I like pretending that I once lived in a garage and one day my cousin Johnny came over to say hello and while he was there, I went to the grocery store across the street to use the bathroom and when I returned, I immediately noticed that my cousin Johnny had turned the radio on and set it to a specific AM station and suddenly paranoia hit me and I assumed he was sending me a message with the specific station but after he left, I listened awhile and then decided to leave the radio on and good thing I did because the sound of all those talk shows kept me company and it all felt like a benevolent conspiracy and one of the shows was about baseball and in the middle of talk about the birth of the boxscore, I pretended that my name was Leonardo and that I was old, 80 years old and smoked cigars and like that radio, the cigar kept me company, something for us both to burn away together, that slow grey snake ash to eventual smithereens of us all.
I had no family in this old man reverie or none that I knew of so day and night, collecting my pension from my days working at the rail yard, I remembered my imaginary younger brother and his mysterious disappearance, last seen a top a horse in southern Spain during Holy Week. I enjoyed the memory of his quick first step on the basketball court and knack for writing long epic poems about every day objects like the one he penned about the history of laundry, from washboards as a practical tool to it being a musical instrument and onward to a Maytag machine and its pinwheel of tumbling colors seen through the oval-shaped window.
But back to my garage room, I seldom sat still even when listening to that radio and smoking stogies. Instead, I paced and it was hot where I lived, hot and humid causing the yellow shag carpet to go brown with the trail of my footsteps. I had learned about pacing from a raggedy old Japanese book I once found outside the Salvation Army and lucky me, one of the cashiers inside was Japanese and he translated the title to me, something about an ancient form of Japanese meditation, this pacing, to tune oneself to the earth’s heartbeat, the planet breathing, the universe pulsating like a jellyfish.
This inspired all kinds of thoughts, but I knew from a Buddhist TV show I watched late at night, to not attach to my thoughts, good or bad, to just let them go like passing clouds, but one of these thoughts dropped anchor in my mind and wouldn’t budge so I followed it all the way to Spain and my younger brother and the horse and then back to North America and what a horse meant to cowboys and Native Americans….the horse, the horse, the horse is all I could think of as I paced north, south, east, and west and so my mind was soon made up, to do what a poetry friend of my brother had instructed – to make dreams so impossible that they come true and since there were no ordinance in the village prohibiting it, I took the Chatwick northbound to the Cremlin Farm, bought a horse and rode it home and then all around town and as expected, the neighbors and locals wanted to talk, to find out the horses name and could their son or daughter take a ride and I never turned anyone down and it wasn’t out of some karmic wish that I would be rewarded for my kindness, just a tribute to my brother and his disappearance.
And so there were horse riding days and they passed and days turned to weeks and then one nice horse riding day with soft, soothing breezes upsetting the humidity, I spotted an even older man, even older than me, a man I had never seen before wearing a Japanese Yomiurui Giants baseball jacket. I knew the emblem from videos I’d seen about the Japanese home run king Sadaharu Oh. The man put his arms out in front of him like a football referee indicating pass interference. I pulled gently on the reins and the horse stopped.
“What’s the name of your horse?”
“Haven’t picked one yet. I’m kind of waiting for the right moment.”
“Well, maybe this is that moment,” replied the man. “That’s a Noma horse you got right there, out of Japan, yes, bred in Japan and very endangered.”
“I had no idea,” I said.
“Well, now you do” and with that he winked, turned around, returned to where he came from, the horizon in the distance, like some sort of specter.
I knew right then and there that my horse would be called Nomo, so close to Noma in name and a reminder, of my brother’s favorite baseball player – Japanese born big league pitcher Hideo Nomo and his two no-hitters, one against the Colorado Rockies at hitter friendly Coors Field making it truly a no-hitter!!
I had read a few books about Japanese baseball, thanks to Robert Whiting, beginning with YOU GOTTA HAVE WA and more recently THE MEANING OF ICHIRO. And now with a horse named after Hideo Nomo, I read more and as is often the case with reading and research, new nuggets of info unfurled like Japanese haiku poet Masaoka Shiki liking/playing baseball as a kid, writing a textbook about baseball, creating words for specific baseball details. He referred to the game as yakyu or field-ball. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002. Shiki’s life was a tragic one filled with his own long lasting tuberculosis and an alcoholic father who died young.
And as the days passed, I thought about this Haiku expression, this three line burst of 5-7-5 syllables, 1-2-3 lines like 1-2-3 outs and I made a vow to write one, good or bad, after every baseball game I attended, whether it be a little league game or the major league ones at the closest stadium to my home and yes, I rode the horse and parked it outside the stadium at that first game and police men on horses shared a moment with Noma my horse and after that first game, I completed my vow at old County Stadium Milwaukee and wrote a haiku…
set to soar
27th out
smashed paper beer cup echo
bar open all night