Bottom of the tenth inning. The winning run is at the plate. Montgomery throws, hangs a curve. Martinez rips it into the left field stands and the Indians win the world series. The stadium erupts in a pandemonium that lasts for thirty minutes. My brother Bruce texts a curse and calls Maddon the worst manager ever. He throws his cell phone on the ground. It will be a week before I hear from him again. The fans that aren’t enraged or crying just stare blankly into the void in disbelief looking forward without seeing.

So it goes.

Maddon’s blunder explodes into another Cub’s legend joining goats and Bartman and Garvey. Instead of an amazing season in which the Cubs achieved the best win record in Cubs history and a National League championship, they are remembered as a team that choked. Forget the amazing moments when Maddon worked his magic during the regular season: a two-strike suicide squeeze; toggling a pitcher between left field and the pitcher’s mound; pulling his team out of slump; pulling off post-season victories against the Giants and the Dodgers. Everyone will remember the one moment in the last inning of the last out of the last game and forget all the rest.

So it goes.

Tomorrow comes. History moves on. There is nothing to do but ride out the winter in the post-partum dullness of the off season. No tears, no joy, no ebullience, no uncertainty, no heartache and no awe. And no memory of great victory.

So it goes.

But wait ’til next year!

Improbability drive finally kicked into high gear?
Has the world flipped on its head so that sun rises in the west?
Is the 12th of Never a fall day in 2016?
Has the entropy of hell sufficiently lowered for a snowball fight?
Have geneticists developed a flying pig?
Will monkeys fly out of my butt?
Or the Cubs win the series?

You promised that you'd do it
When the Cubs won the series
The chances so improbable,
It wouldn't happen even in theory,

The girl you said you'd marry,
When the Cubs won the series
Well its fifty years later,
I hope you love her dearly

The debt you said you'd pay back
When the Cubs won the series,
Well its forty years later,
The interest accruing yearly

All the healthy things you said you'd do
When the Cubs won the series,
Well its thirty years later,
Even your scale refuses query

You told me you'd put spots on zebras
When the Cubs won the series,
Well its twenty years later,
Spots instead of jail stripes would be rather cheery

You promised me a ton of cheese
When the Cubs topped the world,
Well its ten years later,
And your milk hasn't curdled

You thought it would be the end of time
When the Cubs won the series,
There is no more waiting now
Your plight is getting serious.

A day of reckoning is here
Your old promises you mock
Now you will be accountable
When the Cubs put you on the spot

I am 108 years old. I was born on Oct 15, 1908, the day after the Cubs won the last game of their last world series victory. My life has been great, full of adventure and travel and working with smart people and making love to beautiful women and sometimes being a little closer to history then I would have liked. But through it all, baseball, the Cubs, have marked the time. Baseball has passed the days and the nights creating as many highs and lows and stories as the time that passed through it.

I’ve only had one regret in life, I think. I don’t know. It is just something that has lurked in the back of my mind. Maybe, I just have the slightest trace of PTSD. I have never shaken it. I was 36 years old at the time, leading men onto sandy beach to die during a beautiful sunset over the ocean in the South Pacific. Our intelligence was bad, there were far more enemy troops here then expected. Men dropped on either side of me as we stormed the beach. Zeros cruised over head straffing and dropping bombs; concussion blasts ripping men to pieces as they ran. The life expectancy on the beach was about five seconds. A wave of enemy soldiers came at us, bayonets clashing, rounds firing and whistling by me on all sides. I broke through the line and saw a thousand more men up on the hill ready to charge us. I dove into a foxhole and put my back to the dirt wall and the enemy. The only victor in this bloodshed would be the last person to get there when everyone else was already dead.

Continue reading “The Accord” →

Coach Kangaroo slowly moves his way out to the mound,
the bill of his cap tilted down,
Tail, front paws on the ground, lift the huge back feet forward and repeat,
So slow it almost seems like he is going backwards.

"Listen son, your pitching" shaking his long thin snout side to side somberly,
scratching the fur on his chest, taking the baseball in both fore-paws,
rotating it seam over seam, licking it to see if it might taste good
"your pitching, ain't so good" squinting his eyes in the harsh afternoon sun.

"Sometimes you just got to stop and eat the roses"
"And if they don't digest immediately, regurgitate the roses and try again"
"You get my meaning?" asks Coach Kangaroo.

Max looks at him like he just peed on his leg, which he might have.
Coach Kangaroo hops off turning over his shoulder offering one last bit of wisdom
"Oh yeah, and watch out for the dingos"

Max, pitches, the spit on the ball giving his curve ball an extra half foot of drop.
The hitter misses the pitch, twisting so hard that he loses his balance and falls to a knee.
Max has his groove back, and a new pitch in his repertoire.

Music where there is no sound
The dance of space is all around
Put your ear to the vacuum ground
A wave is something that goes up and down

Your floating in space
your headset drawn
nothing to listen to
all the stations gone

The earth and moon hear the sound
The earth and moon dance around
Moon face never looking from Earth's ground
Always falling, never coming down

Your floating in space
your headset drawn
nothing to listen to
all the stations gone

The magnetic sun hears the sound
It sun spots dancing all around
Electric fields to their electric ground
Magnetic lines arcing up then down

Your floating in space
your headset drawn
nothing to listen to
all the stations gone

The milky way hears the sound
Dancing with stars all around
Dark matter galactic edges an unseen ground
Stars moving fast when they should slow down

Your floating in space
your headset drawn
nothing to listen to
all the stations gone

Do you hear it yet?
You need more than your ears
math, sensors, and signals
the offbeat sound of spheres

Space itself hears the sound
Dancing to the static all around
birth sounds of the universe in the background
even with the universe cooling down

Your floating in space
your headset drawn
nothing to listen to
all the stations gone

She stands in the shadows of the alcove, her back to its inner wall, her black hair in a bun, her red lips pursed longingly as she gazes intently upon me as I saunter down the cobbled road in the noon day sun casually dressed in my pin stripped suit, ascot, and top hat. The intensity of her gaze stops me dead in my tracks in the middle of the street, a Vespa swerving and honking and shouting as it curls around me. I return her gaze just as intently. She steps out from the shadows in front of the doorway and squares off with me as I turn to her. I face her, she faces me. She is stunningly beautiful and athletic.

The improbability of it, the impossibility of it, could two strangers throw off the shackles of their different cultures, different languages in the middle of this humble road and dance to perfection. She sways ever so regally and the ends of her lip curl up in the subtlest of smiles. My moment of hesitation and doubt pass. “Now” I say, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” I command.

The accordions and violins and cellos begin to play. We ready ourselves. “Not yet.” Our minds and hearts synchronize to the music. Our weight shifts to the front of our feet. “Now!” I put my hand on her slender waist. And we move as one, as if we are locked together in an eternal entangled embrace, that defies the laws of attraction and repulsion and gravity and effortlessness and all common sense. Spinning, pausing, swaying, rocking, dipping, lifting. Floating effortlessly above the cobblestone dance floor, above the street, moving in mid-air, her graceful legs parting her dress seductively, rising on the music, the joy, the love, kissing, lost forever in the moment.
The music stops. She curtsies to me. I bow to her. The street musicians go back to their business. The crowd disbands. She steps back into her doorway. I continue on my way down the street. The moment gone, the moment forever.

The campfire has died down, the moon has yet to rise, a breeze whistles gently through the tamarisk trees, the night air has cooled a bit since the sun has sky-dived over the horizon. The stars shine brilliantly in the moonless clear sky of the desert. I show her how to find Polaris, the North Star and the Little Dipper from the edge of the Big Dipper, all the stars of the Little Dipper clearly visible, something you just cannot see in the haze of the city. We track the pinpoint reflection of a satellite as it passes overhead working its way through the stars.

As we lay on our inflated inflatable mattress itself on a tarp, under the cover of our spread out sleeping bag, we hear a twig crack near the tree behind us. “What was that?”, Angie says quite alarmed. Even in the dark, I can see the wide-eyed look of fear as she slides herself closer to me. “I think it might be a bear”, I tease. “Really?”, she says quite alarmed. No bears live in the Anza-Borrego desert, a fact I fail to mention. I tell her the old joke that I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun her. Her back to me, both of us laying on our sides in the spooning position, she elbows me in the ribs.

Some leaves rustle in the distance. “Its a mountain lion”, I tell her. Mountain lions do exist in the desert and for that matter in San Diego proper. I have never seen one in the wild. “Are you serious?”, her voice cracks with genuine concern.  “No, of course not”, I quickly say, regretting my inability to resist teasing her. She backs into me even more. I have my arms around her and kiss the back of her neck, my face getting lost in her long hair. Ok, maybe I don’t regret it that much. I see a little kangaroo rat hop over the corner of the tarp. I don’t tell her. Something tells me that a rat would freak her out even more than the mountain lion.

A bat flies overhead. I can see its shadowy outline as it passes in front of the bright stars. Bats are pretty common. “Ok, now I know you are just kidding”, she says. I can feel the tenseness leave her body. Angie relaxes a bit on her first night under the stars. I pull her tight and give her a hug, she turns her head back and gives me a light kiss on the cheek. I’m not sure why bats flying over our heads is not believable, but I let it go, glad that it has diffused her anxiety at least a little bit. A shooting star flashes overhead winking at us. I drift off to sleep, my arm around her waist, our legs curled together, leaving her to find her own sleep fighting through the vivid terrors of her imagination fueled by the unfamiliar noises and sensations of our outdoor adventure.

• Image Borrowed from Wikipedia, My photos long since faded

Here are my scattered memories of Africa – Summer of 1981.

We drive down a dirt road in one of the Kenyan National Parks. Our guide, Henry(our tour group takes up two buses and we have two guides, I can see our other guide’s face but I can’t think of his name. He is actually the driver, but I will go with Henry for the sake of the story) stops and points out some elephants in the distance. Standing up in the bus, the roof of the bus opening up into a canopy so that we can stand and take pictures unobstructed by windows but safely within the confines of our vehicle, I cannot see the elephants. I look and I and I look and I look, Henry pointing off in their general direction. Finally, I detect some movement. No wonder, from this distance, their grey bodies actually blend in with large rocks in the landscape. I hope we will get closer than this but I’m impressed that our driver can spot these far off literally, mammoth-sized animals. Towards the end of the trip, I am much better at spotting creatures. It takes time to train the eyes and mind to pick creatures out of the landscape. Fortunately, more often than not, the beasts are right up in our faces.

We turn the corner in our VW bus, an elephant blocks the road and squares off. This one I spot right off without any help from Henry. The elephant is larger than our bus. And she is pissed that we have entered her personal elephant bubble. Our driver stops and slips the gear into reverse, backing off slowly. The elephant trumpets and charges. Our driver slips the gear into neutral and revs the engine. The loud noise neutralizes the charge.

A snake slithers in the grass as we walk from our hut to the dining room. The snake is a black mamba, a highly venomous and aggressive snake; the bite will kill a human in half a day. A soldier lifts his semi-automatic rifle, bashes it onto and crushes the head of the snake. Monkeys watch the bloody scene from their perch up on a thatched roof, waiting for an easy meal from cooperative or sloppy diners.

An entourage walks past us. The room is alive with whispering and gossip. I am told that it is William Holden, a famous actor that owns the hotel that we are in, the Mount Kenya Safari Club. I do not know or recognize him. I have seen the film Stalag 17, the movie that inspired the comedy Hogan’s Heroes, and the Wild Bunch, though I can’t remember if I saw the films before or after I saw William Holden. He died later that year. Our tour group meets an old matronly woman in a long dress and lots of heavy jewelry, like a character from an Ernest Hemingway novel, sitting in the hotel lobby. We sit in a large circle with her at the focal point. I don’t remember what we all talk about, but I remember that after talking for quite a while, she remembers everyone’s name and story without exception, and I have already forgotten hers.

The Kenya Safari Club was a staging area for another amazing place called TreeTops. On this in between day, of all the things I could of done, I go golfing. No one else is on the course, one of the craziest courses I ever try to play. The tees hit off of cliffs over corn fields and into valleys and back up again. My caddy is a local, a guy I guess to be about my age. After the first hole, I figure out that he intends to play. I give up a couple of balls for him to hit and we play on. But I am way over matched by the course, (I am over matched by most courses), and I lose all my balls to corn fields and ponds and whatever hazards presented, well before I complete the eighteen holes.

Treetops is a hotel in the trees. I remember an armed guard escort, as we walk from the end of the road, to the hotel. My mom and I squeeze into a very small room, more like a compartment on a train than a full hotel as I remember it. The hotel overlooks a watering hole with a natural salt lick that attracts the animals. At an altitude of some 7000 feet, I remember the night turned very cold as warthogs and rhinos visit the oasis in the sky, their breaths visible in the waterhole illumination.

We stop at a tribal village of dirt huts. We pay for the privilege of meeting the villagers. The moment we step off the bus, I and everyone else who ventures out, are accosted by colorfully dressed women, with expanded earlobes and heavy neck rings, selling jewelry. Ten women shove jewelry in my face and give me no room to move. I am very uncomfortable with this extreme violation of my personal space. Eventually, we are freed. A couple of us are invited into a hut, a cylindrical mud structure with thatched roofs. Inside, I have to squat down and I am leaning up against the wall. At this point, I am informed that the walls are re-enforce with dung. I quickly surrender my purchase from the wall.

Our tour group, what I remember of it, consists of two octogenarian couples, who wear bandannas over their faces to keep the dust out, and suffer mightily from the bouncy rides on the dirt roads. Most of their conversation centers on their meds, I vow that I will be more diverse in my conversational skills if I ever make it to that age. One day, parked out in a huge heard of wildebeest, also called gnus, George gives me this joke, which I’ve used about a hundred times since, given the opportunities at zoos and the safari park: “No gnus, is good gnus”. The other group comes from New York City and are gay. They are well-spoken and intelligent people. One of the men does voice overs on commercials that I have heard. The other does paintings for hotels and offices but feels compromised and stifled lacking artistic control over his subject matter. He and his partner act worse than most married couples that I can think off, constantly bickering at each other throughout the trip. One of the gay men is single and aggressive, going out to bars and picking up men. The early 1980s is the time that Aids made the leap from Africa to America. In hindsight, it makes me wonder. I remember another English guy with a couple of tweenage kids that have the worldliness of well-traveled adults. I can’t remember if they were in our tour group or if we just ran into them a couple of times.

At some point we cross over the equator into the Southern hemisphere, my first time. Henry points out Mt. Kilamanjaro. I can’t see it. We are near the border of Tanzania, at that time, in much greater political turmoil than tourist savvy Kenya. I remember the story of tourists robbed and abandoned on the Serengeti by soldiers. I strain my eyes to look for the mountain beneath the large band of clouds. Henry tilts my head up. The snow-covered flattened peak rises above the cloud line. Whoa! I am stunned at the size. On our later prop-plane flight from Nairobi to Mombasa, we fly at eye-level with the top of the peak.

We travel from park to park, Tsavo, Amboseli, Maasai Mara, Mt. Kenya and a couple of others that I don’t remember, even looking at the map. The wildlife is always stunning – elephants, lions, rhinos, hippos, crocodiles, water buffalo, gazelles, giraffes, zebras, gnus, ostriches, warthogs. The warthogs left quite an impression on me, strutting about the water holes with a regal ugliness, impressive ivory tusks jutting out from their flattened faces, stiffened tails pointed to the sky. I take hundreds of pictures using my grandfather’s 200 millimeter zoom lens shooting rolls and rolls of film. One doesn’t truly appreciate the power of the digital camera until you’re stuck changing rolls of film while the wildlife runs off or how cautious one is in judging whether or not to take a shot for fear of wasting film. Film is finite! Still, I think at least half my portfolio is birds and lizards. I remember being quite impressed by Maribu storks, scavengers with featherless heads, long conical bills, and penetrating eyes waiting for the opportunity to move in for a meal. I wonder if these pictures still exist in a shoe box in the dark corner of a closet?

After the photo safari, my mom and I fly to Mombasa on the Indian ocean, a town I mostly remember for the mosques. And then on to Malindi. I snorkeled in the Indian ocean, the Indian ocean home to dangerous rock fish and poison tipped urchins. The tide was crazy, receding something like a half mile out. I walked out to greet the ocean but ended up swimming back, the towel I left on the sand at low tide, quickly consumed by and lost to the incoming tides. On the way back in, I must have swam over a jellyfish. I swam quickly towards shore not sure what was going on, a stinging sensation on my arm and stomach, the stinging sensation turning into a burning sensation. I never saw it. When I got to shore, I had small welts diagonally across my left arm, stomach, and right leg. A man pointed out the condition on a sign just off the beach of all the maladies one might encounter. Sure enough, it looked just like the picture of a jellyfish sting.

I am sitting on the boardwalk. A black man passes by on a donkey. He looks straight at me and says “Some tourists no good.” Maybe I looked at him funny and didn’t realize it. Maybe he just didn’t like tourists.

I still have memorabilia from that trip scattered about my house: wooden figures, stone hippos, a green malachite mask that my mom talked me into buying, a wooden giraffe letter opener. The only pictures I have are the memories imprinted on my brains. I vaguely remember wanting to come back with a Masai spear and shield. Times were different, I sure the stewardesses (yes, they were still called stewardesses back then, not flight attendants), would have been happy to help me store such a trophy in the overhead bin or under the seat compartment in front of me. But if I did, I’ve long since skewered or impaled my enemies, (or was it my brother), with said souvenir.

• Image Borrowed from Wikipedia (Muhammad Mahdi Karim), My photos long since faded