Softball: A Cornucopia of Metaphysics and Bird

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People,

 

Let the record show that for our last game at Codornices before the Department of Parks and Wreck shut down virtually all city fields for the bitter winter to come, my team took on the celebrated botanist Paul Fine and his peeps in a sublime and taut match that was simply magnificent until it wasn’t. More to the point, I think we all know precisely when the spine-tingling equilibration of the contest wilted away like the tragically parched leaves of a desiccated succulent (Yeah, not only ironic, but unapologetically apt).

 

Indeed, my own contingent had loaded the bases in the top of the 8th with 1 out and the score tied at 7 when the ceaselessly thrilling Dan May blasted Steve Bedrick’s 2-fingered 3-1 tar ball just to the right of the mound, and it was then and there that Professor Fine made a gallantly running scoop with such inspirational precision that the imminent DP to 2nd and back to 1st was already playing in my listless little brain—predetermined and in vivid color, but surprisingly, with just a hint of hallucinatory despair.

 

Of course, here’s the thing about imminence: I happen to think that the future is unwritten no matter what Debbie-Downers like John Calvin and Richard Dawkins posit, and thus when Paul proceeded to turn that supposedly inevitable rally-crushing double play into a cataclysmic 2-run overthrow at 2nd that was 6 full feet above Matt Gober’s desperately outstretched mitt, he not only tore deep into the fabric of deterministic materialism, but he also allowed for my own side to score six more runs that fateful penultimate tranche. And thus, his side went down, and down hard, 15-8, and with all due respect, I don’t think history will record that either God or the Big Bang “made him” blow it in a way that was so dipositive and unseemly, and that’s something Paulie’s adoring students are gonna have to think about long and hard in the hero-questioning decades to come.

 

In any case, I wasn't even going to organize a game this upcoming weekend given the imminent loss of our cherished homeland and the fact that tomorrow happens to be the 404th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving Dinner; Yes, that bountiful New World feast in which a hearty group of disheveled English settlers and their Wampanoag Indian hosts laid the foundations for the next four centuries of superb and symbiotic intercultural relations. But then I started to think about what I wrote all of you in November 2000 on this very day, and while I'm obviously not going to quote myself verbatim, I think you'd agree that given our ceaseless travails with both the city and the current American kakistocracy, the following passage has a certain geo-recreational resonance . . .

 

Few seem to remember that this time-honored tradition of combining hearty fowl-based meals with vigorous exercise became firmly established only after Captain Miles Standish and Squanto rose to toast their good fortune on that frosty Plymouth evening in November 1621. Both men agreed to a post-dinner match of exhilarating AAA Pilgrim Ball—a curious colonial pastime that most social historians now believe was an embryonic version of soccer although it was actually played with darts. Regardless, and unfortunately for the Wampanoag, their team lost 10-8, and thus under the pre-match agreement, they and their relatives had to abandon all of New England by 1625.

 

The point is that it's 24 years later and we ourselves are now forced to wander again, and yes, I’m well aware that you can certainly escape to some faraway and exotic locale like Vacaville to both avoid the stress of our annual flâneuring and to have some mighty fine fowl, but I would gently suggest that you'll inevitably be trapped at a predestined meal in which the joy of such tasty fare is more than offset by the cringe-inducing reality of your thankfully distant but totally nutso kin. And therefore there will be a game at North Oakland’s dazzling Golden Gate Park, or Bushrod Park, or possibly a still unfenced Berkeley City Park, or even the 580 Gilman Street offramp if that’s what it takes (Don’t be timorous—embrace the uncertainty!), IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond