Driving Minnie's Piano (21 page)

^{“It's an easy one, Lescargot.”
Coach had a smattering of French or he liked to eat French food or
something and I could only wish that he had not coined his nickname
for me after edible snails. But it was not a matter openly
discussed during his pep talks and strategy sessions. “Take your
time, boys. Use your brain, the one God gave you. Don't let
anything fluster you out there. For every game we win, I'll buy you
all ice cream sodas.” He held true to his promise but only had to
spill the cash twice that season.}

^{He continued to shout at me.
“Focus on the ball. Take your time.”}

^{I noticed that all the other
coaches yelled and screamed at their teams to run faster, play
harder. Hurry! Even running onto the field or off the field, where
it didn't matter. “Wha's a matter? You got lead in your pants?”
they'd yell at a lolly-gagging player, the one with pants made from
old dentist's x-ray blankets. And there was often the familiar
chant of “Hustle, hustle, hustle!” (Eventually, the “Hustle” would
become a popular dance for a short season while I was in high
school.)}

^{But my coach
would never utter the H-verb. He was from the relaxed, maybe even
meditative, school of baseball and believed that taking things at a
slow pace increased your enjoyment and ability. Concerning batting,
for example, he would say, “Lean into it,” whatever that meant, as
opposed to other more virulent coaches screaming for their
eleven-year-olds to
slam it,
massacre it, or bash it out of the
park
. Now that I think about
it, it could have been the snails he ate.}

^{“Lescargot, get under it. Take
your time, that's it.”}

^{Every time I see one of those
slow-motion movie scenes of a high flyball heading toward an inept
little league outfielder I understand the truth captured by the
film footage. The beauty of such cinematography is that the viewer
would not care one iota if a tornado lay waste to all the family
members sitting in the stands watching the team. We would not care
if a nuclear war leveled half the planet just then. We just want
the puny little kid to catch the goddamn baseball.}

^{Like in those films, I'm
frozen there in the outfield, paralyzed by fear of injury to the
aforementioned parts of my anatomy, trying to take my time. (What
else is there to do?) I'm blinded by the sun, the ball is hanging
somewhere in space above me as if gravity has been suspended, as if
the Hollywood director is making a test case out of this one to see
just how long he can drag out the emotion and the suspense, the
infinite hopes of millions of would-be viewers.}

^{Then the world goes mute.
There is no sound around me but I can hear the blood pumping in my
ears, as if beating out some muffled Morse code with instructions
to stick my six-finger Ted Williams glove up into air. My arm,
oddly enough, is willing to respond. If nothing else, it will
shield me from getting hit. Amazingly, I'm optimistic. I've seen
this done before. On TV Phillies games and even in real life. The
ball will be like a magnet to the certainty of an outstretched
glove. How could it be otherwise?}

^{For an instant, the world has
become a more hospitable place. I've forgotten about my rock
collection and can think only of willing the ball out of the sky
and into the glove. I'm moving forward even, expectant, my legs
seemingly knowing where to go to meet the ball. I'll take my time,
of course, I'll lean into it. As if worshipping an ancient
primitive god, I find myself going down on one knee. I've seen a
pro player, Richie Ashburn of the Philadelphia Phillies, do this.
We're still operating on slo mo. Decades are
passing.}

^{And then the ball hits with a
dull thud into the dead grass three, possibly four, feet behind me.
A shudder of disbelief rips my confidence away and I realize that
my optimism had been a short-lived but highly potent drug that had
curdled my brain. The world has conspired against me and I was not
man (or boy) enough to grapple with the vindictive cruel reality of
modern baseball.}

^{The coach is no longer
yelling, Take your time. He has now borrowed from his adversaries
in such a desperate moment. “Hustle!”}

^{I hustle. I
know I have failed as only a fool can fail. And at least that means
I am in familiar territory. A ball aloft in the sky is
terra
incognita
, but a baseball
sitting on the ground, inert, not moving, is familiar psychological
real estate. I hustle. (I bugaloo, I swim, I monkey, I twist.) I
spin around, sprint, grab the ball and throw.
Hard.}

^{Well, I do hustle but in this
pivotal moment, I manage to obey both of the coach's injunctions.
Let's rewind.}

^{A runner is passing second
base, headed towards third like greased lightning. The infield is
helpless. The other two outfielders are running towards me as if
I'm incapable of doing anything right in the game of baseball. I'm
hearing a wall of verbal abuse from both teams but my coach sees me
reaching for the ball. He still believes in me. “Lescargot! Take
your time!” He means it.}

^{I inhale oxygen at the request
of my lungs. I firmly grasp the ball and focus on Bob Blomquist and
his catcher's mitt, his hopeful leather sunflower held high up in
the air. I remember that our coach has told his outfield over and
over again not to gamble on the long-distance heave all the way to
home plate under these dire circumstances. Relay the ball by way of
the second baseman. But I've played second base before and know how
many things can go wrong tossing a ball not once but twice before
making it to home plate. My arm ratchets back as far as it can and
I throw the ball with all the life force within this
eleven-year-old's body.}

^{Even as the ball leaves my
grip, I have a small epiphany, a moment of clarity that has served
me well all these ensuing years. I may not be good at baseball but
I tend to recover well and quickly from my mistakes. (Later I would
replace the word “baseball” with any multitude of
nouns.)}

^{The enemy coach is telling his
runner to (what else?) hustle. Second base is looking up at the
orbit of my throw. I wait for the director's slo mo camera to kick
in again but there is none. Just a very fast runner heading for
home plate. In my head I explain his speed: he's twelve, a full
year older than me.}

^{Bob Blomquist has his
catcher's mask off now. He has the advantage of no sun in his eyes.
My throw is good. I hear the satisfying smack of the ball into
Bob's round cushion of leather. He hardly has to stretch for it. I
allow the sound to replay itself like a euphoric echo inside my
skull. The runner, whose name I cannot remember, slides at the
request of his red-faced coach, an insurance salesman who drinks
before each game. The kid is twelve and is used to pushing little
eleven-year-olds around. Blomquist is eleven like me. We both had
Miss Washington for a teacher this past year at Cinnaminson
Memorial. But the Quist is tough, I know. That's why he is the
catcher. He's got padding, a crotch protector and a chest
protector. What could go wrong?}

^{The grown-up runner kicks as
he slides and even from this distance I can tell that he's kicking
Bob Blomquist, my loyal teammate, in the balls. The plastic cup may
protect Bob from permanent damage but he will not be able to
maintain his balance. He trips backwards over home plate, the ball
falls from his grip and rolls towards the
backstop.}

^{But I'm ecstatic. I guess I
don't really care who wins or loses. All I know is that mine was a
good throw. I'm a lousy catcher but an amazingly good thrower.
Unfair negative attention will be leveled against Bob for dropping
the ball. No one will believe him when he says he was kicked in the
crotch by the runner. But at least, at this point, nobody, not even
me, seems to care that I miffed my chance to make a heroic play. I
tossed a good toss. The game continues, I settle back into a kind
of meditative trance. Nobody hits another ball into right field for
the rest of the game.}

^{Later, when it's my turn at
bat, I walk, then move on to second base before another teammate
strikes out and invokes the wrath of other Glen Meade players, but
not the coach. And soon the game is over. One adult, after the
game, the father of one of my teammates, singles me out to say that
I made a great throw to home plate. His comment
matters.}

^{Years spin by and I lose
interest in baseball, couldn't even take a wild guess at who plays
right field for any team. Not even the Phillies or the Yankees.
I've recovered well from my blunders and I still have a good arm
for tossing rocks into the sea.}

^{I left most of my rock
collection in New Jersey but brought some of the really good geodes
and amethysts, and even some chunks of obsidian I once found, here
to Nova Scotia, where they mingle outside or on the window sill
with other rocks I pick up on the beach.}

^{The worst insult to my beach
stones, I suppose, is when I leave one on the kitchen table and
somebody in my family cleans up the kitchen. If the stone looks
really uninteresting to the family member, it is thrown into the
trash and sent to the dump. That's one of the reasons I'm less
prone to bring home every rock of interest to keep unless it is the
fossil of a dinosaur footprint or a nugget of pure gold. The lesser
rocks are carried for several yards or sometimes even miles along
the empty shorelines of Nova Scotia where I walk and then I turn to
the deep blue sea and I throw them far out into the
water.}

^{As I make my pitch of selected
stone into the sea, I know that there is part of me sailing through
the sky with this object, a stone somewhat less in size than a
hardball but larger than a chicken egg. I follow the trajectory
with my eye, and as I watch, it instinctively welds together all
the things I've done right in my life, and diminishes somehow all
the things I've done wrong. I hear the satisfying ker-plunk into
the sea and then imagine it settling into the clear, pure north
Atlantic water, drifting towards the bottom and settling in among
other stones with headgear of exotic golden, brown and green
seaweed. I've returned the stone to the sea from where it once
emerged and I head on home, my lungs feasting on pure seaside air,
feeling all the better for it, fool that I am.}

^Ravens

^{It's a warm morning in August
by the sea. At eight a.m. I walk the rim of the headland high above
the water with the warm mists flowing upward from below. The Gulf
Stream has finally brought us warm water. My dog Jody runs and
sniffs at the air. The familiar fog is soft and warm around
us.}

^{Suddenly, from above, two
giant ravens drop out of the sky as if produced by some magician. I
feel them before I see them. When I look up I realize they are
dancing on the wind, riding the updraft of air rushing up the face
of the cliff, swooping left, then right, down, and back up almost
as if they are performing to music.}

^{I expect it will be a
momentary thing and they will move on but I'm wrong. As Jody and I
walk along, they stay with us, arcing upward and then back down
until they are quite close to my head. They swoop close to the
ground and, for an instant, I think they might be ready to attack
my dog. Jody barks once, twice, spins around ready to defend us but
the ravens simply continue on doing what they're doing. And it is
quite magnificent.}

^{The rush of southerly air
pushes straight up the escarpment of the headland and pours up into
the sky. The two ravens are working the wind the same way I use the
power of the wave when I surf. These black beauties are much more
graceful than I, however, and live each day learning to use the tug
and pull, the push and power, of the waves of invisible
air.}

^{Today must be a singularly
good day for this surf-dancing with the wind. And they want an
audience. Any species might do, but preferably one or two with good
eyes and some sense of admiration.}

^{I believe the ravens to be a
pair, although I have no way of knowing. They swoop quickly and
effortlessly again, dropping to below eye level along the cliff
edge where they hover wing tip to wing tip, then scoop the updraft
again with a powerful thrust of their wings and rocket vertically
twenty metres into the sky before tucking their wings and dropping
like twin black missiles before us. Jody pulls herself back again
into a defensive crouch but I'm too hypnotized to care for my own
well-being. I am looking up at the great beak of the bird as it
plummets, then the wings explode outward and I feel the full blast
of compressed air used to change the vector. The raven has come so
close to my face that I can smell his scent.}

^{Ravens have a powerful musk,
much more so than any other bird I know. And it is, to me, a
familiar smell. In my early Nova Scotia years, I once had a raven
for a pet, although the word is not quite accurate. Jack had been
hauled from the sea, a wounded creature with a broken wing. A vet
set his wing, I saw to his recuperation and retrained him to fly.
Like this pair above me, his wingspan was the same as my own
outstretched arms. And he was as stubborn as me and as determined
to live his life by his own rules.}