It’s about much more than baseball or a baseball player. Buck died at 96 almost twenty years ago. He was a Negro League player, manager, and the first African-American coach on an American Major League Baseball team, the Chicago Cubs.
He was a Black baseball player beyond his prime before Jackie Robinson opened the door in 1947. Buck had too many reasons to be bitter to count. It rained every day on him.
When Posnanski asked how he kept bitterness at bay, Buck said,
Where does bitterness take you?
To a broken heart?
To an early grave?
When I die
I want to die from natural causes.
Not from hate
Eating me up from the inside.
One last Buck O’Neil story.
Toward the end of his life, Buck was one of 39 Negro League players, managers, and owners considered by a special committee for induction into American baseball’s Hall of Fame.
17 of the 39 were selected for an honor Buck yearned for and deserved. But he didn’t get it. In July 2006, 16 Black men and one Black woman were inducted into the Hall of Fame.
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You are a fly on the wall in your neighbor’s bedroom.
It started innocently, with my new iPhone and zoom lens.
She woke every morning at 8 am, just as the sun crept over our building and gleamed into her room.
Even when we were kids, I was up an hour before her.
I’m in apartment six; Phylis is in two, just below me.
Two days ago, she told me she had fallen while entering the bathroom: “I know I should be careful first thing in the morning.”
“Maybe it’s time we moved in together,” I said.
“Since Bob died, I’ve learned to love my privacy. I promise to be careful.”
We’ve had forty-seven presidencies, with twenty-one men serving more than one term.
Political Scientists rank presidents, with Lincoln first and Trump last. (source)
Barack Obama is tucked in at #7 between Truman and Eisenhower.
Political Science was my day job for forty years. I love politics and I loved teaching this vital subject. In fact, even at 75, I can’t stop. This past year, I taught short courses on the 2024 US presidential election in America, Romania and Mexico.
Honestly, I’m as gobstruck as you may be as to what is going on in my country. I read books and articles, listen to podcasts, and watch documentaries. In my courses, I put together learned sounding lectures with thoughtful power point images.
I won’t repeat, with two exceptions, any of that here. I’ve paid my dues. And will again. But not today. It’s all just too sad. The best I can say is that we really don’t know how it is going to turn out. In the moment, it is dire, very dire.
But I believe two things.
The fact of Barack Hussein Obama, as America’s 44th President, is more important than any of his policies or decisions as president. This is true in the sense that the fact of Jackie Robinson transcends his brilliant baseball skills. As Kamala Harris said, over and over, “We aren’t going back.”
This reality— a Black man and a Black family — as the face of America, led inevitably to the rise of Donald Trump, on the shoulders of the birther lie, Trump’s political ignition spark. He’s been motoring with low octane, calculated deceptions for a decade.
As James Baldwin wrote forty years ago, “America changes all the time but doesn’t change at all.”
This story was published in Medium’s Entertain, Enlighten, Empower.
*
Dawdled.
However, Monet nails it, doesn’t he? We worry about crossing our bridges of concerns, but we can never see them clearly — the fog of human unknowing — until we’re on them.
Or, in my case yesterday, trapped inside this MRI machine.
Photo by the author after the scan!
As some of you know, I fell about a month ago. I’ve written about my excellent medical care in San Miguel, Mexico. Did I black out and fall or fall and knock myself out? Both my Mexican and US doctors asked this question, and now my American GP is putting me through a blood, heart, and head work-up. The MRI was to peek inside my noggen, looking for anything suspicious. We’ll discuss the results of all these tests in a few weeks.
Last week, when my doctor mentioned the head scan, I asked if that meant a tube. He said yes and preferred the enclosed MRI to the more open Cat Scan because it would give more detailed images. “I’m claustrophobic,” I replied. “I’ll prescribe an anti-anxiety drug. The MRI is the best option.” I got the message. And started worrying about coffin-like enclosed spaces and, of course, tumors, a word he used but skirted over.
The good news is there doesn’t seem to be any “unusual mass.” Reading the summary from my doctor, I noticed there doesn’t seem to be anything other than “thinning and atrophy,” which is pretty standard for a 75-year-old organ.
Maybe it was the Lorazepam or the experienced handling of Debra, my MRI technician angel, who included a facial cloth to cover my eyes and a blanket. But the 40 minutes I spent inside that machine were different than anticipated.
In the days before, I imagined feeling confined and panicking. What if I can’t get the image of being in a coffin out of my head? Would I start screaming?
MRIs are loud, so Debra inserted earplugs and small pillow bookends to keep my head from moving. The knocking noise was initially distracting but then comforting. Every magnet pause suggested progress. About halfway through, I started observing myself and my reaction.
Three unexpected thoughts appeared. One, I looked panic square in the eye and dared it to come closer. I’m Rocky egging Appollo Creed on in the last round. He knows he can go the distance. I’m on the bridge, almost enjoying the view from here.
The second, more astounding, was that I could get used to letting go of control. Grasping control of whatever is the core of claustrophobia and much of what’s wrong in our world. For example, if only I could show you, dear reader, my vulnerability, you would love my story.
That’s the essence of “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” All our bridges are phantoms. We use our language to fool ourselves.
Until we get on the bridge, we don’t know. And when we pay the toll, we usually muddle through!
The third thought? You’ve probably figured it out. The coffin image I feared so much? It came back and sat gently on my chest. It wasn’t as scary as I thought.
This story was published in Medium’s Fiction Shorts.
A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Your presence here matters. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you.
Setting: A baseball game
*
“President Trump attended this year’s Superbowl in New Orleans. The NFL replaced its traditional End Racism endzone logo with Choose Love. Which one is the better commercial?”
“At Fenway, the Red Sox privilege the message Black Lives Matter. It doesn’t mean white lives don’t. It means in American history, Black Lives haven’t mattered, and they should, equally. Should we replace Black with All?”
“Doesn’t All Include Blacks? If we all chose love, wouldn’t that end racism?”
“Doesn’t Love and All divert our attention from what is still a problem in America?”
That’s me doing what I do best: talking with students.
Not at, with.
Like you and whatever it is, you do well; we fail as often as we succeed.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
Embarrassing.
Worse, I’m describing the first of three reasons I thought Kamala Harris would beat Donald Trump.
Professors like threes; it makes them seem organized, even when wrong.
I’m 75 and have been in a classroom for half a century, starting with 6th graders and ending, well, I haven’t finished yet. Since 2018, when I retired from teaching Politics to college students, I’ve been on the Lifelong Learning circuit, with a few short appearances in Romania and Mexico. The photos are from last fall at West University in Timişoara, Romania.
Rodrigo S-C asks what we do well. And then gives us his answer.
“She’s a natural-born teacher.” We hear this all the time. Nonsense, and patronizing. No more than Michael Jordan was a natural at basketball. Jordan practiced his way to excellence.
For most of my teaching years, my practice involved learning about the topics I taught. Michael took 100s of jump shots every day during the off season. I read 10s of books every summer. I saw my craft as learning better content. Until Jenna knocked on my office door in 2008.
She was a psychology major taking my course on poverty and inequality. I developed this course soon after I arrived at Luther. It attracted majors from around campus and usually enrolled 30.
I was proud of keeping the course fresh by using different books each year. Books I had read the previous summer. Jordan was shooting. I was reading.
By the time Jenna took the course, I had replaced overhead transparencies with PowerPoint.
Slides.
Full of words summarizing the main ideas from the day’s reading assignment. High-tech transparencies.
I sent an email to Jenna asking her to stop by. She had earned an A on the first exam but was missing classes. That was an unusual combination. Usually, students who missed didn’t do well.
I asked her why she was missing class. “I’m bored in class. I don’t need to go. All you do is summarize the material.”
And then she added this kicker.
“You faculty are hiding behind Powerpoints.”
I felt my face turn red.
There was no smile from Jenna to soften the blows.
In response, I made comments about the value of in-class conversations. And about how I didn’t just summarize the reading but added insights from other authors and my ideas.
I didn’t change right away. I fumed.
And told myself stories: I was a good teacher; Jenna was an arrogant student. True stories. But Jenna’s words wouldn’t go away.
I always prepared my classes in the early morning. Two hours into one morning’s work, I realized all my energy had gone into how to organize the perfect Powerpoint slide show.
And not what my students needed to understand that day’s assignment. Two weeks after Jenna’s observations, I stopped using Powerpoint.
Cold turkey.
My favorite scene in Mr. Holland’s Opus, about a high school music teacher played by Richard Dreyfus, was after most of his students did poorly on a test. Those test results were a Jenna moment. He had to find another way.
In the next scene, he uses a piano to show his students how a Bach minuet formed the background of a pop song. You can watch this scene here.
I love this scene because Dreyfus’ Glenn Holland sits on the piano stool and talks to his students. And asks them questions about what kind of music they like.
Barriers down. He was still the teacher. But he had now joined the class.
It took me a year to revamp my pedagogy. Experimentation.
Finally, I developed an in-class template.
I broke our sixty or ninety-minute classes into 15-minute segments. Each was organized around a theme or question about the day’s assignment. I rearranged the classroom so that we were all facing each other. Sometimes I would be in the middle. I was part of the circle, prodding, questioning, and summarizing.
I relaxed in the classroom.
And started to arrive 10 minutes before the students filed in.
This story was published in Medium’s Fiction Shorts.
A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Your presence here matters. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you.
The setting: A mountain in Alaska.
*
I feel sorry for humans.
They’re around for such a short time. I must seem eternal to them: 60 million years. I’ve seen everything.
The new American President has changed my name again, back to McKinley. It’s been Denali for a few years. The Kuyukon People know who I am.
US Presidents come and go. Countries come and go. Empires come and go. Even mountains don’t last forever.
Sometimes, I wish I was more like the enlightened humans who hang out on my slopes — they know they have very little time, so every moment is precious and can’t be wasted.
This story was published in Medium’s Fiction Shorts.
A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Your presence here matters. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you.
Setting: A baseball game
“President Trump attended this year’s Superbowl in New Orleans. The NFL replaced its traditional End Racism endzone logo with Choose Love. Which one is the better commercial?”
“At Fenway, the Red Sox privilege the message Black Lives Matter. It doesn’t mean white lives don’t. It means in American history, Black Lives haven’t mattered, and they should, equally. Should we replace Black with All?”
“Doesn’t All Include Blacks? If we all chose love, wouldn’t that end racism?”
“Doesn’t Love and All divert our attention from what is still a problem in America?”
“Can’t we take politics out of our games?
“No.”
Note: This article provides some background on the NFL’s decision to replace End Racism with Choose Love.
I’m 75, and my body refuses to lie. As I type, the age spots flash. Two weeks ago, I fell and lost consciousness for a short time. The culprit was likely an inner ear malfunction or possibly my heart, which my doctor reminded me was as old as I was.
Two days ago, Rebecca and I walked upwards to enjoy this view of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where we spent January.
Photo by the author
We walked 14,386 steps total, from a starting point about a mile high, on a day with poor air quality. On the way up, we stopped three times to catch our breath. On the way down, we rewarded ourselves with ice cream sundaes.
Next January, will we hike skyward to see the El Charco Ingenio Botanical Garden or take a taxi?
In May, we’ve signed up for a safari in Namibia. It will be a small group led by a friend who assures us we can do it, even though we are decades older than our trek mates.
When Brian asked us about Africa a few months ago, we said, “It’s now or never.” Would we be able to go on safari at 80?
*
My funny-looking age spots started appearing 25 years ago, and I had my first inner ear collapse in 2018. We met a couple at least ten years younger at the botanical garden who took a taxi because of the poor air quality. The Namibia itinerary looks doable for anyone who can walk a few thousand steps daily. Why would we think we couldn’t do that in five years?
That’s the admonition of two of my favorite Medium writers, Gary Buzzard and Trisha Faye, who suggest that we should not automatically blame advancing years for whatever afflicts us.
Gently, Gary and Trisha, urge us seniors to think less about age. They caution against putting a ceiling on our activties or ambitions too soon.
Last night we bedded in St. Louis on our return from San Miguel to our home in Iowa. Two airline take-offs and landings. As we descended into Lambert International Airport, I thought about the 67 souls lost in the Washington, D.C. jet helicopter crash, many very young, none expecting or could have foreseen what would happen.
Today, we’ll load up and drive six hours to northeast Iowa. These trips tire us more than they used to. Age matters. But the future is too unpredictable. And it will come soon enough.
I’ve tilted this personal photo of Martin Luther King’s Lorraine Motel assassination site because this period in my country’s history unnerved my innocent early adulthood vision of the United States — that my country was good and only did good in the world. It was truly exceptional and guileless. Slavery was an aberration; the Indians were the bad guys. God — Blessed America.
By this period, I mean 1968 and 1969, and these events.
March 3, 1968: James Earl Ray murders Martin Luther King, Jr.
June 5, 1968: Sirhan Sirhan murders Robert Kennedy.
August 26–29, 1968: Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police beat protesters.
Fall 1969: Seymor Hersch published a story about the My Lai massacre by soldiers of the United States that happened in the spring of 1968.
Many other things happened inside and outside U.S. borders in the late sixties, but these discombobulated me at the time. I know that because two memories are so easily recalled.
*
“What is happening to America?” my father exclaimed the day after Robert Kennedy’s death. It was the summer after my first year of college. I was 19, and my dad had just come home from work. I had never heard him speak with such emotion, and I could sense the uncertainty in his voice. Two assassinations. When your father is unsettled, you are unsettled; at least I was.
The second recollection occurred a year later, in the fall of 1969. I was a college junior majoring in Sociology. After a class with Keith Fernsler, my favorite professor, I had just joined a group of friends. One friend, Joe, said, “Paul, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Our Sociology class had just been discussing Hersch’s article on the My Lai Massacre, and I hadn’t realized our class’s discussion of the killing of a hundred civilians had visibly affected me.
King and Kennedy were dead. American soldiers gunned down women and children. If we looked closer, what else would we find?
Photo by the author
Three years later, Watergate and a corrupted Presidency; five years later, defeated, America withdrew from Vietnam.
*
I’m a romantic. I want Romeo and Juliet to live happily ever after. The same is true for my country. After WE re-elected Barack Obama in 2012, I thought — probably mostly felt — America had loosened itself from its exclusionary past. Imperfect as it had been, it had finally lived up to its ideals. The WE now included so many voices that had been silenced. The USA could be one large, loud, chaotic, multiethnic family — finally, a Democratic model for the world.
My favorite Martin Luther King jr quote has always been, of course, a romantic one.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
It turns out it’s a long arc. And it’s been flattening.
*
Today is the first full day of Donald Trump’s second term. Among other things, he pardoned all 1500 January 6th insurrectionists.
Romeo and Juliet died by suicide.
My beloved country may be doing the same.
Innocence narcotizes and blinds. And has nowhere to hide in Trump’s America.
