Game-Changer

Baseball is what makes life coherent, said Plato or was it my step-son? I’ve never known him to be wrong about such things.  Seen up close it contains all the elements of human existence  from humility to Hubris, from heroics to dumb hustle. It also mirrors the racism that infects the American soul and the attempts to remedy our pathology.

Today is Jackie Robinson day. Every player in Major League Baseball wears his number 42 and ceremonies are conducted at each stadium to memorialize his achievement. Robinson was the first four-letter athlete at UCLA. A national Track & Field champion in the long-jump, he led the country in punt returns for the football team and started on their basketball team. He also excelled nationally in tennis. Baseball was his worst sport.

He enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor, rose to 2^nd lieutenant and was then court-martialed for refusing to sit in the back of a bus in Texas. He was exonerated and received an honorary discharge.

By 1947 he had honed his baseball skills and broke through the segregated color-line in baseball. Much is made of the way he swallowed the threats and humiliation aimed at him. This has always struck me as the White man's fantasy of an acceptable Black man. I prefer to remember him as one of the most competitive and daring base-runners to play the game. I would say he and the score of Black players who followed changed the way the game is played.

Baseball is a stoic sport governed by unwritten rules of behavior which regard displays of emotion as show-boating. Robinson’s game was to taunt the pitcher when he got on base. He rattled pitchers with his long leads and fake sprints.  Nineteen times in his abbreviated career he stole home, arguably the most exciting play to watch. It took stealth and guts.

Robinson brought a new dimension to the sport. He made every appearance fraught with possibility. He ignited the crowd, generated a charge and enlivened the game. Six times in his ten year career the Dodgers won the pennant.

Today only 8% of players are African-American. That works out to 2 per 25 man roster. Thirty years ago the number was twice as high. Actually three teams have none, the St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks. Apparently the best Black athletes favor basketball and football where more scholarships are available and the jump to pro level is much faster. Baseball in the inner city is a tough sell.

However baseball has far more players from the Caribbean with black skin than ever before. It is the ticket out of abject poverty. Again the culture of the game is undergoing change. Recent defectors from Cuba have brought with them more emotion and risk-taking than we’ve ever seen before. Some of it has been called dumb-hustle which can put an entire career in jeopardy but it all goes under the heading of entertainment which is what fans come to see. It hardly needs to be said that the ugliness of human trafficking would disappear if our administration had the courage and political will to end the embargo and normalize relations with Cuba. 

Baseball needs to be goosed periodically. If it takes swagger, dugout dances and in-your-face antics so be it.  There are enough geometry and stats already. Bring on the loosey-goosey and unexpected elements that cannot be quantified.

To Have and Have Not

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway published what even he called his, worst book. Critics agreed. It was a hodge-podge of short stories and a novella pasted together. He had lost his way after Farewell to Arms. Disappointing as the novel was you have to admire the title.

The name was about all that remained when Hollywood got through with it in 1944. Cuba, the setting in the book, became Martinique, under control of the Vichy government. Warner Brothers’ Howard Hawks tried to reincarnate Bogart’s Rick from Casablanca and give it a WW II twist. After all Casablanca was cash in the bank. In this version Bogey runs a small fishing boat in the Caribbean. The studio enlisted Hemingway’s rival, William Faulkner, to weigh in on the script and cast Hoagy Carmichael at the piano to play it again, Sam like Dooley Wilson to whom it was never quite said in the first place. The result owed more to Casablanca than Hemingway’s novel but was far more than a hill of beans.

The most memorable moments were Bogey’s liaison with Lauren Bacall. She was a sultry 19 year-old model from the Bronx who taught 45 year-old Bogart how to whistle. Just put your lips together and blow, became the most enduring line from the movie. They sizzled on screen and off in marriage till in death did he part in 1957.

The title had a double meaning or so it seems to me. The clear intention was to draw a distinction between the filthy rich and the great unwashed. However if an individual is to both have and have not anything it strikes me that it gets to a more metaphysical plane. To have achieved a measure of success or security is an illusory state which usually begs for more. You have it and you don’t. It’s never quite enough.

In any case the Haves and Have-Nots might be a caption for our times. The gap grows wider abetted by the High Court, stoked by Congress and fueled by Wall St. The top 1% own 40% of our country’s wealth while the bottom 80% own just 7%. The disparity has never been greater. The wealth of the Walton (Walmart) family alone is equal to the bottom 40% (140 million) Americans.

The numbers are numbing and headed south. They only hint at the human toll. The security and privilege that comes with wealth translates into political power. This insures continued domination of our policies and instruments of decision-making. Middle class stagnation can lead to a loss of personal empowerment. Many Americans have grown dispirited, alienated and cynical which removes them further from the agencies of possible change. The landscape of our youth exists only in the rear-view mirror. We have witnessed the slow collapse and disappearance of family farms, factories, downtown stores and inner cities. Morals have been bent so that greed is admired and with it corruption is a normal way of doing business, particularly in Washington.

Bogart seemed to know what was coming. The hard-boiled cynic finds his moral compass joining with the cause of the French Resistance. How far has our ship of state strayed? Seventy years later we have richer Haves and far more Have-Nots.

This country has been through many storms. Every generation or two we seem to experience a sea change of a sort. Yet out of the wreckage something new and unforeseen emerges. As Wallace Stevens wrote, There is a substance in us that prevails.

A to Z

From antelope to zebra, all herbivorous quadrupeds. The only thing I know about antelopes is that they rhyme with cantaloupes.  And here’s another thing. The word is an umbrella term for a group which include gazelle, impala, and even wildebeest. If you should find yourself in a telephone booth with either of the first two antelopes but don’t know which, both males have horns, of differing shapes, and a gazelle sports a black stripe on its side.  If you were not in a phone booth it might be hard to notice because they are a most jittery animal and very difficult to approach. Wildebeest, aka gnu, are far bulkier and live up to their name.

As any basketball fan can tell you the game is all about gazelles against impalas with zebras as refs blowing whistles. The two antelopes run tirelessly and with grace up and down the court. Occasionally the zebras get chewed out but in the wild zebras do the chewing. They all live and munch in either the grasslands, woodlands or savannas of Africa and none of them ever called a foul. They’re too busy running from cheetahs.

Detroit looks toward four-legged creatures to sell their cars. Neither the Ford Bronco, Chevy Impala nor Dodge Ram could ever compete with the Ford Mustang. The less said about the Pinto the better….and then there’s the Jaguar. But horsepower is still the unit of measure which is an endearing way of honoring the past.

Creationists may argue that zebras got their stripes from the American flag or that God was watching a Laker game but everyone knows God is really a baseball fan and was fixated on the Yankee pinstripe uniform. It has long been noted that zebras are social animals. When they congregate, their stripes form what looks to lions as a huge blob and too much to take on. Another more compelling reason for the stripes is that they evolved over millennia as a protection from the tsetse and horseflies.

Horses, which lack horse sense didn’t think of it and rely on their tail to shoo the flies.  Zebras, with their striped skin, are deemed less inviting to blood-sucking insects. The flies are attracted to solid surfaces because the light waves emitted resemble the light reflected from pools of water where they breed. Survival wins out just like in basketball tournaments. One might think the horsefly would also evolve to get around this striped defense but that is probably too much to ask of these pests. From their POV the system is rigged

Zebras, stripes and all, don’t have what it takes for domestication. Horses were feral once also but opted for a barn and steady meal instead. In exchange they had to pull loads of men with whips. A few took to breeding and racing. They are a thing of beauty especially when they come in as fifty to one shots. 

Zebras should be credited as the first to come up with bar codes. They may all look the same to us but each carries a signature on its hide which singles them out to other zebras. For a long time we thought that was the only reason for their stripes. But now we know better. It is not a form of Z-Harmony in which lonely zebras get to meet their match. Scientists have noted that the biting insects congregate most in certain areas of zebra’s bodies where their hair is shortest and these are the very spots with the most active stripe-lines. One can almost sympathize with flies driven berserk by the refracted light coming off the display of patterns.

In case you are asked what color zebras are the answer is black with white stripes.      

Whether antelopes eat cantaloupe has yet to be studied.

All life forms evolve to give them the best chance of survival. We have neither the speed of antelopes or stripes of zebras. But man possesses both the creative and destructive power never before seen. Our most fearsome predator is ourselves. Four-legged creatures know better than to make such a mess of their habitat.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

In a lifetime normal men have 1 ½ wives (could be true), 2 ½ children (no longer true), 6 ½ cars (more or less true) and sleep 8 hours a day. But who among us wants to be normal? I’d fight with my life for my right to be abnormal. Yet all things being relative, compared to the CEO, now cocaine addict, sleeping in a cardboard box by the off-ramp, I am a normal guy. Therefore it was no shock to realize that at age eight-one I have been asleep for 27 years. ( 27 X 3 = 81)

That’s a lot of time spent in pajamas. And it doesn’t count all the hours, day-dreaming, spacing out starring into my bran flakes or napping. One might expect me to have stumbled upon some ancient truths by this time. If I had I’ve forgotten them.

27 years of sleep is not a bad thing. I am rowing my pea-green boat gently down the stream. Sometimes merrily toward Eden; other times fitfully in flight from paradise. Life is but a dream and with a little luck one I may not soon wake up from.  Just about every night, while the cow is jumping over the moon, I’m dancing  by its light as I act, direct and write my script in this absurd nocturnal theater piecing together scraps of the day. I dine on mince and slices of quince all with my runcible spoon. And just what is a runcible spoon? Don’t ask, just keep rowing.  

It is part of a runcible life we make up as we go along. The dream-life spills over into the light of day as a brief glimpse into an inner landscape. What a crowded mansion our dreams have laid bare seen as a drunken montage. It takes a pickled mind to dream a pickled dream, one marinated in the brine of eight decades. Our dreams present themselves with great truths written in a foreign tongue, upside down in a fractured narrative. 

Dreams remind us of the elasticity, the stretch and contours of imagination. We might marvel how time is collapsed and the sequential chronicle of life is in disarray. How fluent we are in gibberish. How unstuck from the Apollonian we can be to revel in the Dionysian.

Each day dies into sleep. MacBeth murdered sleep. Hamlet saw it as an end to a thousand shocks the flesh is heir to. Some nights are a balm to hurt minds but other seem to injure the psyche into an unease which could be truth. The dream never announces itself but comes in disguise entering through a door we’ve left ajar. We are such stuff that dreams are made of.

So I walk in somnambulance through my day, bursting with love and alert to a vaguely familiar place, a fecund inscape unseen by anyone else, teeming with remnants, overheard remarks, misremembered echoes of voices said or unsaid, amplified and lodged in my ears, early terrors from a childhood closet, disowned parts of myself. Or a vision of unsurpassed beauty beyond all adjectives except perhaps, runcible.

Speaking of Herring

Everyone is talking about pickled herring. Well, perhaps not everyone. But there is Mavis who can’t get enough of it and Fred for whom I just bought two jars and Ralph, a new convert to the club. And we all know about converts.

And then there is Putin who looked in the mirror this morning and saw Pushkin eating pickled herring. Napoleon might have conquered Russia if he didn’t run short of the stuff to feed his marauding troops. When invading Russia one is advised to pack sufficient barrels of pickled herring along with warm underwear, but not in the same suitcase. I’m sure the Russians never run out when they gobble up territory on their western flank.

Peggy is another pickled herring fan which is not the only reason I married her. In fact nobody doesn’t love pickled herring. Danes are crazy for the stuff and Latvians and Estonians. If I were stuck on the Monopoly board on Baltic, which is my lot, pickled herring would be a staple as it is for those folks in northern waters.

When we put out pickled herring for our Sunday Salon it is always the first to vanish. I wonder if some friends bring Zip-lock bags and slip a few bits and pieces into their pockets. The world may be divided between pickled advocates and those who prefer their herring with sour cream.

Schmaltz herring is also worthy of mention....all those consonants supported by a single vowel, as my friend Ed points out. It is herring at its most plump, just before birthing offspring. 

Herring is not a bottom feeder as some creatures so designated to vacuum the ocean floor. Knowing herring as I do I might presume that is beneath them. They feed largely on plankton rendering them  low in carbs and high in an alphabet of vitamins including the all-important D and Omega oil without which one can expect to die a day or two earlier than previously fated.

Some like it split, salted and smoked which goes under the name, kippered herring. If I were a herring I’d much prefer being pickled. However the kippered variety had been the breakfast of Brits for centuries which may have kept the empire from falling. When it did fall Kippers also fell out of favor. By the 70s, due to its association with the past, it was no longer part of the full English breakfast, replaced by eggs, bangers and blood pudding. What a loss. However it is now making a comeback as those rebellious Boomers are getting aged themselves.

Baltic herring are smaller than those in the North Sea and are usually expertly fermented for half a year. Sweden calls them surstromming. The smell is enough to empty a courtroom as in the case where a landlord was sued for evicting a tenant who spread the brine on a staircase. I suppose one accepts this version if they have no friends anyway.

The purpose of this tribute to pickled herring is to fill up the page on a subject I really know nothing about.  Which brings me to something I didn’t know five minutes ago. Herring don’t get to be called by that name until they mature from being merely sardines. In fact there is no single fish named, sardine. They can be any tiny fish. Whether or not there’s an initiation or Bar Mitzvah to earn herring-hood from sardine-ness has not yet been determined.    

Lines and More Lines

Hold that line was the chant from football fans back in the day. Now it’s been cut short to, Defense, which comes out as Deeefense.  Lines have a way of not holding, the way George Bush, the elder, drew a line in the sand in the first Iraq war until Bush the Younger saw to that by demonstrating that he was a good-for-nothing kid after all. Presidents are best advised not to draw lines. Beleaguered Barack Obama wishes he could take back that red line he set out in Syria.

Looking at the time-line it seems that the Curzon line was established after World War One to fix forever the border between Poland and the new USSR. It didn’t last 20 years. Russian people quickly got used to two things in life….lining up and following the Party line. 

When I came into the world breadlines were the headlines and newspapers had bylines that had to meet deadlines. I was raised on movies that depicted young men going off on ocean liners to the front line and pretty girls with eye liners in the chorus line.

In 1940 the French, thinking of WW I trenches, set up their forces at the Maginot Line near the German frontier. The battle line was drawn and German tanks simply went around it into Belgium and brought France to its knees six weeks later.

In New York and thereabouts we used to wait on line for rationed butter or to march into assembly while everywhere else folks waited in line, proving that Easterners were far ahead of their time since everyone is now on-line, except when you’re off-line.

One hundred years before the Civil War Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed their famous Mason-Dixon Line. Unbeknownst to many, including myself, it does not entirely run horizontally. The line is vertical through Delaware. It was drawn up to settle a border dispute between Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Delaware.

Other than line drives and line dancing I’m not fond of lines. Straight or wavy they create divisions. My preference is for blurry ones, if at all, where poetry and prose mingle and fiction strays into non-fiction. Besides, I seem always to get on or in the line that doesn’t move. On the other hand how else could I read those tabloids and catch up on alien landings and JFK sightings?

I was once called to a police line-up to put the finger on the man who held me at gun point. I picked the wrong guy. I blame it on the Line. He shaved his curly-haired head and I fell for it hook, line and sinker.

The entertainment world seems Interested only in the bottom line. If you doubt this you’d be out of line.  Just line up your big names, have them sign on the dotted line and not step out of line. If they behave themselves they will never lose their credit-line.  Does anyone still read between the lines?

Without assembly lines we might have hand-crafted cars with an individual signature…and possibly somebody’s egg-salad sandwich still in the glove department

Unlike Blogs, lines can go on forever. I just read that half of infinity is still infinity. I don’t know what that means but I wouldn’t quarrel with the notion. Even half the notion.   

The Rabble in the Rubble

And then there’s the Ruble recently restored in the Ukraine. Beware when the vote goes 97% in favor of anything.  Our Floundering Fathers, some of whom art in heaven looking down, feared the rabble almost as much as the monarchy. In most states only the propertied with at least 60 acres could vote. In New Jersey, alone, (of all places) could women vote…if they owned the requisite land, certainly not those Blacks, merely 60% human (and 40% superhuman). Shake the pumpkin.

We need our rumbles; at least those 4.4 or less. Let London Bridge fall down, My Fair Lady. Even if hurricanes hardly happen in Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire….. anagrammed Hitlers happen. 

So Humpty got dumped and life is scrambled. He wasn’t a bad egg but quakes level us. They are a shared experience. They remind us there really are no borders. We’re all sharing this hurtling piece of spatial dirt. It may take a global event to recognize our brothers and sisters on the stairwell or homeless on the street.

And just when I had my ducks lined up a few chotkes fall from the shelf. It’s that damn balance of power… that fragile peace whose face we’ve grown accustomed to. Just you wait Henry Higgins, you’ll get yours.

A few days ago, 3/14, was Pi Day. In two years it will be 3.1416. We will carry it to four places and then it won’t happen again for a long while. I’ll take a slice of French apple. Putin will have his Crimea and eat it too. We need our fixed points that math offers but we also need our ruptures. The earth won’t hold still for a minute. Call it flux. Call it anything but don’t call me after ten o’clock.

I’ll be dreaming my usual mish-mash where time bends and memories are juxtaposed. Imagine a new color appearing!  Wouldn’t that be a dainty dish to set before the king? Walk, don’t run or you’ll break your crown and the rumbling tumbleweeds will fumble-bumble after.

There’s a joker in the House of Cards. Even a True Defective can see that. Other Spaceys are out there plotting his plotz and his plot in Potter’s Field. How about we start over from this rubble of a government? What’s broke is broke. Never mind Ukraine, Kabul or Caracas. What’s wrong with Kansas? Fix Katrina and Sandy Hook. Quake the Supreme Court. Dump the tea. 

Some say rebels. Some say rabble. Early on our aristocracy we now call Framers feared the turbulence and follies of democracy. It seems now our worry is the institutionalized greed of special interests and their influence on lawmakers. Bring on the quake.

My deaf daughter has been visiting for 8 days. When she smelled the soup she said she hears well with her nose. I have much to learn from her. How to deal with a world that comes at us unexpectedly, from all sides and can be unforgiving.  Know that the tectonic plates below haven’t settled down yet but we can handle their constant agitations.