The Double Refuge ☠️ Ars Moriendi
Batter Up!
Bases Empty (February 18, 2017) - Diamonds - Cooper Glove (2007) - Playing Heads Up Ball
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Bases Empty (February 18, 2017)
I dreamed I met you again, with my headphones on, along the avenue. The day was white, you had a bluish hue, as if your face was slightly powdered. I asked how your day had been, doing business at some downtown office. You said it wasn't easy, as you leaned on your cane and looked me in the eye (the old you, the one that was starting to worry about going insane) and then you went down the stairs, from the office on the first floor. I followed behind you, as we descended, as you slowly pushed open a door that lead from the stairwell to the white day.
I woke up and went through Kleenex after Kleenex, thinking each time I'd tossed one away that I'd cleared my eyes and could see again, but the tears welled up again, and soon there was a scattered landscape of damp white snow cascading from my pillow to the floor.
I finally had enough and got up from bed and walked into the den, with the pile of Kleenex still in my hands, compressed by my two hands.
In strange tribute, I assumed the old pitcher's stance. I rolled back and forth on my left heel. The Kleenex was now a tight white ball. I leaned back one more time, although I had no signal from the plate, and let go.
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MY FATHER told me that he didn't believe in Heaven. If, however — and there was always an if with my father — there was an afterlife, he hoped to find himself on a baseball diamond, playing ball with his family and friends.
After a year of slipping into dementia, he died on May 14, 2016, at the age of 92.
I hope he hears the cry of the umpire, Batter up!
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Diamonds (2017)
Dad, I hope you find that baseball diamond in the sky, and I hope it's more than you hoped — like a baseball fan happening across the kaleidoscope of diamonds in Cullman, Alabama:
http://cullmanrecreation.org/facilties-parks/heritage-park/
I hope that in some mirror world you walk through the fields of your youth, smell the warm summer air, and stumble across an old baseball diamond with a pitcher's plate two feet long and six inches wide, somewhere in the distant prairies, pounded deep into the ground, an old wooden pitcher's plate, having survived many seasons upon the mound. The plate is solid as the prairie earth. It’s a simple wooden plate, surrounded by the bright Flowers of Truth that everyone else proclaimed — Maharishi, Jesus, Darwin — all those magic Flowers that in the end lead everywhere, wildly, in all directions. But not you. You stand on the ancient mound, waiting for the umpire’s cry.
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Cooper Glove (2007)
Here's my father, on a wooden plank with a bucket in his hand, and beside him, the tax lawyer in his office:
While others debated the meaning of the Cross, Darwin or the Holy Book, he kept his nose to the grindstone. He kept his own quiet counsel, with his stats and rosters, his own unchanging values of X and Y, of baseball and fair play. Beneath everything was a belief in hard work and the Free Market: Adam Smith’s invisible hand, Cooper-gloved.
Here he is, top row, second from the left, with his team from Horse Hill, where his father (the one with the suspenders) was their coach.
Years later he became my coach. Here I am wearing the bright yellow letters of our namesake, the Kansas City Royals:
I remember my dad loading up the ’67 Fury with duffle-bags of gear. He’d spend all Saturday afternoon, even till the sun went down, batting balls to my friends and I on the baseball diamond behind the local elementary school.
From home plate over the bumpy ground of time, this world comes back to me: the crack of the bat, the uncertain bounce across the years that change almost everything — all those Lucy in the Sky years that made me cynical about the value of that game, about that world of sport. Now my father is eighty-three years old and the ball comes bouncing toward me. I'm not sure that I'll find it in my old black Cooper glove.
I search in vain for meaning amid his past world of business and baseball stats. I find it hard to fathom what a man who's eaten at Michelin 3-star restaurants and lived one block off the Champs Élysées would want with baseball stats or a complete roster of the Edmonton Eskimos.
Likewise, my father searches to understand me, as if I were an alien species. Why would I write poetry, spend hours in cafés, or underline sentences in novels?
Although we live in different worlds, these intersect at times, like when we're on the golf course, or at home on the range:
Or when we're at a local hockey game with my two brothers, and he catches me with that same old eagle eye, five megapixels sharp:
He has a smile more dour than his Scottish blood, but the same old St. Andrew’s drive:
The photo drives me to remember his passion for sport, and his dream of Heaven: family and friends at home plate. It makes me remember the names written on the pennants on my old bedroom wall. Many of the teams may no longer exist as far as I know, but I still remember the names: the Red Sox and the White Sox, the Padres and the Braves. Yet the intensity that I felt back then now seems so inconsequential. Or is it still there, that fierce desire to smack the twisting ball out of the park?
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Playing Heads Up Ball
All those early evenings (as the stars threatened to scatter us away from the field and into the alleys of our less noble pursuits) my father stood there with his bat at home plate.
I didn’t realize it then, but I see it now: he was brainwashing us into remembering that if we kept our heads down and gazed at our navels, or if we looked too high into the god-filled clouds, and not at what was coming at us, life would smack us in the head.
Or we'd miss what’s flying by: the way the game's played, the joy of making a perfect catch, the satisfaction of leather on leather, and the beaming smiles of our teammates as they shouted Three up, three down! and we threw the ball back toward the centre of the diamond.
A diamond, rare indeed, in my world of obscurity and rebellion, a world that led me to alcohol and drugs, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath.
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From the age of ten to the age of seventeen, I was a zeppelin crashing downward dazed and confused into the rhapsodies of Castaneda and Queen. All the while my dad watched, uncomprehending.
I remember once when I was seventeen, alienated out of my mind on a bad LSD trip, I came home and sat down in the living room. He was listening to classical music, as usual. He hardly said a word, but I think that somehow he knew what I was going through, and that I would get through it.
Over the next several years, I did get through it — with his unfailing support: he visited me in Quebec when I was staying on a farm for six weeks; back in Calgary he drove me to a porter job downtown; he helped me think through my career choices when we stayed for several weeks in a Fribourg hotel; he set me up with an old Swiss woman (the mother of a Swiss business associate) for three months; he helped me get a summer job in the Maritimes, and helped me set myself up at Queen’s University; he made sure to transit through Toronto, and spent four weekends with me while I was going to school in Kingston; he set me up at the University of Geneva.
He did all these things, and I doubt I ever thanked him enough. He was the centre of the Led Zeppelin line that always got me: “To be a rock and not to roll.” He was that rock.
When he went insane, I couldn’t stand it. They strapped him to his wheelchair and I couldn’t look any more. Only my older brother, who rolled just as hard as me and further afield, was somehow able to sit with him every day. I would try my best to do it, but it was exceptionally hard. My mother even stopped going to see him.
I tried, but still I wonder if I really did my best. I’m pretty sure I didn’t live up to his favourite saying: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
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I'd like to pay homage to that rare diamond in my father’s eyes, to a man whose satisfaction lay in our common good, invaluable instruction on how to live both for yourself and for your team night after star-coming night, dirt and leather lessons on the balance between individual skill and the loss of ego in a finer game; implicit lessons that all came together, all made sense in the umpire's cry: Batter up!
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Next: Sky Train