me laugh in almost every other situation in my life, “We will take care of you.”
Betty watches Danny as he runs to play catch, and I wonder how many players she’s seen doing that and if the sheer volume and interchange-ability makes each one fade a little. She’s smiling because it’s opening day and everything’s happening all over again, like you can always count on it doing. And Danny is back, a nice boy, full of shiny-eyed, resilient belief.
“Tom said Danny just looked like a ballplayer should,” Betty tells me.
And I look at him the way she does for a moment, the way Tom must have. I see the soft youngness of his face. His tanned white skin, his sturdy jaw. I see the way he seems to bounce around the field, his grin. The understated wooden cross hanging off him and the dated earnestness with which he periodically reaches his fingers up to hold it, dutiful and devout, inarguable.
I am not good at faith. Sometimes I find it difficult to think of life as anything other than the loss of things, and I know that sounds big, too big, but it’s true. I read that the term
“nostalgia”
originated in a seventeenth-century medical student’s dissertation, when he mixed the Greek word
nostos
, “return to the native land,” with
algos
, “suffering, grief,” to describe the madness of mercenaries who spent all their livesmoving and trying to remember. It was classified as a potentially fatal disease. Isn’t that crazy? To die from wanting to return. But I miss things that were never mine, want to return to a place, more of a feeling, that never really existed, and doesn’t baseball always promise that there was once something more?
The game ends. The LumberKings are 0-1. I didn’t really pay much attention to the action. It was a boring game.
“Well, all uphill from here,” Tim says.
“Or same old, same old,” Tammy says.
Danny pops out of the dugout, walks over. He isn’t sweating, nor is he dirty. He smiles and nods. Everyone does, bobbing their chins at the shared expectation of what he might someday be, what it might mean to watch him, or maybe just a much needed breeze that everyone felt at once. I look out at what will always be there at the end of every game, running each one into the next.
There is sky, and there is smoke. There is water beyond that. There are train tracks. There is a parking lot. There is dirt, right in front of us. There is this stadium, the splinters in the wall that we don’t look close enough to see. Betty asks if I will be back tomorrow, and I say yes.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Things
A BLOND ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD in too much makeup and her freshly shined church shoes is standing on the grass of the infield singing the national anthem. She is the best singer in the sixth grade at Washington Middle School, as well as in the local youth choir, though judging by one kid’s comments to his father sharing a picnic table with me along the third-base line, that’s debatable. I like her. After she nails the high note on
proudly
, she gets confident and waves her arms a little in front of her, sending a spastic, I-taught-her-that jolt into her father, leaning over the home team’s dugout with his camera aimed. She waves toward the diamond in front of her, the center-field fence beyond that. She slashes her hand through the air on
land of the free
like an auctioneer or an HDTV product girl. I follow her gestures. There is the flag, yes, it is still there. It is whipping hard, as loud as her singing, because it’s spring in Iowa and often that means you don’t want to go outside, let alone stay stationary, watching baseball. Next to the flag, panning left along with her fingers, there is the Lumber Lounge, the VIP area befitting a lumber king, where private parties pay twenty-five dollars a head for unlimited food and drink. It carries corporate sponsorship now, technically the Leinenkugel’s Lumber Lounge. Opposite that, behind the left-field fence is the Coors Light Picnic
Betty watches Danny as he runs to play catch, and I wonder how many players she’s seen doing that and if the sheer volume and interchange-ability makes each one fade a little. She’s smiling because it’s opening day and everything’s happening all over again, like you can always count on it doing. And Danny is back, a nice boy, full of shiny-eyed, resilient belief.
“Tom said Danny just looked like a ballplayer should,” Betty tells me.
And I look at him the way she does for a moment, the way Tom must have. I see the soft youngness of his face. His tanned white skin, his sturdy jaw. I see the way he seems to bounce around the field, his grin. The understated wooden cross hanging off him and the dated earnestness with which he periodically reaches his fingers up to hold it, dutiful and devout, inarguable.
I am not good at faith. Sometimes I find it difficult to think of life as anything other than the loss of things, and I know that sounds big, too big, but it’s true. I read that the term
“nostalgia”
originated in a seventeenth-century medical student’s dissertation, when he mixed the Greek word
nostos
, “return to the native land,” with
algos
, “suffering, grief,” to describe the madness of mercenaries who spent all their livesmoving and trying to remember. It was classified as a potentially fatal disease. Isn’t that crazy? To die from wanting to return. But I miss things that were never mine, want to return to a place, more of a feeling, that never really existed, and doesn’t baseball always promise that there was once something more?
The game ends. The LumberKings are 0-1. I didn’t really pay much attention to the action. It was a boring game.
“Well, all uphill from here,” Tim says.
“Or same old, same old,” Tammy says.
Danny pops out of the dugout, walks over. He isn’t sweating, nor is he dirty. He smiles and nods. Everyone does, bobbing their chins at the shared expectation of what he might someday be, what it might mean to watch him, or maybe just a much needed breeze that everyone felt at once. I look out at what will always be there at the end of every game, running each one into the next.
There is sky, and there is smoke. There is water beyond that. There are train tracks. There is a parking lot. There is dirt, right in front of us. There is this stadium, the splinters in the wall that we don’t look close enough to see. Betty asks if I will be back tomorrow, and I say yes.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Things
A BLOND ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD in too much makeup and her freshly shined church shoes is standing on the grass of the infield singing the national anthem. She is the best singer in the sixth grade at Washington Middle School, as well as in the local youth choir, though judging by one kid’s comments to his father sharing a picnic table with me along the third-base line, that’s debatable. I like her. After she nails the high note on
proudly
, she gets confident and waves her arms a little in front of her, sending a spastic, I-taught-her-that jolt into her father, leaning over the home team’s dugout with his camera aimed. She waves toward the diamond in front of her, the center-field fence beyond that. She slashes her hand through the air on
land of the free
like an auctioneer or an HDTV product girl. I follow her gestures. There is the flag, yes, it is still there. It is whipping hard, as loud as her singing, because it’s spring in Iowa and often that means you don’t want to go outside, let alone stay stationary, watching baseball. Next to the flag, panning left along with her fingers, there is the Lumber Lounge, the VIP area befitting a lumber king, where private parties pay twenty-five dollars a head for unlimited food and drink. It carries corporate sponsorship now, technically the Leinenkugel’s Lumber Lounge. Opposite that, behind the left-field fence is the Coors Light Picnic
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