Three steps down from the parking lot, and a tinkling bell. The musty air of the room carried the dust of a thousand memories, brilliance waiting quietly for someone to notice, to hoist up and put down and carefully drop the diamond needle like a key to a lost moment.
A record shop. The start of a love affair, of alchemy, of digging up the gems and forgotten hairstyles, while St. Jimi, patron of posters, looked down from a psychedelic plane.
There, among the silent wax, Frank Sinatra.
ol’ blue eyes is back
Three bucks.
***
“Jack! Guess what I found out in the mountains. That song you requested…on vinyl”
The old man shifted in his motorized cart, a jolly sack of potatoes with only two eyes. They lit up.
I dropped the diamond key, and we all gathered to listen to the magic.
“Send in the clowns…don’t bother, they’re here….”
***
It’s been eleven years of spinning records at that place. Jack died a long time ago. I still have the record, and the memory of those music shows at his place. (Whenever he’d nod off, I’d play “Hit the road, Jack” to try to subtly wake him. I think it worked once.)
On that same record is another treasure: “There used to be a ballpark.” Jack is the reason I know that song, the reason I found that album in that musty little record store in that mountain town a decade ago.
It’s exactly the song to spin on a night in late August, when the first thought of a coolness floats up. (Or is it melancholy, a nudge from those July plans imagined in May?
“This summer.”)
I sat with my writing buddies at the minor league park the other night. We stared at the field for a second, sensing something there.
“Well, maybe baseball lit is kinda niche”, and the conversation flowed to countless other shores, merging in the cooling air with the babbling brooks of the other fans talking about their days, the kids laughing in the moonbounce behind us, the park organist trying to muster up a few hand claps for the ‘Cats.
The pitcher’s girlfriend–who else could prance like that down the stairs with such confidence–sat ringside, riveted to the drama on the green and brown, a cloud of white chalk blown up by the runner thrown out at first.
“Take me out to the baaalllll game” chortled the lady selling pizza. I joined in. So did my pal up for a beer. I forgot until now that we probably hurt his operatic ears. (Sorry, dude.) The twenty year old cashier stood there and looked both alarmed and glad.
“I know you’d never know it, but I haven’t had a drop!” I proclaimed, swaying, honest.
Bob Ross would have cut down a hundred happy little trees to paint the sunset over the mountains. “Julie” laughed at how she tried one of his videos once, and ended up with modern art. Then the conversation shifted to her son’s miraculous survival of a late-night crash.
The game ended, well-played. The away team boarded their bus, a few phones glimmering through the tinted windows as they settled in for the trip back to the eastern shore.
“None of these guys will ever play in the majors, but…”
A hint of an idea of cooler nights hung in the air.
So did my plans for July. Oh well.
Baseball is America’s Pastime. I see Life at the park: boring, subtle, dramatic, fought on a field with pretty girls watching, ignored, strived for, failed, succeeded, advertised, triumphed, heroic as a third baseman snagging a line drive to the hotbox, futile, impossible, possible, a sky on fire, mountains fading into the dusk, and fragrant as the funnel cakes and overpriced beer.
Before I turned out of the parking lot, I paused, looking up at the bright lights shining on the empty field. Out of the corner of my eye, a ghost of me at nine sprinted across the field in an Orioles hat at the bottom of the 9th, winning the world series. (I didn’t join little league, because I didn’t want to practice. So I became a musician.)
Doesn’t every little boy want to win the world series? Doesn’t every man see a ghost at a ballpark on a late summer evening at least once?
There used to be a ballpark…
PS. Oh yeah. The ‘Cats won, 2-1.