Forbes Field

 Forbes Field after Forbes Field was gone

This is a usual morning. We eat our spare breakfast, toast and coffee; and Roz, having gotten up early to shower, wash and dry her hair, and dress for work, leaves for the day. I won’t see her again until supper time.

      I take the half cup of coffee I haven’t drunk and the half cup left in the pot and pour them over ice, a generous splash of half-and-half, and another teaspoon of sugar into a tall glass - iced coffee. I counteract the effects of the caffeine with a valium. I police the kitchen: scrape our dishes, rinse out the coffee cups, and put them into the dishwasher; I wipe down the table and the counter.

     That’s all the order I have to my morning though I am encouraged to keep all things in order. But what does “things” mean? It’s hard to know: So many expressions intended to be helpful are only vague.

     I try to read. I read the newspaper, I read Nathanael West, and I read and re-read Tristram Shandy and the first sixteen pages of Finnegan’s Wake. I try to write and make only these largely vacuous letters to the ether. At the same time, I am supposed to be staying in the here and now - another piece of good, vague advice. What does it mean? Don’t tumble into the past; don’t stumble into the future; don’t bumble into the mist that surrounds and seems both to shroud and to point the way into madness.

Ken Tekulve pitching to no one :
Forbes Field in the fog under the lights and out of time.

     But all is mist, as the Preacher says: “Mist of mist, all is mist.” You cannot see it and you cannot see through it. And the air is full of its tiny droplets, none the same, each with its own distinctive smell: If you could distinguish the smell, you’d know where that prick of damp came from, the past or future, here or there - whether it blew down from Ohio or up from Georgia; but you can’t distinguish. Soon though you can’t read or write either; in the damp, the pages begin to curl at the corners, then they curl at the edges, finally, the letters begin to sprawl and blur. (It doesn’t matter if you’re reading and writing on paper, or if you’re scanning and typing on a screen.)

Before lunch I am drenched. For lunch, I have a dish of cereal. Sometimes there are bananas or blueberries. Sometimes, in these afternoons of late summer / early fall, there are baseball games on TV.

09.10.19