All About Baseball, Partly

Billy, a former dentist,
strolled by the backstop, coming back from first base,
and pretended to be speaking to no one:

"Why are we here?", he asks.
"Why are we really here?"

He does not mean, Why are we playing baseball?
He is playing a different game.
He has been reading, again.
This time it sounds like Martin Heidegger.
Once it was the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Another time, the God Particle,
and polarized light from the Big Bang.

Neither one of us is smart enough to understand what those things are,
but both of us are as curious as kids about what they are.
We ask each other just to ascertain that we are not alone in our ignorance.
When we solve those problems, we are going to turn to the Infield Fly Rule.

It would be wrong to say
that the guys come to Udall Park
to talk about particle physics
or to contemplate the meaning of light, and life.
They come to play baseball.
But shit happens, you know:
protons collide, and cancer eats at you.
The Civil War has to be fought, still,
with surrogate soldiers in self-deceptive uniforms.
We have to pretend that health care is ruining our civilization
while it repairs our knees and hips and kidneys.
Skin cancer patches are everywhere.

Why are we here?

Baseball.
And because there is something lovely and absurd
about sixty, seventy, and eighty-year-olds playing baseball
when they could be home staring at Fox News.
There is no reason to think when you have Fox News.
Baseball makes you think:
What is the count? The score?
Who is supposed to be in the On Deck Circle?
Deep, deep thoughts Fox never explores.

And how is Amos doing? Or Buddy?
Is the cancer moving fast?
Did someone say Sergio's wife was sick?

Why are we here, really?

It isn't just about baseball, is it?

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

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