“A Late, Ardent Convert To Cheese In Her Wheel-House”

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Note: Ruminant, still largely flat on her back due to spinal fusion surgery, submits this earlier, but still heart-felt, column. . .

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—6/14/10—There, nestled amongst the pages of my beloved New Yorker magazine, was Michael Savage (like a cockroach in my crème brûlée), saying: “I still can’t believe that in this day and age an adult would go to a baseball game.”

Ahh, Michael Savage, of “The Savage Nation,” a purveyor of reactionary, chrome-yellow-journalism after my own black-eyed pea of a heart.

Only Savage could go after baseball, though, for Chrissakes. Baseball! OK, he calls Sotomayor a “stone-hearted racist and a narcissicist”—you’ve got to give the guy high marks for hyperbole—but slam baseball? In THIS economy? In THESE times, when anything so thoroughly red-white-and-blue and smelling of apple pie (with a side of steroids, alas) should serve simply to buck up our spirits? Call the national pastime puerile, past-its-shelf-date, boring, even (as he suggests to interviewer Kelefa Sanneh) vaguely “Cuban,” “Communist”?

Well, up with THIS, Sir, to channel Keith Olbermann as interpreted by Ben Aflleck, I will not put!

I LOVE baseball . . . with the fanatical love of a late-late convert.

I came to my passion for the game, as I came to my last (really) marriage, late in life. I almost missed the heat, as it were; the game; the seat on America’s big Zazen cushion.

For, make no mistake about it, as cricket is to the English, born and bred, as well as naturalized, baseball is to Americans, even if their first language will ALWAYS be Spanish.

Baseball, for all we know, may be the key to the universe; The Great Universal Question (for which the answer will always be ‘42’: see A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe); the only cosmic and un-patentable glue able to hold this great nation together. “Savage Nation”? You can have it. I’ll take my Mets, and Joe Torre’s Dodgers. I’ll take David Wright’s Gary-Cooper countenance and players from hither and yon with increasingly inscrutable names; the hawking and spitting and gum-wad-chewing guy-ness of this interminable game; even the cup-adjusting; the taped riffs of organ music (whyEVER the theme from “Zorba, The Greek,” just for example?); the baroque and nonsensical and evocative and poetic language (“Cheddar cheese in his wheel house,” “A little bit of chin music,” “Showing bunt”).

When Obama’s up to the tops of his waders in Bush’s leftover pig-s&%t, we’re at war, seemingly forever, in  Pakghabisraq, and Cheney’s back-room-deals with Big Oil have done things for the Gulf Katrina couldn’t even imagine . . . well, I’ll take baseball, on the sofa; on the car radio; as background music in the bedroom we can’t afford to air-condition, the lazy ceiling fan revolving over us in hypnotic circles whispering, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.” A field of dreams.

I fell in love with my jazz-musician-husband, my rough-and-tumble Rochester-NY-born father-in-law (whom we all call ‘Clyde,’ for some inscrutable reason), AND baseball some 13 years ago, when Dean and I first met.

I was an effete, depressed, cerebral Lefty. My husband was, and is, a participle-mangling, college drop-out (OK: so it was the North Texas jazz program), musical savant of a trumpeter. My father-in-law was, and is, an irascible, soft-as-a-raspberry-truffle-on-the-interior, retired pressroom foreman, who nearly lost a hand IN a press one day, but who has been playing golf daily, ever since, through the pain.

I loved Dean at first sight, but what “language” did we have in common? On what field of modest dreams might we (and his Dad) meet, chat, and fet to know one another better? Build it, and they will come . . . together.

Michael Savage misses many points, but he seems to adore his gray poodle, Teddy, and so I have hope for him, because the lessons you learn from baseball are pretty much the same ones you learn from living with and loving a dog: 1) Be loyal to your team; 2) Remember: for the most part, it’s only a game (and—goody, goody, there’s another one tomorrow); 3) most of what’s fun in life is pretty simple and basic and repetitive (chase and fetch; chase and fetch); and 4) Once you know the “rules” (as in leaping for Frisbees, making love selflessly, NOT cheating), bliss is not far beyond your grasp.

When my best friend, Angela Zerbe, formerly of Cincinnati, learned I was in love with an American (for the first time in my wander-lust-filled life), she asked only, “Does he like baseball?” If his name had been Harry, or Hal, she’d have been eve happier, but “Dean” would do. And “Clyde” as well. (So, the latter fellow eggs on some dumb ball club in Florida, but that’s part of baseball’s mystique as well: you bloom, and root, where you’re planted, or transplanted . . . though the Washington’s Nats would be a stretch.)

From the horrors of modern life (in no particular order)—the friends with bi-polar and personality disorder; the incarceration of young, map-challenged doofuses in Iran and South Korea; the continuing freedom (in an undisclosed location) of he who outted Valerie Plame; BP’s spending billions on an ad campaign to burnish the company’s image while brown pelicans gag on crude oil in the wetlands; the fact of death, itself, for one and all of us (Adieu, Beloved Edd Balagot, my high school buddy!) . . . baseball is a gentle distraction at best.

And no, it’s NOT for “adults,” whatever the hell THOSE are. It’s for all us kids. Everywhere. It asks so very little—the suspension of disbelief for, yes, quite a few innings at times. But it gives back in spades. It is ALWAYS a “teachable moment.” It’s as Zen as Americans get . . . and it’s pretty damn Zen, for all its chin music, cheddar cheese, and wheel houses.

For the very young, there are many lessons possible to learn over the course of one game, that it is mind-boggling not everyone takes their kids to the ballpark—especially the LOCAL ballpark, in the LOCAL park, or at the LOCAL school.

So, thanks, Clyde, for the patient lessons in lingo, though I’m still working on the logic of the balk. And thanks, Dean, for the seat next to you on the sofa, and for the gift of shrieking and jumping up and down those years when “we” win (and, Oh God, the Mets don’t do that often). And thanks, to the game, itself, for being so guileless, and aw-shucks, and retro, and winsome, and seasonal, and ephemeral, and permanent, all at the same time.

And, Michael Savage, you can’t shuffle off this mortal coil still slamming . . . baseball: it’s Everyman’s ticket to Nirvana, damn it all! Just ask Teddy.