Mostly Anecdotal

“Did you see that Lorus,” she said.

I didn’t hear her because I was standing 150 feet away at home plate.

There was glass all over the floor, and there were bits of glass nestled in the African violets on the window sill. One violet, a shy blue, was on the floor, tethered to its pot by a single root, and there was a baseball next to it.

The game stopped, each of us, my cousins and some neighborhood kids, stood at our positions and looked at one another like nine and ten-year olds do when they know there is going to be trouble.

“Who is going to get the ball?” said the pitcher.

Everyone was looking at me.

“You’re closer,” I said.

“Yeah but you hit it,” he said, and the others nodded.

I dropped the bat and started the long walk to the house. The field was Grandma and Grandpa’s front yard. The yard was longer than it was wide, and the house was set back a considerable distance from the road. Home plate was near the road, Grandma had insisted; she didn’t want us running into the road for a long ball. On the third base side was a row of lilacs, they had been growing for years and were more like trees than bushes and a ball that rolled into them was always good for an extra base. On the first base side a row of roses that would, in a few years, be destroyed by a flood from a nearby creek. And in deep right field just to the side of the house, a willow tree that I would fall out of the very next summer.

I walked through the front door, Grandma was standing in the living room, and she was smiling. I didn’t understand. I was expecting the worst. There was glass all over the floor, and her plant, the precious violet, roots dangling, was sitting next to the baseball I had been sent to retrieve. She said, get the dustpan and a broom and I’ll help you clean up. And then, as I left the room, she said it again, “Did you see that Lorus, he knocked the dickens out of that ball.”

“I guess you know what this means,” he said, as he captured my last pawn. He now had a pawn while I had nothing but my King. The winning plan is to escort the pawn to the eighth rank and there promote it to a piece, most likely a Queen. The game was in its eighth hour and I was tired. I’d been winning earlier in the game and then lost my advantage, and now it looked as if I would lose.

When you begin to lose your mind shuts down like a body when it dies. Thinking is difficult. You’d welcome an out-of-body experience. You’d like to be somewhere else, but you don’t really want to give up. You’re opposed to the idea. You have a responsibility to the game and to yourself to fight on.

You look at the board again with fresh eyes and you understand, it’s the opposition, that’s the key. You have the opposition in a King and pawn versus King ending. All you have to do is carefully maintain the opposition and the game will end in a draw. You look up, and there he is wearing a George Bush smirk, though at the time, some 30 year ago I didn’t know about the Bush smirk. My opponent still thinks he’s winning, he doesn’t know about Bush smirk either, but he’s wearing it.

You smile, he’s not sure if you’re about to resign or . . . You wait a moment and then say, “Yes, I know what it means. It means the game will end in a draw.” He looks back at the board and then at you. He sees what you see, but he plays on a few more moves. You demonstrate that you understand how to maintain the opposition. He says nothing, but circles a draw on the scoresheet and pushes it to you for your signature.

My little sister Janna plays bass in Ridin’ The Fault Line and is executive director of Heart and Soul an organization that brings a little joy into the lives of those who need it most. A local TV station did a short segment on the organization and the role my mother played in its formation. Here they are, my sister Janna, my brother Doug, and Mom who is missed, but who’ll never be forgotten.

Quicktime 7 required

Who is this girl, that spurns Joey, Jimmy, and Bill for a guy named Norman. Why did John write about it, and Sue sing about it in her little girl voice, and why did my mother name me Norman? Why was I just turning 16 when this campy little song got stuck in everybody’s head, and why was I the only Norman in a school of over 2,000?

Why did everybody know my name, and why did I just want to get away? Why did all the hotties who had ignored me before suddenly want to serenade me on the way to class? And who changed the lyrics from Norman oooo, to Norman ew-ee-ew-ee-ew? The fact that it reached number three on Billboard was a plus for Sue who made it popular, but not for me. Why, please tell me why did the song stay popular in my school when it was no longer being played on the radio?

I graduated from high school in 1963 and spent six months in the army as part of my National Guard service. I trained at Fort Ord California where nobody knew my name, and where the singing was limited to marching songs about pussy and not looking at the ground. I escaped Vietnam by joining the Guard and thought I’d finally escaped the last mention of darlin’ Norman, but it was not to be. All it takes now is a family gathering and talk of music and the past, and my sweet sister is likely to break into song.

Norman is my only love
Norman's all I'm thinking of
Norman gives me all his lovin', kissin', huggin', lovey dovin'
Norman, Oooo, Norman, Oooo
Norman, Norman my love

What, you’ve never heard the song before? I invite you to listen:

Clothespins are neat, and using them to attach baseball cards to the spokes of your bike was a cool thing to do when you were ten, but now when I think about Willy Mays, Duke Snider, and Mickey Mantle providing the engine for my Schwinn/motorcycle, I get a little misty-eyed.

Clothespins are designed to attach freshly washed clothes to a line to dry, but when you’re ten you find more creative uses for them, an earing for your sister, or one on your nose to block an unpleasant odor. Pins everywhere, on your nose, on your lips, on your ears, and voilà you look like the pictures of Africans in National Geographic. Today you’d look more like the teenager next door with a three ring circus on his face.

I like the smell of sheets freshly off the line. I liked helping my mom put them on the line. I liked holding the sheet so it didn’t touch the ground while she attached one end and then the other. I liked lying on the grass under the sheets imagining I was on a sailing ship and watching as the wind filled the sails, and dreaming of voyages to distant lands.

In those days, we separated our trash into wet and dry and burned the dry so you had to be careful not to dry your sheets on burning day. That is unless you liked sleeping next to a campfire. Maybe drying our clothes on a line is something we should return to, for there is nothing more annoying than a buzzing dryer that no one will turn off. And if you forget to bring in the wash the worst that will happen is that you’ll have to wait a bit longer for it to dry.

Do I regret the loss of the baseball cards, a little, but I suspect I’d regret the loss of the memories even more. For what is my life but the memory of burying my face in a sheet freshly off the line, or hearing the roar of my Schwinn/motorcycle.