THE WORK OF SPRING

A rite occurs on the Right Coast that I have learned of from family members who are part of the Red Sox Nation. On or about the 15th of February every year they offer a toast to the sign of the coming spring, no matter that there is 38 inches of snow on the ground and the grinding cold of daily life still saps their strength. It is “Truck Day.” It is celebrated by the most zealous and reverential off Boston Red Sox fans for it is the surest sign that spring will come. It is the day 40-foot semis leave Fenway Park in Boston for Fort Meyer, Florida with the paraphernalia needed to conduct spring training. Thus, as it is inevitable that Sox baseball will come, they toast the spring. No groundhogs needed, just seven or eight diesels pulling away from “The Fen” is enough for them know.

There is much rain in Arizona this year and cold in the camps in Florida. Yesterday it was 55 and raining in the Phoenix Arizona area, yet the rites of the baseball spring continue there. There is grousing among the coaches and managers that the proper work will not be accomplished in this short season of evaluation. The players worry of minor yet nagging injuries—pulled muscles and sore arms--due to the lingering wet fields and cold weather which has replaced the warmth and thus the hope of spring. It is a grim March there for the fans as well, those from Milwaukee and Chicago and Cleveland, who have fled the frozen tundra to find only a stiff breeze and low 60’s or rain showers and 50’s in a place they usually find 80’s not uncommon.

The players have been reporting since late February and began there 31 game exhibition seasons on Thursday and Friday. So the long days and nights of the season have begun. It is time to show that one has retained the skill of last year, or that one has improved enough to go to what the players call “The Show.” Or that there is still enough gas left in the tank for one more year as a role player, the veteran to provide cohesiveness, to teach attitude and patience. He who will keep his head as all around him lose theirs as it were.

The newspapers, having space now that the Olympics are over, begin to carry small stories. One does not have to go to the back pages and the tiny agate type to find baseball news. These are intriguing times for those who have a passion for the journey from March when all have reported through sometime in early November when this grind will end with two teams in a stadium somewhere trying to become the next World Series Champions. The Commissioner dearly hopes it will not be in a cold weather city since it will occur nearer Thanksgiving this year than Labor Day. Part of what makes the game worth following as fans, is the hope the Minnesota Twins and Milwaukee Brewers will make the trip just to see what baseball can be like at night, in Minnesota and Wisconsin, in November.

The usual drama will play out this spring. As I prepare to return to what I hope by then will be a warm Valley of the Sun I read with more interest the doings of the great, the once great, and the never will be great players that have assembled. If one can count on anything, there will be surprises as always. There will be a rookie who amazes everyone though he shouldn’t who will sustain it through the year. There will be another who will be back riding a bus in the minors when he returns to a conscious state and his natural playing level sometime very early in May but who, at this moment, is being labeled "can't miss" by some ink stained wretch in the sporting press. There will be a veteran left for dead at the end of last season by one team who will rise like a phoenix with another to amaze us once more. Sadly, there will also be the everyday, consistent, perhaps former All-Star player of many years who will find that the Navy SEAL’s motto, “Yesterday was the last good day of your life” now applies to him. He will stumble and fail at this game he has played since his boyhood. Its most basic tenets will elude him in all ways he has found so natural for so long. It will be hard to watch this man-child of thirty something years of age become confused, frustrated, and by August sitting at the end of the bench wondering what happened, knowing that a “fresh start” next spring with this team is out of the question. In the argot of the game, you can put a fork in him, he’s done. It is over and he is neither adult enough to understand the reasons why nor what to do with the rest of his life.

Just as a skilled aerobatic pilot can make an inside loop look easy, these men in the strange pants and a leather glove on one hand make this seem that way too. It isn’t. There are 27 major league teams. Each have a 40 man roster of which 25 wear the uniform of the major league club on a given day and six of them are usually pitchers. Do the math. 675 men make The Show and only 8 players start for each team everyday, the rest, the two hundred that will be in each camp this spring find another place to play or something else to do the rest of their lives. That is a tough pyramid to climb in any profession and even harder one to stay on top of once you have.

Some who have been there a long time refuse to agree that it is time to step down. There seem to be more of them this year. They are once fine players and fiercely proud men who refuse to accept that they are closer to forty than twenty years old. Their skills have eroded and they move a step slower, see the ball as a hitter too late. They are forced to move on. A manager can’t afford to carry one of the 25 that hits all his home runs in batting practice at 5 o'clock when the game is at 7. He needs everyday players, so they release these men because they can’t do it anymore. It’s a business decision not personal. Some don’t see it that way so they find a place to sign on as a “non-roster” invitee to the rites of spring. They talk of trying to “catch on”, and say words like “a better fit”, or “be a good man in the clubhouse.” They accept the humiliation of a minor league contract with a slim chance to make the team. I will see some of these too, and either be gladdened by their return or saddened by the certain knowledge that by Opening Day in April, they will be home watching it as I will.

These moments are coming in this world barely understood, but so enjoyed by the fanatics that follow it. It is a world without pity, yet with moments that are as touching as a love story. There are memories forever of those who do it so well you watch in awe. Errors in effort are not tolerated, less than perfection is expected but not admired. It is a game where a thirty three percent success rate with a bat in your hand will get you enshrined in the Hall of Fame. To do that, your heart has to work 100 percent of the time and your reflexes must be quick enough to see it, understand it, and hit it in less than two seconds. That is the difference between the legends and the others, the ones called “great” and the ones called “useful.”

So spring is here, despite the rain of yesterday and the blustery winds and cool temperatures of today. There are men at work again in the Valley of the Sun. Very soon, it will be time to go and see as many as I can and enjoy once again the balletic rituals, the triumphs, and sadness of the time.

THE DANCER

I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life! ---and if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Sherwood Woody Goldfein, a good and gentle man, loving husband, father, and one of the best dancers in the City of New York left our family this week.

Any lasting memory of him would have to include watching him dance to the music he loved. He did it so well and gracefully that other men stopped, watched, and realized they were mere poseurs in the presence of one who truly knew how. I saw him at my neice's wedding where there were more partners for him to dance with than there were songs that could be played. He acquiesced to each request with a gentle smile. Every partner, whatever their age, seemed to feel special for having shared a dance with him.

Woody was my cousin's husband. They were in love in a remarkable way not experienced by many in this world. They were soulmates, business partners, best friends, and parents to a special and beautiful daughter. Their unyielding optimism showed us how good a life was, how precious love is, and how very happy two people could be. They were the light that filled the room, he with his gentle grace, she with her wit, and the laughter of both. He was loved by us all and no less so now that he has gone. I am certain that he will have the same effect in whatever universe he has now entered.

In his work and his life, Woody expressed his zest for what he did as he did in dance. He was perpetually in motion. He embraced everything with a relentless energy well into his seventy-seventh year. When he no longer could, he left us, and we are lessened by it. We will miss this man of kindness, and boundless energy uniquely in love with his partner, lover, friend, and spouse.

Our hope is that Woody is now in a place where he will hear and feel the music he loved so much, and move to it as gracefully as we remember.

A NOVEL ENDING

For more than three years as many as ten people lived here in my office. They were of my invention yet had lives of their own.

Three years ago I broke my left leg. The importance of this and distinguishing which one lies only in the fact that four years ago I had my right leg surgically repaired. It had been broken nine years earlier and never fully healed. My life has in some ways then, been measured by these episodes of leg damage, like markers along a highway.

The cast was from hip to toes. I was confined to home most of the time. After two months, I ran out of books of any interest, games to play, and crossword puzzles to do. For reasons not at all clear to me now, I wondered what it would be like to write dialogue. I have written all my life, but never done it. I was vaguely aware that there were rules about how it is done. I have also never writtten fiction. All of the writing I have done in my life—one should not count the political speeches—has been non-fiction. This lack of knowledge of the rules and format was not a barrier to my trying. It is hard to find something I will not try just because there are rules of which I am unaware.

I wondered what it would be like to write a story of two people explaining themselves to each other only through the spoken word as written on the page. That is how it began. As I did it, I began to see a beginning and an and end to a story and I rushed from one to the other with little regard for rules just to get it set down so I would not forget it. That done, I realized there was real work involved now. I needed not only to understand the rules, but also find a voice for each character, a time and a place for the story, and all manner of other details. Thus, three years have passed, the leg has long ago healed, and life as I know it has resumed, and I have had these two people and their friends, who do talk a great deal, yet need narrative to help them along their way now and then, living with me all this time.

Writers often tell of reading things the next day and wondering who had written it. This doesn’t happen to the non-fiction writer since they are writing about events and there are a set of facts or a piece of history to set down in what one hopes is eloquent prose. In a novel, there so many variables such as tone of voice, anger, fear, petulance, greed, and emotions in the voices and the moods of the characters. I was astonished to find it true. These people took over, they wrote about themselves it seems, and I as humble servant, provided the word processing and only followed along.

After my last adventure on the Oregon coast, it seemed time to finish this thing, this novel of mine. I was close to finding the right voices, creating the right words in the right order so that these people would be understandable to me and perhaps to others.

These people were of course dysfunctional or they would not be in a novel. As much as I enjoyed creating them and living with them and their myriad problems and successes everyday here in my cell-like space, I was growing tired of them, and they of me I should think. After all, none of us was getting any younger or more interesting. I read the book by my estimate, between 29 and 35 times from front to back and back to front and middle to each end. I changed them, I coddled them and cajoled them, I lowered their voice, I raised it, I made them more appealing or less so. I gave them new friends, I took away old ones, as some characters left as the story developed along quite different lines than I had originally imagined. Whole chapters came and went, added because they were needed, deleted because they represented some repetition or other nonsense even I could not fully appreciate or understand.

On Thursday night, I pushed the final keys that sent the proofs to the publisher. I will live in terror now until I have a book in hand and am sure that there are not just as many mistakes in grammar, syntax, and spelling as there were before they were read. After that I am sure I will be equally afraid that no one will understand this fiction that came from somewhere inside my head to the printed 500 plus pages that now embody something called “Sunset House.”

It was written down with care since it was there on my "Bucket List." It was somewhere in the top ten of things left to do, close to bungee jumping and above going scuba diving again. “Write a novel” has now been lined through.

It is done, and I will soon hold it in my hand and rejoice in its creation even if I am the only one that understands it and is glad that it was created at all. Such is the work of a wordsmith. We write to satisfy our own egotistical needs. If we are very lucky, we find an audience for our words. They do not matter so much, that audience. The memory of creating these---to me real—people was what brought me my pleasure. Should the reading of it by others bring them a smile, a moment of peace, a laugh, or a thoughtful moment, it will surely please me greatly to know I have contributed a moment to their lives.

The files have been backed-up into storage. All traces of these characters have been removed from my computer. They are now a memory. I will wonder about them from time to a time. Even now, I suffer the literary equivalent of separation anxiety.

I will post something when the book is published. It will be available through both Amazon and The Barnes and Noble web sites, but alas, unless I find a new talent for marketing in a life marked by the inability to sell guns in a riot, it will not be in any bookstore you know. It is published by iuniverse, a division of Barnes and Noble, in case someone should be foolish enough to want to read it.

The royalties that come to me from this printing will be passed on to the relief and rebuiding efforts in Haiti, likely to Doctors Without Borders, a group that has spent many years there and will spend many more. Should anyone be foolish enough to buy it, at least the profits will be for a good cause.

The writing, to paraphrase the recently late and iconic J.D. Salinger, is for the writer’s pleasure, and not for the profit it might bring. Of course, the cynic in me notes that he said that after the second printing of the wildly successful Catcher in the Rye.

Now I have turned my attention to planning my annual pilgrimage to the Valley of the Sun to immerse myself in my passion for the game called baseball and the men who play it so well. Then it will be April and time to be back on the road for three months. The Smoky Mountains seem to call again this year. I was there seven years ago and likely missed more than I saw. It will be warm there then and warm will be good come April and May. The proud road warrior, and my faithful companion, La Coachasita, will be ready after a few minor repairs. She fights stubbornly onward at 108,550 miles, and shows no sign of her age. From her acceleration, it is clear that she has a renewed zest for a trip.

In a few months then, this travelogue called Reamus will continue. I apologize for his absence in the humility of knowing he was likely not missed by many or all that much.

I have been reading your blogs with pleasure these past few months while the “clerical work” of galley proofing and cover design has been done. Thank you for continuing to educate and amuse me with your writings and photography. I hope you will find something in the scribbling here come spring that will do the same.