Conference on the Mound

I look into the dugout and I see Skip, his face redder than usual, with his hands on the back of his head. It’s the signal to stall. Olzewski needs more time to warm up in the bullpen. I take off my catcher’s mask, spit, and ask Burley, whose umpiring behind the plate, for “time”.
“OK,” he says but hurry it up. I’ve got a hot date waiting for me tonight.”
“The only hot thing you’ll have tonight is a bath,” I say.
I stick my mask under my arm and walk as slowly as I can to the center of the diamond. Spots is standing just on the outer rim of the mound, rubbing the hell out of the ball and looking toward center field. The crowd has grown suddenly quiet, as if 55,000 TV’s have been shut off at once. The only sound you can hear is from the vendors shouting “beer here”.
“And to what do I owe this great honor?” Spots says in a false brogue when I finally reach him.
“You looked a little lonely out there so I decided to visit.”
“That fuck, Gomez, really hit the hell out of the ball,” Spots says, still looking out to center field, probably trying to see exactly where his last pitch landed.
“Yeah, he did. Maybe that’s why he makes ten million dollars a year while we get a buck and a half.”
“My curve ball didn’t break.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
Spots is what you call a journeyman pitcher. He’s been in the majors on and off for about fifteen years, pitching at one time or another for twelve different teams. He’s thirty-nine years old now and long on experience but a little short on ability. He never had much of a fast ball, but his curve ball, which is his out pitch, seems to have deserted him. The club, desperate for a lefty, short-reliever, called him back up from the minors a couple of weeks ago.
“Shit, I wish I could have that pitch back,” Spots says, kicking some dirt with his spikes.
“Yeah, don’t we all,” I say.
Spots got that nickname because of his great control and his ability to throw to certain spots. His real name—no I’m not kidding-is Elbert. Sometimes I call him that just to bug him. We go back a ways-I played with him on the White Sox ten years ago when I came up as a rookie.
Spots picks up a resin bag, dusts his hands and throws it down. “This may be it,” he whispers.
“What?”
“I don’t want to go back to the minors. My ass is flatter than a McDonalds hamburger from riding all those fucking buses. I’m thinking of hanging it up.”
“So you made one bad pitch. You’re not the first. There’s you and Clemens and---“
“Yeah, but they only do it once in a while.”
No ballplayer likes to admit that his body is failing him and it’s a time all of us fear. I look at Spots more closely and I notice that his pot has gotten bigger. He always was on the heavy side, but it looks like he may be into the sauce again. That’s always been his problem. His wife finally left him about three years ago—too much booze, too much time away from the family and too much playing around.
“Somebody told me about a new steak house. Why don’t we try it after the game? We can talk about old times. I’m buying.”
“Uh, I don’t know. Maybe…” Spots says.
I see Skip leaving the dugout. Burley meets him as he trots out on the field. Skip raises his right hand and slaps the wrist twice with two fingers from his left hand, signaling that he wants Olzewski. Spots and I watch Skip as he gets to the pitcher’s rubber. The sweet smell of Juicy Fruit hits my nose. Skip must have stuck a fresh stick in his mouth and judging from the bulge in his cheek this is probably his fourth piece. He has an addiction to the gum that he developed a few years back when the league banned chewing tobacco. The more sticks, the more tense he is. It’s no secret that he’s walking on banana peels and may lose his job at the end of the season.
Skip doesn’t say anything. He puts out his hand and Spots hands him the ball. Skip then gives him the customary whack on the butt.
Spots adjusts his cap and begins the million mile trek to the bench. He walks as if in a funeral procession—his steps measured, his head down. He alternates at tugging at his cap and pounding his glove. He reaches the foul lines and does a graceful jig to avoid touching the chalk. He goes down the dugout steps to the accompaniment of scattered boos and shouts of “hot dogs, get your hot dogs”, throws his glove against the wall and disappears into the clubhouse.

"Are you sure you want me to take you to Minsky's Burlesque for your 16th birthday? My sister Goldie, ten years older than I, asked me a second time.
"You said you would take me to any show I picked and I've heard so much about Minsky's and still don't understand what it about. But, I know many of our leading comedians and vaudeville performers got their start in burlesque, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante are two I can think of now."
I dressed carefully, feeling very grown-up in my first pair of high-heeled pumps. I craned my neck to make sure the seams on my silk stocking were straight. I settled the black Empress Eugenie felt hat at an angle on my head, its black feather curling back on one side. I adjusted the little half veil over my eyes, pulled on a pair of gloves and my new black chesterfield coat with velvet lapels and felt a thrill of anticipation.
Goldie and her boy friend, Joe Callon, met me at Penn Station. We took a cab to Minsky's and stood in line with Joe who bought the tickets. I noticed there were many more men in line than women.
We entered the theater and an usher showed us to our seats. The red velvet curtain hid the stage from view, the lights were on, and a five musicians tuned their insruments in the orchestra pit in front of the stage. By curtain time, the theater was full. The house lights dimmed, the orchestra played a lively tune and the red velvet curtains parted revealing a park bench and a street lamp.
Placards at both sides of the stage proclained "Dunstan and Murphy." Two men strode on stage, one wore very baggy pants, had a prominent red nose and twirled a cane. The other, dressed like a business man walked to the bench and sat down. I really didn't understand the point of some of their lines, but the men in the audience laughed uproarously.
Next, a young woman, wearing a long sequinned evenig gown, elbow length gloves and a feather boa, strutted on stage in time to a syncopated beat. She sang in a tiny voice while slowly peeling off first one glove and then the other, until she finally discarded the feather boa and danced off-stage.
Next, a female singer. Again, I didn't think the song hilarious but the men did. She exited to vigous applause.
The next act used the park bench again but this act included a policeman walking his beat and twirling a nightstick. The man in baggy pants walked on stage and threw a crumpled cigaret package on the ground. The policeman arrested him for littering. The next scene showed the man in jail, a friend is visiting him and advising him to get a lawyer and fight the charge. Six weeks later, we see the man get out of jail, he has spent all his savings to pay the lawyer and the fine. In disgust, he clears his throat and spits on the ground. The policeman appears and arrests him again. His friend says, "Don't worry, I'll get your lawyer, we'll fight this." The other man pleads with him just to pay the fine. The red curtain closed and the house lights came on. Men carry large trays of candy and soft drinks went up and down the aisles during the intermission.
Livelier action after the intermission. The girl in the evening gown came out and sang another song, and pulled the evening gown off. She now wore little pasties on her breasgts and a g-string with a tassled, sparkling drape hanging down between her legs. She twirled and turned her back to the audience, swiveling her hips and pushing them forward and b back. She shimmied almost to the floor, and up again. As she got behind the curtain, she waved the g-string at the audience which again applauded vigorously.
The curtains closed, the house lights came on, the show ended.
"Well, sis," Goldie said, "What do you think of Minsky's Burlesque now."
I don't understand what all the fuss and publicity is about," I suppressed a yawn.
"The evening is still young, let's go have a steak dinner," Joe suggested. I drank a glass of burgandy wine with my dinner. It made me sleepy.

My Fingers Remembered by Cecile Betts
"What are you making, Mom?" my twelve year old daughter asked as she leaned over my shoulder to see what I held in my hands.
"I'm putting a picot edge around this baby afghan I just crocheted for my newest great nephew. I learned to crochet when I was only four years old." I finished the last stitch, tied it off and cut the yarn.
"Who taught you to crochet when you were so young, and what did you make?"
"My oldest sister, your Aunt Anna taught me to crochet after she married and me and Matty, Goldy, Dolly and my papa all went to live with her, her husband and his three children."
"Ten people, you must have had a big house."
"No, actually, it was not large, but the children slept 3 to a bed, and we put beds everywhere, even in the unfinished attic."
"But, you haven't told me what you made."
"Anna became pregnant immediately and prepared for her first child. She bought a wicker bassinet from Lord & Taylor and lined it with silk and draped lace around it. She bought a complete layette, little shirts, bellyband, and about 20 dozen birdseye cloth daipers."
"What's birdseye cloth?"
"People used flannel, gauze or birdseye squares for diapers, disposable diapers were not available as they are today. Birdseye cloth is a soft, cotton cloth used mainly for diapers then. And Anna put a hand crocheted lace edge around the diapers. That is what I learned to crochet more than thirty-five years ago."
I stood up, put the yarn and crochet hook away and found a cardboard box in which I placed the afghan. I wrapped the box in brown paper, tied it securely with string and put it aside.
"Will you teach me to crochet?"
"No, because I never learned to hold the yarn and crochet hook correctly, I am very awkward and slow. I'd rather have you go to a yarn shop and learn the correct way."
"Yes," my daughter repleid,"I'd like to make a crocheted sweater. I saw a beautiful one in the window of Northern Commercial."

MY LIFE SAVING PAIN by Cecile Betts

The day before Thanksgiving 2006 I sat in the lounge of the Florence Sylvester Senior Center in Laguna Hills after participating in a Balance and Mobility Class sponsored by the Emeritus Institute of Saddleback College. At 11:45 a lunch would be served. Suddenly I felt a sharp piercing pain in my right upper chest area. I’d never experienced that pain in that spot before. I thought maybe it is heart related. I put a nitro tablet under my tongue, felt the expected headache and waited for the pain in my chest to subside. It persisted. I placed a second nitroglycerin tablet under my tongue fifteen minutes later but the pain persisted. I walked back to the nurse’s office and told her about it.
“You can call 9-1-1 and go to the emergency room,” she advised.
“I don’t think it is severe enough to do that,” I answered.
I stayed for the nice lunch, and then returned home on the community bus. The pain persisted all afternoon, very sharp, very localized. Finally, at 6:30 that evening, I thought it might be a good idea after all to go to the emergency room. I have several cardiac problems including arrhythmias, ventricular tachycardia, leaky valves, right bundle branch block and have had by-pass surgery and a pacemaker. The paramedics arrived promptly, checked my vital signs, listened to my recital of the symptoms and I was placed on a gurney and wheeled out to the ambulance.
Ordinarily, from where I live, I would have been taken to Saddleback Hospital Emergency Room, but by a fortuitous coincidence the Saddleback Hospital Emergency was not accepting more patients and I asked the crew to take me to Mission Hospital. Records of my by-pass surgery, colenectomy and several episodes of hospitalization and various tests were on file there. On the way there, the paramedics received an order to give me a shot of morphine. I felt no pain when they deposited me in the Emergency Room.
“Please call my daughter and tell her where I am,” I asked the first nurse who checked my vital signs and then drew blood for various tests. Six hours later, after the x-rays of my chest and various other tests, they admitted me to the hospital.
On Thanksgiving Day, Dr. Qua, the house physician, walked into my room, introduced himself and announced, “We think you have lung cancer, we can confirm the diagnosis with a needle biopsy, but cannot do it today because they gave you coumadin in the Emergency Room last night.”
My first thought, this can’t be true, I’ve had colon cancer more than thirteen years ago, I was cured.” And next I thought, I couldn’t call my daughter and tell her I have lung cancer, not with all the problems she and her husband contend with. “Dr. Qua, would you please call my daughter and tell her about this.” Dr. Qua assured me he would do that. I never saw him again.
My next thought, I would refuse chemotherapy, I’d seen the way it destroyed the quality of life, and it only prolonged the dying. I also thought I have enough sleeping pills and other pills to take to put an end to this. But, then I knew I could not burden my daughter by committing suicide.
Later that afternoon, a lung specialist, Dr. Marquez, who would do the needle biopsy the next day, stopped to see me. I said, “I will refuse chemotherapy.”
“Slow down,” he said, “in your case chemotherapy is not even an option.”
The next day, I waited outside the surgery on a gurney, waiting to be wheeled into the surgery for the needle biopsy done along with a CAT scan so the doctor could guide the hollow needle accurately. I was conscious during the procedure since it only required local anesthesia.
Later that afternoon, Dr. Marquez appeared again, “It is malignant, Stage II,” he announced to my daughter and me. “What happens if I do nothing?” I asked.
“You will lose a lot of weight, the cancer will grow, and you probably will die within six months.” In a state of shock at this news, I spent another night in the hospital.
The next day, my daughter came with her van and took me home.
“Mom,” she said, “I looked up lung cancer on the Internet, I know you don’t want radiation but there is another option, surgery. The cancer is in the upper right lobe of the lung and is about the size of a half dollar. I think you should see an oncologist, and we need to find a good surgeon. You also need to have some more tests done by Dr. Marquez.”
I heard what she said, but it did not really register. I’d accepted the fact I would die within six months. I did not fear death, but I feared the manner of my death. I began to give my few valuable possessions away.
We found an oncologist, Dr. Howard Cheng, highly recommended, Dr. Marquez, the lung specialist and found Dr. G. Chino, a thoracic surgeon. But we could not get an appointment with Dr. Chino until the third week in January. However, we proceeded to have PET scan, other blood work, x-rays, blood tests, and lung capacity tests. All results were sent to Dr. Chino’s office. Meanwhile, my daughter and I discussed the odds and chances of my surviving surgery with Dr. Cheng and Dr. Marquez. I checked with my cardiologist also. Of course, if I did not have the surgery, death was sure, but there was a chance I might survive.
Finally, I saw Dr. Chino. By this time, in addition to a complete family medical history, he had a thick file containing all the test results. He told me, as Dr. Marquez and Dr. Cheng had both told me, that despite my age, nearly 90, despite my medical history and history of smoking for forty-five years, I had a 75 percent chance of surviving the surgery since the x-rays showed “clean edges.” Not sure exactly what that meant, I left the office in much better spirits than I’d known for the past two months. If I didn’t survive the surgery, if I died during the surgery, well, that was not a bad way to go. I’d know nothing about it.
That same afternoon, a call from Dr. Chino’s office said, “We can schedule surgery for one week from today, if you wish.” I replied, “Okay, one week from today.”
Another trip to Mission Hospital to complete the preadmission paperwork and tests. I would report to the Hospital by 5: the next morning. That evening, at about 8, a nurse called and said she had some questions the hospital wished me to answer. She asked the same questions I’d already answered. I protested, “But you have all that information in the computer.”
“Yes, they want me to confirm that it is correct,” she replied. “There is just one more question, are you anxious or depressed?”
I exploded, “You’ve got to be kidding. I have lung cancer, I have cardiac problems, and tomorrow a surgeon will cut and remove the upper right lobe of my lung. I might not survive the surgery. My daughter has a debilitating, incurable, terminal disease, my son-in-law is on dialysis, my son barely earns enough to live on, and you are asking me if I am depressed or anxious. Of course, I’m depressed and anxious.”
The nurse apologized, “I’m so sorry, my supervisor gave me this list of questions, I guess they didn’t really think about how the patient would feel.”
The last thing I remember about the next day, I lay on a gurney outside the surgery. I came back to consciousness in the intensive care unit. Conscious meant excruciating, unbearable pain. They ask the patient to rate the pain on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the most extreme pain the patient has ever experienced. I would rate that post surgical pain at 100. And I thought nothing could be more painful until the surgeon came in and yanked the two drain tubes from my back. I screeched.
“We’ll have you walking tomorrow,” he announced cheerfully.
I looked at him, I could not get out of bed without assistance, I could not bear the pain of movement, “You’re crazy,” I said. The doctor looked surprised, “No one ever said that to me before,” he remarked mildly. I did not walk the next day; it was the third day after surgery.
After a week in the hospital, I transferred to a skilled nursing facility, which had an excellent physical and occupational therapy program. Most of the time, I could not eat the food, I’d ask for a nutritional drink instead.
Before I scheduled the surgery, I’d arranged for my cousin Mary to come from Georgia to help me at home for two weeks. And for my niece who lived in Florida to come and stay for a week when Mary left. I left the skilled nursing facility as soon as I could get in and out of bed, dress, shower, and get to and from the bathroom by myself.
Three weeks later, I returned home.
My goal, I wanted to resume my volunteer teaching at the Braille Institute, participate in the Writing Class and play Scrabble at the Club by the beginning of May.
I did achieve these goals. I still see my three stooges, the surgeon, oncologist and lung specialist, have frequent x-rays of my lungs, rest more than I did before, but I have my life back.
The strange thing is that neither have nor I never before nor have I ever since, experienced that sharp pain in the upper right chest, which impelled me to go to the Emergency Room. If not for that pain, I would not have gone to the Emergency Room; I probably would not have consulted a doctor until months later when it would have been too late for surgery or survival..
I feel I experienced Divine Intervention. How else would you explain it?

Assignment Character

The first time I saw him, he stood behind the bar in King Mountain Lodge at Mile 77 of the Glenn Highway. His jet black hair sported a little wave where he combed it back from his forehead. His eyes were a bright blue, his complexion ruddy and his nose straight and well proportioned. His high cheekbones hinted at an Indian ancestor. Six foot one, he had a forty-two inch chest and a beer belly which thickened his waist. He wore a white shirt, grey pants with a starched apron tied around his waist. He mixed alcoholic drinks, getting beer or soda from the cooler, and displayed a few slight of hand tricks. He laughed and joked with his customers.
I’d stopped at the Lodge on my way to my property at Index Lake because my two children wanted some soda and French fries to tide them over for the next two hours before I could prepare supper.
I saw him often that summer. I drove to Index Lake every weekend . I did not see him that winter but read in the paper his wife died.
The next summer, I again made a weekly trip to Index Lake, beginning in June just after the ice on the lake melted.
In July, he asked if he could call me when he came to Anchorae to buy supplies from the wholesalers there. I gave him my phone number. I was a divorcee but had not yet started dating, didn’t have time for it because I worked full time and went to stenotype school at night so I would be able to get a better paying job.
The next week he called me and asked me out for dinner. My thirteen year old daughter’s best friend had come to have dinner with us.
“You will have to take my daughter, Martha, and her best friend with us,” I told him.
“That’s okay,” he said.
After that first date, he called me every time he came to Anchorage and once in a while I invited him to have dinner with us.
He invited my 15 year old son, Donald to spend a week with him at the Lodge during the hunting season before Donald left to go to a military school in California. He urged me to come and visit him at the Lodge during the winter. He built a private ice skating rink for Martha.
When I knew him better, I realized he was basically shy if not behind the bar. The oldest of eight children of poor southern sharecroppers, he had little formal education because he left school to run the family farm when his father became ill and did not recover his strength after having typhoid fever. He taught himself many skills. He could do carpentry, electrical work, cement work, thread iron pipe, and knew how to use the wrecker to get a car from a deep ravine, seeming to have an inborn knowledge of the law of physics which states every action has a corresponding reaction. He came to Alaska in 1940, seven years earlier than I did. He’d worked in the gold and coal mines and when the war ended, he and his wife Agnes managed Alpine Inn for several years. He also worked at Gakona Lodge before leasing King Mountain Lodge from Ray Grasser.



I married him three years after I’d first seen him.