PLAY BALL! : GREAT QUESTS BEGIN AT NISSAN

"VAN"

 When I was 8 years old I found myself sitting in a new Quest minivan at the Nissan dealership while my mom filled out the paperwork.  We had never owned such a large and up-to-date car before.  The middle seat could recline!  And there were three rows of seats instead of two!  More importantly, we were beginning a quest of sorts.

The summer of 1993 was the first memorable move of my life, albeit a temporary one.  We used that Nissan Quest to go on umpteen 7 hour road trips between New York and Maryland.  My sister was having leg surgeries in Baltimore, and the family moved from our familiar home on Long Island to spend three months split between hospital waiting rooms and a small apartment in a new neighborhood where my skin color made me a minority.  The former turned out to be my first true international experience, as children were coming from all over the world to have medical procedures done by these first-rate American doctors.  I met a lot of kids who would never enjoy the physical gifts or even basic health that I took for granted.  I also met a lot of kids from places whose names I couldn’t pronounce and seemed to be mind-bogglingly happy despite the fact that they had pins in their legs or IVs in their arms.  I remember one of them re-enacting Garth’s “Foxey Lady” dance from Wayne’s World (one of the top five love stories of all time), belting it out as gravelly as could be with a tube sticking in his neck.  I also remember passing a ball back and forth with a nice kid in a wheelchair, and getting yelled at by a cranky old nurse for playing with a ball in a hospital, and then finding out a few days later that he had died in his sleep.

I had to play alone a lot that summer, and find out how to survive the solitude suffered by every sentient soul.  Until then, summers had been spent in my familiar backyard or with my familiar friends, like Glenn and Matt.  We went to the beach to see the ocean, or on the bay in my dad’s little sail boat, or way upstate to the lake to go swimming in fresh water not too far from Canada.  But in 1993 I had to meet new people.  This was very difficult for me at that age, since I was paralyzed with shyness toward almost everything new.  I think I got way more skills handling solitude that summer than I did handling people.  I’ve always had a huge imagination, and that summer inevitably enhanced it.  My parents gave me this baseball net for my birthday.  It was designed so that I could throw a baseball at it and have it bounce back to me to catch based on the force of my throw.  It was a substitute for my dad and my friends.  I figured out how to throw a football at it too.  Unfortunately I became so good at playing alone that when three neighborhood kids walked by and asked me to come play with them, I shyly declined because I was afraid of strangers of all ages and assumed that I was no fun anyway.  They got really offended and called me lots of racist names I'd never heard of, and I stood there quietly and absorbed it until they were out of sight and then ran inside to tell my mom's friend, who had been looking after me that week.

My best memory that summer was also one of my worst memories.  We were going to my first baseball game with my dad at a nice stadium (Shea Stadium in Queens didn’t count) by seeing the Orioles at Camden Yards.  I got to see The Iron Man, Cal Ripken, Jr., who set the record for most consecutive games played.  Baseball is America’s past time, and the first sport I learned about.  I think I was two when the New York Mets won the ’86 World Series, and I got to grow up knowing that my favorite local sports team was the best in the world.  Never mind that they were the worst in the world in 1993, the first year I began actually paying attention.  But the Orioles were good, and they even had a chance to win the division that summer.  The season was halfway over and they were only a couple games behind the World Series Champions, the Blue Jays.  My dad is a biologist who loves birds and painting, and there were several nice paintings of blue jays in our home.  I associated them with my dad, especially since his middle name is “Jay”.  Also, my best friends basically since my birth, my cousins Mike and Dan, lived in Montreal, which has a different baseball team, but the Blue Jays were better so I'm pretty sure they rooted for them.  Anyway, before the game I made the incredibly stupid mistake of making my first piece of memorabilia a Blue Jays helmet.  The Oriole mascot took notice of this sometime around the seventh inning stretch and had great fun stealing my cap and beating it up in front of the drunken adults around me who laughed at and taunted me, much to my father’s confusion and dismay.  I never forgot that moment of feeling like an outcast loser just because I was rooting for a foreign team for reasons that people wouldn’t easily understand. 

The other most vivid baseball memory was watching the All-Star Game with my grandma and being really excited about it and waiting all day for it, and then the American League beat the National League.  We were waiting the whole time for them to finally put a young Mike Piazza in the game because even though he was a rookie he would soon be great, and they never did put him in.  He went on to become the greatest hitting catcher in history, and mostly as a New York Met. 

As some other point during the summer I recall buying a San Francisco Giants helmet.  I think I did so because they used to be from New York and had one of the greatest players ever, Willie Mays.  They also currently had Barry Bonds, who was having a great year and had just moved back home there to follow in his father's footsteps.  He had a great inspiring season, and years later he figured out how to take steroids like all the other modern home run kings, and he hit more home runs than any of those other steroid-using home run hitters.  Then again, my favorite memory of him is him striking out against New York Mets star veteran reliever John Franco in Game 2 of the 2000 Division League Series on the Mets' way to their only World Series where I was old enough to watch them.

I've never met a real pitcher, but I did meet a kid named Joe who was having the same surgery as my sister.  He was in a wheelchair, and he loved sports.  He was from Cleveland, so he loved the Indians and the Cavaliers, and he loved throwing a baseball with me.  He was strong and took delight in hurting my hand with his fastballs.

There's a stereotype of the "average Joe", but I have four friends named Joe, and they're all far from average.  More importantly, they were all great friends to me when I felt like a minority.  There's Joe Murphy, from Cambridge, who pulled me out of my urban intellectual overload in New York City and made me climb mountains and gives me these "No Excuses... Play Like a Champion" bracelets that always break when I've achieved something, and then mails me a new one as soon has he hears to remind me that there's always a new season.  There's Joe Schuster, who agrees that Forrest Gump is an excellent movie, and whom I met the third day of college when I didn't have any friends.  We went outside and threw a football around, and we've been friends ever since, including as roommates in New York City.  Our passions led us down different paths, but he pulled me out of my own insane head and back into reality with a timely football or baseball catch more times than I told him.  He also insisted we have a ball pit in our house senior year of college so that we would always remember to play after a day of hard work.  Then there's Joe Weiss, who greeted me ecstatically after my journey around the world and encouraged me in my writing dreams more than any other friend or fan had or has done since.  Even though we were living very different physical realities during that time, his connection to what I had attempted to express filled me with hope that I could continue to reach people and make them feel good about life no matter how crazy a path my life would take me on.  And he had an engineering PhD and had just converted his own truck to an electric truck practically on his own, so he probably knew what he was talking about.  And of course, the great Joe Sargent, my fellow staff supervisor at college intramural sports, who saved me from the pits of athletic mediocrity by inviting me to join his football and basketball teams after years of officiating my games and watching my teams lose 100-30 while I scored 25 points.  I was the only white player on both teams.  I was nervous at first, but Joe coached me to just relax and flow with the rhythm of the game, mix in my special talent with the team and everyone would have fun playing and achieve something excellent.  Thanks to that advice, we won two basketball championships and would have won two football championships if he didn't have some internship with the New Jersey Nets during the week that prevented him from leading us to victory.  They all have great senses of humor, and have appreciated my unique style of humor, thus making me feel less alone in this world, something I've been fighting since the quest began in the summer of 1993.

You see, one sunny afternoon that fateful summer I was riding on the highway with my mother in the Quest.  Suddenly I heard my mom shriek, “Oh my God!” as she looked in the rear-view mirror.  I looked in the side view mirror, just in time a tractor-trailer directly behind us swerve off the road, turn on its side, and explode into a ball of flames and black smoke.  We later learned that the driver had fallen asleep, gently curved off the road, tipped over and exploded himself out of this life.  That night on the news we saw a helicopter airlifting the remains of the driver.  I didn't see him, but I saw the truck explode, and it's the only time I've ever knowingly watched someone die.

That summer was the first summer the city of Baltimore tried to get a football team back after the Colts bolted town decades before.  They had to pitch a new name for a new team if the NFL decided to award them one.  I remember being there and reading the paper when they chose the name "Ravens" after the Edgar Allen Poe poem "The Raven".  It's about a guy trapped alone in a room haunted by his own solitude in the universe.

Of course, I haven’t brought up anything my sister went through.  That was obviously the worst of all of it, but I can't say it was my bad experience, because she went through it, not me.  Although I experienced hearing some screams and seeing some faces in true pain, I didn’t experience the pain that caused those screams, so I can’t really claim those as my bad memories, as much as it hurt to know my sister was in pain so constantly.  Meanwhile, I used every opportunity to run around with my legs and be free.  I think Forrest Gump hit theaters that year.  There's a scene where he breaks free of his corrective leg frames and runs from the bullies into a beautiful future, running back and forth across the country and overseas, and loses friends and love and finds them both over and over again in the most strange and unexpected ways.  My sister wore the leg frames, and I ran around until she got to break free and run over the sea to show me it was easy.
         

I moved back to Long Island with my dad that autumn.  Without my sister and mom around I had to find a way to carve out my own identity for once.  I found myself more focused on doing my homework perfectly than ever, even though nobody was really asking me to or pushing me to.  I also played sports with my imagination in the backyard more than ever before.  Sports had become a new obsession for me.  I had just learned all the rules to football, baseball and basketball, and had begun learning math by keeping statistics and winning the Super Bowl World Series Finals every afternoon/evening in the backyard, usually by myself.  Sometimes I played Game Boy, but I wasn’t allowed to own a real Nintendo that used a TV screen until I was 11.  I remember being worried and nervous about being perfect so much that my mom was worried I would develop ulcers as a nine year old.

Looking back, that was the most important year of my life.  For once I realized that I was a good student that could do something well for himself, regardless of what other people were doing.  If I paid attention in class, did the homework on time, stayed organized and didn't get into bad trouble, I would easily learn how to simplify the fractions, remember the history of my homeland, understand my body, figure out how to express what was inside my mind and understand the rest of mankind, and sometime be able to live in the world well because of all of that.  Believe it or not, I also began a great educational relationship with the television show The Simpsons that year, who taught me all about handling life's absurdities with intelligent humor, and many new words and historical/cultural references.

I'll never forget having to memorize poems, and my dad coaching me through full memorization of this really long epic called "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere", where he wakes everyone up to the start of the revolution.  Then it was "Casey at the Bat" where he strikes out, and then "The Return of Casey" where he hits a grand slam, and then some Roald Dahl rhyming books that made people laugh.  Roald Dahl imagined Willy Wonka and his land of pure imagination.  At one point I had to get up in front of the whole school of three hundred intermediate 9 and 10 year old's and recite "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and a Roald Dahl book.  I was small and pale and nerdy and shy, but people generally liked me or left me alone because I didn't give them too much grief.  Plus I had close friends and classmates who were close enough, and that's all you need.  Of course, back then, I didn't realize that I needed poetry.  It was just another homework assignment for me.  All I really cared about was the outcomes of sporting matches.

As for A Ride Called Quest, it lasted in our family for almost fourteen more years.  It survived many repeated road trips to Baltimore until my sister was done with all of her surgeries, and it’s the car I used on my driver’s license road test when I was 16.  By college my parents had nicer cars and the Quest had become the hand-me-down car that my sister and I used when we needed wheels.  It became my car when I returned from a semester abroad in New Zealand, my first overseas living experience.  On the way home for Thanksgiving I hit a patch of ice going down a steep winding central New York hill and fishtailed downhill for a terrifying ten seconds.  We smashed into the back of a pickup truck which was inexplicably stopped at the bottom of the hill.  It turned out he was a volunteer rescue worker responding to a car accident that had occurred in the same spot just five minutes before.  Two girls had skidded out in the exact same place I had, but they had crashed into a house instead.  The rescue worker was temporarily stopped because that’s how slow he had to go to make the left turn off of the road to the house’s driveway.  What mattered was that the other driver, my passenger and I were unharmed.  But although the man's truck was fine, the Quest's front had been obliterated.    At the least, the guy saved me the convenience of calling my own rescue personnel.  Either way, the Quest was done after all of those years.

Luckily, great quests never die.  My dad salvaged some remains and fashioned the back seat into a usable "couch" with wooden supports on the bottom, and it became my first piece of furniture in Brooklyn the following year.  I always got a kick out of telling friends to click their seat belt when they sat down to hang out.  After all, the world is a crazy place.  You never truly know where you're gonna go.  Now the seat is in my dad’s shop by his wood stove so you can sit by the fire and reminisce about all the amazing places a ride called “Quest” can take you, and all of the fantastic people and lessons you’ll learn along the way.

My most recent quest took me to California.  The San Francisco Giants swept the World Series while I worked the wine harvest north of the city before completing my move to the city here a few months ago.

One of my favorite days since I've been here was actually the Super Bowl, which is strange because I had just spent a month living with sports obsessed dudes, and I was sick of sports.  I'd had a lifetime of them.  I'd come for newness.  Even so, my roommate and I were excited to go on an adventure in the city.  Terence, the roommate, had looked up public places to watch the game, and we decided to start at the W Hotel.  We watched it for free while buying foods and drinks and meeting the other people who happened to be sitting at our tables.

I should mention that I'd been seeing all of these signs for an art exhibit by Jasper Johns for weeks, and I'd just gotten a premonition that morning to look him up on Wikipedia to remember what he was all about.  Strangely enough, I'd first learned of him from an episode of The Simpsons where Homer unexpectedly becomes a great artist, and then eventually uses water to transform everyone's world into a work of art.  I later saw a Jasper Johns exhibit at Mass MOCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts.  Mass MOCA is 90 minutes from my parents' home, and the site of my first rock concert, They Might Be Giants.  After that show it became the site of my second car accident.  Thanks to Brad's dad, we got towed back, and Dan got yelled at because Brad's dad, Bill, had put him in charge at the beginning of the night, even though he was just hanging in the back seat.  Thanks to my friend Rob, who's a great musician (check out The Warm Front), I ended up having the courage to go back there and see the Jasper Johns exhibit of American flags, which was very inspiring.  When he looked at the symbols of America, he saw something different from what everyone else saw, and he wanted to inspire others to do so in their own way.  Unfortunately, I found out on the way to the W Hotel to watch the game that it was also the last day of the Jasper Johns exhibit, and it closed in two hours.  Luckily, it was next door at the Museum of Modern Art.

So during halftime of the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl Championship game, the most popular annual event in America, I slipped away to the museum twenty minutes before closing time and got to check out Jasper Johns.  Numbers can be used to "awaken the viewer's eye and mind to experience the familiar in a new way."  Even better, the "reconfiguring of familiar subjects in different media and different dates as a means of providing new ways to read the signs."

I got back to the game in plenty of time to see the second half because the lights had mysteriously gone out in the stadium.  The 49ers had to fight hard to come back, but the Ravens won the game.  They both played their hearts out, made amazing plays I had never seen before, and gave it their all when they had their backs up against the wall.  In the end the 49ers stalled at the goal line, or, in other words, the Ravens held their own with their backs against the wall and won a game they should have sealed a long time ago.  It was their game the whole time.

The whole game I'd been taking notes and trying to figure out the metaphor.  I didn't like the metaphor represented by the Ravens.  It seemed to represent a return to the dark ages... the last time they won the Super Bowl I was actually rooting for them because I had lived in Baltimore, owned one of their shirts, and they represented my status as an outcast.  It didn't matter that I was the outsider who had moved to Cambridge, New York, because I was already an outsider when I moved back to Bellport, Long Island after that summer in Baltimore.  Things would never be the same.  I even wore my Ravens shirt to piss off my Giants friends who claimed it wasn't fair because I wasn't really a Ravens fan.  That was true.  The first team I ever loved was actually the New York Giants, and then somewhere in there I got the brilliant idea to switch my allegiance to the Bills.  The Ravens trounced the Giants... and one of my best friend's mother's died during the game.  She had been sick since before I'd moved there five years earlier, and finally had to leave that night.

I haven't worried too much about football since then, but I have enjoyed two beautiful New York Giants Super Bowl victories over the New England Patriots, my most hated team of all.  Although, to be fair, I'd completely missed the second victory because I'd been in Japan teaching English the year before.  I had to be reminded that the Super Bowl had already happened, and read about the result online.

That's why I'd been so excited to see the Super Bowl this year.  It had been two years, and I was truly trying to live in America in a normal stable independent way for the first time in three years, and I couldn't think of a better cultural event to explore the city.  Let alone the fact that the team from my new home town where I was searching for my treasure was playing the team that hoped to even exist when I had my first move to a new city where I learned all about the world's diversity of pain and profound poetry which precipitates pleasure and peace when possible.


Terence (whose skin is black) and I (whose skin is too white) rooted for both teams and were constantly amazed by their magnificent plays and displays of strength, tenacity, creativity and overall, teamwork.  Black and white players wearing purple/black/yellow uniforms working together to beat other white and black players wearing red/gold uniforms.  As long as it's a good show... but how can you not pick a preferable outcome and align your hopes accordingly?  Who doesn't crave a victory from the world despite one's own lack of direct participation?  You root for it and it might happen, so why not?  Especially if there's a worthwhile lesson...

Well, Baltimore won the day, so I had to be creative and remember that it's not what you look at, it's what you see, and that there were infinite possibilities for poetic creativity in the Baltimore Ravens football victory.

1st, Baltimore is abbreviated BAL on the score sheet, which is close enough to ball, which not only reminds us that we all play the game with one ball, but we all play the game on the one ball.  Also, “BAL” could mean “balance.”  Respect the balance of the world, and achieve it and experience it in your own life...  Or better yet, the Ravens’ symbol is “B,” which is all you have to remember to do amidst all the poetry…  We could B AL, or be Al, like in that Paul Simon song, "You Can Call Me Al," because we all need each other to be our body guards.  Or Al from Aladdin, the street rat in love with the princess who needs a genie-us miracle to have a chance with her... Oh, I know.  The Ravens are hungry.  That’s why we have the word “ravenous.”  They wanted it more and won because they were concentrating on the food to satisfy their hunger and poetry to satisfy their soul instead of gold...  Maybe it means that the alphabet trumps math when it comes to the building blocks of reality…  Purple and black bruises and scars are a better read than sunshine and golden times?  Crazy improvisational trick plays defeat carefully planned strategies?  The East Coast wins my long term soul over the West Coast?  I should go for brunettes instead of blonds?

Still, we need more… you need something more direct from experience, less a result from a play with words... something about people...

Social studies.  When I moved to Cambridge in 1995, my new friend Joe Murphy warned me that there was another intelligent student in class who got perfect grades, and his name was Brad Cone.  Never mind that we ended up as best friends, philosophical allies and basketball teammates.  Back then this “Brad” was my mysterious enemy.  There were only 100 kids in our class, so it's amazing we'd never met or had a class together.  Our showdown was the sixth grade awards ceremony.  We each won lots of awards, but Brad always got the “best science” or “best math” extra award they'd hand out after giving awards to everybody else who excelled.  But then they did social studies.  Our teacher presented the award for best social studies student, and she began by saying, “Someone actually beat Brad Cone!” and then called my name.  I was sitting in the back of the auditorium on the floor by the wall with my buddy Matt, who was the star athlete in school and made me feel at home in a new town, environment and culture by playing all of the sports with me.  I was also sitting with Zach, my first friend at this school, who I met in reading class and with whom I wrote a story about a strange creature who went on adventures.  I ended up playing my first organized sport, baseball, because I was hanging out with him and he had to go to practice, and they let me join the team, leading to the best two months of my life at that point.  Right around then was the awards ceremony.  Since I was so far back in the room, I didn't want to waste anyone's time while they waited for me, so I always ran up to the stage, grabbed the award quickly, and ran back to my seat.  One of the annoying punk 8th graders kept yelling, “Run Forrest!  Run!” at me, and especially when I got the social studies award.

Okay, but so what if I won a social studies award?  This time I need a team victory, from someone and something bigger than me...

"Run home, Forrest, run Forrest run home run Forrest home run forest run home run forest run forest home run"

The first sport I learned to love, play and watch wasn't football at all.  It was baseball.  I see an even more beautiful bird...

Even though we’d moved back to NY in the fall, my dad and I still visited Baltimore a couple times to be with my sister and mother.  I remember staying up late with my dad in a hotel room in the Ronald McDonald house some time in late October.  My sister and mother were asleep on one side of the room, while my dad and I watched game six of the World Series on a seven-inch black-and-white portable TV we’d gotten from my grandparents, with the volume way down so they could sleep.  I was never allowed to be up that late, but my dad made an exception for game six of my first world series.  The Blue Jays were beating the Phillies, 3 games to 2.  If they won this game, they would have their second World Series championship in as many years, and once again be the only foreign team to win the championship of America’s past time.  The only outsiders to truly break through.  Who cares if they're different?!  They might be the best!  Even though the Mets were my team by birth, I'd watched the Blue Jays all year, knew the names of all of their players and was very delighted every time they beat up on the Yankees, who I still can't stand.

They were trailing at the end of the game, with two strikes on their star player.  But then Joe Carter took the biggest swing of his life and smashed the ball over the fence for a three run home run and a championship for his teammates.  He leaped and leaped with ultimate joy and pumped his fist in the air triumphant.  It was possibly the most exciting sports moment I’ve ever seen.  It didn’t matter that I’d been taunted as an outcast for wearing the wrong bird on my head during my summer of solitude.  I’d picked the right team.  Not that it mattered.  After all, both birds can fly high in the sky.

Don’t care about the conformity of crowds or feeling alone far from home.

Love what YOU LOVE, choose your best quest, and let the resulting zest take care of the rest.

When Mr. Carter touched home plate, I knew that the future could be great...

And now I realize that the Super Bowl did tell the truth.  It wasn't about the evil Ravens beating the 49ers who were seeking treasure.  It's not even poetry versus the gold rush.

It's about the GOLD rushing
through the POETRY-VERSE