Birthday, Brothers, Baseball . . .

I’ve decided to depart from my norm and show a little home movie from my birthday lunch in Frederick. (Birthday is later ... think ‘Marseillaise’ ...)

The lunch, at Volt, was terrific. The restaurant surprised me with an ice cream that I thought had a suspicious resemblance to the Tower of Babel (how did they know I wrote a blog?) with candle. It was sort of vanilla but turned out to be flavored with orange mint.

I figure the candle was for the ‘1’ in ‘61’ and, from my p-o-v, the candle flame, sort of as in Roger Maris’s home run record, was an asterisk. (As in *Hey, not really ...)

Out in front of the restaurant, we did a little self-portrait: my sister-in-law Sandra Ashley Van Doren, my brother Steve, me, and my much better half, Laura Owen Sutherland.

Sandy and Steve are the greatest. Steve and I are 16 months apart and have always been essentially a team – I sometimes think that together we make a well-balanced personality. Individually, well ...

They gave me just what I’d asked for: Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, by Larry Tye. This of course is the story of Satchel Paige. Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox this year is the second-oldest player to make his first All-Star team, at age 42; Paige was the oldest, in 1952, at the age of 46, “after,” as MLB.com puts it, “years of dominance in the Negro Leagues.” (That’s one way to put it.)

Steve had not yet inscribed it, so I had a special request. When I was in Pony League (ages 13–15), the manager of the Lorton Fire Department team, Graham Davis, decided based on my Little League experience that I might make a good pitcher. He even got me a warmup jacket – flame red with a big gold ‘L’, which I got to keep (and kept for centuries), even though I never pitched in a game.

When Mr. Davis tried me out, at the Lorton Reformatory stadium, with its old wooden covered grandstands, well-tended grounds and my first real pitcher’s mound, I immediately got frustrated and started firing pitches all the way to the backstop. End of pitching career. (I was a notorious hothead. We once had to stop a sandlot game for 30 minutes to search the woods for my glove.)

I asked Steve if he would inscribe it, ‘Graham Davis should have given you another chance.’

This would have been nice, coming from Steve. Even though I did fine and ended up in center, Steve came along a couple years later, hit .521 and broke every record they had.

He inscribed my book: ‘Graham Davis had it right!’

The Green Barn (17 May 1984)

Breathing in and out the bird’s song
I sat on the wooden step
Four miles below the sun
Within the mown fields
Of middle May.

Breathing in and out the bird itself as he was singing
I sat on the sun-warped step
Exchanging atmospheres
With middle May
And acres of grass.

I am he who sits in middle May, deciding
To write.

On the fourth anniversary exactly
Of my father’s death
A heart attack at fifty-three
I now thirty-five begin again
Knowing that we never cease.

I of course remember the day
At age fifteen
I set out to paint on canvasboard the local barn,
The green barn
Newly painted
In the orchard hills.

The apple trees were years removed
Shoulders of earth showed hollows and curves
And waves of grass I climbed to meet,
Breasting them with canvasboard.

I tried to paint that green barn.
I used a palette knife.
The greens I made seemed repulsive to me – they were for the green fields, the green of the barn would be impossible without the right green of the flowing fields –
I painted in a sweat
I felt in despair the flowing fields were falling, slipping, even running away with every stroke,
With sweat, sun, bees, greens, no-good greens and so much desperate humid heat and sweat and sun I walked home,
I walked home, balancing the plastered board over barbed wire and gullies and through honeysuckle and under branches until
In the desolate back yard of Dad’s eternally half-finished patio and half-finished hull of a boat (he’d work on it seven more years before selling it not quite completed),
I scraped it all off.

Never again.

Never.

Never again the scraping doubt.
I wish I had that painting today,
I could make it right.
I could make it fourteen million different ways,
In oil, watercolor, pencil or pastel –

Or, like this:

The green barn,
Once a red barn,
Now a gold barn in the summer light,
A gold barn filled with silver blue,
The green barn painted sunlight green over gold and violet reflections,
Floats in the fire green, the sky green, the hard green, white, yellow and wet flowering and dry green
In the me green, heart green, hands and eyes green or turning green,
In the bird and turtle green,
Red and violet and gold.