The following is an account of a dream I had in the summer of 2010, just a few days before I found out that my lovely wife, Kyra, was pregnant.
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The foul ball, hurtling through the electrified air of the stadium, a low angle shot, hard and fast.
We were in the nose bleed seats, Abe and I. Good ‘ol Abe who every morning thanks God on his knees that he’s utterly infertile, incapable of impregnating even the most fecund of females, no matter how robust the discharge and regardless of whether he’s getting enough Omega-3s in his diet.
Abe, who turned to me as we passed through the turnstile and said, “What does the SkyDome remind you of, exactly? What feelings does the architecture of this grand colosseum invoke in you.”
I tilted my head toward him, and said, “Warm feelings, Abe.”
When we emerged from the arteries of the stadium, when we passed through the appropriate gate and emerged wide-eyed into the sheer being of the revealed stadium we saw a cluster of seats located behind a monolithic concrete abutment, and the thought passed between us unspoken – these tickets better not be for those seats. We didn’t stop to contemplate the absurdity of their positioning, with the extreme close-up view of a solid mass of concrete, we just knew we didn’t want to sit there. We had come to see the game after all.
Abe checked the row number of these existentially bereft seats and cross-referenced it with the numbers on our tickets. He breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Now, if I had brought my electron microscope, we could of switched seats and watched the painfully slow decay of complex carbon-based molecules.”
After a moment of silence, I responded, “The half-life of that slab of concrete is beyond our scope.”
We found our seats. We gestured to the large black man selling plastic cups of beer and we purchased four. We contemplated shelled peanuts or nacho chips with lukewarm processed cheese in the flimsy plastic container, but decided against it. We drank our beers and the innings starting falling away – “Into the vacuum,” explained Abe.
At the bottom of the seventh the hard-driven fly ball – a hard drive fouled out of play from nowhere in particular – hurtled thru the air directly towards my medium meaty palm. The moment transcended the fate-chance dichotomy and reminded me of the time my pet rabbit Arthur was struck by lightning – and lived. It approached rapidly, jet-streaming. And with a stylized kind of flourish, like a Dominican short-stop on a complex cocktail of uppers, I snagged it out of the air with my right hand.
It was a strange moment of victory – the anomalous ball in my hand, the atemporal moment of recognition, the otherness of the dense, substantial ball. And then I experienced some knee-jerk firing of synapses deep in the recesses of my lizard brain, and I threw it back. I fired the ball back and it landed somewhere in the crowd about thirty rows down. I had no idea why I did this but the thought crossed my mind that there had been about four or five foul balls that had already landed in our immediate vicinity, and the mood was becoming surreal and carnivalesque. It was an anarchic mood of superfluity and abandon. Was I just thinking, there’s more where that came from? At the same time there was something powerful and fearsome about the foul ball and how it centred me out amidst the myriad fanatics – and maybe I was scared the way an initiate to a secret religious order gets scared when handling the sacred symbols.
The crowd roared like one massive insane organism. I winced and ground my teeth, trying to maintain separation from the rising tide of mass psychology. I bowed my head solemnly and noticed, at the foot of my row, a series of small earthenware basins filled with wet mud. We were sitting in the bottom row of a section and there these basins were, in an area usually reserved for the free and easy movement of human beings. A woman approached and dipped her naked foot in one of the larger basins, explaining in vivid English that this was a new initiative at the ball park – the installation of mud baths for the feet in every section.
An irate couple of indeterminate ethnicity approached and starting giving me hell for throwing the foul ball back into the crowd. The man accused me of striking his wife in the head with the ball but I could tell from his tone and his gesturing, marionette-like, that he was lying. I told him that if that was what happened even though it clearly didn’t, that I was hypothetically sorry and that it’s such an anarchic game and I kind of lost my head, with all these foul balls being hit in our direction and such. He visibly calmed and handed the ball over to me, which was, strangely, elaborately swathed in an off-white gauzey material.
Abe nudged me and said, “I call my electron microscope Steve. And Steve is a reliable piece of machinery.”
Again the vacant nod, and I turned to look at the mysterious woman, blond and beautiful, standing in the basin, mud up to her ankles.
