from april, 2011
Summer, 1994
We're down nine runs in the last half of the last inning of the Big Game.
Shoeless Jeff says, with a firm voice, "No! Gol dang it" as he hands the bat back to our guy "in the hole".
"You gotta do it, John" Jeff says to the third man scheduled to bat for us this inning, "or else it's an automatic out".
John turns to me and, in a hushed voice, says, "I don't want to hit my turn".
"I don't want to lose this game."
<Ping>
Yelling. Running. Sliding. Shouting.
We have a runner on base. And now, John should be on deck.
When we started hitting this inning, we were down eight runs. Now we’re down by four
And we have no one "on deck".
<Ping>
. . . .
Shoeless Jeff's game-face is the split-complementary opposite of the one he wears at work.
The low volume of Jeff’s work day delivery is disarming, assuring, with supportive information and Tennessee Ernie Ford one-line wit. Jeff's extensive baseball training as a youth and lengthy career as an adult have fostered in him a stoic silence to his softball authority figures. At game time, Jeff opts for softball action over monkey-man grunt-words to express himself.
On defense, as our lone-wolf left-fielder, Jeff robs home runs from softball goons on fence-less diamonds to communicate displeasure with the opposition. Offensively, Jeff prefers to educate his peers by example, with impatient demonstrations of first-pitch hitting and equally ill-tempered base running.
In short, Jeff isn't a whiner or a cheerleader.
At night, under the 50-foot high spot-lights that cradle the baseball diamond with its first- and third-baseline arms, Jeff is mostly silent, all alone, deep in his left-field domain, while I, as fate and the evolutionary rise of our team's performance over the past two softball years dictates, now assume middle-infield responsibilities as short-stop.
Jeff's our "lead-off", the first in our offensive "line-up" or scheduled list of ten players in a four-man outfield, and I am scheduled to bat second, right after him.
Jeff's directly behind me when we're in the out field. When we're up, he's in front of me.
Which means, when it's game time, I never hear Jeff speak.
Until tonight.
To my far left, on the other side of all the monkey guys, by the bat-rack, I hear Shoeless Jeff say, with a firm voice, `No! Gol dang it'.
Our usually silent left-fielder is not only speaking, he's using foul language.
Something is very wrong.
I walk behind the guys yelling excitedly at our base-runners. I am walking toward the bat-rack, where Shoeless Jeff is trying to get the last batter in our line-up, our right-fielder, to assume his place on the ceremonial circle of dirt near home plate reserved for the next batter.
I turn to see Jeff give back the bat our right-fielder just tried to hand over him, saying. `You gotta do it. You gotta or else it's an automatic out.'
Ping.
Our right-fielder turns to me and says, 'I don't want to hit my turn. I can't do it.'
In the bottom half of the last inning, there are two outs, bases loaded.
And there's no one "on deck".
Ping.
. . . . . .
I grab a bat and I walk up to John not knowing what to do or what to say to him. What I feel every day, and every night, he has now. I can hold it in. But I don't know if he can.
Here, I give him the bat. Just go to the on-deck circle. The place where you go to bat next.
Before someone on our team hits a forgettable ball to someone else who botches yet another defensive play, I tell him 'I'm going to go behind the dugout here' I motion where I'm going 'but then I am going to come back to the fence. Walk with me to the on-deck circle'.
Without breaking our glance, John watches me as I run around the bench to the fence that separates the game from the stands. John holds the bat by the handle, barrel pointed down, looking only at me. John held the bat with the Grip of Life, as if the bat was holding him up or keeping him from drowning. 'Come here', I say from the non-player side of the fence, next to the on-deck circle.
Someone else on our team gets on base. John is looking only at me. I don't have the heart to tell him I don't know what to say. All I know is the feeling of despair or panic or loneliness or …
'Hey, do you feel this?' I place my hand on my chest and I move it down over the top of my stomach, then back over my chest, up to my throat, then back over where my heart used to be.
John nods.
'Joe Montana feels this!'
John's eyes grow wide.
I tell him, ’This feeling … this feeling is why we come here. We come here to feel this.' I motion the chest-stomach-throat-stomach thing again and I smile.
John looked at me straight in the eyes and then his eyes narrowed with purpose and, in the same low voice he used at the batting cage, when he reached his first softball break-though, he said:
'oh-h-h-h-h …'
. . . . . .
Without breaking eye contact with me, his left hand let go of the bat that, up until this moment, had been holding him in it's aluminum grip. He turned both hands palm down so the bat was now parallel to the Earth. With his free, left hand, he was now accepting what his right hand was giving him
I seriously doubt John heard the umpire yelling for him to hurry up. When he walked to the plate he took no warm-up swing. He didn't wait for the ump to motion to the pitcher to 'Play ball'. Didn't even look at him.
I knew he "knew" because he was looking only at the pitcher. And I knew the only reason he was looking at the tobacco chewer standing on the "rubber".
The pitcher had something John wanted.
If the memory of what happened next is my last, I will die easy.
As the ball climbed up into the night, John moved only his head. John knew his moment has not yet come.
As the first pitch began to fall to Earth, John’s head - without distraction or doubt - followed the ball as it moved closer, closer to him as the bat, still, remained lifeless, without motion.
John did not fear the ball. Or any thing or anyone behind it.
John was letting the ball enter his domain.
With a snap, at the last possible second, did John bring the blue bat to life; out of it's anxious misery.
John reflexes hurled the bat forward. But his head, his eyes - his purpose - were still fixed on nothing but the ball. Quickly, faster than I had ever seen him do before, he swung the bat at the object in which he was currently obsessed. Like an evil, loving mother, he put all the strength into what he was about to hit, without letting go of what he was using to hit the ball.
As the ball met the bat, John's hands told the bat to tell the ball where it was about to go. His wrists, in true text-book form, revolved around the axis of the bat, so as to not disturb the path the bat had already assumed.
The twine-covered cork sphere and the aluminum cylinder for the briefest moment became one. At that moment, nothing and no one but John would dictate where they both were about to go.
And, the first thing I thought was: I didn't teach him that!
John was, at that moment, the maker of the softball's destiny. He had reached softball nirvana. For his lifelong search was he about to receive his award.
As the ball passed from my right to left in the direction of third base, I looked only at the batter-turned-baserunner. For a single, precious moment John was the only one at the park who knew it was going to be fair. He either didn't know or care if the third baseman had the ability or the chance to disturb it's current trajectory. All he knew was he had to run.
To the naked, blatant surprise of everyone in the stands and both dugouts, the ball traveled over the third-baseman's dumb-founded head. The anxious elation of the opposite team now turned to panic. Three of John's teammates, on base without hope only moments before, were now jumping up and down behind home plate yelling incoherently and touching each other in a manner that might seem questionable elsewhere.
John was, at this moment in time, the object of his team's mad, rejuvenated adulation.
In the time he ran from the batter's box, his dream become his conquest. Defiantly, as if he'd done this many times before, John got up off the ground, without dusting himself off. John was, indeed, standing with no one around him; all by himself. But he was, without question, not alone.
John Lee stood on second base.
John didn't raise his arms in victory or dance or celebrate in any way. Nor did he pull up his baby blue sweat pants up to his chest like he used to do.
No.
John stood up and let his sweat pants hang precariously from his waist. And as a true gentleman would, he looked at the next batter, extended his hands and clapped aggressively toward home plate. I couldn’t hear what John was shouting, but I recognized his plea. John was shouting to the next guy up: Bring me Home!
Bring me Home.
At a point in my Life when I needed and rejected it the most, John Lee gave me, forced upon me, the most valuable gift one mortal can give another:
Hope.
.
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