Looking forward to September 13

The Column: 09.08.23

It’s been a busy summer for this old retired guy due to the fact that it takes twice as long to get half as much done due to voice-activated Google, which means I can say, “How exactly am I related to Katharine Hepburn?” and the computer screen does some backflips and flashes the answer, “You and she are descended from Elder John Crandall, 1618–1676, Westerly, Rhode Island,” which I have known for years but it makes me feel good to see it again, given the fact that by the age of 81 a man has accumulated a truly stunning list of mishaps, bungles, fiascos, and debacles, all of which are unaffected by dementia but shine bright and clear, warning buoys on the reefs of despair.

Google is a marvel and also a pernicious addiction. Back in the day I focused on the work before me, the sheet of paper in the Underwood typewriter, and didn’t follow the whims of curiosity because it would involve hauling down Webster’s Third Unabridged or the Encyclopedia Britannica or World Almanac, but now if I’m curious I can instantly find out what year Buddy Holly’s plane crashed (1959) or which popes fathered children (many) or who was the first daredevil to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive (a schoolteacher, Annie Edson Taylor, in 1901 at the age of 63), none of which have anything to do with the project at hand.

And so here it is, September, and I’ve yet to go to a ball game, so I went online and bought a ticket to see the Minnesota Twins and also a plane ticket to Minneapolis, since I live in New York now. Baseball is crucial to my sense of order in the universe, that and the analog clock, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Boy Scout Law, the Bill of Rights, the multiplication tables, the rules of English grammar, the Beatitudes, and of course the 50 state capitals. Sometimes I forget Delaware’s (Dover) and Wyoming’s (Cheyenne), but mostly they’re fixed in my mind, just as three strikes means you’re out, three outs and you’re done, and the runner must tag up until the fly is caught before he can advance. These are written in stone.

I’ll sit behind the visitors’ dugout at the ballpark and my sense of order will be restored, same as when I recite the Twenty-third Psalm, it still says that the Lord restoreth my soul and my cup runneth over, it doesn’t say He awakens my consciousness or that I resonate with authenticity.

We live in changing times and when you reach 81 you know this for sure. My people were early risers who enjoyed Grape-Nuts and Hills Brothers coffee for breakfast, followed by a chapter of Scripture, more often Isaiah or Jeremiah than the Gospels. They kept chickens and large vegetable gardens so as not to pay outlandish prices for food. They wrote letters legibly in grammatical sentences and were fond of sad songs about lost love and premature death and were wary of strangers, shunned saloons and theaters, and preferred silence to small talk. The aunts and uncles are all gone now and I doubt that any of my cousins find it worthwhile to behead and defeather a chicken. We are, after all, college graduates. So we purchase frozen chicken breasts wrapped in plastic and we text with our phones and make small talk with seatmates on the plane and drink wine in public but glance over our shoulders first. There are dozens of brands of granola on the grocery shelf and we keep trying new varieties such as the pumpkin/pineapple/winter wheat in hopes it will lead to new insights, and we skip Jeremiah for the daily news and sad songs depress us, we prefer dance beats, and we pay exorbitant prices for exotic coffee beans that we choose from a list recommended by coffee journalists at the New York Times. But baseball is still baseball. The double play is as exciting as ever and the bases-loaded homer and even more exciting, the triple and the double-steal, the runner on first heading for second, the long throw as the runner on third comes home.

I’ll go to the game with two friends one-third my age who are engaged to be married. Marriage is one more thing that hasn’t changed — the happy marriage hasn’t. There is an endless variety of available misery but happiness — there’s no need to google it — requires a cheerful disposition, a vocation, someone to put your arms around and converse with, and having a small cup so it runneth over more easily. And meekness and mercy and making peace are good too.

Speaking of baseball, here’s a great ball cap!

CLICK HERE to buy this handsome The Writer’s Almanac hat.