on whistling streets

June 8, 2024 by Steve Myers 7 Comments

Clem Abri believed trees were magicians, the way their branches and leaves swayed and danced in spring and summer and then knew to carry out a crop rotation strategy, to stay fallow for months, to lose their leaves, to rest and be naked branches, to know like a dog knows, eat when hungry, sleep when tired and it didn’t matter what season….Clem sat under trees and leaned his ear against them and listened and he heard a language he didn’t understand and thought about hugging their mystery, but instead he danced with them again and again and again and isn’t that where the loneliness gives way to platoon camaraderie and works its miracle of togetherness, solving the sting of being born alone and dying alone?

Clem never dreamed of being a major league ballplayer, but he did turn down the sound of the TV and broadcast Brewers baseball games and hearing his voice sent wonder about the particular game, all its details, sending them passenger pigeon to the wind, anonymous messages in a bottle. He felt loose and light after a game and that everyone had a little messiah savior inside them and it could be a Jesus miracle walk on water miracle too because that could be sliding across ice and everyone could do that, hitting us with instant enlightenment, a transient sensation, but nonetheless exhilarating, an old, smelly lady in the lounge of the Hyatt hotel eating the free peanuts until the authorities escorted her dirty hands back outside, homeless, whistling the Girl From Ipanema and time was running out….go and buy a beer for a stranger.

It was 2003 and the Brewers were trying to recover from the previous season’s 106 loss season, the first and only 100 loss campaign for the Crew. Not even the expansion origins of the franchise, back when they were the Seattle Pilots in 1969, not even then did they lose 100 games. They lost 98 and finished only four games behind the White Sox for fifth place and 33 games out of first. The 2002 Brewers finished 41 games out, not too effective on the mound, but Luis Vizcaino pitched well and anyway, losing seasons didn’t matter to Clem. He loved the reality of flowers growing above buried bones, the beautiful evolving out of the ugly and back the other way too, beautiful to ugly like the frown of a booze store cashier and you buying her a lottery ticket and she instantly knowing, again, that anything was possible to enjoy the shared human wretch,  the forlorn of it all. Yes, Clem didn’t mind losing seasons because any season was a raft to keep him afloat in the midst of some old proverb – one foot on a banana peel, the other foot in the grave because there were more than seagulls and crows and pigeons and cardinals to see; there were vultures feeding off the dead and some ladies wore mini skirts and others long Ukranian folk dance dresses. The lights came on at night either way and the moon too, spraying its beam across the old Sea. It was the fifth inning somewhere and the game soon to be official and those on rooftops and behind TV screens and in upper deck seats and bleachers had four innings for the rest of their lives.