Tag: baseball

Notes from The Shrine, 8.7.24: A Bear Came Over the Tracks

~ johnbrandall

Outside in the courtyard at Shrine with my dad. Brad had a mask on but no-one said anything to me about any new Covid restrictions. Within ten seconds of my clapping his shoulder to announce my arrival, Dad asked me to take him outside.

The lawn crew is edging walkways and borders.

”Where are we, the Shrine?” he asks.

”Where do you think we are?” I say.

“I think we’re there. I’m just guessing.”

The edger drones on, throttling up and down, back and forth, in and out, left to right. My dad’s eyes are blue, red, and watery.

”You want to go out there even with that lawn equipment going?”

A rhetorical question he does not answer.

It’s cooler. Way cooler. The two-cycle engine quiets for a moment, just a moment. And the rest of the soundscape steps slowly out from wherever it was hiding. The whir of crickets. Voices from inside.

”You’re not gonna see much in the sky,” he says, “ A few birds, that’s it.”

There’s the song sparrow, reeling off its spell. Nothing happens. They’ll be back to mow, and then again to blow. Maybe we’ll be at lunch by then.

The sky is cloudy. It might not even be eighty degrees, a stunning turn of events. Church bells. I’d go to that mass sometime. There are people in there who know me. Maybe they don’t know my name but they know my face and they know I’m here for my dad. That’s all I know to feel welcome. That is enough. Knowing more would break the spell. Question me, question them. See ya in another life, brutha.

”You want anything to read?”

”No, I just like to enjoy it out here,” he says, “I got papers in there I read.”

Remember back when my parents said they saw a panther, from the St Francis entrance? They said they saw a panther go through some grass, at the edge of the back parking lot, and into the woods. I thought it must have been a dog, or possibly a bobcat…


Read more of this account from early August 2024, right before Covid swept through Dammert…

Lucky You a Pen

~ johnbrandall

In 1986 my dad’s favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, lost the World Series in heartbreaking fashion to the New York Mets.  The Red Sox had twice led the Mets late in Game Six, repeatedly coming within one strike of winning the game and thereby the Series.  But bad relief pitching and an infamous miscue by the Boston first baseman allowed New York to prevail in extra innings.  

I was seven years old so I don’t remember the game well, but I do remember my dad moving from one room of the house to another, depending on how the game was going, believing superstitiously that how and where he watched the game could affect the outcome. 

The next spring my mom bought me some clothes from an erstwhile store called Venture.  Or it could have been Glik’s.  What I remember is that among those clothes was an orange t-shirt that I really liked.  The Mets wore uniforms with orange trim and their logo is orange on blue.  The t-shirt disappeared.  I asked my mom what happened to it.  Apparently my dad had banned the t-shirt on the basis of orange being a “gang color” but I suspect that the shirt reminded him of the Mets.  

~

You can’t make your bed while you’re on it.  That’s what my mom would say to me as I tried to straighten the covers atop my bunk bed, the higher of two bunks in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother.   At the end of the bunk was a window that looked out over our driveway, toward the house next door where Domino the German Shepherd lived, along with the couple who owned the house.  I could lie prone on the end of my bunk and look out the window, high above our driveway.  

Even though my bedroom was on the first floor it felt like a second-floor view because our driveway sloped down as it ran from the street to the back of our house.  On our side of the driveway was a lovely terraced rock garden that my mom looked after.  On the other side of the driveway was a steeply slanted hedge of unruly ivy and honeysuckle that my dad sometimes clipped.  The valley-like feel of the driveway put our yard at a remove from our neighbors’ yard even though they weren’t but twenty feet apart...  


To read the rest of this essay, click here...

One for Joey Votto

~ johnbrandall

A tight, glaring
Earring

A waxy, flippant
Moonbeam

The spot on the field
Where I place my hand

My swing is a fine piece of machinery
When it catches the late light of June

Which is why I’ve got
Two axes—
Because I knew
That the first one
Would rust.

Babler State Park, April 2018

~ johnbrandall

But Meg said, but Greg said.  Camp host reading Stephen King.  Spooky.  The Cardinals lost, the Nationals lost.  Padres at Rockies now, from Coors.  There was a brawl in this game.  Rox lead 5-0.

I turn down the sound of a commercial.  It felt especially out of place here.  In Denver you go to Applejack Wine & Spirits.  In Chicago it’s Binny’s Beverage Depot.  Heck, these days you don’t even have to go to the Binny’s store, they’ll bring it right to your door.  Joe Maddon told me that.

I went to Binny’s a couple of times when I lived a summer in Chicago.  That was back when beer was blowing up, craft beer—or microbrews, as they were then known.  I heard the Tampa Rays announcer yesterday talking about how he used to live in Chicago.  He was doing a Rays game against the White Sox.  It struck me that a lot of people have once lived in Chicago, midwesterners at least.  My brother and sister both live there now.  

I’ve only ever once been to New York City.  The Big Apple was the setting for a book I just read.  It made me want to visit again; or, it made me wish I’d been born there, had a chance to spend more than a few days of my life there.  I don’t think I could move to NYC now.  Not as a dog owner.  Not even as a married man.  I would’ve had to have lived there young.  If I were living in NYC I’d have to be able to float around.  I could have a job but no attachments outside of that.  Otherwise I think the City would crush me, wring me out, drive me mad.


Camping a night in Babler Park five years ago...

“Newville 108” at the Under Review

~ johnbrandall

I am posting today to highlight a poem I had published yesterday on another website.

My poem called "Newville 108" is currently running at a site called the Under Review.

I am hoping you will check my poem out there. Later on this year, I will post it here but for now I want to thank them for publishing my work and I want to invite you to check out their site, and to take a look at my poem there by following this link:

https://www.underreviewlit.com/issues/7-winter-2023

If you are headed there on your phone, I should say that my poem will read best and look best if you tilt your phone sideways so that the screen gets wider, allowing the poem enough room to accommodate the length of its lines. It also looks good on a laptop.

Finally, the Under Review has suggested that it might produce a limited run of print copies of this current issue, which I hope will happen.

Weed Chronicles, Volume One

~ johnbrandall

10.02.2022

What I’ve got here is some OG #18.  I taste meat, grease, gas, incense.  Not fruit.  Bong rip.  No cough but a little tenderness in the throat.  Harvest was June ninth, twenty-twenty-two.  The THC comes in at 26.1 per cent.

Creeping high.  I’m on my first drink, which is not usually the case.  Usually I’ve had a couple of drinks by the time I’m craving a smoke but we’ve been driving all day.

It’s Braves 5, Mets 3.  An urge to write is a good early side effect but this urge might not be due to the weed.  It could be the driving.  It’s happened before.  It’s the movement, my body through the gravity-controlled space of this planet, the vibration of traveling seventy miles an hour, backward in time, against the spin, in a car.


Read the full first volume here...

All Roads Are Crossings (2020)

~ johnbrandall

Where did I put that thing? It has to be in here somewhere. I’ve never brought it back into the house. Maybe I threw it behind the seat? Or maybe the kids were playing with it, even though I’ve asked them to stop. Perhaps I stashed it in the console, along with the sunglasses, the pens, the motion sickness tabs, and this notebook. Or maybe it’s hanging on the rearview mirror, hidden in plain sight, like a rabbit’s foot, a pair of dice, or an air freshener that wore out many moons ago.

~

Things that are crumpled: bedspread, sauteed greens, the economy, mask on the ground, the hours of last night in my memory, recyclables once tipped into the collection truck, an old friendship, the silence, a grounded butterfly’s wing, used latex-free gloves, plastic bag in my pocket that once held oatmeal raisin cookies, my stash of reusable cloth bags now outlawed from use at the grocery, deleted email, used coffee filters, my previous laptop after an unfortunate run-in with the suddenly vital videoconferencing app known as Zoom, various articles of clothing that are now just laundry...

The full essay is here

Rings and Keys in Ste Genevieve

~ johnbrandall

Rental house done
in typewriter theme
boxed wine in the fridge
fuzzy comet up high

Typewriter ribbon
run dry
ink disappearing
into dust
lost as a sinking
creek

Baseball delayed by disease
five planets visible
all-numeric password
my wife and I
driving in the dark
in a very old town
that neither of us knew
to get our eyes on a comet
no one knew would be there

Corona is
a brand of typewriter
of beer
of pruning tool
a constellation Borealis
a fancy word for halo:

That ring we saw during the solar eclipse
that pearly glow

A gaseous envelope
burning hotter
than the Sun itself

I Don’t Know What It Is About A Field—Part Two

~ johnbrandall

Left Tucumcari, New Mexico at 8:40. The woman at the Best Western when I checked out says, "You look like you could use more sleep." Oh, thanks! What a nice thing for you to say. Yeah, I could have used some more sleep. But other guests stirring early, doors clanging, and then someone freaking out when a cat jumped out of the hallway trash can meant it was time for me to get out of bed. That and needing to drive another eight hours today.

I'm on U.S. Highway 54 headed east. This highway takes me all the way to Wichita. Land is mostly flat. Ranch land. Cattle grazing. Mesas in the distance, to the west. Lots of Aermotors. I've realized that's a trademarked name for the old-style windmills.

Lots of empty buildings here. There were lots of them in Tucumcari, too. That town is hollowed out. Abandoned homes. I suppose Tucumcari had its day. Post World War II. Car culture. Route 66. Before passenger air travel proliferated...


The second and final part of the travelogue continues here...