It’s gray and it’s cold and it’s been gray and cold far too long and far too much. Or maybe grey and cold.
Life is so bad that I have been driven to ask what the difference is between “gray” and “grey.” Which one has fifty shades (It’s “e”). Is it Thomas Grey or Thomas Gray who was the 18th century English poet who wrote “Elegy Written in an English Churchyard,” a poem with the original ending that doesn’t do much to improve the mood on these cold, gray days.
No more, with reason and thyself at strife,
Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
But through the cool sequester’d vale of life
Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom.
Gray (not “e” but “a”) rewrote the 128-line poem with a different conclusion but it offers no more solace on days like these.
I have been driven to Grammar (“a” not “e”) dot com for help. It wasn’t real helpful. Look for yourself.
The past few weeks have given us the leaden cloud of impeachment, the weight of which has left us tired and has left our political system with a terrible burden of public distrust precisely at the time we must start deciding who, if anybody, can lift our confidence in government, which is—after all—led by those we, ourselves, select.
It is easy on days like these to think of ourselves as victims of government instead of what we really are—partners in government.
We have attended too many funerals of friends in the last year, read far too many letters to the editor that are little more than partisan political popgun skirmishes, watched noble aspirations for public benefit wither under the power of campaign donations, seen too few films or shows or television series that leave viewers uplifted, and watched too many late-night comedians whose one-note monologues encourage fleeing to bed and seeking refuge fully under the covers.
Yes, the Chief won the Super Bowl but then the President tweeted that they made the state of KANSAS proud and I wondered if he could identify Ukraine on a map without country names printed on them.
Lord, do I ever need baseball.
Some friends at the YMCA, knowing of my media background, have asked if I can get them tickets to a New York Yankees-Chicago White Sox baseball game to be played near the small Iowa town of Dyersville, Iowa, population about 41-hundred, this summer. Dyersville, as you probably know, is widely recognized as the home of the National Farm Toy Museum and the home of the Ertl Company, which makes die-cast metal alloy scale models of farm equipment and other vehicles.
There’s also THE baseball field, the filming site of Field of Dreams, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary last year.
Major League Baseball has been pretty close to the vest with information about tickets for the Dyersville game but there won’t be very many. https://www.mlb.com/news/field-of-dreams-game-tickets-and-faqs
The teams taking part were announced last November:
https://doyouremember.com/108307/mlb-field-of-dreams-game
Beyond that, there’s been little information. We do know the game is scheduled for August 13 and it will count as a regular season game. It will be played in a specially-built ballpark owned by Go The Distance Baseball, the present owners of the movie site. The park has only 8,000 seats and it will be north of the movie ball diamond, connected to it by a path cut through a cornfield. There will be windows in the outfield walls so fans can see the corn. The owners say they’ll find other things to do with the ballpark after the game.
No, I can’t get tickets for you. But like you, I’ll probably watch the game on the teevee. Who will throw out the first pitch? Your guess is as good as mine but I’ll bet it’s a pretty close.
But baseball is coming near. And, boy howdy, do I ever need it!
Chasing down information about the ball game at Dyersville brought me to several Youtube sites about Kevin Costner, the movie, and even the composer of the theme music, James Horner, who was killed in a plane crash in 2015 and is best remembered for the soundtrack to Titanic.
And that, of course, led to James Earl Jones intoning his ode to baseball near the end of the movie. It’s been cited so often that it is almost corny. But, gosh, is it good.
“They’ll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as if they’d dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces….The one constant through all the years…has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game — it’s a part of our past…It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”
In the offseason we’ve watched baseball writhe because of the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal. We’ve watched the free agent meat market produce players paid sums beyond our imaginations. The Royals have changed managers. The Cardinals still have enormous potential waiting to break through.
But when we hear the sound of baseball hitting leather or wood hitting the baseball, all of that offseason stuff fades away because games are played in their time and it is only the game that is important. Uniforms change, players once young and now old at 37 come and go. But it is still 60’6” from mound to plate, still 90’ from plate to first, still 127’ 3 3/8” home to second. The eternal dimensions contain the game.
The rules are clear and mostly unchanging year to year, decade to decade. Lines clearly mark what is fair and what is foul. Every batter has an equal chance to get a hit—three strikes and four balls. The tag of the bag in the first part of the double play, the infield fly, obstruction, the balk—all have rules requiring specific actions or situations. Baseball will be played this year with the same basic rules and dimensions it used last year. It’s one thing we can count on in otherwise unstable times.
Go to a baseball game and for a few hours you know how the game will be played. In the time before the game and the time after the game, we live in a world much less certain.
And the game is all there is for however long it takes to finish it. Cold, gray days, politics and impeachment, popgun partisanship in the letters to the editor page, and most of the cares of the world fade to insignificance because baseball is baseball, a game that by its eternal dimensions tells us there can be stability in life and that what once was good could be good again.
Lord, I do need baseball!