Month: June 2010

Showers

Saturday morning, I am in bed
listening to a summer shower, rested and content, but wistful and
wondering if there’s a way to return to a dream of what I wish I’d left behind
but never really was.
The trees wave outside my window and
I pray for you, for shelter from the wetness and what you will confront.
It would be easier if you were nearby, stirring.

Put a Feed on This.

OK, enough. Congress: shut up. Everybody: shut up about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The finger-pointing, hearings, posturing are all disgraceful. Handle it. It’s epic, and it may not stop. Get every genius you can find. Make it a Manhattan Project. We can fry BP later. That part’s easy.

Think of this: you turn on a faucet and the knob breaks off in your hand, and a geyser of hot water shoots up and starts flooding the kitchen. You run outside and try to cut off the water at the main, but the valve breaks there, too. Water keeps flooding your house. Would you stand there arguing with the fam while your home is being destroyed by water? Maybe your wife/hubby/partner could call a hearing on how you’d been told that thing needed replacing 8 times. Maybe they’d call and complain to the water department that their cutoff valves are poorly maintained. Certainly your family leadership should be called into question right then, eh?

That’s what we’re doing now. We have a fantastic disaster unfolding, unprecedented, really. We need our smart people. I don’t care about BP’s negligence right now. I don’t care about the money, where it comes from, or if “the President’s response has been appropriate.” None of us should. We don’t have the luxury, not right this second. We need smart and courageous folks to figure out what can be done, and tell us. A couple days ago, I overheard a guy at the gym say, “They can go to the moon, but they can’t plug that well.” His oversimplification notwithstanding, he has a point: this is America, and we figure shit out. So let’s figure this one out, shall we?

If an earthquake obliterated, say, Memphis, everyone and his aunt Susan would be starting benefit efforts, loading trucks, texting $10 contributions and designing t-shirts. This is about as bad as that, or Haiti. No, it’s probably worse. We can’t even tell yet. We’ve never even seen this before. The Valdez spill may look like a spot in the driveway before this ends.

So, please, Congress: shut off the cameras. Mr. President: stop speaking to Gulf Coast groups and eating shellfish and carrying on. Tell us you’re getting the best people you can together to do one thing: make it stop.

Anderson Cooper: get off the fucking beach. Go stand outside a door to a room where people are trying to figure out what may be an intractable problem. Tell me every hour what they’re doing in there. Put a camera on the door with a live feed, like the one on the spill down on the Gulf Floor. Every time the door opens and somebody comes out to pee, make them have to look at the camera and say, “Nothing yet.”

All of you: think of the firefighters on 9/11 right after the WTC collapsed, or Churchill, or Captain Sully when a bird hit the engine. Act like them. Go. Because the rest of us feel really, really helpless right now.

Perfect

There is something very sad, and elegant, and essential in the blown call by umpire Jim Joyce in what would have been Armando Galarraga’s perfect baseball game last night.

I just read the story, having missed SportsCenter before bed. It was an unattributed AP wire piece on WSJ.com. There was something very old-school and fitting about reading a reporter’s account the day after. As a baseball fan, it made me emotional. So sad, and so real!

The blown call, the fan/player reactions, the inevitable day-after ranting for use of instant replay, and demands that the commish reverse the call all remind me of why baseball – in that most trite and over-worn of similes – is “like life.”

A perfect baseball game is one of the holiest of holy grails in sport. The odds against it are so great that it has occurred only 20 times in a sport that has an 162-game regular season, and has been played since the 1800’s. To happen, it requires things go perfect not just once, but 27 times in a row. This means excellent pitching, excellent fielding, and yes, excellent officiating. The more spiritually-minded will say it also reflects a certain divinity, fate, luck – whatever you want to call it. No one who sits in a baseball stadium ever forgets seeing a perfect game. It’s like seeing a double-perfect rainbow, finding a 100-bill on the sidewalk, meeting the man or woman of your dreams and winning a Porche convertible all on the same day. No other sport even has a statistic called “a perfect game.” Think of that.

Now, witness the reaction of the umpire, who did the very, very hardest thing a person of character can ever do: immediately and publicly admit, with elegance and grace, that you are wrong. “It was the biggest call of my career, and I kicked the (stuff) out of it. I just cost that kid a perfect game.”

Or the fans, who booed as only a crowd will boo when they know in their hearts they are seeing something wrong, something perfect being snatched away, like a child’s stolen popsicle on a summer’s day.

And manager Jim Leyland, as old-school and hardcore a baseball man as is left in the game, this very classy observation: “Emotions were running high for everybody and I think that’s why the guys were emotional after the game. I wish we wouldn’t have been, but we were. But I think it’s understandable in that case. That’s a pretty sacred thing, something like that.”

And read this, from the AP story, heartbreaking in its simplicity: “After Joyce’s call, Mr. Galarraga quietly went back to work as the crowd started to boo.”

There is much worthy criticism – and unworthy sportswriter ranting – decrying the lack of character and role models in professional sports. Here, in a simple game, are the things parents everywhere try to teach their children: life is sometimes unfair. Admit your mistakes immediately and courageously, and apologize. Forgive those who’ve wronged you, and get on with your work. And if there is injustice, or a thing can be improved, say so, and call for change.

Do I have an opinion on overturning the call? Yes. They shouldn’t. Let it stand.

What about changing the rules? Sure, that’s OK. Although I can’t imagine baseball being improved with endless slow-mo replays on base calls.

Nor can I imagine a simple game being more instructive, or poignant than last night’s. It was perfect just the way it was.