Cardboard Gods

I used to see the years of my life as cleanly as those on the back of a baseball card. Lately everything’s running together and accelerating. Lately I became a father, lately I lost my father. Lately I wonder what’s mine. What’s anyone’s?

“Jesus, look at how tall Jack is,” I said to my wife today as our oldest son walked by. She and I were sitting on a bench in a little park near our house. I remember when Abby, pregnant with Jack, drove the two of us by the park the day we came to look at the condo for the first time.

Our kid can play there, I thought. That memory, a clear one from just before the years began running together, seemed as I sat on the bench as if it had just happened.

“Life’s going by fast,” I said now.

“Yup,” Abby said, “and we’re fucking it up.”

Before I could ask her what she meant, exactly, one of our boys did something to the other, or took something from the other—who knows? It just happened a few hours ago and already the details have dissolved.

Lately I watch my sons claim pieces of the world for their own, not just possessions but hurts and stories and desires. Lately I scattered my father’s ashes, packed up his books and toothpicks and hearing aid batteries. Lately I dug around in my baseball cards, looking for one player in particular, and because it took me a while to find this player within the entropic chaos of my collection, my mind wandered to the future, not far beyond the expanding borders of lately, to where my own sons will be sifting through the very same cards in my absence, packing them up with my guitar pics and Trident gum and notebooks, scattering my ashes.

All you are is a brief awareness. I’ve felt it most keenly in moments that seemed in retrospect like premonition. The time I looked across a bookstore where I worked at a coworker with a pink stripe in her hair and wondered. The time I rode by the little park by the condo for sale and wondered.

Is this mine? Is this my life?

The relentless momentum of time turns the question into a statement. You clamber, always, awkward with hurts and desires, forward. To paraphrase a Denis Johnson notion from the novel Angels, you move to meet your responsibilities. That must have been the familiar synaptic flash in Bill Buckner’s mind when he reckoned the direction of that ground ball.

Mine.

You move toward your life and your life moves toward you.

***

It was never about the ground ball. It was about escaping a burden.

***

That fall I lived in a suite in Arthur Hall on the campus of Johnson State College. The drinking age changed that year from 18 to 21, but anyone who had just turned 18 was grandfathered into legal drinking. I lived with seven other guys in the suite who were my age, 18, or thereabouts, and we spent that one brief stretch of months in which our lives intersected drinking so heavily it was as if we misunderstood the loophole allowing our legal drinking as a requirement to drink until we puked our punch-colored guts out our third-story windows. There were keg parties, Everclear parties, parties where we bought several cases of cheap beer we called Green Death and guzzled the bottles and went into Luis Tiant windups to hurl them against the concrete wall of the common area, shards of broken glass piling up like green ice. There were whole weeks when the booze and the potent marijuana smoke from a waist-high Graphics bong made the carpeted floor of the suite pitch and rock like the deck of a ship, and we all staggered around laughing and woozy and aimless and immortal. The seven other guys were my friends, or so I would have said at the time. None of the friendships lasted. None of the seven guys except me even lasted so much as two more semesters at the college, let alone graduated. None of them kept in touch with me, nor I with them, nor any of them with one another, so far as I know.

I remember them all. They as much as anything are mine.

***

After digging for an hour or so, I found in my refurbished computer box full of cards a 1986 Bill Buckner. The story on the back of it is told almost entirely in numbers and begins in 1968, when my own story began. That’s when Bill Buckner, at the age of 18, reported to the Dodgers’ minor league club in Ogden and batted a blistering .344. He moved into and through his life with great purpose. He took this rare gift that is this life and made all he possibly could of it. In 1985, the last year of statistics shown on this card, the 35-year-old Buckner played in every one of his team’s games and established career highs in hits, doubles, and RBI while equaling his personal best for home runs and stealing 18 bases.

We fucked it up. You, me, everybody.

***

The day Bill Buckner died, I watched the Mookie Wilson at-bat. It was the first time I’d watched it since it had happened 33 years before, when I watched it in the suite in Arthur Hall. It’s a long at-bat, aptly described as epic in most reports. But to me, watching it unfold, foul ball after foul ball slicing all over foul territory in every direction: it’s like watching the snapping undulations of a downed power line. Finally a ball is hit fair, and Bill Buckner moves toward it. It’s a tougher play than it looks. With Mookie speeding up the line, Buckner will have to field it quickly and cleanly and either pit his injury-slowed body against a player with Olympic sprinter speed in a race to the base or shovel a perfect toss to another slow-moving teammate, pear-shaped Bob Stanley. The ball on its third bounce stays down. Why am I explaining this to you? You know as well as I do that everything we know, everything we’ve ever touched, will slip through our grasp.