April 2022

The List

by Todd Morgan

Sam and I were having lunch at the kitchen table. His baseball cap shielded his eyes as he leaned over a piece of paper, pencil grasped in his small hand, his PB&J partly eaten.

“What’s that?” I said.
He didn’t look up.
“Coach said if he was going to war, he’d take some of the guys with him, but some of us he wouldn’t.”

I put down my newspaper and peered across the table. I saw a partial listing of his teammates’ names: Matt, Ricky, …. My nine-year-old was trying to figure out which group he fell in. Go to war or be left at home?

I felt a sudden urge to shield him.

The young coach who said this, Nick, had a swagger about him, one that was either contagious or obnoxious depending on whether you were associated with his team or the opposition. A star high school athlete just a few years earlier, he wore mirrored sunglasses and shaved his head. The kids idolized him.

Like most coaches, Nick had a deep competitive streak. But unlike most coaches, he seemed to know how to fully embrace competition while keeping things in perspective. Time after time he steeled the team to rally from a deficit. He would build up the confidence of each batter, one pitch at a time. For a boy intent on driving in a run, he’d call out, “Just make contact.” To boost a kid battling deep in the count, he’d yell, “Good at bat.” If a pitcher challenged a baserunner’s lead, well then, on the next pitch Nick would shout to the boy to take an even bigger lead. It was a master class in pitting one’s will against the opponent.

Then, once the game ended and he had talked to the team about lessons learned, his intensity vanished. Lighthearted and matter-of-fact behind the mirrored shades, he would crank up the volume on his car stereo and head off into the afternoon blasting “We Like to Party! (The Vengabus).”

Why was this good coach challenging these young boys with a misguided war analogy? Might one of them quietly conclude at nine or ten years old that he was a coward? Was I over reacting?

Sam loved sports, and I wanted to help him be successful. We enjoyed tossing the ball back and forth. I bought him an expensive aluminum bat. Sometimes I pitched to him, or we went to the batting cages and then got hot dogs afterward. Occasionally I cleaned caked mud off his cleats at night after he was asleep and wondered if I was too invested. But there were plenty of other parents like my wife and me, who went to every game and followed each pitch.

When I was Sam’s age, my brother Greg enlisted in an intelligence branch of the army. The enlistment officer told him that because he’d be schooled in top secret codes, he’d never be sent to a combat zone, so he’d never be in jeopardy of revealing secrets if captured and tortured. Greg was pleased and thought he had sidestepped Vietnam. The officer’s story, while plausible and correct in the small details, was a stunning lie.

I often studied the photo that sat on top of the TV while Greg was gone: my parents and him standing next to each other at the airport, my mom with red eyes, my dad wearing a suit and a grim expression, my brother frowning in his dress uniform with its few ribbon medals. Before the army, Greg wore oxford cloth shirts, drank Pepsi, smoked a pipe, read Playboy, and listened to Dave Brubeck. When he came home, he drank beer, smoked pot, worked ‘fuck’ and its variations into almost every conversation, and listened to The Band, Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix.

He told me a story about a highly decorated soldier who did something violent and obscene to a cat. He taught me I could solve life’s problems just by saying “fuck it.” From all of this I understood war was a kind of betrayal or, as Greg would have put it, a complete fucking mess.

There’s a photo I love of Greg taken in Saigon in 1968. It’s a head shot of him in jungle fatigues. He’s wearing a boonie hat and standard issue glasses. The freckles across the bridge of his nose remind me of Sam. His blue eyes stare with childlike determination as he sticks out his tongue at the camera.

I had never considered Sam going to war until Nick’s comment triggered me like an unexpected muscle memory. I doubt I could’ve tempered my response to Sam if I’d known that ultimately Greg would die of ALS. It’s a brutal disease that progressively weakens the muscles, including ones you didn’t know you had. Near the end, Greg couldn’t even close his eyes. The causes of ALS are unknown but veterans are twice as likely to get it as the general population. The US government presumes there’s a service connection when a vet gets the disease.

To try to convey my attitude to a nine-year-old focused on baseball would have been foolish. At the same time, it was insidiously easy to challenge a kid to jump on the war bandwagon and thereby plant seeds of moral confusion about what war is – and isn’t. I also feared one day Sam might have a life-changing conversation with an army recruiter, possibly a charismatic young man with a shaved head and sunglasses.

“Sam…. Nick doesn’t know you well enough to say something like that.”

The baseball cap tipped up and Sam looked out for a moment. It seemed he registered what I said though there was a distant look in his eyes. Then, he returned to pondering the list.

Watching Sam hunkered down, I faced the fact that I would be on guard but he would make his own choices.

I pretended to resume reading my newspaper and we sat together.

Todd Morgan’s stories have appeared in Split Lip Magazine and Every Day Fiction. He was born in Indiana and grew up in Kentucky and New Jersey. He lives with his wife in Oak Park, Illinois.

Mrs. Talbot and a Field

by Kent Jacobson

Life comes with indelible loss: lost innocence, lost
loved ones, broken bonds, broken hearts, faulty choices . . .
Bob Hohler

I remember a woman crossing her lawn, the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Talbot, a slim woman in a dark faded shirtwaist, striding with this-is-my-world certainty, chin out, spine straight. She’d shot from her weathered-shingle second home on Winnapaug salt pond: the sharp smell, the squawking gulls, the jays, the blackbirds, low-hanging limbs heavy with apples. I was 12.

We played baseball in the summer twilight on Mrs. Talbot’s field with its chicken-wired backstop and dirt bases, the sloping left field and the too deep right. Nobody ever hit a home run to right. Nobody. One kid was the son of a double-amputee chicken farmer, and another, the son of his foreman. A third was a string bean with a future in basketball; his dad sold insurance. Another’s cousin would play in the baseball All-Star game, his father a state trooper. My nearest neighbors and buddies, the Crandalls and the Smiths, came from families where mom and dad worked the factory lines. And me, I was the kid who lived on the lone hill, Mom at the University, Dad head of the state forest service. We boys were a mixed collection, just enough of us, we always said, “for a decent game.”

We scrapped and recited. “Who forgot the first baseman’s glove?” “Get the damn ball over the plate. Arm needs a tune-up.” “Where’s the good bat?” “You didn’t tag ‘im, you didn’t tag ‘im.” “Overthrow first and you go find it in the high grass.” We were that kind of family. Each night we bickered for the good of the game. Ball fired to the plate, crack of a bat against beat-up ball, “In the air, in the air, Go back, go back,” runner streaks, “Second, he’s at second,” ball in Mike Smith’s glove in left and a bad throw to third, ball wide, runner scores, “Missed a base, he missed a base.” The game was like a song shout with Chuck Berry and the Yankees’ World War II marine outfielder Hank Bauer, revered for grit and a face “like a clenched fist.”

But then there was Mrs. Talbot. She had an underground, fresh-water spring that poured cold into the marsh, steps from her shingled home. In the August heat, t-shirts sopped, jeans stuck to our thighs, we threw our gloves down to hold our spot and howled across her lawn like we owned the place, the salt smell sharper, and gulped at her spring, the water clean, the water clear . . . and whooped our way back past the lilac and summersweet, the rhododendron and hydrangea, back over her green wide lush lawn to our field.

Mrs. Talbot complained. She said we were too many. There was noise. We wore a path. No water, she said, no more use of the spring.
What’d she say?
We weren’t certain the verdict was final. It couldn’t be. Adults said piles of things, much of which we tried to ignore.
I headed for the spring. That’s when Mrs. T appeared, that stride. I froze.

Adults talked to kids when we needed a correction and I sensed mine was coming now.
She spoke in a whisper without a hint of hesitation. “It’s alright if you come here for water. I won’t allow anyone else.”
Wha . . .?

The boys could see us. I should have gone back to the field right then, told them, Forget it. Verdict’s final. She’s serious. No water.
Mrs. Talbot retreated to the house. I stood there. I watched her go. I turned for the spring.
Why? Why did I do that? Why wasn’t I wiser?

Mrs. T, I thought, is looking after me. She’s singled me out. One boy’s okay. I’m not the army of the 11 of us. I’m quiet, though how does she know?

And sure, my older sister was smart and Mrs. Talbot’s sister, my new English teacher for the college-bound, gave A’s to my soaked-in-books sister. That counted for something. Mrs. Talbot and my family were nearest neighbors (even if we didn’t speak), us up on the hill, 25 rooms, a stone porch and fountain, Japanese maples and an ocean view. On nights and weekends Dad and Mom had transformed a three-story derelict mansion into a summer inn (Winnapaug House) to pay for sis and my college.

I was different from the other boys, Mrs. Talbot’s permission said. I was special. I could be trusted. They couldn’t. I was flattered.
I swallowed the message whole.
I must have told the boys, though I can’t remember. I don’t want to remember. No water except for me. Did I appear smug and pleased?
No one protested, not openly.

Their dads may have said: Live with it. He isn’t like us. He’s like Mrs. Talbot. Though some boys had to balk: Why him? What’s wrong with me? He’s just a kid like us.

All the boys would slip from my life and never see me as older men except that time on a New Haven train when Randy and Kenny Crandall passed and didn’t speak. We didn’t forget, none of us could forget, because we’d had a glimpse early of the way the world would likely work.

You can betray your friends and simultaneously betray who you are and who you have been, and spend much of your life from that point on finding your way back, all the way back… to one isolated abandoned field off the main road.

Kent Jacobson has taught in prisons and a foundering inner-city for 30 years. His writing appears (or will soon appear) in The Dewdrop, Hobart, Talking Writing, Backchannels, Punctuate, Lucky Jefferson, BULL, and elsewhere. He lives in Massachusetts, two hours from Mrs. Talbot’s field.

NFL Road Trip

by Michael Graham

I prefer to travel by book. Paul Theroux has taken me from Cairo to Capetown in Africa. With Jonathan Raban aboard his 35-foot sailboat, we navigated the 1,000-mile Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. There was a memorable journey years ago with Bruce Chatwin to “the far end of the world,” as the restless Brit described Patagonia, the vast, rugged territory at the tip of South America. Travel by book is the way to go, especially these days. It’s cheaper, whether going by hard-bound or paperback. You don’t need to mask-up. You avoid the TSA lines that snake through airports, the ubiquitous orange barrels on the interstate highways. You kick back in your recliner while the author deals with the linguistic barriers and sweats out the nasty microbial infections in foreign countries. Annoying tourists always seem to find Theroux. Chatwin, in Patagonia, hitched a ride with a Chilean truck driver whose feet, he reported, “smelled like cheese.”

So, in January when my wife Linda said our daughter in Georgia had called, inviting us to join her and her fiancé in Nashville for the upcoming NFL divisional playoff game between the Tennessee Titans and our hometown Cincinnati Bengals, I was not properly enthusiastic. Instead, I began finding reasons why we shouldn’t make what would be a quick weekend trip, the game just four hours and fifteen minutes down the road. Yes, but you know people drive too fast on the freeway. It’s the middle of winter, we’ll freeze our septuagenarian asses off. Our seats are field-level, we’ll have to stand the entire time. You know pro football fans — the Dawg Pound in Cleveland, the Jungle in Cincinnati, it doesn’t matter where — they’re intolerable. Yada, yada, yada.

The more excuses I made, the less convincing I sounded. Even I didn’t buy my argument for staying home, not after the Bengals had just defeated the Las Vegas Raiders in the opening round of the playoffs, touching off a week-long end zone celebration, if you will, in Cincinnati. “Act like you’ve been there before,” the late Paul Brown was known to say when one of his players would do a touchdown dance or spike the ball after scoring. Yet it had been thirty-one years since the club that Brown founded had won a playoff game. Bengals fans were understandably charged up, my spouse included. Linda would be going to Nashville, with or without her complaining, worry-wart husband. She hadn’t been this excited since the last time we attended a Bengals playoff game together — way, way back at Super Bowl XVI in Pontiac, Michigan, where Forrest Gregg’s squad lost to quarterback Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers. It was bitterly cold in Pontiac, too, but the 1982 game was played inside, under a dome, and as the Bengals beat reporter for The Cincinnati Post I had a comfortable seat in the pressbox, far from the madding crowd. The Post folded in 2007, a casualty of declining readership in afternoon papers around the country. I folded too, leaving the business in 1989. There would be no press pass this time.

We arrived in the Music City on Friday, the day before the game, a cold front blowing into town ahead of us. The forecast for Saturday called for highs only in the mid-30s, sunny skies, and a 100 percent chance of Derrick Henry. “The King,” as his loyal subjects in Tennessee bow to their all-Pro running back, would be returning to the field after being sidelined for two months with a foot injury. Bad news for the Bengals. For us, the news was all good. Our weekend stay at The Joseph, a Marriott boutique hotel within walking distance of Nashville’s honky tonks and the Titans’ stadium, would be fully comped by our daughter’s fiancé — much appreciated after the valet who parked my car said the rate was fifty-six dollars a day. When one of the beaming clerks who checked us in at the front desk offered Linda and me each a mini teacup of chai latte, I decided maybe it was finally time to lose my shamefully bad attitude and warm up a little to this experience I’d be sharing with family and Bengals fans. (Just don’t ask me to wear stripes. Silly as it seems, I try to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity, even if it was half a lifetime ago when I covered the club. I still can’t look at the expensive Waterford crystal bowl Linda and I received as a wedding gift from Paul Brown and not feel compromised in some way.)

The staff at The Joseph treated us like visiting dignitaries, so willing to be of service that when I decided I needed a softer bed pillow, I told Linda that management would probably dispatch a valet to Cincinnati to pluck mine off the bed in our townhouse and drive it back to Nashville if I asked them to do so. As it was, they sent up three different pillows for me to try. What our friendly, eager-to-please hosts couldn’t provide, unfortunately, was a hard copy of a newspaper—not even a print edition of the local Tennessean. When I asked the concierge where I could find the New York Times (other than on my Android), she shrugged and pointed across the street. “Try Dunkin’ Donuts.”

I woke up Saturday morning and decided to grab a cup of coffee at the Starbucks in the hotel around the corner. Maybe I could get my hands on a newspaper there. It was 6 a.m. when I left our room on the 16th floor and walked down the dark hallway to the bank of elevators, not a soul stirring. Cincinnati fans and Tennessee fans wouldn’t be putting on their gamefaces until later that afternoon, trudging elbow-to-elbow across the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge over the Cumberland River for the three o’clock kickoff in Nissan Stadium. The half-mile-long bridge is named after the late editor of the Tennessean, who, as a young reporter with the paper, saved a suicidal man from jumping off the bridge — a leap the disconsolate might have considered taking after their top-seeded Titans were upset, 19-16, by the Bengals.

Waiting that morning on an elevator descending from the 20^th floor, I stared at the video art on the far wall. A tree toppled over in a forest, begging the question that philosophers have debated for centuries. The video, however, ran silently in a slow-motion loop, this tree not making a sound while I stood there watching it fall through the woods, nor would it have made a sound had I been back in my room and out of earshot. In retrospect, I now see the video as a portent, the falling tree a foreshadowing of the calamitous events on the field that day, events the Bengals somehow managed to overcome. Joe Burrow, their second-year quarterback, went down again and again under the Titans’ fierce pass rush — sacked nine times, a playoff record the Bengals’ permeable offensive line shared with the Titans’ defensive front. Burrow’s so-called pass protectors could only help their unflappable QB to his feet after each hit and hope he would keep making plays when the team desperately needed plays to be made. The game ended with a Burrow pass that set up placekicker Evan McPherson, who booted a 52-yard field goal as time expired. The rookie called his winning kick before launching it—a la Babe Ruth pointing to the centerfield wall at Wrigley Field before famously hitting a home run in the 1932 World Series—and thereafter his moniker was “Money” McPherson as the Bengals made their unlikely pilgrimage to the Super Bowl.

What I couldn’t stop talking about, though, after returning home from this trip I didn’t want to make, was another startling moment, a spooky encounter that Rod Serling could have introduced in one of his monologues from his 1960s TV series “The Twilight Zone.” There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. … a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity … the dimension of the imagination …an area we call the Twilight Zone. That’s where I seemed to be when the elevator door opened early that morning and standing in the corner, all alone, was Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the Tennessee Titans. All 6-4 of him. No mask. Stubby beard. He could have been a ghost, a swirling hologram. The valet, the front desk clerk, the concierge who sent me across the street to the donut shop, had not said a word — there was not a peep, in fact, out of anybody — about the Titans being quarantined in our hotel, if indeed Vrabel and his players really had spent the night there, segregated from the public as mandated by the NFL while the SARS-CoV-2 virus remained on the loose. Yet there he was, the Ohio State All-American, the New England Patriots linebacker, the NFL Coach of the Year in 2021, looking directly at me. I’ve seen that look of apprehension before, when VIPs are afraid you might accost them and ask for an autograph, or worse, try to make conversation.

“Good luck today,” I said, getting on the elevator.
Vrabel nodded.

The door closed. We began going down.
Elevator rides with strangers are always uncomfortable. This one was uncomfortable and weird.

“I’m from Cincinnati. I used to cover the Bengals in the Munoz and Collinsworth days,” I said, a remark that surely made no sense because I had failed to identify myself as a has-been reporter.

Vrabel nodded again. We stopped at the 8^th floor. What can I say before he gets off?
“I’m a big Ohio State fan.” Weak, Michael. Weak.
The door opened. With one last nod, Vrabel was gone.

When I returned to the room with my coffee, I told Linda I had ridden on the elevator with the Titans’ coach, just the two of us, and was so stunned to be face-to-face with him I sounded like a silly, awestruck fan. We joked about the one-sided conversation. I should have hit the emergency stop button, demanded Vrabel hand over the Titans’ gameplan. I should have told him I saw his running back in the hotel bar late last night and he appeared to be limping. (The King carried the ball 20 times, gained 62 yards, and scored one TD — yeoman’s work, but not spectacular.) I should have asked the question I’d been asking since I arrived. “I’m looking for a newspaper, Coach. Do you know where I can find one?”

 

Michael Graham is director of operations for Zeigler Financial, a financial services firm in Wilmington, Ohio. He resides in Cincinnati, where he was a staff writer for Cincinnati Magazine (1989-96) and a reporter for The Cincinnati Post (1976-85). His sportswriting portfolio includes five seasons as the Post’s reporter on the Cincinnati Bengals beat and a year as the paper’s sports columnist, traveling around the country to cover a wide range of events, including the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. At Cincinnati Magazine, he specialized in profiles of the Queen City’s major sports figures, politicians, media personalities, entertainers, and business leaders.