Baseball Takes the (A) Rod

At the instant of the crack he would glide along the deep green carpet looking up in the high blue sky picking out the orb that at its apex must have looked like a dancing white pea in the chill swirling winds above San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.  He moved surely as if guided by some mystic inner sense directing him right to the spot where the little orb would land.  And then he would position the glove just right, oftentimes just in front of his belt, opened and waiting like a leather basket. Plop the orb would drop into the glove and he’d step forward and throw a seed back to the infield.  I had the pleasure and yes, the honor of seeing Willie Mays, arguably baseball’s greatest player do that in person in many a game at the frigid and usually unfriendly confines of Candlestick Park.  I also watched Mays belt a fair amount of his 660 career home runs.  I didn't see the 660^th, which he hit in the uniform of the New York Mets in the twilight of his career.  It was 1973, the Vietnam War was still raging, Nixon was living his Watergate nightmare and I was just about to turn 20. 

Evacuating Suburbia

Throw out them LA papers

And that moldy box of vanilla wafers.

Adios to all this concrete.

Gonna get me some dirt road back street

~  From L.A. Freeway, Lyrics by Guy Clark

“Concrete and cars are their own prison bars”

~ From Toes, Written by Zac Brown, John Driskell Hopkins, Shawn Mullins and Wyatt Durette

Retirement talk has been revolving around the domestic circle a lot lately.  Mine, not the wife’s.  You see she’s been retired and according to her it’s the shit (that’s urban slang for she likes it).  I know this because she tells me it’s the shit all the time, quite often after I've dragged my worn out bones into the house after a day at the office and an hour on the freeway with a few thousand of my fellow Americans feeling like shit; about 10 pounds of it in a 5 pound sack (which is old school for suburbia blows).  

Two Stories; Giving and Taking

This is a story about two stories.  Both are typically American.  Both reflect values.  One story is about values cherished.  The other is about values gone awry.  The stories tell a story; about what is good in America and what is wrong with America.  Each story is about responsibility; accepted and denied. Both stories were on the recent nightly news and were broadcast within minutes of each other.  One story can warm the heart and bring a tear.  The other story is a groin kick that makes you wonder about the double dealing we often think pervades our society.    

Sniping Over the Sniper

There’s been an awful lot of sniping going on surrounding the movie American Sniper, the story of Chris Kyle based on Kyle’s memoir of the same title.  It’s an argument that like damn near every argument in America these days, has no gray area, got nasty from the start and spares neither the movie, its director Clint Eastwood, the Iraq War, the book, nor Chris Kyle himself.  And like arguments in America it managed to go off the rails into wild irrelevance.  A prime example was Michael Moore hauling Jesus into the donnybrook.   I saw the movie the weekend it debuted and shortly afterwards I noticed all the hoo-haw that was hitting the media.  And so I decided to read the book and a fair amount of articles in order to make up my own mind. 

Have Yourself a White Bread Little Holiday (and other Chris..err Holiday Stories)

Christmas is done for 2014.  Like a Dickensian Christmas ghost it snuck up on us, stayed for an instant and then dissolved into winter’s fog.  Every year around Halloween we bellyache that “those capitalist bastard retailers are foisting Christmas on us earlier and earlier every year.”  And then a couple days before Christmas we’re in a panic because we managed to procrastinate away the 2 months long shopping season that the capitalist bastards graced us with.   “What the hell do I get for the wife?  She already has everything.”  So we head for Ross and grab a sweater, any sweater.  On Christmas morning she opens the box, holds it up and asks, “Did you save the receipt?”

In The Land of the Mustangs

The three ambled slowly along the hard scrabble trail, rocky white clumps that crumble underfoot and disintegrate into grainy sand; a landscape peppered with knots of spiny sagebrush.  Looking at the trio you feel desolation; a desperate loneliness;drifting as if looking for something or someplace but you don’t know what or where.  They headed for the ridge that would soon swallow them up taking them to..

A family group of mustangs stops at a water hole

Visiting the Founders' Dilemma

“I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.”  ~ George Washington

“21 Aug. 1805…bought a negro woman Lucretia Jame’s wife, her 2. sons John & Randall and the child of which she is pregnant, when born, for £180.”  ~ Thomas Jefferson’s Memorandum Book  

We traveled the Old Dominion from the northeast corner at Arlington over the state line from DC to the southwest corner at Abingdon, just a tobacco spit away from the Tennessee border.  Along our route we made house calls on some former presidents.  The presidents are long since gone but their homes, from Washington’s Mount Vernon just south of DC to Jefferson’s Monticello on the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge, all remain in magnificent restoration.  Four of our nation’s first five presidents hailed from Virginia, George Washington (1) Thomas Jefferson (3) James Madison (4) and James Monroe (5) and we visited the homes of all four. 

 

Reproduced Slave's Cabin at Mount Vernon