Sunset, Wednesday, 14 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Without meaning to, editorial demon Aime Ballard-Wood corrected me today on my post from Sunday about the overuse of what I was calling ‘exclamation marks’. After writing to me about yesterday’s post on the World Series (she commented, “Afternoon baseball: Hell yeah!” and I replied, “I was feeling like a lonely lunatic!”), Aime said, “Did you have to think about that exclamation point?”

Point? Not mark?

(My response, incidentally, was to give her my best Rex Harrison: They’re second nature to me now/ Like breathing out and breathing in ...)

When I asked Aime about it, she said:

I’ve always said, and I quite like, exclamation point. I like it so much that I refuse to try to look it up. 

It fell to me to do the grueling work. So after three minutes I came up with:

Exclamation point/mark? Chicago [The Chicago Manual of Style – online here, although I was referring to the print edition on my shelf] uses only ‘point’, dumb as rocks Wikipedia leads with ‘marks’ – that alone lends a lot of weight to points, as does the preponderance of ‘marks’ via Google. I liked the sound of marks but will have to go with points.

So I went to my post from Sunday and changed it. Evidence of my Exclamation Mark Period [sic?] is already being covered over by the shifting cybersands.

We ended our discussion as follows.

BILL: Doesn’t it suck that we’re doing this when we should be watching October afternoon baseball?

AIME [exclaims]: Yes!

Sunset, Tuesday, 13 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I couldn’t quite figure out how to say this without sounding like a retro reactionary nostalgia-mongering reprobate anarchist out to sabotage the U.S. economy and undercut the moral fiber of our youth, not to mention our elderly, and ... everybody else. Oh well.

I also know that the core of this idea is already popular with a certain small retro reactionary (etc.) minority of sports fans, but I may have added something to it that makes it even better ... or worse.

For the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere, it should be evident that October baseball was meant to be played in the daytime. This means the World Series, of course, and, by extension into modern times, the playoffs that lead up to it. Of course I’m influenced by warm gauzy memories of Indian summer afternoons when people stopped what they were doing at work or school to follow the game. I’m well aware of the economic imperatives of prime time television revenues that drove these games into the dark ... and into perfect football weather. I also believe that we are generally much, much more driven in our busy daytime lives than we used to be – how many would dare to stop and watch baseball at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday?

My wicked solution: Go whole hog. Make the Fall Classic into a variable series of national quasi-holidays, feast days, or picnic days if you will, to celebrate America. What is more American? (Lacrosse, the fastest sport on foot, but we’ll let that go ... for now. Oh, and basketball, but ... where was I?) So, O.K., what could feel more classically American? Not only that, these are festive days we would share, increasingly, with friends in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, China, Japan, Korea, all the places where baseball has taken hold. It would be great for baseball, and would mean more money, overall, not less. It would be good for the nation and our impoverished workaday obsessions. It would be good for the soul.

And I was very happy when it dawned on me, so to speak, that this little composition isn’t really a random digression but has everything to do with the sun going down on a warm autumn day like the one we’ve just had here.

Sunset’s for someone very close who’s having a tough week. For Rev. Sister S., cheers and love from this side of the Hully Gully.

Sunset, Monday, 12 October 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This seems to be an evening to mention subjects I can’t write about quite yet.

I’ve been sneaking up on the idea of writing about Edgar Allan Poe’s beautiful story “The Island of the Fay,” which I’ve read about five times in the last week. I think I finally see a way ... soon.

If I can’t write about Poe (at one time considered by his peers to be a gifted athlete), that of course leaves us with baseball. For now, all I can do is ask how excruciating it would be if the Colorado Rockies made it to the World Series and we had to watch night baseball from Denver in late October.

More about that, too, another time. Sun’s about to set on what has been a chilly and, until just about this moment, overcast day.

Sunset, Monday, 14 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

The analogy between sunset and a home run can be difficult to avoid.

I’ve been trying all evening ... just can’t escape.

Going ... going ... gone! ... over the wall ... clean into Tuesday.

Birthday, Brothers, Baseball . . .

I’ve decided to depart from my norm and show a little home movie from my birthday lunch in Frederick. (Birthday is later ... think ‘Marseillaise’ ...)

The lunch, at Volt, was terrific. The restaurant surprised me with an ice cream that I thought had a suspicious resemblance to the Tower of Babel (how did they know I wrote a blog?) with candle. It was sort of vanilla but turned out to be flavored with orange mint.

I figure the candle was for the ‘1’ in ‘61’ and, from my p-o-v, the candle flame, sort of as in Roger Maris’s home run record, was an asterisk. (As in *Hey, not really ...)

Out in front of the restaurant, we did a little self-portrait: my sister-in-law Sandra Ashley Van Doren, my brother Steve, me, and my much better half, Laura Owen Sutherland.

Sandy and Steve are the greatest. Steve and I are 16 months apart and have always been essentially a team – I sometimes think that together we make a well-balanced personality. Individually, well ...

They gave me just what I’d asked for: Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, by Larry Tye. This of course is the story of Satchel Paige. Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox this year is the second-oldest player to make his first All-Star team, at age 42; Paige was the oldest, in 1952, at the age of 46, “after,” as MLB.com puts it, “years of dominance in the Negro Leagues.” (That’s one way to put it.)

Steve had not yet inscribed it, so I had a special request. When I was in Pony League (ages 13–15), the manager of the Lorton Fire Department team, Graham Davis, decided based on my Little League experience that I might make a good pitcher. He even got me a warmup jacket – flame red with a big gold ‘L’, which I got to keep (and kept for centuries), even though I never pitched in a game.

When Mr. Davis tried me out, at the Lorton Reformatory stadium, with its old wooden covered grandstands, well-tended grounds and my first real pitcher’s mound, I immediately got frustrated and started firing pitches all the way to the backstop. End of pitching career. (I was a notorious hothead. We once had to stop a sandlot game for 30 minutes to search the woods for my glove.)

I asked Steve if he would inscribe it, ‘Graham Davis should have given you another chance.’

This would have been nice, coming from Steve. Even though I did fine and ended up in center, Steve came along a couple years later, hit .521 and broke every record they had.

He inscribed my book: ‘Graham Davis had it right!’

Sunset, Wednesday, 1 July 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

It was a perfect summer day, then storms chilled everything down. The sky behind me, where the storms went, was half Creamsicle orange, half some deranged hydrangea blue – and if that sounds like a queasy mixed metaphor, it should. I might have taken a shot at it except not one but two cats were sleeping on (and wrinkling) the rolled-up cut linen I could have used for a second painting.

The most important thing I could possibly ever say about July 1st – with all respect to the great and (around these united states) highly underrated nation of Canada – is that it’s the wedding anniversary of Steve & Sandy Van Doren – 37 years today. Congratulations to the best people in the world, or at least my world.

I had some concern that people might take the following the wrong way and assume that the porcine reference could somehow be about them. I’ve taken an informal but devastatingly accurate poll ... and determined that my readers know better than that.

So, let’s ...

PLAY BALL!

I came to the ballpark
And discovered I was pitching
In a lightweight purple uniform
Before stands of black obsidian
I threw pearls across the plate
And every time the swine struck out
The million-dollar Mitsubishi scoreboard
Lit up with a picture of a roast pig with an apple in its mouth.