Last Days of Chestnut, Guinea Pig

May 25th, 2008

May 22

Our guinea pig, Chestnut, is dying. He will probably be dead before I finish writing this, but I am going to leave the beginning as it is. I had hopes that the antibiotics he started yesterday would do their saving work; and his eating one of his favorite delicacies—cucumber peelings—last night with a final, feeble amount of gusto gave me hope that he was bouncing back, perking up. But he has retreated inside his little plastic “igloo” inside his cage, with his back to its opening, minimizing sensory input; the equivalent of turning over to face the wall. He makes no sound, but turns away from proffered food or water as from an annoyance that belongs to the past. He has decided it is time to die. I know that he hasn’t decided anything, really; he is just too sick to stand the sight of food or drink. Yet it seems he has decided it is time to die, and he knows the right way to do it. He has decided it is time to die, and the house is heavy with his decision.

To whom shall I pose silly rhetorical questions with Chestnut gone? How long will it be before I stop adding, “Right, Chestnut?” to the end of statements. Chestnut, Chesty, Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield, C-Field—he answered to them all the same way: with the inexpressive face of a rodent looking in your direction. “Did you mention food?” he perhaps was thinking. He loved to eat. He lived to eat. And now he turns away from food, but seems to have a certain quiet wisdom about him.

That reminds me of something our friend Carmi said when she was visiting. Being a poet with a mystical bent, Carmi often says things that stick in your mind just in her ordinary talking. She and her daughter had had a guinea pig named Oreo. Carmi was impressed that when I went out the back door, scissors in hand, to harvest some fresh grass for Chestnut, he had been so excited that he’d jumped out the open door of his cage in clear anticipation of the upcoming treat. Oreo, Carmi said, had had “ancient wisdom,” but had not been as “street smart” as Chestnut. Now Chestnut’s ancient wisdom has come to the fore.

The antibiotics and painkiller the vet gave us yesterday were just to make us all feel better that we were trying what we could think of. But Chestnut has something called bumble foot, a foot rot—maybe it’s the equivalent of gangrene, I don’t know. Anyway, for it to have affected him so severely means almost certainly that it is too late. The vet wanted to be sure that we knew it was serious, not to be surprised if he was “much worse” this morning.

Yes, there’s some guilt here. We should have noticed how bad the foot was and taken him to the vet earlier. We didn’t take him in for the foot, just for the severe overall decline, lethargy, loss of appetite, etc. Chestnut lived the life of a king from the food standpoint, but I’m afraid his long claws bear witness to a certain lack of care in other regards, including regular inspection for things such as infected feet. He had a known problem, common in older “boars,” of stool agglomeration. Instead of numerous small dry pellets, he would also produce large masses of soft fused pellets. Sometimes it would be a great effort to pass the mass of guinea pig poop. We assumed that one too big to expel was the problem that was causing his loss of appetite, which would not have been as serious.

Chestnut is my daughter’s first and only pet. Well, mammalian pet; she had some African dwarf frogs. He was a birthday present a few years ago, a reward for her agreeing to attend a summer chamber music day camp. We had taken care of a few guinea pigs for days and weeks at a time in the past, and she had been wanting one for quite some time. My wife remembered how she had lost interest in her own guinea pig as a child in a fairly short period and didn’t look forward to becoming the real guinea pig care provider. Looking farther into the future, she dreaded years more of such duty after our daughter had gone away to college. But little Chestnut, just weaned, was purchased at a local pet store, and amused us greatly with his antics, especially the “popcorning”—spastic leaps which guinea pigs engage in when they are feeling good (I guess).

We left the door of his cage open when we were home, and he would roam around the house, even follow people from room to room sometimes. He seemed to like company and play. I would put newspaper (to absorb pee) under the wicker coffee table near the chair in which I would sit reading, and Chestnut would stay under the table. Except he would venture out on a quick foray to nibble away a corner from a paper or a paperback book cover. We turned it into a game with me putting paper out for him and then gently swatting at him with a sheet of paper when he came to get it. I will think of you, Chestnut, when I see those books with the neat bites taken out of their covers. He was quick! And their teeth are so sharp.

This was all when he was young. As he matured, he stopped venturing out of his cage, even though the door was still left open. We found he had chewed on a lamp cord. Had he gotten a traumatizing shock? We couldn’t know of course, but the exposed copper made us think he was lucky to be alive. For a while I was able to lure him out by putting a newspaper near the cage door, which he couldn’t resist coming out to nibble on, but eventually he got to where he almost never came out except when it was forced on him during cage cleanings. Then, he would usually take a few laps around the cage.

My daughter cried for Chestnut last night, as is only right. Sad as it makes me to see her feel bad, I would rather have that than see her heartless and unconcerned.

We have given Chestnut his pain killer and antibiotics for the day, and then used the antibiotics mouth syringe to get some water into him. Dehydration will kill you far more quickly than starvation. He’s fat enough to miss a few meals, I imagine. The only encouraging sign is that he is now facing the entrance to his igloo so he can see out to the world.

May 23

OK, it’s now the morning of the next day. We forced some more water down him, and it must have done him good. He still wouldn’t eat until I brought him some fresh, green grass. That he munched on for quite a while, a very big improvement. Don’t know whether we should get our hopes up.

12:30 pm. Now he’s whimpering in the most pathetic way. It’s really unbearable to hear. Catatonic was better. We will have to euthanize if that doesn’t get better. When my wife gets back from the store, we’ll give him another dose of painkiller. One little rodent in agony here has more of an effect on me than the somewhat abstract knowledge of mass human suffering now occurring. I have not been watching television coverage of tragedies; perhaps I should be.

11:30 pm. My wife said that he had been whimpering that way for days, though I hadn’t heard it before. So it doesn’t signal a new stage of decline and pain, but it is still painful to hear and makes his earlier suffering seem all the worse. She went back to the vet’s because the test-tube-like container the antibiotics was in was too long for the syringe we need to use for giving Chestnut his dose. I doubt the vet thought he’d still be alive, for only now did he mention the importance of food and water. He suggested pulverizing the hay pellets he eats and mixing them with baby food carrots and water and using another bigger syringe to feed it to Chestnut. We thought we got a little into him in the afternoon.

Just before bed, all three of us—my wife, daughter, and I—tried again to get some more water and food into him. He had trouble keeping his eyes open, nothing I’d ever seen before. He didn’t drink water that was squeezed into his mouth this time, as though reflexes aren’t even working. He wasn’t interested in food and didn’t get much if any. Would not be surprised to find him dead in the morning. Glad he ate grass one last time anyway. We’ve gone from hoping for recovery to hoping for a quick end.

May 24

Chestnut greeted me with what might be described as loud whimpers when I came downstairs to start breakfast. Maybe he is doing some things automatically, like greeting, but can only make certain sounds. Hard not to take it as a plea to put him out of his misery. He turned away from his water bottle spout as from something noxious.

10:30 am. We’re now waiting for our daughter to wake up (it’s Saturday morning), so she can be in on the decision to take him to the vet to put an end to his suffering. The waiting is getting to me, since it is starting to seem urgent to put him out his misery, as I think of what he must be enduring with so many bodily systems having broken down. Hopefully the vet is open today.

11:00 am. He’s not, but the phone message gave another place to call for an emergency. My daughter is up, and she agrees it’s time.

1:30 pm. She took him out of his cage and carried him, wrapped in a towel like a baby, upstairs to her room for a long while.

My wife has been felled by the same cold I have presumably, but harder and with fever. She got the news yesterday that an old friend she hadn’t seen in years had just died. The friend’s husband called.

The only place I have found that will euthanize a guinea pig today is quite a distance away, and my wife is too sick to be left alone. She is weak, dizzy, and nauseated in addition to having a sore throat.

I go in to check on Chestnut and he is lying flat, rhythmically whimpering. When he becomes aware of my presence, his whimpers get louder, definitely an acknowledgment of some kind. Maybe a plea. The guilt I feel is heavier, the sadness more acute.

A friend is coming over. Maybe I’ll take Chestnut to the place that will end his life for a fee while she stays with my wife. We haven’t attempted forced feeding today.

5:30 pm. I’m not changing anything I wrote before. Chestnut has been buried in the back yard. My son arrived back from his ultimate frisbee tournament just in time to help his sister and me dig and cover.

I drove to Jamaica Plain to have Chestnut put to sleep. On the way there, I and drivers in the other lanes of a very busy road had to stop for some Canada geese and a passel of goslings to cross. Very slowly. First one bunch, and then another. Especially given the nature of my journey, it was a heartening sight to me, animal life and new animal life. And everyone seemed glad to stop. The geese were lucky, and I hope they don’t try it too often, for their luck must run out.

I talked to Chestnut on the way. I told him what a good pig he had been. He was in the back of the minivan in his cage, so we couldn’t see each other. I wanted to pray, but didn’t know what to pray for. I decided to pray for whatever was the best thing a guinea pig in Chestnut’s condition, about to die, could have. I put in a word for him, knowing it was superfluous, but I asked that he might have the very best the Creator still had to offer.

We arrive at the animal hospital, and I take Chestnut out of his cage and put him in a small cardboard box, just his size, along with an old teeshirt of mine. Judging by the movements of his body and head, as we enter the building, he seems to be more alert than I’ve seen him in days. What is going on? Is this a miracle starting to happen? He actually starts trying to climb out of the box!

At the intake desk, where I’ve already told them my purpose, I’m talking to him: “What are you doing, Chestnut? Are you trying to get me to take you back home?” His body feels surprisingly strong in my hands. I look at him closely, trying to discern what the change means. I say to the intake woman, who is looking at me quizzically, “He hasn’t eaten anything in days. He hasn’t moved like this in I don’t know how long.” Chestnut moves about again. And then a small popcorn! Tired out, I suppose, he relents.

I take Chestnut and the registration form that I need to fill out over to the empty “cat area.” If Chestnut’s activity resumes, I’ll have to think harder about what I’m about to do. I’ve gotten through name and address when I look in at Chestnut, who is still. I wonder. His visible eye is now wide open and clear. His body is soft and warm, but feels totally relaxed in my hand. Is he? Yes—dead.

I’m stunned, as though a lightning bolt of mystery had struck me, electrifying me with hidden meaning I can feel but not decipher. I feel a sort of joyful sadness and great relief. I stroke his beautiful white and light-chestnut coat a few times, then carry him over to the intake desk. I know he’s dead, but I say “I think he’s dead.”

A technician takes the little box with the body away to verify he has no heartbeat, free of charge and with genuine sympathy. The young woman at the desk tries to reassure me about having let his foot infection get so bad. Small animals are very fragile, so the least thing can kill them. She has canaries. Yes, I will take him home, and we will bury him in the back yard.

What was the urgency that drove Chestnut to use every last atom of his remaining strength and life in that seeming attempt to escape? As far as I know he’d never acted that way at the vet’s before, even in that same box, which came from his last trip there. He had always been quite docile the few times he’d been to the vet. But maybe he had some memory of the recent painful foot treatment associated with being in the box. Could he have had a vague premonition, which awakened a powerful desire to live, when he hadn’t been able to summon up the strength or desire to eat or drink for days? Was he trying to escape a sudden pain or fear that came with death’s arrival and which had nothing to do with the external situation? Was it something like a chicken running around with it’s head cut off? It seemed more natural than that.

I don’t know enough about physiology, guinea pig or otherwise, to venture an educated guess. None of these speculations keep me from feeling proud of Chestnut for dying such a death. The burst of activity was brief and strangely inspiring; and, for whatever reason, the timing was just right. If we hadn’t had to wait for the geese to cross… I don’t know.

Did I cry over his death? Well, rodents have never been my favorite kind of animal. They are not the most intelligent beasts. They don’t have to be, the way predators do. They eat whatever suits them with those wonderfully efficient teeth, and they survive by reproducing bountifully, so that an individual is not so precious to the species. Do you think a rational grown man would cry over the death of a mere rodent? Even over a beautiful death that spared us from having Chestnut die at the hands of a stranger and spared me from the possibility of lingering doubt about the decision? Yes, I did cry. When out in the parking lot, I even said “Thank you, Lord” out loud more than once. Superstitious, irrational, childish: call it whatever you like. I felt and feel that Chestnut’s death at just that time—and with a flashback to his former vigorous self!—was a gift, and gifts require a giver. Amen. And, Chesterfield, I have faith that you are getting or have already gotten whatever is the best a guinea pig can get.

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The On-Screen Scientist Speaks!

May 23rd, 2008

I recently decided it might be a good idea to start a podcast. I figured I would just read and record my blog posts. Most of them are timeless—well, as good one time as another—so the fact that a podcast was based on a blog post from a month or two ago wouldn’t make much difference except for the small number of people that had already read the post. The idea was that I might expand my readership into a bigger “listenership.” I don’t subscribe to any podcasts and seldom listen to episodes, but I guess some people do, maybe a lot of them. In any case there can’t be as many podcasts as there are blogs.

I still haven’t decided if I will do it, but I did record one of the earlier, shorter posts just to see how it might be done. You can skip to the last paragraph if you’d just like a link to the recording. I am not happy with it, primarily, I’m afraid, because I don’t like the sound of my own voice, as recorded. Maybe that would be a little better if I hadn’t been getting a cold. Also, I’ve noticed a tendency to slur my words. Do I do that all the time? Probably. It could be a Texas thing. I believe President Bush does it too. Anyway, there have been places where I did that and then went back to record the paragraph again. Total blunders—mispronunciations or saying a word different from the one that was written—have occurred also. So I’ve had a chance to hear some paragraphs recorded multiple times, and I’ve noticed that I emphasize different words in different readings. The meaning doesn’t change much from the emphasis usually, but it is subtly different, and since I clearly don’t have a fixed idea for which emphasis is better, does it make sense to record one rather than just leaving it as text on the screen? Probably not.

There is also the issue of whether to use good old-fashioned mp3 format or new-and-improved m4a (AAC). If I use Apple’s iWeb software to set up a podcast, then I get the Apple-favored m4a. This is probably the wave of the future, and anyone that has iTunes can presumably play it, but what about those PC users that don’t? I haven’t been able to get an answer to this, but I don’t like the idea of having two audio files for each recorded post. I have done it for this first experiment though. The superiority of the AAC file seems clear: it sounds better, and it’s substantially smaller. Having played them both again, I realize that I dislike my voice less in AAC.

Podcasting would be very time-consuming. The recording I made is less than six minutes long, but I hate to think how long it took me to get to a place I could quit, even then with some parts in it I really didn’t like the sound of. That would probably improve in time, but most of the posts are longer, some a lot longer.

Anyway, if you’d like to hear Dangerous Experiments, click m4a or mp3 for the format of your choice. And, if you think I should be encouraged to do more, please send me an email. I’d also appreciate feedback on the audio format issue. Email address is in the upper right section of the page.

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Times I Might Have Died

May 15th, 2008

I have not lived a life fraught with peril. I have never been in combat, nor have I been attracted to dangerous activities such as mountain climbing or sky diving, which others find recreational. The physics jobs I had were not dangerous. I was on one demonstration where a man was shot to death by the police, but I was not even aware of it when it happened. Yet, there have been a few moments in my life which have left a lasting taste of possible fatality.

This is not going to be an all-inclusive account. The one serious car accident I was in is not going to be dealt with here. Instead I am going to talk about three times when I was lucky, and nothing serious happened. Yet the thought of those times makes me realize that I’m alive through luck or providence, and thinking about them gives me an uneasy feeling, a bit like having to go through them again. What a short life it would have been! The three incidents have in common the hurtling toward a road, with the danger of death coming at the road. The scenes seem well suited for appearing in a nightmare, and I suppose that may be what makes them so vivid and gives them their lasting power to evoke fear.

The first of these times was when I was quite young, probably eight. To my shame at the time, I was one of the last among my peers to learn how to ride a bicycle. But I got one for Christmas, and I mastered bicycle riding pretty quickly after that. To be more precise, I mastered the balance and pedaling part. I didn’t get braking. This was an old “balloon tire” American bike without hand brakes. To brake such a bike one has to apply pressure to one of the pedals in the sense opposite to that which propels the bike forward. I understood there was something different about the pedal work to brake, just not what. Instead of standing up and applying the back pressure on one pedal, as I had observed others doing, I stood and applied pressure to both pedals, one in one sense and the other in the other, so that I just balanced them and might as well have taken both feet off the pedals. It was coasting, not braking.

I think I knew that method wasn’t quite right, but it resembled what the others were doing to brake. I remember that when I needed to stop, I would run off the sidewalk into the grass to help me slow down, then dismount while the bike was still rolling to pull it to a stop. I was not thinking this through or verifying stopping power. I guess I basically thought I knew how to brake the bicycle just from the looks of things without analyzing the actual effect. It never occurred to me to ask anyone, adult or child, to show me how to brake.

Highway 80 ran right through my small hometown as broad, red-bricked Main Street, whose surface, I remember, seemed especially hot to our bare feet in the summer. This was the busiest street in Eastland, Texas. Given our theme of luck and fate, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that Eastland was named after an early Texas Ranger, William Mosby Eastland, honored for a brave death as the first to draw a black bean, fatal in the “lottery of death” ordered by the Mexican dictator Santa Anna in 1842 to determine which prisoners were to be executed after an escape attempt.

One day I was out riding my bike by myself and rode up by the high school, which was on a hill above Main Street. I rode along the street that went past the high school parallel to Main St. then turned to go down the steep hill, intending to turn right on Main as part of my loop back home. I don’t remember if I picked up extra speed by pedaling downhill, or if my acceleration was strictly due to gravity, but I know that I was going fast as I came to Main Street. Of course, any attempt at braking with my method could do nothing to slow me down.

This is naturally the part of the journey that gives me that uneasy feeling and makes me want to ward off the memory even as I call it up today. I was trying to make the right turn, but I was moving much too fast for that, and I was moving so fast that a driver in a car approaching that intersection would have had little warning time to try to stop. Unable to slow down, I might as well have shut my eyes and trusted God or Fate to get me safely across. I crossed Main Street at an angle, unscathed, then hit the curb on the other side of the street and went on up it.

Embarrassment now became stronger than fear. There must have been people around that had seen me hit the curb. I tried to give the appearance that that had been my intent all along by continuing to turn to the right so as to ride on the sidewalk alongside Main Street. But I was still going too fast to do that either. I ran into a low stone wall, which finally stopped the bike. More embarrassment. I wasn’t hurt; and the bike, though dented, was still rideable. I can’t remember if I walked it home or rode it. It would have been sufficiently uphill for safe riding.

Eight-year-olds do get killed in bike accidents, and I could have been one of them. In those days, I might add, a kid would have been as likely to wear water wings as a helmet when riding a bicycle. I don’t remember telling my parents about the accident, and I don’t remember when I learned how to brake my bike. The accident did teach me not to go down steep hills until I had mastered stopping. Rest assured that I made sure my own helmeted children learned to brake before they went very far on their bikes.

The next time that sticks in my mind was when I was fifteen living in Garland, Texas. My friends and I would ride around in a car almost every evening. This was a Saturday night, and we were out late. It was one of the rare times when I had gotten our family Ford and was the driver for the night. There were five of us, all fifteen or sixteen years old. It was well after midnight, perhaps as late as 2 am, and we were in a heavy rainstorm. Without going into the details here, suffice it to say that we were being chased by a determined adult in a pickup who had good reason, relating to certain decorative auto accessories recently in his possession, to be chasing us. The consequences of his catching us might be physically dangerous, for all we knew, and would likely involve trouble with the law (and of course our parents) for us. It was a living nightmare: I was responsible for making sure we didn’t get caught.

The windshield wipers on the car were of the type that completely stopped working whenever you accelerated, which meant a lot of driving blind, given the circumstances of the heavy rain and frequent acceleration. We were sliding around like crazy, fishtailing as we turned corners on the slippery streets. The part I remember most vividly is our approach to a major thoroughfare we would have to cross. The chances of a car coming down that street were much lower so late at night than during regular hours, but still not zero. There might be some other speeding teenagers! Before we came to the street someone shouted “Don’t slow down!” so I flew across the street without slowing or looking. The street had been empty; we had won that round of automotive Russian roulette. Soon after that, however, we realized we were not going to shake the guy anyway, so that we had better stop and throw ourselves at his mercy.

Playing the mental tape of the approach to that intersection at full speed gives me the same quasi-panicky feeling as remembering that uncontrolled street-crossing on the bicycle years before and makes me want to put my hands out in front of me to stop it. The difference between the two times, during the actual events, was that I remember being scared of a crash at the time I crossed the street in the car. I was conscious of the possibility that I might be in my last seconds of life. Now I wonder what in the hell were a bunch of kids that young doing out that late in a car? That was the fifties in Texas.

The third incident occurred sometime later while I was in high school. Near the town I lived in there was a 3M plant. Next to the plant was a street that mainly served as a way for workers at the plant to enter the plant parking lot. The street, which was probably less than half a mile long, ran between a major street and what amounted to a country road. It was straight and wide and had very little traffic except when workers were coming to work or leaving. The 3M plant was on one side of this street, and the fenced backyards of houses that faced away from the street were on the other. This broad side street was regularly used as a drag strip by area teenagers, illegally of course.

A drag strip needs to be a quarter of a mile long plus sufficient additional track length to enable the racers to stop or slow down enough to turn after crossing the finish line. The object of a drag race is to accelerate from a complete stop to the quarter-mile line in the fastest time. Improvised drag races along the 3M strip were head-to-head matches between two cars that raced side by side for a quarter-mile. I don’t recall what landmarks were used for the start and finish lines, but I assume there must have been some. One kid would stand in the middle of the street in front of the two cars and signal the start of the race with a dramatic gesture. The cars would accelerate to the finish line and then start braking because the street’s end was not far ahead. Even beyond the obvious danger of speeding, each race would have been something of a gamble, as the street was not marked as being one way, so an unlucky driver could have turned onto the drag strip from the country road to meet a speeding car head-on. Drag races were usually late at night when that danger was minimized. In addition to accommodating two-car races, the 3M road provided a place to see what speed your car could reach in a quarter of a mile.

I don’t remember any of the circumstances of the next event beyond the fact that I was once again driving the family Ford and that I had two passengers in the front seat beside me, Bobby and Jim. Bobby was a year ahead of me, Jim in my class. I recall that it was broad daylight, most likely on a Sunday. Probably at their urging, I drove to the 3M “drag strip” to see what the car could do in a quarter. I should mention again that I didn’t drive all that much, usually relying on one of the other members of our group to get his family car or, in the case of a couple of them, drive his own personal car, to cruise around in. I really didn’t share my friends’ fascination with cars and speed. Somehow I had ended up running around with a certain group, starting with a couple from my neighborhood, despite my not feeling a very deep connection with them or sharing their tastes and opinions on much of anything except music and sports. It did provide me with a group identity, something to do, and a certain status, since a couple of the group were known as being very tough in a fight.

Anyway, there I was at the wheel of our Ford, ready to make a test run. The car had an automatic transmission. I revved the engine up, while holding the brake down with my left foot. The back wheels spun slowly, squealing a little, but without propelling the car forward until I took my foot off the brake and the car surged forward “burning rubber.” There was no gear shifting required on my part; all I had to do was keep that gas pedal on the floor as we raced up the strip, checking the speedometer to see what speed we’d reach in the quarter. I believe it was about eighty miles an hour. We continued speeding on. On down the straight road, pedal on the floor. I must have seemed transfixed.

“Bob! Bob! Shut off!” Jim’s voice broke through to my blanked-out mind to alert me to the reality of the danger we were in, as we rushed toward the road at the end of the street. I don’t remember what was on the other side of the road, probably a ditch and a barbed-wire fence, but we would not have wanted to go flying into it at ninety miles an hour. I managed to slow the car down, without a panic stop, just enough to make the turn onto the road. Fortunately, there wasn’t a car on the country road approaching the intersection at the same time.

I don’t know what was actually in Bobby’s mind, but he was merciless in ridiculing Jim for having been so afraid as to cry out. I was still in a daze, weak with relief and residual fear, realizing how close we had come to a terrible crash. I didn’t join in Bobby’s razzing of Jim, but I also didn’t let on that we had been in danger because of my freezing at the wheel. And I never thanked Jim. I was weak, and in my weakness I didn’t want to acknowledge weakness. I haven’t seen Jim in close to fifty years.

Jim Allen, I hope you have had a good and interesting life, which you are still enjoying. Thank you for speaking up that day when seconds truly mattered.

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It’s Only One Game

May 10th, 2008

I recently wrote (Looking Back At a Rocky Little League Start) about my unplanned entry into Little League coaching when my son was seven years old. That had been coach-pitch ball, where everyone batted each inning, no matter how many outs were made, and no score was kept, except by the players of course.

The following spring we were excited by the prospect of real baseball in the Little League minors. One afternoon, my son, a friend of his, and I were at our neighborhood park engaging in a little preseason baseball practice. A Little League team, or as we later learned, two teams—minor and major league affiliates—were practicing on the diamond, while we were in deep right and center field. This is not a regulation park with Little League fences, so the field is regularly used for frisbee tossing, sunbathing, etc. when games are not being played.

My son and his friend caught the talent-scouting eye of one of the coaches on the diamond. The coach walked over to talk to us to see what was what. He asked the boys if they played Little League. The friend did, but was about to move out of town. All the interest was then focused on my son. The coach, whose name was Jon, invited him to join in the next team practice. Actually, since it was an unofficial practice, he called it a get-together or something like that.

I remembered a story I’d read in the local paper a few years before about a coach in our town being arrested at a ball field right in front of his team for conducting an early unauthorized Little League practice. The league president had called the cops on him supposedly for practicing on a city field before receiving permission from the city. I had thought it was crazy, and that the more practice kids got the better, but there’s no denying the early bird coach had probably been seeking an advantage. These coaches must have felt the heat was off as far as any consequences as extreme as arrest went. They probably would have said that everyone was doing it.

I guess my son and I were flattered by Jon’s desire to have my son practice with his team. Or, more likely, I was flattered, and my son was just happy for the chance to get started with real baseball. We came to the next unofficial practice of these Little League Red Sox. We were delighted to see that Wilson, one of our favorite kids on the “traveling team” from the previous year was there as well. Since his older brother was on the major league Red Sox, Wilson was guaranteed a spot on its minor league affiliate, which made it all the more attractive to us.

What a step up it was for my son to be practicing with experienced players under experienced coaches! Jon’s son was on the minor league team, and he seemed to be a very nice kid, which won Jon points with me as a potential coach for my son. I liked the way the coaches treated the kids and ran the practice, so both my son and I were quickly sold on the idea of being on the Red Sox. I planned to sign up to be eligible for coaching again in case my son’s team had need of coaching help. It felt like the Red Sox were our team already.

The player draft was conducted before one of the Little League meetings. Jon came from the draft to the meeting where I was waiting and told me there had been no problem; the Red Sox had landed my son. I glanced at the list of players in the draft Jon was holding and thought I saw next to my son’s name the notation “Will only play for Red Sox.” Since that went far beyond anything we would ever have said, stretching a strong preference into a requirement, I realized there had possibly been some chicanery involved in getting my son. Assuming I saw what I thought I saw, I still don’t know if the statement was actually used or just held in reserve in case someone tried to draft my son before the Red Sox could. I never said anything to Jon about it; and, since I didn’t, the only sure thing is that I let it go by without comment despite my suspicion.

It appeared that I was going to be Jon’s main assistant coach. I was looking forward to helping and learning from Jon and was glad not to have the responsibility for a team, which had been thrust upon me at the last minute a year before. There seemed a good possibility that I might inherit the managerial role the following year after Jon had moved up with his son to the majors. For now I was doing whatever Jon asked me to, whether putting balls on the tee for batting practice or hitting ground balls to players.

During a practice shortly before the season was to start Jon asked me, somewhat dubiously I thought, “Can you handle this team?” Thinking he needed to go to the bank before it closed or something and wanted me to run the practice for half an hour or so, I said I thought I could for a while. But no, he meant could I take over the managing job for the season! His son was being called up to the majors along with a couple of the other older players, and Jon was moving up with him to help coach at the next level. This meant I would be on my own and with a team depleted of some of its best players. It seemed to be my fate to have a team thrust on me each year. Despite my doubts, I said yes I would try, part of the reason being that I didn’t want to take a chance on whoever else might get the job at that point, as there were no other candidates on Jon’s coaching staff.

If I had been reluctant to take on the seven-year-old coach-pitch team the year before, I really felt in over my head now. This was real baseball, and I imagined it as being close to what my only experience with organized ball had been when I was a teenager. What about run-down pickle drills? What drills would I use at all beyond the most basic fielding and throwing to bases? Could I throw strikes in batting practice? My coach-pitch experience should help there. I would have to start learning the Little League rule book. I would at least be able to know for a fact that no rules were being evaded or stretched by our team. Teaching kids how to pitch? I’d never pitched. Time to order some videos and books! I did find some that were helpful, but time seemed so short.

The two best older players left on the team, Tim and Dennis, nine and ten years old, respectively, were unhappy because they hadn’t been called up to the majors along with the others they liked to consider their peers. There was some talk of their quitting, but fortunately they came to the first practice with me as the manager. Dennis’s mother even helped out by throwing some batting practice.

We had not a single experienced pitcher now, but had some kids that wanted to try. I had already identified Tim as the one kid with the arm, control, and confidence a pitcher needs, but he was untested. Beyond him I wasn’t sure who the best prospects were. I held a couple of tryouts using a pitching targetI had just bought. It was a big tarp mounted on a frame about five feet high and three feet wide with a Little League size strike zone cut out in the middle and with net pockets to catch balls in the strike zone, including special small pockets for balls put on the corners of the strike zone. Most of my pitcher candidates had trouble hitting the target at all, I mean the whole tarp, never mind the strike zone. Dennis, the tall ten-year-old I’ve already mentioned, was promising I thought; but, upon further consideration, he was sure that he didn’t want to pitch. Too much pressure obviously. I put him at catcher, as I wanted a good player there. My son was someone to consider for the future. Mark, another ten-year-old was sure he wanted to try.

A stressful non-baseball problem also arose before our first game. The team had gotten a late addition to its roster in the person of Don, a big ten-year-old with a strong arm, which made me think of him as another potential pitcher. A couple of days after Don showed up I got a call from the mother of Rob, a returning nine-year-old whom I was considering for second base. Rob’s mother was extremely upset that Don had been added to the team. A few years back in the early grades, Rob’s mother had gone high up the school hierarchy to ask for protection for Rob against Don, whom Rob was afraid of. After that, according to Rob’s mother, Don’s mother had accosted her in public and physically threatened her.

I have no way of knowing what the actual situation was between the boys, but I’m sure both mothers had been acting forcefully, in the way that came most naturally to them, in defense of their sons, as they saw it; Rob’s mother to protect her son from bullying (as she perceived it) and Don’s mother to protect her son from unfair accusations and classification (as she perceived it). Whatever had happened, and it had been a few years now, Rob’s mother had gotten a restraining order against Don’s mother back when the original incident took place and was still scared of her.

Much as I hated to be involved, all I could see to do was to call Don’s mother to arrange for him to go to a different team, as he was the newcomer with no ties. To my surprise, she was adamant that Don would not move, that she had no problem with the situation, so Rob’s mother should move her son if she had a problem. Furthermore, she would sue Little League if we “discriminated against” Don by attempting to move him. Obviously, I was stepping into a drama that had been going on for some time, so that what seemed a very reasonable request to me was being perceived as yet another unfair move against Don to be resisted by all available means.

I called Rob’s mother to bring her up to date and see how she felt. She had already talked to Rob about the possibility of his moving to another team; his team loyalty was stronger than whatever residual fear he had of Don, and he wouldn’t consider changing teams himself. That was heartening. This parental conflict was more than I had bargained for, but I couldn’t see anything to do but to go ahead with both boys on the team, keep an eye on things, and hope for the best since the initial conflict had been years in the past.

Don’s mother had showed up with him the first day, ready to become a coach for the team and fully assuming she would, as she had previously coached Don’s soccer team. I only had one assistant coach at the time, the mother of one of the eight-year-old rookies. She was good with the kids, but not very knowledgeable about baseball. She had signed on to coach with Jon mainly to help keep her son, who was a reluctant participant in Little League (only playing at her insistence, I gathered) and prone to bug watching during team practices, on task. So, I could have used the help. But given the situation, I told Don’s mother I was not going to have her as a coach. That evidently surprised her as much as her unwillingness to consider moving her son to another team had surprised me. She said “You’re bold,” I believe the adjective was, but, despite some talk about taking it to the league president, she accepted my decision, and later on in the season became pretty friendly.

I was probably more nervous than the kids about our first game. I didn’t know what to expect. I had barely had a chance to decide who would play where. Wilson and my son were rookies starting at third and short, respectively; Tim and Dennis were new to pitching and catching; and none of the other starting infielders had played their positions before.

The kids looked sharp and focused in their pre-game fielding practice. Tim started the game for us on the mound (figuratively speaking, since our league’s “mounds” were as flat as the rest of the infield, though there was a pitching rubber, which always had a hole in front of it). The Little League pitching rules then in effect (they have since moved to limits on actual pitches per game and week) placed limitations on the number of innings in which a player could pitch. My plan was to get three innings out of Tim and then bring in someone else, leaving Tim eligible to pitch again in our next game, which was only two days off. One pitch in the fourth inning would have made him ineligible for three days.

At the end of Tim’s three innings, I was proud of how the team had been playing and relieved at the way things were going. Tim had pitched well, and our team had a 4-3 lead. Win or lose, this was a respectable showing, and my fears of a fiasco seemed unfounded. Things went downhill fast after Mike was replaced at pitcher. Mark pitched the fourth inning and only got two outs, while giving up five runs. The rule in our minor league was that a team could only bat once through their order in an inning until the final inning. We batted ten or eleven in our league, as we played with four outfielders and had the option of an extra hitter. The fifth inning was worse, as Don failed to get anyone out before I switched to my last known available pitcher to finish it. That last pitcher happened to be the eight-year-old son of the manager, and I would have to stick with him, no matter what. He let in a couple more runs, but struck out the last batter of the inning for the only out we got. We failed to score in the bottom of the inning, and we were now down 15-4 through five.

The Indians’ manager came over to talk to me somewhat apologetically. He wanted me to know that he knew what it was like to be in my shoes, for the previous year his team had won only one game and that was by a forfeit (in other words, they had lost every game). He may have sensed we were on the brink of a similar season with a rookie manager and a depleted team with obvious pitching problems, or maybe he was just recalling similarly lopsided games. I appreciated his words. At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking: why not tell your players to swing the bat if the pitch is at all hittable? Under similar circumstances now, I would probably make that suggestion, but as a rookie manager I felt more inhibited I guess.

The point of the managerial conference was that, being down by more than ten runs after five full innings, under regular Little League rules our team would have had to concede the game, but our league allowed the manager to decide whether to continue or not. A factor to take into account was that teams would not be limited to one time through the batting order in the sixth inning, which is the last inning in Little League. I suppose the memory of our good start and that strikeout of their last hitter influenced my decision to gamble on getting them out fairly quickly, so that we could get one last at bat and hopefully score a few runs to end the game on a somewhat positive note. I probably didn’t really think through the worst case scenario thoroughly, focused as I was on the potentially upbeat ending.

I soon regretted my decision to continue playing. Though the sixth inning started off well enough, with two of the first three batters being retired, from then on the inning became a walkathon, as the batters all seemed to come up looking for a walk, which was indeed to be found. Those two early outs proved to be a curse, as they held out the hope that the next batter could always be the last. It wasn’t as though the opposing batters were all walking on four wild pitches; there were some excruciating walks on 3-2 counts. At this point an adult umpire would almost surely have called any pitch a kid could reach with a bat a strike, but the teenage umpire was sticking by the strike zone as he saw it without considering the score or the fact that the hitters weren’t swinging at anything. Not then, nor ever, did I complain about an umpire’s call, but I think it would have been a good idea to have suggested expanding the zone a little to him if I had thought of it before the inning had started. As the opposing team was not limited to one turn in the last inning, players were coming up for the second time in the inning, and walks continued to bring in runs. I felt bad for the rookie pitcher, needless to say. It was another of those infinite-loop nightmares.

With nine more runs already in, and the score standing at 24-4, there was no way to foresee when or if we’d ever get that final out. Better late than never, I asked for a timeout, walked out to the mound, and waved the team in for a conference. “What’s he doing now?” one of the opposing team parents asked disgustedly within my wife’s hearing. “OK, guys, we’re going to call it a day. Remember, it’s only one game.” “Finally!” said Tim. One of the fathers later told me that Tim’s post-game assessment had been “This team sucks!” What a coaching debut!

Despite the ignominious conclusion of our game, I could see reason for hope. We had had the lead after three innings. We had made plays! If you’re a beginning coach in your team’s first game, the sight of your infielders fielding ground balls and making good throws to first base, where the first baseman catches the ball for the putout—no matter how routine the play should be—is indescribably beautiful. All our trouble had come after I’d taken Tim out. Given that it was the team’s first game and none of the pitchers had ever thrown a pitch in a game, it probably wasn’t too surprising that most of them had trouble throwing strikes. The importance of pitching and experience was not a new discovery. With Tim pitching in our next game, we should have a fighting chance, depending on the quality of the opposition.

I guess it was the combination of the devastating score and the other manager’s reference to their winless season that nonetheless made thoughts of an 0-18 record for the year start to prey on me after only one game. Would I be hoping for a forfeit before the season was over, so I could at least match last-year’s Indians with that one “win?” Would the kids realize there were reasons for optimism, or would they be crushed beyond hope? Would kids start quitting the team? Would the parents start to mutter about my incompetence? What about my son? Had I shattered his confidence by leaving him out there to walk so many batters? All of my doubts about being ready for coaching were weighing on me.

We didn’t have long to wait for our next crack at a victory, as we only had one day off before taking on the Cardinals. Nonetheless it seemed like a long time to me, and it was long enough for us to hear one of my son’s friends say in a matter-of-fact, not a teasing, way that we must really be bad to have lost to the team he knew hadn’t won a single game the year before. I wasn’t pessimistic, just worried.

Contrary to my fears, the kids seemed to be fine. No one failed to come to the game, and they showed no signs of being disheartened. They were not sullen or mutinous. They were kids from eight to ten years old, eager, almost all of them, to play baseball, the greatest game ever invented. Tim was our starting pitcher again. I planned to use up his weekly allotment of six innings in this one game, so long as he seemed OK.

No matter how he may have felt about his team’s chances, Tim pitched even better in this game; and we were still making plays. Through four innings we had a slim 3-1 lead; and each team had recorded only one hit. Then in the fifth we started to hit; we scored three runs in both the fifth and sixth; and we took a 9-2 lead into the bottom of the sixth. In that last inning, with one run in, the Cardinals had runners on first and second with no outs. Then Tim struck out a hitter and got the following one out on a popup.

The next batter hit a ground ball to the third-baseman Mark, who fielded it cleanly and then looked up to see the large runner from second coming right at him. To my great relief, instead of throwing to first base, Mark did the right thing, tagging the runner out, though rather harder than necessary, as often happens in the Little League minors. It was one of the most memorable outs I’ve witnessed in my entire baseball-watching life. Thank you, Mark!

There were smiles all around on our side and great relief for at least one of us. The winless season was no longer a possibility! Tim had pitched a four-hitter with twelve strikeouts, the biggest strikeout coming in the fifth to end the inning with the bases loaded. Dennis was going to be strongly encouraged, maybe even pressured a little, to get over his reluctance to pitch.

Our team would go on to win its next nine games, with both Dennis and my son joining Tim in pitching the team to wins along the way, before losing by one run to the Cardinals in our third meeting with them. Suddenly we were among the elite teams in the city. But with that came the coach’s burden of higher expectations. There was really no escape from the pressure that year, but the second kind is better.

An important thing coaching has taught me is that kids naturally have the highly desirable combined ability to both treat their current activity or contest very seriously and to recover completely from what seems briefly to be a devastating setback or defeat. This was one of the things I had been hoping to instill in the kids on my team: try your best, but don’t dwell on losses. It turned out they didn’t really need to be taught that, if such a thing could be taught except by example anyway.

Being responsible for preparing the team to play its best—to win if possible—and imagining (rightly in some cases) that the other parents were just as anxious about their child’s and their child’s team’s game success as I was, was both a burden and a privilege. I’ve observed that parents seem more anxious about their children in sports when they are younger, I suppose because they seem more vulnerable; and, for some, because of the parents’ hope that they will see their child blossom into a star athlete.

Looking at pictures of that team, I am struck by how little they were. How could their winning or losing baseball games have taken on so much importance to me and to other parents? Part of it is the natural desire of the teacher to see his students perform well, whatever skill they are supposed to have mastered. Obviously, being the father of one of those little players who also took baseball seriously was the main reason, but I didn’t share many of his childish enthusiasms.

I think that points to the answer: baseball provided a bridge I could cross over to his world where play was extremely serious, yet fun, a bridge back to childhood itself. That feat is pretty much impossible for most of us through watching or joining in on other types of play—playing Star Wars, say, to take an example from my son’s childhood. I think the rules and the scoring of baseball are part of what makes the bridge work: the game is still fun and dramatic for grownups. And in organized baseball, the children are able to come partway across the bridge in the other direction toward the adult world. This ambiguous and unconscious mixing of worlds may be the reason that some parents behave so badly, so childishly, at their kids’ games. This would be an inherent danger.

I don’t fully know what to make of the sort of mania we can get into following our young children’s organized games, but I know my son and his friends have good memories of their early Little League days and so do their parents, so I guess no further analysis is needed in way of justification.

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Looking Back At a Rocky Little League Start

May 1st, 2008

Spring is here, though in New England it’s still a bit hard to tell except by the trees that have finally leafed and blossomed—and the start of Little League baseball. I’m sure the kids have been playing ball since February in Florida, but in New England we don’t get started until late April, and even then we typically have a lot of cold rainouts.

This is the first season in nine years that finds me neither managing nor coaching a team. Although I’ve approached seasons thinking I would just be a parent in the stands before, this time I feel sure I’ve passed the point where I might heed a call to fill in as a last-minute replacement. This definitive retirement is harder than I had anticipated, and I find my heart nostalgic for those earlier years when my son was little and his anticipated playing and my unexpected coaching xanax were all in the future.

I remember looking forward to the day my son, greatly enamored of ball sports from age two, would be able to play Little League baseball. I had only become interested in baseball at age ten, and I had missed out on the Little League experience through living in small towns without a league until I was thirteen. By then it was time to move up to the next level, and, lacking the experience of the earlier years that all the other kids had, I was always one of the worst players on my teams.

I had not fulfilled my dream of becoming a good baseball player, even after hours of practicing alone, fielding balls bounced off my grandparents’ brick chimney and catching make-believe popups tossed as I high as I could make them go. Hitting fast pitching was impossible to learn on your own. I was glad to anticipate that my son would be able to get the full benefit of Little League coaching in the town we lived in. I had played catch with him and so on, but I was looking forward to having viagra experienced coaches take him beyond what I could teach him.

We were lucky to live close to a park that included a Little League diamond. It didn’t meet the full Little League specifications, and the topography of the outfield was complex (hills and holes, irregular dimensions), but the field was adequate for local minor league play and far better than the vacant lot I had done my neighborhood playing on. It had an infield, home plate, and a pitching rubber, though no true mound. Our family had attended a couple of games there to see an older boy on our street play. People brought lawn chairs and blankets to sit on in outfield foul territory.

Over the years my son and I would spend many hours on this field, often just the two of us, doing fielding practice, hitting practice, and pitching practice. “Can we go to the park?” was a daily question of his to me during the baseball months for those years, and the answer was almost always yes. Later I would spend a lot of time there with my daughter working on her windmill pitching delivery for softball.

The first level of Little League is tee-ball, which takes kids as young as five. Tee-ballers in our section of town met in the aforementioned neighborhood park on Saturday mornings. Looking at the Little League rule book gives one the idea that tee-ball should basically consist of regular baseball games, only without pitchers, the batters hitting off a tee instead. In our town, there were no games at all. It was really just some practice in the basics of throwing and catching followed by extended batting practice from a tee.

Batting practice is the most boring activity for the player not batting at any level, but most hitters will make contact with the ball on the tee, which helps. On every ball that was hit, at least half a dozen fielders would try to be the first to get to the ball. There were numerous fathers (mainly) there shouting out technical reminders to their sons (mainly) from the sidelines. I avoided this, as it seemed both distracting and somewhat overbearing, however well-intentioned, though I watched to see how my son was doing and how he compared to the others just as attentively as the rest. Having had a weak throwing arm myself, I was glad to see that my son’s arm was among the best, as I had guessed it would be. Rules and positions were not being taught much to speak of, but the kids got caps and tee-shirts that gave them the feeling of being on a real lasix team.

Despite the lack of games, my son loved tee-ball because he felt he was getting started in real baseball. He would dive for balls in the infield just as he had been diving for imaginary balls for almost as long as he’d been able to walk, mimicking the highlight plays he’d seen on television.

After two years of tee-ball we were definitely ready for something else though. We had hoped he could start minor league ball at age seven, but our league held fast to the eight-year-old minimum then in effect. They did, however, have planned an intermediate step for seven-year-olds, which, though part of the tee-ball program, was actually one in which the coaches pitched in something resembling real games.

Each baseball park run by the city was to have one or more traveling teams, so called because the teams would travel to all the parks in the city to play each other. It happened that our park didn’t have enough kids to field a traveling team and wouldn’t have had a coach for it anyway, so after a couple of weeks of getting the runaround at our old park, we were glad to get the go-ahead to go to another park and join its traveling team.

This was a larger park which contained two baseball diamonds, one Little League and one full-sized, arranged so that their deep outfields merged without a fence between them. The tee-ballers were in the big expanse of outfield, and the traveling team had the small diamond. Trish, who seemed to be in charge of the traveling team program, ran the park’s traveling team workouts for the first couple of weeks. The practices had pretty much been limited to batting practice with Trish or someone else pitching, at least since we’d arrived from our park. The third week Trish wasn’t there, so eventually one of the parents was enlisted to run the practice. It was not a good amoxil choice, though the guy had a heart of gold, I think, which became a problem in this instance.

Especially at the beginning level, there are going to be a few kids that have trouble hitting a pitched ball even when it’s being pitched to them for the sole purpose of being hit. One of the first hitters in that day’s batting practice was such a kid. Either his hand-eye coordination was below average, or he felt the pressure of having everyone watch him try to hit to an incapacitating degree. Swing and miss followed swing and miss. It was a painful experience for witnesses, but doubtless much worse for the two principals.

As the swing count rose, the kid had probably become exhausted as well, and he wasn’t coming any closer to making contact than he had been on the first pitch. It was like a nightmare of the I-can’t-get-out-of-this-loop type, which is the kind I sometimes have as I’m just waking up in the morning. Really, it must have been a sort of feedback loop, in which every pitch that was swung on and missed made the guy pitching all the more determined to give the kid one to hit, so he wouldn’t finish the session discouraged I guess. Or maybe he had it in his mind that every kid was to be alloted a certain number of hits. It was driving me nuts, but as I didn’t know the fellow pitching and was just a parent without any particular standing I felt obliged to just watch and hope. The time to end the week’s activity came with the unfortunate bat swinger still at the plate.

The combination of the late start and the long time spent on one kid who couldn’t hit the ball meant that the whole session had gone by without my son having so much as touched a ball or picked up a bat, and he could not have been the only one so deprived.

As we walked without speaking back to the car, I saw my son was near tears and angry. He, who had maintained his high spirits through those earlier tee-ball sessions, was now throwing down his glove in frustration and saying he was ready to quit. It was quite a shocking turn. I decided I would step forward to offer some advice (let the kid hit off a tee to finish?) if a similar situation arose in the future, no matter how awkward it might seem.

Next week Trish was again absent, and there was no equipment for the team either. I tossed out a ball we had brought with us just to get the boys started playing catch. At least everyone was going to touch the ball this week. As I surveyed the scene, a man I had never seen before approached from across the outfield. His face, which was shining with hope, made me think of a leprechaun. He came right up to me, and his very first words were “Will you coach this team?” He was the director of tee-ball I learned. Given the sorry state of the program and my son’s disenchantment with it, I was ready to view this as an opportunity. I saw another coaching candidate behind the backstop, a father of one of the other boys, and told him that I would coach if he would also. I don’t remember if we had so much as spoken to each other before; but he agreed after some heavy-duty coaxing.

I realized just how desperate the director must have been to find a coach when he told us we should gather at a spot across the field where the team would get shirts and caps for the team picture-taking. So the boys and their brand new rookie coaches (wearing team caps as well) had their team photo made, and no one would need to know exactly how long the coaches had been on the job. I was also somewhat stunned to hear that we had our first game coming up next week.

Knowing that practically nothing had been accomplished toward preparing them to play baseball in the previous weeks, I was afraid we would be embarrassed in a game and the boys would become demoralized. I told the team “We have a game next week,” and asked them “Are we ready for a game?” Thinking as an adult, I expected that they would sense their unpreparedness, start to feel the same anxiety I did, and hopefully say something like, “No way,” so I could say “OK, let’s get to work to make up for lost time.” Instead I got an enthusiastic “Yeah! Yeah!”—a bring-‘em-on this-is-what-we’ve-been-waiting-for sort of cheer, complete with leaps and pumping fists, led by an irrepressible kid named clomid Michael.

This was a good reminder to me of what the main object of this program was—kids having fun playing baseball, not coaches running a major league development camp. I was glad they had misinterpreted my question as a call to get pumped up. I smiled and said all right, but I thought we needed to get ready, and we spent the rest of the time working on routine infield plays, running the bases, and hitting.

To become an official coach in the league you had to fill out an application of course, but also attend at least three league meetings, which were really just meetings of coaches. The meeting place was in the basement of the annex to a Catholic Church, whose name I hadn’t even heard before, even though it ran a school; which I mention to point out that, even though I had been living in my town for about fifteen years, my acquaintanceship with many of its institutions, not just Little League, was pretty limited. I eventually found the church and a place to park in the nearly full parking lot.

The room was packed and loud with animated talk, as attendance was always highest just as the season was getting started since coaches were chomping at the bit to get the go-ahead to start practices if teams had been selected or to find out when player tryouts and drafts would be if not. Schedules, equipment, and uniforms all had to be obtained. There was no league web site to convey information back then, so attending meetings was the way to find out what was going on.

I probably stood out a bit in the crowd, if only for my beard and longer-than-average hair. It was a very working class group. Some of the coaches came to meetings wearing their work uniforms. The word for the second person plural used by many in the group was “yous,” which I’m not sure I had encountered in person before, though it was obviously very common. I’d guess I was one of only a small percentage of the coaches in the room that had attended college. I should add that, while the population figure might indicate this was not a small town, among those born here there was a prevailing small-town-like mistrust of the outsider, meaning anyone that hadn’t grown up in the town and shared the same experience of school, church, and youth sports. Despite my fifteen years of residency, they were in a way right to view me as an outsider, if not to mistrust me.

I think most of the professional-class, college-educated people that had moved into town in large numbers during the past few years had put their kids (when they had kids) into the thriving soccer program instead of the declining baseball one. That may be worth writing about someday, but there was no way I was going to encourage one of my kids to play soccer, especially not in preference to baseball. So the love of baseball made me part of this baseball coaching fellowship, even if I might seem different from most of the others in some ways. I reckoned that in baseball savvy I was probably near the bottom.

The local Little League was not a welcoming organization. Though my fellow new coach and I received pro forma permission to take the field without having completed the meeting attendance requirements with the promise we would rectify the situation as soon as possible, not one person came up to us to say hello, glad to have you aboard or anything. I think it was mainly just an organizational culture that didn’t foster welcoming.

The first team we were up against was from the section of town that reputedly had the best teams most years. The coaches, a man and a woman, were of the very serious-about-winning type. They were preparing players for next year’s minor league teams, and of course they had sons on the team. Their main difference from me was that they had grown up in this town, knew Trish well, and were established insiders in youth sports, including hockey, which was as foreign to me and my son as cricket, since I had grown up in Texas and had never had a pair of ice skates on my feet.

The way the games went was that each coach pitched to his own team, while the coaches of the team in the field stood on the field as well, positioning players and giving tips on where to throw the ball in different situations and so on. Everyone in the complete batting order would bat once each inning, no matter how many outs had been recorded. Runners would advance around the diamond as in a real game (except there was no stealing), but the score would not be kept. That was the theory.

We were the home team, and Trish was on the scene, overseeing the proceedings. After the other team had batted through their order, they took the field, and I stepped to the pitching rubber. As soon as our leadoff hitter had gotten a bat, donned a helmet, and stepped to the plate, I delivered my first pitch, which was accompanied by shouts of “Hold on!” from the other team’s coaches, who had not completed the positioning of their defense. From the tone of their outcries, my failure to reckon how long these preparations might take was evidently an outrageous breach of etiquette or an imagined attempt to gain an advantage in a game with no scorekeeping, I’m not sure which. Startled as I was by the vehemence of the protests, I apologized for not having checked before pitching, but that was not sufficient.

The male coach had only one word to express his exasperation at my quick-pitch transgression: “Unbelievable!” I might have expected Trish to step in and say something like, “Just relax. Cut him some slack. It’s his first game. No harm done.” But what she said was quite different.

Trish spoke only to the coach, ignoring me: “This is what they’re sending me. I have to work with what I’ve got.” For all these years, right until I started writing about it, I had always viewed this comment of Trish’s as an expression of insider versus outsider hostility or an excessive deference to the other coach; but it has dawned on me that there may have been some hurt feelings involved that I wasn’t aware of, and hadn’t considered, which would somehow make her comment easier to take. I can imagine that Trish may have been expecting to coach our team herself but had discovered the job had been stripped from her.

And that “unbelievable” expression of disgust at my incompetence might have been spoken partly in solidarity with Trish, who could have painted us as usurpers to the other coaches before the game. But that’s just speculation. The sure fact is that the league was not in very good shape, and insulting new volunteers was not helpful.

Whatever the motives for the decidedly unfriendly comments, I shook them off and let the coaches get their defense set; then I proceeded to pitch strikes to our hitters, which was the best answer I could have come up with since most of our guys could hit. Our team thoroughly outplayed the other one. Even though we were not keeping an official score, it goes without saying that the players were keeping track of how many runs had crossed the plate for each team.

After the game had ended and I was lugging the equipment bag to the car, another car pulled up alongside mine. Michael, his face glowing, had something he was bursting to say: “We dominated them!” Non-competitive games for kids only appeal to grownups, I’ve found.

According to the kids on our team—and I really didn’t keep score or encourage them to—we “won” every game we played that year, which is believable. Just by chance, we had a lot of future all-stars on that team. The season was over when school finished in late June, but I hated to have that be the end. One of the parents knew a coach who would keep his Little League team’s equipment for the summer and let us use it. We agreed to keep meeting every Saturday morning, so long as we had enough to play with four or five on a side. We got together almost every week during the summer, unofficially of course, and with a few extras (a little brother, a big brother, a couple of friends) each time. I know we formed tighter bonds and learned more baseball because of those extra weeks.

I coached most of the boys on the traveling team at least one or two times more, either on all-star teams or regular Little League teams. I still have the ball they signed and presented to me back then when they could barely print their names. The ink has faded, but the memory of who and how they were has not.

The boys on the team are sixteen now, young men really. Though a number of them have moved to other towns, I still see some of them and their parents from time to time, occasionally at school events, but most often at baseball games, now high school or Senior Little League. I don’t know how frequently I’ll see the boys once they have graduated, but I hope enough to tell how they are faring in life. I should add that, as I put in my time in the coaching ranks, I became accepted by the other coaches and gained their respect. There’s no denying that it helped that my son and daughter became known as good players and that teams I managed won a few city championships.

Coaching Little League baseball and, later, softball (when my daughter decided, to my delight, that she wanted to play) became an important part of my life, a totally unexpected one, and it all started when a desperate tee-ball director approached me from across a green field teeming with five-to-seven-year-olds to give me the call I hadn’t realized I was waiting for. I suppose one can look at any unexpected turning point in one’s life as being due to fate or providence, depending on one’s outlook on life and the cosmos, but this one has really stuck in my mind.

I knew I liked teaching baseball to my son, but I discovered I liked to teach other kids as well. Little League involvement also changed my relationship to the community, as it gave me a role in the daily lives of people and their children to a degree that I would never have had otherwise. Thinking about what I’ve done in my life that’s not strictly family related, I’m not sure that Little League coaching doesn’t seem the most significant.

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Presidential Sport

April 23rd, 2008

This is not going to become a habit, I hope, and it is not political commentary per se, just some general advice, drawing on specific examples, to all Presidential candidates about not trying to seem something you’re not. Well, let me back off from that: running for President is mainly about seeming something you’re not. But still, you have to choose a realistic man or woman of the people image for yourself. Otherwise, you may be found out in a way that damages your chances of being elected.

There are just too many reporters, cameras, and, now, bloggers around to think you can keep much secret. Things get found out these days. If you’re going to engage in what some hair-splitting, old-fashioned types may consider “sexual relations” with a young intern, be ready for the embarrassing details to be printed in full in the NY Times and posted on the internet. The public wants to know I guess, though I didn’t. If you didn’t really come under sniper fire in Bosnia on a trip with many witnesses, don’t expect your assertion that you did will go unchallenged. In my mind, the mere running for President requires either courage or ignorance of its inherent danger (see my recent post), so why make up stories?

Today I’m mainly talking about trying to present an image of yourself as a sports fan or recreational athlete when in fact you don’t care about sports or don’t engage in them. We have certainly had some athletic Presidents. Lincoln was reputed to be a powerful wrestler. Teddy Roosevelt was the extreme case of an overachiever in the manly arts. Ike played football, and I first encountered the word “atheist” as a kid when Eisenhower jokingly defined it as someone who doesn’t care who wins the Notre Dame vs. SMU football game. (Don’t worry if you don’t get it.) Jerry Ford played football (too often without a helmet according to LBJ). Washington excelled at tree chopping and dollar tossing in his youth, or so they used to say.

JFK, despite debilitating health problems, was able to project an image of manly fitness because it had been true in his earlier days and exposing Presidential weaknesses wasn’t given such a high priority in his day. FDR obviously wasn’t an athlete, but he didn’t pretend to be, and he managed to appear much less physically handicapped than he actually was, something that would be difficult to achieve today. Speaking of FDR, I’ll bet Senator Obama envies his ability to flaunt his cigarettes in a holder that became iconic. Every era demands new sacrifices.

In recent years at least, it seems that candidates have striven more to give the appearance of being avid sports fans, probably because sports have become more and more important with the expansion of the sports media. Sports nuts are probably a significant segment of the population, if not, strictly speaking, a voting bloc. Nixon was truly interested in sports, I recall. So much for the idea that that’s a reliable indicator of a successful Presidency, but he did get elected twice.

Our current President also seems to follow sports with genuine interest. He owned a major league baseball team. He can throw ceremonial first pitches all the way from the pitcher’s mound to home plate with some authority, a major step up from the weak short tosses from the stands of not so long ago. So why then would John Kerry have tried to go up against the other guy’s strength in an area where he, Kerry, had a weakness? Maybe throwing back a shot of whiskey à la Hillary Clinton recently would have been a better idea; though, against a recovering alcoholic who’d been on the wagon for years, it could have seemed a bit like hitting below the belt.

In any case, Kerry definitely sought to portray himself as a sports fan, including a fan of NASCAR racing, but with results that worked against him I think. Representing Massachusetts in the Senate, Kerry no doubt had been told it’s important to be a big Red Sox fan. But when he started talking about Manny Ortez (probably a running together of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz), it only seemed he was trying to remember lines, not speaking from true interest. And about 99.9% of Red Sox fans were going to see that. Yet he doesn’t seem to learn. He avowed that his favorite Sox player when he was a kid was Eddie Yost, who never played a game for Boston. There was an Eddie Yost, all right, who played for the Washington Senators, so Kerry may have truly remembered hearing the guy’s name. He may even be remembering something about him. Kerry said that the thing he really liked about Yost was that he walked a lot. Not hit homeruns or stole bases, but walked! This was not a normal kid baseball fan he was describing.

Kerry was following in the footsteps of the Senior Senator from Massachusetts with his mangling of ballplayers’ names. Ted Kennedy was somehow prompted to refer to the homerun hitters then challenging Roger Maris’s record as “Sammy Suser and Mike McGwire” (at a time when the names of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were everywhere). Of course, what he really said was Sammy Susa and Mike McGwire. That extra “r” is just something people from Boston add before a following vowel, in this case the “and.” Think of JFK’s “Cubar” if you’re old enough.

In this Presidential season, Mitt Romney tried to recover from his exaggerated tales of being a lifelong hunter by making jokes about mounting gopher head trophies, which I have to admit is kind of funny. But you don’t have to be a hunter to say you don’t want to take hunters’ guns away, so better not overdo it in the first place. Romney spent a lot of money on his campaign, but seems to have come across as a phony to a lot of voters. The hunting fib couldn’t have helped.

Generally speaking, unless you can pull it off, as Hillary did in showing she was “one of the guys” when she downed the shot of whiskey, don’t attempt man-of-the-people feats. I doubt that hers was a spur-of-the-moment decision and it may have been born of desperation, but it could turn out to have been a brilliant move. How many percentage points was that shot worth? She must have practiced that one, but others have jumped in without thorough preparation.

President Jimmy Carter famously collapsed on camera while jogging during his term of office, which did not convey the image of vigor and stamina he was no doubt hoping for. Carter also became a figure of ridicule when he talked of having to beat off with a boat oar the repeated attacks of an aquatic rabbit that kept swimming toward his boat. The “Killer Rabbit” episode certainly has colored my image of him ever since. Maybe it was a rabid rabbit that really was dangerous or a drowning rabbit that should have been rescued instead of bashed, but it just seems ludicrous in the telling. Better to have kept the rabbit story inside the family. Perhaps that unfortunate encounter with the wild kingdom was enough to sink Carter against Reagan, who by the way got his start as a play-by-play baseball radio announcer using fake crowd noise and bat cracks for time-delayed broadcasts based on telegraphed reports coming in to the station.

Then there were the painful-to-look-at pictures of Kerry trying to catch a football as though it were the first one he’d ever had thrown to him, something to be warded off like an attacking hawk at Fenway Park. Whose idea was that? Why football anyway? Well, the Kennedy Presidential clan used to play touch football, so that might have entered into it. And JFK (the original) liked to sail of course, which may explain Kerry’s windsurfing. But windsurfing doesn’t convey mastery the way posing at the tiller of a sailboat does.

If you’ve never engaged in an activity before, better not do it for the first time with press coverage. As a case in point, if you’ve never bowled before in your life, don’t bowl in front of the television cameras the way Obama did. If you bowl a 37, just say you were under 100 unless you’ve foolishly let the press keep score. People might relate to a guy bowling under 100, but 37 is so low that it casts doubt on your basic physical co-ordination or performance under pressure. Most people who have bowled probably won’t remember having bowled a score that low. If you see you’re on your way to a 37, and the press is keeping score, better quit early. You can say it’s that old bullriding injury acting up or something. Is bowling a requirement for being President? No—so don’t act like it is by doing it in public, unless you can bowl at least, say, 150.

I would also recommend that, if you are as weak in an area as your opponent is, be careful how you ridicule him or her. Cheney could pile on Kerry about referring to Lambeau Field as Lambert Field, but Senator Obama’s talking about Hillary out there in the duck blind like “Annie Oakley with her six shooter” didn’t really work. It hinted at ignorance of both duck hunting, where shotguns are preferred, and Annie Oakley, who was famous for her rifle shooting. Associating Hillary Clinton with Annie Oakley in any way probably wasn’t a good idea, as Annie excelled at something usually thought of as a masculine activity, and who knows what might stick in the voter’s mind.

Looking to the fall, consider that John McCain really is a sports fan. This is neither good nor bad as far as I can see, unless taken to extremes. McCain will no doubt reveal some foibles of his own, but his opponent would be well advised not to try to match him in sports acumen or enthusiasm, because exposure as a phony, even in an unimportant area can tip the scales for some people. McCain really did get shot at too.

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Commercial Break: DNA Day Sale Now Underway

April 18th, 2008

And now, a word from our sponsor. If you’ve ever wanted to learn or thought that maybe you should learn what the structure of DNA really looks like and how DNA actually works in our cells to make us who we are and keep us going, then you have a chance to do it in a very thorough and enjoyable way for the lowest price ever. OnScreen DNA, the virtual model programmed by the On-Screen Scientist himself, is on sale at a 70% markdown, in honor of DNA Day and the original discovery of the DNA double helix fiftty-five years ago. The price? Just $19.53 (where’d that number come from?), instead of the usual $69, through April 25, 2008.

What’s DNA Day? It’s the day we celebrate both the historic publication of the Watson and Crick paper that elucidated the double helical structure of DNA and the completion of the Human Genome Project. April 25 has been chosen as the day. I may feel moved to say something about the discovery one of these days, maybe even before DNA Day, but for now I wanted to alert my many readers to the sale.

The software runs on Macintosh OS X or Windows XP/Vista. Download the free OnScreen DNA Lite first if you wish to see the quality of the model. But you don’t really get the full how-DNA-works story in the Lite version, just a detailed guided tour of the structure, including the essential molecular components and chemical bonds. The on-screen tutorials explain everything you’re seeing, and practically no prior knowledge is assumed.

Can you spot the many (roughly 50% it seems) inaccurate popular depictions of DNA as a left-handed helix instead of the proper right-handed type? Well, you’ll be able to after a few minutes with OnScreen DNA (or even the Lite edition, for that matter). It would be so easy to tell the artists hired to make all these nifty DNA double helix logos and designs the difference between left-handed and right-handed DNA, but it seems no one does, even scientists. Witness the many backward examples. I think the professor that was maintaining the left-handed-DNA web site finally got tired of it, but I imagine the archives are still up in any case. Just Google it. New examples appear all the time. The Boston Globe had a doozy that occupied about half a page just last week. Left-handed DNA does exist in nature, but it’s a small percentage and is not the genome molecule of our chromosomes.

Anyway, the animations of DNA and RNA chain-construction in OnScreen DNA are a lot of fun. I still enjoy them after having seen them countless times during programming, debugging, testing, and just playing around. You really need to see the three-dimensional structure of DNA, not just the two-dimensional ladders which animations encountered on the internet seem to invariably fall back on. Having programmed the OnScreen DNA animations, I can see why. It’s a pain to do the three-dimensional programming. But it is worth it. Just go to <onscreen-dna.com/buy_dna_online.php> to purchase online and see for yourself. Or get the free version from the link in the upper right. Amaze your friends by pointing out the next picture of left-handed DNA you come across! That’s almost as good as ordering in French at the French restaurant.

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The Candidates: Reckless, Fatalistic, Uninformed, Optimistic, or Heroic?

April 12th, 2008

Think of a dream job—one with a lot of power and prestige and a private jet, if that’s what you’d like. Now imagine that there was one little drawback: about a 15% chance you would die as the result of a violent assault sometime during your first few years on the job, and that in fact you could be shot dead within your first four months of work, as a previous holder of the position had been. Would that make you pause before submitting your résumé?

Gee, I would have thought Mafia dons had better security than that, you may be saying to yourself. What is this job? Well, being a Mafia prosecutor in Italy has been an even more dangerous job than the one I’m thinking of, but the job I have in mind is plenty dangerous, is only open to US citizens, and carries a lot more power and prestige; so much power and prestige, in fact, that despite the inherent danger, a goodly number of risk-taking people, both men and women, can’t resist seeking the job, even devoting months and millions trying to attain it. The job of which I write is, of course, the Presidency of the United States of America.

Starting with and including Abraham Lincoln, twenty-seven men have held the office of President of the United States, and four of them have been assassinated. So during that time, 14.8% of US Presidents have been killed on the job, all well before their first five years in office, one (Garfield) less than four months into his term. This is a dangerous job! Starting with Lincoln may seem unfair, but I would argue that the first successful assassination (coming at the end of a civil war) changed the game, and made it more likely that others would follow.

The toll could easily have been higher. Ronald Reagan survived a bullet fired into a lung, and a woman shot at President Ford but missed because a man in the crowd grabbed her arm at the last second. Our current President was lucky that a grenade thrown toward him during a foreign trip to Tbilisi, Georgia failed to explode. Harry Truman was the target of two Puerto Rican nationalists in 1950, but the gunmen were shot before they could get to him; one attacker and a White House guard died in the gun battle. In 1994, a man sprayed bullets in the direction of a group of men on the White House lawn, which he erroneously thought included President Clinton, who was inside. Franklin Roosevelt was a target of bullets shortly before his first inauguration, in an attack by a lone gunman which killed the mayor of Chicago and wounded four others; crowd intervention probably saved the President-elect as in the Ford case. Other plans and stalkings have been uncovered, while others have no doubt gone undetected.

You don’t even have to be elected to be a target, nor are you necessarily safe after leaving office. Three candidates for the presidency have also been shot. Candidate George Wallace was paralyzed as a result of a bullet wound, and Robert Kennedy was shot to death. Teddy Roosevelt survived a bullet to the chest after he had left office and while he was campaigning to return to the White House. Saddam Hussein plotted to kill the first President Bush a few months after he left office, but Kuwait security intercepted the would-be car bombers.

To put it in perspective, let’s compare the risk of being President of the US with some other hazardous jobs, first looking at some regular jobs. The overall job fatality rate due to accidents and assaults for all American workers is about four per 100,000 each year, for a 0.004% chance of being killed on the job. Starting with Lincoln’s first inauguration and counting up to the present, the annual fatality rate through assassination for US Presidents is 2.7%, which says that a President’s risk of being killed on the job is around 700 times that of today’s average US worker! The average US worker has about a 0.08% chance of being killed on the job in a twenty-year period.

For the years 2001-6 an average of 43% of on-the-job deaths resulted from transportation accidents. Driving is kind of dangerous, which we knew, but that is quite a high percentage and points out how relatively safe most jobs are. We think of mining as a dangerous profession, and it is about 6.5 times more dangerous than the average job, but the odds of being killed in mining are around 0.5% in a twenty-year-period. Being President is over a hundred times more likely to get you killed than mining in an average year.

For the general population, 10% of on-the-job deaths are due to violent assaults, which seems strikingly high. But since there have been no accidental deaths of Presidents in office, for them the rate is 100%. Put together, driving accidents and assaults account for over half of the on-the-job deaths in the US.

The figures vary a bit from year to year, but the three professions that are regularly in the top three for death rates on the job are fishing, logging, and flying (which includes small planes like cropdusters), each having an annual job fatality rate of roughly 0.1%. Thus the Presidential annual fatality average is twenty-seven times that for he most hazardous normal jobs. Over a twenty year career, a fisherman’s chance of dying from an accident or drowning on the job is about 2%. This is high, but, perhaps surprisingly, nothing compared to the historical risk a President of the US faces while in office for only a few years.

What about the hazards of serving in the US military in Iraq? It goes without saying that some in the military are much more exposed to danger than others, depending on their respective roles. So keep in mind that the figure used here is an average over all military personnel without considering what percentage of them are in relatively safe areas and not regularly involved in combat patrols and assaults. Even remembering that, it still seems counterintuitive that, on average a President is at substantially greater risk of being killed than the average serviceman in Iraq.

Consider the following. In a relatively “hot” period in Iraq (when appreciably more casualties were being sustained than now) from September 18, 2006 to February 4, 2007, the calculated annual death rate for American troops was 7.5 per 1,000 (Bird and Fairweather, 2007, abstract online). Thus a high estimate for the likelihood of dying on the job in Iraq (including non-combat accidents) within a year was 0.75%; which, from the fatality standpoint, is about 7.5 times more dangerous than logging. But the military fatality rate is only 28% of the Presidential one.

Roughly 80% of the military deaths in Iraq have been due to hostile action, with the rest being comparable to “normal” deaths on the job, such as helicopter crashes not due to enemy fire, etc. Take away the hostile action, and serving in Iraq is still about 50% more likely to kill you than logging or fishing in the USA. Over a sustained five-year-period the likelihood of being killed in combat in Iraq for the average serviceman would be something like 3%, while a President has a 15% chance of being killed by hostile action while in office.

However, the odds of suffering a non-fatal wound are over seven times as great as being killed for a soldier in Iraq, while Presidents have been more likely to be killed than wounded. Only Reagan was wounded and survived while in office. The risk of bodily harm, including non-fatal wounds, is then greater for the average serviceman in Iraq than for the President.

None of this comparing of averages over time is meant to suggest that the stress level and hardships of living in a foreign land with many hostile locals, while far from loved ones, eating army rations, possibly being shot at every day, seeing others around you being killed and wounded, and perhaps suffering horrible but non-fatal wounds yourself, are at all comparable to the daily life of luxury in the perceived security of twenty-four-hour Secret Service protection in the White House.

To put that average fatality rate for US servicemen in better perspective, let’s consider the battle of Fallujah in November 2004, which saw very intense house-to-house combat against well-prepared insurgents by US Marines and Army units. Some 6,000 assault troops lost about 50 killed in the ten days of heaviest fighting in Operation al-Fajr. Projecting that brief intensity of combat to an annual rate, would give a fatality rate forty times higher than the figure we have used for the average. More realistically, a Marine that went through the equivalent of a dozen Fallujah’s would be at a 10% risk of being killed.

Considered as occupations, US serviceman in Iraq and US President differ in a crucial way: the President’s uniqueness. A substantial portion of the military personnel are not regularly exposed to the same level of risk as troops venturing into enemy-held areas; and, even for the soldiers most at risk, an individual soldier is just one in the crowd, and chance will play a major role in whether he or someone next to him or fifty miles away from him is the one that dies from an IED explosion or sniper’s bullet, while the President is unique and a target himself just by virtue of his office. Other wars have of course had much higher military fatality rates, and future ones may as well, but the fact remains that the Commander-in-Chief is, by reasonable estimates, at substantially greater risk of being killed than the average serviceman or servicewoman in Iraq, though the risk to the President at any given time is even more invisible and unknowable.

Finally, let’s consider astronauts. Being an astronaut is not a safe job, as we have seen in spectacular fashion a couple of times. So far the career fatality rate has been something under 4%, in the sense that about that percentage of space travelers have died. Some have made multiple trips into space (when the danger peaks, of course) and all have had to train for years before the first flight, but this number can serve as a rough estimate of the likelihood of dying on the job in a career that is measured in a relatively few years, which makes it a good comparison with that dream job I mentioned in the first paragraph. On average, the danger is comparable to serving in Iraq, and it is much safer to be an astronaut than a President. The difference is that the period of greatest risk is obvious for the astronaut, while the secret actions of a Lee Harvey Oswald remain hidden until the final bloody deed itself.

Of course, the assassination probabilities I’ve been using are subject to the objection that it is really impossible to judge the relative dangers for different eras in terms of the overall threat, the level of security, and the likelihood of surviving a gunshot wound. Reagan survived being shot. Would Garfield and McKinley have survived if they had had the same level of medical care? Perhaps one or both would have. But we are dealing with a small sample size, and a slight deviation in the path of the bullet that punctured Reagan’s lung could have proved fatal also.

What if we start counting with George Washington instead of Lincoln? That reduces the assassination rate for Presidents to just under 10%. Looking at only the last fifty years, also gives a fatality rate of 10%. These numbers, though below 15%, still show the Presidency to be a lot more dangerous than all of the other professions we’ve considered, military service in Iraq included.

The constant historical background is that there will always be a certain number of mentally unbalanced people that will contemplate killing the President, whoever he or she may be, and some will eventually act on their obsessions with some possibility of success in our open society. And from time to time an individual or small group will also seek to rise out of their obscurity by performing a mighty deed, supposedly in the service of a noble cause they identify with (Secession, Anarchy, Defense of Cuba, whatever). War and Peace readers, think of Pierre, “L’russe Besuhof.”

What’s new in our times is an organized movement, rooted in religious fanaticism, that glorifies martyrdom in the service of killing. This fact alone, without the prior US history of assassinations, would be enough to make us anxious, especially when we think of the recent killing of Benazar Bhutto. Given the number of attempts by the “usual suspects” on the lives of Presidents and Presidential candidates since the Kennedy assassination, it seems clear that our Presidents, and we as a nation, have been lucky that there has not been a Presidential assassination in over forty-five years.

Of course, security measures have been increased. You can’t drive by or fly over the White House anymore, for example. But, at the risk of sounding overly fatalistic, I’ll guess that the country will have to deal with a Presidential assassination again sometime within the lifetime of most of us.

It’s like the big earthquake that we know is going to hit California or the asteroid that’s going to slam into the Earth one of these centuries unless we’ve figured out how to deflect it by the time it comes. I think it’s more likely that we’ll be able to deflect an asteroid than foil every assassination attempt. All we can do is hope that a combination of enhanced security, dumb luck, or providential protection continues to keep our Presidents safe; and, if we are in a crowd near a President, be alert and ready to wrest the gun from a would-be killer, as others have done in the past.

Retired astronaut Rick Hauck candidly said in 2003, after the second Space Shuttle disaster, that if he had known how high the fatality risk of space flight was, he probably wouldn’t have chosen to be an astronaut. I wonder if the presidential aspirants actually do the calculations? Michelle Obama has reportedly voiced concern for her husband’s safety, supposing there to be an increased danger due the special historical circumstances of his candidacy, but all candidates and their spouses must take the danger into account. Some may feel they are the darlings of fortune—the temptation to think that would certainly be great for anyone close to becoming President—and never give it much thought, but it must still have some place in the back of their minds.

I wonder if thoughts of assassination haven’t influenced the decisions of reflective men like Mario Cuomo, who decided not to seek the Presidency that so many thought could be his. This is mere speculation and would not be a judgment against anyone of whom I knew it to be true. To run for President, one would have to decide whether one could live and function well with the knowledge that, not only might each day be one’s last, which we are all theoretically aware of, but that the end might be due to murder, which is much less likely for those of us who are not Presidents.

Without overlooking their sometimes grievous faults or the degree to which blind ambition may motivate them, let us give those who serve as President some gratitude and respect for the courage they show in seeking and holding the office, as we also pray for each President’s safety.

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Some Thank Yous and More on Ronnie Knox

April 7th, 2008

I started this blog February 27, 2008. I’ve actually had more people drop by or stumble in than I expected, and I’d like to say thank you to a few folks, as well as adding a little more information on Ronnie Knox, the Proust-reading football player I talked about in the previous post for April 1.

The first email I got (via the link near the top right) was from Jamie, who had come across The Perfect Italian Woman after it had triggered a Google alert she’d set up for any web pages relevant to a book she was writing on French women. She enjoyed the piece and was generous in her compliments. Thank you, Jamie, for the encouragement.

That was just one example of the funny ways people can end up here. The story of my unusual free-lance physics job Why Gamble? Hire a Physicist lured people that had made Google searches on “Lawrence Berkeley Lab salary negotiation,” “physicists for hire,” and “postdoc scientist.” I don’t know Valtrex how long they stuck around since I suspect they had something more practical in mind, but it’s interesting to see the unexpected directions people are coming from.

The biggest spikes in visitors to the blog occurred after I posted the long accounts of my troubles installing Windows Vista on my MacBook Pro using Apple’s Boot Camp. Most of the traffic was due to the MacSurfer’s Headline News site’s having linked to the posts. It’s nice to be able to measure traffic in the hundreds instead of in single or double digits. I still get people coming by every day to check those computer-related posts out, which is not too surprising since I dealt with a number of issues that can come up when you’re installing Vista on a Mac.

I am grateful to two Proust-related bloggers that have made less ephemeral links to the Ronnie Knox, Marcel Proust, and I post along with appreciative comments. These are Antonia of The Laws of Night and Honey and Judy of Reading Proust in Foxborough. I’ve also had an enjoyable email exchange with John of the blog Thinking It Through.

Now to more on Ronnie Knox. I found some Google excerpts from a book published in 2003 called Beyond the Xs and Os: My Thirty Years in the NFL, an as-told-to book by the pro football coach, Jim Hanifan, who had been a teammate of Ronnie’s at UC Berkeley. Jim was a junior when Ronnie was a freshman. About Ronnie’s ability he has this to say:

Ronnie was a superbly talented football player. If his old man had not fouled him up, everyone in the country, even today, would know who Ronnie Knox was. That’s how good a player he was and could have been.

Hanifan fills in some painful details of the way Ronnie’s stepfather caused problems Cytotec with every coach Ronnie had. I’ll just move on to later in the narrative, which finds Ronnie starring at football in Toronto and, according to Hanifan, also starring on a weekly television show. He provides a new slant on Ronnie’s decision to quit football.

Without any warning Ronnie just walked off the field one day and quit football. He had gotten serious with a young lady, and the two of them took off and went to Mexico.

Then, after telling of his regret at having years later missed a phone call from Ronnie, who never called back, Hanifan continues.

I heard he ended up living in Los Angeles and was homeless when he died a few years ago. I thought the world of him, and it hurts to see him gone.

I’d like to think that Hanifan might have just heard a false rumor of Ronnie’s death, but this sounds pretty definitive. I’m glad to hear how highly Hanifan thought of Ronnie, but it somehow makes me all the sadder. I’d still like to see an obituary or something just to be sure he’s really dead and possibly to fill in a little more of his last forty years. A strangely tragic https://sheridanbenefits.com/clonazepam-klonopin-for-anxiety/ figure, that Ronnie Knox.

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Ronnie Knox, Marcel Proust, and I

April 1st, 2008

Marcel Proust was not a household name in the household I grew up in; I don’t know about yours. Can you remember the first time you ever heard Marcel Proust’s name? Unless the preceding sentence was it, probably not I’d guess. I can remember perfectly, and with the help of the amazing power of the worldwide web and Google, I can put an approximate date on it. This was actually an important event in my life. But first a little ambien zolpidem online background.

Back in the 1950s there was a young football player in California, an outstanding passer who could also run and punt, named Ronnie Knox. Ronnie was California high school athlete-of-the-year for 1952-53, and had become one of the most sought-after players by college recruiters in the whole country. Ronnie was also good-looking, and was nicknamed “Golden Boy.” His overbearing stepfather, Harvey Knox, had moved him from high school to high school searching for the right coach to best showcase Ronnie’s talents. Then Harvey, acting in effect as Ronnie’s agent, had basically sold his services to the highest bidder, the University of California at Berkeley. The problem turned out to be that Cal already had one of the best quarterbacks in the country, and he had another year of eligibility.

Unwilling to see his son playing second string to anybody, even for a year, Harvey Knox pulled Ronnie out of Cal and took him south to UCLA, even though it meant losing a year of college playing eligibility. Harvey also got Cal in trouble with the NCAA by revealing some of the incentives that had been promised Ronnie in violation of the rules. It was at this time that I first heard about Ronnie because the story made it into national magazines.

California glowed with Hollywood glamour compared to my home state of Texas, and I took an interest in this West Coast story. I was twelve at the time and very open to finding new sports heroes. Mickey Mantle was my number one hero, and he would never be equaled by anyone else in my eyes, but I didn’t have a college football hero, so I think I mentally filed Ronnie away as a candidate for that position. In any case, Ronnie’s name stuck in my memory; but, as he had a year without playing, and I was in Texas and not going to get out-of-state football news unless it made it into a national magazine, I pretty much forgot about him, although his name would pop up every now and then. Ronnie took over the starting tailback job in the first game of the 1955 season for the UCLA team, which completed the season ranked fourth in the country. He played well in his team’s last-seconds loss in the Rose Bowl on January 2, 1956, which I may have seen on television, though I don’t remember it.

In an unusual move for the time, Ronnie decided to turn pro without playing his senior year at UCLA. He signed with the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League and played the 1956 season with them. He was drafted in the third round for the next year by the Chicago Bears, but only appeared in one game for them, whether due to an injury, or just being in a backup role, I don’t know. In any case, he went back to Canada to play for the Toronto Argonauts the following season. It was after that return to Canada that I became aware of Marcel Proust through the unlikely medium of a pro football quarterback’s words.

In the online archives of Sports Illustrated, one finds that the November 3, 1958 issue had as the second entry in its They Said It feature the following:

Quarterback Ronnie Knox of the Toronto Argonauts, an I-like-football-but man: “If I had to make the choice between a month of playing football and a month of reading Marcel Proust, I’d take Proust.”

I’m almost sure I saw the quote in some other magazine as well, with a phrase that described Proust in some inadequate way (but definitely mentioning he was French and probably that he had written a long work called Remembrance of Things Past) for those sports fans like me, who didn’t have a clue who Proust was.

To me, it was an altogether extraordinary statement. First of all, how could a gifted football player rather do anything more than play football? As a non-athletic teenaged sports fan who could only dream of being that skilled and successful at a sport, I tried to imagine what an exquisite pleasure the reading of this unknown-to-me Marcel Proust must be, at the same time thinking what a remarkable person Ronnie Knox must be to have the sensibility to appreciate this rare talent to such a degree. Now sixteen, alienated from fifties Texas culture and society, a reader myself, and vaguely attracted by the beatniks, I found Ronnie Knox, already a somewhat legendary figure, and Marcel Proust, this new intriguing writer, each causing the other to seem more exceptional in my mind.

Though I have no reason to doubt him—and it’s really just the difficulty I have in imagining any other pro quarterbacks I can think of as being that devoted to Proust that makes me say this—I don’t know for a fact that Ronnie actually ever read Proust. It could have just been an impressive name he’d picked up somewhere in college, but that thought never arose in my mind at the time, even to be rejected. All I had to go on were the words on a page. He’d rather read Proust than play football! Someday I too would read Proust, I thought, and then I will become one of the initiates and understand. I had no idea what Proust had written about, which was probably just as well. I very likely pronounced Proust as Prowst in my mind.

From that day on the mystique of the name Proust never faded for me, but I didn’t actually read any Proust until I was a junior at the University of Texas in a European Novel course. The sheer length of Proust’s one work of lasting importance was intimidating, and I thought I should read it straight through. I’d heard a professor recommend it as a summer project. When Ronnie talked about a month of reading Proust he wasn’t talking about rereading the same pages over and over. I may also have wondered if I would pass the Ronnie Knox test of Proust appreciation.

My English professor took an unusual approach. Proust’s long work had been published in separate volumes over time, so there was some slight justification for viewing it as a collection of several novels instead of one long one. The professor had us start toward the end with the sixth book in the series, called ridiculously in the translation we were reading The Sweet Cheat Gone (French title: Albertine Disparue). His reasoning was that the first volume (Swann’s Way), was not typical of the rest of the book, (presumably because the narrator was largely recalling scenes from his early years and because a good chunk of the volume—the Swann in Love section—was told in the third person, unlike the rest of the work) so that to really get to know what Proust was about we should read a later volume.

In practice this decision meant that we were thrown into the middle of a strange situation with numerous unknown characters whose personalities, sexual tastes, and foibles had been revealed and developed over the course of the earlier volumes; not to mention the narrator’s frequent references to earlier events, thoughts, and experiences from those volumes. I can’t remember exactly what I thought of the experience, and about all I can recall from class discussions of the book was the professor’s point that the narrator’s female love interests (e.g., Gilberte and Albertine) had all been given names which were the feminine forms of masculine ones, since Proust’s actual experience was with men. I emerged from this first sampling of Proust as committed to reading the whole work as ever, and with a better idea about what that meant.

It was not, however, until some eight or nine years later that I recommenced reading Proust. It was in Berkeley at a turning point in my life, marriage ending, when I felt the need to renew my acquaintance with great literature, which I sensed I had nearly lost touch with, having xanax spent so much time on physics graduate studies and research and on political meetings and demonstrations. This Proust was still in English translation. I can’t remember if I skipped the previously read volume or reread it, but I did finish all of Remembrance of Things Past, which is what the translator Scott Moncrieff chose to call Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I not only enjoyed the reading but had my approach to the world changed by it. I may want to talk about Proust more some other time, but that’s not my purpose now.

My aim had always been to read Proust eventually in the original French, and I had started learning French during my last year at the University of Texas, but hadn’t advanced very far until I started studying it in earnest about the same time that I took up Proust in translation again. A few years later, back in Austin, I felt ready to attempt A la recherche du temps perdu in Proust’s own language. Of course it was slow at first, but in time I found that I could read pages-long sentences without getting lost, which is a testament to Proust’s writing, of course, and also to its ability to train the reader’s mind to start thinking like Proust (or to have that wonderful illusion). After I don’t know how many months, I finished the full journey en français. A couple of years later I bought a beautiful three-volume French Pleiade edition as a treasure to keep and as a promise to myself to read Proust again someday.

One day not long ago, well over twenty years after that book purchase, and with no particular thought at all, I picked up the first volume of the Pleiade edition, started reading “Longtemps je me suis coucher de bonne heure,” and was swept into Proust’s river again. I’m a little over halfway through the second volume now, and, if anything, enjoying it more than during the earlier readings. But that is impossible to judge with the greatest writers, the unique power of their art being impossible to remember fully when it’s not being actually experienced. This is something Proust himself notes, as I recall.

Only in the course of writing this have I come to realize how obviously, thoroughly, and appropriately “Proustian” this whole experience of mine with the name Marcel Proust was. For the narrator in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu recounts numerous examples of words and names that took on enormous importance and aesthetic meaning for him just from his having heard or read them in some prestigious or romantic context—La duchesse de Guermantes and Balbec, for example—names that he had endowed in his mind with incomparable and exquisite qualities before having made a real acquaintance with the persons or places they denoted.

Just to finish with Ronnie Knox—he decided to quit football for good during his second season of playing for Toronto. The Time magazine online archive for September 26, 1959 records the following.

Badgered by a bad back, and no longer able to throw the long ball, cleft-chinned, curly-haired Quarterback Ronnie (“Golden Boy”) Knox, 24, quit the Toronto Argonauts in Canada’s rugged Big Four, thereby put an end to one of football’s most unfulfilled and peripatetic careers (three high schools, two colleges, four pro teams), which had largely been botched by the boisterous stage-mothering of stepfather Harvey Knox. “Football is a game for animals,” said Ronnie. “I like to think I’m above that.” Dreaming of higher things, Ronnie allowed he might toss off a novel or some poetry, already had some lines at hand that lurched with the proper beatnik beat:

Beauty is a thing of Ragmud But the maid left late. So don’t look under the apple tree Let’s rebel, man.

Who knows what kind of personal conflicts and disappointments may have lain behind that severe rejection of his profession? Or maybe the physical cost was just too great. I vaguely remember hearing that he tried acting for a while, which some web site listings confirm, but I never saw him in anything that I can remember. All I could find on the web were appearances in a handful of episodes of weekly tv dramas (e.g. an episode of Perry Mason), all from the 1958-1963 period. An astrology web site had his (to them) essential data plus a tiny picture of him taken some time after his playing days, in which he did not look happy. I’m not surprised he didn’t make it as a poet, but I don’t know what became of him. There’s also a movie/tv technician of the same name that shows up in online searches. Could it be the same person? If anyone knows, drop me an email.

So would I have read Proust at all without Ronnie Knox? Well, I read James Joyce (haven’t gotten all the way through Finnegan’s Wake, I confess), to mention someone comparable in some ways—writer of genius from roughly the same time period, but not exactly popular—so I can conjecture that I probably would have, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps literature, despite my having enjoyed reading as far back as I can remember, would not have secured such an important place in my mind without that adolescent connection between Proust and an unconventional star athlete.

Ronnie, old man, a lot of years have passed, and I hope the time has been good to you and that you have had a chance to read Proust as much as you wanted to. If you should somehow stumble across this, please know that I am grateful to https://www.maulanakarenga.org/ativan-lorazepam-online/ you.

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