High Time To Take My Own Advice

-AK 

 

The Pendulum's Inexorable Arc

One of the great pleasures of my life is reading Pete Hamill.  Better said, reading is one of the great pleasure of my life.  Pete Hamill is among my favorite writers to read.  

Hamill's genius (my word - not his) was that he was not merely an author of novels or non-fiction works (itself a difficult skill at which to develop proficiency) and he was not merely and old-school New York newspaperman (itself an equally difficult skill at which to develop proficiency) but that he was both.  His ability to infuse his words with vitality was not tied to a word limit or an inches of space restriction.  

This past weekend, while enjoying a simply beautiful early October Saturday afternoon at our little Paradise by the Sea with the Missus, I finished Hamill's Piece Work.  

It is a collection of columns and essays he wrote for various publications across a wide range of topics, including "Writings on Men and Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Friends, Small Pleasures, Large Calamities, and How the Weather Was".  I am not making up any of those subjects.  Each of them is mentioned on the book's front cover. 

The penultimate essay in the book is one Hamill wrote in 1988, shortly after his fifty-second birthday.  I am two-thirds of the way to my fifty-fourth birthday (although given how little I have been able to do in 2020 I am thinking of continuing to list my age as 53 even once my birthday comes and goes and perhaps including an explanatory footnote to clear up any confusion).  As I sat reading it, I was overcome by two thoughts:  I wish I possessed the talent to write what had been written and I am forever grateful to Hamill that he did. 

The essay begins: 

52

I have arrived at last in that peculiar zone 

where I am no longer young and not yet old. 

This stage of human life is called, of course, middle age.

Alas, even that familiar phrase is inaccurate; at fifty-two, 

 I am not in the middle of my life, for there is 

little chance that I will live to 104. 

But I am certainly in the middle of my adult life, 

and this sometimes causes personal astonishment...

That is to say, I have lived a life. 

I am far from finished with that splendid accident, 

but there is one enormous fact attached to the condition

called middle age:  I know now that the path is leading inexorably

through the evening to the barn. And not far away, up ahead,

perhaps over that next lavender hill, lies death. 

Towards its end, Hamill writes: 

But in middle age,

you learn to forgive yourself.

Faced with the enormous crimes of the world

(and particularly the horrors of this appalling century),

you acquire a sense of proportion about your own 

relative misdemeanors. You have slowly recognized the

cyclical nature of society's enthusiasms, from compassion

to indifference, from generosity to meanness, 

liberalism to conservatism and back, 

as the pendulum cuts its inexorable arc in the air...

And most often, we measure

our own triumphs and disasters, errors and illusions, 

against the experiences of others. In middle age, I know 

that it is already too late to agonize over my personal failings.

As Popeye once said, "I yam what I yam an' that's all I yam." 

The damage of the past is done; nothing can be done to avoid it

or to repair it; I hope to cause no more, and I'm comforted 

by remembering that to many people I was also kind. 

For good or ill, I remain human. 

That is to say, imperfect. 

I know not if there is a middle-aged person among us who reads those words and does not recognize the resemblance between the life described in those pages and the one we live in our day-to-day. I for one did. 

Whether I have granted myself absolution for my sins or simply recognized that I cannot undo what I have done is a question whose answer lies far closer to the latter than the former. Regardless, the air is cut by the pendulum's inexorable arc. 

-AK   

And Then There Were Eight

Here in the most bizarre year thus far in the 21st Century, it makes a certain amount of sense that the Major League post-season bears a stunning resemblance to what happens every year in the NHL and the NBA.  It took less than a week to winnow the original field of sixteen down to eight.  

The Yankees renew hostilities with the Tampa Rays tonight in, of all places, San Diego.  Nothing says American League Playoffs quite like a best three-out-of-five series in a National League ballpark.  The Yankees lost eight of ten times that they played the Rays during the abbreviated regular season.  If they reverse that trend over the next five days, then they will play either the Oakland A's or the enemy du jour, the Houston Astros, in the American League Championship Series.  

Fun fact:  Only one of the sixteen teams that qualified for this year's playoffs has never lost a post-season series.  That team?  Derek Jeter and Don Mattingly's Miami Marlins.  Before this year, the Marlins had only qualified for the playoffs two other times in franchise history, in 1997 and 2003, and both times they won the World Series.  Last week, they upset the Chicago Cubs in their first-round matchup, which makes the Fish (point of order, sports fans, although people call the Miami Dolphins "the fish", dolphins are mammals, not fish) a perfect 7-0.  

The odds against them finishing this season at 10-0 are long...

...but then again, it is 2020, so bet against them at your peril.  

-AK 

Life is a Contact Sport

Some words of wisdom on the first Sunday in October...

"Brilliant Disguise"

Bruce Springsteen

The world and the men and women who inhabit it shall likely not.   

Be careful out there.   

-AK 

 

Mom, Ralph Branca, and Dem Bums

Forty months.  Three and one-third years.  Mom died that long ago or, if you prefer, that recently. If I have learned anything at all since she died it is that time can feel both fleeting and endless simultaneously. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive. 

If you were not fortunate to have known my mother, then I feel for you.  You missed one of the greats.  Mom was a great not because she aspired to have her name illuminated by the klieg lights but because she knew that life's biggest, most important moments are not lived in the shadow of the spotlight's glow or in the cacophonous din of the crowd's roar.  She knew that substance is what mattered.  It was who you were and what you did when no one was looking that proved your true measure.  It was a yardstick by which she was never anything other than the tallest person I have ever known or shall ever know.  

Mom died in the sixtieth summer following the great westward migration of her beloved Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.  Although Mom was an ardent Brooklyn Dodgers fan, once Walter O'Malley moved them out of Brooklyn at the end of the 1957 season, she never cheered for them again.  If you ever asked Mom how many times the Dodgers have won the World Series, irrespective of the year in which the question was asked, her answer remained the same:  One.   

My parents were both devout New York National League baseball fans. WPK, Sr. was as pissed about his Giants vacating the Polo Grounds, which they did too at the end of the '57 season, in favor of San Francisco, as Mom was about the Dodgers.  Each became a New York Mets fan when the Mets replaced the Giants and the Dodgers as New York City's National League club in time for the 1962 season.  They never replaced the Dodgers in Mom's heart, even though she cheered for them.  The Mets never evoked  the same passion in her.  Nothing close to it, in fact. 

Ralph Branca pitched in the major leagues for twelve seasons, from 1944 through 1956.  He spent most of his career with the Dodgers, including 1947 when, on Opening Day at Ebbets Field, he did what many other players refused to do, and lined up on the field next to Jackie Robinson, who was making his debut as the first African-American player in the major leagues.  Branca was a good pitcher for the Dodgers, being named a National League All-Star in 1947, 1948, and 1949, during which period he was 48-26.

It was on this date, sixty-nine years ago, in the bottom of the ninth inning of the third and deciding game of a playoff for the National League pennant against their hated rivals the Giants, Ralph Branca threw what is arguably the most famous pitch in the history of major league baseball...

...and assured Russ Hodges a place for time immemorial in the pantheon of classic home run calls. 

Branca left the field that day, defeated, and destined to be known forever as the pitcher who gave up "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" to Bobby Thomson of the Giants.  Were he not a man of substance, a man of character, it is likely that would have in fact been his fate - to be resigned to the scrap heap of history as a pathetic footnote.  

As he had demonstrated years earlier, when standing with Jackie Robinson on Opening Day at Ebbets Field was an unpopular move with the home fans and with more than one or two of his Dodger teammates, Ralph Branca's shoulders were strong enough to keep him upright even as the world collapsed around him.  He died in late November, 2016.  He was ninety years old.  He was the last living member of the 1947 Dodgers team on which Jackie Robinson played as a rookie. On October 27, 1972, Branca stood up for Jackie Robinson one final time. He was a pallbearer at Robinson's funeral. 

Sixty years after her beloved Bums left Brooklyn for southern California, Mom still lived by the principles that had guided her her whole life and that had drawn her to her hometown team and to players like Ralph Branca.  She too had shoulders strong enough to hold her upright and to keep herself and her family going even as the world collapsed around her.  She taught her children that believing in the power of "Wait Til Next Year!" did not mark one as a fool or a romantic but, instead, revealed one to be a person of determination, strength, and character.  

You cannot beat a person who will never give up. Much like her beloved Brooklyn Dodgers and the star-crossed right-handed pitcher whose number "13" lit up the gloaming as he walked off the mound in the Polo Grounds on that late afternoon sixty-nine years ago today, she did not always win.  But she never lost.  

Not once. 

Not ever.

Love you, Mom, and miss you terribly.  It is a good thing that you are the one from whom I inherited my shoulders. 

-AK    

     

The Eagle and the Crow

Occasionally, I happen across something on the world wide interweb and I think, "Damn is this insightful. I wish I had thought of it." Truthfully, given the infrequency with which I think, the latter of those two statements happens far more often than I wish it did.  

But I digress.  

Be an eagle.  

The world can never have too many eagles.   

-AK 

 

What We Do Today Is What Matters Most

 

This past weekend was the first weekend of Autumn, 2020.  The Missus and I spent it at the beach.  Saturday, my early-morning run had me out of the house shortly before sunrise at run's beginning and back in house shortly after sunrise at run's end.   

While I was running north on the boards in Spring Lake, sunrise arrived at 6:48 a.m. It was beautiful, as it always is, even on a day when sunrise arrives unaccompanied by sunshine.  Its beauty lies in not simply what it is but in what it means and in what it represents. 

Sunrise - Saturday September 26, 2020

(as seen while running north in Spring Lake)

Every sunrise unpacks with it not merely a new day but the promise of a new opportunity for each of us fortunate enough to be alive to bear witness to its ascent.  Irrespective of what we did or what we failed to do one day earlier - or on every day that came before this one - redemption presents itself to us just as the sun does.  

It is my favorite part of the day.  

-AK