VII. The Open Window
In Dallas, a manager at a combined comic book and card shop put us in touch with a serious collector, a retired attorney who bought the whole stack of cards for $56,000. Mom and I sat there while he and the manager went through the deck, assigning values to each card: $3,200 for the 1933 Gehrig, $1,500 for each of the Mantles, $750 apiece for the Clemente and Campanella cards. When the list was done, and the individual values were tallied, the collector pulled a checkbook out of his sports coat and wrote out the amount like it was a trip to the grocery store, nothing more.
Seeing my arm in a sling, he asked if I played.
“No sir,” I said, knowing it was true then, even if it hadn’t been just days before. My mother and the store manager exchanged glances, but neither said anything.
The surgeries to fix my arm cost $39,000 and the remaining $17,000 was just enough to catch up on the mortgage and hire some help to get us through the rest of the summer. In the end, I didn’t quit baseball to help my mom around the farm, and I certainly didn’t quit because I lost interest or met a girl, like some of the other guys. No, I gave up baseball because it would never be the same for me again. Sure, I could have come back as an outfielder like the guy in the John Tunis novel, but after tossing the ball around with Mantle and Gehrig and receiving pitch advice from Drysdale, what would that look like really? After it was all said and done, I gave up baseball to focus more on life.
They’re similar in so many ways, that it’s easy to get one confused with the other. In both “games,” a person has to overcome disappointment, unfair circumstances, and even deal with a few bad calls now and then. And speaking metaphorically, a guy (or gal) has got to know how to throw a fastball when the situation calls for it, when to go with the curve, and when to throw the slider. It also requires a lot of listening to the “catcher,” the coaches, friends and parents. And honestly, it’s all about practice, practice, practice. The old adage about a person playing the way he or she practices was never more true. Still, the best advice I got on the game of life was from some guy calling himself “Charles” Mantle. He once said, “A win’s a win.” It took me several years to know just what he was getting at, but I think I understood it better after my baseball days were finished.
He and his friends, “Henry” Gehrig and “Robert” Clemente also taught me that, “only one game matters” and that tomorrow is for getting better. In 1997, I thought they were only talking about baseball, but sitting on a tractor in the middle of a pasture some years later, I know that it was about so much more. I look back now and I realize what that seventeen year old kid needed to learn most was that the best game on earth is life. I needed to hear that because I hadn’t really been living it much, not since dad died in Iraq.
Mantle also said that we have to hurry, “we don’t have much time.”
Yeah, I made it through all those lost days and nights, went to school, did my chores and woke up and did it all over again. But for a while, I wasn’t really there for any of it. It was something more like, I moved to the rhythm of it all, playing my part, saying my lines and swaying with the other dancers, but it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t living. Through it all, the farm was the place where my mom and dad took long walks out along the fence row, sat and watched the sunset under the oak tree, kissed and fell in love and made a life. It is also the place where some bend in the rules of the universe allowed the ghosts of Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig and Roberto Clemente to walk out of a freshly mowed hay meadow and toss a baseball around with a seventeen year old kid.
I don’t know how that happened or why, only that it was and is. I said before that I never saw my dad again that summer, but I never said a word about the summers that came after. And I never said a word about Mantle or Gehrig either.
On summer nights, sometimes in the late spring, and on occasion, the early fall, just before sunset, mom or I would see a shadow walking out across the field, moving past the oak tree or the pecan tree, coming up the fence row or stepping out from behind the barn. Most often, it was dad, stopping by for a quick conversation, a brief hug, but sometimes it was Mantle or “The Iron Horse” checking in on their former student. A smart man would probably make some observation about cosmic doors closing and other windows opening. I don’t know about any of that.
What I do know is that there’s a farm and a barn, a hay meadow and an oak tree just off of Highway 19, out on Route 5 in Ramblewood, Texas where ghosts stop by on seemingly random afternoons. They walk across the pasture and talk about the old days while the whippoorwills and quail call. And if there’s a place like that in Texas, then I bet there’s another somewhere, maybe in Iowa.
In the years that have followed, the farm has changed in ways that I never imagined. After the turn of the century, we converted the south pasture into a field for growing soy beans and it created a nice boon for a farm that previously had always existed just inches from the brink of bankruptcy. The neighbors asked why we didn’t expand our new crop into the pasture to the west. We told them we wanted to keep some of the old farm “the way it was”, and left it at that.
As for me, well I never made it to college, but in 2001, I met a girl named Marcie at the J & C Farm and Implement store over in Mt. Verdant. She has dark hair, bright eyes and a smile that fills me with a happiness that I never knew was possible. We re-modeled the farm house and made it our home in 2003, put in a new kitchen with granite counter tops and a deep industrial sink, just like they show on all of the home renovation shows on Saturday mornings. The next summer, we re-finished the carriage house for mom. She said that dad felt a little weird stopping by to visit mom with Marcie in the house.
Marcie and I were blessed with a daughter the following year, and coincidentally, I published a little book on pitching techniques for adolescents to help with the increased financial demands around the house. With no more baseball cards to sell, I had to find some way to cover the cost of diapers!
Still, the non-fiction sports market is a precarious one. It takes the name recognition of a former star player (or a Ph. D. in the field) to really succeed; so my next book was a fictional offering, a tale about a sheriff in a small town in west Texas, who utilizes his uncanny connection with the paranormal spirits that hang around the family ranch to solve murder mysteries. One might say that the idea just came to me one afternoon….
I changed a few details, made it a ranch instead of a farm, west Texas instead of east and made the protagonist a sheriff instead of an old ballplayer. The series caught on just enough to get a multi-book deal, with a nice advance that arrived around the same time my second daughter was born. So, sitting on a new John Deere tractor out in a hay meadow in the middle of east Texas in 2013, I have to admit that so far, it’s been a nice life. And if I ever think about baseball, it’s only when and if my kids show a little interest in whatever game is showing on television on a Sunday afternoon. If they ask, I tell them (again) how their dad pitched the first four innings of the Ramblewood state championship game, the really close one that clinched it all for the 1997 Wrangler baseball team. Ramblewood 2, Westlake 1.
THE END
Notes
First of all, I have to acknowledge the tremendous debt owed to John R. Tunis for his 1940 book, The Kid from Tomkinsville. Take out all of the ghosts, and this story could have been titled, “The Kid from Ramblewood.” As it stands, the piece is at the very least, an homage to Mr. Tunis’ far superior work!
Second, many of the avid baseball fans “in the audience” will recognize a few not so subtle references to David Clyde, the eighteen-year-old “phenomenon” who pitched for the Texas Rangers from 1973 to 1975. I was a youngster growing up in Texas around that time and kept my fingers crossed that Mr. Clyde would make a successful come back, either with my favorite team, the Rangers, or in one of his subsequent attempts with the Cleveland Indians and Houston Astros. The protagonist’s family name (“Davidson”) was an intentional choice, as at least one part of this tale is based (albeit loosely) on real events.
And finally, many, many thanks to the writer and director (Phil Alden Robinson), as well as the cast and crew from one of my all-time favorite movies, Field of Dreams (Yes, that is the one about the other magical field up in Iowa.). Their wonderful adaptation of the 1982 book by W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe, was an obvious point of inspiration in crafting this work.
In Dallas, a manager at a combined comic book and card shop put us in touch with a serious collector, a retired attorney who bought the whole stack of cards for $56,000. Mom and I sat there while he and the manager went through the deck, assigning values to each card: $3,200 for the 1933 Gehrig, $1,500 for each of the Mantles, $750 apiece for the Clemente and Campanella cards. When the list was done, and the individual values were tallied, the collector pulled a checkbook out of his sports coat and wrote out the amount like it was a trip to the grocery store, nothing more.
Seeing my arm in a sling, he asked if I played.
“No sir,” I said, knowing it was true then, even if it hadn’t been just days before. My mother and the store manager exchanged glances, but neither said anything.
The surgeries to fix my arm cost $39,000 and the remaining $17,000 was just enough to catch up on the mortgage and hire some help to get us through the rest of the summer. In the end, I didn’t quit baseball to help my mom around the farm, and I certainly didn’t quit because I lost interest or met a girl, like some of the other guys. No, I gave up baseball because it would never be the same for me again. Sure, I could have come back as an outfielder like the guy in the John Tunis novel, but after tossing the ball around with Mantle and Gehrig and receiving pitch advice from Drysdale, what would that look like really? After it was all said and done, I gave up baseball to focus more on life.
They’re similar in so many ways, that it’s easy to get one confused with the other. In both “games,” a person has to overcome disappointment, unfair circumstances, and even deal with a few bad calls now and then. And speaking metaphorically, a guy (or gal) has got to know how to throw a fastball when the situation calls for it, when to go with the curve, and when to throw the slider. It also requires a lot of listening to the “catcher,” the coaches, friends and parents. And honestly, it’s all about practice, practice, practice. The old adage about a person playing the way he or she practices was never more true. Still, the best advice I got on the game of life was from some guy calling himself “Charles” Mantle. He once said, “A win’s a win.” It took me several years to know just what he was getting at, but I think I understood it better after my baseball days were finished.
He and his friends, “Henry” Gehrig and “Robert” Clemente also taught me that, “only one game matters” and that tomorrow is for getting better. In 1997, I thought they were only talking about baseball, but sitting on a tractor in the middle of a pasture some years later, I know that it was about so much more. I look back now and I realize what that seventeen year old kid needed to learn most was that the best game on earth is life. I needed to hear that because I hadn’t really been living it much, not since dad died in Iraq.
Mantle also said that we have to hurry, “we don’t have much time.”
Yeah, I made it through all those lost days and nights, went to school, did my chores and woke up and did it all over again. But for a while, I wasn’t really there for any of it. It was something more like, I moved to the rhythm of it all, playing my part, saying my lines and swaying with the other dancers, but it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t living. Through it all, the farm was the place where my mom and dad took long walks out along the fence row, sat and watched the sunset under the oak tree, kissed and fell in love and made a life. It is also the place where some bend in the rules of the universe allowed the ghosts of Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig and Roberto Clemente to walk out of a freshly mowed hay meadow and toss a baseball around with a seventeen year old kid.
I don’t know how that happened or why, only that it was and is. I said before that I never saw my dad again that summer, but I never said a word about the summers that came after. And I never said a word about Mantle or Gehrig either.
On summer nights, sometimes in the late spring, and on occasion, the early fall, just before sunset, mom or I would see a shadow walking out across the field, moving past the oak tree or the pecan tree, coming up the fence row or stepping out from behind the barn. Most often, it was dad, stopping by for a quick conversation, a brief hug, but sometimes it was Mantle or “The Iron Horse” checking in on their former student. A smart man would probably make some observation about cosmic doors closing and other windows opening. I don’t know about any of that.
What I do know is that there’s a farm and a barn, a hay meadow and an oak tree just off of Highway 19, out on Route 5 in Ramblewood, Texas where ghosts stop by on seemingly random afternoons. They walk across the pasture and talk about the old days while the whippoorwills and quail call. And if there’s a place like that in Texas, then I bet there’s another somewhere, maybe in Iowa.
In the years that have followed, the farm has changed in ways that I never imagined. After the turn of the century, we converted the south pasture into a field for growing soy beans and it created a nice boon for a farm that previously had always existed just inches from the brink of bankruptcy. The neighbors asked why we didn’t expand our new crop into the pasture to the west. We told them we wanted to keep some of the old farm “the way it was”, and left it at that.
As for me, well I never made it to college, but in 2001, I met a girl named Marcie at the J & C Farm and Implement store over in Mt. Verdant. She has dark hair, bright eyes and a smile that fills me with a happiness that I never knew was possible. We re-modeled the farm house and made it our home in 2003, put in a new kitchen with granite counter tops and a deep industrial sink, just like they show on all of the home renovation shows on Saturday mornings. The next summer, we re-finished the carriage house for mom. She said that dad felt a little weird stopping by to visit mom with Marcie in the house.
Marcie and I were blessed with a daughter the following year, and coincidentally, I published a little book on pitching techniques for adolescents to help with the increased financial demands around the house. With no more baseball cards to sell, I had to find some way to cover the cost of diapers!
Still, the non-fiction sports market is a precarious one. It takes the name recognition of a former star player (or a Ph. D. in the field) to really succeed; so my next book was a fictional offering, a tale about a sheriff in a small town in west Texas, who utilizes his uncanny connection with the paranormal spirits that hang around the family ranch to solve murder mysteries. One might say that the idea just came to me one afternoon….
I changed a few details, made it a ranch instead of a farm, west Texas instead of east and made the protagonist a sheriff instead of an old ballplayer. The series caught on just enough to get a multi-book deal, with a nice advance that arrived around the same time my second daughter was born. So, sitting on a new John Deere tractor out in a hay meadow in the middle of east Texas in 2013, I have to admit that so far, it’s been a nice life. And if I ever think about baseball, it’s only when and if my kids show a little interest in whatever game is showing on television on a Sunday afternoon. If they ask, I tell them (again) how their dad pitched the first four innings of the Ramblewood state championship game, the really close one that clinched it all for the 1997 Wrangler baseball team. Ramblewood 2, Westlake 1.
THE END
Notes
First of all, I have to acknowledge the tremendous debt owed to John R. Tunis for his 1940 book, The Kid from Tomkinsville. Take out all of the ghosts, and this story could have been titled, “The Kid from Ramblewood.” As it stands, the piece is at the very least, an homage to Mr. Tunis’ far superior work!
Second, many of the avid baseball fans “in the audience” will recognize a few not so subtle references to David Clyde, the eighteen-year-old “phenomenon” who pitched for the Texas Rangers from 1973 to 1975. I was a youngster growing up in Texas around that time and kept my fingers crossed that Mr. Clyde would make a successful come back, either with my favorite team, the Rangers, or in one of his subsequent attempts with the Cleveland Indians and Houston Astros. The protagonist’s family name (“Davidson”) was an intentional choice, as at least one part of this tale is based (albeit loosely) on real events.
And finally, many, many thanks to the writer and director (Phil Alden Robinson), as well as the cast and crew from one of my all-time favorite movies, Field of Dreams (Yes, that is the one about the other magical field up in Iowa.). Their wonderful adaptation of the 1982 book by W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe, was an obvious point of inspiration in crafting this work.
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