“Tommy, want some action?” Al said to me on the school bus.
“No, the Giants are favored by 9 ½ points.” I answered.
“What about over and under, it’s 39 ½?”
Now he had my attention. I felt the Giants defense and running game would keep the score low.
“OK, twenty times under,” I said.
“Good boy!” Al smiled.
So I bet one hundred dollars that the combined score of both teams in Super Bowl XXI would be 39 points or lower.

It was January 25, 1987, an 80 degree cloudless Sunday in the warm California sun. I was headed to the Rose Bowl to see the New York Giants play the Denver Broncos. The trip started two weeks before. The day after the Giants beat Washington in the NFC Championship game I called airlines for a round trip to Los Angeles. They were sold out. Instead I bought a reservation to San Diego. Over the next ten days, I tried to locate a game ticket and had no success. On the Thursday afternoon before the Super Bowl I began calling travel agencies to try to sell my flight back to them. The first place asked me why I was selling it. I told her I couldn’t get a game ticket.

“I have one,” she said.
“How much?”
“$375.”
I swallowed and said “Yes.” Face value was $75.
An hour later, the messenger arrived, and I examined my ticket.

Gate B Tunnel 27 Row C Seat 111.

Possibly the worst seat in the 101,000 capacity Rose Bowl, but I was going to see the Giants.

I left the next day and prearranged staying with my friends Al and Janet an hour from Pasadena. The problem was traveling from San Diego to a hotel lobby in Irvine where Jane and I had worked out a pick up. When I landed, I started working the rental car counters. “Anybody driving to L.A.?” A guy my age in a suit said he was driving to San Francisco. I told him if he dropped me off at my hotel on the way north, I’d pay his first day rental cost. He agreed. Jim was an Encyclopedia Britannica salesman and tortured me for the entire ride on how my future children would thank me forever for buying this gift for them and their children. I declined, he pouted. When we got near the hotel Jim pulled the car over to the shoulder of the highway and said he was late. He took my money for the day rental and left me on the side of the road. I climbed down the embankment and over a six foot fence into the hotel’s parking lot. Jane was in the lobby when I ran in. It was Saturday morning three a m. The game of my life was only 36 hours away.

Jane found companies running buses to the Rose Bowl. For $15 I bought my ride. At noon on Sunday I was on the yellow school bus, with one other Giant fan and 40 Denver Bronco fans. I was excited and surrounded by the enemy. I waved goodbye to Al and Jane. They looked like proud parents, except for the fact that Al was counting on me giving him money to pay his bookie if I lost the bet.

Gliding over the California roads the bus was a happy land where Bronco fans, the other Giant fan and I joked together. The New York guy shared his blue tortilla chips with me, and kept asking, “Would you like another Giant chip?”

Off the bus I strolled around the Rose Bowl a few times to kill time and who do I run into to? Andy Rooney in his lucky Giant ~ Columbo looking raincoat. We talked about our love for the Giants and old Yankee Stadium.

Stepping through the dark tunnel into the Rose Bowl my heart smacked inside my chest. My long suffering was over. The New York Giants were my father’s and my unbreakable link. Our passion for football was unconditional. When I was 7 to 9 years old the Giants lost three consecutive NFL Championship games. Turning 10 in 1964 I knew that would be our year, the Giants, Dad and me. But they stunk, and kept on stinking.

After a good Bronco start the New York defense rose up and by half time I sensed victory even though the Giants were losing 10-9. In the third quarter the Giants exploded, scoring 17 points and led 26-10. Thinking of my dark fan days, thinking of my Dad and me going, watching, listening to hundreds of Giant games together I started to well up, but then I remembered my bet. My stupid $100 bet. Every time I had a good thought about what was happening on the field, I also thought 4 more points I lose my bet.

As I’m having these feelings, the Giants are driving towards my end of the field. On a trick play a receiver ends up wide open. Phil Simms throws the ball to him and I’m mumbling, “Drop it! Drop it!” The receiver catches the ball and my heart lifts then drops at the same time. How could I ever root against the Giants? Best day of my life and I tarnish it.

Final score was 39-20. The place rocked like a Springsteen concert. Giants carried Coach Parcells off the field. I couldn’t wait to talk to my father.

Back on the bus: silence and 40 broken Bronco fans, me and the guy with the blue chips. The Rose Bowl had only had two exits and all the VIP cars exited first. We idled in the parking lot for an hour. When we began to move I felt like I was in a funeral home on wheels. I could hear sad heaving coming from the grim Bronco fans. A tall woman had a tear rolling down his cheek. I felt bad for them but remembered how many times I had sat in their seat. Once in a while, the Giant fan and I would look at each other across the aisle and exchange a quick hand raise, a small yip and one word “Giants!”

Several hours after the game we arrived back at the hotel. I called Jane and asked her to delay one hour so I could celebrate at the hotel’s bar with any other Giant fan I found. I put money down on the bar and a sea of blue started forming where I stood. I remembered something important and slipped away to make a collect call to New York.

“Dad, we won, I love you.”
“I love you, Hon.” he said and we both hung up.

****

super bowl tix 1 25 87

Ten years ago I wrote my emotion published on this web place.

Ten years after, my emotion and compassion is still strong!

Ten years after, one thing is very clear: we must be united to struggle against enemies of freedom.

We must be all together finding solutions for economic problems and avoiding extrémisme in the world.

The death of NYK people must be a reason to commit ourself thinking a new world and never forget to build a new world for our children.

American people and French people always united to défend freedom.

Christian Bonnard
Living in Paris

“The sublest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overheard, in the black headlines of the latest edition.”

10 years ago today this born-and-bred New Yorker was an early twentysomething who worked for a newspaper with “New York” in its name. He attended and reviewed nightly concerts of the Philharmonic he had grown up romanticizing at Lincoln Center. He rewatched films in old theaters with “Manhattan” in their title. A Woody Allen/Neil Simon disciple, he had dreams of making his life in the city, because of the city, listening to music about the city, creating within the boundless boundaries of the city.

He’d grown up reading the Times Magazine with his father, visiting the Met with his mother, seeing the Yankees lose with his friends. His maternal grandfather, a religious Jew who had escaped the Holocaust, took him for Coney Island hot dogs, even during Passover. 10 years ago today this young man watched Seinfeld reruns, wondering how the show could possibly appeal to anyone outside the metro area, so close did it hit home. He had attended college outside New York but could not stomach life elsewhere and returned promptly after some professional experimentation in the nation’s capital. Not even the pull of a high-paying national media job felt right on the Potomac river. America’s capitol was on the Hudson.

As I wrote on this website, later  in a book published by the site’s founder, about 9/11, I watched planes decimate the towers from a family home on Long Island. I had not yet stepped onto the train for a job interview that was supposed to happen that day in the financial district, two blocks from the towers. Later that day I watched a burly stock trader return to the suburbs covered in white powder. He could have been a baker or piece of art at the Brooklyn Museum. But he was not to be objectified. He was crying, tears melting the power away in choice spots on his sharky suit.

I didn’t cry on 9/11. I didn’t cry afterwards or feel particularly scared that the attacks would happen again. I was perhaps still fueled by the naïve invincibility of a young man who had just survived a near-death medical battle. But plenty of people, young and old and healthy, in New York felt as I did. The terrorists got lucky. It would never happen again. I’m not scared. I’m going to work. I’m going to that concert. Why are we going to war? This wasn’t an act of war, it was an act of serial murder.

Less than three years later I found myself living in Los Angeles, the polar opposite of New York City. I started a west-coast life despite having already met the lovely woman who would become my wife, who I left in New York, at least in body, to make my claim on the other coast. I moved from NY to LA for work, a different kind of life, less stress, more canyon. Not because New York no longer promised the hope it had instilled in me from birth. I wasn't scared to be in New York, after 9/11/01, throughout those few following years of multicolored terrorism-potential announcements (e.g., "Today's level: orange"). I didn't feel trapped on the subways, suddenly claustrophobic; that was just job-related tension. I didn’t think about what else could happen, if my parents were safe on Long Island, where so many people could become so easily trapped by another attack. I wasn’t terribly angry that Stockhausen, the avant-garde composer, had called 9/11 “the greatest work of art ever.” The guy wrote a quartet for helicopter.

I was living in denial, and I wasn’t the only one.

Plenty of young adults, right out of college, observed 9/11 in New York and subsequently journeyed to worlds beyond, in many cases, the west coast, California. One of my closest friends ended up in San Francisco by 2002. Another few went to Portland in 2003, and when I went to LA there were more recent New York transplants than the Jewish delis could handle.

Suddenly people were writing LA articles with anger about the bad bagels, worse pizza, lackluster Cantonese food in a city that set the stage for a film called “Chinatown.” This wasn’t the average NYC expat ragging that had gone on for decades. It was rage.

Soon, LA became what one prominent magazine called the new cultural capital of America. Did that have anything to do with how many New Yorkers flocked there in the years following 9/11? I am not a census-taker or infographic designer. I do not have the numbers. But all of a sudden there were better, if still inferior, bagels, attempts to make pizza with “New York Water,” an indie music scene that rivaled Brooklyn, pasta from Italians new to America who in decades prior might have went to New York straightaway.

Suddenly East Coast rap fused with West Coast, a savory beat-mash served up warm and fertile. Anything could happen in the design galleries, and before I could say Guggenheim the art museums of LA were written up everywhere. Hip young American adults were no longer going for New York-inspired loft-like or pre-war interiors; obsessed with midcentury modernism, as practiced by Richard Neutra and John Lautner, they were turning their apartments into 1960s California. Everyone bought Eames chairs and Saarinen furniture, and everyone gawked at Taschen books about Palm Springs living.

Where was New York?

It didn’t go anywhere, of course. I returned to visit many times, but now all my friends were gone. My family remained, but the young people who would become prominent artists, writers, musicians, technologists had moved on, lived. Young people still flocked to New York, but it was Gens Y and Z. Kids who were too disconnected from reality on 9/11/01 to know what they were moving into, the life that sent us across the country, away.

It was an adventure for this new crop of twentysomethings, something bold. To move to New York in the middle aughts or closer to 2010 seemed positively safe in its audaciousness. Anesthetics in the form of video games and bad 3D movies had already created a generation of new young New Yorkers who would make comfortable lives in the city because they feared nothing, felt less.

Tweeting out of a Bushwick apartment isn’t meeting every night for drinks in the same Tribeca bar, as my newspaper colleagues had liked to do. Digital, the virtual world and social networks, created a safety zone, an invisible buffer. Don’t leave your house as much, and your chances of being poisoned with Anthrax on the A Train decrease.

I recently returned from a week in New York. I sojourned there for my brother’s wedding. I quoted the aforementioned E.B. White essay in my Best Man’s Speech. I repeated the line: “No one should move to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

That statement makes more sense now than ever. For no matter how much security-insulation our government-funded protectors wrap around the city, still America’s best, just getting by to see tomorrow is an entirely different kind of feat in 2011.

I long to return to New York but enjoy my California life too much. I’ve softened, weakened, calmed down. I’ve incorporated New York into my LA persona, and NYC Me works because it's real. My professional output shows changes, though: I don’t want and go for It as much. I meditate more. But I remain proud of the instinct to think critically, ask questions. That’s good in many respects; it sets me apart at times, reminds me where I’m from: what real people are like, and that I come from a place where you don't need a Ph.D. to have some sense about you. But I know that I’m quite different than I was 10 years ago, when I traded NYC air and clouds for LA sun and smog. I know that I'm more in-the-moment, more foggy, and less interested in performing, sharing. Now I watch "Manhattan" at home on a flatscreen next to windows with a view of the sun setting over the Pacific ocean; it's a little unholy. I wrote more, played more music, created more art, and had deeper conversations in New York before 9/11 than I did anywhere.

That will always be the truth. Until They hit the Hollywood Sign. Because, someday, They will.

Adam Baer (@glassshallot) is a writer in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Harper's, the New York Times, and on NPR.

I think Jesse’s fascination might be something genetic, something hard-wired into his psyche. His grandfather on his mother’s side spent years in the South Pacific fighting World War II. And for a while, Ian, Jesse’s older brother from another mother, also dabbled in the exotic when he was dating, before he got married. Ian’s girlfriend Anita wasn’t Asian, but Columbian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, or one of those other -ians from one of those South American or Central American places. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either.

I always liked Anita, an intense and passionate little brown girl with white teeth, dark flashing eyes and a good sense of humor, who didn’t seem to mind that I put all the knives away and kept checking the hubcaps on my car whenever they came to visit. But Anita, by last account, moved back to Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, or one of those other places, got married and has had several kids, none of them his, Ian assured me.

Then came Siu Lan who was definitely Asian. She was Chinese, in fact, and I am pretty sure she still is. We called her “Siu Who?” though her last name was actually Wing or Wang or Wong. We did that to differentiate Siu from Sue, my niece who isn’t Asian and spells her name differently but pronounces it the same way. I first met Siu at a party, a family gathering of the Italians at my daughter Janine’s house on Staten Island. Weeks in advance of the event, a nervous Ian had prepared everyone for the meeting of East and West in an attempt to head off any potential problems. But on the appointed day, his grandmother, my mother, made it evident by the expression on her face that she wasn’t very pleased when Ian led a foreigner into the thick of twenty-five screaming Italians all talking at the same time.

I watched the girl, head high, black hair radiating the light of Janine’s Italian crystal chandelier, as she walked fearlessly or foolishly into the middle of things. The conversations dropped to a low murmur and stopped, and in the intervening silence you could hear a steamed wonton drop.

It was my mother-in-law who barreled in and attempted to break the ice with some Asian small talk. “So tell me,” she said with an innocent smile of simplicity on her face, “how come they took Kung Fu off the air? It was one of my favorite shows.”
Siu Who blinked. She shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said without a trace of sarcasm after barely a pause. “But let me get back to my people and I’ll tell you what I find out.”

It was love at first sight, and from that second I knew Siu Who was special!

But their relationship didn’t work out because there were other problems beyond the East/West thing. And eventually Siu Lan went the way of Anita, though I don’t think she moved to South or Central America, and I assume she still lives in Brooklyn somewhere.

Soon after, Ian reconnected with Amy, his college girlfriend, the polar opposite of his previous choices, both geographically and physically. Amy was born in up-state New York, in Syracuse or Schenectady or one of those other “S” cities. She is smart, beautiful, flaxen blonde and so white she might be mistaken for alabaster. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I love Amy, and that is a good thing because she is now my daughter-in-law and the mother of Hailey, who for the first three months of her life was the first blue-eyed grandchild born into this brown-eyed Italian/Sicilian family, until her eyes changed to beautiful black Sicilian olives.

The Asian bug bit Jesse somewhere around seventh grade when he met Jessica, a petite Korean with great lips, who was in the horn section of the middle school orchestra. Jesse played the same instrument. Well, they didn’t actually play the same one, but they both played trumpets. Their pairing had such possibilities. Jesse and Jessie. Two trumpets. No waiting. However, they were both so shy that neither one said a word to the other until high school graduation day, just before they went off to different colleges. And by that time it was too late.

Then along came Amy. Not Ian’s “Caucasian Amy,” but one of the Asian persuasion, a Japanese violinist Jesse met in college. When he brought her around, the family, including my mother, had grown accustomed to Asians at the gates, although they still had trouble separating them according a specific -ese. Just as the family had reduced everything from ravioli to linguini and lasagna, into generic “macaroni,” there was a tendency to lump all of Asia together - Chinese, Japanese – Portuguese? It didn’t seem to matter. And there were some who had problems telling the family’s Asians apart and thought that Asian Amy and Siu Who were the actually the same person, dating first Ian and then Jesse. Not that they looked alike, or that there was anything wrong with it if they did. But some of the confusion was mainly because Siu and Asian Amy had never been seen together. No one ever had problems telling the two Amys apart. My mother-in-law never asked Asian Amy her Kung Fu question. “Because,” she said, “I already asked her once at Janine’s and I don’t want to be a pest. Besides, I don’t want her to think that I am being rude.”

So for as long as Asian Amy was on the scene, the matter of Kung Fu’s disappearance remained a mystery.

We didn’t talk much, Asian Amy and I, when she and Jesse visited. She was shy and quiet, the very definition of inscrutable, the silent, brooding type, a person of many moods, most of them dark, like a rain cloud that she seemed to carry with her. Their breakup was a protracted and painful affair for both of them. Asian Amy was Jesse’s first real love, but in the end, after many fits and starts, they went their separate ways.

After the pain of Asian Amy subsided, it didn’t take Jesse long to hook up, first with Kat, a tattooed Filipina, and then with Kit, a cute little Chinese girl. They make a cute couple. Kit is barely five feet tall and Jesse measures in at a towering six feet four. They have a lot in common. They are both shy and quiet and have a strong affinity for sushi. But if they ever get married I know there is no hope of the union ever producing a blue-eyed baby.

Jesse has other plans after graduation. He has been studying Japanese for about a year. In June he hopes to go to Japan for a year or more to teach English there. He has submitted his JET application, one of the few things he has completed on time without coaxing from his mother or me. He is already there in Japan in his head.

“I hope you get your wish,” I told him. “It is a wonderful opportunity. But what,” I asked him while we were watching Lost In Translation for the third time, “will you do if you are not accepted?”

He looked as though he had never considered that possibility.

“And what will you and Kit do if you are accepted?”

He shrugged as he sat there with his legs crossed looking very inscrutable.

So I am making plans too, to take a trip to Japan when Jesse is there. I am fortifying myself in Asian culture by ordering lots of Chinese take out, and I am desperately trying to develop a taste for raw fish and octopus flavored ice cream.

Joseph E. Scalia grew up a shabbos goy in Boro Park, Brooklyn, turning on lights and lighting cooking stoves. He has published two novels FREAKs and Pearl, two short story collections, No Strings Attached and Brooklyn Family Scenes. He is looking for a publisher for his latest collection of humor, Scalia vs.The Universe.
 

2. From amidst flashing blue lights, pierced by that one super bright lamp the cops shine into the car, a figure emerges. I am alone.

3. "I’m sorry," I say. "I for some reason thought you were parked." "I was in the turn lane," he says.

4. He peers into the back of the car. A baby seat, a suitcase, a bulging black garbage bag, an air mattress. "Your license please."

5. "What’s your first name?" he asks. If this is an attempt to determine if I am drunk, it is setting the bar very low. Why this question?

6. "Thomas," I say. And then, perhaps in apology for that innate pang of pride that I have answered correctly, I add, "I teach at Tulane."

7. "What do you teach?" he asks. When I tell him he says, "Interesting." "Why?" I say. "You working on a novel?" He sighs deeply.

8. "I want to," he says. "But I don’t know where to start." "Starting is difficult, "I say. "Do you have a character in mind?"

9. "I have a voice. But not really a character." For five minutes we discuss writing. The problems. At some point he hands me my license.

10. I tell him to look me up anytime he wants to talk. I ask his name. He says it. "Blumfeld?" I say? No, he corrects my pronunciation.

11. "I’m serious, look me up," I say. "OK," he says. I want to ask, "What is the novel about?" I don’t. He looks pensive, concerned.

12. Maybe I am afraid he doesn’t know. But do I know what mine is about? We part warmly. "Good bye, Thomas," he says. He turns off the light.

Thomas Beller is a writer and founder and co-editor of Open City magazine and mrbellersneighborhood.com. He teaches creative writing at Tulane University, and you can read his tweets at twitter.com/thomasbeller.

It is 2004. I am 44 years old. I do not have regular income, unless you count the checks I get from our good friends at the Employment Development Department. I drive a car that was old when it was made, and I smoke cigars that linger in my beard long after they’re extinguished.

I play in a men’s softball league where my teammates get on my case about the errors I make, where I can’t hit, and where someone is always yelling at somebody about something, which is usually nothing. This is what I do for fun.

I play the game because it is the only game where I understand all the rules and most of the strategy. That and Monopoly, though to this day I don’t understand the whole thing about mortgaging properties.

I also play ball because when I’m playing ball, that’s all I think about.

At home, I am roommates with my ex-wife’s cat, a vile creature who alternates between screaming, “Why did you make Mommy go away?” and vomiting.

My age, my poverty, my car, my cigars, my athletic ineptitude, and Louise the bulimic cat lead me to believe I must change my life.

Where to start? Well, I keep the cat because I feel like she is a little part of my ex-wife I am supposed to take care of. Yes, I know it’s maudlin. Shut up.

My teammates improve my life by improving theirs. I become a part-time catcher, a position more suitable to my waning defensive prowess.

I cannot get a new car until I get out of debt and being in debt makes me nervous so I smoke. So first I will get out of debt.

By writing a musical.

On The Official List of Making It Big, “writing a musical” comes between “blacksmith” and “potato chip repairman.”

I make about a hundred dollars on the musical. I rethink my approach to Changing My Life.

For one thing, I put Changing My Life in all caps. This time, my age, my poverty, my car, my cigars, my athletic ineptitude, and Louise the bulimic cat lead me to believe I am irresistible to women.

Unfortunately, women, in general, did not get the email.

Over a short period of time, I have dates with too many women. Sometimes 4 a week. They like that I can make time for them until they find out why.

Louise the bulimic cat says, “You would not have to do this if you hadn’t made Mommy go away.”

My songwriting partner says, “Are these dates? Or are these Rondates?” I say, “What is the difference?”

He says, “A date is when interested parties do anything from have coffee to have sex. A Rondate is when you think it is a date and she thinks it is a business meeting about her one woman show, and you are too proud to admit your motive so you end up directing her one woman show.”

On The Official List of Making It Big, after musicals and potato chip repair is “directing one person shows.” I direct 7 one-woman shows. One of the women isn’t even an actress. (Read more about this in my next essay, Directing for Food.)

Happily, between one-woman shows 6 and 7, I meet Sally on the internet.

We meet. She says, “Your car seems fine to me.” She says, “You smell like chocolate.” How interesting. She has a damaged olfactory nerve telling her tobacco is chocolate.

Now there are some problems.

Problem One. She is 21 years younger than me.

I decide this is not a problem.

Honestly, in a lot of ways, she is way more grown up than me. For one thing, she has a job.

Problem Two. We can’t see each other regularly because the musical is going to open in Chicago.

I decide this is not a problem. It will solve the Poverty Problem, which is also now in caps.

Problem Three. Louise the screaming bulimic cat cannot come with me to Chicago. I decide this is definitely not a problem. I get a subletter for the summer, making it her problem.

I say goodbye to my softball team. They don’t say anything. I say goodbye to One Woman Show #8, and I tell Sally, “Maybe you can visit me in Chicago.”

Someone once said, “If a woman sees you do something impossible, you will win her heart.” The person who said this obviously saw Clint Eastwood take a bullet for the President in In the Line of Fire so Renee Russo was required by federal law to fall in love with him.

Impossibly, the musical I have written is on stage in Chicago. Impossibly, Sally sees the musical. More impossibly, I am in the musical. Even more impossibly, after the show, she and I walk down a hallway where impossibly happy audience members applaud me like I am Clint Eastwood who took a bullet for the President.

Sally loves the musical. She likes me. She goes back to LA.

A few weeks pass. I finish work on a Sunday afternoon and get on a plane. I am taking a 48-hour vacation to my own home, where Louise the bulimic cat accuses my Wiccan subletter of using her in satanic rituals.

Sally and I are getting together. Maybe we can play a board game like Monopoly, I say, though I do not understand the rule about mortgaging properties. But she says we have to go to her brother’s birthday party.

At the birthday party, I impress the family because I play catch in the backyard with the brother, who is 11, and who has no adult man in his life.

Once again I achieve the impossible. Usually, when kids see me, they think, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Child Collector. Outta here.”

Since it is a kid’s birthday party, it is over at 6:30pm, which I have not anticipated. We talk about going to a movie, but since I am merely vacationing in California, I have no idea what movie is where when.

Then I say, "Well, my softball team has a game tonight. Would you like to go to that? It is only about an hour and half long."

The girl who thinks I smell like chocolate and who thinks I have a nice car says, “Sure.” Bless her heart.

We go home. I change into my uniform. Louise screams and shows off her vomiting skill to Sally.

I have been away from the team for a while. I figure I will play catcher every other inning and get to bat a couple of times. As it turns out, the team is short-handed. Our manager, who normally plays in the outfield, is going to pitch, and he tells me, "Ron, third base."

I say, "Okay," but I haven’t played third base in this league in two years, and the last time I did, I played very, very badly.

Before the first pitch is thrown, I say aloud, "Dear God in heaven: Please don’t let me screw up in front of this girl."

We are in the field, and the top of the first passes without incident. In the bottom of first, I get up with the bases loaded and hit a single to right and get two rbis.

Now, we take the field. Because of the way our manager is pitching (or because of the way the wind is blowing) a lot of the right-handed batters are hitting the ball to me. A Lot.

I would like to be able to tell you that I field my position with aplomb, that I am the hero of the game. So that’s what I am going to tell you. Because that is what happens.

I field everything. I throw guys out at first. I start double plays. After every inning, the guys come off the field saying, "Great play, Ron West.” It is as if I have paid both teams to participate in an elaborate ruse so it appears I have done The Impossible.

At no point in the course of the game do I think, “I have to be on stage and dancing in 16 hours 2500 miles away.” Because when you’re playing ball, all you think about is playing ball.

There is a guy named Ray on the team I do not get along with. I do not know exactly why. Actually, I do. He is far more able than I am and I played poorly in some games and he was upset about it.

Ray has not talked to me in a year. He has not looked at me in two years. (It now occurs to me he heard me say, “I wrote a musical,” and he is suffering from homophobia.)

Tonight, Ray plays left field. I throw a batter out to end the fifth, and he comes off the field and Starts a Conversation. He says, "I don’t know who she is, but you have to bring her every time."

I get on base 3 times, I field almost all of the balls hit to me, I am awarded the game ball, and we win the game. Sally is delighted.

For a brief time, I am making money, I am cheered by fans, and my old car takes me home to have sex. I am a god. A minor god, but still.

The musical closes in September. Sally and I break up. The age difference which I decided was not a problem is actually a problem. I don’t get a new car and the EDD goes back to being my primary employer. I keep smoking. But then something impossible happens.

Louise the quiet little cat loves me.

Ron West lives in Los Angeles, CA. He and Phil Swann have written The People vs. Friar Laurence and other musicals.

Within that ten seconds something had happened in that Starbucks that will last each person who witnessed the scene unfold. We will carry it with us, it might make us more friendly to our fellow Detroiters, it might make us a little giddy or even happy to live in a city that has been under constant scrutiny because of a corrupt mayor and an dismal economy. But nothing can take away the feeling that happened to us that morning. For once, in a sea of distrust and even if it was for only ten little seconds, Detroit became one, good against evil and a family of brethren united. It was a good day.

Eric C. Novack is the author of the cult classic novel Killing Molly. He has had several short stories published on various online magazines (Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, thedetroiter.com). Eric lives in Midtown Detroit and manages Russell Industrial Center, the largest artist community in Detroit.

“What is that?” I asked my friend John, who used to be Yugoslavian when Tito was still alive. Now he’s not sure what he is. I pointed to the page covered in what looked like hand lettered Zapf Dingbats!

“Cyrillic.”

“Cyrillic? Isn’t that some kind of paint? Something you make in pottery class? Or a synthetic fabric that comes from combining cotton and acrylics?”

“It’s the alphabet of my people,” he said, “like the Greek alphabet or Chinese characters, only different.”

“You’re Chinese?” I said.

On the day of the wedding, armed with a Mapquest translation of the directions that routed me through scenic downtown Newark, I made my way to the “The Gardens of Zagreb,” a catering hall in Fairview, New Jersey, where “the fairest view” turned out to be a view of the Young Croatians for Freedom Club, a storefront in the K Mart shopping center.

The lobby of “The Gardens” looked like an explosion in a lawn ornament factory–a profusion of plastic plants arranged in plaster pots sprouting from every inch of available floor space! And where there was no space on the floor there were shelves up the walls holding plants never intended by Mother Nature to be together in the same hemisphere, even if they were plastic.

The effect was intensified by the full-mirrored walls and ceiling that made it difficult to ignore. Water from a large fountain guarded by plaster angels painted gold gurgled down one simulated rock wall and filled the room with the whisper of leaky plumbing and the heavy scent of chlorine that was reminiscent of my youth spent at the old St. George Hotel swimming pool in Brooklyn.

“More is more” was the obvious message that carried us into the cocktail hour, when a roast pig with a surprised smirk on his face and a headless lamb guarded from their final resting places on carving boards the endless trays of ethnic dishes. Big-headed men with Slobodan Milosevic hair and mustaches, not the turned down Saddam Hussein type, but more like the Josef Stalin straight across scrub brush cut, crowded around the bar puffing on cigarettes while their wives, some of whom also sported facial hair, heaped dishes with food.

I listened to their conversations for some insight into these strange people, whose technology brought the Yugo briefly into the world and also brought down a Stealth bomber.

After the cocktail hour I waddled with the others past the mirrors and up the marble steps to the main dining hall where “Sonny Mustac and The Croates,” who apparently thought that loud compensated for good, were vibrating the chandeliers with their specialty polka rendition of Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” The female drummer was either a Sinead O’Connor impersonator or someone who had fraternized with the enemy and got her head shaved.

Father Stipe Tscherne stopped waiting the tables and stepped up to deliver the blessing. Then Sonny and the band broke into an interesting interpretation of “God Bless America,” which they may have thought was “The Star Spangled Banner.” I was seated directly in front of the huge speakers that caused my stomach to rumble from the ultra bass, and couldn’t help but notice that the crowd had some trouble with the words, until it came to the part, “from the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam.” That was followed by the “Croatian National Anthem.” Everyone in the room but me seemed to know the words of all four verses.

After innumerable floor pounding polkas, an interminable Croatian “Hokey Pokey,” interrupted by dinner and an orgy of desserts, when I had more than I could possibly tolerate, I dropped off my envelope with the bride and groom, picked up my wedding favor–a gold painted plaster angel–and headed for the door. The route took me directly in the path of the pulsing sub-woofers that brought on a wave of nausea and vertigo as I passed.

“Hey,” a Lech Walesa looking guy in a blue tuxedo with a smoking cigarette between his stained fingers confronted me as I approached the exit.

“Huh?” I asked. I could see that his lips were moving under his mustache, but I couldn’t make out the words. Even the wet toilet paper that I had wadded into papier maché cones and stuffed into my ears hadn’t prevented my hearing loss.

“You have good time?”

I looked at my watch. “Eleven-thirty,” I answered.

“How you like my place?” He gestured with his hands and I flinched.

“Yes, you’re right,” I responded. “It’s very late.”

“How you like my food?”

“Yes, they certainly were good and loud, and a good night to you too.” I shook the extended hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette.

Hours later, safe and secure on the New York side of the George Washington Bridge, I was unable to fall asleep, due in part to all the sugar and black coffee I had ingested at the “Venetian Table,” also due to the echoes of “The Gardens of Zagreb” still pulsing inside my throbbing head like the aftershock of an exploded hand grenade in an empty garbage can. But mostly it was because of the musical refrain marching around in the back of my mind: “Tak-she zeppa no-ka du-pa,” which may have something to do with the mountains and prairies of Yugoslavia, although I can’t really be sure.

“That means you have made a commitment to silence. The first obligation is to shut off your cell phones. And just because the train stops at a station doesn’t give you the right to turn it back on to listen to your messages. The phone is off for the duration. If by some mistake you didn’t turn it off completely and it rings, you’re not allowed to answer it.

“But don’t worry about not having anything to do. The way this train has been running, we’ll most likely have an eventful trip. We’ve lost our electricity two times on the way here. There’s a good chance we might lose it again. There seems to be more electricity in the sky than in the wires.

“Don’t blame it on Amtrak. Blame it on Con Edison, then the weather. Amtrak isn’t responsible. We guarantee you a safe ride. But if you look at your ticket, you’ll notice there’s no fine print guaranteeing we’ll get you to your destination on time. Luckily, the driver used the train’s momentum to coast into the stations.

“Also, it was helpful that we were going downhill. Unfortunately, the remaining part of our trip is uphill. We’ll just have to wait for the electricity to get turned back on. How long that’ll take, I couldn’t tell you. I work for Amtrak, not Con Edison or the Weather Channel. So thank you for you cooperation. I hope I can thank you again for it when we’re stuck.”

We would light candles for the dead and as we did so we said our prayers for them, an Our Father for Uncle Frankie, a Hail Mary for Michaela, my mother’s mother, a series of prayers for my mother’s brother Ralph. I believe my Mother felt that he needed a little extra help to get to Heaven, or perhaps she just loved him more than the others.

The alcove where we performed our rituals was dark, but not somber. Thinking back I feel its darkness intimated and conveyed a sense of mystery and sacredness, as if we were at a shrine, though the alcove held no relics. As a boy I got an eerie feeling when I was there. But I remember that the small statue of Saint Anthony seemed kindly, forgiving, as if the saint understood human frailty and understood as well that both the living and the dead were in emotional pain. And I think he knew this was not just because the dead were mourning the loss of their lives, and the living were mourning the loss of the dead, but because life and death were both emotionally painful affairs.

The statue was placed in a fake grotto of sorts. Water would drip down the sides of the saint’s alcove and collect in a small basin at the statue’s feet. I remember that the statue was also surrounded by some artificial vegetation that looked to me a lot like wet twine. The water and vegetation signified the washing away of sins, but also rebirth and hope. On an emotional level I believe they symbolized the hope that both the living and the dead would let go of all resentments, all the anger and disappointment they perhaps still felt toward one another. I see now the message that we could only help the dead purify their souls if we let go of our own negative feelings toward them, and thus became able to express pure and honest concern for their welfare through our prayers. So, in a sense, we were getting rid of our own sins, our negative feelings, as we lit our candles and said our prayers for the dead.

It was all of a piece doing things like lighting a candle for Uncle Frankie, or, before he died, visiting him and caring for him – my mother helping carry him to his bathroom, trying to sooth him as he suffered the agonizing pain of trying to defecate though the cancer was eating through his colon. Lighting the candles was of a piece with going to the weddings of family and friends, the baptisms of children and the wakes and funerals that one attended to show respect to the dead and to their families. It was all of a piece with being present at a nephew or niece’s first Communion or Confirmation, and at all the other life cycle rituals that at some point or other I just stopped going to. The concern shown for the living and for the dead was all of a piece.

Looking back on all this I believe I was learning that observing the continuum of life cycle rituals and remembering the dead were both about self-transformation. This was the bit of folk wisdom that was encoded in my mother’s religious practice. There are folk philosophers of mourning like my mother, and there are learned philosophers of mourning like Martin Buber. But I see that my mother and Buber, sort of an odd pair to think about it (one a Neapolitan-speaking Italian-American housewife from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the other an intimidatingly learned Austrian Jewish philosopher and biblical commentator), were both concerned with mourning successfully.

Buber considered mourning to be successful if it resulted in an enlarged emotional perspective or in a deepening of the self. In his philosophy of mourning, outlined in his great work “I And Thou,” loss prompts an imaginative reaching out that leads to greater self consciousness and even, self transformation. But what is one reaching out for I asked myself as I read Buber. It is the essence of the person who has been lost – the deceased’s way of feeling about the world and her way of looking at it – a perspective that ideally could broaden and deepen one’s own emotional experience. The gift of loss and of mourning for Buber is ultimately then the gift of a wiser and more sympathetic self. In his melancholy ontology, as the scholar Roy Steinhoff Smith writes, “Loss is characterized by three fused moments: loss, imagination and recovery.”

Recovery, getting over the loss of someone dear, is made through the imaginative and feeling attempt to recover, or rather to create, one’s own understanding of the presence that has been lost. One recovers something of her essential humanity and somehow makes it one’s own. I believe that was what my mother might have been trying to do as she would light candles for the dead.

For me, recovering the valued essence of my mother has meant developing the sensibilities of an anthropologist. Ultimately, I think this is how I came to mourn her. Somewhat ironic, as my mother found my profession incomprehensible and could not imagine what possessed me to move to the far side of the globe for years of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. I think she experienced my adventures as abandonment of her, although she and my father were outwardly supportive. She died suddenly when I was living in Hawaii, writing a book about ritual and religious life and trying to make sense of a mound of ethnographic data, a lot of it on mourning behavior.

My first cogent thoughts as a professional anthropologist reflected my mother’s belief that the dead have something of value to offer us, and that is the promise of a deeper, more feeling self. I was trying to understand why the dead should be so prominently featured during New Guinea initiation rituals. Why, I asked myself, should the dead be remembered during rituals that were ostensibly about forging the waxing strength of a new generation of youths? Then I perceived that the feelings of power and accomplishment of the senior generation as they celebrated a new generation’s coming of age were tinged with nostalgia, memory and gratitude. The contributions they were making toward strengthening and celebrating the clan’s youth could not have been possible without the contributions that the dead had once made to their own lives. Remembering the dead was in this instance also a celebration of the possibilities of the present. When I understood these rituals as representing the desire to incorporate the memory of a lost presence into the present moment, I was seeing through my mother’s eyes. Buber perhaps had given me the vocabulary to formulate my interpretations, but it was my mother’s sensibilities that brought me to the emotional meaning.

So, in a way this is how I became an anthropologist. This may seem a somewhat removed, perhaps overly aesthetic account of how I mourned for my own mother. It may seem removed from the brute fact of her death, from the depth of my feeling about her. But that is not how I would characterize the process of my grieving. This grieving certainly did involve that call I got from my sister telling me my mother had died. It involved my initial feelings of panic and disbelief at the news, my scream and my temporary madness.

There was the rushed trip to the Honolulu airport, my wife and I both breaking down as we explained to the ticket agent why we absolutely had to get on that plane back to New York for the wake. There was the month spent in New York at my father’s house trying to help him survive his grief, as we dealt with our own, and helping him adjust to his new and achingly lonely day-to-day. There was the unbearably sad return to Hawaii and to my writing. For me these experiences and memories were in fact too powerful to live with. I had to make something else of them. I made anthropology out of them, or at least my particular anthropological sensibility, a sensibility filtered through a memory of my mother. And this sensibility was my way of remembering the dead, incorporating the lost presence into the fact of my day to day life. My sense of my mother’s way of feeling about the world of death and the dead, and many other matters, does define me in a very real sense. But recovering, remembering, creating-however one wishes to put it-my mother’s sensibilities took time and a certain distillation or distancing of feeling. It took thinking and writing to put my pain into context.

As I think back now I see how thinking and writing about mourning during this time brought me back to the sorts of feeling I experienced at Saint Anthony’s shrine as a child. As I wrote I felt a certain fear, even a certain awe at confronting the poetry of another people’s mourning rituals-as at Saint Anthony’s I had felt a child’s fear of the eerie atmosphere of the shrine and a child’s awe of the rituals for the dead that my mother was teaching me to perform. Yet at the shrine there was the kindly image of Saint Anthony’s statue to give me a feeling of safety. As I wrote, the memory of my mother gave a similar feeling of protection and reassurance, as if she was telling me that I was going to figure it all out and not to worry. As in a dream I was brought back to my child self. And as in a dream I was continually brought back, as I wrote, to a memory of one particular mourning ritual that I saw in New Guinea.

One dawn during those New Guinea years I was startled awake by dramatic and powerful singing and by the first rays of the sun coming up over the Pacific. I remembered that I had been fighting sleep for the previous two hours as I tried to observe and record the mourning and song ceremony for Rauatio, a New Guinean man. It was one of many times that I had to stay up all night during those two years that I spent in the field. The singing for many of the ceremonies I was studying would begin at dusk and would last until dawn.

The man Rauatio had died the previous day after a lingering sickness. His clansmen had arranged the scene of the ceremony, placing a coconut frond awning over the corpse, covering the body with a pandanus mat and placing sweet smelling flowers and herbs on it. A space was cleared for the singers in the village plaza in front of the bier. Kin from Rauatio’s maternal line in another village were invited to come to the song performance. They sang the mourning songs along with the people in our village, their singing alternating with ours. The songs and the singing were powerful and beautiful, filled with nostalgia and reminiscence – alluding to the experiences one had shared with the dead in life. They seemed to represent a certain contemplative wisdom about the nature of loss and longing; their collective meanings and themes seemed to represent an example of successful mourning–extracting some element of wisdom and understanding from the brute, wrenching fact of death.

Yet as I listened to the songs that dawn and later, when I came to understand their meaning more clearly, I had the uncharitable thought that I really had not liked Rauatio very much when he was alive. I resented the way he forced himself on me, coming to my hut unannounced and asking me for gifts of various sorts, taking a very keen interest in my possessions and generally lacking social graces in his dealings with me most of the time. I felt that the ceremony was ennobling him in a way I might not have been inclined to do. But if my mother was present at that ceremony she might not have felt this way.

I remember that some of those my mother had lit candles for back in New York had not been the nicest people. Uncle Frankie drank a lot, cursed up a storm when he did, and was rumored to have slapped his girlfriends around every once in a while. Uncle Tony was just plain nasty a lot of the times – I was afraid of him as a boy. There was the rumor that he was even a little bit mobbed up and that was how he got his no show job down at the Brooklyn docks – he was a real stereotype, a stock character out of the Italian American experience. I was sure too that not everyone in my New Guinea village was so fond of Rauatio either. And yet there we all were singing and mourning for him from sundown to sunrise in this beautiful tribal ceremony.

One of the mourning songs describes a soul visiting his old village and sighing that the place was no longer his home, that it belonged to the living now. His nostalgia for life and the pain he feels at being separated from life make him a sympathetic figure for the mourners. They realize that, in Aeschylus’s words, “the sun is sweet”, that despite the difficulty of life, being alive, just feeling the sun on your skin can be the greatest joy.

The last song was sung as the dawn began to break. This tells of a conversation carried out between a ghost and his kin. The ghost asks his kin to take his possessions and to hold them as remembrance of him. His kin become angry with the request, wishing to avoid the pain of memory, of caring anymore for the dead, for their possessions, for the memories those possessions conveyed. But in the ceremony itself the mourners are made to take possession of some of these things, while letting go of others.

I think the idea being expressed here was the same one that my mother was expressing when she lit candles for Uncle Frankie and Uncle Tony back at Saint Anthony’s alcove. We shouldn’t ignore our responsibilities to the dead or to the living; we should make our peace with the dead by helping them along their way – by letting go of some memories we have of them and holding on to others – thoughts that both my mother and Martin Buber would basically agree with.

The next day Rauatio’s young son showed up at the door to my hut. He was grieving the death of his father and was out of sorts. He asked me for an old picture I had taken of his father some years before when I recorded and photographed another ceremony. The boy told me that he was making the rounds through the village and was asking people if he could take back from them some things belonging to or associated with his father. He told me that his feelings of sorrow and grief over his father’s death made him want to hold and to view these things. I went into my strong box and got out the old picture of Rauatio and gave it to him.

As I looked at the photo I remembered that Rauatio had been helpful to me at that ceremony, instructing me in a finer point of meaning. I also remembered him laughing at me good naturedly as I kept getting in people’s ways while I was trying to photograph this or that part of the action. And when I was just a small boy Uncle Tony had once dipped a piece of fennel in some home-made wine and let me nibble on it. He was glad to see that I liked the taste and that he and I were colluding together against my mother’s wishes that I not be given any wine. I had lit a candle for Uncle Tony, and I was glad that I had sung a mourning song for Rauatio. That had been all of a piece.