Hard Knocks

Knock-knock-knock on the door. Fast knocks. Hard knocks. I'm busy, dammit. Was busy. Knock-knock-knock, heavier, faster. Coming. I'm coming, little shit. Eyes press against the narrow glass next to the door, framed by little hands, like the inside of my house some kind of show, or worse a circus. I see him. He sees me. Busted. He slides out of view, waits.

I open the door. I know how it goes. His little eyes rise up to meet mine, hopeful. "Can Owen play?"

"Owen isn't here," I tell him,"at his mom's house this week."

"Oh. Okay." He's sad because Owen can't play, isn't here.

"He'll be home Sunday, though, okay?" I reassure him.

"Yeah, alright." Sunday is still several days away. He doesn't understand where Owen is. At his mom's? Where's that? What's a Sunday? Owen isn't there, that's all he heard. He turns for his bike, peddles out of the driveway. He'll be back tomorrow.

My return to peace is brief. Knock-knock-knock on the door. Shit. Ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong. The hell! I head for the door again. Dammit. The eyes again, watching me watch them again. The eyes hide again.

I open the door, preparing my speech. It's the first boy's little brother, shirtless like their dad. I refer to their dad as "Gun Show," wonder if their dad owns a single shirt.

"Is Owen here?" the boy asks.

"No, Owen's at his mom's house, be back Sunday."

The boy stands there wincing, pinching himself.  I ask him if he needs to pee.

"No," he says, defiant. He lifts his bike and rides off fast, shirtless. Balanced, too, with one hand gripping the handlebars and the other gripping his crotch just as tight. I'm somewhat in awe, and certain that I'd be unable to do the same under similar circumstances. He'll be back tomorrow.

Knock-knock, Owen isn't here. Knock-knock, Owen's not home. He's at his mom's house this week. Be back Sunday. They are young; Owen's friends don't understand. They just want to play. They don't know about divorce. Their parents are normal; Owen's parents are not. Each knock a reminder of why Owen isn't here.

Knock-knock. Heavy knocks. Hard knocks.

Rashful Reminder

A rashful reminder remains from my stroke. The drug that saved my life (the me inside of me), tPA (tissue plasminogen activator, fancy for heavy duty clot-buster), didn't take the first time. They shot it into my arm and they missed; the drug stayed there, though, festered under the skin and soggy like spilled milk under a newspaper. The trauma team eventually found purchase in a vein with another dose, though, sparing my brain. The bruising was hideous.

Now the rash, itchy. Irritating. And I'm thankful, really. It feels good to feel good, afterward. I'm reminded of that every day now, thanks to a little blight on my arm that itches in fits. My nails rake over it, and I go back in time with each scratch. The experience altered my perspective. Life changed in an instant on June 10, 2012.

A stroke occurs when blood flow gets cut off to a part of the brain. Blood clots are often the cause. Read about strokes here.

I don't even know what to say about the stroke itself. I fear my story can be told only so many times before it dries up and fades forever. I was lucky. Many stroke victims are not.

Though I don't know my story yet, or how it should be told, at least there's this...

Practical:

1. Get your blood pressure checked today. Do it now. Know what it is, where it should be and how life impacts it. It matters. You should know why it matters.
2. Watch what goes in your mouth. Diet plays a huge part in all of this.
3. Get active. I'm not a fitness freak, but my philosophy is to do just a little bit more than you're doing. Ease into any major changes. However, it's vital to buy into the idea that a healthy change will be good for your health.
4. Know the signs of a stroke, for you or someone you love.
1. SUDDEN numbness or weakness of face, arm or leg - especially on one side of the body.
2. SUDDEN confusion, trouble speaking or understanding.
3. SUDDEN trouble seeing in one or both eyes.
4. SUDDEN trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination.
5. SUDDEN severe headache with no known cause.
   Call 9-1-1 immediately if you have any of these symptoms. DON'T HESITATE!
   www.stroke.org

Intangible:

Life is fragile — your life and the lives of people you love and care about. You only think you have time to say the things you want to say, or feel the things you want to feel, before something happens to erase all that time you treat like a blank check.

Say it today. Feel it today. 

Random stuff I learn from my dog, Fletch. Part II: Marking

Fletch.

Dogs pee on things. A lot. And they like peeing on things, a lot. Fresh patches of grass and wall to wall carpeting present perfect places to piss. Add to that: street corners, bushes, pathways, sidewalks, fire hydrants, trees, park benches, swingsets, car tires, mailboxes, flagpoles, and flowers. Nothing on the ground is safe from a raised leg and urine to spare.

It's much more than just a birthright. They're programmed to mark territory, claim it as their own. It's a greeting, statement, or a warning.

People say dogs can't speak; well, I disagree. They use their bladders to talk and their noses to hear.

I suppose Fletch really thinks the world is his to piss all over. He certainly acts like it, and marks accordingly. He's just doing what comes naturally to him.

Peeing on everything is not something I should try to emulate, literally. But the model intrigues me. Treat the world a little bit like it's yours. Let others know you're there, that you exist, and that you care. Tell the world that you're present, that you're around, that you've left your mark.

"Occupy the space you occupy." — Adrienne Rich

Random stuff I learn from my dog, Fletch. Part I: Kids

This is Fletch, my yellow lab.

Like all divorces, mine was hard on the family, especially my kids. We spent Christmas Eve together, then they were gone. Gone like Christmas. Nobody was ready for it, certainly not me. 

Fletch picked a spot at the top of the stairs, overlooking the front door and entryway. He waited for days, head lowered, ears peeled. It was everything a picture of vigilance. Cars passed by the house, sending his head up off the floor. He'd strain to hear the slam of car doors, small voices, and footsteps hitting the porch. But the cars just went by.

They went by, went on, to other homes, where other dogs reunited their human families. Deflated, his head drooped to the floor, again and again, beleaguered, and punctuated with sighs. Up and down. Up and down. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

A car stopped one day and he stood, ramrod straight like a Marine. Car doors slammed, small feet approached, sending the tip of Fletch's tail whipping with controlled anticipation. The front door flew open and his family had returned.

They came home, eventually, and they were fine. Fletch's heart was never in question; who could say where his mind was? I missed them too, worried of course. My kids were away from home, settling into a new one. Adjusting. But he doesn't wait by the door anymore, the times they leave. He knows. We both know. The kids will be fine. 

The sting of divorce still strums angry chords in this new song, the one I write with my kids. But we are singing, growing. 

Average

I shot for average growing up and that’s what I got.  School was no cake walk, but it wasn’t hard or anything.  Learning bored me.  Homework?  What’s that?  I got a lot of D’s on my progress reports, which sent my parents into the stratosphere over and over again.  They threatened me within an inch of my life over and over, and I would rally across the finish line, and hold my hands up in victory for average, for a fucking C.  Below average grades were never acceptable; average grades kept me out of trouble.

Fast forward and rewind through life: I’m an average guy (not above average, but I’ll be damned if I’m below average).  I live in an average house, on an average street, with average neighbors, in an average town.  Our lawns each share an average green hue in the summer, as though we planned it that way.  We have average cars with average car payments.  My family is average with 2.5 kids (actually three whole kids... but statistically still average).  I had an average marriage that morphed into an average divorce.  My income is average and I’m grateful for it.  Middle class suits my magnetic attraction to mediocre.

When I’m out of town I eat at average restaurants.  Chili’s, Red Robin, Outback, Red Lobster, Applebee’s, or Olive Garden.  It’s extraordinary fare for the average man.  It’s like a convention of average people dining together in groups, engaged in all the good habits of the herd, where safety is found in numbers.

I buy coffee at Starbucks with other coffee house wannabes.  I’m not into the fancy coffee based beverages, mainly because it’s a language I can’t understand and never cared to learn.  Give it to me black, safe, sometimes with a little half and half.  Nothing says average like a little half and half.  

Like bikinis, baseball stats show a lot but not everything

“There’s no crying in baseball,” Tom Hank’s “Jimmy Dugan” laments in the baseball movie A League of Their Own (1992).  There’s no crying in baseball, it’s true.  And no clocks.  Time doesn’t exist in baseball.  Only moments.  

Moments where anything happens and often does, recorded in the form of numbers and letters and abbreviations on a dance card called a scoresheet.  Short, cryptic croppings like: F9, HBB, 6-4-3, K, 1B8, HR, E6, BB, 2B9, RBI, S8, PH.  And many more, each a captured result, or moment, those moments which depart with a pitch and arrive at some other place in the universe, nobody knowing for sure where.  Like jumping through hyperspace without a star chart, all you know is you’re still in space, or still watching a baseball game.  But the destination arrives pitch after pitch, batter after batter, out after out, and if not for the scoresheet we’d never remember exactly how.  

You see, it’s all about the statistic, the stat.  The game boiled down to results: a strike, a hit, an out, a run, an error, a substitution, an RBI.  All sports have stats.  But stats lose a certain mystique when gathered within the rigid realm of clocks counting down to 00:00.

“Statistics are to baseball what a flaky crust is to Mom’s apple pie.” – Harry Reasoner

The scorebook’s origin goes back to 1845, when the game was still taking shape.  Journalist Henry Chadwick (1824-1908), an English immigrant with a fondness for cricket, is credited with writing baseball’s first rulebook and devising the box score, a formula still used in newspapers today.  Though, a committee determined that Civil War General Abner Doubleday invented baseball, Chadwick is regarded as the game’s father, and most influential visionary.  Some debate remains on that point.

Visitors vs. Home, a whole page for each.  The grid works down for each starter, usually nine, and across for each inning, again usually nine.  There’s a section for pitchers.  Nine batters will face nine defenders for nine innings, three outs at a time.  No more is needed to determine a winner, though five innings at least or it’s tossed (erased from the very fabric of time itself).  A number is assigned one through nine for each defensive player, starting with: 1-pitcher, 2-catcher, 3-first base, 4-second base, 5-third base, 6-shortstop, 7-left field, 8-center field, and finally 9-right field.  The date, time, umpires, pitch counts, temperature, and anything else factually related gets penciled in, deemed crucial and necessary (another ingredient to the recipe).  

A finished scoresheet is similar to an elegant score of music.  Hidden in plain sight, a whole language of movement and meaning scratched in crooked characters and symbols, each telling another piece of the story, a story that unfolds to the trained eye.  The main difference: a score of music can be examined by a conductor and surveyed bar by bar, where he or she hears it breathe on the page, and can measure its tempo, and gauge its very mood, and suffer the agony, and glow in the rapture.  

A baseball scoresheet can show mood, agony, and rapture, but certainly not with very much feeling or drama.  In one game, for example, it’s obvious which team scored a lot, thanks to timely hitting, extra base hits, and a few throwing errors from the opposing team.  Or, in another case, pitching dominated batters inning after inning, until middle relievers––replacements––threw it all away in the 7th and 8th. 

The scoresheet’s humble beginnings of pulp and microscopic fibers from wood and grasses are indistinguishable from other types of paper.  It’s probably not even special by paper standards, as paper all by itself is pretty standard.  However, once a template gets inked across the surface something magical happens.  

A contradiction is born.  

For a game where time doesn’t exist, the scoresheet becomes an elaborate time piece––a most peculiar device with a first pitch “on-switch,” and a final out “off-switch”––to be used at some time in the future, at some ballpark, in some dugout, by an old lady in the stands, or in a press box like the one at Lewis Clark State College’s Harris Field, where official stats are gathered and stored in perpetuity.  

Once pressed into service and deemed official by the baseball powers, the scoresheet is now a time capsule, uniquely bound to a specific span of hours and circumstances.  And finally a time machine, able to go backwards to a place in the past, whenever necessary.  An hour ago, or a century, and all points in between, a reserve of facts, history, and knowledge.  Stats.  

“Baseball ought never be hurried.  It is the only unhurried institution we have left, which is one reason, I think, we love it.”  --James Kilpatrick

So then, how long is the life span of a baseball game?  An hour?  Two hours?  Three hours, or more?  No one knows for sure.  That’s because the tempo of the game is set by the recording of outs.  No hard and fast rules exist regarding how long outs are supposed to take.  Fast, slow, kind of quick, kind of slow, a reasonable amount of time?  Again, there are no shot-clocks, halftimes, quarters or timeouts.  

The outs decide their own pace.  Some are fast, like popping out to right field after swinging on the first pitch (goes as F9 in the book).  Other outs take longer.  Further, they are never automatic.  For example, one at-bat could progress over 12 or 13 pitches.  It might end with a strike out, or pop up, or ground out.  Then again, maybe that same hitter finally watches ball four cross the plate (BB in the statbook).  He walks.  The whole at bat took the better part of 10 minutes, and in the end the batter reaches on a walk.  He wasn’t out; he was safe.  Try again.

Thankfully, outs come quickly at times too.  Alone or in pairs, double plays happen frequently (2 outs), and triple plays (3 outs, pretty rare) are known to exist in the game.  

The next batter slaps a grounder to the second baseman, who flips to the shortstop covering second base for the force out, (that guy who just walked, the one who displayed incredible patience and a good eye, the one who hogged all of our precious time––he’s out now, thankfully), then the shortstop rifles the ball over to first base (4-6-3 DP... 2 outs).  The spectacle took seconds by comparison.  

Fast, slow, the scoresheet doesn’t mind either way, whether it be leisurely like a Sunday afternoon or frantic like a Monday morning.  Record the hits, record the runs, record the outs, record the stats.  It’s not tempo, for a better word than tempo must exist as it applies to baseball, but I’m hard pressed to think of one now.  Pace?  Cadence?  Speed?  None of those words seem to work either.  It’s just outs––they take however damn long they take.

“The game isn’t over until it’s over.” --Baseball great Yogi Berra

You can’t have stats without playing a little baseball, so thank God for broadcasters and baseball writers, who give our humble stats some color and a story to tell.  

It’s a beautiful game.   

“PLAY BALL!” the home plate umpire yells.  Greetings exchange between the lead-off hitter and masked catcher.  They each give a nod to the umpire.  

One guy carries a bat.  The other guy is covered in armor.  “The tools of ignorance” the catcher’s gear is called.  It’s not even a fair fight.  His friends are out there too, not dressed like the catcher, not like a gladiator, but nonetheless foreboding in their greater numbers.  They eyeball the batter, as though he’d wandered into the wrong dark alley.

The batter fidgets and scrapes at the dirt with his cleats, digging in.  He waves the bat, menacing them, teasing them, taunting them.  He means business, wants them to know it.  

Time capsule: ON.  Called strike, ball 1, ball 2, and a foul ball makes strike two.  The pitcher throws gas, nips the outside corner.  The batter can only watch, he’s too late.  He looks at strike 3 as it crosses the plate.  That’s a “K” in most books, circled.  If scored by hand it’s a backwards K.  

“He was caught looking, called out for excessive window shopping.” –The late, great Detroit Tiger announcer Ernie Harwell.

Batter up.  In the chalk-lined box he stands, a hand held up, time to anchor his cleats, find some ruts, and scratch his nuts.  He waves the bat, too, steely eyed and stone-faced.  Meanwhile, the pitcher and catcher roll through signs.  Silent conspirators, they speak in finger wags and head nods before every pitch.  The batter is left to guess what pitch comes next.  

Crouched behind the plate the catcher flashes an index finger straight down.  Fast ball.  The pitcher shakes him off.  Insubordination!  The catcher glares at the pitcher back through his mask, thrusting two fingers down sharply.  Curve ball.  The pitcher approves, nods to the catcher.  Consensus.

The batter expects a fast ball, but gladly sits on the big, hanging curve ball.  He waits, swings with some heft, sends a towering fly ball to deep left.  The pitcher’s head jerks around to watch the ball’s majestic flight.  Groans from the grandstand, it fades from sight.  

The left fielder is determined, knows his home field well, looks over his shoulder, races to the warning track.  Course plotted; variables known.  Back-back-back he goes, a collision of leather, flesh, and particle board awaits at the wall.  His hat leaps from his head, makes a jump for it ahead of the carnage.

Crash!  The left fielder yields to the fence awkwardly.  Gasps from the grandstand, then silence. Dust erupts from the dirt.  Flailing, the left fielder is dazed, perhaps hurt.  He is well-coached, though, knows exactly what to do.  His glove shoots up for out number two.  He caught it!  Is he sore?

The stat: fly out to left field––“F7”––and no more.   

Next batter.  More scraping.  More scheming.  More scratching.  Strike 1 (called), strike 2, ball 1, ball 2, ball 3, now the count is full.  Here’s the pitch . . .  the batter tinks a dribbler towards the third baseman.  The infielder charges and snatches the ball barehanded off the grass and fires it across the diamond to first just a step ahead of the runner.  

That was close.  Too close.  “5-3” goes in the book and the side is retired.  

Scalding temper launches the visiting team’s coach out of the dugout like a cannon shot.  Shouting.  Rage.  The umpire shows his back and waltzes out to right field, beyond giving a good goddamn.  The coach rounds on the umpire, infuriated now, jaws at him like he’s the lousiest piece of crap umpire the game of baseball ever did see.  The umpire folds his arms, takes it.  Then gives some. 

They go at it for a bit.  Just jawin’ and growlin’ and spittin’ at each other like kodiak bears fighting over a rotten fish.  Expletives.  Warnings.  This goes on for quite some time, but then the coach retreats.

Three up and three down to start the Visitor’s 1st.  Quite the half inning to watch in person, or listen to on the radio.  The scoresheet saw it this way: [K.. F7.. 5-3..  0 runs 0 hits 0 errors].  That’s it.  

Now the home team comes to bat.  Moore leads off and draws a walk (BB), and next to bat is Bridges, who hits into a double play (6-4-3).  “Two for the price of one.”  Ernie Harwell again.  Eccles deposits a line drive down the right field line and reaches second base with a stand up double (2B9).  Gaylord steps in and launches the third pitch over the center field wall. (HR.. RBI2.. both runs earned).  Miller reaches on an error by the second baseman, when a relatively easy ball scoots through the wickets (E4).  Shaw grounds the fourth pitch, another chance for the second baseman, who flips the ball to the shortstop waiting on the bag for a fielder’s choice force out (FC46).  

Scoresheet: [BB.. 6-4-3.. 2B9.. HR2.. E4.. FC46.. 2 runs 2 hits 1 error 1 runner left on base].  Inning one is in the books.  It’s 2-0, home team with the lead and eight more innings to go, or 48 more outs (if you’re keeping score at home).

"They both (bikinis & statistics) show a lot, but not everything." – Toby Harrah

Shoreline

Cloudless blue sky, illuminating, divine

She washes over me like a cool summer breeze.

Lazily, like pools of ocean blue and calm sea

Her eyes sparkle in fits, flutter in currents.

Her breaths linger like wet kisses against my skin

Shoreline caressed, she tells me I’m alive.