Spring training

     They pay a tall, skinny guy with a beer belly to come out between games with a hose to spray down the infield and then rake the mound.  The infield has nice, thick grass.  The outfield, where I patrol, is mostly sand and weeds. 

     Your spikes push small craters into the sand as you jog out to your position, slowing to a walk and then stopping when you know it is far enough.  You take a few kicks at the weeds that lay flat against the ground, then turn to start throwing with the center fielder.

     It is hot.  So much hotter in the sun, even for the morning games, than it was just a moment ago in the shade of the battered green dugout.  You are sweating already and wipe your forehead between throws with the terrycloth band on your forearm.  You squint up at the sun, rising high above the palm trees that line the field on the first base side.

     The catcher yells, “Comin’ down!”  The second baseman and shortstop line up for the throw, which invariably skips in the dirt ahead of the bag. 

     You take a final throw from the center fielder and lob the ball in a long arc toward the dugout.  One of the lanky pitchers leaning on the corner takes a casual step out to snag the ball on its fourth hop, tuck it into his back pocket and step back again into the shade.

     The starting pitcher finishes scuffing a hole in front of the rubber. 

     You bend over, settling in with your glove and your bare right hand firmly planted on your knees.  Without standing up you swing your weight around and look back over your shoulder at the fence.  Always the fence.  This one has narrow wooden slats, three feet high, strung together an inch or two apart with stiff rusted wire.  Half falling down, but sturdy enough to really hurt you if you forget it’s there and run into it.  And so you don’t forget.

     You look in to the pitcher, who is sweating freely and swiping at his face with the back of his glove, waiting for the leadoff man to finish digging his own hole.

     We are all set, now.  The pitcher takes the ball from his glove. 

     You take your hands from your knees, and lean forward on your toes, feeling the sand give slightly. 

     As the pitcher winds, and you breathe in and tense your legs.

     It is about to start, right now, this thing that is so repetitive and familiar but also, with each pitch, is fresh and clean before you.  Anything can happen next.

     And with every pitch, every single pitch, you think, “Come on, hit it here.”

Postcard from Miami

   Half an hour until dinner with my partner at eight, which is “early” for dinner here.  I head for the bar at our restaurant, Novocentro, which appears to have Guinness on tap.  A pleasant surprise.  Or so it seemed. 

   One of the bartenders comes over to take my order.  A thin girl with bleached blond hair and a skimpy black tank top, which barely restrains false breasts of science fiction proportions. 

   “Hola,” she says. 

   “A Guinness, please.”

    “Guinness?  Would you like Stella Artois?  It is a special for happy hour.”

   “No thanks.  Guinness please.”

   She retrieves a tall, frosted pilsner glass, into which she dispenses the Guinness in the same three seconds it would take to pull a Coors Light.  No head.  No foaming carmel tides surging from the dark depths.  It tastes like Guinness soda.

   "Nine dollars." 

   Welcome to Miami.

Moxie

She has it, all right.

The gospel

I think of something that seems worth writing about, but instead of just writing about that, I seem compelled to begin by setting some scene, which could be fine if in fact a scene were set, but instead I find myself writing only a stupid report of having done this and then that. 

I must commit myself to the gospel according to Hemingway:  Write one true sentence, about how it really was, and what they really said; not what you wish it had been, or even how you remember it, but how it really was.  And if you can write down one true sentence, then write another one.  And if you can’t, then cross out what you have done and start over. 

Maybe if I had a café to write in, and a cahier, whatever that is.

First to third

   I played my first organized baseball as a sophomore in high school on the JV team.  We had baggy white uniforms with dark green pinstripes – hand-me-downs from the varsity team, which had gotten spectacular new green and gold uniforms that looked like the Oakland A’s. 

    I ran fast but didn’t hit well, so mostly I hoped for walks and a chance to steal second base.  Or to try the play that Donnie Webster came up with, when we played up in Woodstock. 

    I led off.  Donnie hit second, not because he hit well, but because he could bunt.  And he was clever.  He told me that if I got on first, he would bunt down the third base line, and when the third baseman came in to field the ball I should round second hard and just keep going all the way to third if, as happened in JV ball, the shortstop forgot to cover. 

    I think it actually worked once.

    We drive by the baseball field in Woodstock, right off Route 4, whenever we go up to Rutland by way of 93 and 89.  Some day I’ll stop and walk over to the field.  Maybe stand in the batter’s box.  Who knows, maybe even go stand on first base.  And then, if nobody’s covering, run like hell all the way from first to third. 

  

Things keep changing.

I don’t remember much about law school.  I think that I am not repressing those three years – but rather that not much good or interesting happened then.  My “existence period,” as Richard Ford called it, or something like it, in Independence Day.

I arrived in Chicago on an overnight train from Springfield, Massachusetts, because I could not afford a plane ticket.  I came with a big suitcase and a footlocker which held all the clothes I had and the small white alarm clock and desk lamp from my old room at home and the new radio/tape-player my parents had given me to celebrate my graduation from college.  And both my baseball gloves.  I brought, in short, everything I owned in the world, except for my bike and my books. 

I took a cab from the train station to the law school, which I was seeing for the first time, and checked in, whatever that involved.  And then I went looking for lunch.

I told myself that I was a sophisticated, mature graduate of maybe the best small college in the country, ready to take on whatever this Midwestern city, and its second-best law school, had to offer.  What I actually was was homesick, not for my parents’ home in Vermont, but for the home that college and my college friends had become.  And I felt poor, figuring and re-figuring the reserves in my modest checking account that would have to last until next summer against every out-of-pocket – the books for two semesters, each newspaper, each beer, each meal or snack that wasn’t on the dining card.  Including this first lunch, as the dining hall would not open until tomorrow. 

So I had walked west, away from the lake, a couple of blocks, until I saw an Italian restaurant advertising an all-you-could eat pasta and pizza buffet.  It cost more than I wanted to spend for lunch, but I thought I could eat a lot and then not eat much, or maybe at all, for dinner.  So I went in and ate bad pasta, bad pizza and bad salad, by myself, stuffing my face and feeling bad about all of it. 

Ten years later I had a chance to go back and wander around the law school neighborhood for the first time since I had graduated.  I looked for the Italian restaurant.  Not to eat there, but to stand outside and look at it and know that I wasn’t going back there – or how it felt there – any more.  But it was gone.

I went into Gino’s East first, the deep-dish pizza place, which had been a real treat during law school.   The black, graffiti-covered interior did not amuse, as it used to.  It looked stupid. 

The hostess asked me if I wanted to sit at the little bar, which was “not non-smoking, but nobody is smoking now,” she said. 

I said I preferred a table, please. 

A supervisor of some sort cruised by and told the hostess, as if I wasn’t standing right there, to offer me a table in the smoking section.  And so the hostess did, telling me again that no one was smoking now and showing me to an absurd little table with a single booth-style seat on one side and a small wooden chair on the other, in front of a curtain.  A man sat smoking at a table not five feet away. 

I told the hostess that I would go somewhere else for lunch.  And I left.

No big deal.  But something I would not have done until well into my thirties.  For way too long I would have sat in the pitiful chair, breathing the rancid smoke, and rationalizing the decision not to leave on some vague notion of not wanting to be discourteous to the waitress I did not know who worked for people who treated their customers like shit. 

And so I did not sit down at the sad little table in front of the stupid curtain in the smoking section where people in fact were smoking but instead walked a short distance to a place called the Red Rock Grill, where the host showed me to a big booth raised above the floor (which somehow makes the booth seem like a special place), over which hangs a terrific stuffed boar’s head, where I consume a local brew, half a barbecued chicken, coleslaw and spicy baked beans and it is fucking great.

The Red Rock Grill wasn’t there when I was in law school.  Things keep changing.  All the time.

31st and P

   The better part of three days in Washington, full of work, but also restoration.

   Despite two summers here, and many trips back since then, I had no idea Washington could be like this, especially in August -- sunny, breezy, dry and clear, almost cool in the evening.  It feels like San Diego.

   And I find myself remembering things.  How enjoyable it can be to jog here in the morning.  What a pleasure it is to browse in a really good used bookstore, like Books for America at 22d and N.  How important it is to have a good book in your bag and by your bed, like John Keegan's Fields of Battles (procured at the above for a neat four dollars) and how fine it is, good book at hand, to spend two nights in a hotel and never once turn on the television.  How pleasing it is to get off of M and Wisconsin and wander up and down the residential streets of Georgetown.

   I head up to the grand townhouse at 1415 31st Street, between N and P, where, in the summer of 1982, at the ripe young age of twenty, I lived for a summer with J.A.  It was full of rich, old furnishings, heavy drapes, and fine art.  It was owned by J.A.’s grandmother, the mysterious “Lady Jameison,” who was going to be away for the summer, and who was happy to have J.A. and three of his college friends occupy the place during their summer internships in Washington.  But then her summer travels were curtailed – some problem or other related to her heavy consumption of gin – and she came home.  It was only at this point that she learned J.A.’s friends were not just all preppy young boys like him but also a hick from Vermont, which may have been disappointing but was not disqualifying, but also two Japanese girls, K.C. and Nina, who had to go, and which made Lady J. the first real, live, out-of-the-bunker racist I had ever met. 

   The girls had to scramble to find a place to live.  They find some rooms with a divorced woman who lived around the corner, who was happy to rent the rooms but not to grant any access to her kitchen.  So when we all got home from work I would cook one of the few simple meals that I knew how to make and would travel in one big pot – fettucini al fredo, hamburger and cabbage – and carry it around the corner to eat with the girls at a coffee table, sitting on the floor, in their “apartment.”  Then we’d go out for a walk and get ice cream.  

   Actually, Lady J. was the second racist I encountered that summer.  The first was Julie Bolz.  A preppy girl J.A. brought home along with some other interns he had met at one of the innumerable “receptions” that go on in D.C. in the summertime.  He had told these folks about the friends he was living with during the summer – this was before Lady J. came home – and when I came downstairs and was introduced all around, Julie Bolz, well into her gin and tonic, said, “So where are the slope sisters.” 

   Nice. 

   I was young then, and unfailingly polite.  Which is to say passive.  Before I became middle-aged and edgy.  Before so much of my fuse was gone and I became able – if that is the word - to say to people such things as I now say, from time to time, like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” and “You are a fucking asshole, is what you are.”

  Three short years later Julie Bolz ended up in my class at Northwestern Law School, where I was still not yet ready to call her out and just avoided her instead.  As if she wanted anything to do with me. 

   As people like me do, I fantasized from time to time about what I would say, and how I would say it, if I ran into her again.  Which made me wonder what became of her.  Which, now that some nice folks have invented the Internet and Google, takes less about 10 seconds to find out. 

   Julia Bolz is a social justice advocate and co-founder of the Journey with an Afghan School program, a project in partnership with the American Friendship Foundation. A former Seattle attorney, in 1998 she left her law firm to serve as an adviser in developing countries for humanitarian nongovernmental organizations. She has volunteered with dozens of nonprofits across six continents. Since 2002, she has focused on educating girls in Afghanistan, where her team has built and supplied 10 new primary schools and assisted 12 others, serving some 20,000 children. She is also an activist with RESULTS, a grassroots citizen lobby creating the political will to end the worst aspects of poverty.

   Well, how about that.  I bet she doesn’t say “slope sisters” anymore.  Still, I would like to run into her somewhere.  It’s been a long time.  But not too long.