i remain shaken from the assault on our constitution yesterday. i am very proud of Sarah for her response to this event and the reactions to it. i am ashamed of the media and the politicians who attempted to compare yesterday to earlier events and promote their agenda rather than factually reporting what was happening. Then, in the middle of the night, the first few lines of the below poem flew into my head. i don’t know from whence they came.  It may be the first in a series as other words flew right behind the initial ones. It may be the beginning of a much longer poem. i don’t know right now. It is not associated with yesterday’s tragic occurrence in our capital, but i suspect that event fostered those first words flying in the middle of the night to my head. It is, for me, an escape for a while.

then back when

once, back when, a man and a woman walked;
then back when, they got
a horse, a mule, a camel, or an ass
and
rode slowly;
then back when, they tied sticks to the animals
and
carried things with them;
then back when, they made a wagon with wheels
to be pulled by the animals
and
they went further and faster with more;
then back when, they got bicycles and pedaled;
then back when, they got on a train
and
rode further and faster;
then back when, they got a self-powered vehicle
and
cranked it to ride without an animal or pedaling;
then back when, they put on big wheels and paved roads
and
went faster and farther;
then back when, they got a vehicle with an enclosed cab and a starter switch
and
rode in style;
then back when, they added an automatic transmission and air conditioning
and
rode in more comfort;
then back when, they added radio
and
listened to  people talk and play music while they rode;
then back when, they installed a global positioning system
and
knew how to get where they were going and quit going down untraveled roads;
then back when, they added telephones and talked to other folks far away;
now they are looking to get a self-driving car
and
i wonder when they won’t be able to walk or find their way
without their gadgets.

I spent just short of a quarter of a century in the Navy with my sworn obligation to defend the constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Today, i saw our constitution attacked.

i will let all of you and the media throw rocks.

i will only say what i saw today is wrong. It is an attack on our constitution and there is no question in my mind the President is responsible for it happening.

i have watched the media reports today for five hours and i did not hear a factual report of the news. i heard commentators use this terrible event to support their stand on political issues.

i won’t tell you my position other than what i have written above.

i will tell you i have cried more than several times this afternoon.

Our country, our constitution has suffered greatly.

i will cry some more.

After i posted my curmudgeon rant last night, i got to thinking. That is not always a good thing.

Of course, that post centered on baseball, leading to recalling my three quarters of a century love affair with the game, leading to thinking about my past, admitting again, i am one lucky man, leading to me to quit…er, bitching.

Considering what we experienced this year and what fallout from this year we will deal with in 2021, i decided i would focus on the good things this lucky man has experienced.

There was this place i was born and will always be connected. It was and remains home — i will go back there and rest beside my parents when this crazy life takes the  final turn. Back when it was mine and i was its youngster, it was a town in the Faulkner sense of the word, not a village, not a hamlet, not a city, but a town. Round about five thousand souls spread out on farmland with the aptly re-named Town Creek (It was “Sinking Creek” in the beginning) running under the square they built, convenient but flood prone. No matter. That square was the center of the universe for Lebanon, Tennessee. Restaurants, three hardware stores, clothing stores, two drug stores (back before folks thought that “drug store” meant something else), banks, cab station, cobblers, and a couple of pool halls, all dominated by a gothic-like courthouse. On the first block off the square of the two roads, one east-west, the other north-south were more shops and restaurants and two movie theaters.

Farmers came in and sat on the worn concrete steps of the courthouse, chewing tobacco, whittling cedar wood, and solving the world’s problems although their world was significantly smaller than today’s world.

Cars were left in parking spaces unlocked. Even homes didn’t have locked doors until the inhabitants went to bed. Children walked to school unless they lived too far away, and then they took the school bus and the school patrol was comprised of eighth graders until they created a junior high across town and the sixth graders became the school patrol, a responsibility and an honor rewarded with a tour of the state penitentiary and a baseball game at Sulphur Dell in Nashville.

Shorts, no shirt, no shoes were de rigueur from mid-May until September. Bee stings, mosquito bites, poison oak or ivy were part of the learning process.

And the sandlot, empty fields, backyard baseball kept on. Until the first Little League came to town (1954? Where’s George Harding when i need him?), we played pickup ball. We got some rudimentary instructions from our fathers. Mine showed me how to throw a curve and a knuckle ball. We listened to Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese, hawking Falstaff beer,  while we watched the “Game (that’s one game) of the Week” on Saturdays, and occasionally, our dads would take us to the above mentioned Sulphur Dell to watch the Double A, Southern Association, Nashville Vols.

We still played pickup ball with various rules for yard size and whose yard was chosen for the field.

On the Sabbath, we went to Church for Sunday School, and the church service at 11:00 dressed to the nines with fresh haircuts combed just right and then dressed a little more casually (but not much) for the Methodist Youth Fellowship, the men’s choir supper, and the evening service with short sermons and lots of gospel songs.

Beginning in the early ’50’s, we began to watch one channel, WSM, which chose which network show to watch of the three, NBC, CBS, or ABC, which went off the air at midnight and came back on at three p.m. the next afternoon (with the Kate Smith hour). Red Skeleton, Milton Berle, Martha Raye, The Ted Mack Amateur Hour, Fred Waring, and Ed Sullivan were staples. Saturday mornings, television came on early with the kids no longer playing in the lot next door but scrunched around the television watching “Andy Devine’s Gang” with Froggy the Gremlin who had a magic twanger set off by “Nice” Midnight the Cat, and of course, Buster Brown and his dog Tige both of whom lived in a shoe. Gunga Ram captivated in his serial. There was the “Sealtest Big Top” and “Red Ryder” and there was Devine again as Jingles on “The Adventures of  Wild Bill Hickok with Guy Madison as Wild Bill. And there were others before that baseball game.

And we went to school and played during recess on equipment that would get the school administration in jail today for endangerment. We had fights and we played every kind of game and sport known to kids.

And we mustered outside for roll call during fire drills and we hid under our desks to save us from the Red Menace dropping the H-Bomb and we got the first polio shots and we put baseball cards in our one-gear bicycle spokes and put our gear for sports and other pursuits in the handlebar basket.

Then we grew up to realize some of us were male and some female. i fell in love from a dream. Then i “went” with many wonderful girls, taking them to movies, the fair, and if it cost more than ten dollars, i couldn’t afford it. That little town had so many wonderful young women, i remain amazed.

And i am going to stop now thinking about all of that stream of wonderful things in my past i was intending to include.

You see, we learned right before i grilled a great steak for supper that one of Maureen’s closest cousins with a wonderful family passed away last night after dealing with brain cancer for about half a terrible year. i was probably closer to Greg Cook than anyone else on Maureen’s side. His daughter, Cookie, took Sarah under her wing. It is a shock,  a bit of life’s reality that will always be tough to deal with.

i lit the fire in the hearth before supper and we watched “The Princess Bride” for our end of the year entertainment…and to escape the sadness of a good man passing.

So this godawful year is ending.

After i started the fire in the grill and toasted Greg out in the coolness of the Southwest corner winter air, i tuned my fittingly obsolescent iPod to Albert Bell and hooked up to the bluetooth speaker. As the grill heated up and the steak lay near and the bears, Ursa Major and Minor crawled across the heavens to the northeast, and Pegasus flew across the southern sky,  and i could dwell in the house of the constellations and the beauty of the Greeks for a long, long time.

But the steak needed tending. Albert was wailing as only he can about being “Born Under a Bad Sign” and “Let’s Have a Natural Ball.” i saluted Greg one more time and then, then this damn near seventy-seven year old man began to move with the music. i was moving across the small patio outside the kitchen thinking absurdly how my moves weren’t much different than when i was a pretty decent dancer. Maureen and i were good dancing together. She was more graceful, refined, and seemed to flow. i moved to the rhythm and loved it. As with all things, we fit.

And Albert wailed and his guitar played the blues. The old man danced away the blues in the chill of the night and promised to just keep on trying to do the right thing for all that’s remaining of this remarkable event we call life.

i am at peace. i only hope those i love, which are one heck of a whole bunch of people, have a healthy, bountiful, and happy 2021. As i have said to many, it’s about time, and we are due for a change for the good.

This part of is spur of the moment, i have retreated to my office as Maureen finishes up on another meal to delight. Healthy too. i love them but confess i miss more meat and bread. She takes care of me. Now, i will never get tired of her salads. Why?

Well, my father was a meat and potatoes guy. For almost ninety-nine years, breakfast was bacon or sausage and eggs with toast including a slathering of butter and a one-third jar of jelly, grits occasionally, a glass of orange juice, and a couple of cups of black coffee. Lunch was  a bologna sandwich with cheese slices and a slathering of mayonnaise with chips and a coke. Supper was something fried or grilled or a special from his wife with beans and a tomato with coffee or iced tea depending on the season. i shall not go into desserts except to say a coconut cream pie from Sunset Restaurant was close to his favorite.

i think you get the picture. Well, one of the greatest things about Mother and Daddy coming out to the Southwest corner for most of January and February is my mother would cook dinner. Maureen loved coming home to my mother’s meals after a long day of work, but they both agreed Maureen would make the salad.

One evening when we sat down the supper table, and began to eat, Daddy said, “Maureen, you know, i think i could be a vegetarian if i could eat your salads every meal.”

Holy moly!

Yeh, her salads are that good. And i don’t think i’ve had a store bought dressing at any meal she has prepared.

So i’m sitting here in my home office bordering the “family room,” which used to be called a den, except you can’t call them that any longer because some yahoo protested that dens were the property of  bears, bobcats, cougars, wolves, tigers, and pregnant lionesses, so we went with “family room” to be politically correct — gotta tell you i sure liked spending time in the den, and i really don’t think it would upset those wild animals, even the pregnant lioness.

But tonight, i’m here in the office and Maureen is in the kitchen listening to the news on that screen that used to be a television while fixin’ (man, i love that verb) supper, which she calls dinner (gotta understand she IS from the Southwest corner) and listening to the news.

i can hear it. Can’t make the words out. Not sure which network it is. So this is not some rabid left or right complaint about news media. It’s not about content. i’m just wondering who the hell picked these people to read the news. They are grating. Their voices hurt, hurt my ears. They talk so fast that even if i could understand the words, it would be pretty damn close to gibberish except for all of the captions on the screen. Which i’m not watching and glad of it. If i were, i would be forced to watch some guy or gal (is this still okay for the politically correct police?) waving their hands to support all  those words i can’t understand like they were being attacked by a swarm of bees.

Where the hell is John Cameron Swayze, Walter Cronkite, et al?

So 2021, i ain’t watching any of the news programs except maybe local weather because they have these weather experts who never get it quite right. Why? i don’t know. He’s on second.

But now that i’ve rankled a bunch of folks, i confess i am in a quandary. i am in danger of being hoisted on my own petard (thank you, Willie, Shakespeare not Mays.

You see, i have been a Padre fan for years. In the beginning, there was no real thought about much of anything except i loved baseball. i played it along with football and basketball from my first recorded memory until…well until, i quit football of any substance in the fraternity league at Vanderbilt my sophomore year (and it remains the roughest sort  of football i ever played). i left basketball games after a pickup game in a Navy gym when i was in my early thirties. But baseball remained a dream i could pursue. And did all the way to 46 (Bill Hammond, i owe you for convincing me to join your ADABA team). And Jim Hileman and i, watching Orel Hershiser set the straight scoreless inning record but losing to Andy Hawkins and the Padres in Jack Murphy Stadium, 1-0 in sixteen innings, discovering we both were near fanatic fans of the Pittsburgh Pirates from the 1950’s on, talked ourselves into becoming Padre season ticket holders for about twenty years. And i went bananas when they won and into the pits when they lost, and i took Maureen and she became a fan, a knowledgeable baseball lady, and we watched them every night during the season, but at home on television now with only rare trips down to the bay.

And being an old sports writer/codger, i have railed about how ridiculous the sport has become beginning with the Yankees of long ago lore and then the Yankees of today, the Red Sox, the Dodgers, the Cubs: owners making an absurd amount of money, paying players insane salaries on stupid deals with long term contracts, driven by agents and the players’ union, and taking away from the season with extending it to 162 games, and a bizarre playoff system extending to November, but mostly i railed against the evil empire dynasties, buying pennants from temp help and trades with poorer market teams giving away star players to dump salary and making it more about money than the sport.

And oops.

Now it may be my turn. The Padres have gone evil empire. They are rated by some as the best team in the MLB for the upcoming season ,and the statistically boring prognosticators may be right.

But i’m a dinosaur. i like a 154 game season, followed by the World Series. Period. Expansion has made it good sense to have a short play off for the league championship, but please, no wild cards (this ain’t canasta), no designated hitter (baseball players should play baseball, and a big reason it’s there is the players want old hitters to make more money by not playing the tough part of the game, aka defense; of course, the fans who wish to be entertained rather than watch a pure SPORTS contest have bought in big time). Nor do i like paying for tickets approaching the worth of the national debt, paying twelve dollars for a beer or five dollars for a hot dog and peanuts, each. And then, the price for a playoff or series game can break a millionaire (where, oh  where do those attendees get that kind of money?). And i don’t like the shift, nor the new hitting approach created by statistics, which i also don’t like because it has changed the game from what i knew.

But i gotta admit, in spite of dislike, i’m getting pretty excited. i love to watch the best baseball. i am a Padre fan. i would like to see them win a World Series even though i argued the Cubs and the Red Sox lost their mojo, their karma, when they won the World Series.

And i remember, as i have noted here before, Bill Veeck, the Barnum and Bailey marketeer of baseball was right when he said, “Show me a team who caters to baseball purists, and i will show you a team that will go bankrupt in May.”

So i am excited and i’m sad together. And it’s a little crazy. Greg Garcia was the last San Diego native on the team. He is off the 40-player roster. i would like at least some small contact with the real world for the Friars.

i won’t draw any lines in the sand and turn them off and not because Maureen would shoot me, but as i said, i love watching baseball, and watching the best baseball possible is a thrill.

As a bona fide curmudgeon, i just wanted to rain on my own parade into what i hope is one hell of a lot better 2021 than this past 366 days of ridiculousness.

i hope you have a good one, the Padres beat the Braves in the National League Championship Series, and then the Friars take the World Series over the Red Sox or the Yankees in a four-game sweep.

But i ain’t betting on it.

It was finished yesterday. Sarah did about ninety-eight percent of the work. i put in maybe, just maybe fifty pieces. Maureen found one or two…i think.

It’s tradition. It’s connection. When we started going to Signal Mountain for Christmas in 1992, my sister would put out a difficult puzzle with a Christmas theme on a small table in the wonderful family room, pictures of which i have posted here. My father and i mostly would work on it; Martha would help but was mostly occupied, along with Maureen, with Christmas cooking, a marvelous treat of goodies for a week, especially the chocolate chip cookies she placed in the Santa Claus cookie jar on the kitchen counter. The aromas wafted through the house. i was known to stay up into the wee morning hours to work on the thing while ingesting a couple of dozen of those cookies. Maureen would attempt to hide one piece so she could put in the last one.

As the years rolled past, Sarah became more involved and is now considered the expert. She even bought several for Thanksgiving and completed one by herself.

Now these puzzles aren’t easy ones. Most are 1,000 pieces and a couple, i believe, were 1500.

Since we didn’t make that Christmas trip this year, Martha included a puzzle in her gift package. We cleared the breakfast table and shifted our morning meals, along with the big Christmas Day dinner to the dining room. i had to add the leaf to Aunt Ida’s round oak table for the puzzle to have enough room.

Sarah finished it yesterday.

i worked on my few pieces (i found most of the white and green star ornaments on the tree and contributed a lot in piecing together Santa’s face and then mumbled a lot trying to put the other pieces together with absolutely no clue. As i did, i felt Daddy bending over the table on the mountain, griping about having just seen the piece that would fit in a certain place but unable to find it again (i actually said that once yesterday and realized its origin).

Now i am not usually into trivial pursuits. i’ve got a lot of things to get done in the years i have left, and daily tasks seem to have grown in numbers and time (this, of course, excludes golf from the discussion).

But folks this is tradition, a lovely one. And it crosses family generations. And it’s connection, connection to wonderful things. Below is a photo of this year’s finished product and a shot from farther away to give you a perspective on its size.

i hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas and have a healthy 2021. As i have said in one form or another in emails and messages in the last few days. We’re overdue for a good year.