Richard Ford - Independence Day

“That’s not what Dr. Stopler says.” He stares out at the wide, mostly vacant ballyard.

“Well, fuck Dr. Stopler, then. He’s an asshole.”

“You don’t even know him.”

I fleetingly consider telling Paul I’m moving to New Mexico and opening an FM station for the blind. Or that I’m getting married. Or that I have cancer.

“I know him well enough,” I say. “Shrinks are all alike.” Then I sit silent, resentful of Dr. Stopler for being an authority on all of life — mine included.

“What is it I’m supposed to do again if I’m not supposed to be a critic of my age?” He’s been studying this subject since last night. The thought of a whole new leash on life might in fact have inspired his short-lived euphorics.

“Well,” I say, watching the players coalesce into two rival but friendly “teams,” as a hugely fat man with a tripod and box camera emerges slowly out of the runway, his one leg stiff. The cameraman appraises the sun, then starts to set up in accordance. “I’d like you to come live with me a while, maybe learn to play the trumpet, later go to Bowdoin and study marine biology; and not be so sly and inward while you’re there. I’d like you to stay a little gullible and not worry too much about standardized tests. Eventually I’d like you to get married and be as monogamous as possible. Maybe buy a house near the water in Washington State, so I could come visit. I’ll be more specific when I have time to direct your every waking movement.”

“What’s monogamous?”

“It’s something like the old math. It’s a cumbersome theory nobody practices anymore but that still works.”

“Do you think I was ever abused?”

“Nothing I was personally involved in. Maybe you can remember a few minor cruelties. Your memory’s pretty good.” I stare at him, unwilling to be amused, since his mother and I love him more than he (of all people) will ever know. “Do you want to file a complaint? Maybe talk to your ombudsman about it on Tuesday?”

“No, I guess not.”

“You know, you shouldn’t think you’re not supposed to be happy, Paul. You understand that? You shouldn’t get used to not being happy just because you can’t make everything fit down right. Everything doesn’t fit down right. You have to let some things go, finally.” Now would be the moment to bring to light what a quirky old duck Jefferson was — the practical idealist qua grammarian — his whole life spent gadgeting out the mysteries of the status quo in quest of a firmer foothold on the future. Or possibly I could borrow a baseball metaphor having to do with some things that happen inside the white lines and those that happen out.

Only I am suddenly stopped cold. Not what I’d planned.

The A’s and Braves have formed two team-photo groups down the third-base line, taller men behind, shorter men kneeling (Messrs. Begtzos and Bergman are shorter). The kneeling men have their gloves and a fan of wooden bats arranged prettily on the grassy foreground. A low, portable signboard has been wheeled out and placed in front of them. O’MALLEY’S FAN-TASY BASEBALL CAMP, it says in red block letters, and below it, in temporary lettering: “Braves vs. ’67 Red Sox — July 3, 1988.” The sign makes all the Braves laugh. None of the Red Sox seem to be present.

Pictures are quickly snapped. The man who has chalked the base paths supervises wheeling the sign over to the canary-suited A’s, where he jiggers the letters to read O’MALLEY’S FANTASY BASEBALL CAMP: “Athletics vs. ’67 Red Sox — July 3, 1988.”

All clap when the pictures are done, and players begin straying toward the dugout and down the baselines, or just wandering out onto the infield in their too-tight uniforms, looking as if something wonderfully memorable had just happened but they’d missed it or it wasn’t enough, this even though the big game with the BoSox, the whole megillah, what it’s all about, is still to come. “You look great, Nigel,” a husky-voiced wife shouts out from the stands in a yawky Aussie accent. Nigel, who’s a big, long-armed and bearded “Brave,” with a thick middle and turned-in toes that make him seem shy, pauses on the dugout steps and lifts his blue Atlanta cap like ole Hank on his glory day. “You look damn good,” she shouts out. “Damn good on you.” Nigel smiles introspectively, nods his head, then ducks into the shadows along the bench with his mates. I should’ve taken his picture.

For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?

A dead spot now seems to be where these two days have delivered us — not even inside the Hall of Fame yet, but to an unspectacular moment in a not exactly bona fide ballpark, where two spiritually wrong-footed “clubs” make ready to play a real team whose glories are all behind them, and where by some system of inner weights and measures I have just run out of important words, but before I’ve said enough, before I’ve achieved a desired effect, before the momentum of a shared physical act — strolling the hallowed halls, viewing the gloves, license plates, strike zones — can take us up and carry us to a good end. Before I’ve made of this day a memory worth preserving.

I’d have done better to have us wait with the crowd until the doors were cleared, instead of seeking one more chance at quality time and risking this flat-footed feeling of nothing doing, with our last point of significant agreement being that I had probably not abused my son. (My trust has always been that words can make most things better and there’s nothing that can’t be improved on. But words are required.)

“People my age are on a six-month cycle,” Paul says in a reflective adult voice. The “A’s” and the “Braves” mill the sidelines, wanting something to happen, something they’ve paid good money for. I still wouldn’t mind joining them. “Probably the way I am now will be different by Christmas. Adults don’t have that problem.”

“We have other problems,” I say.

“Like what?” He looks around at me.

“Our cycles last a lot longer.”

“Right,” he says. “Then you croak.”

I almost say, “Or worse.” Which would send his mind off inventorying Mr. Toby, his dead brother, the electric chair, being fed arsenic, the gas chamber — on the hunt for something new and terrible in the world to be obsessed by and later make jokes about. And so I say nothing. My face, I suspect, bears promise of some drollery about death and its too, too little sting. But as I said, I’ve said all I know.

I hear the steam organ begin tootling away on “Way down upon the Swanee River.” Our little ballpark has a lazy, melancholy carnival fruitiness afloat within it now. Paul looks at me shrewdly when I don’t answer as expected, the corners of his mouth flickering as if he knows a secret, though I know he doesn’t.

“Why don’t we head back now?” I say, leaving death unchallenged.

“What are those guys doing down there?” he says, looking quickly to the level playing field, as if he’d just now seen it.

“They’re having a great time,” I say. “Doesn’t it look like fun?”

“It looks like they’re not doing anything.”

“That’s how adults have fun. They’re really having the time of their lives. It’s just so easy they don’t even have to try.”

And then we go. Paul first, down the aisle behind the wives, then struggling over the stumpy steps to the runway; and I, having a last fond look at the peaceful field, the men at loose ends but still two teams with games on tap.

We walk through the tunnel’s shadows and out into the sunny parking lot, where the steam-organ music seems farther away. Up on Main Street cars are moving. I’m certain the Hall of Fame is open, its morning crises resolved.