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No Man’s Land

by Anthony D’Aries

“I’m 36 years old, I have a wife, a child and a mortgage and I’m scared to death I’m turning into my father.”

I press pause and lock eyes with Kevin Costner. A tiny ball of thorns forms in my throat. My ears are ringing. My face is hot. Though I haven’t seen Field of Dreams in nearly 15 years, I can still quote entire scenes. But after learning that the 25^th anniversary of the film falls on the exact day my first child is due to be born, this line is new to me.

Three sleepless hours later, it’s almost five a.m., and my father is everywhere: The coffee, the streetlights, the men in work trucks idling in driveways, the classic car show I’ll attend alone today. A Dad kind of day. But he wouldn’t call the Starbucks Instant I’m drinking “coffee,” and my streetlights illuminate cracked concrete, not dew-glistening grass, and he still owns his ’67 Chevy pickup, while my ’66 Dodge Coronet has long been replaced by an ’09 Honda Fit.

Five years, 30 interviews, 72,000 words later and I’m still writing about my father. When I finished my first book, The Language of Men, a memoir about Full Metal Jacket, Bob Seger, taxidermy, The Swimsuit Issue, and all the other filters my male-dominated family used to communicate, I was relieved. I had a lot questions for him: his lurid tales of young Vietnamese prostitutes, his 40 years as a deli manager, his elusive father who always appeared half-shadowed in photographs. My father never complained — at least not to me — about my curiosity or my writing, though he occasionally offered a few clipped comments when my questions violated an unspoken code, pressed too firmly on bruises of work or love or dreams: You off in No Man’s Land now, boy.

I covered a lot of ground in my book. My wife Vanessa and I traveled to Vietnam, where she led sexual health and reproductive rights classes for former sex workers, while I searched for my bored and horny nineteen-year-old father; to Maine and Boston, Texas and San Francisco, returning with old letters and photographs like souvenirs; but ultimately back to Northport, the little fishing village on Long Island where I grew up, armed with a tape recorder and a list of questions.

“I never forgave him for getting old,” Kevin Costner says, in a tone that makes his statement sound more like a question to his younger self. “He must have had dreams, right?”

As I crawl toward fatherhood, what frightens me, what I think is the reason I had to pause and replay several of Costner’s lines, is the word “dreams.” The question that left me stranded in No Man’s Land wasn’t racy or voyeuristic; I had asked my father what he wanted to be when he was my age. The question every adult had asked me since I was six years old. My father shrugged and chewed the inside of his lip as if no one had ever asked him that.

No Man’s Land was flat, desolate country. Wind blew across shallow canyons like breath over empty beer bottles. The more questions I asked, the deeper I traveled into No Man’s Land, until I reached that cold-sweat moment in a long hike when you realize the end is far away, but the beginning is even farther.

***

When I was in elementary school, my family and a few of my aunts and uncles and cousins rented an RV and drove from New York to Georgia to visit my Uncle Richard. HBO had recently run a National Lampoon’s Vacation marathon, and as we geared up for our trip, we referred to my Uncle Richard as Cousin Eddie. Cousin Eddie is Randy Quaid’s character in the movie, an obnoxious redneck who owns a worm farm, has a pack of kids (one born without a tongue), and serves up a barbecue of processed seasonings and condiments: I don’t know why they call this stuff Hamburger Helper; it does just fine by itself. Our Cousin Eddie, my Uncle Richard, bore a certain resemblance – an overgrown plot of land outside Atlanta pock-marked with rusty cars on cement blocks, ATV engines, and a crippled swing set. He shot Roman Candles at his neighbor’s house, ate SPAM, drank Royal Cola, and loved his kids. My uncle shared Eddie’s perverted sense of humor, his punch lines often hinging on a particular sex act or female body part. Not that I understood what he was talking about at the time. The men would laugh and the women would shake their heads and the kids would stare. I preferred the part of his act when he leaned to one side of his chair at the dinner table, bit his lip, and asked if somebody stepped on a duck.

The thought of being in an RV for several days with no television was enough for me to convince Dad to pack a tiny black and white portable TV that was more gray plastic than screen. I hooked our VHS video camera (the size of a Ghostbuster’s proton pack) up to the portable TV so I could watch movies. While everyone else was packing sunscreen and tank tops, I scanned our movie collection. We had an eighteen-hour drive, so I divided that by two, and determined I’d need nine movies for each leg of the trip. I packed Goodfellas and The Untouchables, Willow and Caddyshack, Back to the Future and Lethal Weapon, Tango and Cash and Easy Money — all the movies I knew by heart. I didn’t want to watch anything new. I wanted a steady dose of the familiar, the expected, the lines and scenes I could predict and reenact. And I packed Field of Dreams.

Field of Dreams was one of the rare movies we purchased brand new – the rest were recorded off HBO and labeled in Dad’s chicken-scratch handwriting. On the box for Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner stands before an emerald corn field in sun-bleached jeans, white t-shirt, and worn brown leather jacket, hands on his hips, a slight grin on his face. Over the corn, a massive full moon rises, almost touching the movie’s tagline: If you believe the impossible, the incredible can come true.

Dad chewed a cherry cigar and drove us over the George Washington Bridge. Mom sat in the passenger seat swiping an emery board across her nails in quick, scratchy strokes. With his palm resting on top of the steering wheel, Dad played air piano to Seger’s “Katmandu.” My mother sang along. Sarah and Shannon, my teenage cousins, wore headphones and braided each other’s hair; my older brother, Don, a freshman in high school, slept. For the first hour or so, I tried to make tractor trailers blow their horns, but I eventually got bored and started watching movies. Robert De Niro, then Rodney Dangerfield, then Sylvester Stallone ran across the screen like extras in a Charlie Chaplin film, their voices squealing like The Chipmunks. Each tape seemed to be stuck on fast-forward. I soon realized that there was an issue with the play-back speed on our video camera. The only movie that played at the correct speed was Field of Dreams. Eighteen hours, divided by two. Lots of fields. Lots of dreams.

Though Dad and I played catch from time to time — and I joined Little League for a season or two in elementary school — I didn’t care about baseball. It was no different than basketball or football or street hockey or any of the other sports I played with mediocre skill and mild enthusiasm. I couldn’t name a single professional baseball player, I’d seen Billy Joel play more times at Shea Stadium than the Mets, and given how rarely we ventured into New York City, Yankee Stadium might as well have been a desert island. Dad didn’t listen to games on the radio or watch them on TV, except when ESPN re-ran old World Series games. Then he watched them as if they were a Clint Eastwood western, jabbing me in the ribs before a home run the way he would when a burlesque dancer jiggled across the saloon stage or an outlaw was about to get pumped full of lead.

***

I park my ‘09 Honda Fit next to a jacked-up Hummer with pink plastic testicles dangling from the tow hitch. Across the parking lot is a baseball field full of muscle cars. A few Cub Scouts walk by carrying boxes of raffle tickets. A heavy-set man in a train conductor’s cap uses a stainless steel spatula to push a pile of sausage and peppers onto a grill. GTOs and Road Runners, Camaros and Thunderbirds, 442s and Corvettes roll up to the registration booth. They idle for a moment, as if the rumbling exhaust were haggling over the admission price, then roll through the gate and onto the field. They add themselves to the necklace of cars in the outfield, snarling like wild cats as they approach each other, before the drivers kill their engines. I smell exhaust from across the field, coffee brewing in tall stainless-steel canisters, Armor-All and cigarettes, Windex and leather and aftershave. I unclip the keys from my belt loop, partly to avoid scratching any of the cars, but mostly to hide my bulky black Honda key.

Vanessa likes car shows, but this one is too early for her. I’m glad I’m alone today, wandering from car to car in a quiet Massachusetts suburb not far from the prison where I teach men older than my father how to read, a town not unlike Northport: million dollar horse farms sloping to weathered ranches or capes, then farther down to the faceless brick apartments behind Main Street. On my morning drives to work, the farms and apartments seem abandoned, as if I were a laborer arriving too early at a massive job site.

The early morning reminds me of Costner rising at dawn to tend his corn. After watching Field of Dreams the night before the car show, I’m surprised by how much of the film is about identity and purpose, how we expect work to define us. I’ve always admired the outcasts, the underdogs, the square pegs. The high school stoner athlete, the female race car driver, the professor in scuffed work boots. Or Costner and his wife, the young married couple whom the town considers crazy for plowing under their corn and building a baseball field, cashing in their crop for what W.P. Kinsella calls “dream currency.”

As I walk from car to car, I see a young woman pushing a boy in a stroller back and forth beside a blood-red ’68 Cobra. The boy runs a Matchbox car along the stroller’s railing, flipping and twisting, then landing the car smoothly on his plastic seat belt. The woman talks to a man spraying wax onto a rag and polishing the Cobra, as the Everly Brothers sing about how much time can do. I never paid much attention to this song, but it’s hard not to when the speakers are the size of box trucks. Is it optimistic or pessimistic? Does time allow us to sand and prime rusted metal, give it a glossy coat? Or is time the rust itself, the deterioration, the cement shoes on the Buicks and Toyotas on my uncle’s front lawn?

Sixteen years ago, when I followed my father’s ’67 Chevy pickup in my ’66 Dodge Coronet to the fairgrounds on Sunday afternoons, the cars and music and people we saw were the same I see now. Leather-bound ‘Nam vets with hats stabbed full of pins; obese food vendors wheezing over sausage and pepper heroes, skinny rat-faced and sunburned bikers telling loud stories in front of their chromed-out Harleys; teenagers smoking mentholated cigarettes, boasting about their Civics’ new sound systems; mahogany-skinned Indian or Middle Eastern men with gold hidden in furry wrists posing next to Lamborghinis or Teslas; baby-faced professionals in new leather jackets eyeing For Sale signs; Cub Scouts bragging about their fathers, like the one today: “Oh yeah? Well, my dad’s gotten carbon monoxide poisoning twice this year!”; the brittle Elk’s Club members in full regalia collecting admissions, stamping the backs of hands, and drumming up business for the 50/50 raffle. All of them pinned to the same evolutionary line like overalls in the breeze.

My father is retired now, no longer bound to the one-day-off-a-week schedule he had for forty years. When I was a kid, I was fascinated with his job. On Sundays, he’d wake me at 4:45 in the morning. Time to make the donuts, boy. Then 7-Eleven and coffee and the black shimmering asphalt leading us to Great Neck. Not Gatsby’s Great Neck – my father’s Great Neck was owned by Waldbaum’s supermarket. On a good day, he’d stop along the way and scrape a raccoon or rabbit off the highway, store it in the supermarket’s walk-in refrigerator, and bring it home to work on alone in his taxidermy workshop in our basement. I remember stepping through the supermarket’s glass doorway and wandering the empty, dimly-lit aisles. We were alone in a giant warehouse of shiny, colorful food. As we made our way to the deli counter, my father let me choose any box of cereal I wanted – just grab it off the shelf and open the box. I always hesitated because it never seemed right. Relax, will ya? Delivery guy’ll get credit for it. I decided I wanted to be a cereal delivery man when I grew up.

Now, whenever I visit my parents, I still hear him making his coffee at 4:45. The sliding glass door, the Winstons in the garage, the razor and Artic Blue aftershave. Take the job out of the routine, and the routine remains. I’ve inherited his routine – the mornings, the coffee, the quiet. Like the Roadrunners and Cougars and Stingrays in the outfield, my father and I are solitary animals.

***

“Not Field of Dreams, again,” my cousin Sarah said, holding onto the walls of the RV. We were somewhere outside of Washington D.C.; I was on my third viewing.

“It’s the only one that works,” I said.

“There needs to be a rule for how many times we watch that,” Sarah said, and as the word “rule” came out of her mouth, Dad shouted from the driver’s seat like James Earl Jones: “There are rules here? No, there are no rules here.” And I was Kevin Costner, stumbling backwards, as if Jones were right in front of me delivering his lines. Dad laughed. Sarah shook her head and joined her sister in the RV’s cramped bathroom.

As the cars and trucks zoomed around our oil-burning RV, I walked through corn fields, wondering how far I’d get before I disappeared like Shoeless Joe Jackson. I only knew Shoeless Joe because Dad and I had watched Eight Men Out a bunch of times, not because I knew anything about the real Joe Jackson. But the Hollywood version was enough for me to feel like I knew all about Joe and the 1919 White Sox World Series scandal. I wasn’t concerned if Joe was a hero or a thief or if one man couldn’t be both; I was lost in the magical realism of Field of Dreams — one moment Costner and his wife are unpacking groceries, the next dead baseball players are standing on their front lawn. I wanted a farm, a VW bus, and a magic corn field. I wanted a voice to tell me what to do.

***

Since I’m alone and have no car to show, I only stay for a few hours, unlike the full days my father and I spent wandering the field of cars and rummaging through the swap meet. I toss my empty coffee cup into the garbage and walk across Main Street. I keep walking, past my Honda, past the Hummer’s plastic balls and follow a narrow street through a quiet neighborhood and instead of cars I’m thinking about how the hell Vanessa and I will ever afford a house and if we even want one and what’s so bad about raising a family in an apartment? Field of Dreams is still stuck in my head, but not the scenes of Shoeless Joe side-stepping in left field or Costner’s VW bus cruising to the Doobie Brothers. Instead, I see Costner at the kitchen table with his glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, him and his wife staring at a stack of bills, as if more money money might suddenly appear. I see his pushy brother-in-law telling Costner the bank is ready to foreclose. I see Costner’s little girl choking on a hot dog.

When I told my father Vanessa and I were having a baby, he took a step back and sat down. I thought I’d given him a second heart attack. He was thrilled, but surprised.

“To be honest, I thought it was off the table for you two,” he said.

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought you were both into your careers and that was that.”

I was surprised to hear him say this — Vanessa and I had been together for ten years, married for five. Later, I thought about my father’s reaction. He was twenty-three when my brother Don was born, only a few years home from Vietnam, back slicing cold cuts at Waldbaum’s where he’d worked before he was drafted. College was off his table. I used to think he missed out on something, or that war and work restricted him from doing the one thing he always wanted to do, but perhaps these thoughts were less about him, more about me.

My parents did well for themselves, for me and my brother; a housecleaner-receptionist-accountant and a deli manager would be hard pressed to build a similar life on Long Island today. One summer, as Don and I floated on giant packages of Oscar Meyer hotdogs or wheels of Carlsberg cheese in our above-ground pool — promotional items companies gave to all the deli managers — my father and his father re-landscaped our backyard. At the time, my grandparents were caretakers on a farm in Mattituck, a small town at the east end of Long Island, on the north fork. I remember afternoons sitting on the cold tractor in the barn, listening to what I thought were Army helicopters passing overhead. I later learned that the helicopters carried people from Manhattan to the Hamptons on the opposite shore of the island.

The farm job arrived a few months after Grumman told my grandfather they no longer needed airplane mechanics. The sun and the corn and the animals coaxed him off the couch and away from his Budweiser; the cool nights and crickets and lingering scent of soil on his hands lulled him to sleep.

That summer, for a week or so, my father stopped at a construction site near Waldbaum’s each day and brought home piles of large stones. Don and I watched Dad and Grandpa unload stone after stone from a rusty wheelbarrow. I don’t remember why we didn’t lend a hand – normally my father would have told us to get our asses out of the pool – but instead we watched them pour soil along the fence. Grandpa brought large hedges from the farm; he and Dad transplanted them from black plastic pots into the new soil, their roots dangling like dirt-caked tentacles. Then they edged the yard in white and gray stones, some smooth and round, others rough and jagged. Before dinner, they sat on the steps of the deck sipping iced tea, pointing and nodding like fans in the bleachers.

***

During my interviews with my father, I wanted him to articulate his dreams, but if he had asked me the same question, I wouldn’t have been able to answer either. My grandfather didn’t know he wanted to be a farmer — he became one and it gave him a purpose again – so perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to answer my question either. My dreams seemed to change daily – cereal delivery man became mechanic became archeologist became writer. I wanted my dream and my job to be the same, or to at least find a way to create a life where work and dreams were not mutually exclusive. Maybe that’s what I was asking my father to do – to tell me what to dream. Perhaps explaining a dream is like telling someone your wish while smoke twists from your birthday candle.

Was I asking for too much? Are my father’s dreams a crop better left unattended? Is “No Man’s Land” barren, or had I only visited during planting season?

***

Dad pulled the RV into Uncle Richard’s pot-holed driveway. By this point, my brain was a cookie jar of Field of Dreams quotes. I took one look at my uncle working on his shed and whispered: If you build it, he will come, as if some dead shed-building lumberjack, ostracized from his union decades ago for throwing the World Series of Log Rolling, would emerge from the tall weeds edging my uncle’s property and ask him if this was heaven. When my uncle started yelling at his neighbors and threatening to fire his nail gun, I wanted to ease his pain. And when we took a long drive to an amusement park, I thought not about my uncle’s giddiness for a laser-light show, but about the length of the drive: Go the distance.

After we settled in, Dad and Uncle Richard walked around the yard, checking out the cars on Richard’s lawn. He owned several acres of land and nearly a dozen cars, most of them without wheels or an engine, their bodies like Sonny Corleone’s ’41 Lincoln at the end of The Godfather. Grass and weeds grew through bullet holes that Richard or neighborhood kids had blasted into doors and fenders. His lawn was like time-lapse photography of the car shows. If all the Cobras and Mustangs and Broncos broke down in the outfield and never ran again, in fifty years the show would look like my uncle’s front lawn.

Dad and Uncle Richard both shared a love for anything done in a garage. “Putzin’ around,” Dad called it. Anything with tools. But when they worked on houses together, Richard was the demolition man and Dad built walls. Dad was a preservationist — his ducks and owls and rabbits perched on the mantel, his Chevy pickup rebuilt from scratch. While Uncle Richard gazed at the stripped and rusted frames on his lawn like a full man proud of the bones on his plate, Dad saw them as skeletons no one bothered to bury.

***

I stop for lunch after the car show and by the time I get home, the sun is setting. I park my Honda in the driveway and walk inside. Our two cats sit in the fading sun. They see me, arch their backs, and cry for food. Vanessa opens our bedroom door, a nap lingering on her face like morning mist.

“I didn’t even hear you leave this morning,” she says.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I say. Perhaps my body is preparing for the late nights and early mornings we’ll face seven months from now, but I know that’s not entirely true.

“Any Broncos?” Vanessa asks.

“There was one you would’ve loved. ’71. Convertible. Sky blue. It was for sale, too.”

She grins and raises her eyebrows, then pours a glass of water and walks back into the bedroom. I stand in the kitchen, not sure what to do next. Our cheap wall clock above the stove trembles with each tick. It’s too early for dinner and I’m not hungry. My window of time for coffee has closed. I decide to join Vanessa in the bedroom. I grab my book off the nightstand, lie beside her and stare at the first paragraph for what feels like half an hour. Vanessa’s book slips from her hands and startles her out of sleep. Her eyes open for a moment, then close. I turn to her, place my hand on her stomach, and watch it rise and fall.

At the end of Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner discovers that he didn’t build the field to reincarnate Shoeless Joe, but rather his father. The day before they shot the final scene, Dwier Brown, the actor who played Costner’s father, attended his own father’s funeral. He drove all night to make it to the set, threw on his costume, stood in front of directors, cinematographers, sound men, dozens of extras, and pretended to be a dead father.

Is the authentic acting the only reason the movie hits me so hard? If so, then why was I on the verge of tears before anyone even appeared on screen, the opening credits and soundtrack taking the wind out of me? My father’s not dead, though his heart attacks and strokes and Winstons stashed in the garage aren’t easing anyone’s pain. I’d ventured into No Man’s Land with my book, lived to tell the tale, and he and I are both still here. For now.

Perhaps it’s not the word “dream” that pulls at me, but “time.” I’m on the brink. I’m James Earl Jones at the edge of the cornfield, giggling nervously as I push through the tall stalks. I’m Kevin Costner demanding like a child that Joe explain the magic to me.  I’m one of the many thousands of drivers lined up on the highway, headlights twinkling, hunched over steering wheels like old men listening for a whisper.

Anthony D’Aries is the author of The Language of Men: A Memoir (Hudson Whitman Press, 2012), which received the PEN/New England Discovery Prize and Foreword’s Memoir-of-the-Year Award. His work has appeared in Boston Magazine, Solstice, The Good Men Project, Shelf Awareness, The Literary Review, Memoir Magazine, and elsewhere. He currently directs the low-residency MFA in Creative and Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

James Thurber, Devotee and Scourge
Forgive him for inventing the football cliché, for he was still a fan.

by John Baskin

James Thurber was an odd duck, very much bred in Columbus, Ohio, but also not of it. This fact accounted for a wonderful tension in his work, whereby the temperament of a Midwestern foozle lay beside a fellow reading Henry James, someone equally at home in Paris or Parma but not really from either. He was also one of Ohio State’s biggest fans, except when he wasn’t.

Thurber once explained Ohio as “a region steeped in the traditions of Coxey’s Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.” When he went off to Ohio State in 1913, the university’s primary function was still vocational training and most of its 4,000 students were solidly grain-fed Ohioans. It was the kind of place, Thurber observed, where it was dangerous to be found with a copy of Shelley in your pocket. A German teacher of Thurber’s time contended that “any stirring of the mind” on campus was considered high-brow and undemocratic. Still, there was a good English department and a small, lively band of students, and Thurber always acknowledged both.

Midwestern to the core, Thurber could never quite make up his mind about football. On one of his typing hands, he wrote that Ohio State was a college “for football players, Boost Ohioers, and stock-judging teams.” On the other, he wrote, “We give place to no man in our ardor for the game as it is played at Ohio State.” And he said football “has more beauty in it than any other competitive game in the world, when played by college athletes.”

So he vacillated, scheduling trips back from New York to coincide with Ohio State’s home games and illustrating the front cover of the official program for the Ohio State–University of Michigan homecoming game in 1936, but also fretting over the emerging big-time nature of the football program, which, he thought, was diametrically opposed to any equal fealty to the arts. (He was fond of quoting his old professor, Joseph Denney, who’d said of the university, “Millions for manure, but not one cent for literature.”)

Because of his national platform, he helped give rise to the notion that Ohio State was a “football factory.” By the 1940s, Thurber had established himself as a literary lion, first at The New Yorker, where he’d written “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” his most famous short story, and several books, including the autobiographical My Life and Hard Times, which catalogued the deeds—and misdeeds—of his Columbus relatives. It’s generally regarded as his masterpiece, a portrait of a particular Ohio world soon to be overrun by modernity: his grandfather, who wasn’t sure the Civil War had concluded, his Aunt Sarah who lived in nightly fear of a burglar blowing chloroform under her door, and a grandmother who thought electricity leaked out of the empty light sockets. Biographer Charles Homes characterized the events of the book as representing “What Ought to Have Happened, if only the world were a little more artistically organized.”

It was Thurber’s essay, “University Days,” in My Life and Hard Times that gave America an enduring picture of the dim bulb football lineman, personified by the Ohio State tackle Bolenciecwcz, whom Thurber described as “while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter.” When the economics professor asks Bolenciecwcz to name any means of transportation, the ensuing colloquy among Bolenciecwcz, his classmates, and Professor Bassum is classic Thurber:

“You may choose among steam, horse-drawn, or electrically propelled vehicles,” said the instructor. “I might suggest the one which we commonly take in making long journeys across land. ” There was a profound silence in which everybody stirred uneasily, including Bolenciecwcz and Mr. Bassum.

Mr. Bassum abruptly broke this silence in an amazing manner. “Choo-choo-choo,” he said, in a low voice, and turned instantly scarlet. He glanced appealingly around the room. All of us, of course, shared Mr. Bassum’s desire that Bolenciecwcz should stay abreast of the class in economics. For the Illinois game, one of the hardest and most important of the season, was only a week off.

“Toot, toot, too-tooooooot!” some student with a deep voice moaned, and we all looked encouragingly at Bolenciecwcz. Somebody else gave a fine imitation of a locomotive letting off steam. Mr. Bassum himself rounded off the little show. “Ding, dong, ding, dong,” he said, hopefully.
Bolenciecwcz was staring at the floor now, trying to think, his great brow furrowed, his huge hands rubbing together, his face red.
“How did you come to college this year, Mr. Bolenciecwcz?” asked the professor. “Chuffa chuffa, chuffa chuffa.”
“M’father sent me,” said the football player.
“What on?” asked Bassum.
“I git an ’lowance,” said the tackle, in a low, husky voice, obviously embarrassed.
“No, no,” said Bassum. “Name a means of transportation. What did you ride here on?”
“Train,” said Bolenciecwcz.
“Quite right,” said the professor.

Did he really create the vacant-minded Bolenciecwcz with his boyhood friend Chic Harley in mind? Hard to believe, but his college chum Elliott Nugent says he did. Thurber also wrote an epic poem about Harley that went, in part:

There’s a thousand other stories of the games of other years,
But one from out the thousand like a flash of light appears,
And there’s nothing half so thrilling from the first year to today,
Like the glory of the going when Chic Harley got away.

Easier, of course, for the world to remember Thurber’s portrait of poor, laboring Bolenciecwcz over his Harley-induced iambic pentameter, and therein the Thurber dichotomy in which he was at once university devotee and scourge. In 1940, he had added more parody to Ohio State football, this time in the play he’d written with his Elliott Nugent, The Male Animal. (Nugent, a man-about-campus and future actor-playwright of note, had taken the fledgling Thurber under his wing, made him get a haircut and a new suit, and got him into Phi Kappa Psi. The two men would remain lifelong friends.)

By the mid-century, The Male Animal was regarded as “a small classic of the American theatre.” It was in a Midwestern college town (read: Columbus) on the eve of The Big Game (Michigan, of course), and the play involved a professor; his winsome wife, Ellen; and a returning jock who in his own spangled university days had been Ellen’s boyfriend. The dominant theme is the romantic triangle and its resolution, with a backstory of whether or not Professor Turner—who plans a classroom reading of a letter by the executed anarchist Niccolo Vanzetti—will buckle under the pressures of censorship.

Another of Thurber’s several biographers, Burton Bernstein, said the play was “like a tipsy midget at a teamsters’ outing, its academic-freedom theme bravely, absurdly, asserting itself in an otherwise conventional Broadway romantic comedy.” Reviewers generally agreed it was “a palatable way for the theatregoer to take a dose of social conscience.” Thurber blanketed Ohio with tickets, admonishing visiting firemen from Columbus that the play’s setting could be any Midwestern campus town, but no one was having any of it. (Thurber and Nugent wouldn’t publicly admit the setting was Ohio State until years later, “to avoid libel and mayhem,” as Nugent put it.)

In 1942, the play moved from Broadway to Hollywood. The local references in the film rendered “Midwestern University” even more clearly as OSU, to wit: the Neil Avenue gate, the scarlet-and-gray school colors, and, of course, the team fight song—“We Don’t Give a Darn for the Whole State of Michigan.” Speculation was that the relatively innocent audiences of the 1940s were not yet accustomed to such immodesty as “damn,” even though Clark Gable had famously used it a couple of years before when he walked away from Vivien Leigh at the end of Gone with the Wind. Ohioans, though, had no such reservations. It was, first of all, Michigan they were talking about, and they’d been not giving a damn about Michigan since the 1920s.

According to local lore, it was sometime in the 1920s when an inebriated fan wandering through the old Deshler-Wallick Hotel lobby had yelled, “We don’t give a damn for the whole state of Michigan.” That was followed by a wonderful impromptu moment in which a musical combo in the lobby—and several dozen well-lubricated OSU fans—spontaneously set the phrase to the music of “The Old Gray Mare.” And thus a legend was born.

 The Male Animal, with its serious underlying note of an unpalatable censorship, made Thurber seem terribly prescient in the 1950s when Joseph McCarthy burst onto the national scene, infecting the country with the specter of a communist under every bed. Thurber wasn’t happy with McCarthyism, of course, but he was also unhappy with Ohio State because the university in 1951, after a “faintly socialistic Columbia University professor” gave a talk on campus, instituted a gag rule for speakers.

Thurber’s position was that no communist could sway an Ohio State audience and not allowing them to speak forewent a splendid occasion “to heckle and confound such speakers.” A few months after the gag order, the university decided to award Thurber an honorary degree. Both the timing and the manner of it—the university hinted Thurber didn’t actually have to be present—was insulting, and he declined, rather graciously but pointedly.

The gag rule eventually went away (as, thankfully, did McCarthy), but it left a dent in both the university and Thurber, further provoking his contradictory feelings about Columbus and Ohio State. As usual, though, his Buckeye DNA held sway, bringing him back home in 1959 to receive the Distinguished Service Award of the Press Club of Ohio. In 1960 he made the dedicatory speech for a new OSU Arts and Sciences Building named after his old professor Joseph Denney. Thus his affections swung back and forth, for he was at heart an artist with an artist’s concomitant aesthetic liberality, and he was also bedrock Columbus, bound by the same conservative fetters as his mid-century Ohioans. The truth was, he never really got far from home. Once, traveling through Carcassonne in the south of France, he was delighted when he spotted an automobile with a Cleveland license plate.” You just can’t outrun Ohioans,” he said proudly.

What Ohio State fans should remember about Thurber was that, first and foremost, he was an Ohioan and, in his own way, one of them. His early life was suffused with sports, particularly baseball, because Columbus in those days was a baseball town and Thurber, as a 12-year-old kid, saved his nickels to go to Neil Park and watch the Columbus Senators. Ohio State, having lost to Michigan 86–0 when Thurber was eight years old, was still a work-in-progress. That would be changed, in part, by the ministrations of a young man named Chic Harley—Thurber’s classmate at East High who’d played baseball on a team captained by Thurber’s brother.

Thurber was a couple of years ahead of Harley; he looked on while Chic helped establish Ohio State’s national presence. He would later write the quintessential description of Harley on the football field, for the New York newspaper PM, and it went like this: “If you never saw him run with a football, we can’t describe it to you. It wasn’t like Red Grange or Tom Harmon or anybody else. It was kind of a cross between music and cannon fire, and it brought your heart up under your ears.”

It isn’t difficult to see why Columbus—and Ohio State—figured so prominently in Thurber’s writing. One, he was born into a family so inventively moonstruck they begged to be herded onto the printed page where they could be consumed at leisure. (Personal favorites: Aunt Mary, who survived until the age of 93 on what seemed to be copious amounts of chewing tobacco, and Thurber’s mother, Mamie, an inveterate showoff who once appeared on the stairs in her dressing gown, her hair awry, and announced to guests she was being kept in the attic against her will because of her hapless love for Mr. Briscoe the postman.) Two, at Ohio State, he was known for cramming four years into five and still getting away without a degree. He managed to noodle through most of his course work but biology (where his faltering eyesight kept him off the microscope) and military drill, which he hated unreservedly and complaining that the uniform made him look like a streetcar conductor. (“You’re the main trouble with this university,” the ROTC commandant told him. “Either you’re a foot ahead or a foot behind the company.”)

Thurber lived at home and ferried himself back and forth on the streetcar, a somewhat spectral figure floating about the campus, awkward and dreamy. His was the frequent picture of the artistically-inclined loner who combats isolation with a rich imaginative life (the salon of the mind holds many a lively event where the bashful introvert is the life of the party).

In the 1920s, Thurber landed a reporting job at the Columbus Dispatch, where he stymied the old hands with his approach to the news. “He was a scribbler, a writer,” sniffed one of them, with the superiority in which the profession held the suspiciously literate among themselves. Thurber, who was addressed as “Author” by his city editor, bemoaned what he said was the paper’s perfect lead for every story: “John Holtsapple, 63, prominent Columbus galosh manufacturer, died of complications last night at his home, 396 N. Persimmon Blvd.” The city editor, a man named Kuehner, who’d trained on the police beat, hated departures from journalistic rigor, especially flowery introductions, and whenever he spied one, he shouted, “This story is in bloom!”

Thurber’s experiences with the city desk lent him a recurring anxiety dream in which the editor races over to his desk carrying a shoe and barks out, “We’ve got just ten minutes to get this shoe in the paper!” His basic job was covering city hall, but his fertile imagination overrode the beat’s minimal qualifications. It sometimes caused him to ignore important numbers, such as his story on the municipal debt, in which he overstated it by $6 million. That incident was followed by a bulletin board directive at the Dispatch forbidding Thurber to write any story that dealt with sums above five figures.

He was not inspired by the prosaic dramas of city hall, his interests gravitating naturally to the collection of oddballs wandering in and out of the mayor’s office. (They included a man who could receive a local radio station on the rims of his spectacles and a woman who predicted earthquakes by a twinge in her left side.) Thurber’s working day was a brief office appearance after which he took off, “a sheaf of folded copy paper in my pocket and a look of enterprise in my eye,” heading for Marzetti’s, a restaurant whose main population seemed to be newspapermen who sat around drinking coffee and doodling on the tablecloth.

In 1922, he covered the dedication of Ohio Stadium, and he wrote his college chum Nugent about the event. “Too bad you can’t be here to whiff the football air and to see the stadium dedicated,” he said. “It is nearly completed now, a wonderful structure, set down in the pastoral back eighty of the OSU like a modernized Greek temple or a Roman coliseum born of mirage. Michigan plays here October 21, dedication day…”

There he was again, a fan. He remained one, too. Even as an adult he could still recite Columbus line-ups and batting averages, and at The New Yorker, when the magazine’s vaunted proofreaders spelled Chic Harley’s first name as “Chick,” he threw a fit. “It was an error no Ohio State man could ever live down,” said biographer Bernstein. When Thurber died in 1962, E. B. White, one of his closest friends, wrote, “There were at least two, probably six Thurbers. His thoughts have always been a tangle of baseball scores, Civil War tactical problems, Henry James, personal maladjustments, terrier puppies, literary rip tides, ancient myths, and modern apprehensions. Through this jungle stalk the unpredictable ghosts of his relatives in Columbus, Ohio.”

And his Columbus always featured Ohio State at its center. Because he hadn’t concluded his university stay with a proper graduation, it was as though he’d hang around in perpetuity, awaiting resolution to some vague and unfinished hometown business. Even with his typical ambivalence, there’s little doubt he’d have been pleased when in 2016, as Ohio State played Nebraska, the Buckeyes unveiled replica uniforms from the famous undefeated 1916 Chic Harley team. They featured red jerseys with gray vertical stripes and the look was called “music and cannon fire,” after Thurber’s famous description of Harley running.

The fans may have only dimly recognized Thurber’s name, but they surely knew Harley’s. It’s unlikely many would have recognized the commonality of the two men, though. They were classmates at Ohio State when Chic almost single-footedly ushered in its first golden age. They were present at the creation, you might say. Thurber’s depiction of Harley running is still the single quote everyone uses when Harley’s name comes up. From a relatively young age, they both suffered physical debilities; Harley began a descent into dementia, Thurber into blindness.

Thurber, of course, was no athlete—he once said his most notable accomplishment was “hitting empty ginger ale bottles with small rocks at a distance of thirty paces.” He was the afflicted American male, slight of build, awkward, so unathletic that he passed gym only by enlisting another student to masquerade as him and swim across the pool in his place. Harley, of course, owned the gym. Yet even such disparity bound them together, for Thurber envied Harley’s easy grace and converted the idea of it into his writing. Even today, Thurber’s mid-twentieth century essays are the epitome of grace. They appear to be effortlessly tossed off when they’re nothing of the kind—deceptively simple declarative sentences that in their quiet rhythms blend both humor and, to use Thurber’s own phrase, “the damp hand of melancholy.”

Thurber’s athleticism was an inner one, given voice in a story like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” where Mitty’s alter ego—as with Thurber’s own—became the athlete. No one understood better than Thurber that life was an obstacle course. Like his boyhood hero on the football field, Thurber slipped past many of the obstacles with Harley’s own dexterity. Only the expression differed. Then one day, there they were, both Ohio State immortals. Chic Harley and James Thurber: two peas in an Ohio pod.

John Baskin is the author of New Burlington: The Life and Death of an American Village and The Cincinnati Game (with Lonnie Wheeler), and has written for The New York Times, The Nation, The Yale Review, and other publications. This essay comes from Lords of Smashmouth: The Unlikely Rise of An American Phenomenon, his recently released book.