May 15,
opening day. The Classics versus the Hot Shots, game time 8:00 a.m. The old man got out of bed at 4:30, unable to feign sleep any longer. Beside the bed he stretched calves, quads, hamstrings, glutes, adductors, lower back, tris, rotator
cuffs, did planks and pushups, balanced, then went to the toilet to review his swing thoughts--load, see, snap: a trip of the hips round the spine to bash, at three, on the ball--while depositing a mound of stool, made black by iron supplements. He rubbed
Icy-Hot on his sacroiliac and put on his uniform: long-sleeved black undershirt, crew-neck jersey, white with black pinstripes, CLASSICS arched on the chest in black, black 21 on the back, black ankle-length softball pants, white socks, black windbreaker,
black cap logoed with a white C. In the kitchen he worked through his pills, this once almost oblivious to the view, feeling his pacemaker responding to the spur of his surging adrenaline. His heart had been rewired; had his brain?
He
breathed deeply and said, "Good morning, Alexa. What is the temperature?"
"Good morning, Wayne," Alexa said. "The current temperature is 49 degrees. Today, expect a high of 64."
"Lexa, what is the question of the day?"
"Today's
question is from the topic of general knowledge. It is worth five points. The term 'Renaissance Man' is another way of describing which type of person: (a) polymath (b) Philistine (c) sycophant (d) periodontist?"
The old man guffawed.
"Oh, Lexy, be Sirious!"
"I'm sorry. I did not understand your answer."
"Polymath!" he responded, his belly still spasming.
"That is correct. A polymath is a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning, like a Renaissance
Man. You have earned your 61st general knowledge badge and five points. You are among the 45% of users who answered this question correctly. You have a total of 1,436 points. You have earned a bonus question. Would you like to
answer it now?"
"No, thank you." After such an easy win, a true laugher, why risk defeat? Why not just ride this buoyancy all the way to the game? That wasn't being superstitious, was it?
To keep his legs fresh, he drove down
empty 5th to Starbucks, helping himself to a primo parking space at the corner of Main, and arrived at the door just as LaTasha was unlocking it.
"Wow, looking good, Wayne!"
"Thanks, LaTasha. The Kid from Edmonds is ready to play."
"You're in some sort of senior softball league, I take it?" said a regular following him in, one to whom he had never spoken but had occasionally nodded, a youngish senior, 65, maybe, recently enrolled in Medicare, maybe, gray crewcut, dynamic grin, aerodynamic
ears, penetrating, glasses-free eyes, 5'10"-180, maybe, weight on the balls of his feet, bouncing with vitality. Some seniors, the old man had observed as they waited in line at Starbucks or gazed from sidewalks at shop windows or rested on exercise
machines at HSAC, virtually cancelled themselves, letting their mouths gape and their eyes, behind glasses, glass over, death-toward-being seemingly their default being-toward-death.
"Yeah. You interested? Teams are always looking for younger
players."
"No, thanks. Those days are gone. At my age I'm just concentrating on my golf game."
He ordered an egg-feta-spinach wrap for the protein, an 8-grain roll for the fiber, and a grande pour-over of single-origin
Columbia Narino Supremo for the menu-touted notes of dark chocolate and black walnut, scanned, anapestically took the roll and his iPad and sat down to eat at the far corner table with view of the street. He broke off a clover leaf of the roll and stuffed
it into his mouth. Stale, dry, disappointing. But not an omen. There were no such things as omens.
His phone chimed an arpeggio. He tingled in hope, braced himself in dread, as he also did each of the half dozen times a day he
checked his email. He craved affirmation, wallowed in its bestowal for hours, but feared its fettering obligation to respond, to summon his rhetorical resources, to affirm the affirmer, to wag his tail appreciatively, to admit his need. A text-message
from Liz Ann: "Good luck today, Coach!" "Thanks, Liz Ann," he tapped in reply. As it whooshed away, a second text, from Sylvia, rang in: "Just read your recent blog post on aging--disappointing!"
Then three beeps from the microwave.
"Here you go, Wayne," LaTasha called, setting a cup and a plate on the counter behind him. "Your wrap's ready. And your pour-over, too."
No longer buoyant, he trudged over to get them, trudged back. Sylvia had disdained his piece on
epitaphs and now the one on aging. Damn! He opened his wrap. Syl, Wayne be frontin', now don't you be huntin' for sumpin' that's really nuttin'. He took a small, hot, juicy, faintly sour bite, hit the simplesite.com icon for his
blog, and opened "Wabi-Sabi."
You know, dude, said a white freshly bathed naked octogenarian to his altered ego as he put on his bi-focals and leaned forward to peer into the wide mirror backing the sinks in his bathroom, every time I do this
I think Look away, you’re hideous. From forehead to ankle, in various places to varying degrees, the exitless maze of my Byzantine skin is puckered, seersuckered, scored, chevroned, tildeed, trenched, crinkled, parenthesized, hashtagged,
rippled like lake water agitated by the drippings from a rower’s oar, fanned out in creases like stylized sun rays, pebbled and sunken like a deflated leather basketball, or corrugated like ET. Ouch. Its elastic gone, it folds, it
droops, it jiggles. It's crepey, it's creepy. It’s dreggy, it’s drecky. It’s de trop.
Venerable one, replied his altered ego, you are blinded by your sight. You hold the mirror up to nature, but you don’t
see reality. What you see is what you don’t get. Slip through that looking glass. Go East, old man, to the land of wabi-sabi. Unclench. Cling not to anger, disgust, remorse, sadness. Let go of your pinched
Western esthetic. As you gaze at yourself, find the beauty in decay. The patina of age is lovelier than the bloom of youth, a desiccated raisin more profoundly pleasing than a plump grape. The warping of time gives birth to the sublime. The symmetric, the
pneumatic, the smooth, the firm are far too easy to love, like snow-capped mountains, moonlit lakes, Neil Diamond songs. Don’t mourn lost September morns; rejoice in the continually metamorphosing embers of November. The metastasizing of flaws
is fascinating. Impermanence and entropy are liberating. The tarnished, the hoarfrosted, the withered, the scarred, the nicked—the soul trembles before the austere glory of the authentic. Keats was half right: truth is beauty. The imperfect is
the tense of life. The rough is itself the diamond. To a fully opened eye, the tangled spaghetti of Maggie Smith’s facial wrinkles rocks; Clint Eastwood’s crags make his day.
Dude, I’d like to believe you, I really
would. You mean well. You’re a loyal altered ego carrying out your dream job-- that is to say, your job of dreaming. It’s why you exist. I eye the glass, you offer the reconciling gloss. You speak of the union of soul
and oversoul, of atonement with nature, of transcendence. But I call that wobbly-sobby. Your view is refracted through a rosy prism of spiritualism, whereas I can only see through the glass darkly. My view is superficial, my interpretation literal.
There is no hidden meaning. The attempt to expand consciousness by whatever means—meditation or psychotropical drugs or speaking in tongues—and the Platonic quest to find the ideal, which is the real, behind the real, which apparently is not, are
equally vainglorious. Appearance is reality. We are animated matter. We age. We begin to disintegrate. We lose whatever beauty we had and with it our vigor and power and control over our environment and ourselves. An aged man is
but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, and no matter how the poet spells his name, there’s no yeast to leaven our decline. We become irrelevant. We die. We fully disintegrate.
Executive ego of mine, even if we stipulate
(as we certainly should) that our flesh has an Ozymandate to die, and even if we grant (as I’m arguing we probably should not, because hiding in the hideous I perceive an awestruck “o” and a reverential “deus”) that seeing is
believing, that there is no ideal behind the real, the continuous kaleidoscoping of the epidermis on its journey from birth to earth is wonderful in the most literal sense. Become your own seeing master and teach yourself to behold the marvels of the
journey. It’s not a matter of ratiocination or drugs or ecstatic frenzies. It’s a matter of attention, repetition. It’s simple classical conditioning. As a cheese eater, you progressed from flavorless Kraft slices to nutty
and ever so faintly sulfurous emmental to peppery pecorino to the lushly rotting blue ammoniacal veins of Gorgonzola. With painting, you gradually discovered many varieties to savor, from the picturesque to the poignant to the painful to the pathological.
Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” and Monet’s “Water Lilies” are gorgeous, but you also found provocative rewards in Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory,”
and Picasso’s “Guernica,” not to mention the geometric distortions of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and his other Cubist works. You’ve investigated the Ashcan School’s exploration of life’s seamy side and
have looked at the dirty, brutish, raw “Outsider Art” in vogue today. You’ve learned that grotesque and gruesome are not in themselves ugly. You’ve seen that grotesque and gruesome can grow on you.
I certainly have.
That’s the problem that I’ve painfully pointed out.
Yes, they’ve become you—but with practice you will see that they also become you. Google facial closeups of such momentary monuments of magnificence as Charlize
Theron, Melania Trump, Gisele Bundchen, Sofia Vargara, Matthew McConaughey, Brad Pitt, Channing Tatum, Bradley Cooper. Study them daily. Sooner than you might expect, their monotonous callow blandness will come to seem chilly, not cool. Google
facial closeups of molderers who have eschewed Botox and silicone, like Maggie and Clint, Dame Judy Dench, golf commentator Judy Rankin, Willem Dafoe, Nick Nolte. Study them daily. Sooner than you might expect, you will warm to their textured,
tortured tissue. Use Netflix to look back at Miss Jean Brodie in her so-called prime, her vapid face like plain tofu, its insipidity a stark contrast to the mien of the Dowager Countess. Then go back to your bathroom mirror and give yourself a chance
to rejoice in reality. Everyone, including yourself, deserves a fair seeing.
You know, dude, that just might work. Maybe what you’re saying is not so wobbly-sobby after all. I’m going to give your aversion-immersion therapy
a try. How I’d love to be able to dive into a deep pool of narcissism again!
"Sylvia," he texted, "thanks for reading me. Our talks have complicated my thinking, for sure. But, tho it's a struggle, Imma cling to my superficiality!"
Self-cajoled, feeling the game again growing within him, too amped to dig into the NY Times, he simply sat and munched the wrap and sipped the coffee, which seemed to deliver, in addition to the dark chocolate and black walnut, a whiff of the peat
moss that every spring he and Diane used to spade into the wet clay earth of the gardens at their L-shaped two-bedroom cedar-sided rambler with attached garage on Grandview in North Edmonds, a half-mile from the Bowl. Following the lead of Chet
and Evelyn, they spent hours each week from spring to fall cultivating vegetables and flowers. In the big garden of their fenced back yard, their vegetable love growing, they planted Bibb lettuce, Swiss chard, rhubarb, bush beans and peas, beefsteak
tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, pumpkins, beets, carrots, Finnish potatoes, parsnips, shallots, garlic, oregano, tarragon, rocket, cilantro, basil, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. In the beds along all sides of the house
they grew tea roses, rhododendrons, azaleas, and blue hydrangeas. In late winter they buried bulbs for daffodils and black tulips; in the summer they set out lemon marigolds and pink and red impatiens in that space. In the front lawn, which the
old man kept trim with a gas-powered rotary mower, they planted two dense lilac trees, purple bloomers, fifteen feet apart. He and Diane were doers, together. He mowed, she raked. He hoed, she staked, propping up heavy tomato stalks, realigning
rose bushes after pruning them back to five-leaf clusters. He set out the soaker hoses for the vegetables, she tended the flowers with her watering can. She, like her father, filled an emptied MJB coffee can, procured from the old man's parents,
with water and dropped into it one end of a long cotton sock, placing the other at the base of a cucumber plant, which then drank long and slowly. He, like Almanzo Wilder, followed the same procedure with milk and a pumpkin plant. The cukes emerged
with thin rinds and moist flesh, the pumpkins swelled to a size ideal for the jack-o-lanterns which each carved to place on the front porch in October, hers always better executed, with eyeballs and angled noses and articulated teeth, his with four gaping
holes. They harvested vegetables together, they cooked dinner together. They bought Pelligrini's The Unprejudiced Palate and cooked their way through it, learning to mince and to bone, to make frittatas and risotto and pasta e fagioli
and polenta and rabbit stew and roast chicken with tarragon. They progressed to Julia Child, their love of inner organs--sweetbreads, liver, tripe, kidney--blooming, and then, browsing one day in the Edmonds Library, when it was part of the new civic
complex between 5th and 6th and Bell and Edmonds, where the Christian Science church and Sunday School buildings had once stood, discovered Elizabeth David, whose precise prose suited the detailed simplicity and gumption of her gastronomy, admonishing them
neither to embroider nor to cut corners with ingredients or execution. The old man admired the integrity of her approach but was not above sloughing and bluffing, his mincing and dicing sometimes verging on chunking, his deboning characterized by some
sawing and ripping, his measurings ballparkish. He liked to suggest substitutions--garlic instead of shallots, walnuts instead of almonds on the haricots verts--and additions--chicken livers in the cassoulet. "Just follow the
recipe and do it right," Diane would say. "Everything is there for a purpose." Her touch was sure, her work exact. After reading David on bread-making, she quickly became adept, punching down with authority, kneading tirelessly. Each
week she provided a new, textured loaf--wheat, rye, pumpernickel, or sourdough made from a yeast strain that she kept in the refrigerator--so aromatic when pulled from the oven that the old man would immediately have to cut himself a ragged chunk. At
dinner, she would close her eyes for a brief silent prayer, he would take a sip of wine, and then they would commune over the food, blessing it with attention. Each summer they took on a home improvement project. Together they tore the old composition
shingles off the roof, rolled out new sticky tar paper, installed new flashing around the chimney, and covered the whole with thick cedar shakes, she lining them up and he nailing them in. Together, wielding brushes, they repainted the fading barn-red siding
charcoal gray and trimmed the window sashes in white, he laboriously scrubbing face and hands with turpentine at the end of the day, then dumping his spattered clothes in the garbage can on the patio, she emerging virtually unscathed. Together, they
laid oak parquet flooring over the old linoleum in the kitchen and dining room, she measuring the tiles and spreading the glue, he cutting and laying the pieces in.
The old man cherished and envied Diane's competence--she could miter baseboard corners
without using a box--and was occasionally irked but more often tickled by her certainty, her impatient, impulsive directness. She knew what she wanted. If she noted black spots on the leaves of the roses, within the hour she was off to Wight's
Nursery in Lynnwood to get a lethal spray. When she telephoned someone, she demanded bluntly "Is Susie there?", never bothering with a preambling "Oh, hi, John! Hey, how are you? This is Diane. Does Susie happen to be around?"
In stores, she moved quickly, darted with assurance, made instant decisions--this book, those shoes, that cantaloupe. Circling a rack of hanging blouses at the Aurora Village Nordstrom, she would authoritatively dismiss the unsuitable ones with a deft
swipe of her left hand, clanging one hanger against another. The old man could seldom buy anything on a first viewing. He needed to check other stores, other models, other brands, get all the specs, sift the information for a few days. Clothes,
running shoes, softball bats, golf clubs--were they affordable? If affordable, was that the way their money should be spent? If so, which option was best? He dithered. When he saw an intriguing book at the Edmonds Bookshop, he would
heft it, check the blurbs, randomly sample a few paragraphs, consider the price, reshelve it, and return a day or two later to pay for it. "If you want it, get it," she would say. "I can't today," he would reply. "I'll think it over."
It took him a week to give himself permission to buy the Robert Fitzgerald translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey that he coveted. Cars, appliances, house wares--she was ready to buy at first sight if something looked and
felt right. Often enough, he ended up agreeing that her instinctive choice was the right one for them. Thriftily, she would pull from a pocket and reuse a tissue on which she'd already blown her nose, but her heart told her that the best way to save
money was to spend money. Reward cards from Starbucks, Walgreens, Target, and Safeway filled all the slots in her wallet, and she was compelled to take advantage of discount coupons that arrived in the mail. A dollar off the foot-long turkey-ham
sandwich at Subway? That would be her lunch for two days. Twenty per cent off any purchase at Kohls? She'd need a new pair of running shoes within a year anyway, so best buy now. Two dollars off a two-pack of three-pound jars of Skippy
peanut butter at Costco? Buying three saved six dollars and provided the security of a year's supply. She kept pantry and closet shelves full; they never ran out of bananas, tuna fish, band aids, light bulbs, or batteries. She loved to be
on the go. She had weekly outings with her golf group, her tennis group, her Canasta group, her Bible study group. Idling at home, she would leap toward a ringing phone in excited anticipation. She was up for anything--a coffee stop, a trip
to the library, a run, a movie, a ball game, a walk on the beach, a ferry ride. Although the old man was compelled to keep up with the world and to improve something--knowledge, skills, conditioning--every day, he also needed several timeouts to gather
himself, draw inward, rest, sort out thoughts and emotions, invite inspiration. He liked schedules. Once a week, he would dust and vacuum, she would do the laundry and clean the bathrooms. But on what day, at what hour, would she run
the washing machine? When the hamper was full. Should he wear a pair of pants one more day and chance being without it for the next week because she suddenly felt it an opportune time to do a wash? That was up to him, a risk he must run.
What time would they have dinner? When they were hungry. Eventually they compromised: she would do laundry at some time on Mondays, they would eat dinner between 6:00 and 6:30. In the kitchen she moved aggressively, single-mindedly, oblivious
to him. Absorbed in her task, she turned from mincing board to stove decisively, crashing into him if he had made the mistake of moving into her path. When the dishwasher was full, she ran it, even if the noise forced him to jack up the volume
on the TV. When she unloaded the washer or set the table, she banged and clanged silver and crockery, full-speed ahead. Nothing at that moment existed but that task. The old man, when learning to drive, had been taught by his parsimonious
father to consider the comfort of his passengers by accelerating slowly and smoothly and decelerating gradually and gently, letting the engine's compression do the work, in the process saving gas, brake linings, tire tread. But Diane, behind
the wheel of a car, was all quick accelerations, speed shifts, sharp turns. She would race up to red lights and make sudden stops that bent torsos over seatbelts. On the freeway, in the midst of heavy traffic, she continually changed lanes, moving
from left to middle to right and back again, needing to find a way out of the maze, her turn signal blinking her irritation. On the golf course, she fumed at slow-playing groups ahead of her. "Hit the damn ball," she would implore them sotto
voce. She never took practice swings or lined up putts, just played quickly by feel. She craved perpetual motion, poor antsy dear (so to speak). Mais zoot alors! Qu'est que c'etais le temps?
[Pour ainsi dire--love
it! Solveig]
6:45!
His heart thumped. Time to move! He grabbed his iPad, set his plates quietly on the counter, tossed his cup in the trash.
"Good luck, Wayne," LaTasha said. "Keep your eye on the ball!"
"Thanks, LaTasha. I'll try to harness my neurotic neurons."
He stepped into the unisex bathroom, which smelled reassuringly of antiseptics, took from his jacket pocket a plastic Walgreen's bag containing a coiled catheter and a nitrile glove,
and drained the coffee from his bladder.
Leaving the Bowl, he drove out Snake Road to the Meadowdale Playfield five miles north. His car thermometer registered 52 degrees. The old man's team, the Classics, and its arch-rival, the Hot Shots,
had dominated the Edmonds Park and Rec Senior Softball League--which consisted of players who lived in Shoreline, Edmonds, Terrace, Lynnwood, Everett, or Marysville--since its inception in 1993. One or the other had won every championship but two in
the league's 26 years. The Ancient Mariners, the Olde Timers, The Codgers, the Sunshine Boys, the Good Ol' Boys, Forever Young, and the Legends occasionally succeeded in recruiting some young, under-60 talent, but most of the good newcomers opted to
play for the established winners, the Classics or Hot Shots. A majority of the players--all of whom were white except for Nate Inouye, a Hawaiian, and Wes Watanabe, a Japanese--had played high-school baseball; a fair number had played fast-pitch or slo-pitch
softball during their working lives and wanted to continue with the sport after retirement. This year the Classics had brought in two new 56-year-olds, Johnny Merlot, a fleet outfielder, and Gordy Goldsmith, a bow-legged shortstop with excellent range
and a powerful arm. Five players were in their 60s, three in their 70s. The old man and Zee were the oldest players on the team and in the league. Because of their relatively slow reaction times, they alternated on defense at the less demanding
positions of second base and catcher. The several dozens of others who had comprised the league when they began playing in '95 were now dead, or physically unable to perform, or had sensed that their teams no longer wanted them as their skills declined.
The old man had gone to the funerals of many players--victims of cancer, strokes, heart attacks--over the years. In 2004, one of them, a stubby, left-handed, tobacco-spitting pitcher, Kenny (King) Cole, had collapsed on the field while delivering a pitch,
members of both teams gathering around in a prayer circle while summoned EMTs administered CPR in vain.
At the three-field complex, he parked, changed into his softball shoes, and headed for Field 1, which was bordered on the west by towering
evergreens. There was no rain, but the skies were low and the clouds mean, the air heavy and moist, almost wringable. His eyes began to flood. He hung up his bat bag, dapped with Zee and the manager, pitcher Larry Miller, a 70-year-old 200-pounder
who was beginning to find it a challenge to hustle to second base for two-out force plays when the middle infielders were playing deep to improve their fielding angles. "Great day for a game, hey, you two octos?" Larry said. "As long as it's not
actually raining, any day is," the old man said. "We're ready to go." He and Zee had been practicing together three times a week for over a month. They played catch as their teammates straggled in, then took the field, an emerald green carpet
with henna-colored base paths and pitching circle and white foul lines, to shag balls for batting practice, the Hot Shots occupying an adjacent field for their warmup. In his excitement to hit, to test his new skills against competition, he fought for
breath. When his turn came to take 10 practice swings against Larry, he visualized proper rotational mechanics--load, see, snap--and then had an almost perfect session, spinning the ball deep from left center to right center. With the old man and
Zee alternating at second base, the team ran a brief defensive drill, Larry hitting grounders to the infielders and calling "Take one" or "Take two," or fly balls to the outfielders and calling which base to throw to, then jogged in to the aluminum bench behind
the dugout screen.
Larry posted the lineups written in black felt pen on an erasable board.
Hot Shots
Classics
LF--Dick Dodge
RC--Merle Oberon
SS--Buddy Budnick
LF--Johnny Merlot
1B--Chuck Metcalf
SS--Gordy Goldsmith
LC--Doc Holiday
3B--Tommy Thompson
RF--Rabbit Watson
LC--Billy Fontaine
LC--Guy Fletcher
RF--Vern Rapp
C--Tim Clark
1B--Dale Hills
3B--Frank Baxter
2B/C--Wayne Adams
2B--Jim Montgomery
C/2B--Gary Zylstra
P--RJ McCoy
P--Larry Miller
"Okay, guys," Larry said. "Tommy will lead us."
They made a tight cluster and joined hands. "Lord, we thank You for the blessing
of good health that enables us to play this game that we love. We realize how fortunate we are. We pray that You will watch over us as we play today and keep all players on both teams safe from harm."
"Amen," everyone, even the old man,
chorused.
There were 15 spectators-- a few wives bundled up in ski jackets and holding kazoos, a couple of pre-school grandchildren, a passerby who had stopped for a rest while walking his German Shepherd--in the bleachers when the game began. The Classics
jumped to a 5-0 lead in the top of the first. Fleet Merle, a place hitter, lined a single up the middle, Johnny grounded one through the hole between first and second, Merle racing to third, and Gordy, a left-handed swinger, drove one deep into the gap
in right center for a triple. Three batters, two runs. Legendary third baseman Tommy Thompson, the cleanup hitter with the boxy butt and thighs like telephone poles, the one guy actually capable of hitting a ball far enough to strike the chain-link
fence 300 feet away, the league's best player even though his COPD forced him to suck oxygen from a bottle nestled into a pack on his back, inexplicably popped out to the pitcher, a weak fizzling fart, but Billy walked and Vern smashed a one-hopper that bounced
off the shortstop's chest, moving Billy up to second and allowing Vern to reach, Gordy cautiously remaining at third. Dale, first-pitch swinging, flew out weakly to short left field, Gordy again unable to score. The old man swabbed the tears from
his left eye and stepped into the box, legs quivering but mind focused. "C'mon, Wayne, we need you right now," Larry yelled, partly an encouragement, partly a demand. "Spin it, Wayne," Zee said, taking practice swings in the on-deck circle.
Staying true to his protocol, turning his back on the thoughts of failure that kept trying to insinuate themselves into his consciousness, he took ball one as Hot Shots pitcher R.J. McCoy tried to tempt him with a short pitch. "Good eye, Wayne, good
eye." He took another ball, slightly inside. He steeled himself not to swing until he had taken a called strike. If he swung at a pitch just because he liked it, because it looked hittable, he knew he would be too early and would transfer
his weight prematurely, forcing him to slow the swing down and to contact the very bottom of the ball and thus to pop up the way Dale had. Once he had a strike, he was prepared to swing at the next pitch if it was at all near the strike zone. He
would say to himself, "This is my pitch," then as RJ released it he would say "Wait, wait" (without the second "wait" he would be too early). When it dropped to a level that would enable him to maintain his balance yet swing as hard as he could, he would
stride aggressively into his rotation, his head remaining still, and say "Hammer it," like a woodsman sinking an axe into a tree, as he threw the bat into the ball. He got the strike, the ball plunking the middle of the plate. He was ready.
The next pitch was on the outside edge, perfect for going to right. He waited, waited, high-stepped toward right field and hammered a rising line drive which flew over the first baseman's head and down the line, rolling almost to the fence before the
outfielder could catch up to it. Adrenaline gushing, he raced past first and then slowed and stopped at second as the runners all scored ahead of him. The five-run limit! "Attaboy, Wayne," "Great start," "Clutch hit," his teammates
were yelling and screaming as he jogged to the dugout to get his glove for defense amid a flurry of high-fives and daps and shoulder claps. In the stands Bernice Rapp, Margie Thompson, and Gloria Fontaine, who came to all the games, stamped their feet
and blew their kazoos. "Nice hit, Wayne," the young leadoff batter for the Hot Shots, Dick Dodge, acknowledged as the old man went behind the plate to catch Larry's warmup pitches. "Thanks," the old man said. "Got lucky." "Hope I'm
that lucky when I'm your age," Dick said.
The old man's euphoria subsided as the Hot Shots, in their red jerseys, white pants, and white caps, responded with a barrage of hits in their half of the inning. Three straight singles loaded the bases,
and a fourth scored their first run, bringing up Jack "Rabbit" Watson, the fastest player in the league. "How you doing, Wayne?" he said as he stepped into the box. "Good, Rabbit. No pressure on you, now." "You got that right.
Pressure is when your Social Security payment doesn't come in." Rabbit took a strike, then a ball. His foul tip on the third pitch, like a struck match instantly blown out by the wind, was too quick for the old man. The ball grazed his unresponsive
glove and caromed off his right shoulder. Bernice, Margie, and Gloria groaned. His teammates said nothing. Stunned, he picked the ball up from the dirt and tossed it back to Larry. He should have caught it. A 70-year-old would
have caught it. They'd have kept Rabbit from running if he had caught it. On the next pitch, Rabbit lofted a deep fly over Johnny's head and raced around the bases, gripping his cap in his right hand, his silver hair sweat-stuck to his scalp, his
arms pumping, his legs churning, to score. An inside-the-park grand slam! The Classics trudged off the field while the Hot Shots roared out of their dugout to greet Rabbit at home plate. Five runs. Ah, runs. They keep crowding
you up, the old man angstromized. They keep crowding you up.
"Sorry, guys," the old man said in the dugout.
"Forget about it," Larry said. "Our turn to score now."
But they went down one-two-three, Zee lining out to third,
Larry grounding to second, and Merle flying out to right center.
The old man and Zee switched positions on defense. Repeating his mantra--"Down, down"--he had no trouble handling the first ball that came his way, a dribbler that he gobbled up
smoothly. The Hot Shots then put two singles together, and the next batter hit a hard grounder three steps to the old man's right that he managed to backhand. He checked the glove twice to make sure the ball was in there, then, amazed and relieved,
threw it to Gordy covering second, who threw it to first for the double play, Bernice, Margie, and Gloria responding with more foot-stomping and kazoo-blowing and his teammates shouting "Nice job, Wayne!" "Great play, Wayne, you're like a vacuum out
there!" "You mean because nature abhors me?" the old man said with a smile.
After four innings, the score was Classics 11, Hot Shots 10. In his second at-bat, the old man, maintaining mental equilibrium, had smashed a line-drive single up
the middle, Zee had followed with a hard top-hand ground ball between third and short, and both had come around to score on successive hits. Leading off the fifth, the old man turned on a pitch and lashed a double down the left-field line. Three
for three! Zee moved him over with a grounder to second base, Larry popped out to the shortstop, and then the old man scored on Merle's sacrifice fly to left-center before Johnny ended the inning with a groundout. But the Hot Shots immediately
tied up the game in their half, and neither team scored in the sixth.
"Okay, guys, our time, let's hit, here we go!" Larry said in the dugout as the seventh began.
Gordy lined an inside-out single to left, and Tommy walloped a line
drive that rattled the chainlink fence in left-center, Gordy moving to third easily and Tommy chugging into second, his chest heaving as he sucked from his oxygen bottle. Johnny trotted in to pinch-run for him, the small crowd applauding the big man's
feat, and Tommy walked back to sit on the bench and dap with appreciative teammates who came over to congratulate him. The next batter, Billy, flew out to shallow left, neither runner able to advance. Vern lined out to short, the runners again
holding, but Dale then patiently worked RJ for a walk. Bases loaded. Bernice, Margie, and Gloria kazooed raucously.
All right, the old man thought. Les jeux sont fait.
"Okay, Wayne, just like before," Larry said.
"Like you can, Wayne," called Gloria.
"No pressure, Wayne," the catcher, Tim Clark, said.
"Rabbit told me that pressure is when your social security payment doesn't come in."
"What does he know about that? He's a retired Air Force
colonel. He's been on a fat military pension for the last 10 years."
The old man laughed, acknowledging the wry in the catcher. He visualized his rotation as he stepped into the box. Load, see, snap. Speak, hands, for me!
The first pitch was a perfect strike in the middle of the plate, tempting to hit, but he took it, following his protocol. The next would be his. Wait, wait. It came in on the inside edge, and he waited, but then, overcome by an urge to lunge
at the ball, didn't wait, rushing his snap, speaking out of turn, his shoulders opening up, his head moving with them, his eyes pulling off the ball. He chopped a grounder to third, the worst thing he could do. The third baseman scooped it up,
stepped on third to force Johnny, then threw home to get Gordy. Never, never, never hit a grounder to the left side with runners on! You stupid fucking idiot, he said to himself as he ran fruitlessly to first. His mind had betrayed him.
A neurotransmitter had faltered. Agenbite of dimwit!
"Don't worry about it, guys," Larry said. "Let's just hold 'em and go extra innings."
But in the bottom of the seventh, Rabbit led off with a single and one out later scampered
home with the winning run on Tim's double. The Hot Shot wives tooted their kazoos when the two teams met in the middle of the infield to shake hands.
"Good job, guys," Larry said as they put their bats and gloves in their bags. "It was anybody's
ball game. And we play them three more times. We'll get our revenge."
"Good hitting, today, Wayne," Zee said. "Looks like you're pretty well rewired now."
"Not that last time. We should have won that thing. Something
came over me. I choked in the clutch."
"So, you want to swing by Starbucks on 220th and get a single-origin coffee from their Clover machine and maybe decompress a little?"
Suffused with shame and desperation, the old man said, "No. Thanks,
Bro, but I need to go straight to Harbor Square and pound the hell out of some machines for about an hour while the fire in my gut burns off some of its fuel. This hurts even worse than when I struck out against Easterbrook in high school. I'll
see you at our next game on Thursday. And be sure to let me know if I can help with your campaign."
[The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord! Tommy]
[Wayne, I was cheering for you all through
"Wabi-Sabi," so proud of your growth--and then it all went to hell in the last sentence as you succumbed once again to lookism! Charlotte]