My last drink was a Varsity Hop Devil draft, consumed with a friend at a local watering hole as a celebratory conclusion to Father’s Day.
The five-week abstinence in which I have engaged since then is a significant factor in my slowly shrinking stomach. But that wasn’t my sole reason to cease tippling for a while.
WHEN I was 23 or 24, I wrote the first chapter of what I intended to be my first novel, and to call it a piece of shit would be to insult all of the shit that has ever been published.
It was an angsty and lovelorn and overly earnest chapter about a guy not long out of college, who, sure as shootin’, looked and acted very much like his creator, an angsty and lovelorn and overly earnest guy not long out of college. Like virtually every young, first-time novelist, I was writing about myself and, like virtually every young, first-time novelist, I was doing a piss-poor job of it.
ON SUNDAY we packed up the girls in the Odyssey just after lunch and hit the road. Just under three hours later, we arrived at our destination, a rustic, wooded camp nestled on the west side of Rehoboth Bay. A very short 20 minutes of check-ins and goodbyes later, we were driving back, short a couple pieces of luggage and one very excited and somewhat apprehensive 10-year-old.
And, boy, has it felt weird ever since.
WHEN I’M in the zone, the way I am now, hunger is not something to endure, to bitch about, or even to assuage. It’s something to enjoy and take pride in.
For most of the last three-plus weeks, I’ve gone to bed hungry. The hollow feeling in my stomach returns sooner after meals. These are good things.
Some years back, somebody published a book examining our tendency to view ourselves as if characters in a film. I didn’t read the book, so I don’t recall whether its thesis was merely an observation or something larger, a sociological tsk-tsking of a helpless descent from our actual lives to an artificial media landscape.
Well, I had one of those Oh, Jesus, this feels like a movie moments Sunday.
This one I should have seen coming.
On Friday, the last day of the t-ball season, the Butterfly Blues–my team of seven 5- and 6-year-old girls–finally got it together. Just as I was wondering whether my nonstop stream of exhortations (“Keep your hands back! Don’t take your eye off the ball! Drop the bat before you run! Stop eating dirt!”) had had any effect, the Blues gave me a final-game treat.
They still sometimes need to be told to run to first base. They still sometimes need to be told where first base is. They still sometimes need to be reminded that the game they’re here to play is t-ball, not “Play With the Stray Leaf on the Ground.”
But a funny thing happened over the last couple of months. The seven 5- and 6-year-olds I coach have become better ballplayers.
Now, as noted above, they are still very much athletic works in progress. But where they are doesn’t matter; how far they’ve come does.
Firecracker is one of my players, and as much as I want her to approach the game with Utley-level intensity and focus, she’s among those who need to reminded that staring at the game two fields over is a good way to whacked in the coconut by a ball she should have been prepared to catch. Nevertheless, she, too, has begun picking up how things go.
Our last practice of the season was last night; our final game is tomorrow night. By the time we exchange the final high-fives, I’ll be ready for the break. But I’ll also be damned proud that a group of little girls most concerned with whose mom was bringing the post-game snack somehow learned a little bit about playing ball. | DL
I told him that a player on a streak has to respect the streak. … You know why? Because they don’t–they don’t happen very often. … If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you are! And you should know that!
–Crash Davis, Bull Durham
Nobody said parenting was a picnic, but I wasn’t prepared for this.
Sunday afternoon: Game 6 of the Flyers-Penguins series is underway, and I’m strolling through a supermarket, not parked in front of a flat-screen, and that was just fine. I hadn’t watched as much as a face-off through the first three games, all wins for the Orange and Black. I’d tuned in to Games 4 and 5–losses. Clearly my viewership was the deciding factor.
Special Sauce is with me, though, and we keep up with Game 6 thanks to my iPhone. It isn’t long before she asks, “Dad, can we watch when we get home?”
Gut-check time.
New York is not the city that never sleeps. Las Vegas is.
At 4 o’clock last Saturday morning, I left a nightclub inside Mandalay Bay, and while the casino wasn’t quite as busy as when I had walked in a few hours earlier, neither was it silent. Commerce continued; the lights were on. Had my middle-aged body not been reminding me with each exhausted step that I no longer have any business staying up until such hours, I might have thought it was a quiet Tuesday in the early afternoon.
But I’m 43, and there’s no way around that, and while Las Vegas has plenty to offer those of us no longer in the full flower of youth, its more hedonistic charms now exact an ever steeper price.
With a new job that requires a 120-mile round trip daily, I’m in the market for a new car, one that holds on to gas like an old woman hoards cats. Car shopping typically is about as much fun as doing your taxes. But this time around, things are different.
Dadlibbing 