And those, as far as I can tell, having thoroughly explored his home desktop computer, his iPad, his phone, and his metal filing cabinet containing three college-ruled notebooks of jottings from his reading and
one that served as a bank for his verbal coinings, two fat manila folders of jumbled clippings from newspapers and magazines dating back to the '60s, and a boxed hard copy of A How Pretty Town in reverse order, each chapter dated and paper-clipped,
"The Sleepers (1/20)" on top, were the last words Wayne Adams wrote for what he intended to be his magnum opus. Wayne's death in the ICU at Swedish Hospital from respiratory failure caused by COVID-19, on April 1, 2020, his birthday, caught
those who knew him by surprise, given that prior to the state-issued shelter-in-place order in March he had seemed to be the picture of octogenarian health, plowing through each day energetically, walking around town, lifting weights, shooting baskets, frequenting
batting cages with old pal and recently elected Councilman Gary Zylstra, and cramming the hours with reading, writing, and re-creational (he maintained that those looping sitcom reruns refilled his creative aquifers) TV watching. A phone call on April
2 from his lawyer and also lifelong friend Michael Monken, informing me that in January Wayne had revised his will and named me executor, surprised me as well. In keeping with his I daresay singular notion that the most we can ask of life is that it
be a perpetual high school, he was leaving the majority of his modest financial estate to Edmonds School District 15, to be used at the District's discretion to enhance its high school academic and athletic programs, with a smaller amount going to the Edmonds
Historical Museum to preserve the history of his beloved Bowl, and was ceding control of all his written material to me. But, dressed in a charcoal Levi's thick poly-cotton blend collared shirt, untucked, a thigh-length black leather coat, black skinny
jeans, and his silver-black Under Armour high tops, he had told me on a mizzling afternoon in November as we drank beer seated in front of the fireplace at Brigid's Bottle Shop in Salish Crossing, that his immune system, growing increasingly confused and cantankerous
with age, had become subversive. "I'm my own worst enemy," he said. "I sabotage myself. Fifteen years ago I had an auto-immune disease called polymyalgia rheumatica, severe inflammation of the hip and shoulder joints. I had never even
heard of it, had no idea it was a thing. I had come home from a softball tournament in Las Vegas feeling sore and tired, which was to be expected after playing 10 games in three days and running hard. But day by day it got worse, not better.
It hurt to have sex with Diane, what with the robust involvement of the hips, you know." He smiled briefly. "In fact, any attempt to use either the shoulders or the hips was painful. I couldn't lift my arm above my head. Diane had to
shampoo and comb my hair, help me on with my shirts and jackets. To sit required an uncontrolled freefall of two feet. Bad enough when collapsing into my cushioned Morris chair but imagine my hesitancy to drop trou and plummet through hip-flexor spasms
toward an unforgiving slippery toilet seat to go number two. Finally it hurt just to lie in bed for sleep. In less than 30 minutes pain would vice my shoulders and I would have to edge myself out and mince my way to the living room to take a little
pressure off by sitting upright in the Morris, where I would watch TCM and Netflix, dozing off occasionally, until false dawn. Fortunately, when I went to see him a week later, Dr. Hope Jr. suspected what it was. He ordered some blood tests and
put me on a steroid, Prednisone, 50 milligrams a day for two weeks before gradually dialing the dosage down. I was a junkie standing before the cupboard at 5:00 every a.m., shaking for my Preds. It took six months for me to get back to feeling
normal. In addition, for the past 10 years I've had rheumatoid arthritis, another auto-immune disease, and it seems to be getting worse. At first it was just fingers, then it became knees and ankles, and now it's in the hips. It hurts to
walk, let alone run or jump. At my upcoming quarterly appointment with my rheumatologist, Dr. Martin Heidegger, I'm going to demand an increase in my Methotrexate. I take six tablets per week now. I'm going to ask for 10 and won't settle
for less than nine. What do I care about side effects? I might not even live long enough for the drug to exact its debilitating toll on my kidneys and liver. Then a year and a half ago my dry macular degeneration migrated to wet, my immune system,
alarmed by my deteriorating vision, compounding the problem by creating rogue blood vessels intended to bring helpful oxygen to the area but only exacerbating the distortion because of the resultant increased swelling. And just last week my hematologist,
Dr. Marshall Music, called to tell me that my recent bone marrow biopsy revealed an uptick in self-destructive cancer-causing white blood cells from seven to nine percent. I still have some strength--I bench-pressed 120 this morning--but I think it's
quite likely that my quixotic immune system, in tilting at so many windmills over the years, has weakened and left me vulnerable to any new bacterial or viral strain that wafts along. I do get a flu shot every fall and a pneumonia booster every three
years, but I doubt that's sufficient to deflect all incoming."
The firelight reflected off his face. I looked at him a little more carefully. I had to admit that he looked older than when I had seen him at the championship game in August.
Although his hair, which he had worn combed straight back since I had known him, remained a mousy brown with just the odd strand of gray, the hairline had retreated perhaps an additional half inch. The skin between his sparse eyebrows was scored like a pastry
chef's crimpings on the edge of a pie crust. The hollows beneath his eyes had a dusky tinge, his cheeks caved beneath their bones, his deep dimples, once resiliently round, now sagged into long convex grooves that obversely parenthesized his mouth, and
the areas above and below his thin lips were fields of furrows. The grizzle of his three-day stubble (desperately trying to mask the wrinkles or too indifferent to shave?) did not work to his advantage, either.
"Are you really blaming yourself?"
I countered. "I thought you were a rationalist. Haven't you put the ghost of Sigmund Freud, whom old Bokanov called 'the Viennese quack,' to rest? Psychosomatic illness? Come on! Bacteria, not stress, causes ulcers. The
psychopathology of everyday life? There are no accidents? You forget your keys because of synaptic traffic problems, not for any meta reason like self-loathing or an imbalance in your id-ego-superego dynamics. The bogus interpretation of nocturnal
dreams? Your brain is just tidying up its workshop, refreshing its screen, during REM sleep, not posing cryptic puzzles the solving of which will be therapeutic for you. Although it may bemuse us to see the immune system as a comic Quixote
or as a tragic Othello who kills the very thing it loves, it has no subversive intent--no 'intent' of any kind. It's just doing the job it evolved to do, acting on its interpretation of limited data, lacking any ability to see the big picture.
It's not the immune system's fault that it's myopic or experiences bouts of dyslexia, nor is it your fault that you have one that makes mistakes. Read Susan Sontag on the wrongness of seeing illness as metaphor."
And then he laughed. Those
big guffaws that came from his belly. And grinned--showing those big, crooked, yellowish-white coffee-stained teeth--just enough to give me hope that he was still jonesing for a rush of some kind.
"Liz Ann, thanks," he said. "I needed that
bracing splash of cold water in the face. I have read Sontag. I'd forgotten that--because of synaptic traffic problems, not repression of something painful, I agree! Freud's fiction is fascinating, full of stimulating fancies and
conceits, concepts and tropes--the unconscious, wit and its relation to the unconscious, id-ego-superego, the Oedipus complex--that can occasionally, if not taken literally, be useful in the examination of some aspects of human existence, but overall it is
not fiction that I believe willingly."
He lifted his half-full schooner of Brittany and Justin's Winter's Balm IPA, squinted at it, quaffed. "Passion fruit! What I need right now, enervated as I am. I haven't been able to write or
tweet anything since my account of the August championship game, which I finished just before heading to St. George. I welcome your company and this bright infusion of sweet-tart-full-bodied- orange-mango-osity whose alluring perfume continues to linger
on my palate after I swallow. So-named by Spanish missionaries in Brazil who fancied that the purple blossoms resembled Christ's five wounds."
"So you're taking communion, Coach? Drinking Christ's blood?"
"Hmm. That does present
me with a dilemma."
"Many others--Diane, Dave, Zee, Monk, Charlotte, possibly Sylvia, possibly even Solveig--would say that the acknowledgement and internalization of that passion is exactly what you need."
"And what would you say?"
"Hmm. That does present me with a dilemma."
"What? You mean you're in the numinous and transcendence camp?"
"It's not a matter of which camp I'm in. Not a matter of camps at all." Trying to give it a faux Suddenly
Last Summer or Three Faces of Eve ominous eeriness, I said, "Tell me about St. George, Coach. You texted me in October 'No gold. I was terrible.' and that was all I heard until you texted yesterday and invited me for a beer.
What happened?"
I sipped some of Brittany and Justin's Umber Ale, a meaty brown brew with hints of walnut, maple, molasses, and, oddly, egg white.
He grinned. "In that championship game at Meadowdale in August, you saw me at
the pinochle of my senior softball career."
I grinned back. "I like it! A deliberate malapropism in the midst of depression may be a sign of resilience. Of course it may also be a sign of quiet desperation, a whistling past the
graveyard. Go on."
"Okay, I'm just gonna say it, at Meadowdale I was great. Could not have played better. Attuned, in the moment, mindfully mindless, not clinging to consciousness, immersed in the realm of the ludic, in a relationship
with something beyond myself, my being and doing a yin-yang unity, chillaxed, angst-free, serenely joyful, open to affordances and serendipities."
"And then?"
"And then came that regression to the mean that I blithely predicted in our
conversation after the game and privately airily dismissed as a mere bump in the road on my way to a gold medal and just possibly election to the United States Softball Association Hall of Fame."
"You just suddenly lost it? Fell out of tune?
Went all Berg and Schoenberg on their asses?"
He chuckled. "Not quite. In September we had some practices at Celebration Park in Federal Way. In national tournaments, in divisions 65 and older, you play 11 guys in the field, so they
put me at rover, the middle infielder. Teams usually put their best infielder at shortstop and their second best at rover. The position demands versatility--speed, good hands, good arm, good footwork around the bag--and even with my vision and
balance problems, among the 80-year-olds I could provide that. Or so we all thought. But in our infield drills, although I was not a disaster, I wasn't sharp, a bit slow to react and get in front of balls, bobbling some, looping a few throws,
pivoting a little clumsily at second base on double plays. In BP, which I approached with serene joy, confidently assuming I would be autonomically resuming my intunitive swing, I was at first surprised, then puzzled, though not disheartened, by
my frequent failure to make clean contact with the ball. For every fairly solid line drive or reasonably deep back-spinning flyball there were two dribbled grounders or weak pop-ups. I was early, I was late, I was hitting off the handle or off
the end of the bat. The old me would have stewed and groused, but the new me maintained equanimity, believing that my championship swing would return with the next pitch. 'Hey, it's been a while,' various teammates said. 'Your timing's a
little off. It'll come back.'"
He drank some Winter's Balm. He seemed to be picking up steam. "So we went to St. George. The basketball shooting contests were on Saturday and Monday, the softball competition Monday through Thursday.
I flew into Vegas ahead of the other guys on Friday, rented a Kia Soul, skirted the Strip, which has little appeal to me--in the past 20 years, participating in softball tournaments, I've probably languished a total of 40 days and 40 nights in various
garish, jangling casinos there--and drove the 100 miles north through the austere desert and the gorgeous sedimentary rock road cuts in the Virgin River canyon on 1-15 to the Ramada for a drama--as Kinbote found a cat-mouse game in muscat, so I hope
you'll allow me my little botkin"(I was smiling. It cheered me to hear him eeigling and schmeeweigling again)--in St. George, a town that is 70% Mormon, laid out in that prototypical rectilinear Mormon grid with the gleaming white Temple near the center standing
tall and proud, a conservative town that probably is not experiencing a battle for soul control between progressives and reactionaries, but is like the Bowl in some ways: clean, safe, orderly, busy, set amidst beauty (iron-rich red mesas and buttes, white
sandstone cliffs, black-studded basaltic lava fields), and dependent on tourism (lush golf courses, proximity to Zion National Park, and home of the renowned Huntsman Games, which attract over 10,000 participants each year).
"Saturday morning I drove
out to Snow Canyon Middle School on the west side of town for the Hot Shot competition. There were eight participants in my age group. Four of us shot at a time, each at a corner basket. I was ready. I had been practicing my jumpers
for months. I was in shape. I knew I could get off 12 shots in one minute. At Harbor Square I had timed myself in that drill scores of times. The old rhythm and feeling were back. I was squaring up, I was getting off the floor six inches,
quantum leaps for me, I was nothing but one smooth motion from my gather to my follow-through, with a song in my heart I was lasered on that space just over the front of the rim, ready to chord my movement to the rhythm of 'Hallelujah.' The red lights
of the scoreboard timer blinked on: 1:00. The horn blared. I started with the required layup, then grabbed my ball out of the net ('Now you've heard there was a secret chord'), dribbled to the left baseline marker, pivoted, squared, shot, swish
('that you can play and please the Lord'), raced to retrieve the ball and dribble to the right baseline marker, pivoted, squared, shot, swish ('and you don't have no worries, do ya'), raced to retrieve the ball and dribble to the left 45-degree mark, pivoted,
squared, shot, swish ('Well it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth'), raced to retrieve the ball and dribble with the left hand to the right 45-degree mark, squared, shot, a rim-rattler but good, ('the minor fall and the major lift, hallelujah'), raced to
retrieve the ball, breathing a little harder now, dribbled behind my back and went to the top of the key, pivoted, squared, shot a hybrid push-jumper, lacking the strength for the pure J from that distance, swish, ('hallelujah, hallelujah,'), raced to retrieve
the ball, headed for the left corner again, pivoted, squared, shot, a swirler but good, ('your faith was strong, needed no proof'), raced to retrieve the ball, headed for the right corner again, pivoted, squared, shot, hit the far side of the rim, and the
ball caromed forward and rolled rapidly away from me, clear to the corner of the gym. That was it, Liz Ann, a perfect score to that point, and then disaster. My song and faith gone, I sprinted after the ball, pacemaker pounding, finally captured
it, frantically dribbled back to the court and, exhausted now, cast off a desperate airball as the horn blared indifferently. I finished fifth."
He looked at me and shook his head. "I had that gold, man."
I tugged twice at the sleeve
of his leather jacket. "That was just bad luck, not bad faith or bad karma. You were in tune, flowing, then you got a bad break. It wasn't your fault. There was nothing you could do about it."
"Yes, it was my fault. I could
have lived with a miss or two that I could rebound, I could have still posted the highest score, but I shot the one shot that could kill me, not quite enough backspin, a little too flat, a little too long, a little too hard."
"But it was one error!
Surely the other guys were making errors, too?"
"Yes, but they were erring on the side of caution, they weren't shooting themselves out of the competition."
"Then look at it this way, Coach. You have often lamented your tepidity and timidity,
your tendency to be a quakebuttock"--
"E'en so, e'en so," he nodded.
--"but here you dared to be bold, to grab for the gold, you were Phoebe on the carousel."
"And then I missed and fell off."
"But you went for it. That's
growth! And you were perfect--until you weren't. Your practice made myelin, and myelin almost made perfect. So much to be proud of there!"
He took a sip of his passion fruit, sucked some air over it, seemed to reflect. He shrugged.
"It gets worse."
"Oh?"
"Yes. After agonizing all weekend over my failure to be a Hot Shot--overconfidence, a smug sense of privilege after making seven in a row leading to a lapse in attention--on Monday morning I'm back at Snow Canyon
for free throws and 3-pointers. Free throws are my métier, my forte, my make-my-day. I set a team record in high school. I used to shoot with you girls in practice. I have rehearsed the form 10,000 times.
I settle in at the line, a fellow contestant near the basket rebounding for me. Without a song in my heart this time, and without, it turned out, enough leg or wrist or follow-through, trying to think without thinking, I lofted my first shot, which,
short and flat, hit the front of the rim and bounced back to me. Shocked, I tachycardiaed. My mind exploded. How is this possible! I'm too good for this! A single miss is my entire margin for error if I want to get the gold.
I have to make all the rest. I slammed the ball off the floor, shook my head, took a deep breath--and missed again, clanking the right side of the rim. When my partner returned the ball I slammed it twice, dribbled it several more times, shifted
my feet, seething, all right, goddamn it, now I'm pissed, it's the old me, you know how I get, fuck you world, angry adrenaline rises up in me, focuses me, out of spite I make the third shot, and the fourth and the fifth, I'm rolling, you can't stop me, they're
all swishers, and I start to tighten as I get to 20, and tighten more at 24, I'm quaking, I might actually have a chance if I do well on my 3-pointers, I just need this last one, and in my craven need I jerk it slightly, pull it a little left, it lips out,
and I have 22 points, goodbye gold. I beat myself again."
"But you still had a chance for silver or bronze."
"Yes. And I got the brass. I went on to make four of my six 3-pointers for a total of 34 points. The winner,
from California, had 36, and the runner-up, from Pennsylvania, had 35."
"Bronze is good! And you came back! You climbed out of a hole to win it. You should have proudly posted a selfie on Facebook with your medal around your neck."
"Only with gold could I have done that. I wanted to be the best 80-year-old shooter in the nation--okay, small sample size, I'll grant you that! But brass was failure."
"So embrace the failure! Chew and stew and rue as you eat your
bitter heart out. Grit over it! Aren't you the guy who celebrates the fact that he is not an animal, who revels in consciousness, who exults that he can daydream, make fictions, who sees suffering and joy as the double helix of life?"
"I was."
"Are."
"Maybe that was horseshit."
"Bullshit!"
He flinched. His eyes widened. Then he forced a smile and accepted the blow. "You could be right."
I smiled back and patted his sleeve, rather enjoying
the pliancy of the leather. "What about the softball?"
"Yeah, the softball. We were scheduled to play a doubleheader at one o'clock. With my head buzzing, I drive my Soul back to the Ramada, change into my TUKWILA TITANS softball uniform
(gaudy orange jerseys and caps, black shorts), pick up a protein box lunch and a tall cold brew at the Red Cliffs Mall Starbucks drive-through and down them on the way to the Snow Canyon Softball Complex, seven beautifully manicured fields of tightly clipped
green grass, smoothly dragged henna infields, crisp white boundary lines. So lovely there in that little bowl with the white cliffs looming to the north and the buxom red hills enclosing us to the east."
"Lovely enough to return next year for
another try?"
He drank some beer and looked into the fire.
"Anyway, our first game is against a local team, the St. George Dragons. When I arrive, the guys all say 'Hey, Wayne, how'd you do?' and I say 'Brass' and they say 'Great' and I
say 'Yeah, thanks. Not really.' " I'm trying to put myself back together, find a comfortably confident persona somewhere between quakebuttock and coxcomb. My teammates all believe in me. It's my first year as an 80-year-old, I'm the young
guy, lithe and lively, they brought me in to be a star. The Dragons are a weak team. We mercy them 15-2 in five innings, no thanks to me. I feel that I am ready, but I make a throwing error and go 0 for 3, two lazy flies and a chopped grounder,
with a walk. Our second game is against the Minnesota Maulers. They beat us 8-5. Twice I muff grounders with two outs and a chance to end the inning with a force at second, and they go on to score after each error. At the plate I fail
to hit a single ball on the sweet spot and go 0 for 3. Tuesday we have a single game against Scrapiron from Colorado. They beat us 10-9. I have one good play on defense. The shortstop and I both go for a grounder hit between us, I grab
it backhanded and, not having time to turn and make the throw to second, without even thinking or looking zip it backward underhanded straight to the second baseman's glove for the out, bringing roars of approval from my teammates and an inner exaltation from
me. An affordance! A serendipity! The next inning I drop a pop fly. On offense, again out of sync, I bloop a single to left on my first at-bat, then go out three times in a row on poorly timed swings. Later I go to Applebee's
with the guys for beer and dinner, but my head is buzzing. I know they're all wondering when I'm going to start producing. In my room that night, watching an American League playoff game and reruns of The Office, in desperation I decide
to forget serenity and fluidity and revert to a mechanical approach. At bat I will not swing until I get a called strike, hoping that will keep me from jumping on the first bad pitch. When the pitch is released I will utter my old mantra 'Wait,
wait.' When I swing I will say 'Hammer it!' to keep my eyes focused on the ball and then force myself to keep my chin on my right shoulder so I don't move my head. In the field, I will say 'Down, down' on groundballs, and then 'Look it in.'
I will be really intense, throw myself once more into the breach.
"It doesn't make any difference. Wednesday we begin double elimination medal play, seeded fifth, based on the results of our first three games, behind Top Gun from San Diego, Scrapiron,
the Maulers, the Silvertips from Mesa, and ahead of St. George. We lose to the Silvertips, 14-5. I say 'Wait, wait,' but I don't wait. I'm out in front. I say 'Hammer it,' but I don't hammer it. I pull my head. Apparently
my officious protective proprioceptors, a kind of adjunct to my immune system, commandeer my mind and will, privileging balance over performance. I rip one line drive down the left field line for an RBI triple, the only time when pulling my head and
falling away don't mess me up because the pitch is way inside, and that's it. I simply cannot hit the ball on the screws. On defense I make one intunitive play. There's a pop up between me and the second baseman. I close on it, but it's his
ball. At his side I defer to him but he bobbles it, it slips from his grasp and falls toward the ground, and mindfully mindlessly I reach out and snare it near my ankles--again to roars of approval. For the rest, I make a few routine plays but
also a couple of errors each game. I'm looking up, I can't stay down, down. My frustration and depression increase with each game. My teammates go from encouraging me to pitying me to giving up on me. The second game, loser out, is a rematch
with St. George, whom we mercied in our first meeting, and they rally to beat us, 10-8. In short, in sum, in fine, I stink and we go home in ignominy."
"Aw, sad," I said, and could not resist plucking at his sleeve once more. "But
you had 11 players on your team. Those other guys must have been having defensive lapses and making bad swings, too."
"True. We all 'contributed' to the losses. But I expected more of myself. Had I hit .700 with power and made
maybe only one error, I could have accepted not winning the gold. But to do what I did and then get knocked out is unacceptable."
"And yet you have to accept it, don't you?"
"Why can't I always be at my best?"
"Coach, surely
you recognize that you've just committed the logical fallacy of the complex question? The stark truth is that you are. At any given instant, you are. In the next instant you might be better, or worse, but at that instant you are the best
you can be. As you said in a different context, Coach, you see, you saw, you gee, you haw, you pitch, you yaw. That's you. Unalgorithmicable. Forever angst-ridden. Now shooting or swinging intuitively, now analytically,
now mindfully mindless, now maniacally mechanical, now relaxed, now intense. Both work for you until, absurdly, they don't. Both so grow out of who you are, that perennial sophomore. You'll never find serenity. The graph of your life,
of your teaching and coaching and playing and blog-writing careers, is a cascaded range of peaks and crevasses that will ultimately end in a steep entropic declivity. You reap less than you sow, you come then you go. All is vanity. As you
have before, lean into that Sisyphean absurdity. Revel in your doing, your truing, your skewing. For you, only senselessness makes sense. That's your fiction."
He turned from me and stared at the forking flames of the fire for
several seconds before turning back.
"And do you share my fiction?"
I shook my head. "Coach, no, I can't go there. Mechanicomorphism does not feel right to me. I get the rational arguments against the belief that the universe
has purpose--deductive conclusions drawn from premises based on findings from physics and biology--but they don't quite stand up against my own intuitions. I look at the order and intricacy and beauty of nature--the solar system, our bodies, a
glorious orange Oriental poppy--and I feel awe, reverence. Where you think emergence, I think design. I look at Jennifer and feel that she is in my life for some divine reason. And I can't imagine myself, or anyone else I used to know, truly
dead dead. My parents, my grandparents, my deceased friends are all still here. I often sense their unbidden presence, a hovering, a looking in on, a shepherding. Though it's totally unempirical, undemonstrable, it feels true. I
am other than my electro-chemical system. I don't have a religion, but I am religious. Or maybe I'm a closeted Unitarian!"
We laughed and clinked glasses and took our last swallows of beer. I left a five on the little table beside
me and we strolled through drizzle to our cars. We hugged.
"Thanks for offering the comfort today," he said. "Love you, Mann!"
"The cold comfort," I corrected him. "Love you, too, Coach."
Elizabeth Ann Mann
October
2020