American Pastime

   The batter took a hard swing at a high fast ball, fouling it straight back. Then he stepped aside and looked at the bat for a long time. He brought it up to his nose and sniffed it all around. He looked and sniffed again. Pretty soon the catcher came out and looked at it too. The pitcher came off the mound and was heading toward home plate when the umpire motioned for them to get back to the game.

   What were they doing? the woman asked her companion.

   They were looking for burnt wood, he said. Some say that the seams of the ball will burn the wood if the speed of ball and bat are just right. If the wind is blowing out you can smell it as far away as the pitcher's mound. But it also takes a powerful, controlled stroke parallel to the plain of the seam with just the right amount of friction. Not too little, not too much.

   Is that true?  she asked.

   I don't know, he said. But Ted Williams said it was and I'd say he should know.

   They were in Kansas City for the weekend. It was a good game and the best afternoon he'd had in a long time and he was happy that she seemed interested in understanding baseball. Afterward, they went to the Plaza, got something to eat, and went back to the hotel where they went to bed, made love, and drifted slowly to dreaming about their day:

   Jack?  

   Hmm?

   Can you smell the burn?

   I love baseball, he said sleepily.

--glwarren, 2014

Haircut

You are where?  London?

Yes.
The last time I called it was Buenos Aires.

I know.

And the time before that, Majorca and Marseille.

I get around, don't I?

Well, wherever, I thought you might like to know that Jack has died.

. . . . Yes . . . . Thanks.

It has been some time ago and I meant to tell you sooner, but it has just kept slipping my mind.

   My hair tumbles down the barber's gray-striped cape. It has been six months since I was here last. And six months before that. And the old barber reminds me . . . again . . . that he used to cut my father's hair a long, long time ago. And . . . again . . . "Have you never met him?" And I will remind him, again, that Jack has been gone for some time now. He looks at me as if not understanding and then, "Oh, yes, I remember. You look so much like him," he says, and excuses himself a moment to take money from a customer.

   The hair on the cape appears coarse and colorless, like hair from an old dog dying. I have sometimes joked about it with the barber. What! This hair is not mine, I protest. But today, when I roll it between my fingers, it feels soft . . . soft and fine as baby's hair . . .  and strands of it float effortlessly across the room through shafts of morning light.

   Was this your hair, Father . . . ??

Before I was born?

Before Mother barred the door forever to your drunken forays?

Before voices told you, wrongly, that you could fly?

Before that fatal flight, eyes wild open, from the fourth floor of the Evergreen    Hotel?

Before I knew that I would never know you?

--glwarren, 2014

Anna's Hummingbird

   Lucy Willow was the first to see her, that emerald flit of a thing, the Anna's Hummingbird. From her place by the window she let out such a yowl that Emma Munson dropped a pan of fresh bread dough to go see what the matter was with her "dear, dear Lucy 'Pussy' Willow." Emma then phoned Ira Horn, erstwhile mayor and ornithologist, or vice versa, and he in turn forwarded the news to Audubon in the City. Audubon explained that the poor lost soul, through some dysfunction of migratory memory, had wandered far from her California home, but given enough time would right herself and make her way back. But here she was for now, the object of boundless admiration and relentless observation. Folks from as far as Chicago and New Orleans came to see the Anna's Hummingbird, and convoys of motorists from nearby cities daily poured onto the streets of the village and spilled back into the countryside . . . until one morning the village woke to find her gone.

   Anna, my Anna, took it as a sign. She had wandered from the prairies of western Minnesota to our town one late October. There was already snow in Minnesota, while here the fields were greening with winter wheat. With some encouragement, she stayed. She believed that some part of the primitive brain that lay dormant in us all would now and then stir an individual to behavior of a migratory nature that was impossible to resist. No one knew where it would lead them. She never got quite settled here, however, and became increasingly melancholic over time. After nearly three years she decided Kansas did not suit her personality. How had she described it? Ah, yes, "humdrum". She had grown tired of the humdrum of it all.  Making humdrum love in a humdrum town to the humdrum call of summer frogs up and down the river . . . It was not her idea of happiness. We stayed up late that night. Drank wine. Cried a little. Made love and then made love again. When I woke later that morning she was gone.

--glwarren, 2014

But then someday when your poor heart

Is on the mend

I might just pass this way again

--Gordon Lightfoot, For Lovin' Me

      

The French Connection?

   There is an opportunity presented us/we bloggers for observing the traffic drawn to our sites. It is stats for the number and origin of views per day, week, month, etc. I don't profess to understand how it works. I only see the numbers. And this day the stats show that visits from France greatly outnumber those from the United States. I'm hoping I am not or have not been misleading anyone. I am thinking the webcrawlers in use have been keying on some post(s) of mine, e.g. Slacker, and drawing the browser here. But it might be a little like having your metal detector set for precious metals and coming up with nickel and copper. If so, I apologize for what is probably a wasted visit. But maybe not.

  I'm certainly happy to have the French visit. And, after all, I have bandied Rimbaud's name about.  And to his I might add that of Camus . . . oh, oh! Ah well, both have had a great influence on me. 

  In 1962 or '63 I wrote a note to a young lady and stuck it inside a volume of Camus' notebooks (English version).  "Read this man," it began. "In him you will find me. In him I found myself." Yet I had to give up reading him. I was trying to find my own way at the time and the kindred voice of his work made my efforts appear imitative and redundant. As, of course, they were.

  Come one, come all.