Highways and Byways: Flanagan Writes Again

By Maik Strosahl

I thought I would do a tribute to Moristotle’s “Goines On” series. I don’t know where he got the name Goines from (I didn’t find it in the ones I went back and read), but Flanagan is the name the old man called me who was my neighbor when I was six and was watching him work on his lawn mower. He taught me many things as I grew and I don’t think he ever called me Maik. I never had a chance to tell him thank you.

Flanagan Writes Again

Flanagan was tired after the last stop on a really hot Saturday. He decided to go inside the store he just delivered to get a drink and maybe a snack. While standing in the checkout line, he spotted a display of 2021 Topps Baseball Cards.
    Flanagan hadn’t purchased any baseball cards since he lost his collection in the divorce settlement to his first wife, but with his favorite team the Dodgers winning in ’20, he picked up three packs and put them on the counter.
    Baseball had been an obsession in the past for Flanagan. He played at every opportunity as a teenager at the McKinley Elementary diamond just up the block. As he got older, he spent a summer selling souvenirs at John O’Donnell, cheering on a young Shawon Dunston and the Quad City Cubs. When he learned about Fantasy baseball, he ran a league and did the stats by hand each week for every team. Yahoo took away a lot of the fun when they automated the stat-keeping. He knew almost every player for every team. And baseball cards, well they were an obsession of their own. It wasn’t the exciting special cards that he chased, rather he would sell these to further his addiction in building the sets. That was when cards were fun. Somewhere along the way, he had lost that fun and lost the love.
    Even with the Dodgers winning the series, he hadn’t watched a game all season. Maybe the love could be rekindled.
    Flanagan took note of the receipt. $6 per pack. Oh, when the price of fun was not so high! He ripped open the packs as he once did, separating the set cards from the special inserts. It was then, while sorting the cards that he noticed a small hiccup to his renewed passion. Looking at all the standard poses of batters, pitchers and catchers, he started to wonder. “Who the heck are all these guys?”
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Explanation from Moristotle: After looking at the comments from a dozen or so of the earliest of my “Goines On” pieces, hoping to find where I had revealed the source of the name “Goines,” but not finding such a revelation, I decided to provide it here: I chose “Goines” from the surname of the artist David Lance Goines, several of whose posters grace the walls of my house. The first mention of the artist on Moristotle & Co. seems to have occurred on January 19, 2018.

Copyright © 2021 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.