Once Upon a Fastball

by Bob Mitchell

  He sits down at his desk, opens the book up to a poem, places the opened book side by side with the note:

  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

  That is all you need to know.

  Yikes.

  This is no throwaway line. It is the key that will unlock the note’s door.

  The poem is John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Papa Sol loved it, Seth recalls, loved the Greekness of it, the mythology, even read it to him once or twice. He also remembers having read it in high school. Now, as he makes his way through the poem, deep in exegetical meditation, it all comes flooding back to him, as mystery cedes to meaning.

  Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

  Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,

  Sylvan historian…

  Sylvan historian! Seth looks at Papa Sol’s note, sitting on the desk, to the right of the poem:

  My dearest Sylvan one.

  Yesss. The Grecian urn, subject of the poem, is addressed by the poet as a “sylvan historian,” since one of the scenes it relates on its surface has a woodsy setting. And yes, I, Seth Stein, just like the urn, am a historian, too, a “Sylvan one.” So far, so good.

  Seth reads the remainder of the first stanza, and his eyes drift down to the beginning of the second:

  Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

  Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,

  Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone…

  Ditties of no tone! And now to Papa Sol’s note:

  My spirit hears nothing if not ditties of no tone.

  So. The urn, or art, can capture “unheard melodies,” which are sweeter than ones we hear in real life. Papa Sol was a human being but also a sensitive artist. He understood about the music no one can hear except those whose spirits can appreciate the idealized melodies that are art and that, unlike reality, are toneless and eternal. And Papa Sol was a Romantic, a dreamer with a lofty spirit.

  Now to the second part of the third stanza:

  More happy love! more happy, happy love!

  For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,

  For ever panting, and for ever young;

  All breathing human passion far above,

  That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,

  A burning forehead, and a parching tongue…

  A burning forehead, and a parching tongue! And Sol:

  My forehead burns, my tongue is parched.

  Okay. The amorous scene depicted on the urn is one of lovers frozen in time, eternal passions frozen by art that will last forever. Only problem here is that the passion is idealized, frozen by art, and can never be consummated. In the note, Papa Sol implied that his human passion was also “far above,” ideal, unsatisfied. Like the lovers, his passion was often unfulfilled. Must have been referring to the Ball and the Terry Fiasco and the Billy Blunder and maybe other disappointments? This must have been how he saw his life: passionate, but also, in part, disappointing and incomplete.

  Now on to stanza four, and the final three verses:

  And, little town, thy streets for evermore

  Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell

  Why thou art desolate, can e’er return…

  And Sol’s version:

  Can a soul ever return from the silent streets of a little town?

  Wow. So, the town pictured on the urn is empty, and the poet is saying that it will always be empty, since art has frozen it in time. But also, no one from the past, from the time when the streets of the town were empty, can ever come back to life to explain why there were no people there.

  History! Of course. Papa Sol must have been thinking of me, his Sylvan historian, when he wrote this. The people of the past have disappeared forever and can’t return to life, so it is up to the historian to go back and answer the questions.

  It is up to the historian to go back and answer the questions.

  Go back: as a scholar, as a researcher, or…literally?

  If I’d gone back to the Polo Grounds and Candlestick and Shea and Yankee Stadium as an ordinary historian, via my research, I would’ve put some of the pieces of the past together, but, of course, not nearly all of them, since History is an imperfect discipline, as I’ve learned from Whitehead and Churchill and others.

  But I might have gone back…literally. Ridiculous as it seems, could Papa Sol have known, as reflected in his note, that the baseball he bequeathed to me would actually take me back to the frozen past, then allow me to return to the present to tell about it? Could he possibly have known that it would permit me to go back and see him as he really was, warts and all?

  Seth is flushed with the power of discovery, of knowledge, of clarification, of an even deeper love for his Papa Sol. He presses on, and now he is reading the first line of the fifth and final stanza:

  O Attic shape!…

  And Sol:

  Your legacy is in the Attic.

  Aha. So I was right to assume the capital A had to do with the Greeks, not something buried in Grandma Elsie’s attic. Of course, and now I see: The essence of what he wanted to give to me in life resides in the Greeks, in their heroism and their high ideals and their art. In the end, life is flawed by its imperfections, so you have to hold fast to high ideals and dreams, and reach for something lofty.

  Seth inserts the note in the book, on the same page as the Keats poem. And he grins a crooked grin: Papa Sol’s note—the perfect, clarifying companion to the magical baseball—is no longer Greek to him.

  Seth is sitting in his office in Robinson Hall, which exhibits the same studied chaos as in his town house: Baseball memorabilia, history tomes, and random note cards and paper are arranged haphazardly and in such a way that, aside from Seth, no human being could ever find anything, or even want to.

  The Brahms Horn Trio is playing on the iTunes of his Apple laptop. Seth always listens to Brahms when he is trying to organize his thoughts.

  He is putting the final touches on his outline for the second chapter of his book, and he is stuck. Whenever Seth hits a brick wall, he grabs a pen and a pad and starts scribbling words. Any words that come to mind. Spontaneous, random lists of words. And invariably, by dint of this creative, cathartic, and free-flowing process, he extricates himself out of the quicksand of writer’s block.

  He writes his name first, and then Kate’s, Elsie’s, and Sammy’s. Followed by lists of sea mammals, baseball managers under fifty, U.S. presidents with long beards, symphonies beginning with the letter C, curly Italian pasta, African capitals, Chilean vineyards, sculptures by Michelangelo, novels by Dickens, makes of acoustic guitars.

  Another page of the writing pad. He jots down Papa Sol’s name, and his mind wanders back to his four visits, and he scribbles some more names, right under Sol’s:

  Solomon Stein

  Bobby Thomson

  San Francisco

  Billy Buckner

  Walter Retlaw

  Something about this particular list catches his eye. Not sure what, but it’s definitely something. He reads the names first silently, then aloud. Nope, nothing jumps out at him except for the alliterations in Solomon Stein and Billy Buckner. Then what in the world—

  Suffering sciatica.

  Like a prehistoric termite trapped in a tomb of amber, Seth is frozen stiff by his discovery. He counts once again, just to be sure. Yup, every single name he has just listed, every single one of the entities that played major roles in his four visits to the past, contains precisely twelve letters.

  Someone with a mind less agile and persistent than Seth’s might have dismissed this as a meaningless coincidence. Seth Stein, on the other hand, will not be satisfied until he has exhausted all roads to the truth.

  After all, VERITAS.

  He Googles on his iBook G4, types in twelve, clicks on SEARCH.

  Mother of pearl.
>
  The basic sales unit in trade is twelve, or a dozen.

  The Western and Chinese zodiacs have twelve signs.

  There are twelve heavenly bodies in our Solar System.

  There are twelve months in a year.

  There are twelve hours in half a day, and twelve numbers on a clock.

  The basic units of time (60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours) can all perfectly divide by twelve.

  The minute hand of a clock turns twelve times as fast as the hour hand.

  Jewish tradition talks of the twelve tribes of Israel.

  The New Testament describes twelve apostles of Jesus.

  In traditional Jewish practice, a girl becomes a bat mitzvah on her twelfth birthday.

  There are twelve days of Christmas.

  In Greek mythology, the Twelve Olympians were the principal gods of the pantheon.

  In Greek mythology, Hercules was assigned Twelve Labors.

  In English, twelve is the largest number that has just one syllable.

  In the U.S., twelve people are appointed to sit on a jury.

  There are twelve pairs of ribs in the human body.

  There are twelve major joints in the human body.

  Okay, so the number twelve is an amazing, incredible, international, universal, essential, significant, mystical, omnipotent number. So what? The real question: What are the names of the highlights from his visits trying to convey to him?

  Seth takes another look at one of his Google links. And there it is, in the etymology of the word twelve:

  The word “twelve” is a native English word that presumably arises from the Germanic compound twa-lif, “two-leave,” meaning that two is left after one takes away the base, ten…so a literal translation would yield “two remaining [after having ten taken].”

  Two remaining after having ten taken. Seth scratches his head, thinks hard.

  And sees the light.

  Battered brown leather briefcase in hand, Seth Stein scurries through the Yard—Weld, University, Thayer—then passes Annenberg Hall and heads up Oxford. His mind is racing almost as quickly as his feet, but stopping his momentum cold is a disheveled, scholarly-looking homeless person.

  “Spare a buck for a cup of coffee?”

  Although Seth is in a rush, he is feeling magnanimous, so he reaches into his jeans pocket, fumbles, pulls out a not-so-crisp dollar bill, gives it to his new friend, with a smile and a “good luck, man.”

  Whatever happened to “Buddy, can you spare a dime?”, Seth wonders.

  As he continues up Oxford Street, his feet screech to a halt. What was that I felt there in my pocket, next to the bill?

  He fumbles around in the pocket again, does his “blind man palpating” guessing game with his right hand. Can’t quite tell what that object is. He removes it from his pocket, walks closer to a light coming from a nearby building so he can get a better look.

  The object is a pair of peanuts in their shell, the kind he rarely eats, the kind you can find at a baseball game.

  Mamma mia.

  A stunned Seth is standing outside the door of Kate’s apartment. He is thinking about this latest piece of prima facie evidence. He is thinking that the camel’s back is now officially broken by the straw that is the ballpark peanuts. As if the ticket stub, the mustard stain, the sunburn, and the Mets cap weren’t enough to make him a true believer.

  But he is mostly thinking about the number twelve and its etymology.

  Two remaining after having ten taken.

  He is reviewing in his mind his original conclusion about the significance of this sentence. Two remaining after having ten taken. Ten taken. First my folks died in a plane crash. That’s two. Then Kate’s maternal grandparents died in a car crash. That’s four. Then her father’s parents passed around the same time, of natural causes. That’s six. Then Kate’s parents died in that horrendous elevator accident. That’s eight. And Papa Sol disappeared, and when he did, a big chunk of Gram’s life was taken away. That’s ten. I never knew my mother’s parents, so it’s still ten. And so they’ve all been taken, these family members of mine and Kate’s, the ten of them. And now there are two remaining.

  “Hey, babe, willya grab me that bottle of Barolo?” Seth tells Kate as he sweeps her off her feet, pulls her back nearly to the floor, and plants a passionate smackeroo on her lips, reproducing that V-J Day photo on the cover of Life.

  “Wow, lover boy!” Kate purrs. “What’d I do to deserve that?”

  “You’ll see,” Seth reassures her. “But first,” he adds in his best Gabby Hayes twang, “this here goldarn varmint of a bottle needs t’be opened, an’ right quick.”

  While Seth opens the wine, Kate is wondering why the Barolo? She knows that Seth knows that she’s been saving it for a very special occasion, so—

  “Sweetie,” Seth says, wineglass in hand, “sit your cute rump down. I’ve got something to tell you I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while now.”

  Knowing better than to get her hopes up, Kate registers a look of apprehension.

  “No, it’s nothing bad, dear. It’s all good.”

  Seth and Kate sip, and he proceeds to tell her the story—the entire story, in exquisite detail and five-part harmony—of his four amazing visits to Papa Sol and the past, including every bit of prima facie evidence. It requires a full hour to tell her everything, to open up his mind and his heart and his soul.

  He is finished now, spent physically and emotionally. He takes a second sip of the precious wine and leans against the back of the sofa.

  Kate is exhausted, too. She has spent the entire sixty minutes, literally and figuratively, on the edge of her seat. Smiling. Frowning. Giggling. Laughing. Crying. Cheering. Booing. Getting angry. Getting happy. Being frightened. Being proud.

  “So you believe me? You think it all actually happened?” he asks.

  “Of course, I believe you,” she answers, this time without hesitating. “This kind of thing doesn’t happen to just anyone,” she continues, “but you’re not just anyone. I love you, Seth Stein.”

  Seth pauses a sec. Two remaining after having ten taken.

  “I love you, Kate Stein.”

  Not sure she heard right, Kate has a spasm in the pit of her stomach.

  “Se-eth?”

  “Yeah?”

  She gives him one of those innocent, doe-eyed Lucy Ricardo looks. “What’re…you…saying?”

  “What I’m saying, my sweetie pie,” Seth says as he raises his glass of the special wine high in the air, “is that…”

  Seth is thinking about how life is too damn short to put off important things like this anymore and about how proud Papa Sol would be of him at this very moment.

  “…is that …I propose…”

  The La-Z-Boy is where Seth always ends up when he is feeling anything of any consequence: sadness, happiness, fear, pride, pensiveness, despair, hope. Or ecstasy, which he is feeling now.

  Last night was a once-in-a-lifetime evening, and Seth has returned home today from Kate’s apartment experiencing an entire gamut of feelings, from Amorousness to the need to stack some Z’s.

  He is reclining in his La-Z-Boy, smoking the last of his stash of Cohibas to celebrate his engagement to Kate, and his sharing with her the four visits to the past and the rest of his life. He is listening to the original recording of the old Broadway chestnut Show Boat. The one recorded opening night, 1927, at the Ziegfeld Theatre.

  He blows a series of exquisite little smoke rings that follow one another up to the ceiling like an ethereal string of pearls. The very shape of the ring sequence expresses his inner joy:

  ooooooo

  There’s something about a Kern and Hammerstein musical that always makes Seth happy. Here comes one of his favorite songs, one that Papa Sol used to whistle all the time, a real tearjerker actually written by Charles K. Harris in 1892, as performed by the wonderful Frederica von Stade in the role of Magnolia Ravenal:

  After the ball is over, after the break of morn
,

  After the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone,

  Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all—

  Many the hopes that have vanished…after the ball.

  As the final syllable of this quatrain dissolves into the air, Seth projects his head and neck forward jerkily, doing his very finest pigeon imitation.

  Thuffering thuccotash.

  The final piece of the puzzle. The last line of Papa Sol’s note. The passion for word games he and his grandfather share.

  P.S. What will you do after the ball?

  Seth springs out of his chair, walks to the stereo, replays the song. Then a third time. Then, one by one, each bar. Then again. And again. Then he returns to his recliner and meditates.