The Stuff of Memories

The World Series begins tonight. The Houston Astros v Los Angeles Dodgers. Game one in the City of Angels.

Unfortunately, with that opening sentence, I have probably lost half of you. Such is the state of my favorite game in 2017. When it comes to sports, Americans would rather watch protesting football players, or the tattoo-covered freaks who prowl the courts of the NBA. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As a proponent of the free market, I must respect the decisions of my fellow citizens and admit that my game is no longer the national pastime. Fine. I will watch, with the same fevered anticipation I brought to the first fall classic I ever watched, the 1968 matchup between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals. That’s the one where Mickey Lolitch won 3 games and outdueled Bob Gibson. By the time the 1969 Series was over and I had witnessed the New York Mets upset the Baltimore Orioles, I was good and hooked. Haven’t missed one since.

But for me it goes further than the World Series. When I was a kid, I hated being inside...more than practically anything. Winter was the worst. Sure, snow was cool, but only for a while. By the time the end of March came around, I was about to lose my mind which meant that my Mother was down to her very last nerve. What always saved my life was the beginning of baseball.

Baseball meant that it was warm enough to be outside again. Baseball meant that me and my friends could gather in the field behind Elmont Elementary and play all day Saturday, and Sunday afternoons after church. Baseball meant collecting baseball cards and snapping off a slug of that hard slab of bubble gum inside each pack. Baseball meant that my big brother and I would set the old green radio in the window sill and reenact the Richmond Braves games from Frank Soden’s play by play call. When they were on the road old Frank would get the plays fed to him on a ticker, then recreate the action with the help of truly horrible sound effects in a studio in Richmond....

Yes fans, the pressure is mounting here in Rochester, New York on this humid night as Hal Breeden bats with the bases full of Braves. There’s nowhere to put the big guy and there’s a full count. Just listen to the roar of that crowd...(cue the pathetic crowd noise sound that sounded more like some guy trying to hawk popcorn in a wind tunnel). 

I would toe the imaginary rubber in the my back yard, then kick and deliver the 3-2 pitch to my brother who was waiting at the plate(which was the lid to the trash can), Hal Breeden’s capable stand-in. 

The Rochester hurler peers in for the sign, gets the one he wants, rocks and deals...(cue the sound of the cracking of a bat which was actually Frank tapping the base of the microphone with a number 2 pencil). Breeden swings and lifts a high fly ball deep to left field! That’s got a chance...it’s going...going...Gone!!!

Every now and then a magical moment would happen when whatever Frank had just described was exactly what happened in my back yard...my brother would swing and lift a high fly ball over the roof of our house, across the street out front and into the marshy hollow where Mrs. Lawrence’s natural spring was, a prodigious blast of over 300 feet! Of course, that marked the end of the festivities, since that property was well guarded by Mrs. Lawrence herself and her ever present 12 gauge shot gun which she would shoot every once in a while at nothing in particular, just to scare us pesky kids away. It worked. That just meant I would have to get Dad to drive us into Ashland to buy a new baseball.

So, I’ll be watching tonight, and I’ll be recalling a thousand such memories that are swimming around in my head, each of them wonderful, and oddly calming.

Play ball!

"What Does Your Wife Do?"

Today was my wife's first day back at school after her long summer break. It's as good a time as any to answer a question I get asked a lot pertaining to her employment...What does your wife do?

Setting aside for a moment my often suggested alternative question, (What doesn't she do?), she works at an elementary school here in the west end of Henrico County as an Interventionist. Whenever I use that descriptor I get puzzled looks. Actually, whenever I hear the term "interventionist" I think it should be a new Cabinet level post in the Trump White House.(but that's another story). In Pam's case it describes someone who takes small groups of K thru 5th grade students who are struggling in math and reading for specialized extra instruction in short, thirty minute sessions. I probably just made a hash of the proper description, but it's the best I can do, having not been schooled in the esoteric language of the modern education bureaucracy. However you describe the job, she is unbelievably good at it...so good, in fact, that when her students learn that they have improved so much in their reading and math skills that they no longer need to be in Mrs. Dunnevant's class, many of them burst into tears!

Generally speaking, here's how it works:

Four second graders who are all horrible at math are marched down to her class for a thirty minute session with Mrs. Dunnevant. They walk into the most colorful, crazy, fun looking class in the entire school. They meet this energetic, beautiful blonde woman who makes them all feel like they are the coolest kids in the history of elementary education and she is the luckiest teacher in America for getting to teach them! What a coincidence, right?! Then she introduces them all to the thousand ways that they can earn a stunning variety of stickers, gadgets and gizmos that she has picked out just for them! Some kids warm up to her immediately, others take longer, but eventually they all eventually fall in love with Mrs. Dunnevant.

What makes this all the more remarkable is the fact that many of her students can barely speak English. See, along with her regular, garden variety west end kids, Pam has had kids from Russia, Pakistan, India, Jordan, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Vietnam. Occasionally, I'll surprise her with an iced coffee from Starbucks, and when I walk into her class it looks like a summer camp meeting at the United Nations.

But, no matter where these kids come from, by the time they finish a year with my wife a couple of things are true: #1 they are measurably better at math and reading and #2 they know that Mrs. Dunnevant loves them.

It's a part time job. She has no benefits and she gets paid by the hour, which is officially 4 and a half per day, although her actually time spent working is closer to 6 or 7. It's at times overwhelming, at other times frustrating. But, when she reports for work at the beginning of a year and hardly any of last year's students are back, she gets the incredible thrill of knowing she has made a difference.

So yeah, that's what my wife does.

The Triumph of the Id

For close to fifty years now our world has been committed to the pursuit of self expression. While our parents had been taught to keep their emotions in check and a tight throttle on their tongue, my generation and generations after mine have kicked self restraint to the curb with characteristically reckless abondon. In this new world, express yourself, has been the mantra. Don't keep your emotions bottled up inside! You be you! Cry, weep and wail, gnash those teeth, and by all means...do it in public.

Nowhere is this new brand of comportment more on display than in the sporting world. When I was growing up, I used to watch guys like Walter Payton score touchdown after touchdown, then stoically flip the ball to the referee, with not even a stifled fistpump. I would watch Bob Gibson blowing hitters away in high pressure games with a facial expression which would convince the casual observer that the man was engaged in an activity no more stressful than mowing the lawn. 

All of this changed during the 1960's, (didn't everything?), when Homer Jones performed the very first touchdown celebrating spike of a football. Soon after, Billy "white shoes" Johnson performed the funky chicken after a touchdown reception, and it was off to the races. Baseball was slow to adapt to these self congratulatory demonstrations, primarily because baseball has always been slow to adapt to anything, really. But adapt they have.

If you've watched any of this year's baseball post season you have witnessed the overwhelming triumph of the Id. When a pitcher gets out of a tight jam, he practically goes berserk in an orgy of guttural screams and fist pumping. When a batter gets a hit, even an inconsequential one, he can be counted on to gesticulate wildly to his teammates in the dugout, as if he had just won the powerball lottery or split the freaking atom or something. I'm told by all of the smart people that baseball needs more, not less, of this sort of spleen venting. More drama is what people want, more pathos, less circumspection. After all, I'm advised, sports is entertainment, and what is entertainment without emotion?

I can practically feel the eye rolling going on out there among readers thirty and younger. I get it. My day is past, your day is ascendant. But, as I have watched baseball these past couple of weeks I've had a nagging feeling that the antics I'm seeing are merely a reflection of the greater society. Everything has turned into entertainment, even our politics. And what is entertainment without emotion? It's like, fifty years ago somebody made the decision that manners and decorum were somehow bourgeois. Keeping a lid on your emotions was suddenly soul crushing. Courtesy, class and sportsmanship were vestiges of a bygone era inhabited by a generation of repressed suckers.

Then we wake up one day, and Donald Trump is President.

I don't know about you, but I could do with a little self restraint in America about now, a little less drama.  A bit of class, grace and decorum would feel like  a godsend in 2017. A touch of humility in my public officials would feel like a cool breeze on a hot summer day, wouldn't it?

Missing This...

I haven't seen my kids since this picture was taken back in July. I've talked to them on the phone, texted them, shared goofy dog pictures with them, even Facetimed them...but I haven't been able to give them a hug in three months. Some might not think this is that big of a deal. I know people whose children live on the west coast or even out of the country all together. For them, three months would be nothing. But, many of my friends get to see their kids all the time because they live on the other side of town or even down the street. When they move out of state, this is how it has to be. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I suppose I'm missing them more right now because for the last four years, October was the month when I would rent a cabin down in Gatlinburg for five days. Patrick and Sarah would drive the 4 hours up from Nashville, and Kaitlin and Jon the 6 hours from Columbia. We would have a blast. The air was chilly, the views of the Smoky Mountains from the hot tub on the deck were sensational, and Pam would make all sorts of insanely delicious fall dishes that we would all make pigs of ourselves eating. One such trip served as one of our  first opportunities to observe the new girl, Sarah, up close. We put that poor thing through the ringer, even insisting that she zip-line over a 300 foot gorge for our amusement. She was game, though, and we came away impressed with her willingness to do any stupid thing we planned for her that weekend.

But this year, our Gatlinburg trip was derailed for a multitude of reasons that are too boring to chronicle. We were planning on making up for it by making a road trip visit to both Nashville and Columbia after we returned from Maine. Alas, that plan has been sacrificed on the alter of the Great Exploding Dishwasher Disaster of '17, whereby we are being held hostage by a gang of contractors who may or may not show up at our home any minute to begin hauling our furniture away, kicking us into a hotel for a week and ripping up and replacing our hard wood floors. So, no fall trip for us.

What this all means is that the next time I will get to see my kids won't be until Thanksgiving, and even that might be weird since, our luck, we'll be staying in a Holiday 
Inn somewhere when they all get here. I'm sure everything will work out fine. It's just that whenever we are separated from these guys for significant periods of time, I get a little squirrelly. Besides, I haven't seen my Grand-dog in at least six months. Oh, the humanity!!!!

I'll get over it. Thank goodness for cell phones and FaceTime, right? But, I still miss this...

I Fought The Law...and the law won.

A day like today is better left alone, left to stew in its own juices. To speak about it, might give it even more power. Perhaps silence would be the more prudent course. Maybe, if I ignore the events of the day, they will fade into inglorious oblivion, just a droplet of water in the lost mist of time. On the other hand....I write, so there's that.

Today, I spent the majority of my time and energy doing battle with Leviathan, in this case the Tennessee Department of Revenue outpost of Leviathan, with a brief visit to the Wells Fargo division. These two institutions are both basically field offices of Leviathan, but both are fully Leviathan, root and branch. The reason for this sad 4 month project has been the quest to arrange things so that my son, who lives in Nashville, can obtain proper registration stickers for his car. Unfortunately, even though the car is his...especially since he is the one making the payments, his name appears no where on the title, since the loan is solely in his father's name. Wells Fargo, the Enron of the banking world, holds the title and will not allow me to transfer the title into my son's name while there is a lien outstanding. So far during these past 4 months, my son has received one $150 ticket for driving on expired tags. It has been my fervent hope and prayer to get this cleared up so more such tickets will not be forthcoming. Today, I had been led to believe, was going to be V-GB day( Victory over Government Bureaucracy Day). However, after nearly 4 hours of telephone conversations with three different functionaries, it became apparent to me that the day was going down in a fiery crash of recrimination and accusation. Once it was all over, I had one last job to do...inform Patrick of the results of the day. Since he has been the one ducking into parking garages at the sight of cops in downtown Nashville for the past 4 months, he is understandably vested in a positive conclusion to this bureaucratic infighting. How was I going to break it to him that we were essentially back at square one. I had promised him a phone call, but thought better of it. I decided on a carefully worded email, the first paragraph is reprinted below:

Patrick,

I'm aware that I told you that I would call you as soon as I had news about this nightmare, but I'm afraid if I do, I will forget some important detail and also, if I retell this one more time, I might lose control of myself in an undignified manner. So, I've chosen to write out this summary of today's news instead.

There is no need to regale you with the gory details of the day. Suffice it to say that when fighting city hall, the first casualty is always the sanity of the attacker. In the case of the Tennessee Department of Revenue, this loss of sanity is hastened by the thick southern drawl of the clerks in question. All of them sound like your grandmother. In your minds eye, they are wearing aprons and pulling cherry pies out of the oven while trying to explain to you why there is no way in hell they can register a car in Tennessee to someone who lives in Virginia...But, I can certainly understand why you are so frustrated, bless your heart. Even when you can get them to admit that they signed for a FedEx package which contained the transfer title in question, but somehow no one at the Tennessee Department of Revenue can find it, ...even then....they make it sound like your fault. Now, I admit that it's a shame that it got lost, but you probably should never have sent that in the first place!

So, after a 4 hour battle with the bureaucratic state bequeathed to us by FDR's New Deal and fattened considerably by every single President since, I can report that the old adage is still true...

I fought the law and...the law won.

My Entertaining Family

Pam: How come having this hole in the floor makes me not want to cook in here?

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A text conversation between me and my son from yesterday:

Me: I have spoken to two people thus far this morning, one from Wells Fargo bank and one from the Tennessee Department of Revenue. Still no answer. But, someone at the Tennessee Department of Revenue is working on it and will call me back with an answer sometime today.(Editor's note: No such call back). Wells Fargo did, in fact, send the transfer title to the Tennessee Department of Revenue on the 28th of August and they have a signed receipt and a FedEx tracking number to prove it.

Patrick: OMG. Thanks for the update. All of this incompetency is making me more conservative by the hour.

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Kaitlin: Jon made the mistake of mentioning "Lolly and Pops." Now, Jackson won't stop staring at the door.

My family provides all the entertainment I need on a daily basis.

New Things Are Hard

Everyone who knows me would probably consider me an extrovert. That's a fair assessment, I suppose, but my extroverted personality isn't absolute. I'm more like a selective extrovert, for although I am generally comfortable in large crowds of people, my comfort level has it's limits. Yesterday was a great example.

As most of you know, I have been attending a new church for the past year or so, Hope Church, just across the Gouchland County line on Patterson Avenue. After being a member of the same church for 30 years, it's difficult to start from scratch at a new place with new people. But, Pam and I have done just that. We've joined a small group and are slowly getting involved, but it's a tedious process. Every Sunday when we walk through the doors of the place we still feel like we don't know a soul. So, when I saw that the church was planning a fund raiser golf tournament to raise money for their youth ministry I thought, what better way to get to know some people? I signed up and was paired with three total strangers.

I have to confess here that I don't know that I've ever experienced such social discomfort since, maybe, junior high. As I drove into the parking lot of the golf course, an actual knot rose in my throat. It startled me. What the heck was this all about? Why was I suddenly nervous? I usually think that it's the other hundred people who should be nervous at the prospect of meeting me! But, yesterday it was me who was suddenly overcome with dread. I carried my clubs around the clubhouse and saw a sea of men. I scanned the crowd for a familiar face and came up empty. 

I finally found my cart...5B. This was not a good sign. The letter "B" meant that there was going to be two foursomes on the same tee box. In other words, I began steeling myself for a 5 hour round of golf with three guys who I didn't know. I read their names on the cart sign. Their clubs were already on the cart, but they weren't. I headed to the registration table desperately trying to recognize someone...anyone.

Wait...that guy looks familiar. He's one of the guys who does music, isn't he? Oh, and there's Pete Bowell, one of the pastors. That's a good sign. At least I know I'm at the right course. It's such an odd feeling being in such a large crowd of people, yet feeling completely isolated. Everywhere I looked there were small groups of friends yucking it up, then that group would spot another small group of friends and they both would begin yucking it up. Meanwhile, I was busy eating my boxed lunch at a table by myself...which sounds quite pathetic, but it really wasn't. It's just one of those awkward situations that we all find ourselves in every once in a while.

After woofing down my lunch, suddenly some guy walked up to me, extended a hand and said, "I know you, you're Doug Dunnevant." 

Nothing. He didn't look like a golfer...

"1976. Patrick Henry High School."

Still, nothing. The great scene from Groundhog Day flashed before my eyes...Ned Ryerson, BING.

"Robbie Robertson!!"

Yes! Sudden recognition. It was Robbie Freaking Robertson! I hadn't seen the guy since graduation. BING!!

"Robbie! Great to see you again, man! How long have you been going to Hope?"

"Naw, not me...I work here at the Club."

But at least I knew someone on the premises. Things were looking up! 

As I made my way down to the range to hit a few practice balls I spotted some dude in knickers. He had the whole Scottish highlander getup, plaid socks, beret, the whole works. I thought to myself, that guy is either a scratch golfer or completely without self consciousness. Either way, probably a fun guy. On my way back to the cart I ran across a familiar face. I recognized him and he recognized me. We stopped and stared at each other, both frantically searching our memories for a name. This guy was in my small group, for goodness sake, and I still couldn't recall his name!! How embarrassing. Finally, I think I said something lame like...small group, this week's meeting is at your house, right? Its times like this when you consider the merits of the hermit life. Maybe the monk existence has its advantages. 

Finally, we were all called to our carts by a guy with a microphone who went over the rules, then handed the mic to David Dwight, senior pastor of the church. He made a few remarks, then said a prayer. By the time I made it over to my cart, I was greeted by my cart mate for the day...knickers guy. He ended up being very nice and great fun...but sadly, not a scratch golfer.

5 hours and 35 minutes later, we finally limped off the golf course and headed to the clubhouse for dinner. That's a long time to spend on a golf course...a very long time. In fact, I'm reasonably certain it's the longest amount of time I have ever spent playing a single round of golf...certainly the longest amount of time I've spent with total strangers on a golf course. Luckily for me, they were all nice guys and we got along well. Still, by the time I made it home, I was wiped out. It turns out that playing golf poorly combined with making conversation with strangers for 6 hours is a lot like...work.

But, on the bright side, this coming Sunday I will have a greater chance of making eye contact with someone I know. There will be a flicker of recognition, then we will exchange a nod and a grin. I have determined to remember their names...Wayne, Barry, and Bill.

New things are hard. Even when you are determined and committed...new things are hard.