Shutout Before Summer
A shutout in baseball is where the pitcher pitches a perfect game, so the other team doesn’t score a single hit. While it sounds like the ideal solution, as Crash Davis in Bull Durham says, “Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls. It’s more democratic.”
Everyone wants to participate. No one wants to be shut out, but we all have those moments when we feel like we’re being cut off from whatever we’re striving for.
We won’t even go into the whole job hunting thing. Just because educators have a very limited time to find jobs and my colleagues and I are applying like crazy even as we receive rejection slips doesn’t not mean we’re being actively shut out of the work force.
That Facebook cut me off from my 249 followers in its latest change was probably not intentional. I never expected my fans’ undivided attention. What I miss are the conversations. I loved being able to chat about books, art, history, coffee, quilting, whatever with friends of friends and total strangers. I probably drove Facebook crazy deliberately embracing random, but hey, their company. If you want to keep chatting, let’s connect on:
Just when I started to feel really sorry for myself, I got a gentle reminder that sometimes stuff just happens. About a year ago, a neighbor asked me to care for her grandaughter’s dog. I couldn’t because of the cats, but another friend agreed even though the “cute little puppy” turned out to be a 14-year old, 40 pound sweetie who’s since developed a tumor. It’s taking both of us to pay for medical treatment, but what else you gonna do? We can’t shut the puppy out. The fact that the original neighbor’s stopped speaking to me is just the icing on my chagrin cake!
But fortunately April is National Poetry Month. All month long, I have been stumbling across pieces of poetry to bring light and beauty into my funk. This, hands down, has to be the coolest thing I’ve ever heard –
- Poetry & Jazz – classic poetry and jazz recordings, including the voices of Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, Kenneth Patchen, Gil Scott-Heron, and Melvin van Peebles
It’s the kind of thing that can make you believe you can “for one extraordinary June and July… for whatever perverse reason, began playing baseball with joy and verve and poetry” – and no shutouts!
kathybryson 