“The great thing about baseball is when you're done, you'll only tell your grandchildren the good things.”
-- Sparky Anderson
About a month ago, I entered the bookstore on a Friday. I wasn’t working, but I came in to write in seclusion from the media (television, internet) that so commonly exacerbates my writer’s blocks. The first thing I spotted upon entrance was a particular feature display dead in the middle of the drive aisle.
The first two, single shelves cradled the fresh-from-the-printers hardcover Juiced, by Jose Canseco. The cover resembled a baseball card though Canseco’s unaffiliated jersey and helmet, marked only with his number, 33, perfectly symbolized his allegiance to himself rather than any particular ballclub. A star precedes the title, perhaps a satirical asterisk added by the designer, referring to the career statistics that descend from the corner.
That week’s Sports Illustrated filled out the display. When my eyes fell on Stephen Wilkes’ cover photograph, I was overcome by a sour melancholy. It nearly brought me to tears. The picture was simple. No digital trickery involved here. But it was the subject that made me ache: The Field of Dreams. No other symbol of the game, including the lush green ivy of Wrigley Field, will ever resonate with me like that field does. The final exchange of dialogue in that film breaks me every time. And not in a manly, grit my teeth and maybe a tear will escape sort of way. I devolve into a blithering infant every time Kevin Costner utters that line:
“Hey, dad? You wanna have a catch?”
Oh man. Give me a moment.
Seeing that humble field in Dyersville, Iowa captioned with “Broken Dreams” tugged every heartstring I had. But I kept it together long enough to pull a copy off the rack, and find a secluded table where I could peruse Gary Smith’s article “What Do We Do Now?” on the congressional steroid hearings. In the article, Smith phoned and interviewed a few dozen various devotees of the game (from an unnamed Sunday school teacher, to Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, to Hank Aaron, Jr.), asking what this new scandal has done to their love of the game.
I read the article with interest, but kept the proper perspective on the answers offered; as thoughtful as many of the answers were, they were all, nevertheless, knee-jerk reactions to a news event that occurred only days, if not hours before. I did not want my consideration of this topic to fall under the purview of rash castigation (or woe or justification), so I waited only a few days, for the first pitch of the regular season.
That’s all it took. One pitch and I had my answer.
Only in Spring Training could Gary Smith have pulled off an article filled with such loss and sorrow. I don’t blame him. The article was an immediate response to what felt like a bitter disappointment, if not embarrassment, for many a baseball fan. I bought that issue of Sports Illustrated. I wanted to have it in case the sky did fall on baseball. But all it took was one pitch, and I pitched it into the wastebasket.
I cannot overemphasize the head-shaking that cramped my neck for days after watching home run savoir Mark McGwire’s over-coached heming and hawing, introducing his carefully crafted platitude “I’m not here to talk about the past. I’m here to be positive about this issue” into the annals of inanity. You can only slap your forehead so many times before your eyes go crossed, and I had a good start on it after enduring ESPN’s sound-byte record-setting over the next week.
But twenty games into the regular season, it all seems so – as Big Mac would say – in the past. With Steinbrenner shitting bricks about his basement dwelling Yanks, the Cubs showing the Red Sox what a curse REALLY looks like, and teams like the Dodgers, ChiSox, and Orioles blowing past many experts’s expectations, a few measly weeks quickly reminded me why that corn-cut field in Dyersville carries such reverence.
Spring Training sometimes causes us to forget the raomance of the game just as it reminds us of the promise to come. The circus of the steroid controversy could only have cast such a dark cloud during this transition stage. The regular season is the main course, and when you’re busy drooling over the juicy steak of division rivalries, the last thing on your mind is how dry the breadsticks were.
Welcome to the regular season boys and girls. Dig in.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
The Gate Opens and The Horse Breaks a Leg
I walk this empty street
On the boulevard of broken dreams.
I walk alone.
I walk alone.
-- Green Day
I’ve come to believe it takes a particular strength of character to learn from past mistakes while avoiding the pitfalls of regret that are so abundant in each of our personal histories. In recent days I found myself navigating a particularly nasty minefield of should-haves and could-haves as I dug for the roots of the most glorious failure in my quarter century of life.
A little less than a year ago I set off on a quest. My treasure? A Master’s degree in creative writing. The end goal was – and is – a writing career, but a return to school seemed the most sensible first step for my reinvigorated passion. Unfortunately, my new determination did little to endear me to the application committees of the four universities I courted, and early last week I got my final rejection letter from my Alma Mater, Southern Illinois University. As if the rejection itself was not a swift enough kick to the unmentionables, I actually got my denial over e-mail after writing the office of admissions to inquire about my application’s status. They apparently thought so little of my wooing that they couldn’t sacrifice the Xerox toner for my notification. Or maybe it was the 34 cents for the stamp. I can’t say.
So after my inspired escape from my demoralizing Quad City employ, my southern migration, and my head first charge into the grad school application process, I come out on the other end with a few grand less in my bank account and a myriad of questions about my next pursuit. I put so much of my heart and time into this one goal that when it didn’t come to fruition I felt a little like a horse at the Kentucky Derby that breaks his leg in its first step out of the gate. My ambitious agenda, careful planning, and diligent work-ethic put me right back where I started. Or at least, a thousand miles away in exactly the same predicament.
Thanks to the wonderfully vacuous rejection letters from my dream schools, I am left with no clue about whether my continued pursuit of a Master’s degree would be a wise decision. Without an English Degree (though an approximation of one on my transcript), I wonder if I automatically begin the application process with two strikes against me; and I’ll swing at anything with two strikes. Since the rejections tell me nothing about my qualifications and my inquiries into the strengths or weaknesses of my application met with more inane refusals, I’m reluctant to sign up for another round of that horrible process when it could be a futile endeavor to begin with.
In considering this failing, I found it hard not to look back on my years in college (and the years after them) and then kick myself repeatedly in the ass for the blunders I made. This is the minefield that I speak of. If I had started pursuing my Creative Writing minor a semester sooner, I could have had it completed when I graduated instead of ending up a class shy. If I had leapt immediately into grad school I would not have needed to fall back on a family friend and former football coach (God bless you for doing it though, Vic) for a letter of recommendation. Any number of other college opportunities (Studio A Playhouse and my internship at NBC, for example) I largely took for granted. I seemed to float through them, dazed, instead of bleeding them for every advantage and experience I could.
A matter of years ago, I would have been so wrapped up in these traps of regret and self-destruction that I’d be inclined to take a backwards step into one. Instead, I’ve studied the minefield for patterns and found the most promising path ahead.
And that most promising path seems to be a figure eight. I’ve been to the West Coast. I’ve been to the East Coast. And each time I return to the center. I return home. It’s time to get centered again.
I look back on the two years I lived in Rock Island after college, and I see one of the great missed opportunities of my life. The Quad Cities is not a hopeless place for me to start a writing career. But improper perspective and a sour attitude can make the pearly gates look like Bangladesh, and anybody who knew me then would attest that my perspective was as skewed as a glass-eyed glaucoma patient.
I wasn’t trapped at the Isle of Capri. But that’s how I saw it. I wasn’t “out of the loop” as a writer in Rock Island. I just made it so. Of course, I had to break the shackles of habit and security to learn that, but I have learned it.
My Uncle Joel has lived in both corners of this country while the majority of his family remained rooted in the middle. He lived in Seattle for a number of years before moving to Florida. I don’t know how he does it. I desperately miss my family. I miss Rocky football. I miss Casino Rock Island. I miss the bleachers at Wrigley. I miss WINTER. Yes people. The real world has snow. You’re not of the world if you don’t shovel your walk at least once a year. I’m aching for the back spasms and numb toes.
My parents plan to take their vacation here in July. After a week of fishing and gator-baiting, I’ll be bringing my sharpened perspective and newly shorn skull home, ready for two-a-days and the climax of baseball’s regular season.
I really have no idea whether my life in The Cities will be any better this time around. I ate a big helping of crow on the grad school debacle. I could certainly be back on this site a year from now with another plateful.
But I’m optimistic. I daresay, I’m confident.
What do we Cubs fans always say? Next year is here? We’ve eaten almost a century’s worth of crow. We have a taste for it. And one of these years, we’re going to be right.
One of these years, I’m going to be right too.
Three months and counting…
Then it’s time to test the waters of the Mississippi River once again.
On the boulevard of broken dreams.
I walk alone.
I walk alone.
-- Green Day
I’ve come to believe it takes a particular strength of character to learn from past mistakes while avoiding the pitfalls of regret that are so abundant in each of our personal histories. In recent days I found myself navigating a particularly nasty minefield of should-haves and could-haves as I dug for the roots of the most glorious failure in my quarter century of life.
A little less than a year ago I set off on a quest. My treasure? A Master’s degree in creative writing. The end goal was – and is – a writing career, but a return to school seemed the most sensible first step for my reinvigorated passion. Unfortunately, my new determination did little to endear me to the application committees of the four universities I courted, and early last week I got my final rejection letter from my Alma Mater, Southern Illinois University. As if the rejection itself was not a swift enough kick to the unmentionables, I actually got my denial over e-mail after writing the office of admissions to inquire about my application’s status. They apparently thought so little of my wooing that they couldn’t sacrifice the Xerox toner for my notification. Or maybe it was the 34 cents for the stamp. I can’t say.
So after my inspired escape from my demoralizing Quad City employ, my southern migration, and my head first charge into the grad school application process, I come out on the other end with a few grand less in my bank account and a myriad of questions about my next pursuit. I put so much of my heart and time into this one goal that when it didn’t come to fruition I felt a little like a horse at the Kentucky Derby that breaks his leg in its first step out of the gate. My ambitious agenda, careful planning, and diligent work-ethic put me right back where I started. Or at least, a thousand miles away in exactly the same predicament.
Thanks to the wonderfully vacuous rejection letters from my dream schools, I am left with no clue about whether my continued pursuit of a Master’s degree would be a wise decision. Without an English Degree (though an approximation of one on my transcript), I wonder if I automatically begin the application process with two strikes against me; and I’ll swing at anything with two strikes. Since the rejections tell me nothing about my qualifications and my inquiries into the strengths or weaknesses of my application met with more inane refusals, I’m reluctant to sign up for another round of that horrible process when it could be a futile endeavor to begin with.
In considering this failing, I found it hard not to look back on my years in college (and the years after them) and then kick myself repeatedly in the ass for the blunders I made. This is the minefield that I speak of. If I had started pursuing my Creative Writing minor a semester sooner, I could have had it completed when I graduated instead of ending up a class shy. If I had leapt immediately into grad school I would not have needed to fall back on a family friend and former football coach (God bless you for doing it though, Vic) for a letter of recommendation. Any number of other college opportunities (Studio A Playhouse and my internship at NBC, for example) I largely took for granted. I seemed to float through them, dazed, instead of bleeding them for every advantage and experience I could.
A matter of years ago, I would have been so wrapped up in these traps of regret and self-destruction that I’d be inclined to take a backwards step into one. Instead, I’ve studied the minefield for patterns and found the most promising path ahead.
And that most promising path seems to be a figure eight. I’ve been to the West Coast. I’ve been to the East Coast. And each time I return to the center. I return home. It’s time to get centered again.
I look back on the two years I lived in Rock Island after college, and I see one of the great missed opportunities of my life. The Quad Cities is not a hopeless place for me to start a writing career. But improper perspective and a sour attitude can make the pearly gates look like Bangladesh, and anybody who knew me then would attest that my perspective was as skewed as a glass-eyed glaucoma patient.
I wasn’t trapped at the Isle of Capri. But that’s how I saw it. I wasn’t “out of the loop” as a writer in Rock Island. I just made it so. Of course, I had to break the shackles of habit and security to learn that, but I have learned it.
My Uncle Joel has lived in both corners of this country while the majority of his family remained rooted in the middle. He lived in Seattle for a number of years before moving to Florida. I don’t know how he does it. I desperately miss my family. I miss Rocky football. I miss Casino Rock Island. I miss the bleachers at Wrigley. I miss WINTER. Yes people. The real world has snow. You’re not of the world if you don’t shovel your walk at least once a year. I’m aching for the back spasms and numb toes.
My parents plan to take their vacation here in July. After a week of fishing and gator-baiting, I’ll be bringing my sharpened perspective and newly shorn skull home, ready for two-a-days and the climax of baseball’s regular season.
I really have no idea whether my life in The Cities will be any better this time around. I ate a big helping of crow on the grad school debacle. I could certainly be back on this site a year from now with another plateful.
But I’m optimistic. I daresay, I’m confident.
What do we Cubs fans always say? Next year is here? We’ve eaten almost a century’s worth of crow. We have a taste for it. And one of these years, we’re going to be right.
One of these years, I’m going to be right too.
Three months and counting…
Then it’s time to test the waters of the Mississippi River once again.
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