Or you could just call it a tricycle

Apple surprise

The builder who developed our street back in the 1950s planted crabapple trees in the front yards, some of which remain.  In a good year the pink blossoms make a fine show in the spring before the wind and rain knocks them down.         

And later, as summer winds down, the crabapples themselves deluge the driveway and the lawn.   

Early one morning these three deer were after them like they were vacuuming.

   Along with the crabapple trees we have another apple tree that never belonged.  It looked like a crabapple, to our unsophisticated eyes, but the blossoms were more white than pink and instead of prodigious numbers of crabapples it produced only a couple of odd little green apples.  Or none.

      And so it went until this year - our twenty-first in the house - when the odd tree on the end pushed out a bumper crop of big, red, actually edible apples.  We don’t know what variety, but the ones that don’t have bug holes and brown spots, of which there are a few, are actually pretty good.  

   Why the tree would suddenly produce this year, out of nowhere, is a mystery.  We wonder if it has to do with the big wasp nest that appeared in the adjacent crabapple this year, also a first.  We think the wasps have taken care of the moths that used to plague the crabapples. 

   But really, as with much of the actual world, there is so much we just don't know.

The Constituent

   So my older brother likes to snap photos with his cell phone, which is good, and to share his better snaps with me, which is also good, but then he goes and shares this photo of Senator Leahy, which is so not good.  

     Think for a moment about how many times our good senator has been photographed in the course of his life.  Thousands and thousands of times.  And yet my brother finds a way not merely to take but also to not immediately delete and instead remarkably to share what must be the worst Leahy photo ever taken.  

     It's not Leahy himself of course -- the walking-with-his-mouth-full notwithstanding -- but the constituent in back smelling his fingers.  ("Did I wash my hands?  I think I washed them ...")

Fly fishing - season 1

   I have been out only a handful of times with the new fly rod and have not done too badly.  Two rainbows and a brook trout at Meccawe Pond, on small black flies that actually looked like flies.  A yellow perch and a rock bass at Woodward Reservoir, on woolly buggers.  A small sunfish and a calico bass at Lake Cochituate, on a gray and silver-bodied streamer.

     Still do do:  brown trout, any trout in a stream, bass with mouths large or small, pickerel, whitefish, and so much more.

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.