From my perch at the gym, the manager’s lookout when this place was a bank, I can see the lobby television which today (July 5) is playing a video loop of baseball highlights. With hockey over, a part of my brain, like metal filings slowing shaping around a magnetic gnat, attaches to my distant second sport, baseball, and in July the lobby TV favors ESPN and baseball highlights.
I’d far prefer vignettes of games, say, the play-by-play of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox, an interleague game, like I watched while training an hour-plus on the Brown Deer Holiday Express treadmill while M and I were in Wisconsin during the holiday(s) weekend (Canada Day & Independence Day) to see Mom and Baby Leon, our new great nephew, two teams mired in the middle of the standings with little at stake but following muscle memory, playing the game they have since childhood been better than anyone else in the neighborhood, and now, all of them, champions of the sport.
That is what takes me away, the simple pleasures of watching the count, the pitch selection, where the catcher sets up, how the pitcher pauses/stops, a rhythm frozen in time, just as he did in Little League, Coach helping him, then it’s muscle memory, as likely to balk, even with runners in scoring position, as launch into moon orbit.
Instead though ESPN serves up what isn’t baseball at all, rather the highlights: circus catches, hotdog homers, 100 mile per hour fastballs, and more and more these days the strange, excruciating sight of players bizarrely forgoing muscle memory while beating out infield hits, and instead of running through the bag as every Coach since T-Ball has told them, they suddenly pull up short and then hop around in killing pain while grabbing the back of their leg, and everyone from the hotdog seller to the dreamy kid with his mitt knows that the base runner just pulled his hamstring, a nasty injury that could nag him for the rest of the season.
Last weekend it was the Mets’ red-hot Jose Reyes. Thankfully a Grade 1 strain, the least worrisome. But now he’ll have to watch it. Ideally, Reyes should take more than just a few days, and not risk the injury worsening, work with a physical therapist on stretching and strengthening exercises. Which is what I did, with not terrific results. In my case, after what I’d describe as a Grade 1 strain in February, I didn’t take care of myself, and re-injured it, the second time so badly, an MRI showing a nasty tear of the right hamstring, that I was not only forced to drop out of the Boston Marathon, but for the next two months was on the shelf, the first week needing a cane just to get around. Now I’m back at it, pre-injury training and long-distance running. But you have to watch it, Jose. Don’t push yourself.
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Baby Leon is wearing a blue one-piece with a lion insignia in the living room of Grampa J and Gramma G’s in Milwaukee, where they invited us to come on the Friday of Independence Day weekend, which this year falls on Canada Day; so that afternoon instead of prepping the barbecue and putting a few dollars down to support the Canadian Legion in exchange for a Canadian flag lapel pin or a stick with a plastic red Maple Leaf attached, I am holding my great nephew Leon, only three weeks old, and thinking of my dad’s beloved older brother Leon, who died a few years ago and now as I whisper sweet nuttin’s into the blink, blink, blinking eyes of Baby Leon, whose name was one that Baby Leon’s mom and dad, G and M, chose because they simply liked it, there being no obvious antecedent, so I’m filling in with my Uncle Leon, Great Uncle Larry holding Baby Leon, thinking there must have been a day, although I have no photo record of it, (although now there is more than one photo of me and Baby Leon to pass down!) when Uncle Leon was holding Baby Larry, his beloved brother’s first-born son, staring down into my eyes and whispering sweet nuttin’s to me, more than a half-century ago, or so I tell myself, closing my eyes as I continue to hold Baby Leon, and then say to both G and M that I can’t thank them enough for being here, and to Grampa J and Gramma G for their invitation to share Baby Leon as we are doing, with no one rising to take him from my arms. Eventually I get up, cradling his tiny, tiny head, a perfect fit in my palm and put him into the waiting arms of Gramma G during the first out-of-hospital visit to family that Baby Leon has ever had.
Baby Leon was not even grasping for my fingers, he’s too young for that, does not even know that he has fingers, or toes for that matter, think spider on its back, so calm in its helplessness, we were all this way once, so dependent, what comes to mind is the Proustian phrase, that perfect moment of music that repeats, that will soothe even the most savage beast, like the gorilla mother in the Chicago area zoo who came to the rescue of a little boy who fell into its enclosure and wouldn’t let any harm come to him.
And I hold that thought. That it’s not about personal ownership. Rather it is like music; something that takes us away to the most beautiful and enchanted of places, one that if we close our eyes, let ourselves go, will come back to us at a later time.
If only men can bring themselves to hold a baby, truly hold one that is not theirs, they will embrace a deep part of themselves, throw off that impulse to celebrate only themselves in the way that sports and advertising would have us think that that is the only way for a real man to be.
Next: Running for Your Life: Smoking Over Rules
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