West Coast Observer: Game Over

Remembering Ernest Thayer’s 1888 baseball poem

By William Silveira

How timely now is the last stanza of “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888”!:

All Over the Place: Sliding into Second

—Will We Ever Have the Baseball Feeling Again?

By Michael H. Brownstein



The bases not loaded, but could be,
our best hitter coming to bat,
not fourth in the lineup I don’t know why
but seventh, and today two men on
and we can do this – the sun a lemon rind,
the clouds a willow wisp of breeze –

All Over the Place: Green Grass

—Will We Ever Have the Baseball Feeling Again?

By Michael H. Brownstein






Sunlight littered left field with large swipes,
ivy covered walls christened green and darker green,
the outfield a perfect place for a picnic and the infield
a diamond of sweet grass and art.
We were two of the lucky ones,
able to enter the park late afternoon
after the crowds were gone, the garbage picked up.

All Over the Place: Cub’s Park, One Evening

—Will We Ever Have the Baseball Feeling Again?

By Michael H. Brownstein






Evening, a clear skinned sky, the outfield
green, well trained, and happy, the infielders
gathering the breeze, winds in motion.
We had box seats, close enough to see
the face of the guest of honor throw the first ball,
my son at my side, his first visit to the park,

Thor's Day follow-up: Where the "Kingdom of God" is

Deconstructing prayer in sestina

By Morris Dean

You said that talking with God is one-way¹:
we can talk "to" God but can't talk "with" Him.
You told us that God is imaginary
and we are really talking to ourselves—
or "with," I suppose, if we should answer.
What, then, do you say about fulfilled prayers?

Tuesday with Another Voice

Today's voice belongs to
Guest Columnist
Jonathan Price

How is a major league pitcher like William Faulkner?

We are now in the postseason of baseball, and we, if we watch television, will see many games and many pitchers. Baseball is supposedly an American game, and one that can go on forever, and during this forever the watcher's mind tends to wander. Mine certainly does, into unchartered territories and strange metaphors and comparisons.

Rounding third

I've felt this morning as though I were again a potent young male brimming with juice and the motive energy to deliver it in continual spurts of seminal fecundity. (Either feeling that way or like a middle-aged female novelist making up phrases for her next commercial romance?)...At any rate, my almost manic sense of having so many ideas desperately wanting to be expressed inspires the lust for life I sometimes feel in whose sway I simply do not want to die, must not die yet, not yet.

Alas, the young-male metaphor is, in fact, just a metaphor for this gray-headed sixty-five-year-old. Yet the feeling of that restless sexual motive is real and does, as I say, seem apt for the élan vital (or something) that was sweeping through me...Was sweeping through me? Yes, now it seems already to have died down and left me in its wake rational and contemplative. But hopefully not spent. So many ways to go, in which to head?

Home

On a particular day in early May our move from the house of twenty-five years to the temporary apartment (on the way a few weeks later to the new house abuilding) arrived at that point where we had to start sleeping in the apartment, which I may have thought could never for a moment achieve the status of "home." On that day, and for a couple of days thereafter, both of us (my wife and I, not to mention perhaps our dog) were confused and ambivalent about what to call "home." The day after our first night in the apartment, for example, one of us said, as we returned to the old house for some more things to remove before the closing, "Let's go back home...."

But for weeks now we've referred to the apartment as home. I call my wife from the sidewalk waiting for the bus to tell her I'm leaving work, I'll be home soon. Or last night, at the president's barbecue, we looked at each other and one of us said, "Ready to go home?" (Ready to go home and watch another episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?....) I noticed, even on our vacation in California, and on Bainbridge Island, that we spoke of "going home," back to my sister's house from the harbor after getting off the boat from Santa Cruz Island, back to our daughter's condo from watching "Iron Man" at a movie theater, back from the Suquamish Museum or from the Naval Undersea Museum to my high school Latin teacher's condo we used on Bainbridge Island for our last three nights on the West Coast.

What makes a place home? Possibly it's having the sheets you slide between to sleep at night. Or the place where you park your toothbrush and dentifrice. Where the coffee beans are in the morning. Something utterly basic and essentially everyday. Even the visiting team's third-base coach unselfconsciously waves his (or her) runner..."home." Home is where you score?

"Off the Black"

Always fascinated by a performance of Nick Nolte's, I watched "Off the Black" last nigth (2006: directed by James Ponsoldt) and was equally fascinated by the performance of young Trevor Morgan. The movie opens with Trevor on the mound taking a very long time to deliver the next pitch. He shakes off two signs then seems to think forever about the next one before pitching what umpire Nolte rules a ball—the one that walks home the winning run. Though baseball is (was) the only sport I could call my own, I never heard the phrase "off the black," which I take it means close, but not a strike.

Dealing as the movie does with communication between father and son (and between father and stand-in son) and with a father's death (and with things being not quite a strike), the movie will probably haunt me for a few days. And would probably haunt you it you made a point to watch this highly commendable example of storytelling art.

And a good example, for Nanowrimo participants, of the story that dwells at home and next door.