barefoot Brandy

April 30, 2024 by Steve Myers 10 Comments

It was so many years later and yet she’d still appear in my dreams as a savior, rescuing me from quicksand or a tidal wave and in that I was never a good swimmer, never caught the rhythm of a stroke, not even doggy paddling, I figured it a good idea to find her number and call her, just to see how she was doing, but all I could find was an address so I sent her a letter. She was a writer, mostly plays and poetry. My letter went something like this…

Dear Brandy, I hate starting a letter with “Dear” but I’m nervous. I just wanted to once again apologize for the way things turned out. I know it usually takes two to screw up a romantic situation, but I feel mostly responsible. Anyway, I read a good one the other day and thought of you and wanted to share it…..

a little girl climbs up the steps and knocks on the attic door. 

“come in,” says the voice.”

“what’s a good day daddy?” she asks. 

daddy looks up from the typewriter and says, “a good day my dear is 10 pages.”

P.S. I still have the puzzle you gave me, that map of America with all the baseball stadiums. I glued the back and put it in a frame and it’s on the wall now so you’re kind of always with me as long as I’m alive and enjoy a place where I can sleep and dream.

I remember when Brandy and I first met. It was at a McDonald’s, back when I had the courage to strike up conversations with strangers. I told her I was thinking about joining the Air Force which wasn’t true. I’m afraid of flying. But I pretended that my interest in the air force was because Jimi Hendrix was in the Air Force for a short while and Jimi Hendrix was my favorite guitar player which was true and he was from Seattle and I always felt a debt of gratitude to Seattle for being the birthplace of the Milwaukee Brewers franchise as the Pilots in 1969 and that was true too. Brandy didn’t know anything about Jimi Hendrix or baseball and I didn’t know anything about poetry or theater so we had a lot to share. We talked that first day about McDonald’s once offering pizza and how plumbing probably saved the world from massive diseases and then where we were born, any brothers and sisters and then that led us to talk about how we got along with our parents and what we hoped to do with the rest of our lives.

I was reluctant to keep talking, not having much experience with women and all that, but it was as if she could read my mind or maybe she picked up on my fear because of my body language, me looking desperately for a place to hide my hands. She pondered out loud the thrill a child experiences when they wander beyond the confines of a predictable backyard. After she said that and without really knowing why, I accepted her invitation to meet at the same McDonalds later that same week and after agreeing I kind of felt at ease or more at ease anyway and so I told her about Richie Hebner once being a gravedigger in the off season, that players used to not make so much money. It was my way of trying to turn her onto the endless cast of characters in baseball. And it was a bingo bulls eye on my part.

“I assumed players always made a lot of money,” she said, “way more than teachers and what not.”

She was excited to learn something new and apparently it inspired her too because she replied with a confession. She looked at her hands and said,

“I take so much for granted, like how my mind and body are connected like I send a message from my mind to my legs and they lift and it’s one foot in front of the other and locomotion….far out!”

This inspired me to talk about the locomotion of base stealers and Ron LeFlore transitioning from prison to playing major league baseball. I soon learned that Brandy had a pet bird, a monk parakeet that she said she found, wounded in a Brooklyn bus cabin. She knew all about these parakeets.

“In such a cold climate like Brooklyn?” I asked, more than a little surprised and very excited by the strange geography of it all.

Brandy said the parrots escaped from a crate at JFK airport and the rest was birds and bees proliferation history. There was then a long pause and I mentioned the size of a horses toe nails and what was so great about our conversation was that there were no rules, just one random thing after another and breakfast coffee turned into a fish sandwich lunch and then we walked in Greenwood Cemetery and she took off her socks and shoes and of course I thought about Shoeless Joe Jackson and told her about the Black Sox scandal and for some reason or no reason we stopped and right in front of us was Henry Chadwick’s tombstone and it was all too much, too perfect because I had just begun to study a bit about Sabermetrics and I knew Chadwick was kind of the godfather of the box score and he knew way back when that a defender with more range was bound to make more errors so range was as important as the number of errors committed. I loved the logic in that, but it was my emotions that took over at that point which was rare for me.

“I have a 1976 Topps Lymon Bostock card,” I said. “He was shot and killed and every once in a while I look at the card and remember the fragility of life and I also have a Mike Hargrove card from the same set and he took his time in the batter’s box and that reminds me to take my god damn time too, that there’s no rush.”

Immediately after I said that, I looked down at Brandy’s naked feet and I swear she was flexing her toes as if they were yawning, but I knew it wasn’t out of boredom or fatigue, more of a relaxing feeling like she wanted me to keep talking.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell Brandy much about advanced metrics, but that year we shared together…wow! and after it was done, I returned to Milwaukee and got to see Robin Yount get his 3,000th hit. I forget who the pitcher was, but the hit was a patented Yount line drive single to the opposite field.