Hi, Everyone – It’s been a busy week. I’ve been working hard on my canal boat story, To Live and Die In the Floating World, going over my publisher’s edits and recommendations, as well as those of a couple of friends, trying to make things sharper, clearer. The tough thing is that, once it’s in print, I’ll see errors and inelegances that I should have noticed before, but now it’s too late.
In the meantime, and more importantly, baseball season is underway and I can’t help going back into the archives once more, after my old article on Beverly Cleary, and will share another piece I wrote many years ago for The Oregonian on baseball, silent conversation and the passage of time.
I hope you enjoy it.
Best to all, Steve
The Long Conversation
After winter’s uncounted hours, baseball season began this week and time can start again. Fans—at least those who live in cities with a ball team—will rediscover the quiet pleasures of keeping an eye on the field on a warm summer day while shelling peanuts from a sack and talking with an old friend.
Yet the best baseball conversations consist of the unspoken communion of the game itself. For more than twenty-five years, since he could first lurch at a gently tossed nerf ball, my older son and I have carried on a long, wordless conversation with ball and glove, conducted in the yard or a vacant grade school field.
Over the years we have progressed from foam rubber to tennis balls to real baseballs. Whatever the ball, each toss has been a question, every catch an answer, a relaxed seminar of challenge and response, memory and anticipation.
We start at close range with easy tosses, conversation starters, easing us into the familiar whoosh of the throw and the whap of the ball hitting the glove. Sometimes, when thrown hard and well and caught just right, the ball makes a resounding pop and we raise our eyebrows and smile at a thing done well.
As confidence grows and arms get warm we back up a few steps, then a few more, the discussion growing more earnest. We’re ready now to air out more ambitious propositions. We waggle our gloves, fingers up to request the long parabola of a pop-up, or fingers down for a ground ball, snagged nicely and returned with a low, serious throw – the smooth tag applied, catching one more of the thousands of phantom runners who have challenged our arms over the years. We both make the occasional bad throw or let a grounder trickle under our gloves. We turn and run after the errant ball without complaint; these things happen, take it easy.
For years, I was the teacher, my son the pupil. He learned to make the back-handed stab and the cross-body toss, to settle under the fly ball and catch it over the throwing shoulder, ready to make a clean transfer to the bare hand for a quick accurate throw. With time he has become a better fielder than I ever was, intuitive and graceful. But he is modest about it, knowing that any conversation darkens when you brag.
Now the challenges run the other way. He still sees the ground ball clearly and adjusts quick as a dragon fly to the bad bounce, lopes easily for the running catch. But I sometimes misjudge the grounder or chase the long fly ball with the gracelessness of a three-legged dog.
Years ago, when we were both younger, he simply threw, with the child’s confidence that I, a grown-up, his dad, would catch it. Now he thinks first, adjusting a little to my diminishing speed and uncertain glove work. These things happen too.
My son is grown up now, long ago moved away, and the discussion is interrupted often, sometimes for a year or more. But it’s only in recess, there to be taken up once more when baseball season has come, and time – and our conversation – can begin again.
(A final note: My son and I played catch a couple of weeks ago for the first time in years. It was as if we’d never stopped.)
My novels Tangier, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka are available through your local bookstore or the usual online sources. You can now also order them directly on my website here. There's no charge for handling or shipping, so this represents a substantial savings over other online sites. I'll be happy to sign copies if you'll let me know who it's going to.