Dream

I still very vividly remember the last baseball game I ever attended. It was in the waning years of the Dodgers, after Steve Finley and the back-to-back-to-back home runs that had me amazed over Sunday's dumpling lunch. It was after José Lima and Paul Lo Duca and Shawn Green and Adrián Beltré and the sweaty palms that came with Eric Gagné and those brilliant ninth-inning saves.

My father had gotten the four of us seats right behind the right field foul pole, and I remember spending most of the game straining to see around its bright yellow bulk. It came to be, then, after the hard, bright field lights had come on and the blazing sunset had given way to a cool early-summer chill, that the Dodgers were down by one in the bottom of the ninth. Oh, it was tense. There was one man on first and one out to go. Quiet whispers rustled through the stands as the final batter stepped to the plate. A pinch hitter. Jim Thome.

One foot in the box. One toe digging in. The other foot followed. I thought I could hear the crunching of his cleats over the muted roar of the crowd. He hitched up his right shirtsleeve with his left hand, bat pointed straight down the line, loosening up his wrists, settling in. We thrummed with excitement.

The man on the mound drew back, settled, glove to his mouth as all eyes in the stadium glared daggers at his back. The wind up. The pitch.

And Jim Thome cocked his foot, reared back, and the resounding crack echoed through the field, through the hearts of a thousand breathless dreamers who arched back to follow the streaking white ball as it streaked across the blackness, straight towards the center field wall, and going, and going, and

dropping just short into the glove of the center fielder whose cleats ground the dirt of the warning track.

Jim Thome slowly turned his jog away from second base back to the dugout as the other dreamers beside me gathered their things and stopped dreaming about high fly balls and started worrying about traffic and how congested the 605 would be and wouldn't it be better to take the 5 at this time of the day.

As I trailed behind my family as we oozed up the stairs, I cast one last glimpse over my shoulder at the field, a green patch of mundane wonder, a haven of brightness that kept away the night, and, if only for a moment, allowed a man to dream.

Open

I blog a lot about school. These posts usually contain excessive moaning about tests for which I'm too lazy to study in classes I never really wanted to take. No, I don't understand myself either.

But tonight was open house at this over-achieving public high school in Southern California. As a senior, I had no motivation to go and suck up to next year's teachers, so I decided to go for a nice long (painful 3-mile) run in the afternoon back to school just to troll my ASB friends who had to help set up and guide poor lost 8th grade parents around campus. My timing was off by just enough for me to miss virtually everyone I wanted to see, so I ran a painful 1.5 miles back home. Thoroughly unsatisfied with myself, I decided to attend open house just for the sake of attending and doing nothing. Besides, the alternative was me sitting in my room and staring at my laptop and the twenty million other things I've been putting off in favor of MUN.

I walked onto campus and exchanged snarky comments with one of my prom dates, then drifted around from the math department to the MUN simulation, where I stayed just long enough to snicker at the sophomores, and then I drifted back to the math department to meet up with my adoptive mother. For some odd, reason, I thought I should pay my Lit teacher a visit. I don't know. English teachers and I have a thing.

I walked into his classroom, and it was completely empty. He was standing up at his podium in a shirt and tie, idly thumbing through a book for his Lang class. I burst out laughing, and he pulled his customary wry face at me. Somehow, I ended up sitting on his table chattering about banana peels and ruptured testicles while he went crawling through one of his cabinets for a book that would make me "stop being depressed." Apparently, I'm to read Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. After his latest book recommendation (Sophie's World), I'm a little hesitant about this one. Oh well. We'll see how it goes.

Open house was winding down by now, the dim night lights flickering on under the eaves, looming shadows thrown out before and behind me as I savored a peculiar sense of freedom that only comes with being out alone at night and feeling perfectly content with life. I don't get that feeling so often anymore.

I helped MUN throw the library back into shape and was about to leave when I saw my physics teacher trudging out of the science building to his car, bags in each hand and a large backpack hanging from his shoulders. I've previously made no secret of how much I loathe my 4th period CP Physics class. But after our short, thirty-second exchange, I can't bring myself loathe the man himself. It is I who deserves the blame.

What's always been so attractive to me about school and the art of teaching is that under the veneer professionalism, there is a genuine human being that is more than a robot that doles out A's and B's and (heaven forbid) C's at  the semester. Sometimes, as students, we forget about that person and just look at the factual information with which we are presented by this robot, someone we can't care to know well at all. Sometimes, we forget that these robots can have uncertainties and doubts and fears that they can never show to us because we are students and we must learn the impersonal and the distant.

But then I look back on my fourteen years in school and remember that I've spent the majority of my life in the classroom, not at home, not with friends. I remember that some of the best friends I've had are teachers. Young teachers just getting married and popping out their first kids, old teachers with three times more teaching experience than I've had life experience, in-between teachers who've seen enough to understand but not enough to disregard.

We're all human, I guess. And it's human nature to forget. But there are some things we should always try to remember.

Blues

Sometimes—it doesn't matter where—it comes,

Creeping,

Like stair-footsteps in the night,

Merciless.

Meaningless.

Like twisted sheets, they reach,

White hands so cold

And so bright

That all else dies.

And then I’m sinking,

Drowning,

Rushed along with the

Inevitable tide.

And then I’m lost,

Lost in white

That black becomes.

Blue.

And then it’s not.

It can’t be

Blue

Because blue is

Soft, and

Sky, and

Silk, but

This is

Hard, and

Feet, and

Glass.

Shivered.

Sometimes—it doesn't matter where—it comes,

Loud,

Like the fall,

Proud, and

Small.