January 2022

Ritual

by Gerald C. Wood

The steel toe broke the skin
of clay and dirt as I slumped,
troubled at knowing Indians
chained, sold blacks in Charleston.

I stood among the shards,
overalls too tight in the
bottom, short at the shoes,
a harlequin farmer at rest.

I sighed as my son ran uphill,
breathless into the garden,
holding his left hand out,
as if expecting healing rain.

Cooling, his words fell on me,
“Dad, want to play catch?” as
I dropped the hoe, stood tall,
Believing time our best friend.

That field dissolves from garden
to dream, as the boy, grown a teen,
returns again a victor on the track,
his words seeking “a game of catch.”

Now with labored breath, I long to be
a homeless ghost, haunting this land
as our play and game grow still and
“a catch,” not ours, has a timeless pass.

Gerald C. Wood is co-editor of Northsiders: Essays in the History and Culture of the Chicago Cubs and author of Smoky Joe Wood: Biography of a Baseball Legend, recipient of the Seymour Medal (2014). His essays on baseball also have been published in NINE Journal. He is Emeritus Professor of English, Carson-Newman University.

Feeds

by Scott Palmieri

Our mantra was “Hope for the best, but know the worst is coming.” Deep down, we knew “the worst” wasn’t real suffering. At least, it wasn’t the suffering I read about in my English classes: Sylvia Plath’s despair, Flannery O’Connor always killing someone, and Shakespeare killing more. The first hour of my baseball first fall practice, we started our season of suffering in the form of groundballs. I know it was an hour because Coach was pacing back and forth behind the infielders, updating the minutes, one grounder after another after another.

That morning, I thought embarrassment would be the worst of my first day as I ran across campus, ten minutes late to my first class, Intro to Literature, an English major who couldn’t read a campus map, relieved to be received by a merciful professor. In a full sweat, I sat, panted, and nodded, trying to pick up, midstream, the discussion of the syllabus. But the morning mishap and everything in my life up to that point, especially the halcyon days of recruiting, were charming distant memories, replaced by the suffering of baseball basic training, which started with relentless groundballs. Field and scoot to the end of the line, a short rest in between, a stubborn September sun baring down, making every play more difficult, field and scoot again. Had there been a syllabus for our semester on the field, authored by Coach, the classroom policies would have included “Keep your head out of your ass” and “Hustle, or I will rip your fucking face off.”

Midway through the hour, a new level churned hotter in the form of “middle feeds.” A quicker torrent of groundballs began, fungo bats mercilessly slashing at the middle infielders. We fielded, shuffled, and tossed double-play flips, swirling from shortstop to second base. One line fielded, the other received, dropping the balls in a milk crate on the bordering outfield grass, our quads and hamstrings searing, our mouths gasping, as the crate filled, urged on by our diminutive, derisive young Coach with his bursts of encouragement such as “You’ll never play here!” every bobble or toss gone amiss feeding his insatiable rage.

These were the first grueling minutes of a grueling fall, our northeast college team on the heels of a disappointing season the spring before, after a conference championship the spring before that, with most of the stars and starters now graduated. At shortstop, my roommate Mike, whom I had known from our Long Island high school careers occasionally crisscrossing, endured, along with the same ceaseless onslaught, the full wrath of Coach, who, throughout the entire fall, tried to break him to bits, replacing the best player in school history and the best shortstop in the region. Our other roommate, Pete, a slugging catcher being converted to an outfielder, suffered his own long day of drills.

Every day thereafter, practices loomed like ominous New England clouds, which never opened for the rain we prayed for. We trudged to our morning classes, which served as hours killed until practice- Intro to Psychology, Western Civilization, Introduction to Literature. But no brain schematics, no history of suffering, no illuminating texts could ease the gloom of Coach’s body and mind gauntlet ever pressing upon us, like the soreness of my massive stress pimple, his teethy snarl and throat-scraping growl balled up, festering on my chin.

The only break in our routine came thanks to the field hockey team. In fall, our outfield was their field, our left and center converted into a gridded rectangle, so their home games pushed us out. Instead of a day off, though, we piled into vans and traveled across the city to a park to play intersquads, chances for the pitchers to show their stuff and for the coaches to better assess what they had to work with, as the vision of a final roster had to come soon.

After our scrimmages, topped off by sprints around the bases to drain excess energy, we loaded back into the vans, our cleats exchanged for sneakers, our bodies and minds at rest, having survived another day. One afternoon, as we exited the park, Mike and I sitting shoulder to shoulder in the packed cabin of the van, our mood lightened from avoiding the worst of Coach that day, we turned our heads to His voice: “Middle infielders, on the field when we get back!”

A protective cup for the soul might have lessened the blow, the order from the front seat a clean kick to the spiritual groin. The long day had reopened, the worst of the physical and mental exhaustion still ahead. Middle feeds. Asses down, glove out, reading the hops to cradle the ball into our leather pockets, lifting it back out to sweep a firm toss to the waiting glove aimed over the base. Over and over. “Double plays are hit, they’re not made!” Coach would yell, an occasional Zen-like exclamation, “Be quick but don’t rush,” roaring the word “awful,” more “aw” than “ful,” minced with physical threats. Once I escaped for a few minutes when, leaning for a backhander, both my calf muscles cramped, dropping me to the ground, knotting up as if two baseballs were pressed against the skin.

The unexpected missive from Coach would delay our cherished daily exit from the locker room. This included our rookie duty, a drop-off to the laundry room, when each day, my assigned senior gleefully handed me his dirty gear, his jockstrap dangling from a large nickel safety pin. The most memorable exchange was when he reassured me that his recent case of “the clap” had cleared. Mike, Pete, and I, in a pilgrimage of the team’s underclassmen, would then make our way across the small campus to the cafeteria, run by the tall, broad shouldered Uncle Lou, as he was called, whose silver pompadour and gold rimmed glasses, with the top couple buttons of his white dress shirt unbuttoned, said casino pit boss more than cafeteria general manager. Most nights, he greeted us at the door as we ambled in toward the end of dinner hours.

Still in the days of college mess halls, most nights we braced ourselves for what floated in the murky Salisbury steak gravy or the yellowish pool of the baked scrod. Only chicken patty sandwich night could lift our spirits. But no matter the entrée, practice was over. We teetered our trays, rattling them onto a long table, as we climbed into the space between bench and tabletop, a feast celebrating our survival. Our small glasses filled with soda, we savored our sips, clinking the ice at the bottom, crunching and laughing in the fading autumn light. Between scanning the room for girls, we conducted a post-mortem of each practice. Pete f-bombed the coaching staff, and Mike denounced the merciless daily regiment, declaring, “That’s it. I’m going to say something to Coach,” both empty protests tilting me over with laughter.

After dinner, we retreated to our dilapidated dorm, a convent decades before, befitting our austerity: high ceilings and gritty faucet water, hard tiled floors, and rumors of a mysterious tunnel behind a basement door we opened once but never entered. Our legs spent, we swung open the rusty scissor-gate elevator doors, clattering to the top third floor for a shower and an evening respite. Mike flipped on our small television and climbed to the top bunk, while I fell into the bottom. Pete, sitting on his single, rubbed his wood bat with a cow femur, the streaking sound soothing him while he hardened the grain.

Later, leaving the room for a study hall, Pete popped on his Walkman headphones, clicking on what we learned later was Christmas music, the yuletide songs, along with his bat treatment, his coping method, even in the mild air of fall, yearning for home and the distant semester break. One day, I noticed Frank Sinatra in the teeth of the cassette player, our first non-baseball bond when I revealed my healthy CD selection of Ol’ Blue Eyes. Mike, rightfully concerned, felt relieved that my father also raised me on John F. Kennedy. Studying to be a high school history teacher, Mike led our charge to a conspiracy theorist who visited campus. With our worn down, psyches, we embraced the wholesale government plot. Many nights, as a strange lullaby, Mike’s copy of the Oliver Stone movie played in our VCR, the comfort of “back and to the left” somehow easing the prospect of the grassy knoll that awaited us each afternoon.

But on that van ride of despair, upon hearing our Coach’s command to return to the field, those nightly solaces stretched far from us. It was the horror of finding an unexpected set of calculus questions on the back of a test’s last page, a failure to remember our “worst is coming” philosophy. Soon, Mike and I would be suffering, winding around the infield dirt in our two lines, fielding and tossing, above the soundtrack of Coach demanding perfection. One grounder after another.

We rattled in the van in silence. I could only mutter to myself, from my recent reading of Bartleby the Scrivener, “I prefer not to” or contemplate the carnage from Western Civ: Roman prisoners ushered to the Coliseum lions. But then a small yet predictable miracle, as we merged onto the modest stretch of highway we needed to cross. Traffic. Visibly perturbed, Coach watched each ebb of movement, leaning to the windshield, as if he could will away the congestion, peering through the modest spaces between cars, with the frustration of watching his pitcher walk the bases loaded.

As we crawled deeper into the six o’clock hour, bumper-to-bumper, there was a mention from the front seats of “cafeteria,” confirmed by an upperclassman, who whispered something about the meal plan, that Coach would have to give us enough time to make dinner. Without saying a word, we shared the surprise that this man, whose looming presence followed us through every hour of our waking days and some of our sleeping ones, could be brought to his knees by the dining hours of Raymond Hall Cafeteria.

As the van trudged on, we stared hard at the dashboard clock and did the math that Coach was surely doing, too. The Goddess of Rush Hour answered our prayers, and the Saint of Fender Benders threw in rubbernecking for good measure. The green digits neared and then crested 6:30, and by the time we ramped off the highway, the imminent 7 o’clock closing of Raymond Hall made middle feeds impossible. Still, Coach waited, as we turned street corners, which, with each trip, were becoming more and more familiar, as were the backs of the campus buildings that bordered the grounds. We pulled into the fieldhouse parking lot, the vans clunking into Park. Defeated, he uttered, “OK, guys. You’re all set. Go catch dinner.”

Exultation.

We hurried into and out of the locker room, down the stairs to the laundry chute to push through the soiled pins, then out of the building, darting away from the vacant infield and the white lined outfield emptied of field hockey players, one of whom I would meet just months later and marry years after that. But there was so much ahead of that: the rest of the fall season, the winter break, four baseball springs, until suddenly, graduation. Then there were weddings and all the bests we could hope for and the inevitable, terrible worsts that were much harder to see coming. Before all of this, we had to make dinner.

Through the dusk shadows crossing between the dorms and classroom halls, we quickened our pace, relief overtaken by the dread of losing the meal. From the distance, we could see, leaning on an open door, the large figure of Uncle Lou. What a sight we must have been, how beautiful, right then and there, running, lucky with our sufferings, at the start of our civilization- the eventual school superintendent, the Major League Baseball bat maker, and the college professor. We entered the cafeteria, one after another, inhaling the redemptive smell of chicken patty.

Scott Palmieri is a professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. His writing has been published in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Hobart, The Leaflet, The Alembic, and The Result Is What You See Today: Poems About Running. He played baseball at Providence College and continues his love of the sport through writing, coaching Little League, and playing, as long as his legs will allow, in a senior men’s league. He lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island, with his wife and three children, his biggest fans.

Slow on the Uptake

by Sydney Lea

At 60 — almost, Lord God, 20 years ago! — I took up the sport of flatwater kayak racing, my back and knees having started to protest too vigorously about my running through the woods to stay in shape. But the coronavirus shut down my paddle races in 2020.

Just as well. I’m talking about the races, Lord knows, not the virus. In middle June, I’d had an operation on my right hand, one designed to rectify a botched earlier carpal tunnel procedure. I was cautioned to treat my thumb and first two fingers delicately for six weeks, so I’d never have gotten in shape anyhow for the 12-miler scheduled for early August. But there’d be other races in other places.

Immediately after my first post-surgical workout on our beloved Maine lake, my wife took a picture of me. One of our granddaughters saw it and said, Look! Grandpa’s smiling! My face was contorted, but I wasn’t smiling.

I can dwell on doom sometimes, not blessings like the sweet child’s unique and beautiful smile. Like how on whitecap days such as that one the west wind striates the surface with parallel lines of foam. Like the half-grown eagle that struck the water’s surface twice, fishing its way to a tree, from which it now screamed.

I idled below the big raptor’s perch. I needed the break, though I lied to myself that I just wanted to check on its fortunes. They had been less than mine. I saw that I should feel privileged simply to be there, rocking side to side.

Tax your old muscles and bones like this, I told myself, every day if you can, as strenuously as you can. Extend your years as far as possible. But I was an old man now, and Mother Nature would remain undefeated. I’d be gone before long, the way new grass withers and dies — a notion from Scripture, which may mean nothing to you. That’s none of my business.

My die-hard spirit dies hard, but after that snapshot was taken, it struck me that a month without exercise would have weakened anyone, even a young man. As my mother used to say when stubbornness blinded me to my own ample advantages, You’re slow on the uptake, pal.

I felt I had little time — and all the time in the world. I could be here now, as one 60s icon advised after he went from Harvard professor Richard Alpert to aspirant Buddhist monk Baba Ram Dass. I was in my twenties then.

I remember the would-be monk’s father, a corporate lawyer, calling him “Baba Rum-Dumb.” Even then, I shared some of his cynicism, but staying in the present is a worthy aim. No, it won’t free the poor and oppressed in our time any more than in Ram Dass’s salad days and my own, for all our idealisms. Nor, to quote a song from that era, have we found the way we put an end to war. That’s a truth we’ve been confirming and reconfirming since humans started to farm and, in the process, conceived of property.

I still long to demolish injustice, but at my age it’s worth being diverted by what’s left of wonders — like that salmon, bright as a jeweler’s gem, 15 feet deep in the cove beneath the eagle’s perch, in water so clear I could look right through it, so pure I could drink it.

 

Sydney Lea is 2021 recipient of his home state Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. (Past winners include luminaries from Galway Kinnell to Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Rudolf Serkin, and many others.) A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, he served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015).  He is the author of 23 books, the latest Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life,” essays (Green Writers Press, 2021). The mock-epic graphic poem, “The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy“ (Able Muse, 2020), was produced in collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka.  Four Way Books (NYC) published Here, poems, in late 2019.

The Referee

by Terri Kirby Erickson

In memory of my father, Tom Kirby, 1934 – 2019

How long ago it seems when my middle-aged
father stood in our living room, practicing his
moves. He had a test to pass, signals to learn.
I sat on the couch, holding the local high school
football referee handbook, calling out words like:
delay of game, pass interference, and personal
foul. I would make up ways for him to memorize
motions, like naming one signal the two-handled
teapot and yet another, the back off, buddy. He
would work through the whole list after spending
eight hours at his day job. Still, I, a teenager who
had no knowledge of paying bills and feeding the
family, found it funny to see my father, once he
aced the test, wearing his new uniform—the stiff
white pants, his striped shirt, the shrill whistle that
hung around his neck. But I loved the hours we
spent together, laughing—how there was this thing
his daughter could do for him instead of the other
way around. Although I never saw my father on
the field, I can picture him there, his face lit by the
stadium lights as teams of fierce young men zoomed
back and forth across the yard lines, fans cheering
or jeering from the bleachers when Dad turned into
a two-handled teapot, full to the brim with fair play.

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including A Sun Inside My Chest, winner of the 2021 International Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in “American Life in Poetry,” The Sun, The Writer’s Almanac, and many others. Her awards include the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Nautilus Silver Book Award. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and his extensive collection of Loudmouth golf pants.

 

Babe Ruth Hits First Professional Home Run,
Fayetteville, North Carolina, March 7, 1914

by Philip Gerard

This was the summer the Orioles come to town—
minor leaguers, but plenty of pep and banter.
And this one kid—green, but knows his stuff, see?
Swaggers around, joshing with the kids,
so limber for a big man, the flannels
tight over his bulky chest and
muscled arms, cap ready to fly
right off his big tousled head.

Always grinning, whatever the score,
like maybe falling behind was just a dare
to do something about it, something
those bleacher rats would remember
and tell their own kids about someday.
Now, this ain’t Orioles Park or Ebbets Field
or even beat-down Shibe Park,
just the old Cape Fear Fairgrounds,

a sun-burned infield and some wooden stands.
He loiters at the plate, loose as a grifter,
waving a scarred little bat—skinny
as a broomstick in his thick hands.
“Look at him waggle that pole,” says one of the scribes,
“like a baby with a rattle.” And it sticks, you know?
Babe. That’s what the papers start calling him,
that day forth and forever.
He don’t look like much, till he reaches out

and slaps Mr. Spalding like swatting a fly—
and boy it is not only gone, it is gone
into the middle of next week.
Some sport measures it out—
four hundred feet and counting.
He trots around like no big deal
and the bleacher rats are cheering him on,
already dreaming of their own swat at glory
on a field that stays forever green
and always belongs to the babes.

 

Philip Gerard is the author of 13 books of fiction and nonfiction, including
Cape Fear Rising and The Last Battleground, as well as numerous essays and
short stories, 11 documentary scripts for public television, and an award-winning
radio drama. He has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Weekend
Edition,” CNN, CSPAN, and the History Channel, along with numerous national
podcasts. He teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington
and with his wife Jill Gerard co- edits Chautauqua, the literary journal of
Chautauqua institution in New York. In 2019 he received the North Carolina
Award for Literature, the highest civilian honor conferred by the state.