Shame and Wonder Read online

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  THE OTHER DAY I asked Elizabeth if she remembered how it felt, back there in that little room at night. Those first few nights before we got the curtains up. Did Mr. Possum come around much? Was it hard to get to sleep? I imagined she would have stayed awake and looked for him—his shadow on the wall. Or, actually, walls. Somehow her room was a sort of panoramic camera, other backyard lights and windows figuring into it. I think maybe I remember one time peeking in to see him turn the corner. It all lined up exactly right to show what it was possible to know. Once there was something. But she didn’t stay awake, she says. And so the possums vanished until Rocky came along a few years later.

  I would love to be able to do a Porter drawing of Elizabeth back then in her room at night. My artist girlfriend, Nancy, might be able to pull it off. She did a wonderful Krazy Kat cartoon for me that’s dead-on. Here is Burton, I’d explain, as imagined in the prime focus cage suspended at the top of the largest telescope in the world. Make it look like that. See if you can get that subtle, hazy, silvery, dreamlike glow to everything. The cool, fastidious surfaces. The loneliness. The sense of loss and wonder. Have her sitting up in bed and turned to face the wall behind her. Porter liked to draw these delicate white lines with tiny arrows to define the beam and angle of the light and its reflections. That might work. Between the window and the shadow. Have the room be nearly empty. And be careful with the shadow—her attention is the focus, not the shadow.

  And perhaps a little extrapolation here might be in order. A little stupendousness, as silly as that sounds. (A little traveling music, Jackie Gleason used to say.) Imagine a great hemispherical dome like Palomar but bigger. Maybe something like that immense and strangely futuristic cenotaph for Isaac Newton that Étienne-Louis Boullée proposed at the end of the eighteenth century in a series of almost hallucinatory renderings. How fearfully, somehow, it seems to emerge in its own planetary shadow, its own night, into a ragged revolutionary dawn. You want Enlightenment? Well, here. It’s not exactly what you thought. The monumental ambiguity. But anyway, like that. As big as that. And the interior very much the same as well—completely spherical and empty. Though in this case with a great horizontal slot cut through to the sky for about one-quarter of the circumference at an elevation thirty degrees or so above the equatorial level where a mezzanine directly below the slot provides an observation floor. Stay with me here. The dome itself, like Lizzy’s room, becomes the instrument. The mediating principle. The slot, the backyard fence. And here’s where Porter’s style comes in—it’s mostly atmosphere. It’s all inside the empty dome. Gauzy, silvery air and simple, vastly curving surfaces. Some people on the mezzanine for scale—so small you can’t tell what they’re wearing. Maybe lab coats. Togas. Ordinary dress. They’re lost up there. Above and behind them you can see the night sky wheeling past the slot. The endless stars. Can you imagine the quality of dark in there? Imagine how you might not want to whisper lest your soul escape into it. And yet Porter plausibly dilates how we see it. As if starlight were enough. No white lines here; just the faintest indication, slightest brightening of the starlight-brightened air, a brighter dark, comes through the slot, expands and plays against the far side, where perhaps a third—a huge rectangular section—of the spherical interior seems to present a darker surface, like a blackboard, to receive it. This is a photosensitive surface that, on clear nights, can be activated, forced to stay awake all night, night after night, for years or even centuries. Stupendousness requires that possibility. To give the information time to gather—random starlight, faint, discouraging, light-years-distant fact of starlight to accumulate around some sort of shadow of the deepest, most uncertain understanding. Not much more than that, but wouldn’t that be something, after all.

  When we got Rocky he was a puppy, so it took a while before the possums started to appear—or reappear. I’m told they live no more than two to four years in the wild, which is unusual for a creature of that size. As if they never quite evolved beyond some kind of strict necessity. Some fragile, thin necessity. I guess when this was cotton fields or sorghum, pasture, prairie, or whatever, they would have inhabited the strands of forest here and there along the creeks. But now that we’re here, so are they. They came along to eat our garbage, get our dogs worked up at night and, if we happen to observe them, reassure us inexplicably. Oh look, we sort of start and sort of sigh, it’s Mr. Possum. So substantial in his insubstantiality—and yet it all works out. He comes and goes. And even Rocky, dim and hollow as he is—as faintly, gradually as information accumulates in him—contains, or represents at least, the understanding that there’s nothing but the stories that we tell. Good dog. That nothing else helps very much to mitigate our loneliness, our distance from ourselves. And that it doesn’t change a thing that, every now and then—say, one in thirty, one in fifty—having hauled another to the alley, laid him carefully in the grass outside the fence, you’ll come back later and discover he has gone.

  Ignorance

  I don’t know anything about baseball. I never even learned the rules beyond the basics of softball I picked up from watching my daughters play when they were little. In the fifties it was pretty much assumed, if you were a guy, that you played baseball, knew the rules, possessed a stack of baseball cards, a bat and glove—the glove, for me, was the mystery. How to get that big orange leather glove to fold around your tiny hand like that, acquire that oily stain of competence that deepened toward the center where the impact should arrive. That you and it should be so much of a single mind about this thing. Even kids with no conspicuous interest or ability would show up now and then—it must have been a seasonal thing—to hang around, just hang around, with a glove and a ball to whack into it as a thing to do as thoughtlessly as chewing gum or puberty or something. Bobo Riefler, for example, had no special love for the game as far as I could tell. What Bobo loved was fiddling with his bicycle, tricking it out with various gizmos of debatable utility like those little loops of belt leather he would wrap around to dangle from the axles to keep them shiny, fastened under with big jewel-like red reflectors. Even so, when it came time, he’d have that glove. As if brought forth from his subconscious fully broken in, attested to by signatures of worthies even I had heard of, black-stamped declarations as to features, style, and general suitability. And his name too, of course, in ballpoint blue along the wrist strap or the side of the pinkie finger, blurring out into the orangey-yellow cowhide like an old tattoo.

  I had a glove. I owned one. But had never come to terms, somehow. Whatever those terms were, I had not come to them. Not that I was incapable. I could throw a rock or even—should the occasion require—a spear about as well as anyone. To hurl a rock, your arm gets like a whip. A spear (unweighted stick) goes sideways, though, if you sling it; it requires the forearm snapping to the left as you release. I could outrun the other neighborhood kids except, sometimes, Wayne Flemming. And when leaping from the swing for distance, I knew it was speed not height you needed, how to hit the ground and roll and come up standing. Not go sprawling on my butt. I did just fine with that. But put me out in left field in the morning—God, I hated P.E. first thing in the morning, with that sad, old scratchy morning devotional version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” still in the air, the implication that our circumstances justified such desperate reassurance—and I’d die. I’d be no good. I would be worse than nothing. Measurably. Statistically—say, twice as bad as, possibly even three times worse than nothing. An embarrassment is what I was. Ground ball to left sneaks through on an error: that’s one you don’t see every day. Boy, that’s one for the books; what do you call that? What in the world do you call that? Fielder’s taken off his glove to get down on his knees and build little houses out of rocks for ants. Did you say ants? The ball sneaks through because he’s busy making little houses for the ants? Well that’s just crazy. That’s just nuts. And so it seemed. And so it was. And why on earth would ants need houses?

  My glove came to me on an impulse from
my father. I was maybe eight or ten and we were driving back—my mom and dad and I—from Estes Park, Colorado, which he liked to visit in the summer, having worked there on a dude ranch as a young man in the thirties. We’d been driving much of the day in our unair-conditioned Ford through all that featureless expanse of northwest Texas. It was cooling off toward evening and we’re getting pretty close, a couple of hours from Dallas, and at that point things seemed quite relaxed and settled into one of those inexplicably perfect moments, of which I recall a few in my life, when all the usual urgencies fall away and there’s a kind of neutral buoyancy, a kind of equilibrium or something. Cars still had those little side vents then, ahead of the crank-down windows in the front, and wind came through there pretty well so you could lie down in the backseat and appreciate your passage into cooler air and, after a while, the slight deceleration and deflection of intention from the highway to whatever little town it was and something there of interest we might even stop to visit if it’s open. And it was. It was the Nokona factory store, where handmade baseball gloves were sold. And when we came back out I had one and I remember it being dark. Though that does not seem very likely—that a store like that in such a tiny town would keep late hours. I imagine what I’ve done is let the whole thing slip into a kind of darkness, let the leather-fumigated dark of sleeping with that glove that night wash out across the whole event somehow. Or maybe it was closed but someone still inside to answer a special appeal from my dad, who, though quite stern in many ways, was very good in situations where a point of flexibility was needed. Getting things to work out, finally. I was given to know that this was a special thing but did not constitute a charge, an expectation or a promise to participate—he was busy in those days and very tired when he got home—so more a simple understanding. Well, I guess this is your baseball glove. The kind of understanding you arrive at when things clarify for no particular reason, and the natural forms of things can briefly settle into place.

  Formality

  When I was very small, like five and six, I had a regular babysitter—portly, cheerful, widowed Mrs. Wilson—at whose home I would be left sometimes when my mom and dad had plans to be out late. She would hide pennies about the house and let me keep whatever I found, then put me to bed in a huge, high, white-bedspreaded bed by a window, open in the summer, facing the street and, just across, a neighborhood baseball field. I knew it was a baseball field. I must have known what baseball was. In any case I’d lie there watching the young men warming up. It seemed so risky, heedless, how they slung the ball around from base to base and even into the dirt as hard as they could to make it difficult, raising little clouds of pink-red dust that hung for a while in the field lights, which had just come on to signify, to me at least, that deepening distinction between regimes—the one where I was in the bed across the street in the gathering dusk and the one emerging on that harsh red dirt, which seemed so uninviting, not at all the sort of dirt a kid would want to play in. Little cars and plastic dinosaurs would not do well out there, it seemed to me. It seemed to me you had to know what you were doing. That was dedicated dirt. There were conditions. What emerged out there so clearly, as the evening closed around it and the people with their lawn chairs and their soda coolers gathered, were conditions altogether unlike those obtaining here on the clean white bedspread by the window in the dark.

  So, what is happening in this moment? We’ve the origins of baseball like a myth. Here’s how it started: someone watching from a window on a pleasant summer evening, it emerges. Lights come up. The ground turns red. How much of this is really true?

  I’ve gone back recently. That part of town has not changed much. The field looks pretty much the same. The backstop structure—galvanized posts and chain-link fencing—shows no signs of being any newer than my memory. There’s a look old galvanized steel gets as the zinc wash wears away and rust starts showing a depleted and inactive sort of stain, as if the chemistries of air and heat and zinc and steel and memory have neutralized somehow, found some agreement. Mrs. Wilson’s house is gone. There’s just a vacant lot, which strangely works for me—my ancient witness ghostly, purified, suspended at the height of that big bed above the grass. When I was there a couple of days ago I noticed a policeman parked nearby. And I remembered there had been a terrible incident not far from there a week or so before—a girl discovered behind a dumpster, naked, stabbed, but still alive. I couldn’t recall if anyone had been arrested. But I figured I’m too old to be a suspect now. I get to be a ghost here with my notebook, which I hope he sees me writing in, recording faint inscriptions in the concrete made when it was poured, I’m guessing maybe seventy years ago. No trouble here, he must be thinking. Just some harmless old eccentric kneeling, studying the concrete. Taking notes. Which is just crazy. Which is nuts. But surely harmless. What has that to do with anything, I’m sure he thinks. The crap we have to deal with—death and violence, terrible suffering—every day.

  I’m able to make out only two names in the concrete—actually, one name written twice. It’s so abraded, and the two-foot letters spaced so far apart it’s hard to see that they make a name. I stand away a little. “JOE.” Big capital letters. And then off to the left, much smaller, “JOE” again, above a single capital “G.” I’m thinking this one is the first. And seeing how it went so well, he was encouraged. Got expansive. Put his shoulder into it. Both hands on the stick. Forget the “G.” Just Joe. Not Shoeless Joe. Not Joltin’ Joe. But Joe before all that, as clear and thoughtless as it’s possible to be right here, you see, at the beginning.

  Loss

  Several months ago at a downtown breakfast gathering of friends, I met a young man named Dave England with his wife and their baby boy. Dave wore a Texas Rangers baseball cap, a heavy full black beard I vaguely recognized as current bullpen fashion, and a T-shirt with the image of a cartoon superhero labeled SABERBOY. I’d later go online to learn that SaberBoy personified a currently trendy statistical pragmatism known as sabermetrics (from the initials of the Society for American Baseball Research), a nontraditional approach that had been celebrated recently in the movie Moneyball. But at the time I sensed only some sort of inside baseball joke and wondered about it and about what seemed the earnestness, perhaps the perseverance, underneath it. Three months earlier I had watched—not really watched but rather peeked at through my fingers as a child might at a horror movie—Texas lose the Series in the most horrific manner. This must be a response to that, I thought. Like mourning. Like processing with the image of the dead. Or maybe not exactly that but obligated in that way, to carry out into the street, into the ordinary life with which it merges very tenderly, I noticed, as he reached to take the baby, long-sleeved undershirt in baseball style extending. Look at that, I thought. How all that baseball stuff extends to all that precious, ordinary other. Look how baseball seems to gather all our hopes unto itself without self-consciousness, apology or error on a beautiful Sunday morning in the garden of the Dream Cafe. “So what is ‘OBP’?” I wanted to know. I leaned across to ask—to go right at the heart of things, I figured, since the big home-plate-shaped shield on SaberBoy’s hypertrophic chest bore these initials in a fat and friendly calligraphic font that made me guess some sort of dietary supplement. But no. “On-base percentage,” I was informed. Ah, yes. Of course. Of course. The wind that lifted SaberBoy’s cape behind him so dramatically did not affect his hair. He gazed straight out through black-framed spectacles exactly like the ones Dave England wore. “So”—I leaned over again; I think the baby had, by then, been handed back—“So, tell me…” And right here I can’t remember how I phrased it, how I formed the question, even what the question was exactly. Something to do with loss, the way the Rangers lost it, twice a single pitch away from winning it all—in case you missed it, twice. Just how to carry that along, I guess. What happens to devotion. Everything that it attaches to. And here again I can’t recall his answer, only the manner of it—unembarrassed, straight out. How the sun emerged behind him from be
hind the hazy, scudding morning clouds and how he actually wept a bit and wiped his eyes behind his spectacles, confused perhaps. But altogether unembarrassed. As if it were an allergy or something he was used to. Something chronic, unavoidable.