It Was Twenty Years Ago Today by Billy Shears

Part the Third

Take this, brother, may it serve you well


My mother was of the sky
My father was of the earth
But I am of the universe
-Yer Blues

How many references can I pull off? We will find out.

I’m a-gonna come back to the critical question at some point. I want to go out to an invisible place. I want to sit in a place called the Exchange Field for a moment. We can pause here, I think.

The Exchange Field was where I played my little league baseball. It was the last place I played baseball. It was 1980 and I was eleven maybe twelve years old. This does not have a lot of meaning, but it is a reference point. It was the best year playing ball I had up to that point. I was just becoming good. I remember one practice we had; it was a coach-less practice. I don’t know if anyone ever had one of those, it was the only one I ever had, someone got the gear and we went at it. It was insane, the most unorganized function I had ever been at until I was an adult. The reason I bring this up is two fold. One, I quit playing that year about three quarters of the way through the year. Second, that practice.

I lay down in the grass somewhere in the outfield while the arguments went on and on. I closed my eyes and listened to all of it. I was completely separate from the fuss. I told myself to remember this moment. I wanted to remember it for the rest of my life because it made no sense and yet seemed to answer something. I watched the clouds turn to dusk. I had an overwhelming feeling that life was soon to be altered for me, but I couldn’t fathom the whole thing. It was my last year in my hometown. That was still pretty big. It is one of the defining estimations of my childhood. I did that often. I remember practicing in my backyard sometimes after dinner, as the sun went down and the porch light came on and I was getting called in, I would lay down under the apple tree and stare up at the stars. Those moments are still so real I can feel the cold grass and the change of temperature now. Inside those moments, as I felt when I was listening to music when I was older, I would find the depths of my imagination and dream of the life I was preparing to have.

I had no perception of how it would happen. A friend of mine often complained about a mutual person in our lives; that they lived with this guidebook. It was a book that lacked personality. It was filled with the materiel and nothing of the soul. We learn as children to play act and usually someone comes along and moves the perceptions into actions; not for us. Back in those days, as you probably well know, we dreamed and dreamed of how things were gonna be. I dreamed of baseball. I would out pitch Nolan Ryan. I would out hit Pete Rose. I would out play Brooks Robinson. Well, I never even outdid Moonlight Graham.

It occurs to me, that only one person since those years ever asked me if I still played baseball. My friend’s Grandmother on a visit back to town brought it up because she would watch me everyday play out my scenarios in the backyard. When I quit playing, it was never pursued by anyone that I can recall. The coach pursued it with me once. He was a nice guy, a typical divorced father trying to stay in touch with his kid by coaching his team. He liked me. He even believed in me. I have no idea what I was so pissed about to quit playing baseball forever. Only over the recent years have I played softball. My body is so beaten from physical labor jobs, drinking and smoking that it was embarrassing for me to really try. I could try to get back in shape, but that’s another essay.

I talk about this because I am hoping soon to have children, possibly at least nine boys. I would want my kid to play ball, but I also want to show them how. I’ve coached in the past, I can do it. But, when it’s your own kid, it becomes something personal. Before I stray too far and confound the hell out of you, I can come to my point. The issue I am trying to get to is confidence and passion.

To play baseball, you need both of those things. The hand and eye coordination I believe will be taken care of with that tenacity. For that game, I had passion. I had no confidence until that final year. I learned most of what I learned in the backyard. I would also at times ride my bike with a couple of bats and a bag of baseballs to the Exchange Field and practice by myself for hours. Pitching, hitting and throwing. I developed pretty good skills. But like Mickey in Rocky, I didn’t get no notice or the championship, because I had no manager. O talk to me about that scene!! I believed in what I did. I didn’t think I would break from the habits of my past. I learned this back then. It was reinforced when I quit. As well, the feeling of invisibility of what I had spent almost five years chasing, that no one took to mean anything.

Food for thought, did you know that Fidel Castro tried out for the New York Yankees, or at least a professional American baseball team? Imagine, DiMaggio and Mantle playing along side of him. I would be smoking a Cuban cigar right now I bet. I didn’t quit playing sports. I went on to be a really good football player. I did well because of the type of sport it is. Everyone is playing together on an individual basis. But I always missed playing baseball. Out here in California, I have driven past sandlots that I have seen movies about. I have that feeling overcome me.

Still, I learned a valuable but deferent lesson. That a lot of what I did would go unsupervised, unnoticed and unconcerned. The skill I developed was slipping through the cracks. And that I did. I was told as well that certain positions or lifestyles were out of my reach. When I would reach for something greater, I was told that was for the crème of the crop. I have mentioned this story before, but it was also about twenty years ago when I was signed up for a chemistry class I was taken out of it because the guidance counselor told me I was not going to college and didn’t need the class. I have spent eighteen years in the chemistry field.

I want to point out, what I am examining here. I am looking at a source of something I have felt critical about as well as a supposition that I was changed by an event. I want to prove that it was not that event but a continuation of conditions. I will begin to string these topics together, but it is a broad canvas. The important thing is to be along for the ride.

This passion was not eliminated because I stopped playing baseball, let’s make that clear. That would be asinine to exclaim. It was one moment in a series of moments of stops and starts and failures and items left unresolved. It is something I think everyone can dig because everyone had some type of passion in their youth that got left behind without notice and remains in some lesser fashion. But, that was mostly about confidence and encouragement.

But I am of the universe and you know what its worth

The clamped down version of the passion may be divulged in lyric form. It is where I found my expression. It was where I could look into my imagination again, like lying on the grass when I was a child and falling out of the world. I had it. I didn’t know what to do with it. It was bruised through frustration and etched under the skin by ill spirited individuals. I think that the over all definition of depression is a reversed passion. Anyone I know who has suffered depression has evolved from similar expectations. In one fashion or another, either the bar was too high, too low or when you accomplished the impossible there was no reward.

As Willie Nelson sang in I’d Have To Be Crazy

You'd swear I was loco
to rub for a genie
while burning my hand on the lamp

I’ve given that song away but it has meaning here. We’ve all done it. And why do we get desperate for that magical reward? Because the other instruments in our lives have failed us. They failed to love, trust and reciprocate. Yeah, it’s a bitch, but get over it. I know, I know, yes, yes, but it does not make it easier.

There’s been days when it pleased me
To be on my knees watching ants
As they crawled crossed the ground

Been insane on a train, but I’m still me again
And the place that I hold you is true

I don’t pretend that those quotes are in order. It is just the way it is coming out of my head. But the fundamental loss of confidence fuels the frustrations of inoperable passions. This is a spiral and a helter skelter that one does not just gingerly jump off of.
Might as well, do you or don’t you want me to love you…its all the same and it does not all wash out.

What I am saying is that I did have something more at a time. I had a lot more. Suddenly I was flush with attention. I ran with it the only way I knew how. Which wasn’t the way to do it and again, without any right minded guidance, that perhaps was deliberate. The key there is reaching a market value and having the bubble burst takes training to overcome. This I believe is where the inoperable passion became a functioning glutton. My path then led to a vortex of ideals that was something out of the old gangster movies. Like Bogart’s Duke Mantee and Leslie Howard’s Alan Squier; characters in Petrified Forrest. I carried it out with all the judiciousness of Dostoevsky’s Idiot.

One of my favorite parts in any movie was a Bogart scene in High Sierra. He is caught up in the hills, with the cop’ers all around him. He’s there for the duration, no getting out alive. His girl hears about it on the radio and goes to the stand off. She calls out to him. He gets shot and as he falls or when he lands, I don’t recall, he says “I’m crashing out!” She asks the cop’ers, what does it mean when a man crashes out? Ah, it’s beautiful. (If you need the answer to that question watch the movie). That desperate feeling, when you feel that all is lost. It can be Romantic in a fashion, but hardly a lifestyle. I’m no good at being noble. Always know sometimes think its me.

Sometimes I think it’s embedded. I cannot help but play the rebel without a cause. I have the passion in my mind. I can feel it. I have felt it for a long time. But I end up behind the curtain.

So what about that magical reward? I have called it over the last few years, the Request of Happiness. I have had some complaints that the term is a sort of contradiction. It makes perfect sense to me, but why wouldn’t it? Rather dubious. Do we get a reward for our behavior? Do we at some point have to respond to karmic forces? Do we receive a reward for our contrition or our penance? I have said for many years that I have lucked out of consequence. No doubt paid dearly for some actions. I did however come to some understanding with my guardian angel if you will about some of the due. I am being called to it each and everyday. The challenge and the test that we must endure, the reason and the lessons learned to overcome and achieve something greater than myself. Yes, the magical reward the search for the grail.

How do we break that bond? How do we reach beyond the inoperable passion, frustration and get out into the world and live without devastating what we are comfortable with? Is there an evolution? Is there a grail? Is there a reward? Do we just reach out and stake out and squat out some land and call it our own? Do you risk? Find our duty, change our ways of thinking? Is that all it is? Is it as simple as the title of this third section? Will it open up and be a functioning passion? Will it achieve and be recognized? This is what I must continue to challenge in the essay.