Show and Tell

This photo, Thursday, taken just after 8am, in my car. See the three – it’s show and tell.

Left to right – That baseball, familiar baseball stitching, that baseball has traveled with me out and about, hither and thither, a big hunk of my life. Found in the infield of the track at the old Wareham High School (no track there when I was a school-attending kid), this Saturday mid-day I’m the only one at the track, I’ve left a meeting with a bunch of local cats in the town hall basement, folks getting together and shooting the breeze about fixing up their lives, and it ends at noon and I stroll over to walk in circles a while, this before continuing my travels from up in Lowell to out onto the Cape and visiting my mom who has recently suffered an aneurysm of sorts, her brain, and is recuperating, and me down, like every weekend, to visit and offer whatever comfort her son offers, and I want to walk on a track new to a particular physical ambiance I rejoiced in as a kid as part of the journey. And on the grass is this used baseball, and I have cargo shorts and stick the ball in a pocket down one leg, and I’m guessing this is like 2002, could be a couple years earlier, and the ball goes into my Taurus and rides with me down to the Cape and back to Lowell and later in a move to Medford and over and over again down to the Cape and I carry it when I walk all over, and I move to Berkeley (CA) and then Oakland and work in San Francisco and the ball goes with me and in my shorts when I walk the circumference of Lake Merritt and quite possibly the length of the Crissey Field path by the Golden Gate and its with me over and over again walking the Cape Cod Rail Trail after my Mom has passed and I work in P’town and run an HIV/AIDS house and live all over and it travels with me across the Country again (3rd time) out to here in Portland and these last few years it tends to stay in the car. These connections. Around a gifted baseball.

Those cards – on top couchsurfingat70.com – well, here you are, and I had those printed and I took that photo from the rooftop of my best pal’s apartment house three blocks up from Lake Merritt in Oakland, above the six floors and I went up there a bunch of times over the years when crashing in his studio and I loved the view and I loved this pic and it right away felt like the couch surfing visual. Its spirit.

“Grace” – My wife Susan created this, in her studio, sculpted clay, energized with love, devotion, hunger to make it all better. “Grace”. Who’d of thunk me carrying around the word “Grace”, man you can travel back through my life and lots and lots of folks would get a good chuckle over that. There’s the then and there’s the now. Way less chuckling. It’s a word which came into my life maybe 20 years ago, back when I was traveling to see my damaged mom. Back when I found the baseball. These days I begin every morning on my knees, on a cushion (old knees) and among other prayerful requests I ask the Great Spirit to fill my day with Grace.

The Great Spirit does.

A baseball. A couch-crashing rooftop. A promise.

This is show and tell.