Rabbit

Last year at the baseball conference:

"Hub Fans Bid Rabbit Adieu"

forever young

Just wrote the last paragraph of my little Updike-Williams essay for the next "Baseball in Literature and Culture" volume. I hate shilling for corporate America but I just have to confess: I love this commercial.

A virally-infectious Pepsi commercial featuring a hip-hop-cadenced rendition of the Dylan classic “Forever Young” has been getting a lot of televised play lately. After a slew of rapid-sequence-montage clips drawing on images from sports and popular culture, and before the final, lingering image of Ruth and Jeter capped by the summary slogan “every generation refreshes the world,” we're treated to a split-second of Williams in full swing. That's the immortal image he sought and deserves. In time, let us hope, that ugly other mental picture, the one his wayward son forced upon us, just fades away. The picture of perfection is the one we want to keep.

Skeeter

John Updike's poem "Baseball" evokes a moment in my life that could come back to me tinged with mild humiliation, or at least blushing humility, but thankfully it just makes me smile. Recalling the skill and difficulty involved in the deceptively simple-seeming act of snagging a fly ball, Updike wrote:

...circle in the outfield
straining to get a bead
on a small black dot
a city block or more high,
a dark star that could fall
on your head like a leaden meteor.

It was an early summer Sunday, the Nashville Sounds were hosting an afternoon game at Hershel Greer Stadium, and I had just settled into my seat to watch batting and infield practice before the game's scheduled 2 pm start. (We don't do that very often anymore, to my regret. I was still a single guy on my own recognizance back then.) A Sounds staffer approached with an offer any sensible person of my general athletic competence would have declined. I accepted. So that's why, a few minutes before 2, I found myself in center field as another Sounds staffer pointed an up-ended pitching machine in my vicinity and proceeded to launch a succession of black-dotted baseballs into the high sky above me. A city block? Might as well have been a city away. I did manage to catch one of them, but all of my attempts were successful from the team's point of view: they elicited loud crowd reactions. Howls of derisive laughter. General merriment. And in spite of it all, I had a blast doing it. As Updike says later in the poem, it is our birthright as Americans to fail spectacularly.

I had not quite disgraced the player whose glove I borrowed for the contest: the one and only "Skeeter" Barnes, a very good career minor leaguer who had many cups of coffee in The Show with Cincinnati, St. Louis, Montreal, and Detroit. You could look it up.

But you'll have to take my word for what Skeeter said to me as I returned his glove to him and hustled back to my hiding place in the grandstand. "It's not as easy as it looks, is it?" No, sir. It's not.

There goes Roy Hobbs

"Sometimes when I walk down the street I bet people will say there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in the game."

"Isn't there something over and above earthly things— some more glorious meaning to one's life and activities?"

"In baseball?"

"Yes."

He racked his brain... (Bernard Malamud, The Natural)

As did Ted Williams, as did John Updike, as also (without bat in hand) do I. Racking our brains, tracking ever-elusive, "ever-not-quite" (William James liked to say) transcendence on Earth. It's oh-so-close, sometimes, glimmering and twinkling at us before it darts back into the dark. But while we're here in the visible world we've got to keep on tracking. And drink a toast before we go.

"The Last Pitch"

Grades are in! Time to refocus on my next work-in-progress, a tighter and more "publishable" version of my "Baseball in Literature and Culture" conference contribution, noted here a while back. (That's tighter as in more concise and coherent, not more sloshed or stupid. Gotta set the bar high.)

As noted: at the conference in March I paid tribute to John Updike and his classic New Yorker tribute to the great Ted Williams, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." It was my small way of bidding "Rabbit" adieu. Ted, we learned from conference speaker and former MLB star Mudcat Grant, was one of the too-few white stars who welcomed baseball's integration and were kind to African-American ballplayers.

So this will be an homage to Williams and Updike, and a consideration of baseball as mirror to society and culture, and a meditation on death. And I promise, it will be cheerful. Stay tuned.

"Mudcat"

Yesterday I enjoyed and participated in the 14th annual "Baseball in Literature and Culture" conference, with scholars from far and wide (though I had only to amble down the hall) assembling to explore and celebrate the meaning of a game. The luncheon speaker was Jim "Mudcat" Grant, one of thirteen African-American twenty-game winners chronicled in his book The Black Aces.

He spoke of visiting the White House's Previous Occupant, who had difficulty distinguishing Dontrelle Willis from Montel Williams - to Condi Rice's evident embarrassment; of "gross" memories of a brutally-segregated America from which we've just awakened; and of the joy of living long enough to be able to tell his grandchildren, with conviction, that they COULD grow up to be president themselves one day... children whose great-great grandmother was born into slavery.

Dr. Harriett Hamilton of Alabama A&M reminisced as she paged through "Daddy's Scrapbook," the sacred memory-trove of her late father Henry Kimbro - one of the great under-sung stars of the Negro Leagues.

For my part, I paid tribute to John Updike and his classic New Yorker tribute to the great Ted Williams, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." It was my small way of bidding "Rabbit" adieu. Ted, we learned from Mudcat, was one of the too-few white stars who welcomed baseball's integration and were kind to African-American ballplayers.

I can't wait 'til next year.

John Updike, U & me

Another fallen hero...

I once published a brief comment about John Updike's aversion to materialist metaphysics. He had written, in his reluctant memoir Self-consciousness:

"When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept—the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation."

I wrote:

Updike may appear to yearn for the supernatural, but in fact his books are full of appreciation for the natural, simple satisfactions of everyday life. He would love nothing more, it seems, than to "be a self forever."

That's still how I read him. I wish he could be a self forever, here amongst the selves we're sure of, for my own selfish reasons as one of his most admiring readers; and because he was the theist whose charm and intelligence and humanity most tempered my inclination to dismiss theism as nothing but the residue of pre-scientific superstition.

It is very sad to think of his no longer being here. What a vast space of "emotion and conscience, memory and intention and sensation" for us all to try and fill. Who will temper me now?

Addendum: Garrison Keillor has penned a very nice tribute to Mr. Updike, eliciting from me a brief further comment...

Very nice tribute to a very great man whose greatness was out of all proportion to his humilty and generosity of spirit. I've posted my own humble tribute to him at http://delightsprings.blogspot.com/ and though I never met him, I think (based on something he told Terri Gross about his distress in contemplating the intrusions of biographers, even friendly ones) he would say that as an admiring reader I did, sort of, know the best of him.