Primitive Information

In the dream, the ball is bouncing towards me. Only every time it touches the grass, it splits in two. One ball, two balls, four balls, eight. I can see each of them clearly and I spread my arms out wide as if I’m going to try to gather them all up at once. But there keeps getting to be more of them and my arms won’t spread wide enough and by now the runner’s past me.

Baseball is a game of angles. Or, you could say, it’s a game where a couple different things are always happening at once. Or more than a couple things.

Think about this: think about what happens when a ball’s put in play. If there’s no one on base then the moment a ball is hit there’s a player reacting to it, trying to catch it and throw it back, and another player, the batter, running to first base. But what if there’s more players on base? Each one of them has to make a split-second decision about whether to run once a ball’s been hit; and unless there are already two outs, then depending where each runner is and where the ball gets hit, each runner’s decision is going to be a little bit different. And even if there’s only a runner on first base, then that gives the pitcher something to think about already, before he pitches the ball.

Another dream I have is one where I keep throwing over to first. The runner is there, and I know he’s going to steal, everyone knows it. We look at each other, we lock eyes, and just from his eyes I know he’s only waiting for me to glance away and begin my motion and he’s gone. So I make the throw.

The first baseman snags the ball and sweeps his glove across the runner’s butt and the ump motions “safe.” He gets up, dusts himself off, glares at me, takes an exaggerated step or two. We lock eyes again. Something won’t let me turn away, won’t let me twirl and make the throw home. I toss over again.

A murmur goes through the crowd. It makes me anxious, but as I settle on the mound I already know I’ll do it again. I throw over a third time, fourth, fifth, six, I lose count—I’m just stuck doing it. It’s the yelling of the crowd that wakes me up.

Baseball is beautiful, but it’s terrible, too. There’ve been times when I’m out there just doing it, soaking it up and enjoying every moment, because I’m not thinking too much. I’m noticing little things like the way the light makes everything glow, and the smell of the dirt and the grass, the bats and the mitts and the powder, and the contentedness of the crowd as they arrive at their seats and look around at each other and see us warming up, and the rising excitement right before the game starts.

But other times, I suddenly think about the idea of winning, and I get frightened. Not of winning, but of something happening that makes us lose. And that I’ll be involved and everyone will see it. So my heart starts racing, and I hunker down and hope like hell that whatever happens, the ball won’t roll towards me.

Tags: Workbook by dhadbawnik
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Longtime Detroit Red Wings captain and three-time Stanley Cup winner Steve Yzerman was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame last night, along with several other great players. I still remember when the Wings drafted Yzerman, and the long march afterwards to becoming a good team, competing with some of the great Oilers teams of the 80s, and finally challenging for Cups by the mid-1990s, when my friend Ron and I had season tickets to the Red Wings. We got to see some great games. Here are two stories about Yzerman, one from ESPN and one from Sports Illustrated.

Tags: Sports by dhadbawnik
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The first time I disappeared it was an accident. We were in the department store. One minute we were walking in the aisle, there were bodies around, racks full of coats, shirts, slacks, pegged pants hanging stiff and straight as flayed meat. I can’t remember if I wandered off the path to touch one of them, or my mother did, or both of us stopped to look at something and just lost each other.

I was embarrassed, first. When I knew. Understanding that you’ve disappeared is a gradual process. It’s a negative information. You have to realize that nobody sees you, and that takes a while.

Later I began to do it a bit more intentionally, though still it was a half-conscious thing, at best. There was a series of funerals. They were all at the same place. Both my grandfathers died within, I don’t know, six months or a year of each other. Then one grandmother. I barely knew the grandfathers—I mean it was sad, in both cases there were late-night phone calls and suddenly being up with the kitchen lights on and mom and dad pacing and talking in the proverbial “hushed tones” I guess you could say.

But then the funeral home: it was actually a pretty cool place. Down in the basement there was a room with a ship in a giant bottle and lots of neat nautical stuff. There was another room with a great big table and deep, comfortable leather chairs. And the key thing: an actual Coca Cola fountain. There were tall glasses and straws and you could drink as much as you wanted to, and the Coke tasted sweeter and more sophisticated somehow coming out of that fountain.

There I guess were my first formal experiments in disappearing. I would do it while the visitors filed through. Being the child of the son of the deceased, we had to be there all day. I didn’t mind; I had books, and the basement, and the Coke fountain. What I minded were the people filing through, with their sad looks and condolences. And the faint mothball smell of their funeral clothes as they bent down and gaped at me, saying things like reading off titles: “Your Grandfather Was a Very Good Man,” and “At Least He Didn’t Suffer.”

So I disappeared.

It took time. Concentration. I was frustrated at first. Uncle Ned and Aunt Sally came downstairs and sat with me for a very long time, not saying much of anything—God, it was awkward! Sitting between them on this couch, just seeing their big fat legs sticking out, with Uncle Ned sort of resting his hand near my thigh, both of them breathing… I couldn’t read and I couldn’t disappear.

But gradually it happened. I remember how excited I was when some random relative came bouncing down the stairs to look for me, only she couldn’t find me. And I was sitting right there! With a Coke in my hand and a book in my lap. I had to sit very still, of course. She walked right up to me, looked right through me, shouting over her shoulder the whole time to my mom that I wasn’t down here.

For a minute, I thought my mom would raise a general alarm and they’d turn the whole place over trying to find me. But there were more people coming all the time. This woman stood there in the center of the room for a minute. Jesus, who was she? I’ll never forget the way she got quiet, looking around, slowly. And then this sort of creepy look came over her face. That’s the weirdest part about disappearing. You finally see what people look like when there’s no one else around. It isn’t pretty. I think the whole history of the world could change if everyone could see that. And I can’t even describe it. Something dropped away, and something else came onto her face that I didn’t recognize even as human.

Let me put it this way: I was very glad at that moment she couldn’t see me.

I’ve been able to disappear whenever I want to, pretty much ever since.

Tags: Workbook by dhadbawnik
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