I pull over, stop the car, and park beside the hill that rises above a lovely green expanse of grass.  

Just below me down in center field, an important game is taking place.  A young father is pitching, and his small boy is swinging for the fences.   (The fences are about twenty feet from home plate.)  A folding beach chair serves as backstop and catcher.

Nothing has ended, after all.   It’s simply beginning again.

 

 

 

 

 

*  selections from  T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922.   facsimile edition.

Road Trip to Elsewhere

 

 
  The signs I viewed soon after touching down in central Mississippi sounded nothing like home.  A town named Pearl.  The Chunky River.  Holy Revival Tabernacle and Minnow Bucket Road.

Two quick flights from Boston had taken me to another world.  

In retrospect it seems odd that I didn’t notice a single ball field during my visit to the Deep South, a region I've long associated with athletics:  Archie Manning and the SEC, Eli Manning and the Ole Miss Rebels, Jerry Rice, Boo Ferriss, the Bulldogs at State, and that retired guy from Hattiesburg who throws a football in Wrangler commercials. 

Oh, I saw plenty of uniforms on this road trip, but they had nothing to do with football or baseball.  So many uniforms.  Atlanta, Charlotte, Jackson, Meridian:  so many men and women in uniform.  Combat boots on young recruits, women with crisp caps and hair pulled back tight, infantry and Air Force and Airborne.  Camouflage, flight suits, and Navy blue. 

Many faces displayed an otherworldly expression, as if they were gazing at something far away.

At Logan Airport, I watched one mother bid farewell to her U. S. Army son.  There was nothing she could do as he disappeared inside the sterile jetway.  She left the gate area slowly, leaning toward someone who might have been the young man's dad, seeking comfort and strength.  I watched until she too disappeared from view.

When my Delta flight landed in Atlanta, most passengers remained seated and silent.  No one rushed to stand up and grab belongings at the sound of the bell.   Military personnel had been invited to deplane first, so that is what they did, while the rest of us solemnly applauded.  A handsome young man in camouflage departed, his final destination:  Kuwait.   “Thank you, ma’am,”  he nodded, and I watched him go.   He looked so young, so very young.   Thank you.

They journeyed alone and in small groups; said their goodbyes; boarded their flights.  Inside a quiet terminal in Jackson, Mississippi I witnessed a poignant homecoming, the scene like so many others even more affecting because it was so subdued:  three small children formed a circle around their dad, sheltered by a larger gathering of loved ones surrounding a lieutenant now safe at home.  

I traveled with a pair of dog tags in the pocket of my jeans.

As I walked and as I watched, passing all the snack bars and ticket counters, rest rooms and Hudson newsstands, so much seemed superfluous.  Newspapers, magazines, cosmetics, bestsellers, the sports pages.  That world ceased to matter.   I was traveling to meet my son, and it never occurred to me to check the box scores or MLB standings.  Baseball headlines and trade deadlines suddenly seemed remote and insignificant, and the seriousness with which others approached those subjects struck me as amusing.

I watched a single mom happily diapering her baby boy, just as I once tended to my own children.  The infant's name was Marcus, a distinguished and manly name, or so it seemed to me.  A young father struggled with his diminutive twins, one of them screaming a newborn cry, a sweet and fragile sound that instantly took me back to blissful mornings and wakeful middle of the nights.

My children had always traveled well.   The oldest loved an airport experience, no matter what our destination.  Delayed and connecting flights never upset him; he'd stand patiently at picture windows, studying the activity on the runway and imagining flight.  Nothing engaged his attention more than pilots in cockpits preparing for takeoff; orange sticks waving an aircraft into the gate; the slow rollback. 

Last Thursday morning he greeted me early, a grown man all dressed and ready for work.  He wore a khaki flight suit, Marine Corps dog tags laced into his boots.

Two hours later, I stood on a short runway in Lauderdale County under very uncertain skies as a T-45 Goshawk approached, its beam of light shining golden just as it should, a Navy jet swiftly touching down, then taking off again.

 

  Inside a small hut beside the airstrip and outside it as well - just steps from those painted lines you see in the photograph - I stood and watched six young men rehearse and refine their touch-and-go landings.  Their jets came straight at me, one after another, a golden light on the nose of each aircraft assuring me (and their mild-mannered yet acutely focused flight instructor) that if this patch of asphalt were the more fluid terrain of a carrier out in the middle of the sea, they would catch a hook.  

The strike zone matters.   

 

 For two whole days, I didn’t think once about baseball.   The subject never even crossed my radar screen.  I saw no highlights or web gems on tv, checked no game summaries, and I survived without wireless newsfeeds from my colleagues in the business.  Players' names became faint sounds in the distance, like friends I had known long ago . . . .  

From time to time I wrestle with some questions, and maybe you do too.   Is baseball ultimately just a frivolous pursuit, or is it worthy and significant?   Does the game lift me up and fill an empty space, or does it drag my spirit down?  Is it mostly an escape from pain and trouble, and thus unreal?   Or is it real?

Maybe baseball isn't the huge thing I've made it out to be.  In the end, it really isn't the thing I love most in life.  

For the past week or so, the field of my dreams has been an airfield, its painted lines configuring a new geometry, a stretch of asphalt functioning as a metaphor for fluid runways that move in the middle of turbulent oceans where there is no manicured grass to be seen.

Last Thursday morning I wore foam earplugs to muffle the exhilarating noise of jets touching down so close we could almost touch them, then swiftly taking off again in well-choreographed, intelligently-executed patterns of touch-and-go.  The powerful music they generated didn't manifest itself as something to be heard.   No.  Sound waves became a tactile thing felt palpably in the chest, not anywhere near the ears.   An intense rumble of vibrations very close to the heart.

In less than 48 hours my son would touch down on a moving runway in the middle of the sea - not just once, but ten times.  Alone in the cockpit, he would be G-suited, helmeted, and belted in for landing and takeoff, protected beneath a transparent canopy and furnished with an ejection seat.  Touch and go.  Lap around the boat.  Catch a hook.  Then catapult off the deck, accelerating over uncertain waters in a manner that most of us will never know, from 0 to 120 knots in approx. two seconds.

Upon finishing his required carrier landings, he sent a message home, delivered in words that were typically succinct and matter-of-fact:  CQ complete.  And then came a photograph of USMC wings pinned close to my son's heart, his name inscribed in letters of gold.

 

 

"They will soar on wings like eagles;
   they will run and not grow weary,
   they will walk and not be faint."

                                                       -  Isaiah 40