Category: Yo Ivanhoe

Is it not against all natural reason that God out of his mere whim deserts men, hardens them, damns them, as if He delighted in sins and in such torments of the wretched for eternity, He who is said to be of such mercy and goodness? This appears iniquitous, cruel, and intolerable in God, by which very many have been offended in all ages. And who would not be? I was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated Him!

–Martin Luther, in Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand

America is always in desperate need of new heroes, and what could be lovelier for this cynical, hard-hearted nation (not to mention for a sport with a spastic, rubber-jowled, spit-spraying, pencil-necked, talking lapdog for a commissioner) than a hero named Boof?

Honestly, I can’t think of one thing.

–Michael Langenstein, “Play Ball”

Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

–Mark, 9.24

Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?

–Isaiah, 53.1

And ye shall gird yourself for battle and go forth against that city where the wind blows without rest, and against the unbelievers for whom gold is more precious than blood, and ye shall smite and quench, and flay them in the streets and homes, and where they are at work in their fields and counting towers. When there is not a mouth left moving to utter blasphemies, ye shall offer their fat to the Lord.

–The Additions of Esther, 34.7-10

There is, of course, only one conclusion a reasonable person can make at this point: The Twins are God’s team.

None of us has ever seen anything like the 2006 season, and there isn’t a person on the planet who can offer an explanation for the things we’ve seen.

I’ll confess that my faith had been shaken –shaken by the dispiriting and punchless 2005 season, by the March death of Kirby Puckett, the steroid scandals of the off-season, and by the Twins’ hamstrung break from the gate back in April.

Shame on me. Shame, shame, shame on me.

I have a thing about numbers, though. I like to add them up, isolate them, and basically move them around until they cough up some sort of magic. The day Kirby died I turned to the numbers to distract me from my devastation. March 6 was the date of Puck’s death: 3-6. There was some good Minnesota baseball mojo there; Both three (Harmon Killebrew) and six (Tony Oliva) have been retired by the Twins. Put the three and six together and you have 36, Jim Kaat’s old number, which currently belongs to Joe Nathan. Add them and you have nine, which was worn at one time or another by Larry Hisle, Bombo Rivera, Slick Gardner, Mickey Hatcher, and Gene Larkin.

Stetch it out to 3-6-06 and add it up and the magic starts to fade a bit. Fifteen has sort of a lackluster history with the Twins (Disco Danny Ford, Tim Laudner, Ron Coomer, and Cristian Guzman have all worn it). Make it 3-6-2006, however, and it’s considerably better so far as numerical omens go: 17 was the number of Camilo Pascual, Leo Cardenas, and Rick Aguilera, not to mention Joe Grzenda and Fred Manrique.

There’s some point there, I’m sure, even if I can’t quite put my finger on it. I do know, though, that when I get to monkeying around with numbers it’s almost always a prelude to a fit of religious mania. Numbers inevitably drive me to the Bible, where they tend to make even less sense to me than they do in real life.

As spring rolled into summer, and as the Twins rolled out of a miserable early spring and into history, I was wearing my hairshirt and poring over my dog-eared Bible, all the while keeping at least one ear tuned to the Twins on WCCO. I was alternately muttering imprecations and howling hosannas (from the Hebrew: “Save, we pray”).

I spent the season –the first one in a long time– as just another fan. I listened to the games, went out to the ballpark occasionally, ran through the boxscores every morning, and chatted about the Twins with friends and folks at work. I was tired of the dissecting game, and learning to fall in love all over again with the game of baseball.

It was thrilling.

It was absolutely thrilling.

It is.

It continues to be.

My gratitude for what I –I who am so entirely undeserving– have been given knows no bounds, and so, late on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in autumn, I collapsed in the grass in my backyard and showed my teeth to God.

I also asked him to look out for Wayne Hattaway, one of the greatest characters and human beings it has ever been my privilege to meet.

As a feeble –a so, so feeble– token of my gratitude I’m going to do my damndest to return here to grind out some sort of appreciative or anguished nonsense throughout the playoffs.

I’m going to do what I can.

The Twins, though, are in God’s hands.

I’ve got the world on a string. I’ve got the whole world in my hands. I’m on top of the world. I’ve got all the time in the world.

Wonderful world. World of wonders. World of the future. Mattress World. Disney World. Sea World. Auto World. Tractor World. Reptile World. Sex World. Robot World. Sound World. Drowning world.

A world of fine dining.

The world is your oyster.

The luckiest guy in the world.

World champion. World expert. World renowned. World leader. World class. World record. World War. World Peace.

World above. World below. World within. The afterworld. The underworld. Crime world. Invisible world. Dream world. The hidden world. Strange world. Beautiful world. Troubled world. Spirit world.

The world in a grain of sand.

Off to see the world. World Traveler. All over the world. Out of this world. A world of difference.

The old world. The new world. Brave new world. The lost world.

Third world.

The world of our fathers.

End of the world.

Man of the world.

Light of this world.

For He so loved the world.

In his own little world.

Hard world.

What in the world?

Why in the world?

How in the world?

Welcome to my world.

Any world that I’m welcome to.

I’m in a world of pain.

I’m a stranger in this world.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

World without end.

Cruel world.

World of Pants.

Amen.

I could be mistaken –I could always be mistaken, I often am– but this seemed to be the scenario: I was asking for a glass of water. I was begging for a glass of water. I was so fucking thirsty that I could barely swallow. My tongue was all fat and fuzzy. It felt like a dried cow tongue lodged in the middle of my face.

I’d been crawling for days. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many days. Crawling across empty suburban strip mall parking lots, across busy city streets, along old state highways, and right out into the fields and the darkness. I crawled across creeks and rivers.

If you spend enough time crawling across fields, I can tell you that eventually those fields might as well be deserts. You get parched. You get thirsty as the devil himself for a glass of water. Your hands and shoulders and knees throb. Your whole body hurts.

These days not one person will bat an eye at a crawling man, let alone stop to offer him a glass of water. You crawl long enough, though, and the law is eventually going to get tired of what they’ll call your “routine,” as if you were a gymnast or a ventriloquist.

The police will drag you up off your hands and knees and haul you away. They’ll want some answers, which you will be unable to provide. They’ll put you in a room with a plain table and bad fluorescent lights. You will ask them for a glass of water. You will beg them for a glass of water, and they will bring you a styrofoam cup of scalding hot coffee.

I fell asleep briefly and was startled awake at three a.m. Upon getting up and muddling about I was additionally startled to discover that there were apparently no pens to be had anywhere in the world. There was no ink. There were no pencils.

There was no way for me to write anything down, to leave any kind of permanent or even (the more realistic scenario) hopelessly transitory record.

And I realized as well that the words weren’t taking shape, weren’t coupling, weren’t forming sentences in my head. They weren’t getting in line. They weren’t even in solitary evidence.

There were no words at all. They had completely left me. Nothing would take words to my tongue. I heard no speech, saw no signs, and opened book after book to blank pages. I went to the stoop and saw there was no newspaper on the welcome mat. The welcome mat didn’t even say ‘welcome’ anymore.

All that was left were these vague urges crawling in my blood, this wordless sadness. I didn’t, in fact, even know that it was words I was missing, lacking as I did words to articulate or explain their absence. I couldn’t speak at all.

And then I heard Ornette Coleman, and found the first small comfort of the wordless day.

We are here and now.

Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.

—H.L. Mencken

I can at best report only from my own wilderness. The important thing is that each man possess such a wilderness and that he consider what marvels are to be observed there.

—Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

‘Whole thing works on gravity. Heavy falls and the light flows away.’

–From William Kittredge’s “The Van Gogh Field,” in which a farmer explains a thresher

Dear Eddie,

It’s raining here, but that’ll come as no surprise to you, brother. The cold rain that camps out over these parts this time of year always did put you in a black frame of mind.

Your long silence has become like a bad tooth to me, Ed. The older I get the more it bothers me, and about now, just when I start hauling in the split wood and building big fires in the stove, is when I find myself brooding over our old disagreements. A fire in a damp, dark house on a rainy night can be a tough thing to stare into through the long hours.

The old man never did come to terms with what was eating you back in those bad days, and I don’t expect you ever thought he would. It might, however, surprise you to know that I feel like I’ve grown somehow closer to you in the years since you went away.

I’ll be square with you, Edster old boy, I’ve had my fill of plenty of things. Maybe I’ve finally had that crisis of faith you were always predicting, but all I know is that I’ve lost a good deal of steam over the last several years. I’m old, of course, and haven’t been in the best of health. That’ll certainly make a man mull some, and a lot of the old crowd is dead now, which only makes this sleepy little place feel even emptier.

Do you remember watching the thresher at work when we were boys, Eddie? It’s a powerful and damn useful metaphor in this part of the country. I like to imagine that even as a youngster I could see something symbolic in the steady, relentless work of that machine. I believe it was the thresher that put the fear of God in me, and it’ll likely disappoint you to know that I’ve never quite managed to be shook of it, even if there are increasingly days where there’s as much pure puzzlement as fear in my attitude towards the Creator. Puzzlement and fear, and also –I can’t help it, Ed– respect.

I know this is one area in which the way we’ve always seen the world strongly diverges. I remember, believe me, some of our arguments, and some of your dust-ups with pa. And I do wish from time to time (and I guess, if I’m going to be honest, more and more frequently) that I had a bit of your cocksureness about the meaninglessness of things.

The problem is, though, that I tend to find everything somehow meaningful, even if I can’t ever quite seem to divine to my satisfaction exactly what that meaning is.

Still, I believe it’s there all the same, Eddie. This place hasn’t managed to beat that notion out of me. And I do believe that things happen for a reason, and that even seemingly senseless tragedies have a significance that often eludes us.

What, I wonder, is more significant and more deserving of our careful attention than a terrible injustice or tragedy? And might that significance be reason enough to justify many of the things we can’t understand, and give some credence to the things we persist in believing?

Significance, of course, is a difficult thing to find and make sense of in the midst of despair, but surely that shouldn’t have to mean it’s not there.

I don’t know, Eddie, that thought –if, in fact, there’s a clear thought in there– gives me a sort of peace, and these days even a sort of peace has become precious to me.

I hope this finds you, brother, and finds you well. I’ve been thinking about you a good deal. That’s all I really wanted to say. Plenty of the memories of our years together are good enough that I pray I won’t have to part with a single one of them in the time that I have left.

I also pray that you’ve managed to hang onto a few of them as well, and that they give you as much comfort as they give me.

–A letter found in an old copy of Francis Parkman’s Pioneers of France in the New World

I was trying to remember where I’d seen the guy before, and it was driving me crazy. I had an image in my head, but I couldn’t quite find the proper context.

Was he the sullen waiter with the black eye who’d recently served me at that awful new Italian restaurant in St. Louis Park? Or was he the bass player in Jews in Orbit, the band that had played a friend’s wedding reception back in July?

I decided he was the Jews in Orbit guy. I was almost certain.

Resolve is what’s called for here, I heard him say. It was clear from his deadpan delivery that he was being ironic.

The youngster at his side confessed that he didn’t understand the meaning of resolve. In his mind, he said, he pictured a television advertisement for…what was it? A laundry detergent?

The other fellow –a still youngish man, some kind of father, I suppose, but it was obvious to even the boy that he was in way over his head– said, Steely resolve. You need to learn to exercise some self control, to check your desires.

It’s my money, the boy said.

The man shook his head sadly and continued to flip through the racks of CDs. He was wearing a dirty Boston Red Sox cap, a tattered Feelies tee-shirt, long, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. At no time during this brief exchange had he diverted his attention from his browsing. He didn’t so much as look in the direction of the boy who was bouncing anxiously at his side.

The boy had thick black eyeglasses and an unruly head of brown curly hair. It’s my money, he said again. I want to buy this Iron Maiden CD.

The man finally turned and addressed the boy directly.

I want you to understand this, he said, placing his hands on the boy’s shoulders. Are you listening to me? If you buy that Iron Maiden CD I can guarantee you that there will come a day in the not so distant future when you’re going to feel very, very stupid. Do you understand what I’m saying? That is a guarantee.

It’s my money, the boy said.

The man snatched the disc from the boy’s hands, shoved it back in the rack, and resumed flipping through the CDs.