Tim McCarver on David Wells

"He's a good athlete, but he doesn't move around well."

Eight Men In?

We had a great baseball question going around at work today. Apparently Sports Illustrated published an article recently in which they identified eight active major leaguers whom they consider locks for the Hall of Fame. How many can you get?

What's the World Coming To?

Bought a cat.

Cowboy Up Yours

I’m so tired. Ruthie and I stayed up last night and watched every pitch of the most glorious baseball game I have ever seen. It ended sometime between 12:30 and 1:00 this morning when Aaron Boone abused a knuckleball deep to left. That’s nearly four hours later than I prefer to go to bed when I have to get up at 5:30 the next morning, and I knew I’d feel like this all day, but we did it anyway. The Yankees beat the hated Red Sox in eleven and it was so exciting that when it was over we were too hyped to sleep. Why do I care so much? I don’t know, but if the Yankees get swept by the Marlins in the Series I’ll be okay with it now that they’ve beaten Boston.

I Can't Make this Stuff Up, Volume II

The following happened in the winter of 2001. This is exactly how it took place.

It was February and, what’s more, my desk calendar told me that it was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, so I hung my head out of the cage I work in and said to Chris, who had just climbed down from his forklift, “Happy Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.” Now there’s no traditional response to a greeting like that, so I wasn’t expecting anything in particular from Chris, but when he just looked at me with a stare blanker than I knew possible, I wondered where he was. That he had heard me was certain, and while I wasn’t expecting him to offer a celebratory hug, neither was I prepared for the vacancy of his eyes and the openness of his mouth. I think he even cocked his head to one side a little like The Boomer does sometimes. He was confused. I tried to help.

“You know, the President.”

He said, “Oh yeah. He was the first one, right?”

“No, I think he was sixteenth. You know—Civil War guy, big funny hat and beard, shot in the head…Abraham Lincoln.”

To which he replied, “Hmm. So who was the first one?”

At this point I’m certain I was the one who looked lost, but I managed to tell him, slowly, “No, that was George Washington.”

And he looked at me, and he squinted with thought, and he said, “Don’t hear much about him these days, do you?”

Fetch me a Bowl to Puke In

Most Sunday mornings Ruthie and I turn on the AM radio preachers to listen to while we get ready to go. Not because we like them, but because we're so amazed at how tacky they are that it's usually pretty amusing. This morning we heard the following three comments from three different preachers, which I will file in a too large folder labeled, "Part of the Problem."

"Hell is God's last act of love toward those who reject him."

"People who don't believe don't believe because they don't want to."

"The Great Commission is the greatest document ever given on Planet Earth."

And we wonder why nobody wants any...

A Borrowing of Misery

Anybody who knows me reasonably well and has been paying attention (or are those the same thing?) knows that for some reason I’ve got a thing for the Vietnam War. (The rest of you are welcome to check out this year’s Fourth of July post from the archives.) So when I got word that the traveling Vietnam memorial wall was in town I made sure to get there. Went last Saturday afternoon to Colerain Park with Ruthie and our friend Bart, not knowing what to expect. What I found was the truth in something I’d heard David Crosby say about the Wall in a concert back around 1986, “There are too damn many names on it.” I mean, you just keep walking and reading and I have no personal connection to one of those names, but they’re names I know—like Michael and Kenneth and Pedro and Robert and Gary—and then you look up to see how much more wall there is and it just goes on and on. Even the way it tapers into the ground at each end makes it look like it never ends.

A lady with a microphone was reading through the names when we got there—working her way through the D’s. Between each name they’d ring a bell. “Carl Edward Dunn” Ding. “Charles Clifford Dunn” Ding. “Creighton Robert Dunn” Ding. “David Hamilton Dunn” Ding. The reading had started at eleven o’clock that morning. “Donald Louis Dunn” Ding. We got there just after four in the afternoon. “Gary Wayne Dunn” Ding.

She was in the D’s.

After five hours.

“Gerald Dunn” Ding. The Wall is so highly polished that you can see yourself in it as you look at the names, but I wasn’t there to see myself. I was there, in part, to see the other visitors—members of generations older than my own, who remember. People who had lost brothers, husbands, sons, friends—people who for me are bridges between my own shallow understanding of loss and names etched in sharp block letters in a long black wall. Some cried, though none wept uncontrollably. Some stood for several moments with their fingertips barely touching a name. One rough looking veteran knelt at one of the eastern panels and gingerly placed a rose at its base. He knelt there a long time with his head down. Praying? Remembering? Trying to forget? I have no idea. He may not even know. An older couple stood silently, hand in hand, neither speaking, remembering a soldier I’d guess from their age might have been a son. No words. Except from the lady with the microphone.

“Michael John Dunn” Ding.

Several people had left personal remembrances. One soldier’s daughter left a laminated bio of her dad whom she had never met. Dead in 1966 at age 19--her dad could’ve been mine. (Ruthie wondered later what our generation might have been like had our parents’ generation been so traumatized and decimated.) Somehow the fact that there are over 50,000 names on the wall wasn’t as moving to me as one girl who never met her father.

And so we walked and we looked and we read and we didn’t say anything, Ruthie and Bart and I. We took our time, but you can only process the names of people you never knew for so long and by the time we got to the end of that interminable wall, I was ready to be finished. So after a brief look at a display dedicated to the history of the wall and to personal mementos left there by visitors we made the walk back to the car. We had been there over an hour. “Alfred Thomas Dwyer” Ding.

She was still in the D’s.

Happy October

I'm surrounded by wonderful people. Just last night Dale picked me up from work, Michael fixed my furnace and my computer, Justin took me to pick up my pickup, Mike talked to me about how to make a brandy sauce to put over steaks, my wife (with help) fed twelve people with a smile on her face, someone did dishes while I was gone with Justin, Tasha led a great discussion of an incredible Redeemer and today I get home and Dana has bared her soul beautifully on her own blog. (Dana's Blog) Plus it's October.

My eyes are open. I'm not missing any of it. I am grateful.